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Cory Doctorow      

Science Fiction Author, Tech Activist & Co-Editor of Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

His novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books, Head of Zeus (UK), Titan Books (UK) and HarperCollins (UK). He has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.

His recent books include “Chokepoint Capitalism” (with Rebecca Giblin) (2022), a nonfiction book about creative labor markets and monopoly; “Attack Surface” (2020), a standalone sequel to “Little Brother” intended for adults, “Poesy the Monster Slayer,” a picture book for young children (2020), the nonfiction tech/politics book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” (2020), “Radicalized” (2019) and “Walkaway” (2017), science fiction for adults; and “In Real Life,” a young adult graphic novel created with Jen Wang (2014).

His latest young adult novel is “Homeland,” the bestselling sequel to 2008’s “Little Brother.” His New York Times Bestseller “Little Brother” was published in 2008. In 2023, Verso will publish “The Internet Con,” a nonfiction book about monopoly and radical interoperability. In 2023/4, Tor Books will publish two more science fiction novels for adults: “Red Team Blues” and “The Lost Cause.” His latest short story collection is “With a Little Help,” available in paperback, ebook, audiobook and limited edition hardcover. In 2011, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called “Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century” (with an introduction by Tim O’Reilly) and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called “Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now.” “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,” a PM Press Outspoken Authors chapbook, was also published in 2011.

“Little Brother” was nominated for the 2008 Hugo, Nebula, Sunburst and Locus Awards. It won the Ontario Library White Pine Award, the Prometheus Award as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in America’s top 1000 independent bookstores in 2008; it was the San Francisco Public Library’s One City/One Book choice for 2013. It has also been adapted for stage by Josh Costello.

He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund and the Metabrainz Foundation. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net.

Speech Topics


Heed Not the Autocomplete Worshippers

"Criti-Hype" is the cardinal sin of technology critics - that's when you take the outlandish claims of the tech industry at face value and criticize them as though they were true: "Holy moly, these evil wizards have invented a superintelligent computer god! Whatever shall we do?"

There are real problems with AI, but Skynet isn't one of them. The real problems have to do with automating bias, exploiting workers, destroying the environment with pointless, computationally intensive work, and distracting us from the real potential - and problems - of life in the digital age.

We don't have to accept the claims of mediocre tech bros at face value to condemn them for their misdeeds. It's okay to call them out for monopolies, labor exploitation and bias-laundering without worrying that they have unleashed a transhuman immortal demon that will devour the Earth in its quest to turn us all into paperclips.

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