The Magic of Cory Doctorow

Cory’s given me so much Googlejuice that I’m only too happy to return the favour. (This is why I sometimes refer to the world of blogs as “the Sycophantic Web”.)

He appears in an interview in today’s SXSW Festival Tech Report. A sample question:

A lot of Canadian expatriates such as yourself are doing wonderfully creative and innovative things in terms of new media and the Internet. Do you have any explanations or insights here? Is there something in the water north of the border?

Yes, we are taking over. We will eventually own the entire world.

Actually, Bruce Sterling thinks there is something unique about the Canadian perspective. In the introduction he wrote for my new short story collection “A Place So Foreign and Eight More” that is coming out in March, Bruce points out that being Canadian gives you a built-in window to the creepiest kind of alien of all, which is the alien that is almost just like you but is completely different.

I don’t if you saw it, but there was a story titled “The Uncanny Valley” that went around the blogging universe in October. According to this bit of research on human perception and cognition, people of all cultures respond very positively to humanoid artifacts, so long as they aren’t all that humanoid. So, Mickey Mouse or other sort of furry objects or certain robots are ok. But, that kind of warm response decreases sharply as the object becomes more humanoid. Then there is a point at which an object becomes too humanoid. If it looks a lot like a human but it isn’t quite a human, then people react to that with complete revulsion: think of zombies or of the cenotaphs in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. So, the creepiest alien of all is the thing that you can recognize as being you, but isn’t you.

I agree with Bruce. I think Canadians have this built-in point of view on America. Because you guys talk like us, you look like us, you listen to the same music as we do. Your culture is a lot like ours. But you are different in a lot of really strange ways. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Marshall McLuhan came out of Canada. I think that that was an almost inevitable occurrence. Because it takes being at 30 degrees off true to really see something clearly. It is hard to see something clearly when you are in the belly of it.

I also think that Canada had a couple of advantages at the beginning of the new economy. Socialized medicine allowed people to quit their jobs much more readily and pursue freelance life. So, there are a lot of people like me who dropped out of school and quit their jobs and just went off and did freelance Internet stuff without having to worry too much about the consequences. I think that fostered a kind of extended adolescence where people didn’t have to get involved with button-up corporate stuff. People could remain a lot more free and more inventive and more innovative as freelancers than their American compatriots.