Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a long, in-depth discussion on the subject of “What does it mean to keep the internet free” with Jack Russell Weinstein from Why?, the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life’s program on North Dakota Public Radio (MP3). Weinstein and I ranged pretty far and wide about what internet freedom really means, what threatens it, and how we can defend it.

I appeared on this week’s Canadaland podcast (MP3) with Jesse Brown to talk about the promise of the internet 20 years ago, when it seemed that we were headed for an open, diverse internet with decentralized power and control, and how we ended up with an internet composed of five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four. Jesse has been covering this for more than a decade (I was a columnist on his CBC podcast Search Engine, back in the 2000s) and has launched a successful independent internet business with Canadaland, but as he says, the monopolistic gentrification of the internet is heading for podcasting like a meteor.

I’m on this week’s Techdirt podcast (MP3) talking about my latest book Radicalized — this being Techdirt, the talk quickly moved to DRM, and then to tech policy, monopolism, breaking up the Big Tech platforms, and neofeudalism.

While I was out on tour with Radicalized, I recorded an interview (MP3) with the Left Field podcast (“A couple of socialists with a couple of beers. We talk about Canadian politics and current events around the world”). We covered a lot of ground, particularly around the catastrophic EU Copyright Directive and, of course, the new book.

Another great podcast interview from my Radicalized book tour: this one with My Summer Lair (MP3) where host Sammy Younan and I discussed the book from a Canadian perspective (we recorded in Toronto) and really dug into some of the book’s themes.

During my book tour for Radicalized, I recorded a podcast interview (MP4) with the Security Sandbox podcast (formerly Hacker Culture). Host Sean Sun and I carried on a wide-ranging, hacker-centric discussion that covered everything from the EU Copyright Directive to writing discipline to my recipe for ginger liqueur — and, of course, the new book.

This morning, CBC’s flagship weekend programme Day Six aired its latest episode (MP3), a conversation between host Brent Bambury, me, and Tim Maughan, the author of an outstanding debut novel called Infinite Detail. (Image: Jason Vermes/CBC)) It’s often said that sci-fi’s role is to project the future, but Doctorow is skeptical of that perspective. “What we’re doing is kidding ourselves that we’re projecting a future; I think that at best, we’re reflecting the present,” he told Bambury. “As an activist, I have to think that the future is not predictable. Otherwise, there’d be no reason to get out of bed. The future changes based on what we do.”

I recently recorded an interview with Yascha Mounk for Slate’s “Taming the Net podcast (MP3), whose mission is: “How to preserve the freedom of the internet without letting the internet destroy democracy.” Mounk and I talked about how the internet enables abuses, but also enables us to push back against those abuses.

On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the American public domain in twenty years. I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, after a roster of astounding speakers. It was a big challenge and I was pretty nervous, but on reviewing the saved livestream, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Proud enough that I’ve ripped the audio and posted it to my podcast feed; the video for the keynote is on the Archive and mirrored to Youtube. The whole event’s livestream is also online, and boy do I recommend it.

This week, I sat down for an interview (MP3) with Terrence McNally for his World That Just Might Work show to talk about information politics, science fiction, oligarchy, resistance, and hope!