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Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Cory Doctorow: Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future
Last Christmas, my family took a trip to Walt Disney World, and, as is now-traditional, I dragged them onto the Carousel of Progress, the beating heart of Tomorrowland. The Carousel began life as a GE exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair, a watershed moment for Disney's theme park business, since the Fair's sponsors could be persuaded to part with big bucks that WED, the engineering arm of Disney, could use for R&D on new ride and exhibit technology. GE's Carousel of Progress bankrolled the robotics R&D that gave us the Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, and other animatronic-intensive theme park classics. The Carousel of Progress is one of my all-time favorite Disney attractions — I even wrote a long novella about it, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now Is the Best Time of Your Life" for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology Godlike Machines. Here's the gimmick: you are loaded into a theater shaped like one wedge of a pie, with a stage before it. The curtain parts, revealing robots depicting a family from the turn of the 20th century, who do a little singing and gag-telling schtick about the promise of electricity. The lights come down, and the theater rotates around the stage, moving to the next scene (meanwhile, in the next wedge-shaped theater over, a new group has just been loaded into the opening segment). Around and around you go, viewing three sequences about the progress of technology in the 20th century, with special emphasis on the role that electricity (and GE) played in the American century. Then you come to the grand finale, a segment depicting the near-future of technology. In the original, 1964 incarnation, this focused on some marginally speculative GE products, like self-cleaning ovens, electric dishwashers, and hi-fi sets, as well as such safe predictions as passenger jet service. This final sequence aged rather badly and had to be re-done for the Carousel's 1967 installation in Disneyland's Tomorrowland, which also had the problem of being routinely overtaken by tomorrow. The current generation of the show, dating to 1994, was slightly more ambitious in its futurism, but much, much more wrong about the future it predicted. Its finale opens upon Christmas eve, 1999, where the family has gathered for its annual tryptophan orgy. There's a tree, a flat-screen, HD set, a video-game console with a VR headset and glove, and a laptop in a little nook off to the side. In the course of a brief sketch, we see the whole family gather around the electronic hearth to first watch Grandma beat the pants off junior at Space Ace, then the Disney World Christmas fireworks. Dad programs the voice-activated electric range to cook the turkey (he still managed to burn it), and uses the house's home-automation system to dim the electric lights on the tree. And Mom sits with her laptop and laughs along with the gang. This five-year-out prediction got pretty much every single detail of 1999 wrong, and badly so. What's more, they got it all wrong in a way that is particular to all forms of bad science fiction, especially that most profitable of subgenres, corporate futurism. Let's take a look at some of the fallacies in the 1999-of-1994 depicted in the Carousel: LIKE TODAY, BUT MORESOWhen confronted with a new technology and asked to predict its application, it's tempting to look for existing, unsolved problems to which the technology might apply. For example, in a notorious early ad for personal computing, Honeywell depicted a satisfied, modish hausfrau cheerfully setting the dip-switches on her kitchen's PC in order to recall recipes. It's easy to follow their thinking: Computers are used by giant companies to store and manipulate files in the workplace. What files do housewives have to store and manipulate? Recipes! This is the "horseless carriage" fallacy: tomorrow's world will be like today, but moreso. Faster transport will get us to the same places, but faster. Faster communications will let us talk to the same people, but better. So it's natural to think that HD television will be twice as unifying as old, standard-def sets (in fact, one of the big selling points for HD is that it will allow a small percentage of the household, usually Dad, to watch sports matches with his friends, while the rest of the family waits it out somewhere else). JUST ENOUGH, AND NO MORECall this one the Fallacy of the Entertainment Industry, for they have committed this sin more publicly than anyone else. This is the idea that technology will develop enough to achieve some end, and then stop. For example: microchips and optical drives will progress to the point that everyone can afford to have half a dozen CD players around the house, but they won't become so advanced that home users will be able to rip them to MP3, load them into minuscule personal media players, and share them over the Internet. Or: microchips and networks will become so ubiquitous and cheap that we'll be able to provide video-on-demand services to the home, but not so cheap and ubiquitous that viewers will be able to share the same shows online. THAT'S NOT WEIRD, IT'S DUMBThinking weird is important if you're going to get the future right (imagine trying to explain World of Warcraft to the attendees at the 1964 World's Fair), but "there's such a fine line between clever and stupid." For example, home automation systems are still looking for a home (so to speak) and they may never find one. But the applications imagined by the Carousel — dimming Christmas tree lights and reprogramming the oven — aren't weird, they're just dumb. If you have the physical strength and coordination to actually put a turkey in an oven, then you have the wherewithal to press some buttons on its front to set the time and temperature. And who ever heard of wanting to dim the Christmas tree lights? I don't know how to predict the future, and I never will. But I do know how not to predict it: don't stick to your boss's comfort zone by predicting that doing exactly what you're doing now is exactly the right thing to do forever. Like I said, the Carousel is one of my most cherished Disney park attractions, and with good reason. As a science fiction writer, it's hard to imagine someone making a better example of exactly how the future can go wrong. I only wish they'd restore the 1964 show, along with the miniature domed city after the show, through which Mother and Father narrated the joys of their Jane Jacobs nightmare town, with its strictly regimented planning and zoning. Getting the future wrong has consequences, as the rustbelt and its displaced industrial workforce can attest. We could do worse than to study how that happens. |
From the March 2010 issue of Locus Magazine
Labels: CoryDoctorow
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Thursday, January 7, 2010
Cory Doctorow: Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll
