Makers
By Cory Doctorow
Blue blazer today, and she wasn’t the only one. There was Reedy from the NYT’s Silicon Valley office, Tribbey from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the UK tech rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 5,000.
The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell—the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her—the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird, and ethical in a twisted way.
“Why the hell have you done this, Landon?” Kettlewell asked himself into his tie-mic. Ties and suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like surfers playing dress-up. “Why buy two dinosaurs and stick ’em together? Will they mate and give birth to a new generation of less-endangered dinosaurs?”
He shook his head and walked to a different part of the stage, thumbing a PowerPoint remote that advanced his slide on the jumbotron to a picture of a couple of unhappy cartoon broncos staring desolately at an empty nest. “Probably not. But there is a good case for what we’ve just done, and with your indulgence, I’m going to lay it out for you now.”
“Let’s hope he sticks to the cartoons,” Rat-Toothed hissed beside her. His breath smelled like he’d been gargling turds. He had a not-so-secret crush on her and liked to demonstrate his alpha-maleness by making half-witticisms into her ear. “They’re about his speed.”
She twisted in her seat and pointedly hunched over her computer’s screen, to which she’d taped a thin sheet of polarized plastic that made it opaque to anyone shoulder-surfing her. Being a halfway attractive woman in Silicon Valley was more of a pain in the ass than she’d expected, back when she’d been covering rustbelt shenanigans in Detroit, back when there was an auto industry in Detroit.
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971.
Biography.
He is of Eastern European Jewish descent. His paternal grandfather was born in what is now Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad. 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 emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow’s mother’s family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians. Doctorow was 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 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 for four years, 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 he departs from the EFF Staff. 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, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States. He then returned to London but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues. In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He was a student in the program during 1993–94 but 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 chose a Conservative government; he stated at the time, “London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighborhoods 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.
Cory Doctorow
