It’s time to delete those IP provisions and throw open domestic competition that attacks the margins that created the fortunes of oligarchs who sat behind Trump on the inauguration dais. It’s time to bring back the indomitable hacker spirit that the Bill Gateses of the world have been trying to extinguish since the days of the “open letter to hobbyists.” The tech sector built a 10 foot high wall around its business, then the US government convinced the rest of the world to ban four-metre ladders. Lift the ban, unleash the ladders, free the world!
He said all this and more at the Liberty Books event at Cleveland Park Library in DC this evening.
And he is as engaging and kind as people here have mentioned.
He sends his love to all us here at elsewhere.
I had asked a question during the discussion. Then when I went to get my book signed, he thanked me for my question. I thanked him for his response, and I mentioned that he was much loved and missed over at elsewhere, where a lot of the boing boing community had reconnected when boing boing…(Waved my hand, he visually commiserated annoyance) And he said, aww, thank you! Tell them I love them, too.
I hope I didn’t err by mentioning it to him. I didn’t say cafe.
@chgoliz - just passing through on my way home to Maine. We stayed a couple nights to visit friends and attend this event. Safely outside the beltway now.
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable conversation to me, IMHO.
(It’s not impossible that he’d already heard of us somehow, through a web search in the days when we had “happy mutants” as part of the site name, or from someone also acquainted with both sites. No, not me.)
And I agree with @mindysan33 , if he wants to stop by and say “hi”, hang around for a while, it’s cool with me.
But plenty of the things that Big Tech gets up to are about the narrative of growth. That’s why Big Tech has pumped every tech bubble of this stupid decade: metaverse, cryptocurrency, AI. These technologies have each been at the forefront of Big Tech marketing and investor communications, but not solely because they represented a market opportunity. Rather, they represented a more-or-less plausible explanation for how these companies that were on the wrong side of the law of large numbers could continue to double in size, without breeding billions of new customers to sign up for their services.
I emailed with him a few times, and he always answered. I was working on a sermon about science fiction and used an excerpt from an article he’d written as a reading in the service.
Extremely supportive and thoughtful, in my opinion. A real hoopy frood!
The interviewer at the event I attended, Matt Stoller, kind of off-handedly asked Cory, “how did you learn to write?” And Cory shared a truly amazing origin story of meeting Judith Merrill at a school trip to a library in Ontario as a nine year old and entering her writers’ group and then continuing for his entire remaining junior high and high school career and eventually getting his first story published in a sci-fi magazine that was founded by a couple people who’d been “bullied into” starting the mag by…you guessed it, Judith Merrill.
He was so obviously appreciative of the impact Miller had on the entire field. It’s not surprising at all that he is passing it forward to this day. But still so cool to hear about your experience with him!
cough; it wasn’t just “a library in Ontario”, it was the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, whose founding patron was Merril. It’s one of the largest spec fic collections in the world.
The problem isn’t disruption itself, but rather, the establishment of undisruptable, legally protected monopolies whose crybaby billionaire CEOs never have to face the same treatment they meted out to the incumbents who were on the scene when they were starting out.
When an industry is heavily concentrated, when it is a cartel that controls key chokepoints that restrict access to key markets, then rising prices don’t trigger discounts from rival companies, because rival companies simply can’t get any market oxygen. And when a shock – covid, bird flu, etc – strikes, cartels can hike prices way over their higher costs, and point the finger of blame at the shock. This is a special subspecies of greedflation called “excuseflation”
No, not me.)
But still so cool to hear about your experience with him!