I dearly love Cory and his books (attended the reading last monday too, was a blast!), but there is one thing that bugs me about his narratives: Too often, the defining piece of technology that enables his heroes to do the heroic open-source-shared thing they do just falls from the sky.
The vision he outlines where everyone can and will chip in and things get better all the time, where there is no human overlord ruling them but there is self-organisation and all that, the way this vision comes to reality in his works happens because there is one enabling piece of technology – and he rarely explores or explains how that piece was made. There are off-hand remarks like “the UN made it”, or “was built on this other thing”, but the fact that this already was probably a major undertaking gets glossed over.
Don’t get me wrong – I still very much like the thing, and this glossing over is important to be able to write a good piece of fiction, but it also reinforces the, in my mind negative, “single brilliant hacker” stereotype that keeps being so damaging to hacktivist communities.
Yeah, Christian Buggedei , that’s a really good point. Actually building the tech and doing so in a way that it has a sustainable model for keeping itself growing over time would be a really interesting and important addition to his stories. It’s funny, because that’s so much of what his real life is about.
Cory Doctorow did the thing where he said crypto and didn’t even mean cryptography, as it would be right and proper, but this other thing, you know, hang on, tip-of-my-tongue, right, cryptocurrency. #CryptoMeansCryptography
The Vital Edge by Gideon Rosenblatt Work, society and the human experience in an era of machine intelligence.
I dearly love Cory and his books (attended the reading last monday too, was a blast!), but there is one thing that bugs me about his narratives: Too often, the defining piece of technology that enables his heroes to do the heroic open-source-shared thing they do just falls from the sky.
The vision he outlines where everyone can and will chip in and things get better all the time, where there is no human overlord ruling them but there is self-organisation and all that, the way this vision comes to reality in his works happens because there is one enabling piece of technology – and he rarely explores or explains how that piece was made. There are off-hand remarks like “the UN made it”, or “was built on this other thing”, but the fact that this already was probably a major undertaking gets glossed over.
Don’t get me wrong – I still very much like the thing, and this glossing over is important to be able to write a good piece of fiction, but it also reinforces the, in my mind negative, “single brilliant hacker” stereotype that keeps being so damaging to hacktivist communities.
Yeah, Christian Buggedei , that’s a really good point. Actually building the tech and doing so in a way that it has a sustainable model for keeping itself growing over time would be a really interesting and important addition to his stories. It’s funny, because that’s so much of what his real life is about.
Wrong. It was because of government interference that crypto failed.
Cory Doctorow did the thing where he said crypto and didn’t even mean cryptography, as it would be right and proper, but this other thing, you know, hang on, tip-of-my-tongue, right, cryptocurrency. #CryptoMeansCryptography