How to be Cory Doctorow
Everybody wants to be the cofounder of Boingboing. At least everyone I know.
You write something and boom, millions of people hear it and react. It’s a great gig.
I sat next to Cory at a conference today. It was like playing basketball next to Michael Jordan. Cory was looking at more than 30 screens a minute. He was bouncing from his mail to his calendar to a travel site and then back. His fingers were a blur as he processed inbound mail, visiting more than a dozen sites in the amount of time it took for my neck to cramp up. I’m very fast, but Cory is in a different league entirely. Rereading this, I can see I’m not doing it justice. I wish I had a video…
This was never a skill before. I mean, maybe if you were an air traffic controller, but for most of us, most of the time, this data overload skill and the ability to make snap judgments is not taught or rewarded.
As the world welcomes more real-time editors working hard in low-overhead organizations, I think it’s going to be a skill in very high demand.