Cory Doctorow

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Cory Efram Doctorow (Template:IPAc-en; born 17 July 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.<ref name=USCbio>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="FiftyFigures">Template:Cite book</ref>

Life and career

Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His paternal grandfather was born in what became Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad, Russia (St. Petersburg). Both fled Nazi Germany's advance eastward during World War II, and as a result Doctorow's father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> His grandparents and father migrated to Canada from the Soviet Union.<ref name="insight">Template:Cite web</ref> Doctorow's mother's family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.<ref name="insight" />

Doctorow is a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating to their time together in elementary school.<ref name="nationalpost">Template:Cite news</ref> Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a "hippy summer camp" at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that was influential on his intellectual life and development.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He quit high school,<ref name=GMSFBC>Template:Citation</ref> received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and attended four universities without obtaining a degree.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Cory Doctorow has stated both that he is not related to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and that he may be a third cousin once removed of the novelist.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as "a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow".<ref name="rankin">Rankin, Thomas. (January 2007). "Cory Doctorow". Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works. Salem Press. p. 1. Ebsco.</ref>

In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> with John Henson and Grad Conn, which was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003.<ref name="USCbio"/> The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

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Doctorow at eTech 2007, wearing a cape and goggles in reference to his depiction in webcomic xkcd

Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for four years,<ref name=USCbio/> helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff.<ref name=USCbio/><ref>As of 24 September 2019, the name Doctorow no longer appears in search results for uscpublicdiplomacy.com.</ref> He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States.<ref name=USCbio/><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.

In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.<ref name="waterloo4">Template:Cite web</ref> He had been a student in the program during 1993–94, but had left without completing a thesis. Doctorow was also a visiting professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom from September 2009 to August 2010.<ref name="waterloo4"/> In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008;<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

In 2015, Doctorow decided to leave London and move to Los Angeles, expressing disappointment at London's "death" after Britain's choice of Conservative government; he stated at the time, "London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic.<ref name="Pluralistic-20yearsblogger">Template:Cite web</ref> The circumstances surrounding Doctorow's exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing.<ref name="Pluralistic-20yearsblogger" /><ref name="metafilter-doctorow-beatles">Template:Cite web</ref> Given the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing, MetaFilter described this news as "the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up" for the blog world.<ref name="metafilter-doctorow-beatles" /> Doctorow's exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Other work, activism, and fellowships

Doctorow served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2007, together with Austrian art group monochrom, he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, which asks people from all over the world to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

On 31 October 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics, a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

As a user of the Tor anonymity network for more than a decade during his global travels, Doctorow publicly supports the network; furthermore, Boing Boing operates a "high speed, high-quality exit node."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He also presented on enshittification at the 2024 conference, HOPE XV.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow was appointed as an A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University from 2024–2030.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.<ref>Template:Cite tweet</ref>

Fiction

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Doctorow in his office, 2009

Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old, and sold several stories, followed by publication of the story "Craphound" in 1998.<ref name="GMSFBC" />

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licences, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="FiftyFigures" /> The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition.<ref name="FiftyFigures" /> In February 2004, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons license that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Down and Out... was nominated for a Nebula Award,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004.<ref name="locus-2004">Template:Cite web</ref> A semi-sequel short story named Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.<ref name="salon-truncat">Template:Cite web</ref>

His novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, published in June 2005, was chosen to launch the Sci-Fi Channel's book club, Sci-Fi Essentials (now defunct).

Doctorow's other novels have been released with Creative Commons licences that allow derived works and prohibit commercial usage, and he has used the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that print versions are published.

His Sunburst Award-winning short-story collection<ref name="sunburst-2004">Template:Cite web</ref> A Place So Foreign and Eight More was also published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow (left) pictured at the 2006 Lift Conference with fellow Boing Boing contributor Jasmina Tešanović (centre) and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling (right)

Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2009,<ref name="hugo-09">Template:Cite web</ref> and won the 2009 Prometheus Award,<ref name="lfs.org">Template:Cite web</ref> Sunburst Award,<ref name="2009 Winners: The Sunburst Awards">Template:Cite web</ref> and the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.<ref name="locus-jwc-09">Template:Cite web</ref>

His novel Makers was released in October 2009, and was serialised for free on the Tor Books website.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow released another young adult novel, For the Win, in May 2010.<ref name="GMSFBC" /> The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper format by Tor Books. The book is about "greenfarming", and concerns massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

Doctorow's short-story collection With a Little Help was released in printed format on 3 May 2011. It is a project to demonstrate the profitability of Doctorow's method of releasing his books in print and subsequently for free under Creative Commons.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In September 2012, Doctorow released The Rapture of the Nerds, a novel written in collaboration with Charles Stross.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow's young adult novel Pirate Cinema was released in October 2012. It won the 2013 Prometheus Award.<ref name="lfs-2013">Template:Cite web</ref>

In February 2013, Doctorow released Homeland, the sequel to his novel Little Brother.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> It won the 2014 Prometheus Award (Doctorow's third novel to win this award).

