This week on my podcast, I conclude my reading of my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” ( here’s the first half ). The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008 ), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine , as well as into Chinese , Russian , Hebrew , and Italian . The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben...
Apr 13, 2025
This week on my podcast, I once again read my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008 ), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine , as well as into Chinese , Russian , Hebrew , and Italian . The story was adapted for my IDW comic book series Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now by Ben Templesmith. I read this into my ...
Apr 06, 2025
This week on my podcast, I read Why I don’t like AI art , a column from last week’s Pluralistic newsletter: Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinou...
Mar 30, 2025
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column, “There Were Always Enshittifiers,” about the historical context for my latest novel, Picks and Shovels : It used to be a much fairer fight. It used to be that if a company figured out how to block copying its floppies, another company – or even just an individual tinkerer – could figure out how to break that “copy protection.” There were plenty of legitimate reasons to want to do this: Maybe you owned more than one computer, or ma...
Mar 23, 2025
Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. The lecture was called “With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It.” It’s the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year’s McLuhan Lecture in Berlin , and continued with a summer Defcon keynote . This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities ...
Feb 26, 2025
This week on my podcast, I bring you the audio from yesterday’s Jacobin virtual book launch for my book Picks and Shovels , with Yanis Varoufakis, hosted by David Moscrop. You have until Monday night to order personalized, signed copies of the book from Los Angeles’s Secret Headquarters (I’m dropping by the warehouse to sign them on Tuesday, on my way to my event at LA’s Diesel Bookstore with Wil Wheaton ). See the whole tour schedule (20+ cities and still growing!) here . MP3...
Feb 16, 2025
This week on my podcast, I read MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing , a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter. MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It’s not just that these people are desperate – it’s that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, sm...
Feb 09, 2025
This week on my podcast, I read Canada shouldn’t retaliate with US tariffs , a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter. But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of 5% rather than Apple’s 30%. Canada could make app stores for the Android, Playstation and Xbox, too. There’s no reason that a Canadian app store would have to conf...
Feb 02, 2025
This week on my podcast, I’m reading “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart),” my short story in Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions , commissioned by J. Michael Straczynski. Margaret came into my office, breaking my unproductive clicktrance. She looked sheepish. “I got given one of those robots that follows you around,” she said. She took a step, revealing the waist-high reinforced cardboard box. “Want to help unbox? I stood up and unkinked my spine and hips and shoulders with ...
Jan 26, 2025
This week on my podcast, I’m reading “ Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital ,” the latest post from my Pluralistic.net blog. It’s about the new “Free Our Feeds” project and why I think the existence of Mastodon doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to making Bluesky as free as possible. When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot. Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a grea...
Jan 20, 2025
This week on my podcast, I’ve got Wil Wheaton reading the first chapter of the audiobook of Picks and Shovels , the next Martin Hench novel, which is out next month. Please consider supporting my work by pre-ordering the book as a hardcover, DRM-free ebook, or DRM-free audiobook in my Kickstarter! The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant–what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money–but for now he’s an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way...
Jan 10, 2025
This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series. Here are the previous year’s installments: 2012 , 2013 , 2014 , 2015 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 . MP3...
Dec 17, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “ Spill “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth . I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management...
Dec 09, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read part five of “ Spill “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet conn...
Dec 01, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read part four of “ Spill “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet conn...
Oct 29, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read part three of “ Spill “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet con...
Oct 27, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read part two of “ Spill “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma. My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet conne...
Oct 27, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read part one of “ Spill “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And hackers? Well, we’re no better at taking our own advice than anyone else. Take “There is no security in obscurity”—if a security system only works when your enemies don’t un...
Oct 07, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read “ Vigilant “, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Nelda Buckman and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Kids hate email. Dee got my number from his older brother, who got it from Tina, my sister-in-law, who he knew from art school. He texted me just as I was starting to make progress with a gnarly bug in some logging software I was trying to get running for my cloud servers. My ...
Sep 29, 2024
This week on my podcast, I read my latest Pluralistic.net column, “ Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster ” about the way that gamers were sucked into the coalition to defend trusted computing, and how the Crowdstrike disaster has seen them ejected from the coalition by Microsoft: As a class, gamers *hate* digital rights management (DRM), the anti-copying, anti-sharing code that stops gamers from playing older games, selling or giving away games, or just *playing* games: https://www.r...
Sep 16, 2024
