Slashdot Mirror
Cory Doctorow On For the Win, Gold Farming, and DRM
adaviel passes along a New Scientist interview with Cory Doctorow, who has been touring for his new book For the Win. The SF author and technology activist talks about DRM, gold farming, and much else besides.
As a geek a decade older than this particular fruit-bat, I can assure you he's right on the monkey.
Fuck off back to Digg where you belong.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
It's not a racist term, it's an accurate term. China is one of the few countries with the right mix of technology and a large poor labor force that can actually make gold farming profitable. At least without using bots. Even when your entire inventory is from stealing accounts, you need warm bodies to process (that is, remove everything of value from the characters on) those accounts and then transfer the gold to the buyers.
And the pejorative modifies "gold farmer" not "Chinese".
"Obscurity, not piracy, is the biggest problem writers face. In the 21st century, if you are not making art with the intention of it being copied, you are not making contemporary art."
Interesting fact: Cory Doctorow rips his ideas from other people. The original quote was from Tim O'Reilly. If you watch the internet closely, you'll see him copy other people's quotes and ideas all the time without giving them credit. A few months ago, I saw him regurgitate one author's comment that piracy is like masterbation. Of course, Cory never gives them credit - he's too busy wanting people to believe "his great ideas" aren't directly cribbed from other people. No wonder Cory is such a big fan of piracy - that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Indeed it is a rehash, it didn't seem all that original when John Boorman & Sean Connery did a version in movie form (the surreally bad Zardoz) in the '70s. Doctorow's take is admittedly much better--Zardoz set a really low bar. I liked the "adhocracy" concept, and the name was inspired. But overall, a short-story of an idea stretched out to book length, without a stunning plot, memorable characters or inventive energy. YMMV.
Cory Doctorow is IMHO at best a mediocre science fiction writer. But he has carved out a niche primarily by pandering to internet posters, who then hold him up as an example of an artist who is successful "because" he eschews copyright and promises them more free stuff. Which is sort of true, but is not a scalable business model: if everyone did what Doctorow did, he wouldn't be noteworthy, and he'd fall deeper into the midlist if not total obscurity. When a "science fiction author" is most famous for blogging and his opinions about copyright, it does say something about his accomplishments in actually writing science fiction.
I'm maybe being a little unfair, but I like reading novels. When Doctorow talks about overcoming "obscurity," based on gimmicks unrelated to quality of his fiction ("A band recorded 'Little Brother' songs"!) I get depressed. Many of my favorite authors are pretty obscure (well, pretty dead, but my next favorites are just obscure), but can get by. The last thing I want is them trying to work in product placements and mini-games to try and go viral one way or another.
Problem is art has never payed well except in the last half century or so and then only for a few superstars. Now shysters are trying to sell absolute control over works on the promise artist will somehow get payed more, they won't.
Here's a nice quote from a recent Mick Jagger interview :
"People only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t."
Same goes for authors. There's a reason "starving author" is such a well known concept.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
I was pretty excited by Little Brother, a book by an author who shared some of my views on IP, so much so that I supported the author by buying it after the tidal wave of good publicity it got online and from some of my other favourite authors. I have to say I share your opinion, there were some good ideas in there but they weren't very well developed because Doctorow was too busy over-egging the oppressive regime pudding. I kind of think the stuff the existing regimes get up to is evil enough, I don't need exagerration and invention to paint them even more so, if anything that detracts from his point because people read this book and come away saying, "well, at least the government isn't really that bad". He threw up one strawman after another so he could heroically demolish it with a six page rant on his views, that's borderline okay on an internet forum, I don't expect to be subjected to it in a novel I've paid for. Some of his other books have similarly interesting premises, but on the strength of his writing here I won't waste my time even if I don't have to waste my money. I applaud his championing of the causes surrounding IP abuse, but he's no author, cribbing together your blog posts of other people's ideas into a tenuous storyline does not a great author make. Ironically I think I read his book on the back of Charles Stross singing his praises. Stross shares many of the views (but is much more pragmatic about having to change things from inside the system) but stands head and shoulders above him as an author.
To provide another perspective:
What you describe as "ripping off" could be better viewed as exposing oneself to ideas that are actually relevant to people by, you know, interacting with them. Discard the bad or irrelevant ideas, keep the good ones and share them with others to make sure they continue to propagate. Combine some in the form of 'mash ups' to create something kind of new. And in addition, possibly process the ideas gathered from such activity such that something completely new and unique comes out.
Maybe you shouldn't focus so much on the ideas that clearly circulate as part of a wider conversation and try instead to filter those out so you can more easily identify the new ones. Then at least you could make a meaningful evaluation about how good Cory is as a source of new ideas compared to others.
I could go with the "not my native language" defense but even I should have seen that one :-) Apparently it got past my spell czech (bad Tibor!) because there's an archaic nautical use of the verb spelled that way.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Belay that order; Cory Doctorow is the John Katz of the Internet 2.0. Avoid at all costs.
To each their own. I disagree. Doctorow's stuff is worth a read. However, I don't think he's an amazing author. A lot of his stuff leaves me with the impression of being a little under-done; a little raw, in need of a bit more baking to be done. But he writes some cool stuff based on some interesting ideas. And he gives it away free if you're not inclined to buy it.
As for self promotion... well, sure. He's an author. He makes a living writing stuff. You don't sell writing without getting people to read it. And to do that, you have to both get the word out and get people interested. Doctorow's thing is to write about current ideas (I don't even agree with everything all of those). But I've never heard of him claiming that he is, himself, the font from which all modern wisdom originates.