Cory Doctorow

Life and career

Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971. He is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. 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. His grandparents and father migrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow's mother's family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.

Doctorow is a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating to their time together in elementary school. 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. He quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto, and attended four universities without obtaining a degree.

Cory Doctorow has stated both that he is not related to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow, and that he may be a third cousin once removed of the novelist. Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as "a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow".

In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003. The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign.

Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for four years, 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,{{cite web |author = Fulbright-Canada Staff | url=http://www.fulbright.ca/en/pdf/2006_Award_Recipients_Eng.pdf |title=2006 Award Recipients |access-date=2 September 2008 |work=Royal Fulbright Commission web site |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080229090257/http://www.fulbright.ca/en/pdf/2006_Award_Recipients_Eng.pdf |archive-date=29 February 2008 |url-status=dead

In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. 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. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.

Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008; they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008. Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalization on 12 August 2011.

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." He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM).

Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic. 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. 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. Doctorow's exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.

Other work, activism, and fellowships

Doctorow served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2000. 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. 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.

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." Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference. He also presented on enshittification at the 2024 conference, HOPE XV. In July 2024 Doctorow was appointed by Cornell University to be an A.D. White Professor-at-large for a six-year term. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Fiction

Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old, and sold several stories, followed by publication of the story "Craphound" in 1998. 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. The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition. In February 2004, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons licence that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. Down and Out... was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004. A semi-sequel short story named Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.

His Sunburst Award-winning short-story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More was published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. 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 released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence. It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2009, and won the 2009 Prometheus Award, Sunburst Award, and the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novel Makers was released in October 2009, and was serialized for free on the Tor Books website.

Doctorow released another young adult novel, For the Win, in May 2010. 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. Another 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.

In September 2012, Doctorow released The Rapture of the Nerds, a novel written in collaboration with Charles Stross. In October of the same year, the young adult novel Pirate Cinema was released in October 2012. It won the 2013 Prometheus Award. In February 2013, Doctorow released Homeland, the sequel to his novel Little Brother. It won the 2014 Prometheus Award (Doctorow's third novel to win this award). His novel Walkaway was released in 2017.

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. The book was selected for the 2020 edition of Canada Reads, in which it was defended by Akil Augustine. Attack Surface, a standalone adult novel set in the "Little Brother" universe, was released on 13 October 2020. His novel called Red Team Blues, a financial thriller about cybersecurity, was released in April 2023. It features a character named Martin Hench. A 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.bezzleA 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. 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.

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), his contributions to Boing Boing (the blog he co-edited), as well as regular columns in the magazines Popular Science and Make. He is a contributing writer to Wired magazine, 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. 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.

He popularized the term "metacrap" by a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia." 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.

His essay "You Can't Own Knowledge" is included in the Freesouls book project. 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."{{cite web | access-date = 25 February 2013 | archive-date = 28 January 2013 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130128061604/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/doctorows-law | url-status = live | access-date = 25 February 2013 | archive-date = 2 May 2013 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130502062122/http://www.slideshare.net/cranbury/digital-rights-managment-vs-the-inevitability-of-free-content | url-status = live |access-date = 25 February 2013 |url-status = dead |archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130524230830/http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/008.nsf/eng/01720.html |archive-date = 24 May 2013 | access-date = 25 February 2013 | archive-date = 1 May 2013 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20130501225223/http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=178058&print=yes | url-status = dead | access-date = 24 February 2022 | archive-date = 24 February 2022 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20220224172727/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/24/ive-been-waiting-15-years-for-facebook-to-die-im-more-hopeful-than-ever | url-status = live

Opinions

Intellectual property

Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing. 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.

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).

He was a keynote speaker at the 2014 international conference CopyCamp in Warsaw, Poland with the presentation "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free."

Enshittification

Main article: Enshittification

In criticizing the decay in usefulness of online platforms, Doctorow in 2022 coined the neologism enshittification, (which he calls enpoopification on public airwaves) which he defines as a degradation of an online environment caused by greed:

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.Multiple sources:

• In its annual vote, the American Dialect Society designated enshittification as 2023's Word of the Year.

