Nigel Beale Interviews author activist Cory Doctorow: On the Future of the Book

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DATE : Mon, 7 Dec 2009 03:45:00 GMT
Entered in Database : 2009-12-07 03:45:00
length : 4176039
Link to the Show / Show Notes

Copyright activist, speaker, teacher (how about âspeacherââor âspreacherâ), columnist, science fiction novelist, short story writer, co-editor of  Boing Boing,  and the very manifestation of articulate dynamism, Cory Doctorow was in town recently to promote his novel Little Brother (free download here), a fast paced, current-day 1984-like polemic calling for teens to subvert security measures, especially those used by governments that claim to "defend my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.â As Austin Grossman puts it in the New York Times: MY favorite thing about âLittle Brotherâ is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that oneâs continued dignity and independence depend on it: âMy technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasnât spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacyâLittle Brother argues that unless youâre passably technically literate, youâre not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms â that in fact itâs your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy." Iâm clearly not nerdy enoughâ incarcerated I am in fact by technological illiteracyâincapacitated tooâneither machine I used to record my conversation with Cory worked for the full duration of our encounterâthey did however capture enough, thankfully, to provide his engaging take on the future of the book, the seeds of its destructionâand mention of a guy with a lemon up his nose. Please listen here: (For discussion of copyright, please watch this space over the coming days for my interview with the acknowledged giant in the field, Bill Patry). Subscribe to the Biblio File Podcast here

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