How to Fix the Internet is EFF’s amazing new podcast: nuanced discussions of tech law and ethics with incredible experts, interviewed and contextualized by EFF executive director Cindy Cohn and strategy director Danny O’Brien.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/13/said-no-one-ever/#fix-it

I devoured the first three episodes. I mean, I started working with EFF nearly 19 years ago (!) but I was learning SO MUCH from them.

Today, the episode I recorded dropped. I’ve never been in such august company.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/podcast-episode-control-over-users-competitors-and-critics

Our discussion is about the role interoperability plays in helping technology users exercise self-determination, giving them alternatives to bad moderation, abusive lock-in, and poor security choices.

And about how companies love interop when they’re trying to eat another company’s lunch, but then they love to take it away once they win, because without interop, companies can control their customers, critics and competitors.

You can get How to Fix the Internet in your favorite podcatcher. Here’s the RSS:

https://efforg.libsyn.com/rss

and here’s the MP3 for my episode:

https://ia601407.us.archive.org/10/items/eff-podcast-episode-4-interroperability/EFF_Podcast_Episode4_Interroperability.mp3

Here’s part twenty-four of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.

Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

MP3