Doctorow was a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, dating to their time together in elementary school.[7] Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a "hippy summer camp" at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that was influential on his intellectual life and development.[8] He quit high school,[9] received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto,[10] and attended four universities without obtaining a degree.[11]
Cory Doctorow has stated both that he is not related to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow,[12] and that he may be a third cousin once removed of the novelist.[13] Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as "a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow".[14]
Doctorow at eTech 2007, wearing a cape and goggles in reference to his depiction in webcomic xkcd
Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for four years,[1] helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after his departure from the EFF Staff.[1][17] He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission,[18] the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern CaliforniainLos Angeles, United States.[1][19] He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.[20] He was a student in the program during 1993–94, but left without completing a thesis. Doctorow was also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom from September 2009 to August 2010.[20] In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.[21]
Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008;[22] they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008.[23] Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.[24]
In 2015, Doctorow decided to leave London and move to Los Angeles, expressing disappointment at London's "death" after Britain's choice of Conservative government; he stated at the time, "London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated."[25] He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM).[26]
Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020, and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic.[27] The circumstances surrounding Doctorow's exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing.[27][28] Given the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing, MetaFilter described this news as "the equivalent of the Beatlesbreaking up" for the blog world.[28] Doctorow's exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.[29]
In 2007, together with Austrian art group monochrom, he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, which asks people from all over the world to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.[30][31]
As a user of the Tor anonymity network for more than a decade during his global travels, Doctorow publicly supports the network; furthermore, Boing Boing operates a "high speed, high-quality exit node."[33]
Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference.[34] He also presented on enshittification at the 2024 conference, HOPE XV[35].
Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old, and sold several stories, followed by publication of the story "Craphound" in 1998.[9]
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licences, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works.[37][2] The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition.[2] In February 2004, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons license that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage.[38]
Down and Out... was nominated for a Nebula Award,[39] and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004.[40] A semi-sequel short story named Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.[41]
Doctorow's other novels have been released with Creative Commons licences that allow derived works and prohibit commercial usage, and he has used the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that print versions are published.
His novel Makers was released in October 2009, and was serialised for free on the Tor Books website.[49]
Doctorow released another young adult novel, For the Win, in May 2010.[9] The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper format by Tor Books. The book is about "greenfarming", and concerns massively multiplayer online role-playing games.
Doctorow's short-story collection With a Little Help was released in printed format on 3 May 2011. It is a project to demonstrate the profitability of Doctorow's method of releasing his books in print and subsequently for free under Creative Commons.[50][51]
In February 2013, Doctorow released Homeland, the sequel to his novel Little Brother.[54] It won the 2014 Prometheus Award (Doctorow's third novel to win this award).
In March 2019, Doctorow released Radicalized, a collection of four self-contained science-fiction novellas dealing with how life in America could be in the near future.[56] The book was selected for the 2020 edition of Canada Reads, in which it was defended by Akil Augustine.[57]
Attack Surface, a standalone adult novel set in the "Little Brother" universe, was released on 13 October 2020.[58][59]
His novel called Red Team Blues, a financial thriller about cybersecurity, was released in April 2023. It features a character named Martin Hench.[60]
A second novel featuring forensic accountant Martin Hench was published in February 2024: The Bezzle is centered around the financial (mis-)management of privately owned prisons.
