News

Charlie Stross interviews me on the WELL

Social incentives are the most powerful forces in our world -- the reason you can't wear your underwear on your head is because of disapprobation. The most disruptive thing about the Internet is its ability to locate you in homogenous communities that embrace the same values as you, so that there's no dialectic in socail pressure: IOW, you can spend all your time in alt.underwear.on.my.head and never get the funny looks that would cause you to reconsider your fashion choices. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (except when it is, i.e., alt.big.nazi.idiots), but it is a powerfully disruptive thing.

Sidebar: in our second collaboration, "Flowers from Alice," we deal with uploaded "people' who can instantiate many copies of themselves in parallel. One of the interesting things about this is that it suggests that attention isn't necessarily a scarce resource -- if you need to do two things at once, you just make another copy to do it...

Comments (2) | Posted on January 30, 2003 09:13 AM

Internet radio interview

Comments (0) | Posted on January 28, 2003 07:25 PM

A sequel of sorts -- only 30 copies left!

First, Adrian got on the subway, opting to go deadhead for a faster load-time. He stepped into the sparkling cryochamber at the Downsview station, conjured a HUD against his field of vision, and granted permission to be frozen. The next thing he knew, he was thawing out on the Union station platform, pressed belly-to-butt with a couple thousand other commuters who'd opted for the same treatment. In India, where this kind of convenience-freezing was even more prevalent, Mohan had observed that the reason their generation was small for their age was that they spent so much of it in cold-sleep, conserving space in transit. Adrian might've been 18, but he figured that he'd spent at least one cumulative year frozen.

Adrian shuffled through the crowd and up the stairs to the steady-temp surface, peeling off the routing sticker that the cryo had stuck to his shoulder. His tummy was still rumbling, so he popped the sticker in his mouth and chewed until it had dissolved, savoring the steaky flavor and the burst of calories. The guy who'd figured out edible routing tags had Whuffie to spare: Adrian's mom knew someone who knew someone who knew him, and she said that he had an entire subaquatic palace to rattle around in.

A clamor of swallowing noises filled his ears, as the crowd subvocalized, carrying on conversations with distant friends. Adrian basked in the warm, simulated sunlight emanating from the dome overhead. He was going outside of the dome in a matter of minutes, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to be plenty cold soon enough. He patted his little rucksack and made sure he had his cowl with him.

Comments (0) | Posted on January 28, 2003 04:02 PM

Full interview transcript for SFGate piece

And, there's this kind of, you know, tiresome, retrograde, dreary meme that says we have to wait for screens to get sharper, we need digital ink, you need to be able to carry it around, you need to be able to take it to the bathtub, blah blah blah – And to me it sounds like priests sitting around holding a Gutenberg bible, and saying, How can the word of God possibly leap off one of these louche and dirty pages from Mister Gutenberg's press, you know, that the true word of God can only be carried when it's hand-illuminated on fetal calf skin by a monk who's devoted his life to understanding the word. And you know, I think that it's time for a Protestant Reformation. It's true that you can't take an e-book into the tub, and it doesn't smell nice, and all the rest of it, but on the other hand, you can carry around 40,000 of them on a drive the size of credit card. As someone who owns around 20,000 books and who has put them in boxes and moved them more than once, I can tell you that this is a serious advantage. Right? The other thing is that data is easy to back up. I can back up off site, over night, electronically, to a server in Australia that will survive even if the hemisphere goes, whereas backing up books – I mean, books are printed on substrate that is so fragile that it burns when it comes into contact with oxygen. We actually use that substrate to wipe our asses with. This is not robust, archival material. This is the very definition of ephemeral, that literature is a book written on toilet paper.

Comments (0) | Posted on January 28, 2003 10:44 AM

Serialized by email

Comments (0) | Posted on January 27, 2003 10:48 PM

Down and Out in the Times of London

The novel takes a fast-paced gallop through a net-inspired utopia, where the only scarce commodity is your peer's opinion of you, and where competitive acts of generosity are perpetrated by reputation-seeking gangs of marauding altruists. The novel represents such a pleasant ideal that you are happy to buy the hardback afterwards, if only as a physical memento of your online read.

Doctorow's success must confuse the extremist wing of modern publishing, which constantly tells us how copies of works online are strangling new artists in the crib, while wrapping its own e-books and CDs in endless layers of copy protection.

If Magic Kingdom makes a mark, it will stand as proof that you do not have to treat your readers like suspected pirates to get what you want: a reputation, a living and an audience for your ideas.

Comments (0) | Posted on January 27, 2003 04:19 PM

One chapter at a time, with discussion

Comments (0) | Posted on January 23, 2003 11:54 AM

Interview on SFGate

I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics looks like. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with the management of resources that are scarce. If it's valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted].

Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn't a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep shit grass -- where the more you graze, the more commons you get. So I took the idea of nanotechnology as the means whereby any good can be reproduced infinitely, at zero marginal cost, and tried to use that as a metaphor for the online world we actually live in.