I once gave a (now-notorious) talk at Microsoft Research about Digital Rights Management ( http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt) where I said, in part, "New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at." I'd like to take that subject up with you today. Specifically, I'd like to examine it in light of the ancient principle of "Close enough for rock 'n' roll," and all that that entails. What, exactly, does "close enough for rock 'n' roll" mean? Does it mean that rock 'n' roll isn't very good, so it doesn't matter if the details are a little fuzzy? I say no. I say that "close enough for rock 'n' roll" means: "Rock 'n' roll's virtue is in its exuberance and its accessibility to would-be performers. If you want to play rock 'n' roll, you don't need to gather up a full orchestra and teach them all to read sheet music, drill them with a conductor and set them loose in a vaulted hall. Instead, you can gather two or three friends, teach them to play a I-IV-V progression in 4/4 time, and make some fantastic noise." Rock 'n' roll has two important virtues relative to orchestral music:
1. It costs a lot less to make, and so it costs less to make experimental mistakes
2. More people can participate in it, and can bring more experimental ideas to the field (see 1)
On the other hand, it lacks a lot of the important virtues of orchestral music: the sheer majesty of all that tightly coordinated virtuosity, the subtleties and possibilities opened up by having so many instruments in one place and available to be combined in so many ways. In other words, rock 'n' roll is cheap, experimental and fluid, and devotes most of its energy into the production of music. Orchestral music is expensive, formal and majestic, but tithes a large portion of its effort to coordination and overheads and maintenance. If the Internet has a motif, it is rock 'n' roll's Protestant Reformation thrashing against the orchestral One Church. Rock 'n' roll gets lots of wee kirks built in every hill and dale in which parishioners can find religion in their own ways; choral music erects majestic cathedrals that humble and amaze, but take three generations of laborers to build. The interesting bit isn't what it costs to replicate some big, pre-Internet business or project. The interesting bit is what it costs to do something half as well as some big, pre-Internet business or project. Take Newsweek. If you wanted to launch Newsweek today, you'd probably have to spend as much as Newsweek did. Maybe more, since you'd not only have to do what Newsweek does, you'd have to somehow outspend or outmaneuver Newsweek to get there. But what does it cost to publish something half as good as Newsweek, say, the Huffington Post? Sure, HuffPo has brought in about $20MM in venture capital, but ignore that sum — that's how much they can sweet talk out of the world of finance. I'm talking about how much capital it cost to build and operate HuffPo. A tiny, unmeasurable fraction of what it cost to build and run Newsweek. But HuffPo is at least half as good as Newsweek — in audience reach, in influence, in news quality, in return-on-investment (though not in absolute profitability — that is, a dollar put into HuffPo will generate more income than a dollar put into Newsweek, but HuffPo uses a lot fewer dollars than Newsweek does, and returns fewer dollars in total than Newsweek, too). What's more, as time goes by, we can expect it to get cheaper to get more Newsweek-like. Cheaper and better ad-sales markets. Larger pools of interested people with the time and skill and tools to follow breaking news. Even cheaper printing and logistics, should HuffPo go hardcover, thanks to the spread of cheap printer-binders around the world. This is the pattern: doing something x percent as well with less-than-x percent of the resources. A blog may be 10 percent as good at covering the local news as the old, local paper was, but it costs less than 1 percent of what that old local paper cost to put out. A home recording studio and self-promotion may get your album into 30 percent as many hands, but it does so at five percent of what it costs a record label to put out the same recording. What does this mean? Cheaper experimentation, cheaper failure, broader participation. Which means more diversity, more discovery, more good stuff that could never surface when the startup costs were so high that no one wanted to take any risks. What's driving this cost-reduction? Part of it is the free ride on general technological development. Everyone — even the big, lumbering, expensive companies — needs cheaper hard drives, cheaper networks, cheaper computers. Every society is trying to increase the general technical literacy of its population, because every employer benefits from technical literacy in its workforce. Partly, it's a free ride on overinvestment bubbles. When the dotcoms came along, they were — canonically — founded by two hackers in a garage working on doors balanced on sawhorses. They were so humble in origin that it was easy to believe that they'd grow to three or four hundred times their present size. Even three or four thousand times their present size. So they attracted capital — who doesn't like a crack at a 4,000X payout? More capital than they could absorb — because buying more sawhorses and doors and garages and commodity servers just doesn't cost that much. With all that money came a burden to spend, to try to grow a business large enough to pay off all that investment, which meant luring great numbers of bright people into the startup world, training them as you went on technical matters, turning them into Internet people. When the overinvestment bubbles (dotcom, finance) crashed, you were left with a lot of skilled smart people, a lot of equipment that had gotten cheap fast thanks to enormous consumption by overfinanced companies. This, too, made it cheaper to start something new. But even without overinvestment, the gap between rock 'n' roll and the orchestra is narrowing. Technology is giving us the organizational equivalent of a really kick-ass synthesizer, one that can allow a one-man band to sound like a whole firm. It may be that we'll never get to a point where you could build Disneyland today for one tenth of what Disney has spent since 1955. But I'm pretty sure that in my lifetime, you'll be able to build an 80 percent Disneyland (you could call it "Disneyla") for maybe 30 percent of the capital sunk into the Magic Kingdom. This is one of the great conundra of our era: the spectre that haunts every executive, every government, every powerful person who owes her stature to her command of an empire that enjoys its pride of place thanks to the prohibitive cost of replicating it. But lurking in those 80 percent replacements are an infinitude of ideas too weird and too funky and implausible to try at full price. Lurking there are ideas as weird and dumb as a company called (I kid you not) Google, an encyclopedia that everyone can write, a wireless network standard based on open spectrum that anyone is allowed to use, without central planning. It's rock 'n' roll, and if it's too loud, you're too old. |
From the January 2010 issue of Locus Magazine
Labels: CoryDoctorow
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Friday, November 20, 2009
Cory Doctorow: Riding the Wave
Cory Doctorow was born in Toronto, Canada. He made his first semi-pro sale at 17, and his first professional story, "Craphound", appeared in Science Fiction Age in 1998. He won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1999, and novelette "0wnz0red" was nominated for a Nebula in 2004. "I, Robot" (2005) was a Hugo and British SF Award finalist, and won a Locus Award, as did "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" (2006) and "After the Siege" (2007).
First collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003) won the Sunburst award in 2004, and more short work was collected Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (2007). His next collection With a Little Help from My Friends is an experiment in self-publishing, coming in 2010. Other stories were adapted as comics in Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (2008).
Locus Award-winning first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom appeared in 2003, followed by near-future SF Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) and urban fantasy Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005). He achieved his greatest success with New York Times bestselling YA Little Brother (2008), which won the Campbell Memorial Award, Prometheus Award, and Sunburst Award, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It was also adapted as a stage play. Adult novel Makers appeared in October 2009 (and was earlier serialized at Tor.com), and YA novel For the Win (an expansion of story "Anda's Game") is forthcoming.
Some of his essays were collected in Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (2008). He is a contributor to popular blog Boing Boing, "a directory of wonderful things," and co-edited anthology Tesseracts Eleven with Holly Black (2007).
Doctorow was European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation until 2006, when he quit to write full time. He remains a Fellow of the EFF, and acts in an advisory capacity. He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and did a one-year writing and teaching residency at USC (2006-07).
Doctorow lives in London with wife Alice Taylor (married 2008) and their daughter Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow.
Excerpts from the interview:
“In January of last year I looked at my wife and said, 'Do you realize, in the last 18 months we got married three times on two continents, had a baby, changed countries, you changed jobs, I wrote two books, published three books, went on a book tour, we went on our honeymoon, and I spent a month researching the next book in India and China?' Yeah, that was a busy 18 months!
“When I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I told my boss, 'I'm only going to do this to the point where it doesn't interfere with writing. If -- when -- the writing expands to that point, I'm going to resign in good conscience, rather than come to a point where I'm either neglecting you or resenting you.' When I did resign, my boss was absolutely delighted, because it meant I was succeeding. I remained on board as a Fellow of the organization, which put me inside the confidentiality circle of attorney-client privilege, but I don't take a salary anymore. I continue to raise funds, make substantial donations, and work on campaigns and cases with them.”
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“This mythological Edenic period in which all you do is write and the world ceases to hammer at your door never emerged, nor I think will it ever. I don't think anyone has that life -- at least not that I know of. If I want to be totally honest with myself, I don't know what I would write about if I didn't have all this other stuff going on in my life.”
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“I'm going to be doing more YAs after Little Brother. I'm just finishing For the Win, basically a novelization of 'Anda's Game'. It's about union organizers and video games, set in Southern California, the Pearl River Delta of China, and Mumbai, India, along with bits of Singapore and Malaysia. Kids are forming a global union called the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web. After that will be another YA called Pirate Cinema, about kids who decide the entertainment industry is an existential threat to democracy and set out to destroy it.
“My adult novel Makers came out recently. One of the things it's about is something I also wrote a Locus essay about: the idea that there's such a thing as progress. I think what there really is, is change; specifically, there really isn't technological progress, merely technological change. What that change does is disrupt status quos, and every status quo has its in-group and its out-group. There are always people who benefit from a different status quo than what we labor under at any given moment, and technology gives an advantage to people who want to undermine the status quo. The status quo is much harder to defend with technology than it is to disrupt with technology.”
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Photo by Amelia Beamer
Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
Read the complete interview, and biographical profile, in the November 2009 issue of Locus Magazine.
US/Canada readers may purchase this issue for $6.95 + $3 shipping -- click the PayPal button to order.
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Labels: CoryDoctorow, interviews
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Friday, November 6, 2009
Cory Doctorow: Teen Sex
My first young adult novel, Little Brother, tells the story of a kid named Marcus Yallow who forms a guerilla army of young people dedicated to the reformation of the US government by any means necessary. He and his friends use cryptography and other technology to subvert security measures, to distribute revolutionary literature, to liberate and publish secret governmental memoes, and humiliate government officials. Every chapter includes some kind of how-to guide for accomplishing this kind of thing on your own, from tips on disabling radio-frequency ID tags to beating biometric identity system to defeating the censorware used by your school network to control what kind of things you can and can't see on the Internet. The book is a long hymn to personal liberty, free speech, the people's right to question and even overthrow their government, even during wartime. Marcus is 17, and the book is intended to be read by young teens or even precocious tweens (as well as adults). Naturally, I anticipated that some of the politics and technology in the story would upset my readers. And it's true, a few of the reviewers were critical of this stuff. But not many, not overly so. What I didn't expect was that I would receive a torrent of correspondence and entreaties from teachers, students, parents, and librarians who were angry, worried, or upset that Marcus loses his virginity about two-thirds of the way through the book (secondarily, some of them were also offended by the fact that Marcus drinks a beer at one point, and a smaller minority wanted to know why and how Marcus could get away with talking back to his elders). Now, the sex-scene in the book is anything but explicit. Marcus and his girlfriend are kissing alone in her room after a climactic scene in the novel, and she hands him a condom. The scene ends. The next scene opens with Marcus reflecting that it wasn't what he thought it would be, but it was still very good, and better in some ways that he'd expected. He and his girlfriend have been together for quite some time at this point, and there's every indication that they'll go on being together for some time yet. There is no anatomy, no grunts or squeals, no smells or tastes. This isn't there to titillate. It's there because it makes plot-sense and story-sense and character-sense for these two characters to do this deed at this time. I've spent enough time explaining what this "plot-sense and story-sense and character-sense" means to enough people that I find myself creating a "Teen transgression in YA literature FAQ." There's really only one question: "Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don't you punish them for doing this?" Now, the answer. First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes. Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I knew. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn't exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won't be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy. Second, because it is good art. Artists have included sex and sexual content in their general-audience material since cave-painting days. There's a reason the Vatican and the Louvre are full of nudes. Sex is part of what it means to be human, so art has sex in it. Sex in YA stories usually comes naturally, as the literal climax of a coming-of-age story in which the adolescent characters have undertaken a series of leaps of faiths, doing consequential things (lying, telling the truth, being noble, subverting authority, etc.) for the first time, never knowing, really knowing, what the outcome will be. These figurative losses of virginity are one of the major themes of YA novels — and one of the major themes of adolescence — so it's artistically satisfying for the figurative to become literal in the course of the book. This is a common literary and artistic technique, and it's very effective. I admit that I remain baffled by adults who object to the sex in this book. Not because it's prudish to object, but because the off-camera sex occurs in the middle of a story that features rioting, graphic torture, and detailed instructions for successful truancy. As the parent of a young daughter, I feel strongly that every parent has the right and responsibility to decide how his or her kids are exposed to sex and sexually explicit material. However, that right is limited by reality: the likelihood that a high-school student has made it to her 14th or 15th year without encountering the facts of life is pretty low. What's more, a kid who enters puberty without understanding the biological and emotional facts about her or his anatomy and what it's for is going to be (even more) confused. Adolescents think about sex. All the time. Many of them have sex. Many of them experiment with sex. I don't believe that a fictional depiction of two young people who are in love and have sex is likely to impart any new knowledge to most teens — that is, the vast majority of teenagers are apt to be familiar with the existence of sexual liaisons between 17-year-olds. So since the reader isn't apt to discover anything new about sex in reading the book I can't see how this ends up interfering with a parent's right to decide when and where their kids discover the existence of sex. |
From the November 2009 issue of Locus Magazine
Labels: CoryDoctorow
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Friday, September 4, 2009
Cory Doctorow: Special Pleading
As I write these words, the news of Locus editor-in-chief and co-founder Charles N. Brown's death is only a week old, and I'm still in shock. Charles has been generous and supportive of me throughout my career, and producing this column for the past three years (three years!) has been a curious kind of pleasure. These columns, written directly (more or less) to the science fiction publishing industry are very different from the other kind of writing I do, and in some way, they are all continuations of a long-ago interview I conducted with Charles at the WorldCon in San Jose, five years ago, which was typical of Charles's interviews, as John Scalzi describes them: "it largely consisted of the two of us having a conversation, me on a couch and him at his desk, and him seemingly being a bit grumpy about it." That challenging, intelligent, and wide-ranging discussion has never really ended for me. Nor, apparently, did it ever end for Charles. In the July issue — which just arrived at my PO Box this week — Charles writes about a little print-on-demand project I'm planning called "With a Little Help" (a short story collection that tries every imaginable income-generating technique for open publishing in order to get some data about which avenues hold the most promise): "I don't know what it will prove. Remember, Stephen King was able to see an incredible number of downloads of a short story, but I've never heard of anyone duplicating that success. Cory, with his vast Internet connections, may