Cory Doctorow: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention (opens in new tab)

Hey there. I certainly don't recall this exchange, and it sounds rather out of character for me. I have consulted for Disney on and off for a decade and was the inaugural artist in residence for the Blue Sky and R&D groups at WDI. Today my wife is the head of Studiolab at WDS (my work on the Ghost Post project last year helped WDI R&D win a Thea, and they were kind enough to credit the work to me).

I literally can't imagine having said these things (at that particular Siggraph I spent several hours chatting with the WDI R&D people who were on the committee and had booked me in, and who were kind enough to give me a bunch of laser-cut HM merch they made just for me) and I have never to my recollection been deliberately rude to someone from Disney (likewise I try to take real pains to be kind to people who do me the honor of coming up for a book signing).

But if anything I said came across as anything like this, I apologize unreservedly. I can only imagine that some kind of horribly botched joke came out very wrong indeed and I am dismayed to learn I made such a poor impression. I hope to run into you at some future event and make a better one.

Thanks,

Cory

I think it's just a tragedy of a strong ego that allows people who are really talented to assume they can treat other people however they please.

Separating the ideas from the personalities who express them is really important, especially nowadays when it's really easy to get glimpses of personalities online. You're not hurting anyone but yourself by allowing a bruised ego to get in the way of acquiring new ideas and knowledge.

Newton was a total jerk to anyone who he thought was dumber than him (everyone), in fact I read that his quote "... standing on the shoulders of giants." was actually a dig at a colleague who was short (in Bryson's Brief History of the World, I think).

I have this same conversation whenever talking about Taleb's work, where his ideas about risk and randomness are somehow conflated with his twitter persona. You can be a total asshole and still have good ideas, or you can have shitty ideas and be the nicest person around. Some of the nicest people you'll meet are in places where they'll shake your hand, look you in the eye, buy you a beer and then proceed to tell you how great a job our president is doing.

I also prefer when good ideas come from good people, but so long as their ideas aren't about how to treat other people (making themselves hypocrites) I say fuck 'em, better to take their ideas and be a better version of their proponent.

It is obviously clear that not everyone who works at Disney supported the idea to take works of art and culture from the public and retroactively put them back under copyright, nor the idea that lobbying from such organizations should have such enormous power in dictating policy in a democratic country where a democratic vote would had gone in an other direction. Cory Doctorow has dedicated a large part of his life (and wealth) towards combating such behavior, and obviously it's not fair when such polarized views conflict with people who just happen to work for a large company.

That said, I personally don't judge him too harshly for it. If you spend your whole life working and using your money to save the oceans and meet a representative for BP, I strongly suspect that images from the Gulf oil spill will pop up and the meeting will be very frosty. It comes with the territory, as people rarely do spend their whole life and worldly possessions unless they also have strong views on the issue. Its not uncommon to see such personalities to be founders of movements but at the same time be rather poor diplomats.

My sister works for Disney and I am polite about, but I still place Disney on the same tier as Backwater(Academi) in terms of evil.

If you are an Animator I get it they treat you well and it's a small industry. However, objectively they cause an immense amount of direct and indirect harm.

If someone worked for Halliburton, even just as a secretary, I'd link less of them and might let them know it. Given Disney's influence on copyright law, I could see Doctorow putting all Disney employees in the 'enemy' column. But since he gives himself permission to be a total Disneyworld fanboy and give them money every visit, then he's in no position to be telling off anyone else who does business with them.

That really surprises me, given that he has an obvious love of Disney properties. Examples: "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", every third post on Twitter being about Disneyland, etc.

my funny meeting cory story: ran into him after a lecture and fanboyishly told him I'd been reading boingboing half my life (~15 years) - he freaked out, muttered something like "I'm not that old!" shook my hand and ran away.

> He took one look at my badge that said "Disney" and started hurling sarcastic insults at me about my employer and suggesting my character was tarnished for working for them.

So, you waved a red flag in front of a bull and got gored. Um ...

I'm sorry he was a jerk to you, but, by the same token, waving "Disney" in front of him is kind of asking for it. A fan would know this.

I mean, if you were a fan of Morrissey and were eating a hamburger or similar in front of him in a fan line, you're going to have a similar bad time.

Many of these people have strong opinions and they aren't particularly quiet about them. If you trip one, you're going to get flamed.

Maybe it's not right or fair, but it's who they are and they are not exactly secretive about their hot buttons.

Sad but interesting story, thanks for sharing. I've had a similar experience with meeting someone IRL and being totally disappointed at what a jerk they were.

You sound like an awesome person to me :-)

He's an author and activist. No surprise that he does different things than journalists. This is a "commentary" column in a science fiction magazine. He bills himself just as I said:

https://boingboing.net/about

The name of one the articles is: Cory Doctorow says fight against DRM laws is more important than his blogging

So, no, he won't change your mind about DRM because he is not in favour of it.

Nope. My personal preference is uMatrix, but that's an implementation detail. I rarely see an ad, and I didn't see any on this page. Also, I have more or less tuned out Facebook and similar sleaze, and I try to maintain some vigilance concerning anything which begins to unduly attract my attention.

And then I have to wonder: Am I living in a cleanroom? Am I letting my defenses rot? Am I setting myself up for a fall if some day I end up face to face with all the unfiltered gunk out there, presented in some new, insidious manner that I believe myself far too sophisticated to succumb to? Have I - or we - perhaps already succumbed, but do not know it?

I've done the same thing, but I wonder how much I am really protecting myself. I need to whitelist sites that I use to get them to work (HN, for example), but that doesn't stop HN from attacking me.

I suppose it raises the bar, but how soon until I whitelist a site that attacks me?

It would be an excellent outcome of Meltdown/Spectre if we could just get rid of JavaScript and other attempts at throwing arbitrary crap code at you (such as WASM unblockable ads, bc miners, and what not) and work towards the original goal of the Web as federated (or even better p2p) hyperlinked documents once again.

I agree re giving him credit and I’m certainly a fan. It’s a hard topic to publish about on the web because that type or article could very easily be a plain static HTML page with no JavaScript on a personal server but obviously he’s a professional writer and probably sold to that site to get paid (fair enough) and the site gets that money from ads so circle of life but still dissonant to take the message to heart in that context.

I guess it depends when people get afflicted. If you spend your adult life all day playing a slot-machines or a dopamine-enriching computer game, you are unlikely to be starting a family anytime soon, and so it won't be your children who go on to be the afflicted population in the next generation.

If you had children, they might be more aware of the dangers of these attentional assaults, and actually more resistant to it.

At the risk of being censured for a frivolous, redditlike comment by a new account, I am reminded of a snippet of doggerel by Ogden Nash, and compelled to share it:

  I think that I shall never see
  A billboard lovely as a tree
  Indeed, unless the billboards fall
  I'll never see a tree at all