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Networked Identity in the Science Fiction and Blogging of Cory Doctorow Robert P West Chester University Digital Commons @ West Chester University English Faculty Publications English 3-2010 The aH cker and the Hawker: Networked Identity in the Science Fiction and Blogging of Cory Doctorow Robert P. Fletcher West Chester University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Fletcher, R. P. (2010). The aH cker and the Hawker: Networked Identity in the Science Fiction and Blogging of Cory Doctorow. Science Fiction Studies, 37(1), 81-99. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/eng_facpub/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Digital Commons @ West Chester University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ West Chester University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THEHACKER AND THE HAWKER 81 RobertP. Fletcher The Hackerand theHawker: NetworkedIdentity in theScience Fictionand Bloggingof Cory Doctorow Introduction.In 1842 Charles Dickens undertooksomething of a book promotiontour in Americaduring which, according to PeterAckroyd, heemphasized the democratic spirit of his writings, as if uniting himself with his audience,and then launched into a pleafor international copyright, using the spectreof a brokenand exhausted Walter Scott as anexample of a writerwho was unjustlydeprived of his rightful income. (350) Despiteinvoking the ghost of the most popular novelist to precede him, Dickens' s attemptto bringthe Americansaround to a sense of fairplay - while not appearingtoo materialistic- brought him a lot of grief.Not only were his criticismspoorly received in thepress, but his nextnovel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44),also suffereddisappointing sales on bothsides of the Atlantic. Fastforward to 2008. Anothernovelist with the initials CD. is lecturingand writingabout democracy, culture, and copyright on both sides of the Atlantic, but thistime the writer is arguingagainst the extension of copyrightowners' rights over textsthrough a revisionin the law and warningof the use of digital technologyby corporations to exercise that centralized control. For several years Canadiansf novelist Cory Doctorow spoke against the US DigitalMillennium CopyrightAct (DMCA) and DigitalRights Management (DRM) softwareas a representativeofthe Electronic Frontier Foundation; in 2007 hetaught a graduate courseabout the history of copyright at theUniversity of Southern California; and bothon a popularblog, <boingboing.net>, and in printpublications such as The Guardian,he has criticizedthe shift in focusof copyright law - froma measure thatprotected the rights of suchauthors as Dickensto faircompensation to one thatguards the exclusive control exercised over cultural products by moneyed corporationsfor ever longer periods of time.1 Like Dickens's competingroles as artist,democrat, and businessman, Doctorow's differentactivities as artist,advocate, and entrepreneurtell us somethingabout his novels'relations to changingmodes of culturalproduction and to the social organizationthey entail. As the nineteenth-centuryrealist's campaignfor international copyright regulation speaks to whatN.N. Feltes,in Modesof Production of Victorian Novels (1986), termed the development of "the commodity-textof the capitalist literary mode of production"(9), so does the twenty-first-centurysfnovelist's efforts to limit corporate control over intellectual propertyspeak to thedeveloping contradictions at workwhen the technology enhancingthe dissemination of informationalso fostersa heightenedeconomic conflictover ownership and access. Even morethan Dickens, Doctorow finds himselftrying to balancehis role as popularchampion against his owninterests as entrepreneur.Whether we are discussinghis novels or his own mediated This content downloaded from 144.26.117.20 on Fri, 24 Oct 2014 10:31:13 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 82 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 37 (2010) identity,we can takeDoctorow as a harbingerof thenovelist in a networked world.If my connection between Dickens and Doctorow seems overblown given the limited,if growing,popularity of the latteras a novelistor celebrity, Doctorow's textsmay nevertheless be analogousto Dickens's earlynovel, The PickwickPapers (1836), in howthey preview the shape of things to comein the productionand dissemination of novels. In theremainder of thisessay, I will showhow an overridingconcern with openaccess has cometo dominate his fiction. This is especiallytrue of his recent work,such as thestories that comprise the collection Overclocked (2007) andthe young-adultnovel Little Brother (2008), fictionsthat explicitly take the social controlof