In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual "gold," jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world's poorest countries, where countless "gold farmers," bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation

Hailed by Bruce Sterling as "a political activist, gizmo freak, junk collector, programmer, entrepreneur, and all-around Renaissance geek", the Internet's favourite high-tech culture maven is celebrated with the first collection of his infamous articles, essays, and polemics. Irreverently championing free speech and universal access to information -- even if it's just a free download of the newest Britney Spears MP3 -- he leads off with a mutinous talk given at Microsoft on digital rights management, insisting that they stop treating their customers as criminals. Readers will discover how America chose Happy Meal toys over copyright, why Facebook is taking a faceplant, how the Internet is basically just a giant Xerox machine, why Wikipedia is a poor cousin of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and how to enjoy free e-books. Practising what he preaches, all of the author's books, including this one, are simultaneously released in print and on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their reuse and sharing. He argues persuasively that this practice has considerably increased his sales by enlisting readers to promote his work. Accessible to geeks and non-techies alike, this is a timely collection from an author who effortlessly surfs the zeitgeist while always generating his own wave.

"Filled with wisdom and thought experiments and things that will mess with your mind." -- Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book and American Gods "Cory Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age." -- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed "Author, Internet guru, and practical philosopher Cory Doctorow gives hard-headed advice about how to gain fame and fortune using the Internet. Along the way, he explains a great deal about the hidden workings and dangers of modern technology. Whether you want to make money online or just surf safely, there's much to learn in this fast-moving and entertaining narrative." -- Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit "Required reading for creators making their ways through the new world." --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Edited by Charlie Brooker, the creator of the hit Netflix original series
this book takes the very essence of the globally acclaimed cult TV show to create new, original, darkly satirical stories that tap into our collective unease about the modern world. This is
in book form, allowed to roam through the imaginations of some of the leading names in contemporary fiction. This collection will challenge you to see the world in a different—and more disturbing—light.

Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near—all too near—future.
'Unauthorized Bread' is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman's perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster.
In 'Model Minority' a superhero finds himself way out his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system.
'Radicalized' is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system.
The final story, 'The Masque of the Red Death', tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society.

Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works-and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role-playing game where she spends most of her free time. It's a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It's a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends.

But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer--a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake.

From acclaimed teen author ( Little Brother , For the Win ) and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow and Koko Be Good creator Jen Wang, In Real Life is a perceptive and high-stakes look at adolescence, gaming, poverty, and culture clash.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother , a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it. Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s. Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo. Then things get really interesting.

A detailed disassembly manual for people who want to dismantle Big Tech<br /><br />We have recently seen the enshittification of the internet. The tech platforms have created monopolies whose high walls make it expensive to move freely online. They built self-serving, artificial barriers to maintaining connections across platforms. The cost of leaving X or Facebook grew higher, holding hostage the people you love, the communities that matter to you, and the audiences and customers you rely on. None of this is caused by technological it was a business decision, intended to commodify every part of your personal life.<br /><br />We can choose we can dismantle the tech platforms. In  The Internet Con , Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation. We must force upon Silicon Valley the thing it fears interoperability. That means tearing down the walls between platforms, allowing users to mix, match, plug in, and repair without restrictions.<br /><br />Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and total annihilation of the platforms.  The Internet Con  is the disassembly manual we need to fix tech for good, and take back our Internet.

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go?

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam.

And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.

The Lost Cause What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping

Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world.

Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art's real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.

Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn't changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted-not happiness, not money, and most certainly not love.

Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain....

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In near-future Britain, this is more illegal than ever. The punishment for being caught three times is to cut off your entire household from the internet for a year - no work, school, health or money benefits.

Trent thinks he is too clever for that to happen, but it does, and nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where slowly he learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. He joins artists and activists fighting a new bill that will jail too many, especially minors, at one stroke. Jem introduces him to the Jammie Dodgers, beautiful brilliant "26" to love and cemetery parties.

Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds ...

