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.
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.
(Thanks, Greg!)
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.
(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!
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!
The Guardian’s just published my latest column, “Illegal filesharing: A suicide note from the music industry” about the insanity of the latest record-company salvo in the copyright wars, a cozy deal with British ISPs that will have them spying on and degrading the connections of subscribers accused of infringing downloading:
So no, I don’t think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they’re a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.
The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they’d found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.
These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you’d have to do stuff that’s a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we’d have gotten off of Napster 1.0.
And yet that’s just what we’re going to end up doing. It’s historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we’ve solved the problem by creating blanket licences.
Roy Trumbull has performed an excellent reading of my short story The Super Man and the Bugout — a story about Superman as a Jewish boy raised in Toronto’s suburbs, put out of work by the arrival of benevolent aliens who welcome Earth to the Galactic Federation.
The Camerahead Project is a Seattle protest group upset about the growing prevalence of CCTV cameras there — they’re staging a bit of theater tomorrow in Cal Anderson Park, walking around with giant cameras on their heads to get people thinking about what it means to have their public spaces under constant surveillance.
Local artist Paul Strong, Jr. says he’s holding the demonstration, called the Camerahead Project, to remind people that video surveillance cameras are recording their every move at Cal Anderson Park and three other parks around town. “The project not only raises the questions of who is watching who and who is watching the watchers, but also … why we are being watched at all,” he says. “There is so much going on in the news about wiretapping and data mining, all these little thing that happen locally go right by.”
I met Paul at one of my signings in Seattle for Little Brother and loved his camerahead outfit — he says it was inspired by Pablo Defendini’s Little Brother poster.
I recorded an interview with the libertarian podcast Free Talk Live earlier this week and they’ve just popped it on the air. I’ve never really done an interview where I ended up debating socialized medicine.
