Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Cory Doctorow: Makers

Good evening my name is Rachel Kass and on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm delighted to welcome you to this evening's event with Cory Doctorow who'll be discussing his new novel makers. Even though the holiday season is almost upon us frighteningly we still have a number of really exciting events coming up this season. Tickets are on sale for this Wednesday's discussion with Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe whose new book The Audacity to Win chronicles the campaign from primary to presidency. Mr. Plouffe will be speaking Wednesday evening at First Parish Church at 7:00 p.m. and $5 tickets are on sale now. We also have $5 tickets available now for our event on December 3rd with publishing legends Harold Evans and Jason Epstein who have each written memoirs about their lives in the industry as well as our December 7th event with the entire cast of America's Test Kitchen who will discuss the show and the new comprehensive cookbook featuring every recipe demonstrated on the show during their 10 seasons. They want to talk about every recipe. For more information about these and other upcoming events please visit us online at Harvard dot com where you can also sign up for our weekly e-mail

newsletter. And I'm very pleased to welcome to the store Cory Doctorow Corey is a science fiction novelist journalist blogger and technology at activist. He is a coeditor of the technology blog Boing Boing and contributes to numerous publications including Wired magazine. The New York Times Sunday magazine The Boston Globe as a science fiction magazine among others. His books include novels short story collections and nonfiction. His most recent being the bestselling novel little brother for which he was awarded the Promethea sward the Sunburst award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His new novel makers takes us on an imaginary but completely imaginable future where inventions like 3D printers and an economic system dubbed new work a sort of new deal for a technologically advanced era wreak unexpected and unintended consequences on society. The review and BBC is Focus magazine says in a fable of all our tomorrows Doctorow brilliantly shows us the near future that's equally wondrous inspiring and

terrifying. After this evening's talk we will have time for questions followed by a signing here at the front. As always I'd like to thank anyone who purchases a copy of the book here this evening by doing so you're supporting both a local independent bookstore as well as this author series and now join me in welcoming again Cory Doctorow. Thanks. So you've just heard the kind of basic premise of makers and I'm going to read you a little bit of it right from early on. The premise basically is is the economy is in tatters no one knows what to do with these big old rusting companies that have no sales but are sitting on substantial assets that are dwindling away through their infrastructure supporting factories that nobody that makes things that nobody wants to buy anymore and some Silicon Valley venture capitalists buy them out liquidate them turn their capital into micro-finance for garage inventors with the idea that they'll give you ten grand you invent something cool Six weeks later it will have been

cloned and you have to invent something else but you'll have me 20 grand in the interim. And so they the Silicon Valley folks have recruited a woman named Andrea flakes who's a reporter for silicone for the San Jose Mercury News to go to Florida meet one of these teams. She's just turned up and they're giving her the tour of their factory which is in a dead mall that was never in fact fully built which has been turned into a junkyard and now lately turned into a workshop. Perry gestured with an arm deep into the center of the junk pile. All right. Check out this stuff as we go. He stuck his hand through and I'm glazed window of a never built shop and plucked out a toy on a battered box. I love these things he said handing it to her. She took it. It was a Sesame Street Elmo doll labeled boogie woogie Elmo. That's from the great Elmo crash Perry said taking back the box and expertly extracting the Elmo like he was shelling and not the last and greatest generation of Elmo and technology cast into an uncaring world that millions of little tag or

washable graffiti kits and stead after Rosie gave them two thumbs up on her Christmas shopping guide. Poor Elmo was an orphan and every junkyard in the world has mountains of mint in package B W E's getting rained on. Waiting to start their lawn half million year d composition. But check this out. He flicked a multi-tool off his belt and extracted a short sharp scalpel blade. He slipped he slipped the grinning disco suit open from chin to growing and shocked it's for your exterior and the foam tissue that overlaid its skeleton. He slid the blade under the plastic cover on its ass and revealed a little printed circuit board. There is an entire Atom processor on a chip there he said. Each limb and the head have their own sub controllers. There is a high powered digital to analog rig for letting him sing and dance to new songs and an analog to digital converter array for converting spoken advanced commands to motion. Basically you dance and sing for Elmo and he'll dance and sing for you. Suzanne nodded. She'd missed that toy which was a pity she had a five year old

god daughter in Minneapolis who would've loved to boogie woogie Elmo. They had come to a giant barn set at the edge of a story and a half's worth of anchor store. This used to be where the contractors kept their heavy equipment. Lester rumbled aiming a car door remote at the door which quaint and opened. Inside it was cool and bright. The chugging air conditioners efficiently blasting purified air over the many work surfaces. The barn was a good 25 feet tall with a loft and a catwalk circling it halfway up. It was lined with metallic shelves stacked neatly with labeled boxes of parts. Scrounge from the junk yard. Perry said Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USP cable into his chest cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front. This thing is running and stall party. It can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the DP W.E. So everyone is a little different depending on who is offering the cheapest part on the day it was built.