In November 2024, the Australian Macquarie Dictionary selected it as its word of the year, defining it as follows:{{cite web

Awards

• 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
• 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
• 2004 Sunburst Award for A Place So Foreign and Eight More
• 2006 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "I, Robot"
• 2007 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"
• 2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award

For ''Little Brother''

• 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award
• 2009 Prometheus Award
• 2009 Sunburst Award
• 2009 White Pine Award
• 2018 Inkpot Award

;For Pirate Cinema

• 2013 Prometheus Award

For ''Homeland''

• 2014 Prometheus Award

Selected bibliography

In chronological sequence, unless otherwise indicated

Fiction

Novels

• The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, 2011,
• (with Charles Stross)

Little Brother Universe

Martin Hench series

Graphic novels

• In Real Life. Illustrated by Jen Wang. First Second. 2014. .
• Poesy the Monster Slayer. Illustrated by Matt Rockefeller. First Second. 2020. .

Collections

• or
• • Other instance:

Short fiction

Non-fiction

• Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004.

Anthology

• Tesseracts Eleven with Holly Phillips (2007)

References

References

1. "Cory Doctorow". USC Center on Public Diplomacy USC.
2. (2022). "Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture".
3. (17 July 2013). "Literary Birthday – 17 July – Cory Doctorow".
4. Doctorow, C.. (28 May 2013). "What My Father Taught Me: Cory Doctorow".
5. Doctorow, C.. (2 September 2009). "Azeri "donkey video" bloggers arrested".
6. (9 July 2018). "An Interview with Cory Efram Doctorow (Part One)".
7. Warnica, Richard. (6 September 2014). "Toronto superstar academic who coined 'net-neutrality' could be nominee for N.Y. lieutenant-governor". [[National Post]].
8. (23 February 2018). "Sense of Place: Cory Doctorow, Grindstone Island, Ontario".
9. Doctorow, C.. (2010). "Godlike Machines". Science Fiction Book Club.
10. Doctorow, Cory. (3 July 2023). "Commentary by Cory Doctorow: SF Doesn't Predict, It Contests". Locus.
11. (8 May 2020). "Graduation certificate from Mom and Dad". Self-published by subject.
12. (22 July 2015). "RIP, EL Doctorow".
13. (23 December 2012). "Is Cory Doctorow related to author EL Doctorow?".
14. Rankin, Thomas. (January 2007). "Cory Doctorow". ''Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works''. Salem Press. p. 1. Ebsco.
15. Heltze, Paul. (9 April 2001). "OpenCola-Have Some Code and a Smile".
16. Steadman, Ian. (13 April 2013). "Open source cola and the 'Napster moment' for the food business".
17. 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.As of 24 September 2019, the name Doctorow no longer appears in search results for uscpublicdiplomacy.com.
18. "University of Waterloo: Scholar in Virtual Residence". University of Waterloo.
19. "Conferment of Honorary Degrees and Presentation of Graduates". www.open.ac.uk.
20. Doctorow, C.. (27 October 2008). "Little Brother UK edition signed!". BoingBoing.
21. Doctorow, C.. (3 February 2008). "Fine News". BoingBoing.
22. Doctorow, Cory. (12 August 2011). "UK Citizenship Certificate, Cory Doctorow (redacted).tif".
23. Doctorow, C.. (29 June 2015). "Why I'm leaving London". BoingBoing.
24. (20 January 2015). "Cory Doctorow Rejoins EFF to Eradicate DRM everywhere". Electronic Frontier Foundation.
25. (13 January 2021). "20 years a blogger".
26. (30 March 2020). "In the blog world, this is the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up".
27. (30 January 2020). "Boing Boing: Wayback Machine snapshot as of 30 January 2020".
28. Levinson, Paul. (15 June 2000). "New Canadian Regional Director".
29. Tapscott, Dan. (2006). "Wikinomics". Portfolio/Penguin Books.
30. "piracy messages".
31. (22 May 2007). "Instant Blitz Copy Fight Project".
32. "This is What a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Cory Doctorow". The Tor Blog.
33. (17 March 2016). "Cory Doctorow to Keynote at The Eleventh HOPE | The Eleventh HOPE". The Eleventh Hope.
34. (14 July 2024). "Cory Doctorow :: HOPE XV :: pretalx".
35. "Science fiction novelist and technology activist Cory Doctorow appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large – Andrew D. White Professors-at-Large Program".
36. Cory Doctorow. "Uhhhhhh. I am a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. I was raised by Trotskyists. This is, as the physicists say, "not even wrong."".
