Doctorow and his Magic Kingdom

Tech and Politics align

Novara Media interviews Cory Doctorow

I’ve been a fan of Cory Doctorow for many a year now, from his ardent activist and digital human rights work to gently easing myself into his sci-fi and cyberpunk fiction.

My hopes and dreams for a better computing future, one which is private, under my control and useful to everyone has pretty much aligned with Cory’s viewpoints and aspirations throughout this time.

In another aspect, my political will thrived on progressive politics from the Internet’s very own “New Media”, crowd funded by enthusiasts, run by ideological sound socialists and literal communists.

A politics of truth and consideration for the working class “masses”.

The people have been neglected, nay abused.

They need honourable “champion” journalists speaking truth to power with integrity.

Enter Novara Media.

Well before the pandemic hit and made everything worse, I was clued into finding alternate opinions opposed to messaging of legacy media (TV news and newspapers monopolies).

I enjoyed the variety of perspectives being honestly discussed.

In the dual digital enclaves of tech advocacy and political justice, the hope was that the two would come together at some point and champion digital and economic freedom for everyone.

I feel, with the interview of Cory Doctorow on a Novara Media IRL downstream event, finally the good ideas have gravitated toward each other!

Well worth a watch to see the to and fro of discussion between Aaron Bastani and Cory. Cory amidst his popular ‘Enshittification’ book tour was on form, fast and furious, guiding the audience through the intracacies of the defilement of our computing and digital rights. Digital rights are human rights!

The Plan is to Make the Internet Worse. Forever.

You can get Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification book, DRM-free, on his site:

Enshittification at Craphound.com

If you want to explore Aaron Bastani’s views it might be worth checking out his book:

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

The Magic Kingdom out loud

At one point in the interview Bastani goes out of his way to recommend wholeheartedly one of Cory’s early books of fiction, namely Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Whilst I’ve read a good number of Cory’s near-future “cyberpunk” fiction books, I’ve not read ‘Magic Kingdom’ and it intrigued me that Aaron gave it such high regard.

The ebook can be picked up, DRM-free, on craphound.com but sadly there is no audiobook available.

However, Cory’s podcast is archived and on the books 10th Anniversary (around 2013) he performed a reading of the book over several episodes, partly to celebrate the book but also, so he could annotate his copy because he was wanting to refamiliarise himself with it to write a prequel.

I would encourage you to buy the ebook, give it a read, but I’ve also listed the archival links to the podcast episodes where Cory reads the book out.

These files are served from the Internet Archive and I would also urge you to explore and use the site, since it is a unqiue resource for everyone and should be supported as much as possible - because these days it is under attack from corporate abuse. The Wayback Machine that has been archiving web site snapshots for decades is a precious treasure for all netizens.

Catch Cory’s writings on his prolific blog at Pluralistic or use his RSS feed in your favourite RSS reader!

Also catch up with Novara Media’s Articles or use the address as an RSS feed.

Human rights are digital rights!