(2017-07-17) Cory Doctorow Locus Interview Bugging In

Locus interviews Cory Doctorow: Bugging In

The onboarding process to your utopian project is always difficult. It’s a thing Burning Man is struggling with, and it’s a thing fandom is struggling with right now. We were just talking about what it’s like to go to a big media convention

It’s a real problem, and there is a shibboleth, which is, ‘I don’t object to all these newcomers, but they’re coming in such numbers that they’re overwhelming our ability to assimilate them.’ This is what every xenophobe who voted for Brexit said, but you hear that lament in Science Fiction too, and you hear it even about such things as gender parity in the workplace.”

‘‘For me, I live by the aphorism, ‘fail better, fail faster.’ To double your success rate, triple your failure rate. What the Walkaways figured out how to do is reduce the cost of Failure, to make it cheaper to experiment with new ways of succeeding

That was the wisdom of Obama with ObamaCare. He understood that Obamacare is not sustainable, that basically letting insurance companies set the price without any real limits means that the insurance companies will eventually price it out of the government’s ability to pay, but he also understood that once you give 22 million people healthcare, when the insurance companies blew it up, the people would then demand some other healthcare system be found.

The one thing I love about Libertarians is that they often overlap with the Rationalist movement. Rationalism is not without its flaws, but it’s a very powerful force for improving the world.

I don’t dispute that libertarianism works well, I dispute whether it fails better than Collectivism.

what the right sort of person does is look after their neighbors, that’s what stops disasters from turning into catastrophes

Getting back to the availability heuristic, what I want is for people to be able to vividly imagine that the heroism in the moment of disaster is to avert catastrophe by bugging in instead of bugging out.


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