(2008-07-03) Doctorow Onion Interview

Cory Doctorow did an excellent interview with The Onion. Little Brother and other topics.

In the UK, here, we have RIPA, the Regulation Investigatory Powers Act, that's supposed to be exactly that, for catching terrorists. And it turns out that the number-one use of RIPA powers is local councils who use it to acquire the video-camera feed from private video cameras (WebCam), to catch people who let their dogs crap on the sidewalk. So literally the most trivial things you can imagine is what this stuff ends up getting used for, because trivial things happen much more than big consequential momentous things.

You can get together with friends and do stuff really much more easily than ever before (Here Comes Everybody). Which means to a certain extent that we don't need the government to back off on data mining, and we don't need the record industry to back off on its distribution model. All we need is the space in which to easily form groups that subvert both those things. In other words, the space to form groups that make available and distribute cryptographic tools that make data mining irrelevant. The space to build alternative distribution models that make the record industry irrelevant. (Route Around)

I'm way more interested in, instead of trying to turn the 15-year-old upside down and shake an extra couple of quarters out of his pockets, in how I can use his natural loquaciousness, his natural enthusiasm, to help get the message out about really high-ticket items, like a $20 hardcover, into the ears of people who routinely buy $20 hardcovers without even blinking. (free EBook approach)

I think the most compelling, intuitively true study that I've seen on online distribution... Rufus Pollock from Cambridge University, who's a Ph.D. candidate in economics there, conducted it. What he concluded was, for the bottom 75 percent of music, Pir Acy represents a small-to-midsize increase in sales, so it generates more sales than it displaces.

• or is he really referring to this study by David Blackburn?

One of the things I've noticed about Writing every day is that there are days when writing that page feels like flying. Like the hand of God reached down and touched my keyboard, and every word is just pure gold. And then there are days that I feel I'm writing absolute, totally forgettable junk that shouldn't have been committed to phosphors, let alone saved to disc. The thing is, a month later, you can't tell the difference. The difference between a day when it feels like you're writing brilliantly and a day when it feels like you're writing terribly is entirely in your head, it's not in the prose.

I asked a lot of these writers, "What do you think makes Young Adult fiction work, what's your top tip about young-adult fiction?" One of them, a guy named Garth Nix, whom I saw in Australia at the National Australian Science Fiction Convention in Brisbane, said "The state of adolescence is the state of jumping off a cliff over and over again, and trusting that you're going to land safely."