succeed. But will it affect publishing? Probably not." And now, I'd like to return Charles's volley, though he'll never get to see it, because, you know, it's his magazine, and he hired me to do this, and when your publisher hands you a straight line like that, you'd be nuts to pass it on. In January 2003, my first novel came out. Called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it was published by Tor as a hardcover original with a print-run of about 9,800, with an advance of about $7,500. Like practically every other first time novelist, I dreamed of selling a book and quitting my day job (though I had a really cool day job, working as a full-time activist for the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation); as with virtually every other first-time novelist, the advance for my first book totally failed to change my life and catapult me to financial independence. I was level-headed enough to know that this wasn't going to happen (even if I did occasionally daydream about it). I knew that if I was ever going to be a full-time writer, it would come as the result of a career of books that succeeded commercially and critically and that meant writing the best books I could and doing everything I could to help my publisher sell as many books as they could. Down and Out was critically successful, garnering good mentions in the trade press and even the New York Times. I had already established a modest name for myself at the time, having sold about a dozen short stories and won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 WorldCon on their strength. Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, had about 30,000 unique readers back then (now it's a couple million), which was a good-sized megaphone to be speaking through. To make things more interesting, I became the first novelist to use the brand-new Creative Commons licenses on a book, releasing the electronic text on terms that allowed for its free, noncommercial sharing. Thirty thousand people downloaded the book in the first 24 hours (several million copies have been downloaded to date), and the hardcover did well, too — by the time the trade paperback came out a year later, we'd hit about 85 percent sell-through, a good number that pleased Tor, my agent, and me. It's amazing to think, in retrospect, of the amount of foofaraw this garnered. At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that as soon as an electronic book leaked onto the Internet, its commercial life was over, first because readers would never pay for it; and second because publishers and booksellers wouldn't stock it. Even though Bruce Sterling had sold a ton of copies of his 1992 The Hacker Crackdown while simultaneously releasing the book as "literary freeware," even though Orson Scott Card had released several of his books on AOL; even though the nascent "bookwarez" scene had put thousands of current and classic titles online as text-files without obliterating their commercial fortunes. The Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom experiment really pissed people off. It was denounced as a breaking of ranks with authors as a class, and as a stunt that I could only afford because I had so little to lose, being such a nobody in the field with my handful of short story sales and my tiny print run — at least when compared to the big guys. Free samples were good news if no one had heard of you, but for successful writers, free downloads were poison. To "prove" this, critics often pointed to Stephen King's experiment in online publishing, "The Plant," which King gave up as a bad job after earning a mere hundreds of thousands of dollars in voluntary payments, and which he never returned to. A genuinely successful writer like King had nothing to gain from the publicity value of free downloads, they said (ironically, this appears to be the story that Charles referred to in the July Locus, citing it as proof of the success of free downloads). Over the next six years, a funny thing happened. After publishing three more novels, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, a graphic novel, and a million or so words' worth of nonfiction, speeches, essays, and blog posts, I seem to have made it, more or less. I quit working for EFF on January 1, 2006, in order to write full time, though I've found that interesting diversions rise up to fill the vacuum left by the day job, from my 18-month-old daughter to a year's stay in Los Angeles on faculty at the University of Southern California under the auspices of the Fulbright program, to a little screen writing to some lectures. And of course, there's Boing Boing, now grown into a modestly successful business that provides a nice supplemental income and provides some security, as well as a means of keeping my readers excited about my work between books. The other thing that's changed is the criticism. Six years ago, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom couldn't be counted as a real success for open publishing because I was too obscure to feel the cost of the lost sales. Now, I'm too successful, someone whose name is so widely known that I am uniquely situated to benefit from open publishing, since the micro net-fame I enjoy provides the vital push necessary to wrest sales from freebies. Hilariously, some of the people who say this go back in time and revise history, claiming that I was only able to sell as many copies of Down and Out as I have over the years (nine printings and still selling great!) because I was such a big shot famous writer in 2003, on the strength of a dozen short story sales. There's a name for this rhetorical tactic: "special pleading." Special pleading is when you claim that some example doesn't merit consideration because it lacks, or contains, some special characteristic that makes it unique, not part of the general discussion. I hear a lot of special pleading, taking one of two forms:
Your books only sell because you're such a popular blogger. No one else can do what you do unless they, too, are popular in some other field.
It's true that being widely read in one area is a good way to sell books in another area. Nationally syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry does well with his novels; folk legend Janis Ian has a good reputation for her excellent short fiction and poetry. More broadly, any kind of fame is a plus when it comes to marketing a book, as director Guillermo del Toro and his publisher knew before his novel The Strain went to press. But some well-known people sell a book and then move on after the critics have their way with them, and some keep on writing and selling. These latter are writers who happen to do something else — just as Geoff Landis works for NASA and writes; just as Kim Stanley Robinson and Rudy Rucker taught at university while writing; just as a thousand other writers find that having a day job is too much fun or too satisfying or too necessary to give up.
You have sources of income other than science fiction, so you can afford to give your books away. Not everyone can found a successful company or get paid for speaking while working on novels.
