Here’s the video from the talk I gave last week at the O’Reilly Strata conference on “big data” in NYC. The talk is called “Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes,” and it talks about the philosophy underpinning the “privacy bargain” we strike online when we trade personal information for access to services.
Strata Summit 2011: Cory Doctorow, “Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes”
Earlier this week, I gave a talk on the way that “Big Data” is underpinned with a kind of myth about how users trade privacy for services. Ciara Byrne from the NYT’s VentureBeat interviewed me afterwards about it. I think she did a really good job of condensing a hard, nuanced question into a brief and informative article.
TRSF is a new science fiction anthology of original stories commissioned by Technology Review, the tech magazine published by MIT. They commissioned a story from me, “The Brave Little Toaster,” and the brief asked me to look at near future science and technology issues — I tackled “The Internet of Things,” and told a story about a man whose refrigerator ends up hosting an unfortunate (very unfortunate!) Internet of Things object. The book is $7.95 for pre-order.
Featuring all-new stories by a dozen of the most visionary science fiction authors writing today, TRSF takes us to 12 possible worlds of tomorrow. Inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered by MIT’s Technology Review, celebrated writers join the freshest talent from around the world to describe what the future may have in store for the Internet, biotechnology, energy, computing, and more.Illustrated with an original cover painting by legendary sci-fi illustrator Chris Foss, the TRSF also features classic Foss covers inside its pages.
See the emerging world of electronic books, iPad apps, cloud computing, and more through the eyes of possibly the most productively opinionated commentator of our day. Any complacency you have about the digital everyday will not survive unscathed.
Cory Doctorow thinks about lots of things, and he writes about lots of things, and he does both in a way that sends some folks right over the edge. It’s not that Cory is being outrageous to be outrageous—it’s that he realizes that the context of our lives is change. That’s a message some people don’t want to hear. Well, I want to hear it. I don’t always agree with Cory 100%—who agrees with anyone else all the time?—but I never get tired of reading what he’s thinking about next.
Reading Context, I felt like there should be a sticker on the cover, much like the one on Cracker Jacks, which promises us ‘a prize in every box’ or perhaps the old slogan for Lay’s Potato Chips, ‘bet you can’t eat just one!’ These bite-sized clusters of observations are munchable and easy to digest, but inside, they carry thoughts that can wake you up in the middle of night. The topics here range across intellectual property, science fiction, technological innovation, media policy, and electronic publishing, but he is often at his best when he pulls things down to the human level, describing the pleasures of being a parent in the digital age, or that guy he knew long ago who wore his sweaters inside out.
I can’t say this about many authors, but I can say it about Cory, and without hesitation: Anyone who considers themselves smart, strategic, or even informed about where our digital economy is going (and I hope that’s you) must read him. And this book is a great place to start.
My latest Guardian column, “Lib Dems get a chance to vote on copyright reform,” discusses the new Liberal Democrat IT white paper that’s being presented at the party conference this weekend, where members will get the chance to vote in favor of repealing some of the worst sections of the Digital Economy Act, dealing with web-censorship and disconnection over copyright claims. The paper is very good, but somewhere between the final draft prepared by the committee and the paper the membership will vote on this weekend, someone inserted a clause saying that “a form of theft” and goes on to say that “there is no reason why digital offenders should not be prosecuted under the criminal law in the same way as those who steal tangible goods.” I’ve spent the past few days trying to track down who put this language in, and everyone both denies it and says they don’t support it — which raises the question, what’s it doing there at all?
This is pretty outre stuff. Every developed nation’s legal system treats thefts of tangible goods as absolutely distinct from copyright violation. Applying criminal sanctions for copyright infringement would be unprecedented in the industrialised world.
Don Foster, the Lib Dem MP with the DCMS brief, apparently lobbied to have “a statement making clear that copyright infringement is as serious as theft” included in the document, though his staff disavows any involvement in the phrasing and says: “For Don, non-commercial copyright infringement has only ever been a civil issue.” Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem MP who was also involved in the drafting, says, “there is no intention to change the current system in this regard”.
My short story Clockwork Fagin, which will appear in the forthcoming YA anthology Steampunk! is available from today as a free file for Kindle, Nook, and other ebook platforms. The whole anthology comes out on Oct 11.
