Cory Doctorow donates Razr mobile phone
Cory Doctorow, ORG Advisory Council member, famous novelist, copyright activist and one of the driving forces behind BoingBoing, has kindly donated a Razr mobile phone and a signed first edition of his novel Eastern Standard Tribe, to the Open Rights Group for us to auction. We have duly put both together as one lot on eBay, with a starting price of just £5. (Rather fuzzy photo.)
Bargain!
Details for the Motorola Razr:
Flipphone
Condition: New
GSM/GPRS 850/900/1800/1900 Mzh
Unlocked
Camera with 4x zoom
Bundled Items: Battery, Wall Charger
Features: Bluetooth, Colour Screen, Email / Web, GPRS, MMS enabled, Polyphonic ringtones, Streaming video, Vibration
And the blurb for Eastern Standard Tribe:
Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He’s doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth into the world.
Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art’s real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.
The comm - instant wireless communication - puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn’t changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by common time zones, less than families and more than nations. And Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people.
The world of next week is overflowing with ubiquitous computing, where an idea scribbled onto one’s comm can revolutionize an industry. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted - not happiness, not money, and, most certainly, not love.
Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain. Happiness or smarts? What’s it going to be, Art?
If you want to check out Cory’s book before you buy this signed hardback, then you can - he’s made it available for download under a Creative Commons licence.
So, whilst you’re checking out the full spec for the ultra-slim Razr and reading through Cory’s download to make sure you’re into time-shifting double-dealing hackers, why not bid? Just in case…
March 30th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
Err so the guy donates a RAZR to ORG and a signed copy of his book in return for a free plug for his book on the frontpage of the website? wtf is that about? Is this open to anyone then? Seems somewhat pathetic to me…
March 30th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
I would have linked to the websites and blogs of anyone who donated materials to ORG to auction in order to raise funds. In the blogging world, that’s called ‘good manners’.
And yes, anyone can bid on these items. That’s why they are on eBay. If all you want is the Razr, you could always give the book to someone else, or donate it back to ORG if you really don’t like it. Equally, anyone can donate valuable items to ORG for auction to raise money, so if you have something you think would raise a good price, please let me know.