It's true that I co-founded and co-run Boing Boing and that the income from it and from a few talks a year help to supplement my income, and it's true that not every writer can do this (by the same token, not every writer can be a shrewd investor like Robert Silverberg, an MIT faculty member like Joe Haldeman, or the great-grandson of an oil tycoon like Larry Niven). Many's the writer who found that — free downloads or no — having another source of income made good sense. But the fact is that writing is a substantial and crucial part of my family's income. I'm not going to publish my tax return here, but you can do the math for yourself for my last novel: about 100,000 hardcovers of Little Brother in print at about $2 royalty each; 17 foreign rights deals ranging from a few thousand to mid-five-figures; audio rights; film option; etc. Then there's 26 columns a year for the Guardian, six a year in Locus, half a dozen short stories, and royalties from my backlist. While I'm awfully glad of my Boing Boing and lectures and incidental income, I've got plenty of skin in the game and sell plenty of books. I don't give away downloads because I'm just a swell guy — I do it because I'm a self-employed entrepreneur who needs to make as much as he can to support his family. Marketing and business are not science. Despite the conceits of quantitative economists, there's precious few good double-blind experiments to be run on commercial propositions. At the end of the day, all we know about any business-model is whether it appears to be working for the people who've tried it (and even then, we don't know what the future holds, as any number of once-enthusiastic derivatives hedgers can tell you from bitter experience). Writers are all different, and the success stories are all unique. Some SF writers enrich themselves with grants, or film deals, or by writing ten books for every book that their peers manage to write. Some edit, some have wealthy spouses. Gene Wolfe co-invented the machine that Pringles come out of (true fact!). An artist's income is very much an a la carte proposition, in which writers choose some items from one or more columns in order to find the fit that suits them best. "That won't work for every writer," is as weird and pointless as "those directions might get you to the corner store, but if you're trying to get to the greengrocer's, they're useless." All we can know, in the end, is what worked for some writers, so that we can see if they worked for us. Here's what I think I know about online publishing and free downloads:
- The conversion rate is low; when the price is $0, a lot of people will come and kick the tires, but only a few will buy (just as lots of people pick up a book in a store and riffle the pages without buying the book)
- Free downloads work amazingly well to magnify existing publicity, enabling friends to tell each other about books they love by sending them the e-book; among these people the conversion rate is much higher
- Free downloads don't generate much publicity in and of themselves — they need to be part of a larger campaign that gets people excited about the project.
Here are some things I'd really like to find out:
- Will people donate to support a free book? How much? Will they donate more to support an audiobook or a print edition?
- How much work does it take to replicate a professional publisher's contribution to publicizing and distributing your book?
- How much demand is there for premium editions, and what characteristics make those premium editions more valuable?
This is the kind of thing I hope to explore in the With a Little Help project. I'll be reporting in on what I learn. I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who'll be ready to dismiss it by asserting that something that works for one writer doesn't automatically work for every other writer. This is true, obvious, and unimportant. The important thing is what writers might try, based on the experiences of their peers. |
From the September 2009 issue of Locus Magazine
Labels: CoryDoctorow
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Sunday, July 5, 2009
Cory Doctorow: Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise
I was 15 when I got my hands on a grubby copy of Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman's classic how-to manual for dropping out, living for free, and "ripping off the system." It was chock-a-block with fascinating tidbits like how to generate the tone that would get you free long-distance calls, how to organize a co-operative store, how to recycle tires into sandals and how to dumpster-dive dinner from your local supermarket. I was hooked — I read that book a dozen times that summer. Steal This Book began my life-long love affair with secret knowledge: from texts on con-artistry like Maurer's seminal The Big Con (the basis for the film The Sting) and Lovell's How to Cheat at Everything: A Con Man Reveals the Secrets of the Esoteric Trade of Cheating, Scams, and Hustles to dubious demolitions manuals like The Anarchist Cookbook, to the streetlore that explained how to short out the contacts on the back of a payphone speaker to get an open dial-tone and what magic words will cause a collection agent to stop calling you for fear of prosecution for harassment. At one point, I had quite a collection of this stuff: anarchy files from BBSes; grubby Paladin Press paperbacks on creating new identities and urban caching techniques; ancient phone-switch manuals from the old Bellcore research outreach department; and catalogs like Amok and The Whole Earth Catalog, which promised bottomless "access to tools and ideas." (It's a good thing I only dabbled in conspiracy theories, UFOlogy, and cryptozoology or I would have gone bankrupt). Apart from prurient interest, this stuff is pure gold for science fiction writers — it lets you fake a pretty good spycraft, spin interesting scenarios that hatch in the crevasses of straight society, and provides texture and background on the woo-woo edges of reason and sanity. I also grew up on science fiction novels that were full of this stuff: competent heroes and lovable rogues who worked the angles, solved the cons, and uncovered the truth that the shadowy forces of conspiracy wished to keep us mortals from discovering. These two literatures — the fiction and the how-tos — fed one another, because it wasn't enough to read about something being done, I wanted to find out how to do it. Not because I had any interest in blowing stuff up or hacking the phone company, but because it made the story better, and it gave me that frisson that genuinely forbidden knowledge can convey. These facts were a currency in my social circle. We'd trade them like baseball cards. I'd show you my payphone trick and you'd show me your gag for turning the cellophane on a cigarette pack into a smoke-ring machine. Social capital accrued to everyone who could show or explain something that gave you power and insight into the mysterious workings of the world. Like all currency, these facts were scarce. They were expensive. You needed access to esoteric books, secret BBS file-depositories, shady characters who knew knife-tricks and could roll joints one-handed (drug lore was a big part of secret knowledge, of course, our own version of the sacred rituals of a secret society). Well, the market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. And that means that the two literatures — how-to and fiction — have effectively merged into one master story, the "plausible premise." New warfare expert John Robb coined the term "plausible premise" to describe the new reality of "open source insurgencies" ("insurgency composed of many small groups without any hierarchical leadership or organizational structure that typifies 20th century practice"). Open source insurgencies don't run on detailed instructional manuals that describe tactics and techniques. Rather, they run on a master narrative about how insurgency may be conducted — as screenwriter John Rogers put it:
What you really need is a plausible premise. i.e. "You can kill US soldiers with IEDs." and then the new Interconnected Marketplace Of Shitty Evil Ideas will solve the problem for anyone looking to kill US soldiers with IEDs.
