Cory Doctorow on the Future of the Book
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Copyright activist, speaker, teacher (how about \\u2019speacher\\u2019\\u2026or \\u2019spreacher\\u2019), columnist, science fiction novelist, short story writer, co-editor of\\xa0Boing Boing,\\xa0and the very manifestation of articulate dynamism, Cory Doctorow was in Ottawa to promote his novel Little Brother.\\xa0a 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.\\u201d
As Austin Grossman puts it in the New York Times:
MY favorite thing about \\u201cLittle Brother\\u201d 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 one\\u2019s continued dignity and independence depend on it: \\u201cMy technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn\\u2019t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy\\u2026Little Brother argues that unless you\\u2019re passably technically literate, you\\u2019re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms \\u2014 that in fact it\\u2019s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."
I\\u2019m clearly not nerdy enough\\u2026 incarcerated I am, in fact, by technological illiteracy\\u2026incapacitated too\\u2026neither machine I used to record my conversation with Cory worked for the full duration of our encounter\\u2026they did however capture enough, thankfully, to provide his engaging take on the future of the book, the seeds of its destruction\\u2026and mention of a guy with a lemon up his nose.\\xa0
(For discussion of copyright, please listen to a\\xa0giant in the field, Bill Patry here).
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