Content collects several of Cory Doctorow’s favorite pieces of his written on “technology, creativity, copyright, and the future”, clumping in the mid-2000s. The content is mixed in medium, but united in message: herein are essays, speeches, and interviews that cover technology and creativity, with the occasional obstacle of law. Doctorow began his life’s work in libraries and bookstores, but took note of the bookwarez scene as it emerged in early Usegroups — committed to the scanning and electronic sharing of books — when he shifted into tech and began writing science fiction. If, he figured, people are going to spend hours disassembling, scanning, and sharing books regardless of the law — and science fiction books are especially popular for scanning and sharing — why not simply….offer an ebook version of the book to whosoever wants it? A clean copy, with no OCR errors and with the author’s blessing? Doctorow took a gamble that he could gain more readers through exposure, and thus indirectly, more buyers. Yes, some people may be content with reading an ebook copy, but once hooked they might elect to buy a physical copy they can read outside, or give to a friend. This is not that similar from the early shareware approach of video games, in which the first levels of a game were freely available to play & make copies of, but the full version had to be sent for by mail. Although Doctorow pursued this on a hunch, he also believes that stringent copy protection of ideas is both impossible given the nature of the internet, and ultimately bad for artists and human creativity in general.

In later books he’s advanced this more, writing in Information Doesn’t Want to be Free that there are other models creatives can pursue, like the ‘subscriber’ model employed by Substack, YouTube, and Patreon. Doctorow attacks some legal and technical hurdles directly: his cheeky opening piece is a speech he gave to Microsoft on why it should abandon intrusive digital rights media software, or DRM: I say “cheeky” because Bill Gates famously penned “An Open Letter to Hobbyists” decrying those who copied software and shared it for free, denying programmers like himself sales. Much of the book remains relevant today, like Doctorow’s observations that most ‘consumers’ of media, be it stories or music, pursue ease of use over quality: they prefer an mp3 player packed with low-quality mp3s that they had control over, to something like a Sony Music Clip that offered better quality but few sharable options. This sometimes causes changes in the way creative works are delivered: because most people listen to songs by themselves, not as part of albums, the idea of concept albums has largely faded. There are dated elements, but for those of us who were plugged in in the mid-2000s, that adds its own nostalgic interest: I was interested in his defense of early Wikipedia, and amused by his confident proclamation that facebook would go the way of MySpace, because the more people it attracted, the more negative interactions would grow around it — moving people to ditch the platform for others. I’m told the whippersnappers have moved on these days, and I’m so out of the loop I can’t even go for laughs by guessing at outdated platforms — but facebook is still a giant as far as web traffic goes. right behind Google & YouTube for monthly views.

Context is a similar essay collection, but smaller and more varied. While Doctorow still writes on copyright and licensing, this set also has random articles like a complete list of all of the tech Doctorow uses — the specific laptop, mice, etc — and columns responding to events of the day (like a piece on Net Neutrality), in addition to the odd book review on a related topic. The iPad, recently released, comes under fire in several pieces: although Doctorow is the kind of gadget geek that sees him faithfully buying his phone model’s latest release every year, he shares the same contempt for Apple’s locked-down devices and ecosystem as Steve Wozniak did in the 1980s, fighting with Steve Jobs over the unmoddability of the Macintosh. He’s particularly incensed that Apple’s terms of service make jailbreaking the software iPads use to restrict app installation to its app store — a copyright crime. Interesting, he’s more critical of streaming & cloud services than I would expect from a technophile, arguing that owning one’s own equipment and files is still cheaper and consumer-friendly. The essays aren’t dated, but the cloud essay appears to have aged like the finest milk, especially for businesses. This was another interesting collection, but you do have to be interested in tech and internet creativity.

Related:
The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy. On the ipod and its influence on the music industry
Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow. A novel based on remixing context

Quotes/Highlights:

People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They’re ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and they’ll use any technology that serves that ideal — and mercilessly eschew any technology that would subvert it. There’s nothing wrong with driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son, so there’s no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand, there’s nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in the horse barn.

Bill Gates told the New York Times that Microsoft lost the search wars by doing “a good job on the 80 percent of common queries and ignor[ing] the other stuff. But it’s the remaining 20 percent that counts, because that’s where the quality perception is.” Why did Napster captivate so many of us? Not because it could get us the top-40 tracks that we could hear just by snapping on the radio: it was because 80 percent of the music ever recorded wasn’t available for sale anywhere in the world, and in that 80 percent were all the songs that had ever touched us, all the earworms that had been lodged in our hindbrains, all the stuff that made us smile when we heard it. Those songs are different
for all of us, but they share the trait of making the difference between a compelling service and, well, top-40 Clearchannel radio programming. It was the minority of tracks that appealed to the majority of us.

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its “democratic-ness” — the ease with which it can be reproduced.

The thing is, when all you’ve got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What’s left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that need to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.

I once asked a Japanese friend to explain why so many people on the Tokyo subway wore surgical masks. Are they extreme germophobes? Conscientious folks getting over a cold? Oh, yes, he said, yes, of course, but that’s only the rubric. The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression, to make your face into a disengaged, unreadable blank–to spare others the discomfort of firing up their mirror neurons in order to model your mood based on your outward expression. To make it possible to see without seeing.

Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation – the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh,
I should buy a copy of this book – is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

This led me to formulate something I grandiosely call Doctorow’s First Law: “Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won’t give you a key, they’re not doing it for your benefit.