networked identities as theirprimary, indeed their pedagogical, subject. Justas muchof what made Dickens innovative was alreadypresent in Pickwick, however,I will arguethat the conflicts of Doctorow's mostrecent work were alreadythe focus of his less didacticfirst novel, Down and Out in theMagic Kingdom(2003). The Bloggeras Novelistand the Work as Assemblage.In a February2008 Guardiancolumn, Doctorow discussed how, in thepast few decades, the idea of copyrighthas morphedinto the notion of "intellectualproperty": Fundamentally,thestuff we call "intellectual property" isjust knowledge - ideas, words,tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similarto propertyinsome ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot ofmoney and labour into its development torealise that value.... But it is also dissimilarfrom property inequally important ways. Most of all, it is not inherently "exclusive."Ifyou trespass on my flat, I can throw you out (exclude you from my home).If you steal my car, I cantake it back (exclude you from my car). But once youknow my song, once you read my book, once you see my movie, it leaves my control.Short of a roundof electroconvulsive therapy, I can't get you to un-know thesentences you've just readhere. ("Intellectual Property'"; emphasis in original) As a memberof <boingboing.net>, Doctorow blogs on diversetopics, but one of themost consistent is thisbattle against overly restrictive copyright and advocacy insteadof whathas been termed"copyleft," a formof licensingthat allows to differingdegrees the non-profituse or even modificationof variousmedia products.Doctorow licenses his textsthrough Creative Commons, which is relatedto theopen-source software movement. Most recently, he has beenpart ofthe fight against the adoption of a cloneof the DMCA inCanada. As a blogger, Doctorow's own"augmented" identity depends on a postmodern,networked, cut- and-pastetextual practice, especially in whathe termshis "knowledge grazing": I consume,digest, and excrete information fora living....[M]y success depends onmy ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.... Beingdeprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain- damage.Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. ("My Blog") In sucha confessionof dependency on theInternet, one which more and more of thepopulace might be inclinedto make these days, lurks a dualrecognition of the intertextualityand materialityof knowledgeon the one hand and the This content downloaded from 144.26.117.20 on Fri, 24 Oct 2014 10:31:13 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE HACKERAND THE HAWKER 83 interdependencyof machineand humanin a systemon the other- bothare subjectsthat inform the conflicts of his sciencefiction. Inher various works on electronic textuality and so-called posthuman identity, N. KatherineHay les emphasizesjust such a linkbetween the material specificity oftexts and concerns about embodiment (How WeBecame, passim; My Mother 144). She analyzes,for example, how Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995), a hypertextnovel that revises Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), unearthsnot onlythe supposedly discarded parts of the original story, but also "thoseaspects oftextual production that were suppressed in theeighteenth century to makethe literarywork an immaterialintellectual property," thereby valorizing the "fetishizedunique imagination" of the (male) Romanticartist (My Mother 147). Accordingto Hayles, electronic texts such as Jackson'sresurrect a concept of the "Workas Assemblage,a clusterof relatedtexts that quote, comment upon, amplify,and otherwiseintermediate one another"(105). The authorof the hyperlinkedtext is also transformedfrom bounded, unique individual into a function(à la Foucault)or a dispersed,patchworked, or versioned subject akin to Doctorow'snetwork-dependent blogger. In "How I Learnedto StopWorrying andLove thePanopticon," while considering the significance of Google's search technologyand archival practices, Doctorow again acknowledges the patchworkedsubjectivity of the blogger and winds up musingabout the nature of materialembodied existence and the traces left by writing. The bulkiness of print storagehas alwaysforced archivists to be selectiveabout what gets saved, but withthe cheap and compactstorage of "words-as-bytes,"nothing need be forgotten: Thisis a goodthing, but it's also a painin the ass. Our embarrassing excesses, drunkenrants, typos and brain farts and flames no longervanish into our sub- consciences[sic], but rather hang around like embarrassing relatives, undeniably ours,with us forever. There'san upside,of course.The enduringpresence of ourpublicly stated positionsacts
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