Hieroglyph-Inspired by New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson, an anthology of stories, set in the near future that reignites the iconic and optimistic visions of the golden age of science fiction. A remarkable anthology uniting twenty of today's leading thinkers, writers, and visionaries, among them Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson, to contribute works of "techno-optimism" that challenge us to dream boldly and do Big Stuff. Engaging, mind-bending, provocative, and imaginative, Hieroglyph offers a forward-thinking approach to the intersection of art and technology that has the power to change our world.
Contents:
Foreword (Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future) • essay by Lawrence M. Krauss
Preface: Innovation Starvation (Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future) • essay by Neal Stephenson
Introduction: A Blueprint for Better Dreams • essay by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn
Atmosphaera Incognita (2013) / novelette by Neal Stephenson
Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl (2014) / novelette by Kathleen Ann Goonan
By the Time We Get to Arizona (2014) / novelette by Madeline Ashby
The Man Who Sold the Moon (2014) / novella by Cory Doctorow
Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA (2014) / novelette by Lee Konstantinou
Degrees of Freedom (2014) / novelette by Karl Schroeder
Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy (2014) / short story by Annalee Newitz
A Hotel in Antarctica (2014) / novelette by Geoffrey A. Landis
Periapsis (2014) / novelette by James L. Cambias
The Man Who Sold the Stars (2013) / novelette by Gregory Benford
Entanglement (2014) / novella by Vandana Singh
Elephant Angels (2014) / novelette by Brenda Cooper
Covenant (2014) / short story by Elizabeth Bear
Quantum Telepathy (2014) / novelette by Rudy Rucker
Transition Generation (2014) / short story by David Brin
The Day It All Ended (2014) / short story by Charlie Jane Anders
Tall Tower (2014) / novelette by Bruce Sterling
Science and Science Fiction: An Interview with Paul Davies • interview of Paul Davies (1946-) • interview by uncredited
.

In a new Little Brother novella, there is no security in obscurity. But there can be redemption in mutual aid.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Amusement park rides are the ultimate battleground in this Locus Award–winning dystopian sci-fi novel by the acclaimed author of Little Brother.In the near-future world of the Bitchun Society, scarcity is a thing of the past, death has been conquered, and a constant internal interface allows everyone to monitor their ultimate pursuit: the esteem of others. At barely a century old, Jules is still a young man when he realizes his dream of living and working at Disney World. He devotes himself to keeping the classic attractions intact, with only minor adjustments to their original twentieth-century designs.But when the Hall of Presidents is overtaken by a rival group, the old animatronic designs are replaced with a new, direct-to-brain immersive experience. For Jules, this assault on the artistic purity of Disney World cannot stand. And it only upsets him more when someone has him killed. After rebooting in a new body, Jules is ready for war. “A black-comedic sci-fi prophecy on the dangers of surrendering our consensual hallucination to the regime. Fun to read, but difficult to sleep afterwards.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Cyberia

A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media


Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)--or both.

In Culture Heist , scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue that thanks to "chokepoint capitalism," exploitative businesses create insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that rightfully belongs to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon's role in radically changing publishing's economics, to the influence of Spotify in leveraging digital rights management, these few vicious monopsonists have lobbied for more barriers for new entrants.

By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow first deftly show how powerful corporations construct "anti-competitive flywheels" designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.

In the book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.
Culture Heist is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's been siphoned away--before it's too late.

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.

The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life.

Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.

A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow returns to the world of Red Team Blues to bring us the origin story of Martin Hench and the most powerful new tool for crime ever the personal computer.

The year is 1986. The city is San Francisco. Here, Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant--what a bounty hunter is to people, he is to money--but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever, one we now take completely for granted.

When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup the Three Wise Men to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches the greasy old guys running Three Wise Men without a second thought, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Magenta Women's Enterprise. Located in the heart of the Mission, this group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Three Wise Men and set out to beat them at their own game, making better computers and driving Three Wise Men out of business. But this optimistic startup, fueled by young love and California-style burritos, has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

In this company-eat-company city, Martin and his friends will be lucky to escape with their lives.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back.

Written by the core Internet figures – video gamers, Tea Partiers, tech titans, lefty activists and ordinary Americans among them – who defeated a pair of special interest bills called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect IP Act”), Hacking Politics provides the first detailed account of the glorious, grand chaos that led to the demise of that legislation and helped foster an Internet-based network of amateur activists.

Included are more than thirty original contributions from across the political spectrum, featuring writing by Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz; Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; novelist Cory Doctorow; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA.); Jamie Laurie (of the alt-rock/hip-hop group The Flobots); Ron Paul; Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of Techdirt; Kim Dotcom, internet entrepreneur; Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Nicole Powers of Suicide Girls; Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, and many more.