69 | Cory Doctorow on Technology, Monopoly, and the Future of the Internet
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2019
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should work and how it should be organized. In multiple ways — as a blogger, activist, fiction writer, and more — Cory Doctorow has been thinking about how the internet is affecting our lives since the very beginning. He has been especially interested in legal issues surrounding copyright, publishing, and free speech, and recently his attention has turned to broader economic concerns. We talk about how the internet has become largely organized through just a small number of quasi-monopolistic portals, how this affects the ways in which we gather information and decide whether to trust outside sources, and where things might go from here.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist, journalist, and blogger. He is a co-editor of the website Boing Boing, and works as a special consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of the nonfiction book Information Doesn't Want to Be Free as well as science-fiction works such as Walkaway and Radicalized. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University, where he is also a Visiting Professor, as well as being an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina's School of Library and Information Science.
- Web site
- Boing Boing
- Podcast
- Wikipedia
- Amazon.com author page
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll |
| 0:04.2 | So the internet you may have heard of it kind of a big deal |
| 0:08.6 | Good chance that you're either listening to this podcast over the internet or somehow |
| 0:13.6 | used the internet to find out about this podcast or to download it or whatever |
| 0:18.3 | It's still a state of flux when it comes to how society deals with not just the internet but technology more generally |
| 0:25.6 | computers |
| 0:26.5 | Smartphones things like that and one of our sharpest thinkers about this relationship between humanity and the changing world of technology is today's guest |
| 0:35.8 | Corey Doctoro |
| 0:37.2 | Corey is best known perhaps as the co-editor of the blog Boeing Boeing |
| 0:41.2 | But he's also a science fiction writer his most recent book is called radicalize a collection of four novellas |
| 0:47.9 | But he's also a very prolific nonfiction writer and he thinks deeply not just about technology |
| 0:53.3 | But about the law philosophy morality the economics of it all so we really get into the relationship that people have |
| 1:01.8 | Not only with technology but with the corporations the powers that bring this technology to us and the ways that |
| 1:09.2 | They are leveraging our interest to make money for themselves and the good parts and bad parts of that and how we can sort of fight against it |
| 1:17.2 | Corey talks about these things both in his essays and books but also his stories |
| 1:22.3 | Which gives him a number of different angles on these important problems |
| 1:26.1 | So it's a very fast |
| 1:28.1 | Multi-faceted idea rich conversation. I think you're going to like it |
| 1:32.4 | Remember that you can visit the podcast homepage at preposterousuniverse.com and if you're interested in listening to |
| 1:39.1 | Mindscape without ads you can become a patreon which is linked from the podcast page |
| 1:45.2 | Patrons also get monthly ask me anything episodes |
| 1:48.9 | You can ask me a question. I'll do my best to answer it of course regular old episodes always available here for free whenever you want them |
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