Cory Doctorow’s Totalitarian Urge

Tonight I attended a packed-out lecture by author, agent provocateur and Boing Boinger Cory Doctorow. It was entitled “The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards”. This blurb accurately describes the talk:

“It’s about how technology changes the way we view social problems,” says Doctorow. “Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.”

It’s the first time I’ve seen Cory speak, and he’s a great storyteller. His speech was dense with ideas and visceral images. I really liked how he connected disparate ideas and frequently shifted his tone from the highbrow (Heisenberg) to the lowbrow (YouTube), or from obscure geekery (GUIDs) to more familiar topics (London’s congestion charge). He used the word ‘hypertrophic’ three times–I had to look it up.

As somebody who’s read a lot of what Cory’s written, his speech’s themes were very familiar:

• Open source, privacy and transparency = Good
• DRM and copyright = Bad

For someone unfamiliar with these ideas, I’d bet his speech was pretty mindblowing.

I sat with Dave, and he kindly let me take a photo of my notes from the talk (click for larger, legible version):

I also took a photo of the doodle I made:

As I think I’ve said before, I used to care a lot more about these issues. In the last couple of years, I’ve come to see them as abstract and erudite causes of privileged intellectuals. I’m a card carrying member of that group, but I’m trying to shift my attention to topics which seem more urgent.

Like, say, access to daycare, digital rights have become kind of a non-issue for me. We can’t care about everything, can we? I’m glad there are activists who care passionately such topics–I’m just not one of them anymore.

UPDATE: Ianiv recorded the session, for those who were busy watching Jeff Cowan score his sixth goal in four games.