37. (13 March 2011). "Cory Doctorow: How free translates to business survival". BBC News.
38. (2003). "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". Tor Books.
39. "The Nebula Award Listing; Science Fiction & Fantasy Books by Award". Worldswithoutend.com.
40. (3 September 2004). "2004 Locus Awards". Locus Publications.
41. Cory Doctorow. (27 August 2003). "Truncat". Salon.
42. (1 September 2004). "2004 Sunburst Award Winner". The Sunburst Award Society.
43. (17 April 2004). "2004 Nebula Awards". Locusmag.com.
44. (28 April 2008). "Little Brother Blog". Craphound.com.
45. (31 January 2010). "AnticipationSF Hugo Nominees: Best Novel". Anticipation: The 67th World Science Fiction Convention.
46. "Libertarian Futurist Society". Lfs.org.
47. (28 September 2009). "2009 Winners: The Sunburst Awards". The Sunburst Award Society.
48. (7–12 July 2009). "2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award". [[Locus (magazine).
49. "Cory Doctorow's Makers; Blog posts". Tor.com.
50. "Post publication progress report for "With a Little Help"". Craphound.com.
51. Cory Doctorow. (19 October 2009). "Doctorow's Project: With a Little Help". Publishers Weekly.
52. Upcoming4.me. "Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross' Rapture of The Nerds cover art and summary reveal". Upcoming4.me.
53. (20 July 2012). "2013 Prometheus Winners Announced". Libertarian Futurist Society.
54. (20 June 2012). "Cover for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother".
55. "Author Cory Doctorow to Speak at UC San Diego on Scarcity, Abundance and the Finite Planet".
56. (16 January 2019). "Revealing Radicalized, A New Book From Cory Doctorow".
57. [https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/meet-the-canada-reads-2020-contenders-1.5433115 "Meet the Canada Reads 2020 contenders"] {{Webarchive. link. (9 February 2020 . [[CBC Books]], 22 January 2020.)
58. "Attack Surface".
59. "His Writing Radicalized Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them".
60. (27 April 2023). "Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues: a refreshingly hopeful finance thriller about cryptocurrency".
61. "The Lost Cause".
62. "The Bezzle".
63. "Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel". Macmillan Publishers.
64. Lilley, Ernest. (2001). "Review". SFRevu.
65. Spence, Ewan. (18 November 2004). "Cory Doctorow (the EFF) Interview". AAS: All About Symbian.
66. (11 March 2005). "The Anthology At The End Of The Universe: Leading Science Fiction Authors On Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy". BenBella Books.
67. Doctorow, C.. (24 October 2006). "WorldChanging: User's guide for the 21st Century".
68. "Metacrap". Well.com.
69. Doctorow, Cory. (7 December 2016). "Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood-Hacker".
70. Doctorow, Cory. "Freesouls – You Can't Own Knowledge".
71. (15 April 2009). "TOC 09: Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks". O'Reilly}} [http://boingboing.net/2009/04/15/my-drm-and-ebooks-ta.html] {{Webarchive.
72. Doctorow, Cory. (12 December 2004). "Steal This File Sharing Book – A–Z HOWTO for file-sharing". Boing Boing.
73. Doctorow, Cory. "The Internet is Not a Waffle Iron Connected to a Fax Machine". IAI.
74. (22 July 2008). "Cory Doctorow at Cambridge Business Lectures".
75. Doctorow, Cory. (27 May 2014). "Call for Speakers: Copycamp Warsaw, with Birgitta Jónsdóttir and Cory".
76. Doctorow, Cory. (16 December 2014). "Cory Doctorow – CopyCamp 2014". Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska.
77. (28 January 2023). "TikTok Isn't For Creators Anymore". [[Slate (magazine).
78. "Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk's "Chaotic Blitz" at DOGE, Living in a Tech Dystopia, Luigi Mangione & More". Democracy Now.
79. Doctorow, Cory. (23 January 2023). "The 'Enshittification' of TikTok". [[Condé Nast]].
80. (5 January 2024). "2023 Word of the Year is "enshittification"".
81. Doctorow, Cory. (2024). "'Enshittification' is coming for absolutely everything". [[Financial Times]].
82. "The Long List of Hugo Awards, 2000". Nesfa.org.
83. "EFF: Yochai Benkler, Cory Doctorow, and Bruce Schneier Win EFF Pioneer Awards".
84. "The John W. Campbell Memorial Award Listing". Worldswithoutend.com.
85. "White Pine Award list of winners".
86. (6 December 2012). "Inkpot Award".
87. A quasi-sequel to ''Down and out in the Magic Kingdom''.
88. Doctorow, Cory. (23 November 2016). "Car Wars: a dystopian science fiction story about the nightmare of self-driving cars". Boing Boing.