Cory Doctorow Wows at SFU

Hear­ing Cory Doc­torow (the sci­ence fic­tion writer and one of the main con­trib­u­tors to the best blog on the web, Boing Boing) speak was a blast: it’s the intel­lec­tual equiv­a­lent of a roller coaster at Dis­ney­world. He’d be pleased to hear that metaphor, I sus­pect, because as he men­tioned “I have a sort of love/hate rela­tion­ship with the Dis­ney cor­po­ra­tion.” (One of his early books, Down and out in the Magic King­dom which you can get in text or audio book com­pletely for free, deals with Dis­ney in the future at some length)

His lec­ture, enti­tled “The Total­i­tar­ian Urge”, fol­lowed the themes of Con­trol and Chaos, the Inter­net and explo­sion of knowl­edge shar­ing ver­sus the con­stant attempts by those less enlight­ened who want to reach out and keep your com­puter, your thoughts, your ideas, cre­ations and col­lab­o­ra­tions under their sur­veil­lance or worse yet, arrest you for hav­ing them. It’s a rare treat when a speaker is equal parts chal­leng­ing and well informed, play­ful and schol­arly, rue­ful and insight­ful. He threw out some won­der­ful ver­bal and thought-provoking fire­works like ‘The war on abstract nouns’, that Mark Twain’s orig­i­nal philo­soph­i­cal view of the world was that of a bil­liard table before the first shot is taken, and that if we knew every­thing about that first stroke of the cue ball, we could pre­dict the future of the whole game (and how that view has even­tu­ally become less and less viable as we know more and the Inter­net enables such extra­or­di­nary degrees of non-linear shar­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion). He spoke of how DRMs (Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ments schemes) and gov­ern­ment attempts at con­trol­ling the shar­ing of data is lit­er­ally a return to the Dark Ages (when Alchemists were the Sci­en­tists, but just didn’t share their findings)

I saw a lot of friends there, and am pleased to see that one of them, Ianiv Schwe­ber, has posted the audio of the talk at Now­Pub­lic, a grass-roots citizen-produced News Site. Lis­ten for yourself.