Hey, Austinites! I’m headed your way tomorrow (Thurs) for the next leg of my book-tour. I’ll be reading at BookPeople at 7PM, and then heading to EFF-Austin’s WhuffieFest, a fundraiser/party at Amelia’s RetroVogue and Relics, 2213 South 1st Street in the 78704. I haven’t been to Austin since SXSW 2003, and I can’t wait to get back!

Tonight’s my last night in San Francisco, and it’s the capstone of the Bay Area leg: the Electronic Frontier Foundation fundraiser/party at the 111 Minna Gallery at 7:30. I’m really looking forward to this — a great way to end a fantastic stop in one of the cities of my heart.

After Austin, it’s off to Cary, NC (Saturday) and Chapel Hill, NC (Sunday), then New York and Brooklyn, and finally Toronto, my hometown. Here’s the full tour schedule.

A reminder to fans of the free download: there’s an amazing list of libraries, schools, youth shelters, halfway houses and other worthy institutions that are looking for donations of copies of the book. If you liked the ebook and want to thank me, the best way to do that is to donate a copy to one of them.

The US paperback of Little Brother just came out and is entering its second week on the National Independent Bestseller list! Thanks to everyone who supported the book — I’m over the moon!

Hey, Palo Alto: Just a reminder that I’ll be at Books Inc tonight at 7PM. And I’ll be back in San Francisco tomorrow night at 7:30 at the 111 Minna Gallery for the EFF Geek Reading benefit!

My latest Guardian column, “Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good” asks that we collectively kill the expression “Information wants to be free,” in favor of better, more comprehensive slogans such as “People want to be free.”

It’s time for IWTBF to die because it’s become the easiest, laziest straw man for Hollywood’s authoritarian bullies to throw up as a justification for the monotonic increase of surveillance, control, and censorship in our networks and tools. I can imagine them saying: “These people only want network freedom because they believe that ‘information wants to be free’. They pretend to be concerned about freedom, but the only ‘free’ they care about is ‘free of charge.'”

But this is just wrong. “Information wants to be free” has the same relationship to the digital rights movement that “kill whitey” has to the racial equality movement: a thoughtless caricature that replaces a nuanced, principled stand with a cartoon character. Calling IWTBF the ideological basis of the movement is like characterising bra burning as the primary preoccupation of feminists (in reality, the number of bras burned by feminists in the history of the struggle for gender equality appears to be zero, or as close to it as makes no difference).

So what do digital rights activists want, if not “free information?”

Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good