Cory Doctorow
speaker
2,525 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 5d ago
Cory Doctorow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But when it comes to a post-politics that is neither left nor right, the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Stephen Brust, who once told me, left and right have had the same meaning since the French Revolution.
If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, what is more important, human rights or property rights?
If they say property rights are a human right, then they are on the right.
That's it.
That's the crux.
If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left.
You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center.
Or the right of people not to have their homes or devices searched by cops.
Or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that e-books are never sold, merely licensed.
If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights.
Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines.
Human beings have the right to shelter.
If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution.
At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict empty blights.
Human beings have the right to food.
If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000 pounds of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off.
As Bruce says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution.
It's literally the plot of Les Mis.
In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live.
Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists.
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