It’s been a few years since I last sat down with Carey Parker and his Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons podcast, and last week I corrected that oversight, recording a long interview about the Right to Repair, Adversarial Interoperability, and Sonos’s e-waste gambit. Part I is up now (MP3), and part II will be up in a week.
For my latest podcast, I read my January 2018 Locus column, Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention.
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For my latest podcast, I read my Copyright Week post for EFF’s Deeplinks blog, , In Serving Big Company Interests, Copyright Is in Crisis.
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For my latest podcast, I read my Guardian Cities column, “The case for … cities that aren’t dystopian surveillance states,” which was the last piece ever commissioned for the section.
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The editors of Guardian Cities (previously) saw my Toronto Life blurb about how a “smart city” could be focused on enabling its residents, rather than tracking and manipulating them, and asked me to write a longer piece on the theme: The case for … cities where you’re the sensor, not the thing being sensed is the result.
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In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action,, where I I discuss how the US government’s unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech companies who get to decide what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed — that is, how the USG’s complicity in the creation of monopolies allows for a kind of government censorship that somehow does not violate the First Amendment.
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The Canadian Broadcasting Coporation’s annual Canada Reads prize is one of Canada’s top literary prizes, ranking with the Governor General’s prize for prestige and reach; it begins early in January with the announcement of a longlist of 15 recommended books, and then these are whittled down to a shortlist of five books later in the month. Over the months that follow, each of the shortlisted books is championed by a Canadian celebrity in a series of events across the country, with the grand prize winner being announced in late March after a televised debate among the five books’ “champions.”
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In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my Globe and Mail editorial, Science fiction and the unforeseeable future: In the 2020s, let’s imagine better things, where I reflect on what science fiction can tell us about the 2020s for the Globe‘s end-of-the-decade package; I wrote about how science fiction can’t predict the future, but might inspire it, and how the dystopian malaise of science fiction can be turned into a inspiring tale of “adversity met and overcome – hard work and commitment wrenching a limping victory from the jaws of defeat.”
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In my latest Locus column, Inaction is a Form of Action, I discuss how the US government’s unwillingness to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws has resulted in the dominance of a handful of giant tech companies who get to decide what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed — that is, how the USG’s complicity in the creation of monopolies allows for a kind of government censorship that somehow does not violate the First Amendment.
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Next month, I’m giving a keynote talk at The Future of the Future: The Ethics and Implications of AI, an event at UC Irvine that features Bruce Sterling, Rose Eveleth, David Kaye, and many others!
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