Seizing the Means of Computation

Public Discussion with Cory Doctorow

May 10th at 15:00
Room 1037, UT Delta Centre

(eesti keeles)

Cory Doctorow has been a significant figure in shaping information policy debates worldwide, alongside respected peers such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Lawrence Lessig, and Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall.

Besides decades long policy work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and being Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University UK, he is a renowned science fiction writer. In this role he is giving a public talk on Overcoming the Enshittocene at Prima Vista literary festival on May 8th.

We are excited to host him two days later at the Institute of Computer Science to continue the discussion and to ask questions.

Cory Doctorow will introduce the topic once again in a short talk about the four forces that keep tech companies from abusing us — competition, regulation, interoperability and an empowered tech workforce. The discussion following the talk is moderated by Ulrich Norbisrath and you can send your questions in advance to askcory@infoaed.ee.

The title of the discussion Seizing the Means of Computation is a subtitle of Doctorow’s latest non-fiction book The Internet Con as well as the remedy proposed at the last part of his Prima Vista talk.

See also

• Seizing the Means of Computation (video of May 10th discussion)
• #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 (some photos, see gallery)
• Overcoming the Enshittocene (video of May 8th Prima Vista talk)
• Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (linkblog)
• Cory Doctorow’s Literary Works (mostly downloadable)

The event happens in collaboration between institutes of Computer Science and Cultural Research of Tartu University and was initiated by Internet Society Estonia. Portrait image used is Speaker Cory Doctorow CC BY-SA Dominik Butzmann 2019, social media sharing images Wired portrait 5-6 CC BY-SA Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud 2020 and the markup text for the event page is found here.