Cory Doctorow

Yeah, that's true.

In suburban Toronto, a weird little school with like 80 kids.

It was kindergarten to eighth grade in one classroom.

Older kids taught the younger kids.

We more or less were left to go feral and design our own curriculum.

They chucked us out of the school on Wednesday afternoons to take our subway pass and find somewhere fun in Toronto to go do stuff.

It was great.

Can I slightly problematize that?

So we were both also science fiction readers back then.

And so, you know, 1981, first William Gibson story has been out for a couple of years.

I was pretty alive to the dystopian possibilities of computers at the time.

So I wouldn't call myself...

I would call myself hopeful and excited, but not purely optimistic.

And I would also like to say that, like John Hodgman, nostalgia is a toxic impulse.

And when I think about what I like about those days, it's not that I want to recover those days.

It's more that I kind of dispute that the only thing, an era in which people had lots of control over their computers could have turned into is one in which the computers had lots of control over them, that there was probably something else that we could have done.

So what I would do is contrast what happens when things aren't great now with how I felt about what happened when things weren't great before.

So I think when I was a larvum on the early internet and I saw things that sucked, I would think someone's going to fix this and maybe it could be me.

And now when I see bad things on the internet, I'm like, this is by design and it cannot be fixed because...

you would be violating the rules if you even tried.