Clearly I'm not the only one to have formed that opinion. I have to say, however, that I've noticed that a lot of his posts are about things that could be considered as 'promoted' by the post. As it is I've met Cory and he isn't of a self-congratulatory mind set after all he's Canadian and that's almost as self-effacing as being English. It slightly raised my hackles and I thought "that has the potential to cause trouble" before any furore ensued. That sounds self-congratulatory and is likely to attract adverse comment. The original Boing Boing post that the referenced thread is about started out "My Nebula-award-nominated story.". Those people are poison, and whatever it is they tell themselves about what they’re doing, their effect on the rest of the world is evil. (For instance, assuming that he’s an uncritical advocate of technological change, when in reality a great deal of his fiction is about tragic near-future consequences of exactly that.) It also means that there’s a certain kind of person who’s evidently compelled on an almost pre-conscious level to take Cory down a peg, because it’s just intolerable that anyone should be smart, widely admired, successful, and obviously having fun. This makes him an excellent impresario of the interesting, but it also means that some people jump to false conclusions about him. The real fact of the matter is that Cory Doctorow is, in basic temperament, an enthusiast. In fact, of course, they don’t own you, and you should no more pay attention to what they think than you would to what a spammer thinks. This is the nastiest side of any sort of fame, even microcosmic fame: a certain number of people simply assume that if they start out with a forelock-tugging explanation that they’re “one of your biggest fans,” they can then go on to deal you a load of the most astonishing vileness, because as One Of Your Biggest Fans they obviously own you. As a result, a certain kind of person feels entitled to try to guilt-trip the Boingers into not talking about their own projects and enthusiasms, as if Boing Boing’s eminence means its authors no longer get to indulge themselves the way EVERYONE ELSE ON THE INTERNET DOES EVERY DAY AND THREE TIMES ON WEEKENDS. It’s been so successful that, for some people, it now feels like part of the Internet’s basic furniture. Holy crap.īoing Boing is a compilation of links to stuff its authors find interesting. Cory’s response, far politer than its target deserved, evidently occasioned more and longer complaints about the inadequacy, injustice, and unfairness of the free ice cream. How this amounts to justifying the charge, levelled in the universally-recognizable, 100% phony-baloney voice of the concern troll, that “BoingBoing seems to have become for you mostly a PR vehicle for your stories”, passes all understanding. Like that’s unusual.Īs Cory points out, out of the last 55 posts he contributed to Boing Boing, one was about his latest Guardian column, one was a link to a comic strip that referred to him in its punchline, and one was about a fan translation of one of his stories into Swedish. Its authors occasionally use it to talk about projects they themselves are involved in. What the hell is wrong with the people in this thread? Boing Boing is a blog.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |