The battle for Ring Zero

The esoteric argument I have been having with myself since 2002.

In Bruce Sterling’s Locus review of my novel Walkaway, he describes the book as “advancing and demolishing potential political arguments that have never been made by anybody but [me].” That is a fair cop. I spend a lot of time worrying about esoteric risks that no one else seems to care about.

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

For example: for twenty years now, I have been worrying about the shifting political, technical and social frameworks that govern our fundamental relationships to the computers that are now woven into every aspect of our civil, personal, work and family lives.

Specifically, I’m worried that as computers proliferate, so too do the harms in which computers are implicated, from cyberattacks to fraud to abuse to blackmail to harassment to theft. That’s partly because when a computer is in your door-lock, burglaries will increasingly become cybercrimes. But it’s also partly because of something fundamental to the nature of computers: their infinite configurability.

At its very foundational level, the modern computer is “general purpose.” Every computer we know how to make can run every program we know how to write. That’s why computers are so…