In 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself.[63] Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer to the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.[64]
He popularised the term "metacrap" by a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia."[65] Some of his nonfiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon PublicationsasContent: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. In 2016, he wrote the article Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood-Hacker (published on MIT Technology Review) as a review of the TV show Mr. Robot and argued for a better portrayal and understanding of technology, computers and their risks and consequences in our modern world.[66]
His essay "You Can't Own Knowledge" is included in the Freesouls book project.[67]
He is the originator of Doctorow's Law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit."[68][69][70][71][72]
Writing in The Guardian in 2022, Doctorow listed the many problems confronting Facebook and suggested that its future would be increasingly fraught.[73]
Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalised to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing.[74] He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media and that copyright laws should not be operative unless someone attempts to sell a product that is under someone else's copyright.[75]
Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management and claims that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices).[76]
He was a keynote speaker at the 2014 international conference CopyCampinWarsaw, Poland[77] with the presentation "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free."[78]
In criticising the decay in usefulness of online platforms, Doctorow coined the neologismenshittification,[79] which he defines as a degradation of an online environment caused by greed:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.[80]
The word gained traction in 2023, where it was used by a variety of sources in reference to several major platforms discontinuing free features in order to further their monetization or taking other actions that were seen to degrade functionality.[81][82][83][84][85][86][87] In its annual vote, the American Dialect Society designated enshittification as 2023's Word of the Year.[88]
The webcomicxkcd has occasionally featured a partially fictional version of Doctorow who lives in a hot air balloon up in the "blogosphere" ("above the tag clouds") and wears a red cape and goggles, such as in the comic "Blagofaire".[89] When Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon.[90]
The novel Ready Player One features a mention of Doctorow as being the newly re-elected President of the OASIS User Council (with Wil Wheaton as his vice-president) in the year 2044, saying that, "those two geezers had been doing a kick-ass job of protecting user rights for over a decade."[91]
The comedic role-playing gameKingdom of Loathing features a boss-fight against a monster named Doctor Oh, who is described as wearing a red cape and goggles. The commentary before the fight and assorted hit, miss and fumble messages during the battle make reference to Doctorow's advocacy for open-source sharing and freedom of media.[92]
Doctorow, Cory (1 February 2004). Ebooks : neither E, nor books. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 5 December 2014. Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004.
— (2005). "Wikipedia : a genuine H2G2, minus the editors". In Yeffeth, Glenn (ed.). The anthology at the end of the universe : leading science fiction authors on Douglas Adams' The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. BenBella. ISBN9781932100563.
^Doctorow, Cory (8 May 2020). "Graduation certificate from Mom and Dad". Flickr.com. Self-published by subject. Archived from the original on 1 August 2020. Retrieved 18 May 2020. Graduation certificate from Mom and Dad. I finally graduated from high school (after 7 years!) in 1991. My parents were so relieved they made me this (which my Mom just found while doing some lock-in organizing and sent to me). Love their optimism! I dropped out of four universities after this and never got a degree.
^Steadman, Ian (13 April 2013). "Open source cola and the 'Napster moment' for the food business". Wired. Archived from the original on 13 February 2019. Retrieved 13 February 2019. It's called Open Cola, a product first produced by now-defunct Toronto software company Opencola as something of a joke. Taking inspiration from Richard Stallman's famous dictum that free software was "free as in speech, not as in beer", it was meant as a kind of promotional tool. The recipe was published online for anyone to take and adapt. Version 1.0 was published on 27 January 2001 -- the latest version is 1.1.3. Opencola closed in 2003, but Open Cola's recipe is still around.
^As of 24 September 2019, the name Doctorow no longer appears in search results for uscpublicdiplomacy.com.
^Fulbright-Canada Staff. "2006 Award Recipients"(PDF). Royal Fulbright Commission web site. Archived from the original(PDF) on 29 February 2008. Retrieved 2 September 2008.
^Read, Brock (6 April 2007). "A Blogger Infiltrates Academe". Chronicle of Higher Education. 53 (31): A30. Archived from the original on 9 July 2008. Retrieved 9 February 2008.
^ abDoctorow, Cory (13 January 2021). "20 years a blogger". Mostly Signs (Some Portents). Archived from the original on 15 January 2021. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
^"2004 Locus Awards". The Locus Index to SF Awards. Locus Publications. 3 September 2004. Archived from the original on 1 March 2007. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
^Cory Doctorow (27 August 2003). "Truncat". Salon. Archived from the original on 10 October 2012. Retrieved 2 December 2011.
^"2004 Sunburst Award Winner". www.sunburstaward.org. The Sunburst Award Society. 1 September 2004. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
^"2004 Nebula Awards". The Locus Index to SF Awards. Locusmag.com. 17 April 2004. Archived from the original on 13 July 2011. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
^"Little Brother Blog". Craphound.com. 28 April 2008. Archived from the original on 18 May 2011. Retrieved 16 November 2010.
^"AnticipationSF Hugo Nominees: Best Novel". www.anticipation.sf.ca. Anticipation: The 67th World Science Fiction Convention. 31 January 2010. Archived from the original on 6 June 2014. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
^Doctorow, Cory (16 December 2014). "Cory Doctorow - CopyCamp 2014". Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska. Archived from the original on 17 December 2014. Retrieved 21 December 2014.
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