Locus Online Perspectives Cory Doctorow: Bugging In – Locus Online

Walkaway is an optimistic disaster novel. Its about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains arent the people next door, whove secretly been waiting for civilizations breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them.

In Walkaway, the economy has comprehensively broken down, and so has the planet. Climate refugees drift in huge, unstoppable numbers from place to place, seeking refuge. The world has no jobs for most people, because when robots do all the work, the forces of capital require a few foremen to boss the robots, and a few unemployed people mooching around the factory gates to threaten the supervisors with if they demand higher wages. Everyone else is surplus to requirements.

But just because youre useless to the rich and powerful, it doesnt follow that youll lie down in a ditch somewhere to take yourself off the game-board. The useless people declare the system to be the problem and walk away from it, forming a kind of parallel, bohemian society that uses software and automated manufacturing techniques to build a post-scarcity world on the fringes of the terminal phase of late-stage capitalism.

This is harmless enough for the powers that be, so its a relatively stable relationship until, that is, the scientists whove been working on a moonshot project to create practical immortality treatments for the 0.1% decide to take their work to the walkaways then, as the rich figure out theyll have to spend eternity with us, all out war breaks out.

Its a book about the struggle between people who think other people are the problem (the rich) and people who think other people are the solution (everyone else).

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Awareness of self-deception is a tactic thats deployed very usefully by a lot of people now. Its at the core of things like cognitive behavioral therapy the idea that you must become an empiricist of your emotions because your recollections of emotions are always tainted, so you have to write down your experiences and go back to see what actually happened. Do you remember the term Endless September? Its from when AOL came on to the net, and suddenly new people were getting online all the time, who didnt know how things worked. The onboarding process to your utopian project is always difficult. Its a thing Burning Man is struggling with, and its a thing fandom is struggling with right now. We were just talking about what its like to go to a big media convention, a San Diego Comic-Con or something, and to what extent thats a new culture, or its continuous with the old culture, or its preserving the best things or bringing in the worst things, or its overwhelming the old, or whatever. Its a real problem, and there is a shibboleth, which is, I dont object to all these newcomers, but theyre coming in such numbers that theyre overwhelming our ability to assimilate them. This is what every xenophobe who voted for Brexit said, but you hear that lament in science fiction too, and you hear it even about such things as gender parity in the workplace.

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For me, I live by the aphorism, fail better, fail faster. To double your success rate, triple your failure rate. What the walkaways figured out how to do is reduce the cost of failure, to make it cheaper to experiment with new ways of succeeding. One of the great bugaboos of the rationalist movement is loss aversion. There is another name for it, the entitlement effect: basically, people value something they have more than they would pay for it before they got it. How much is your IKEA furniture worth before and after you assemble it? People grossly overestimate the value of their furniture after theyve assembled it, because having infused it with their labor and ownership, they feel an attachment to it that is not economically rational. Sunk cost is another great fallacy. You can offer somebody enough money to buy the furniture again, and pay somebody to assemble it, and theyll turn you down, because now that they have it, they dont want to lose it. That was the wisdom of Obama with Obamacare. He understood that Obamacare is not sustainable, that basically letting insurance companies set the price without any real limits means that the insurance companies will eventually price it out of the governments ability to pay, but he also understood that once you give 22 million people healthcare, when the insurance companies blew it up, the people would then demand some other healthcare system be found. The idea of just going without healthcare, which was a thing that people were willing to put up with for decades, is something theyll never go back to. Any politician who proposes that when Obamacare blows up that we replace it with nothing, as opposed to single payer where its going to end up that politician is dead in the water.

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Getting back to the availability heuristic, what I want is for people to be able to vividly imagine that the heroism in the moment of disaster is to avert catastrophe by bugging in instead of bugging out. Because the heroic story, in a lot of traditional science-fiction, is that when disaster strikes, the hero runs to the hills. The hero bugs out of town, and defends a small group of people from the ravening hordes. Its The Road. Its John Wyndham. The reality is that power plants have been failing for a long time, and the people who ran to the hills during the blackout didnt fix the power plant. Its the people who ran to the power plant who fixed the power plant. Those are the heroes. I want to give people the intuition that what the right sort of person does is look after their neighbors, thats what stops disasters from turning into catastrophes. I really want this book to be an intervention in the world. I want it to be something thats easy to call to mind in the moment where your heart is thundering and things are going terribly wrong, to realize what you do in that situation is help out. Mr. Rogers said when theres a disaster, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. If you ever take a first aid class, 99% of that first aid class is the knowledge that everyone else is going to assume that someone else is going to take care of a problem, and the realization that the perfect person doing the perfect thing is less important than any person doing something. Even if you know a small amount about looking after someone, you should rush forward. Be prepared to get out of the way if someone says, Im a doctor, but rush forward.

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Later on this tour Im going to stop at Reason Magazine, which is part of the Cato Institute. Ive talked with those guys a lot before, and we have a lot in common, and a lot of places where we differ. Like with Occupy, I think you should never over-specify your values. Walkaway plants some flags that are unequivocal in terms of how I stand on some issues where I have deep and probably irreconcilable differences with some of my allied people in the libertarian camp. I speak as a guy whos won three Prometheus Awards! I have a lot of respect for elements of libertarianism, but I also have some gaps. I dont dispute that libertarianism works well, I dispute whether it fails better than collectivism. I think libertarianism has some really grotesque failure modes. This is what Im planning to dig into when I talk to them. I keep having dialogues in my head where I try to Iron Man their best arguments and think about what my best arguments will be. Do you know the term Iron Man? Its the opposite of a Straw Man argument, so when youre having a dispute with someone else, and you say, Can we stop, and Im going to tell you what I think your best argument is for your position, and you tell me if I have it right? Its a way of advancing the debate beyond exploiting bugs in how the person has expressed themselves, and trying to come to common ground so that you can argue about substance. The one thing I love about libertarians is that they often overlap with the rationalist movement. Rationalism is not without its flaws, but its a very powerful force for improving the world.

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Im working on a third Little Brother book now, for adults, called Crypto Wars. Paramount has the film rights to the first one. Im doing some screenwriting for the first time. Id always resisted screenwriting, because everything Ive ever written thats fiction has been published, and screenwriting is the last scene of Indiana Jones, over and over again, the most amazing thing anyones ever done, and its in a warehouse somewhere, and no ones allowed to know it exists. My agent was able to cut a deal where even if no one turns this stuff into a movie, I could turn the writing into books and stories. Russ Galen is the agent. Hes amazing. Hes also the agent for Philip K. Dick, Norman Mailer, and Arthur C. Clarke, and there are a remarkable number of PKD and Arthur C. Clarke movies where hes an executive producer, so hes got a lot of experience. Its through a media company I like, a fairly new one thats done some incredible work, so Im happy to be doing it. After that, I dont know what Ill do. I sell books after Im finished, partly out of superstition that if I sell the book and cant finish it, that would be a problem, but also because in general my career has just gone up, and the longer I wait to sell a book, the more I can get for it.

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Locus Online Perspectives Cory Doctorow: Bugging In - Locus Online