Install party doesn't care though. One click and away it goes. The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen montages of playful photoshopping of public figures meant matted into historical fine art all done now. Have a look. This is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweat shops stuff no sweatshop stuff either. See this. That solder is too precise to have been done by hand. That's because it's from India. If it was from Cambodia you'd see all kinds of wobble in the solder. That means tiny clever hands were used to create it and that means that somewhere in the devices karmic history there's a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. But this is the good stuff. So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I've turned these things into a wall climbing monkeys. I've modded them for a woman from the University of Miami Jackson Memorial. They use their capability to ape human emotions and physiotherapy programs with nerve damage cases. But the best thing I've

ever done for them with so far is the bug is the distributed boogie woogie Elmo motor vehicle operations cluster. Come on he said and took off deeper into the Baron's depths. They came to a dusty stripped down smart car one of those tiny two seat electric cars that you could literally buy out of a vending machine in Europe. It was barely recognisable having been reduced to its roll cage drive chain and control panel. A gang of naked robotic Elmos were piled into it. Wake up boys Time for a demo Perry shouted and they sat up and made canned tinny Elmo Oh boy noises climbing into position on the pedals around the wheel and on the gear tree. I got the idea when I was teaching an Elmo to play Mario Brothers. I thought I'd get a decent dig dogging if I could get up to speed on all of the all of the first level using an old paddle I'd found and rehabilitated and I was trying to figure out what to do next. The dead mall across the way is also a drive in theater and I was out front watching the silent movies and one of them showed all these cute little furry animal whatevers collectively

driving a car. It's a really old sight gag I mean like racial memory old. I've seen the Little Rascals do the same bit with alfalfa on the wheel and buckwheat and spankie on the brake and clutch and the doggy working the gearshift. And I thought Shit I could do that with the Elmos. I don't have any networking capability but they can talk and they can parse spoken commands so all I need to do is designate one for left and one for right and one for fast and one for slow and one to be the eyes barking orders and they should be able to do this and it works. They even adjust their balances centers of gravity when the car swerves to stay upright at their posts. Check it out. He turned to the car driving almost 10 and what they snapped up right and tick salutes off their naked plastic noggins in circles drive. He called the Elmo scrambled into position and fired up the car and ensured orders in short order they were doing donuts and the cars a little indoor pasture. Elmo's halt. Perry shouted in the car stop sign only rocking gently stand down. The Elmo

sat down with a series of tiny thumps. Suzanne found herself applauding. That was amazing she said. Really impressive. So that's what you're going to do for codicil that the companies they broke up the finances for Kodak and Duracell. So that's what you're going to do for COTA sell. Make these things out of recycled toys. Lester chuckled. Nope not quite. That's just for starters the Elmos are all about the universal availability of cycles and apparatus. Everywhere you look there's devices for free that have everything you need to make anything do anything but have a look at part two commuter. He lumbered off in another direction and Suzanne and Perry trailed along behind him. This is Lester's workshop Perry said as they passed through a set of swinging double doors and into a cluttered wonderland where Perry's domain had been clean and neatly organized. Lester's area was a happy shambles. His shelves were an orderly but rather crammed with looming piles of amazing junk thrift store wedding dresses plaster statues of bowling monkeys box kites knee high 10 knights and armor sea shells painted

with American flags. Presidential action figures paste jewelry and antique cough drop tins. You know how they say a sculptor starts with a block of marble and chips away everything that doesn't look like a statue. Like he can see the statue in the block. I get like that with garbage. I see the pieces on the heaps and roadside trash and I can just see how it can go together like this. He reached down below work table and hoisted up a huge triptych made of three hinged car doors stood on end. Carefully he unfolded it and stood like a screen on the cracked concrete floor. The inside of the car doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver spot welded to it were all manner of soda tins pounded flat and cut into gears chutes Springs and other mechanical apparatus. It's a mechanical calculator he said proudly. About half as powerful as a unit Ach. I milled and milled all the parts using a laser cutter. What you do is you fill this hopper with G.I. Joe Heads and this

hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this way and it will drop a number of Eminem's equal to the product of the two values and this hopper here. He put three scuff GIGO heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies and another and began to scrape crank slowly. A music box beside the crank played a slow irregular rendition of Pop Goes the Weasel while hundreds of little coin sized gears flipped turned flipping switches and adding and removing tension to Springs. After the weasel popped a few times 12 Brown AMS fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. It's OK they're not from the trash she said. I buy them in bulk. He turned his broad back to her and heaved a huge galvanized him tin washtub full of brown m and m's in her direction. See it's a bit bucket he said. Suzanne giggled in spite of herself. You guys are hilarious she said. This is really good. Exciting nerdy stuff. The gears on the mechanical computer are really

sharp and precise. They look like you could cut yourself on them when they ground over the polished surfaces of the car doors. They made a sound like a box of toothpicks falling on the floor. Click click click click click click click. She turned the crank until 12 more brown M and M's fell out. Who's the Van Halen fan. Lester beamed. Might as well jump jump. He mimed heavy metal air guitar and thrash to shore and head up and down as though he were head banging with a mighty mane of hair band locks. You're the first one to get the joke he said. Even Perry doesn't get it. Get what Perry said also grinning. Van Halen had this thing where if there were any brown Emon AMS in their dressing room they trashed it and refused to play. When I was a kid I used to dream about being so famous that I could act like that much of a prick. Ever since I've afforded a great personal significance to brown Eminem's She laughed again. Then she frowned a little. Look I hate to break this party up but I came here because Kettlewell said that you guys

exemplified everything that he wanted to do with code to sell the stuff you've done is all very interesting. It's killer art but I don't see the business angle. So can you help me out here. That's step three. Perry said C'mere the letter back to his work space to a platform surrounded by articulated arms terminated and webcams like a grocery scale in the embrace of the metal spider. 3D scanner he said producing a Barbie head from Lester's machine and dropping it on the scales he prodded a button and a nearby screen filled with a three dimensional model of the head flattened on the side where it touched the surface. He turned the head over and scanned again and now there were two digital versions of the head on the screen. He mouse over the mouse on over the other until they lined up right clicked a dropdown menu selected an option and then they were merged rotating. All right. Thank you. Thank you so we have some time for

questions and then I'll sign your books questions thinly veiled polemics disguised as questions yeah. How did I get into 3D printers Well you know I actually started out looking at them totally metaphorically which is I think a grand tradition in science fiction if you look at kind of the first generation of cyberpunk literature it's it's really clear the computers are all metaphor I write like you know I think William Gibson is a genius and a treasure to the human race but if I were designing a cyberspace deck I'd put a circuit breaker in it you know. So it's really clear that those computers were absolutely metaphorical for other things and they say as much you know if you look at the kind of early days of cyberpunk they said as much and for me 3D printers were kind of a metaphor about the panic about the replication of digital goods and specifically they were sparked by an incident. I went and saw the head of the British Phonographic Institute which like the RIAA here give a talk about like the future to some interim industry group that the British government put

on. And back when I worked for the FFI I had to put in a suit a lot of these things. And. So I went and saw him speak and he said you know basically you people from all you other industries you think were such idiots in the record industry because we sued all of our customers. You just wait though. Someday 3D printers are going to come and then everything that you do that relies on patents or trademarks you're going to be in the same position we're in because they're going to be printing this stuff at home and you're not going to have any way to stop them and you'll be suing them too and you'll be in a panic. And on the way out a friend of mine said you know. It's kind of interesting to hear some from the record industry talking about 3D printing I mean that's pretty kind of futuristic and forward looking. And I said Yeah but he thinks the major impact of 3-D printing is going to be trademark infringement. Like. What about printing AK 47. Right or like Seran. So you know I go and you know it struck me that this was like such a parochial view of what the main impact of 3-D printers and kind of

general fabrication Distrito fabrication was going to be. It was kind of like I thought at the time it would be like looking at the railroad and going Man those guys who sew bags for horses are in trouble. And you know it's like absolutely true that like oat bags for horses kind of dwindled after the advent of the railroad but anyone who thought that that was like the major impact of the railroad really wasn't paying attention so I think that was like kind of where I started and then I went off and did a lot of reading about 3D printers and when saw a bunch of 3D printers and kind of played with some 3D printers and I kind of watched that that feel but it really started with thinking about 3D printers as a metaphor for just kind of what happens when when distribution of and instantiation of physical objects starts to look more digital.