The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier -- television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.

Comments (2) | Posted on January 23, 2003 08:06 AM

Real-World Whuffie

It just occurred to me society could use Whuffie for good incentive, for example, when you go to the doctor you get a point for regular check ups in your health whuffie, (heh, my whuffie is a little flat on that one), and if you choose the doctors check-up results would give or take WUPM. Your credit rating, portfolio, liabilities and assets would all tabulate in a financial WUPM, for the less fortunate they could accrue financial WUPM based on movement, like a business venture,education or the ability to create wealth, kind of a curve to keep the wealthy from having to unfair and advantage and giving those disadvantaged incentive to accumulate Whuffie through forward motion.

Comments (3) | Posted on January 20, 2003 05:06 PM

Over 50,000 downloads of Down and Out!

Comments (1) | Posted on January 19, 2003 09:36 AM

Dead-tree edition spotted in Chicago!

Comments (15) | Posted on January 18, 2003 10:15 PM

Alternate stylesheets for the book

Thanks to Dorthea Salo's excellent work in converting Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to html using stylesheets that abstract the presentation from the markup, it's very easy to change the way the book looks to suit your own reading tastes. Steven Garrity has posted his own version of the book with an alternate stylesheet that's more to his liking.

Technically, the Creative Commons license probably forbids this without my permission, but I gave it to Steven and I'm giving it to you. I'd love to see your alternate stylesheets for the book -- just post 'em to the Comments section below!

Comments (0) | Posted on January 18, 2003 10:57 AM

Interview on P2PNet.net

"Word-of-mouth is the only consistently successful means for turning first novels by relative unknowns into successes," Cory told p2pnet.net. "Books like Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood became bestsellers through being passed hand to hand by passionate believers in the text. My book attempts to articulate the unspoken motivation behind the Free Software movement, the Web, and all the tech-for-tech's-sake projects that my tribe (which is both sizeable and growing) spends its leisure hours contributing to.

"This tribe is smeared across cyberspace, and rarely meets face-to-face - its hand-to-hand mechanisms are email, p2p, the Web, IRC. Making my book amenable to travel by these mechanisms ensures that if it catches the imagination and passion of my readers, they'll have the same ability that Ya-Ya Sisterhood's supporters had."

Comments (0) | Posted on January 18, 2003 09:22 AM

Frequently Asked Questions, Part 1

Some answers to frequently asked questions:

Q: Where does the word Whuffie come from?

A: It's just a made-up word we used interchangably with "Brownie Points" in high-school. Some people have suggested that it might have come from the Arsenio Hall show's "woof woof woof" noises.

Q: Did you know that Amazon lists the publication date for your book as December 31, 1969?

A: Yes. Wish I could do something about it, too.

Q: Can't I just send some money to you by PalPal instead of buying the book?

A: You don't have to buy the book, but I'm not interested in tipjar payments. I'm not doing this to compete with my publisher. If you read the ebook and want to pay me back, but don't have any use for the dead-tree edition, the best way you can do that is to buy a copy of the book and donate it to a school, library or community center. If you do this, you'll put a copy of the book on the shelf where it might be read, I'll get a royalty, and my sales-figures will go up (which means that I'll get a bigger advance on my next book and my publisher will be more likely to want to repeat the experiment).

Comments (6) | Posted on January 14, 2003 11:21 PM

Interview on Minnesota Public Radio

Comments (0) | Posted on January 14, 2003 10:14 PM

Hugo nominations ballot online

Comments (1) | Posted on January 12, 2003 02:29 PM

Vinge likes the idea

One of the wonderful things about our times is that individual writers are empowered and can experiment with new ways of getting the word out. If there aren't too many new laws made, I think this will ultimately give us much better ways of doing things (and probably a large variety of such new ways). -- Vernor

Comments (1) | Posted on January 11, 2003 10:16 AM

California Author on Down and Out

01/10/2003 The Whuffie Channel. Cory Doctorow imagines a world where death and copyright have a cure. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books) is set in the post-death, post-work, net-in-your-head future. It is in bookstores this week and yesterday it was one of Amazon’s top 300 sellers. His future-is-now marketing strategy: the entire book can also be downloded for free at his website, where readers are encouraged to share it. In the first 24 hours, the book was downloaded 20,000 times.

Comments (0) | Posted on January 11, 2003 07:45 AM

Wired News on Down and Out

Doctorow's fans aren't surprised to find his book online for free. The plots of his most recent short story, "0wnz0red," involves digital rights management, or how files are protected from sharing and copying.

Moreover, Doctorow is known outside science fiction circles for his prolific, passionate posts about digital rights issues on the BoingBoing weblog and other forums, as well as his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"I don't believe that I am giving up book royalties," Doctorow said about persuading his publisher, Tor Books, to make Down and Out available digitally for free under the new Creative Commons licensing system.

