It’s no secret we’re huge fans of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For twenty-five years they’ve done the hard work in trying to keep cyberspace open and free for users against those who would have you believe that the world would be safer if only you’d yield your rights to them.
To celebrate their 25th Anniversary, EFF have gathered together twenty-one short fictions collectively entitled Pwning Tomorrow: Short Fiction from the Electronic Frontier. The list of authors is impressive, including Neil Gaiman, Lewis Shiner, Madeline Ashby, Lauren Beukes, and Cory Doctorow, but even more impressive is the range of the stories themselves.
Some stories play with concepts of intellectual property, a familiar battleground in cyberspace. Some treat the darker side of the nauseous effects of corporate marketing (Rudy Rucker and Eileen Gunn’s “Hive Mind Man” shows this brilliantly) and runaway technology. Others are more optimistic about possibilities of cybernetic augmentation, new journalism, and social media.
The line between fiction and reality is not only blurry in the future but in the present. As Dave Maass writes in the foreword, EFF don’t just love this stuff, some of them also create it. Two of the authors in this collection were once part of EFF’s team, and one other is the lead plaintiff in the Jewel v. NSA case, EFF’s lawsuit to end warrantless, mass surveillance of our electronic communications.
We thank EFF for all they’ve done in these long twenty-five years and we hope they will be around for another twenty-five.
