I have admired Cory Doctorow’s books for a few years now. He has an amazing ability to weave simple explanations of technical concepts into rallying-cry stories. Doctorow recently released a new book, Homeland, and is on tour with the book. I went to his talk in Cambridge today. He is every bit as good a speaker as he is a writer.

The room was packed. When I first came in, I could not even see Doctorow because people spilled around the bookshelves. As the crowd shifted, I eventually got to a place where I could see the talk and take pictures.

Doctorow started by talking about Aaron Swartz (who helped Doctorow with ideas for Homeland and wrote and afterword), from the time he met him to his death. Much of this part of the talk is covered in this post. I have recounted the major points below.

Doctorow went on to explain the importance of case law accessible through PACER. While it is important precedent and not copyrighted, the legal documents still cost money to access. In 2008, Aaron Swartz used RECAP, a tool for posting PACER documents freely, to post 20% of US case law documents online. While technically legal, the FBI was not happy with Swartz, so they put him under surveillance and approached him. Luckily, everything turned out fine that time.

But then, as Doctorow recounted, Aaron Swartz turned to JSTOR in 2010. Access to many documents on JSTOR is limited to people who pay for a subscription or the article. Unfortunately, Doctorow explained, this can limit innovation and progress. He recounted a story of a teenager who came up with a potentially life-saving idea for an early stage test for pancreatic cancer by reading articles downloaded from JSTOR.

So Swartz used a script to download articles from JSTOR, which he had access to legally.  The prosecutors saw this as stealing. Doctorow, however, compared this action to “checking too many books out of the library”. Swartz decided to fight the charges.

While this case was ongoing, many organizations were fighting against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and related bills. The problem with these bills is that they could shut down sites where users can post content by requiring the owners of those websites to be sure posts do not link to copyright infringing material.This would shut down a large portion of the Internet. So the Internet fought back.

Doctorow then described how one of the most effective tools for getting people to campaign against SOPA worked. “There was a tool that we helped build that would allow you to put up a little widget on your website that when people came to visit it would say ‘Oh, hi, you like my website. I’m gonna have to shut it down if this stupid law passes. Uh, what’s your zipcode? Oh, yeah, so here’s your congressmen and here’s your senators and here’s where they stand on this. Do you want to give them a phone call? Because you can do that by clicking this button. 8 million phone calls. And congress realized that while it’s hard to get reelected without campaign finance, it’s much harder to get reelected without votes.”

Doctorow then moved to how all of these issues connect to the bigger picture and the future. “Aaron didn’t do any of this because information wants to be free,” he explained, “Information and I, we had a long, soulful heart to heart and it confided in me that the only thing it really wants from any of us is for us to stop anthropomorphizing it. Cause information ‘wants’ nothing, but I’ll tell you what people want, and the may you make people free is sometimes with good information. If you know the law, you are more free than someone who doesn’t know the law. If you know the truth of the world, you are more free than someone who doesn’t know the truth.”

He echoed this idea about the power of information to improve the lives of people later in the talk when, in response to a question about why we should care about free information when kids are starving, Doctorow referenced a study where poor people who were given Internet access had a significantly higher quality of life than those who did not have Internet access.

One part of making people free is ensuring that everyone has control over the devices they own and those that influence their lives because “the Internet and computers are what our world is made of today. But we don’t regulate them like they’re important. We regulate them like they’re a fact machine attached to a waffle iron. We regulate them like they are the second coming of telephony…. and not like they are the nervous system of the 21st century where everything we do requires the Internet. We get it terribly, horribly wrong.” One of the major reasons why we get this regulation wrong is because of the influence of money on politics and laws.

Doctorow said that in Homeland, he wanted someone to get elected as an independent without major donors. To understand how this might be realistically done, Doctorow emailed people experienced with various campaigns. Aaron Swartz replied with a description of a vote-getting machine. Doctorow put it directly into the book.

But what might happen in a future where we keep getting the regulation of the Internet and devices completely wrong? Doctorow discussed a future hearing aid that would be implanted and control what we heard or did not hear. This could clearly be misused. “Lest you feel that is a far-fetched, science-fictiony type of idea,” Doctorow cautioned, “it’s actually a toned down version of reality as it already is.” He then described pace makers that could be remote controlled and remotely update other pacemakers. This is the beauty of Doctorow’s ideas and writings. He warns people about the future by using technology and policy today as an example.

“We are making our future today,” Doctorow continued, “It’s the beginning of the future. And it will either be a future where the computers listen to us and do what we say where their default posture is ‘yes, master’ or it will be a future where the computers don’t let us do what we want, where they give us orders, where their default posture is ‘I’m sorry, I can’t let you do that Dave’. And we get to choose.” But, as Swartz said in his afterword to Homeland, “It only works if you take part.”

After the main part of his talk, Doctorow took a moment to discuss suicide and depression. “Whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t solve them,” he said, “whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever.” But on a lighter note, Doctorow pointed out that the Internet and computers could be some of the best tools yet to help us take care of each other so long as we stop to ask how people are feeling.

After that, Doctorow took a few questions on topics related to his talk and people lined up to get their books signed. Artisan’s Asylum was there talking to people as well.

Overall, it was an inspiring and fascinating talk that covered a broad array of issues we are all facing today. This description does not do it justice.

Oh, and I got my book signed.