I’m re-listening to the episodes we’ve released of the podcast recently (great company for weeding & mulching!), and I have to say, it’s just so intellectually stimulating talking to Cory Doctorow.
I mean, his mind moves a mile-a-minute, and he’s deeply read in his areas of expertise, so I honestly was struggling a little to keep up, but nonetheless, it was just super-fun talking to him. (And luckily, if I got too overwhelmed, my co-host Benjamin Rosenbaum was usually keeping up just fine and could step in.)
In the first part of the episode, we start with his _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_ and talk about scarcity, utopia and dystopia, the problems inherent in reputation economies (like Kickstarter)…
…then transition to positive / negative reputation, what happens when someone gets cancelled and why, struggling to find integrity between an author’s public platform speech and what their work seems to be revealing (and navigating that complexity as writers ourselves)…
[touching on Harlan Ellison, Trumpists, Haman, truth and reconciliation, Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, Starship Troopers, C.S. Lewis, the Problem of Susan, and virtuous pagans]
…and then transition to monopolistic large networks (like Facebook), the dangers inherent in those commercial structures, how we might combat those dangers by stopping criminalizing interoperability (and if you think I had to pause and look up words periodically while talking to Cory, you would not be wrong), how that relates to governance, like my service on the school board…
…and that’s just the first 45 minutes. Whew. This episode is recommended to those of you who enjoy a little meaty political discussion mixed in with your science fiction. 
https://speculativeliterature.org/episodes/#ep-8
