Paul Parkinson has adapted “Hello Cory” (Kyt Dotson’s rollicking little fanfic story about, well, me) for audio, taking advantage of its Creative Commons license. He says, “Use, abuse, reuse. All yours.”
Kyt Dotson has written a fantastic piece of fanfic about, well, me! She writes, “Since xkcd has been pushing the whole red cape and goggles for Cory, I decided to extend the mythology myself — as a writer I suspect it’s one of the things we are wont to do anyway. So I wrote Hello Cory, which is basically a Cory Doctorow fan fiction/cameo set with the Mill Avenue Vexations universe (no, if you don’t live in Tempe, AZ you probably haven’t heard of it.) And I Creative Commons licensed the work, just because a suitable tribute to Cory could accept nothing less.”
Who did you piss off?”
“The MAFIAA.”
I’d heard that acronym before, but I don’t run in quite the right circles to fully grasp its significance. Elaine would rant about how they were collectively destroying music and movies and treated everyone like criminals.
He went on. “The MPAA and the RIAA will certainly want to intercept me. This is why I’ve been traveling by night with the camouflaged balloon. I had to leave it a few miles back.” An expression of sorrow crossed his face. “I figured that I was flying in the right direction, but I lost my star fix and had to slow down to get my bearings. That’s when they fell upon me. Dark shapes like wicked fingers slashed out of the night from all directions, I tried to out run them with the phlogiston overdrive…but the fiends had struck the boiler and then it ruptured.”
Update: And the next morning, Paul Parkinson read this aloud and put the MP3 online!
The organizers of last week’s “cocktail robotics” festival in Vienna, Austria, the annual “Roboexotica” event, have posted the audio from the lectures in German and English. I gave a talk there called “A Singular Metaphor” in which I tried to delve into the reason that the idea of uploading our minds is so attractive right now. Sean Bonner had a fun talk on user power on sites like Digg called “The inmates have taken over the asylum…,” while Jens Ohlig from the Chaos Computer Club proposed that robots should create all literature, David Fine pondered consciousness, and Make Magazine’s Bre Pettis gave a talk called “Machines: If you can’t beat them, join them,” about the utopia of apocalypse.
(Thanks, Johannes!)
My latest Guardian column, “Downloaded BBC programmes should be forever,” talks about how the BBC has sold us out with its failed, DRM-based iPlayer (a reliable source puts the number of active iPlayer users at less than ten thousand and a second reliable source says, “That number sounds high”) and how it and the Trustees should have had the guts to go to rightsholders and say, “Sorry, we can’t accept any deal that doesn’t give the public at least as much freedom as they have with their existing VCRs.”
You might decide, hell, I’m a paid-up licence-payer, why shouldn’t I use iPlayer to store up several months’ worth of the kids’ favorite cartoons for them to watch in an all-day marathon on New Year’s day – while I sleep off New Year’s Eve? You might just reach into the guts of your iPlayer and change the line of code that says, “Delete my shows after 28 days” to “Delete my shows after 28,000 years”.
If you did you’d be part of a grand old tradition of shed-tinkerers. A few years back I attended a DRM meeting in Edinburgh. We were wrangling over a DRM for DVB, the digital video standard that is used throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia. It was nearly Christmas, and one engineer slipped off at the break to buy his son an electronics kit at John Lewis. When he showed it around, all the engineers in the room immediately broke into nostalgic recollections of “building crystal sets with grandad in the shed” when they were growing up. These were the formative experiences that made engineers out of these gents, and yet there they were, busily designing a broadcast system that would prohibit user modification.
My latest Information Week column is “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook” — in which I explain why Facebook and all the other social networking services live in a boom-and-bust cycle because they get crufted up with people you don’t want to add to your friends list, but have to for social reasons.
You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.
It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).
Two more fan-translations of my story Scroogled (originally published in Radar, about the day Google became evil) have come in this week: Stefan Talpalaru’s Romanian translation and Aleksandar Balalovski’s Macedonian translation. These join eight other translations into Spanish, Russian, Persian, Bulgarian, Dutch and Polish, and I hear there’s an Italian one underway!
Scroogled in Romanian, Scroogled in Macedonian
Here’s part twenty-one of my reading of Bruce Sterling’s brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
Escape Pod has just podcast an audio version of my short story “Other People’s Money,” which originally appeared in the Forbes “future of work” issue:
Which is why she was hoping that the venture capitalist would just leave her alone. He wasn’t a paying customer, he wasn’t a fellow artist — he wanted to buy her, and he was thirty years too late.
“You know, I pitched you guys in 1999. On Sand Hill Road. One of the founding partners. Kleiner, I think. The guy ate a salad all through my slide-deck. When I was done, he wiped his mouth, looked over my shoulder, and told me he didn’t think I’d scale. That was it. He didn’t even pick up my business card. When I looked back as I was going out the door, I saw his sweep it into the trash with the wrapper from his sandwich.”
The VC — young, with the waxy, sweaty look of someone who ate a lot of GM yogurt to try to patch his biochemistry — shook his head. “That wasn’t us. We’re a franchise — based here in LA. I just opened up the Inglewood branch. But I can see how that would have soured you on us. Did you ever get your VC?”
See also: Other People’s Money: My Forbes story on the future of work
