This year’s speaker for the Leonardo Lecture Series was Cory Doctorow. He’s a science fiction author primarily, but his reputation as a net-celeb is driven by his strong advocacy for fair use and open access to media.
When I heard he was in town, both Gord and I signed up immediately.
With a military-spec brush cut and horn-rimmed glasses, Cory wouldn’t look out of place managing a mainframe forty years ago. The only visual evidence of his techno-weenie background was the single ipod headphone dangling from the neck of his brown argyle sweater.
Once the packed lecture hall settled in, the ideas started fast and furious – Cory’s love of technology is palpable. He covered a tonne of ground, from the “war on abstract nouns” to identity theft via stolen fingerprints on gummy bears. To quote Gord, “it was like drinking from the firehose.” Having been well steeped in the the ideas that form the basis of the talk, neither of us heard too much that was new, but his style and manner of presentation made a potentially long seventy minute talk pass quickly.
While many of the tasty lesser ideas that were tossed out could have stood alone, the bulk of the conversation was on how we collectively are “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” as we accept more and more intrusions into our private lives.
I’d place Cory on the technology-optimist camp, but he certainly painted a bleak picture of the potential for abuse, drawing parallels between the Soviet Union Black Marketeers and college students getting busted for setting up file sharing.
Cardinal Richelieu’s famous quote was used several times:
“Give me six lines written by the most honorable person alive,
and I shall find enough in them to condemn them to the gallows.“
Clearly, the massive data trail anyone of us leaves any time we fire up a web browser, cell phone or even walk outside could provide more than enough material to hang the most pious of us. Something to think about the next time we allow our right to privacy to be further eroded by politicians using fear to sell dubious security measures.
I saw a few tape recorders and apparently the talk will be converted into a podcast and uploaded to NowPublic. Definitely worth a listen if you get the chance.
