This week for my podcast, I’m doing a swap with Wil Wheaton and his podcast! he’s gonna read one of my short stories, and I’m reading a couple of his public journal entries about the role my novel Little Brother played in helping him parent his son Nolan (MP3). It’s a lovely memory and a beautiful example of the joys and pitfalls of parenting, and I’m so honored to be reminded of the role that I played in Wil and Nolan’s relationship.

Thanks to Wil for suggesting this piece — it’s a bit of turnabout as I wrote him into Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, and then he had to read his own character’s lines when he narrated the audiobook (the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface, comes out next October).

Wil has released his reading too: a fantastic audiobook of my story Return to Pleasure Island from my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

My latest podcast (MP3) is a reading of my 2017 Locus column “The Jubilee: Fill Your Boots ,” about the nature of material scarcity, which is a subject of enormous significance at this moment as production has ground to a halt, and in which the use of the internet to coordinate our activity is at an all-time high. The essay’s thesis is that the answer to the climate change crisis might coordination, not privation — holidays when our renewable energy sources weren’t producing, work when they were. Making hay while the sun shines. Given the enforced time off so many of us are living through, the ideas are more salient than they were when I started thinking about them in 2017.

Cheapness and coordination go hand in hand. Trains gave us railroad time, the first system of timekeeping that synchronized clocks beyond ear­shot of the clocktower’s bells, so 11:00 a.m. in New York was also 11:00 a.m. in Toronto – and they also made it drastically cheaper to move goods from one place to another, both to bring them to market and to refine them further in multi-stage, distributed industrial processes. Spoke-and-hub aviation gave us flight transfers in 45 minutes, including baggage logistics, making it possible to go from small, out of the way places to large, centralized places without having to provide economically unsustainable point-to-point direct routes between every small town and every big city. Walmart’s supply chains stretch from China to Burbank with fantastic reli­ability, so that everything Walmart sells is always available, without having to wait for misshipments and misorders. A single McDonald’s hamburger can contain beef from 1,000 animals – the company isn’t a restaurant chain, it’s a logistics firm that solves problems involving fractional cows.

My latest podcast is a reading (MP3) of “Data – the new oil, or potential for a toxic oil spill?” — a column I wrote for Kaspersky in which I argue that data was never “the new oil” – instead, it was always the new toxic waste: “pluripotent, immortal – and impossible to contain.”

Data breaches are inevitable (any data you collect will probably leak; any data you retain will definitely leak) and cumulative (your company’s data breach can be combined with each subsequent attack to revictimize your customers). Identity thieves benefit enormously from cheap storage, and they collect, store and recombine every scrap of leaked data. Merging multiple data sets allows for reidentification of “anonymized” data, and it’s impossible to predict which sets will leak in the future.

These nondeterministic harms have so far protected data-collectors from liability, but that can’t last. Toxic waste also has nondeterministic harms (we never know which bit of effluent will kill which person), but we still punish firms that leak it.

Waiting until the laws change to purge your data is a bad bet – by then, it may be too late. All the data your company collects and retains represents an unquantifiable, potentially unlimited source of downstream liability.

What’s more, you probably aren’t doing anything useful with it. The companies that make the most grandiose claims about data analytics are either selling analytics or data (or both). These claims are sales literature, not peer-reviewed citations to empirical research.

Data is cheap to collect and store – if you don’t have to pay for the chaos it sows when it leaks. And some day, we will make data-hoarders pay.

This week, I appear on the Cool Tools podcast to discuss my favorite, most indispensible gadgets and services and why I love them.

https://kk.org/cooltools/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-author/

My top picks were my Crkt Snap-Lock knife – a one-handed-opening, lightweight, super versatile pocket knife that I carry everywhere.

https://www.crkt.com/snap-lock.html

I also chose my Chinese OEM underwater MP3 player. I swim every day for my chronic pain maintenance and this is how I make it bearable, getting through 1-2 audiobooks/month.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00GWV6GUO/cooltoolsshow-20

My third choice was Libro.fm, the DRM-free, indie-bookseller friendly way to listen to audiobooks. Basically the same catalog as Audible, at the same price, the only difference being that buying from them supports neighborhood booksellers, not Amazon.

It was a really fun! @Frauenfelder and @kevin2kelly are super smart about gadgets.

Here’s the MP3:

http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/7810/13374488/779800513-cool-tools-218-cory-doctorow.mp3

Back when cruise ships were a thing, I went out on the Writing Excuses Cruise as an instructor with Mary Robinette Kowal and friends. While there, we recorded an episode of the Writing Excuses podcast.

In a mere 25 minutes, we pack in a lot of material: how to break into the field, what a publisher’s job is, how “digital is different,” self-promotion, not being an unlikable weirdo when you’re self-promoting, technology’s role in shaping artistic success, and more. (here’s an MP3).