Medium – Page 11 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Against the great forces of history

What Ada Palmer’s University of Chicago Papal election LARP can teach us about our own future.

“Cesare Borgia oath of Fealty,” from the 2019 Papal election LARP. Photo by Ada Palmer. Used with permission.

Ada Palmer is a wonder. Not only is she a tenured University of Chicago historian who specializes in the forbidden information of Florence during the Inquisitions (witchcraft, homosexuality, heresy and other fascinating subjects); she’s also a composer, librettist and performer whose album-length retelling of Norse mythos is, astoundingly, exceeded by her song about space travel (if this doesn’t make you well up, I don’t want to know you).

And to top it all off, she’s a brilliant science fiction writer, whose inaugural series, Terra Ignota, has just concluded with its fourth and final volume, Perhaps the Stars.

Continue reading "Against the great forces of history"

Dead letters

Email could be the last federated internet technology — but it isn’t.

Vintage engraving of a dead letter office where postal officials struggle to decipher addressing information; captioned “Who is it for? A scene in the dead letter office experts trying to decipher an illegible address”

It feels like only yesterday that we were living through the Substack bubble, as mailing lists enjoyed a new renaissance (rebranded as “newsletters”), a tangible expression of the techlash and our collective disgust with the platforms and their attempts to enclose the internet and convert it to “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four.”

In the abstract, mailing lists/newsletters represent the promise of a return to a Jeffersonian internet, where each of us can garden own little patch, not subject to the whims of third parties. That, after all, is the original design brief of the internet, to be an “end-to-end network” where any party can connect to any other party without needing permission from anyone else.

Continue reading "Dead letters"

Hope, Not Optimism

Fatalism has no theory of change

Green tree ants on a leaf, Daintree rainforest, northern Australia (author’s photo)

I’ve been an activist all my life — literally, I attended my first demonstrations in a stroller — and that’s reflected in my work, from the essays and blog posts I’ve published for 20 years to the dozens of books I’ve written, both fiction and nonfiction.

To be an activist is to want to change the world. To change the world, you need two things: first, an understanding of what’s wrong with it, and second, a theory of how to make it better.

Much of my work focuses on the former: documenting, analyzing, and tracking injustices, dysfunctions, and emergencies — my essays are a form of public note-taking that helps me break down and understand complex phenomena.

Continue reading "Hope, Not Optimism"

Take it back

Copyright reversion, bargaining power, and authors’ rights.

Stationers’ Register entry for the transfer of Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and twelve other books in 1607.

Few labor markets are as dysfunctional as the market for creative labor. Writers, musicians, graphic artists and other creative workers often produce because they feel they have to, driven by a need to express and discover themselves. Small wonder that creative workers are willing to produce art for lower wages than they’d accept for other types of work. This leads to a vast oversupply of creative work, giving publishers, labels, studios and other intermediaries a buyer’s market for creative labor.

For the most part, arts policy pretends this isn’t true. When economists and business-people talk about labor markets, they lean heavily on the neoliberal conception of “rational economic actors” who produce when it makes sense to do so, and move on to another form of work when it doesn’t. Homo economicus is a nonsense — behavioral economics has repeatedly demonstrated all the ways in which “economic actors” don’t behave the way economic models predict they will — but it’s especially absurd when applied to creative labor markets.

Continue reading "Take it back"

Ignore Career Advice From Established Writers

We don’t know anything about breaking into today’s market

Screengrab of Judith Merril introducing Doctor Who on TVOntario, in the 1970s.

“Breaking In,” is my latest column for Locus Magazine; it’s both the story of how I broke into science fiction, and an explanation of why there’s so little to learn from that story.

When I was trying to sell my first stories, I obsessively sought career advice and memoirs from established writers. I sat in on countless science fiction convention panels in which bestselling writers explained how they’d butter up long-dead editors to sell to long-defunct publications.

Continue reading "Ignore Career Advice From Established Writers"

Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay

Beyond “competition,” “efficiency” and “innovation,” interop delivers self-determination.

*Image from Theophilus Brown’s 1915 patent for a manure spreader (USP#1139482)*

I am recuperating from hip-replacement surgery and while that often means I can’t concentrate enough to work, it also means I have long, uninterrupted periods to carry on correspondence, such as the paragraphs below, from my overdue reply to a left-wing economist with whom I’ve been discussing the case for interoperability. In our previous round, my correspondent had suggested that interop wasn’t necessarily good, and that even profitable interop could be bad for all of us — do we really need 50 nearly identical inks on Amazon that can all work with our printer? How can anyone make a “good” choice in that environment? My response is below.

Continue reading "Everything is Always Broken, and That’s Okay"

Why Bother?

A letter to a discouraged young writer

This week, a friend wrote to ask if I had any words of encouragement for a 14-year-old writer who had grown discouraged, convinced that writing would neither improve her life, nor this tormented and fraught world. Here is what I wrote to her, with a few edits.

Dear XXXXXXXXXXXX,

XXXXXX asked me to send you a brief note of encouragement. I understand where you’re coming from. Writing can be incredibly demoralizing, in part because it is incredibly elevating. Working out your anxieties, hopes and fears on paper through the lives of imaginary people can be an absolute tonic, and when the world is all in chaos, that tonic can be balm indeed. But at the same time, writing can feel inconsequential, especially when you’re just starting out, because it is intangible, just a bunch of made-up rubbish that has no power on its own to materialize those aspirations or mitigate the things that give rise to fears.

Worse, when you start writing you will quickly discover that very few people even care that you’re doing it — the proud relatives in your life are glad you’re writing but not very interested in specific works, and the friends who are entertained by your work are only interested in consuming so much of it.

Continue reading "Why Bother?"

Twitter Arguments

A theory of change

The kind of activism I do has a serious structural barrier: it’s esoteric. Even today, tech-policy issues are extremely niche. Indeed, tech-policy is a niche within a niche —most people have little technical knowledge and most people have little policy expertise, and the stuff I do requires that you have some of both.

Continue reading "Twitter Arguments"

Raiders of the lost ARC

Arts and crafts and authorship.

Authors’ uncorrected galley for “Red Team Blues” (2021).

I have screen-burn. Before the pandemic, I spent an unhealthy amount of my time sitting in front of laptop, in ways that were harmful to my posture and eyesight and mental health — but now, nineteen months in a lockdown where my laptop is also how I get groceries, see friends, attend meetings and “travel” to conferences, I am heartily sick of it.

I switch it up. I take walks (though fewer now that I did at the lockdown’s start, alas), I make short trips to shops (masked and anxious), I’ve even been to a small, out-of-town conference where masks and proof of vaccination were required.

Continue reading "Raiders of the lost ARC"

Disneyland at a stroll (Part VI)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing.

Guests are seen boarding/exiting the original Mad Tea Party in Disneyland’s Fantasyland in this undated photo from around 1960. — Evan Wohrman/CC BY-SA

This is Part VI in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems. In Part III, I described how every fix for long lines just made the problem worse, creating complexity that frustrated first-time visitors and turning annual passholders into entitled “passholes.” In Part IV, I look at the legal and economic dimension of different pricing models for managing aggregate demand. Part V looked at the paternalistic misdirection and subtle design cues Disney uses to manage aggregate demand.

Continue reading "Disneyland at a stroll (Part VI)"