Or, more succinctly, in order to get the marketplace off its ass to solve the impossible, you have to just pull off the highly improbable and make sure everybody knows about it. Show it can be done, show how you did it, and watch the "marketplace" attack because you've made the "premise" "plausible."
But this doesn't just work for insurgents — it works for anyone working to effect change or take control of her life. Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it — even the firms that specialize in doing it for you. In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it. This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. Bruce Sterling's new Imaginary Inventions project is seeking to catalog the imaginary inventions of fiction, hucksters, failed entrepreneurs, and other imaginers. I sent him some excerpts from my forthcoming novel Makers (Tor, HarperCollins UK, Fall 2009), which concerns hardware hackers whose principle activity is thinking up stuff that would be cool, then googling to figure out how to build it, and Bruce replied,
There's hardly any engineering. Almost all of this is mash-up tinkering. It's like the Burroughs cut-up method applied to objects. These guys are assembling hardware in the same crowd-pleasing spaghetti at the wall approach that Web 2.0 web designers use in assembling features and applications.
That's exactly right. That's the plausible premise right there — spaghetti-at-the-wall hacking that assembles, rather than invents. It's not that every invention has been invented, but we sure have a lot of basic parts just hanging around, waiting to be configured. Pick up a $200 FPGA chip-toaster and you can burn your own microchips. Drag and drop some code-objects around and you can generate some software to run on it. None of this will be as efficient or effective as a bespoke solution, but it's all close enough for rock-n-roll. Plausible premise invention is everywhere. Look at the incredible games flying out of Seattle's Valve Corporation: Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Left 4 Dead — all built on the same engine with radically different narratives and play mechanics and atmosphere, a GURPS approach to game design that shrugs off the macho business of creating your own 3D engine from scratch in favor of pulling something down off the shelf and remixing it. What does this all mean for science fiction? Well, it probably means that SF writers are going to get credited with a lot more invention than we're accustomed to. The formerly rare occurrence of technology jumping off the page and into the world (Heinlein's waterbeds, Clarke's geosynchronous orbits) are about to become a lot more common. When readers can download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it becomes much simpler to turn fiction into reality. For better or for worse. |
From the July 2009 issue of Locus Magazine
Labels: CoryDoctorow
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Saturday, May 9, 2009
Extreme Geek
by Cory Doctorow I am by no means the geekiest SF writer working in the field today; on the power-law curve of geekiness, there are many ancient and gnarly masters before whom I am but a noviate, barely qualified to check the syntax in their shell-scripts. Stross, I'm looking at you here. Nevertheless, I am far more geeky than average, and that geekiness has crept into my writing practice in a way that is very close to perfectly geeky inasmuch as it probably costs me as much effort as it saves me, inasmuch as it delights me, and inasmuch as it points the way to civilian applications that someone else might want to develop into products that the less geekified may enjoy. In that spirit, I offer you three quirky little tassles from the fringes of technology and SF writing: 1. Business: Book donation programThis is the lowest-tech entry on the list, but it's also the most generally applicable. As you know (Bob), I give away all my books as free, Creative Commons-licensed e-books the same day they go on sale in stores, on the grounds that for most people, a free e-book is more apt to entice them to buy the print book than to substitute for it. But there's a small minority — mostly other geeks — for whom the e-book is all they want, and who, nevertheless, want to see the writers they enjoy compensated (bless 'em!). They write to me with some variation on, "Can't I just send you a donation?" And my answer has always been no, because:
- I don't want to have to bookkeep, file taxes on, and otherwise track your $5;
- I don't want to cut my extremely valuable and useful publisher out of the loop;
- I don't want to reduce my print-books' sell-through rates (which determine advance sizes, print runs, and bookstore orders).
So, traditionally, I asked my readers to compensate me by donating a book to a school or library or halfway house. But, practically speaking, this isn't very useful advice. Most of us have no idea how to give books away to schools or libraries — do you just show up at the reception desk with a book, shove it into the clerk's hands and say, "Here, this is for you?" Starting with my novel Little Brother, I've been doing something different: I actually provide a matchmaking service to connect donors with willing recipients. I hired an assistant — the talented Olga Nunes — to monitor through a googlemail address that I published in a solicitation to schools, libraries, etc., telling them to e-mail their work contact details if they wanted a free copy of the book. Olga vetted these to ensure that they weren't fakers or scam artists, and then posted a geographically sorted list of would-be donees to my site. Then, I put the word out to potential donors that there was an easy (or at least easier) way to compensate me if you liked the e-book and didn't need the hardcopy: visit your favorite bookstore and buy as many copies as you'd like for any of the organizations that solicited donations, then e-mail us the receipt so we can cross them off the list. Judging from donor e-mails, many of them just gave to the first outstanding request, others looked for requests from their region, and others judged by merit. Some donated several copies — as much as 15! As I type this, we've given away well over 200 copies to people who really wanted the book. I got the sales number, my publisher got the sale, the library or school got the material, and the reader got to feel like s/he had paid for the value s/he'd received. Now, this wasn't cheap. I needed to hire someone with the good judgment to tell scammers from honest people and with the HTML skills to format and update the page. I definitely spent at least twice as much as I made on this program. As a commercial venture, it was a flop. But as a proof-of-concept, it was a ringing success. There is a market opportunity here for someone who wants to automate the service. I envision something run jointly by, say, the American Library Association (or maybe the International Federation of Library Associations) and the Adopt-a-School program (to ease vetting), that works with a couple dozen booksellers, national and local, and lists books by all kinds of authors and requests from all over the world. Donors can either get a suggestion for a book to donate (perhaps based on preferences like "Science Fiction" or "Young-Adult Novels" and "Schools in My Area" or "Schools in the Nation's Poorest ZIP Codes") and, with a few clicks, donate a book, receiving a tax-deduction receipt in return. 2. Research: Twitter meets notekeepingI'm in the middle of a research-intensive novel, for which I've read some 50 or 60 books. I made extensive notes as I did, unconsciously falling into a Twitter-style shorthand in my long text-file, for example:
