How's Your Whuffie? Interview with Cory Doctorow

Richard Koman writes "My interview with EFF's Cory Doctorow just went up on O'Reilly. The interview is largely about his book, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," but naturally veers towards discussing his view of Disney, programmers, and peer to peer. Then there's this: Doctorow: I think that Disney's art and technology kicks ass. But one thing you discover in the technology world, especially in free software, is that being a good programmer and being a good person are not necessarily correlated, or at least being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated."

Comments

Re:No, no, no!

[sir99]

I take offense to that... I have poor hygiene and poor social skills, and it hasn't made me a good programmer!

Typical converse error ;-)

If you figure out what a converse error is, maybe you'll become a better programmer in the process. Then you can work on the social skills and...ah, screw it; programming's good enough!

Re:Theory vs. Reality

[gpinzone]

I happen to have read his book online. The plot is as one-dimensional as they come. However, the cool aspects of the book are use of technology, the society that grew from it, and the excruciating detail about the Magic Kingdom, particularly, the Haunted Mansion.

That said, it's not exactly best-seller material. It's going to be a difficult task to evaluate exactly how much more or less in sales the book will make by offering it online for free. If anyting, it's made the author much more recognizable in the sci-fi community.

The book itself...

[stang]

From the article:

What to make of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , the first novel by Cory Doctorow, dot-com survivor, inveterate blogger, and now, outreach coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Part organizational-intrigue novel, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and part Swiftian satire of the tech mentality, revolutionary impulses, and Disney itself, the book has acquired quite a bit of notice, at least in part for its bold use of the Net.

Having just finished the book, I can tell you what to make of it: A poor ripoff of John Varley's The Phantom of Kansas with karma added. Oh, and whereas Varley managed to pack his ideas into a well-paced short story, this one dragged out for 208 pages as it subjected us to Disney technical minutiae on the way to a disappointing resolution.

At least I found out how the ghost hall works in the Haunted Mansion.

Beautiful quote:

[cK-Gunslinger]

Doctorow: Well, sure, even the recording industry understands it will never get back to the way it was. I don't think it's dead. I think it is fundamentally changed and I think they're slowly coming to grips with that, although not as fast as we would like them to. But the recording industry has a story of, "We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists." But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn't for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn't have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.