Back in May, we had to cancel a planned benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in NYC due to illness striking one of the organizers. I promised then that I’d be rescheduling it for some time in August and now, here it is!

I’m really proud to have the chance to serve the CBLDF, which is a model for how an imaginative, vibrant civil liberties organization operates. They raise money to bail out comic creators and sellers (and others in the trade) who face legal persecution for making comic books.

Even better: this event includes DJ Spooky, whom I’ve wanted to meet since I wrote the intro to his new collection of essays on music, and afterwards, Spooky’s spinning a small-venue set, also to benefit the CBLDF.

I really hope to see you there — I’m coming into New York a day early (I’m on my way to 3Pi Con in Springfield, Mass, where I’m one of the guests of honor, along with Randall “XKCD” Munroe) and spending a bunch of dough out of pocket just to have the chance to do this for CBLDF. Tickets are limited — act now!

On August 21, Cory Doctorow, award-winning author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing and experimental writer / artist / musician Paul Miller, a.k.a. D.J. Spooky That Subliminal Kid team up for a multimedia speaking event benefiting the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Following their respective presentations, Doctorow and DJ Spooky will take the stage together for an open forum discussion about their work and the futurepresent each eloquently addresses across different media.

Cory Doctorow will read and discuss the issues behind his bestselling young adult novel, Little Brother. Addressing internet and government security, censorship, and civil liberties in a post-9/11 near-future atmosphere, Little Brother tackles timely issues while telling a story that’s smart, funny, and jam-packed-with-pop culture nuggets. Doctorow “hopes it’ll inspire you to use technology to make yourself more free.” Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that works to keep cyberspace free. IDW recently published Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now a collection of comics based on his cyberpunkiest Sci-fi short stories.

DJ Spooky joins Doctorow to present concepts from Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, his new book / literary mixtape collecting writing by artists and thinkers including Brian Eno, Jonathan Lethem, Saul Williams, Steve Reich, Moby, Chuck D, and more.

Cory Doctorow Meets DJ Spooky: A CBLDF Benefit Mashup!

Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!).

There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner’s inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, “We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games.” Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.

We have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We’ve really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before.

Link

I gave a talk a couple weeks ago in Cambridge, UK, as part of the Cambridge Business Lectures, entitled, “Life in the Information Economy.” Lots of folks asked about video for the talk — and here it is! The (free) lecture series goes on — the next speaker is John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, on Sept 12.

Life in the Information Economy

Greg Elmensdorp was inspired by my story Printcrime (a short-short story I wrote for Nature Magazine) to created this blue-red 3D illustration. I think it’s terrific and really captures the mood of the story.

The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

Printcrime in 3D

(Thanks, Greg!)

Tor and Expanded Books have released part two of the video interview/book trailer they shot with me and John Scalzi, talking about our new young adult novels — my Little Brother and John’s Zoe’s Tale, which comes out in three weeks. The Expanded People really cut nice stuff — I laughed even harder watching the video than I did when we were shooting it!

Sci-Fi Juggernauts Meet Up – Part 2

See also: Scalzi and I talk about our latest books — video