- Newborn babies are swaddled tightly at birth, it tames them. If you aren't swaddled, you grow up wild and restless. Socialism 79 #china #childhood #control
- Louche boy wearing wide-bottom "trumpet trousers" and shirt rolled up to expose his belly on a hot day. Socialism 86 #china #fashion
- "Drink vinegar" is "conjugal jealousy." Socialism 155 #china #slang #romance
These notes are from "Socialism is Great!", Lijia Zhang's amazing memoir of life in rural China during the period of economic reform and industrialization. The hashtags (#tag) are loose categories that each note seemed to fit into while I was writing them down. These notes, and hundreds more, live in a text file. As I made these notes, I had a sense that, somewhere, there'd be a program that would parse through them, generating a tag-cloud [see picture] with clickable links to different hashtags' contents. Unfortunately, as this file grew longer, I realized that no such program existed. I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud. Now, as I write the novel, this has become an invaluable aid: for one thing, it lends itself to a kind of casual, clicky browsing in which one hashtag leads to another, to a search-query, to another tag, exploring my notes in a way that is both serendipitous and directed. For another, the format is one that comes naturally to me, because of all the other services I use — such as Twitter — that employ this telegraphic, brief style. Dan's Perl script is freely licensed and can be downloaded from http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=707360. 3. Process: FlashbakeI know a lot of archivists and one of their most common laments is the disappearance of the distinct draft manuscript in the digital age. Pre-digital, authors would create a series of drafts for their work, often bearing hand-written notations tracking the thinking behind each revision. By comparing these drafts, archivists and scholars could glean insights into the author's mental state and creative process. But in the digital era, many authors work from a single file, modifying it incrementally for each revision. There are no distinct, individual drafts, merely an eternally changing scroll that is forever in flux. When the book is finished, all the intermediate steps that the manuscript went through disappear. It occurred to me that there was no reason that this had to be so. Computers can remember an insane amount of information about the modification history of files — indeed, that's the norm in software development, where code repositories are used to keep track of each change to the codebase, noting who made the changes, what s/he changed, and any notes s/he made about the reason for the change. So I wrote to a programmer friend of mine, Thomas Gideon, who hosts the excellent Command Line podcast ( http://thecommandline.net), and asked him which version control system he'd recommend for my fiction projects — which one would be easiest to automate so that every couple of minutes, it checked to see if any of the master files for my novels had been updated, and then check the updated ones in. Thomas loved the idea and ran with it, creating a script that made use of the free and open-source control system "Git" (the system used to maintain the Linux kernel), checking in my prose at 15-minute intervals, noting, with each check-in, the current time-zone on my system clock (where am I?), the weather there, as fetched from Google (what's it like?) and the headlines from my last three Boing Boing posts (what am I thinking?). Future versions will support plug-ins to capture even richer metadata — say, the last three tweets I twittered, and the last three songs my music player played for me. He called it "Flashbake", a neologism from my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I was honored. It's an incredibly rich — even narcissistic — amount of detail to capture about the writing process, but there's no reason not to capture it. It doesn't cost any more to capture all this stuff every 15 minutes than it would to capture a daily file-change snapshot at midnight without any additional detail. And since Git — and other source repositories — is designed to let you summarize many changes at a time (say, all the changes between version 1 and version 2 of a product), it's easy to ignore the metadata if it's getting in the way. Now, this may be of use to some notional scholar who wants to study my work in a hundred years, but I'm more interested in the immediate uses I'll be able to put it to — for example, summarizing all the typos I've caught and corrected between printings of my books. Flashbake also means that I'm extremely backed up (Git is designed to replicate its database to other servers, in order to allow multiple programmers to work on the same file). And more importantly, I'm keen to see what insights this brings to light for me about my own process. I know that there are days when the prose really flows, and there are days when I have to squeeze out each word. What I don't know is what external factors may bear on this. In a year, or two, or three, I'll be able to use the Flashbake to generate some really interesting charts and stats about how I write: does the weather matter? Do I write more when I'm blogging more? Do "fast" writing days come in a cycle? Do I write faster on the road or at home? I know myself well enough to understand that if I don't write down these observations and become an empiricist of my own life that all I'll get are impressionistic memories that are more apt to reflect back my own conclusions to me than to inform me of things I haven't noticed. Thomas has released Flashbake as free/open software. You can download it and start tinkering at http://bitbucketlabs.net/flashbake. As I said, it's not the kind of thing that an info-civilian will be able to get using without a lot of tinkering, but in the month I've used it, I've already found it to be endlessly fascinating and useful — and with enough interest, it's bound to get easier and easier. |
Labels: CoryDoctorow, Essay
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