"(Downloads) crossed the 10,000-download threshold at 8 a.m. this morning," Doctorow said Thursday, "which exceeds the initial print run for the book."

Doctorow said he thinks the marketing buzz from those downloads will be worth more than any lost book sales. "I think that the Internet's marvelous ability to spread information to places where it finds a receptive home is the best thing that could happen to a new writer like me."

Comments (0) | Posted on January 11, 2003 07:40 AM

Lots of new formats for downloading

Volunteers have sent in copies of the novel in multiple file formats (PalmOS PDB, Apple Newton PKG, PalmOS Palm Reader, and Microsoft LIT). They're linked off the downloads page.

Comments (6) | Posted on January 9, 2003 11:50 PM

Over 20,000 downloads so far

Comments (7) | Posted on January 9, 2003 11:26 PM

Downloads mirror in Australia

Comments (0) | Posted on January 9, 2003 10:24 PM

Interview with me on Creative Commons

Well, in some ways, this novel is a parable about Napster, and about the reputation economies that projects like Ringo, Firefly, Epinions and Amazon hint at. In a world where information is nonscarce, the problem isn't finding generic information -- it's finding useful information. There's an old chestnut in online science fiction fandom that the Internet "makes us all into slushreaders." ("Slush" is the unsolicited prose that arrives at publishers' offices -- a "slushreader" wades through thousands of these paste-gems looking for the genuine article). This has always struck me as a pretty reactionary position.

Nearly every piece of information online has a human progenitor -- a person who thought it was useful or important or interesting enough to post. Those people have friends whom they trust, and those friends have trusted friends, and so on. Theoretically, if you use your social network to explore the Web, you can make educated guesses about the relative interestingness of every bit of info online to you. In practice, this kind of social exploration is very labor-intensive and even computationally intensive, but there's a lot of technology on the horizon that hints at this...

Scarcity is, objectively, worse than plenty. When you've got lots of some useful object, you're richer than when you have less of it. When there's more than enough to go around, the economic value tends to plummet, but the utility is just as high. Think of oxygen: on the Earth's surface, we're well-supplied with breathable atmosphere. Aside from a few egregiously West-coast "oxygen bars," it's hard to imagine paying money for O2. But in Heinlein's sf novels set on the moon, there's a thriving trade in oxygen. In both situations, air is highly useful, but dirtsiders are richer in air than their loonie cousins.

Comments (4) | Posted on January 9, 2003 09:07 AM

Automated cut-ups of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"Honk!" she said, after a short queue of older men, then there was no way of mirrors and into hers as we stood by the time alternately moping, drinking, and plotting terrible, irrational vengeance on Debra for killing me, destroying my relationship, taking away my beloved (in hindsight, anyway) Hall of Presidents over for a couple glasses from the Bitchun Society didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them. The first time I debarked for the patchy red welts from the computer where it disappeared into the discussion. If I needed to do that, too." Was I really advocating being more like you and start playing. Others would pick up their own jokes, and even though he blew his spiel about half the time. "Lillian," he said, cautiously. "Doctor Pete is a couple of days, starting the rehab is a terrific attraction, and it's going to live, I'd like to have a backup made before she did.

Comments (0) | Posted on January 9, 2003 08:46 AM

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom webring

I anticipate a desire among fans of the book to visit the sites where it (took/will take) place, sort of like hitting the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic cathedral, and snap photos proving they were there. Hoping to be the first to do so, and maybe thereby accumulate some whuffie of my own, I present the "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Whuffie Ring," a web ring to let people link up their Down and Out fan pages.

So go ahead. Travel to Florida. Visit Liberty Square, the Hall of the Presidents, the Haunted Mansion. Get your picture taken with one of its 999 happy haunts. You loved Disney World when you were a kid--you know you did. Now's your chance to show the world you love what it could someday be.

Comments (0) | Posted on January 9, 2003 12:11 AM

Welcome to the site

This site is a way to keep track of the goings-on with the book: stores that are carrying it, new reviews, and general news about the book. I am immensely grateful to Mena Trott and Ben Trott for putting this site together, using their wonderful Movable Type blogging tool.

Most importantly, perhaps, is that this site is a place where you can download the whole goddamned book, completely gratis, in a variety of open, standards-defined formats. These books are licensed under a Creative Commons license. This is a somewhat novel idea. Not a lot of writers have published a free electronic edition simultaneous with their dead-tree-edition novels, and so perhaps a word of explanation is in order.

More...

Comments (8) | Posted on January 9, 2003 12:00 AM

Whuffie: One of the notions for 2003

Whuffie
It's the great conundrum of the web. Why do so many people do so much for free? What do people get out of it? Whuffie - that's what. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow for his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Whuffie embodies respect, karma, mad-props; call it what you will, the web runs on it. BH

Comments (2) | Posted on January 5, 2003 04:06 PM