Cory Doctorow dreams of a DRM-free utopia – so he's suing the US government to get it

Walkaway author Doctorow wants to 'kill all the DRM in the world in a decade'

Cory Doctorow fears for the future. Rising inequality, political instability and technological surveillance are merging to create a world, he says, in which "there are disasters - and those disasters are human-made".

Most sci-fi writers might use this insight to create a dystopia, but Doctorow, 45, has been creating something more optimistic. His new novel Walkaway shows how catastrophes can create "the first days of a better nation".

Set in Toronto "somewhere between five minutes and 50 years in the future", Walkaway focuses on three idealistic twentysomethings who leave their homes to live in abandoned zones outside state and corporate control. Work is voluntary; ownership is an illusion; even death can be digitally defeated. Only the cynicism of "default society" stands in the way of a post-scarcity paradise.

"We're on a knife edge between technological utopia and technological dystopia," says Doctorow. "I wanted to tell a story about how goodness, combined with technology, can overcome our worst nature."

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Doctorow has been writing about the possibilities and dangers of technology since he published his first story at 17. Three short-story collections, two non-fiction books, ten novels and a graphic novel later – each one written “pretty much back to back to back,” alongside “about a dozen” posts a day for the technology site Boing Boing, where he is co-editor – and he’s one of the most admired science-fiction thinkers around. But when I ask how he plans to reach techno-utopia, Doctorow demurs: “Science-fiction is historically really bad at predicting.” Instead, he prefers to take action. That’s why he’s suing the United States government.

Read more: Trouble brewing as company adds 'DRM' to coffee

Online freedom is Doctorow's political passion. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a digital-rights activist, giving away copies of his first novel under Creative Commons license. Then, in 2015, came a moment, he says, "where I just couldn't bear to sit on the sidelines". The breaking point was the proliferation of digital rights management (DRM), software designed to regulate the use of connected products, from ebooks to coffee machines to pacemakers. To Doctorow, it looks like nothing less than digital tyranny: a way of making "computers designed to control their owners".

So, with advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, he's suing the US Government to remove the law and "kill all the DRM in the world in a decade". In this way, he believes he can bring the world closer to utopia.

How? To Doctorow, the answer is simple: computers. They solve, he says, "the oldest human problem, of how we co-ordinate ourselves to work together for a common goal" - but only if they can be used freely. So, although he doesn't know how to get to utopia, he thinks enabling open access is a good place to start. "The writer EL Doctorow - who's not related to me - said that writing a novel is like driving in the dark: you can only see as far as your headlamps. But you follow that little bit of illuminated space to the end of your journey. Breaking DRM is my next step. That's what gives me hope."

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is published by Macmillan on April 25.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK