The Kitschies are a British award for science fiction and fantasy; every year they choose some marvellous books to honour. This year, I’m proud and pleased announce that they’ve shortlisted the UK editions of my novels Pirate Cinema and Homeland for the “Inky Tentacle” award for best cover. Both covers were designed by the studio Amazing15 for my British publishers, Titan Books. I’m indebted to the judging panel and the Kitchie volunteers — thank you!
I’ll be returning to SXSW Interactive this March for the first time in more than five years, to interview Pulitzer-winning journalist Barton Gellman, who is one of the journalists who’s been entrusted with some of the Snowden NSA leaks. We’re doing a presentation called “Snowden 2.0: A Field Report From the NSA Archives,” which follows an address by Glenn Greenwald. We’re speaking on March 10 — I hope to see you!
Here’s a reading of my latest Guardian column, Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful, about the social and political factors that make all the difference when choosing technologies.
Banshee fails gracefully because its authors don’t attempt any lock-in. When I find myself diverging from the design philosophy of Banshee to the extent that I want to use a rival system to manage my music, Banshee is designed to assist me in switching. Unlike Apple, Microsoft, and others, who treat you as a product to be bought and sold – and who have engineered laws like the DMCA to make it illegal to convert your files for use with rival products – Banshee is designed to work with me until we part ways, and then to gracefully bow out and let me move on to someone else’s version of this particular bit of plumbing.
A good example of this is Amazon’s MP3 store. Until recently, it worked beautifully. I’d pay a reasonable price for my music, and Amazon would let me download it to my computer with as little fuss as possible. Recently, that changed. Amazon wants to promote its cloud drive services, so now it requires that you lock yourself into an Amazon-proprietary downloader to get your MP3s. The Amazon MP3 store started life with a lot of rhetoric about liberation (they made t-shirts that trumpeted “DRM: Don’t Restrict Me!”) that contrasted their offering with the locked-in world of the iTunes Store. Now that Amazon has won enough marketshare in the MP3 world, it’s using that position to try and gain ground in the world of cloud computing – at the expense of its customers.
Lucky for me, MP3 is an open format, so MP3 investments fail well. The fact that I bought hundreds of pounds’ worth of music from Amazon doesn’t stop me from taking my business elsewhere now that they’ve decided to treat me as a strategic asset instead of a customer. By contrast, I was once unwise enough to spend thousands on audiobooks from Amazon’s Audible subsidiary (the major player in the audiobook world), kidding myself that the DRM wouldn’t matter. But the day I switched to Ubuntu, I realised that I was going to have to spend a month running three old Macs around the clock in order to re-record all those audiobooks and get them out of their DRM wrappers.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
My latest Guardian column, “Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful,” talks about evaluating technology based on more than its features — rather, on how you relate to it, and how it relates to you. In particular, I try to make the case for giving especial care to what happens when your technology fails:
Graceful failure is so much more important than fleeting success, but it’s not a feature or a design spec. Rather, it’s a relationship that I have with the technology I use and the systems that are used to produce it.This is not asceticism. Advocates of software freedom are sometimes accused of elevating ideology over utility. But I use the software I do out of a purely instrumental impulse. The things I do with my computer are the soul of my creative, professional, and personal life. My computer has videos and stills and audio of my daughter’s early life, rare moments of candid memoir from my grandmothers, the precious love letters that my wife and I sent to one another when we courted, the stories I’ve poured my heart and soul into, the confidential and highly sensitive whistleblower emails I’ve gotten from secret sources on investigative pieces; the privileged internal communications of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a law office to whom I have a duty of care as part of my fellowship (and everything else besides).
Knowing that I can work with this stuff in a way that works is simply not enough. I need to know that when my computer breaks, when the software is discontinued, when my computer is lost or stolen, when a service provider goes bust or changes ownership and goes toxic, when a customs officer duplicates my hard-drive at border, when my survivors attempt to probate my data – when all of that inevitable stuff happens, that my digital life will be saved. That data that should remain confidential will not leak. That data that should be preserved will be. That files that should be accessible can be accessed, without heroic measures to run obsolete software on painstakingly maintained superannuated hardware.
Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful
(Image: Smashed, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sarahbaker’s photostream)
Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson converted my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (from the collection Overclocked) into .mobi and .epub for easy viewing on an e-reader or mobile device. I probably get more fan mail for Sysadmins than for any other story, and it won the Locus Award the year it came out (it was later adapted to comics by JC Vaughn for the IDW book Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now). Give it a read!
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Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson converted my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (from the collection Overclocked) into .mobi and .epub for easy viewing on an e-reader or mobile device. I probably get more fan mail for Sysadmins than for any other story, and it won the Locus Award the year it came out (it was later adapted to comics by JC Vaughn for the IDW book Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now). Give it a read!
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Here’s the second, concluding part of my reading of my 2003 short story “Flowers From Al,” written with Charlie Stross for New Voices in Science Fiction, a Mike Resnick anthology (Here’s part one). It’s a pervy, weird story of transhuman romance.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
In my latest Locus column, “Cheap Writing Tricks,” I ruminate on what makes fiction work — why we perceive stories as stories, why we care about characters, and how the construction of stories interacts with the human mind (and why How to Win Friends and Influence People is a great writing tool).
In my latest Guardian column, I explain how UK prime minister David Cameron’s plan to opt the entire nation into a programme of Internet censorship is the worst of all worlds for kids and their parents. Cameron’s version of the Iranian “Halal Internet” can’t possibly filter out all the bad stuff, nor can it avoid falsely catching good stuff we want our kids to see (already the filters are blocking websites about sexual health and dealing with “porn addiction”). That means that our kids will still end up seeing stuff they shouldn’t, but that we parents won’t be prepared for it, thanks to the false sense of security we get from the filters.
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Here’s part one of my 2003 short story “Flowers From Al,” written with Charlie Stross for New Voices in Science Fiction, a Mike Resnick anthology. It’s a pervy, weird story of transhuman romance.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