His novel Walkaway was released in 2017.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In March 2019, Doctorow released Radicalized, a collection of four self-contained science-fiction novellas dealing with how life in America could be in the near future.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The book was selected for the 2020 edition of Canada Reads, in which it was defended by Akil Augustine.<ref>"Meet the Canada Reads 2020 contenders" Template:Webarchive. CBC Books, 22 January 2020.</ref>

Attack Surface, a standalone adult novel set in the "Little Brother" universe, was released on 13 October 2020.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

His novel called Red Team Blues, a financial thriller about cybersecurity, was released in April 2023. It features a character named Martin Hench.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Standalone hopepunk novel The Lost Cause, set in 2050s California about mitigating and surviving climate change impacts amidst the legacy of contemporary political divisions, was published in November 2023.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Template:AnchorA second novel featuring forensic accountant Martin Hench was published in February 2024: The Bezzle is centered around the financial (mis-)management of privately owned prisons.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

A third Martin Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, was published by Tor Books in February, 2025: the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever invented: the personal computer.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Nonfiction and other writings

Doctorow's nonfiction works include his first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder and published in 2000),<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> his contributions to Boing Boing, the blog he co-edits, as well as regular columns in the magazines Popular Science and Make.<ref name="rankin"/> He is a contributing writer to Wired magazine,<ref name="rankin"/> and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe.

In 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer to the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He popularised the term "metacrap" by a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Some of his nonfiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon Publications as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. In 2016, he wrote the article Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood-Hacker (published on MIT Technology Review) as a review of the TV show Mr. Robot and argued for a better portrayal and understanding of technology, computers and their risks and consequences in our modern world.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

His essay "You Can't Own Knowledge" is included in the Freesouls book project.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He is the originator of Doctorow's Law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web [1] Template:Webarchive</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Writing in The Guardian in 2022, Doctorow listed the many problems confronting Facebook and suggested that its future would be increasingly fraught.<ref name="doctorow-2022">Template:Cite news</ref>

Opinions

Doctorow (left), alongside Mayor of Burbank Konstantine Anthony, picketing in support of the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike

Intellectual property

Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalised to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media and that copyright laws should not be operative unless someone attempts to sell a product that is under someone else's copyright.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management and claims that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

He was a keynote speaker at the 2014 international conference CopyCamp in Warsaw, Poland<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> with the presentation "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Enshittification

Template:Main In criticising the decay in usefulness of online platforms, Doctorow in 2022 coined the neologism enshittification,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (which he calls enpoopification on public airwaves<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>) which he defines as a degradation of an online environment caused by greed:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

The word gained traction in 2023, when it was used by a variety of sources in reference to several major platforms discontinuing free features in order to further their monetization or taking other actions that were seen to degrade functionality.<ref>Multiple sources:

In November 2024, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary selected it as its word of the year, defining it as follows:<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

Awards

For Little Brother

For Pirate Cinema

For Homeland

Selected bibliography

In chronological sequence, unless otherwise indicated

Fiction

Novels

Little Brother Universe
Martin Hench series

Graphic novels

Collections

Short fiction

Title Year First published in Reprinted in
Craphound 1998 Science Fiction Age, March 1998
  • Northern Suns (Tor, 1999, David Hartwell and Glenn Grant, editors)
  • Year's Best Science Fiction XVI (Morrow, 1999, Gardner Dozois, editor)
  • Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine (Japan) 2001
The Super Man and the Bugout 1998 DailyLit
Return to Pleasure Island 2000 Realms of Fantasy Template:Cite book
0wnz0red 2002 ? Template:Cite book
Truncat<ref>A quasi-sequel to Down and out in the Magic Kingdom.</ref> 2002 ? Template:Cite book
I, Row-Boat 2006 Flurb: a webzine of astonishing tales 1 (Fall 2006) Template:Cite book
Scroogled 2007 Radar (Sep 2007) Template:Cite book
The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away 2008 Tor.com
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth 2008 ?? Template:Cite book
True names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum) 2008 Template:Cite book Template:Cite book
Chicken Little 2009 Template:Cite book Template:Cite book
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow / Now is the best time of your life 2010 Template:Cite book Template:Cite book
Clockwork Fagin 2011 Grant, Gavin J. and Link, Kelly, eds. (2011). Steampunk! Candlewick Press. Template:ISBN
Another Time, Another Place 2011 Van Allsburg (2011). The Chronicles of Harris Burdick: Fourteen Amazing Authors Tell the Tales Template:ISBN
Lawful interception 2013 TOR.COM
The Man Who Sold The Moon 2014 Boing Boing
Car Wars 2016 Deakin University<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Party Discipline 2017 Tor.com
The Canadian Miracle 2023 Reactor Magazine
Spill 2024 Reactor Magazine
Vigilant 2024 Reactor Magazine

Non-fiction

Anthology

  • Tesseracts Eleven with Holly Phillips (2007)

References

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Further reading

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Template:Sister project links Template:Spoken Wikipedia

Interviews

Template:Doctorow-navbox Template:Inkpot Award 2010sTemplate:Locus Award Best First NovelTemplate:Locus Award Best Novella Template:Authority control

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