What perfect timing!
Q&A: Cory Doctorow
Science-fiction novelist on Disney, Whuffie, Napster and what's wrong with San Francisco
By Dylan Tweney, Special to SF Gate.
In your book, you have a sort of alternate currency called Whuffie. The characters are constantly checking one another's Whuffie scores and looking for ways to earn more Whuffie. Can you explain the idea?Well, currency is a way of keeping score today. Whuffie is how much esteem people hold you in. Currency is a really rough approximation of Whuffie. You can't really get a job without esteem. You generally can't get a mortgage with no esteem.
In the book, I have this sort of magical McGuffin technology, which is something that can automatically find out how you feel about everything that you have an opinion on. Then, someone who has a high opinion about me can ask me -- without any kind of conscious intervention -- how I feel about you. They can just ask the network, "How is it that Cory feels about you?" And that gives them some idea of how much time of day they should give you.
It sounds a little like walking around with your bank balance displayed in a box above your head at all times.
Well, it's true. Except, you know, we already do this, in some way. As currency is a rough approximation of your Whuffie, the things that currency affords, like your style of dress, your haircut, all the semiotics of your presentation, are descended from Whuffie. It's just that Whuffie's harder to [fake].
The Internet has made us very socially deviant, in the sense that social norms are enforced by groups. If you have some incredibly strange idea of, for instance, wearing underwear on your head, generally speaking, there is social disapprobation that keeps that factor in check. But on the Internet, you can basically exist in the communication spheres of people who have the same value system as yours, no matter how weird it may be. On the Internet, you don't get that pressure to return to a norm. In some ways, Whuffie is a way to make you more socially normative. It's not necessarily a good thing.
Why did you call it "Whuffie"?
The word is what we used in high school instead of "brownie points." A friend of mine pointed out, given the era that I went to high school in, that it almost certainly came from "The Arsenio Hall Show": "Woof, woof, woof."...
...In the world of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," there's no death, there are unlimited resources, nanotechnology can create any object you desire (including a clone of yourself) and energy is free. What were you trying to accomplish by setting the story in that kind of world?
I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics looks like. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with the management of resources that are scarce. If it's valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted].
Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn't a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep s*** grass -- where the more you graze, the more commons you get.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/inquire/
Q&A: Cory Doctorow
Science-fiction novelist on Disney, Whuffie, Napster and what's wrong with San Francisco
Dylan Tweney, Special to SF Gate Thursday, January 23, 2003
San Francisco, California, USA -- Cory Doctorow is a true believer in the power of technology.
His first novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," is one of the first works to be published under the Creative Commons license -- an agreement that lets people copy and redistribute the book freely so long as they credit the author -- and is available for download on his Web site. That move puts Doctorow at the forefront of a growing digital rights movement.
Doctorow's novel is like a love letter to Napster, Google and Walt Disney World. It's a rollicking, fast-paced story and is entertainingly inventive without bogging down in the impressive array of future technologies it imagines. "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (also published in hardcover this month by Tor Books) is set in a future where death has been eliminated, energy and raw materials are freely available in limitless quantities (much like MP3 files on KaZaA today) and people's nervous systems are wired directly into the Internet. The protagonist, Julius, works at Disney World, and the novel chronicles his struggles to protect the theme park's Haunted Mansion from being shut down by an ad hoc group of designers who have developed a technology for "flash baking" theme-park experiences directly into parkgoers' brains.
In his day job, Doctorow is outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He's also one of the primary contributors to the popular techie weblog BoingBoing, he co-founded a dot-com, OpenCola, and he has another science-fiction novel and a short-story collection due out later this year.
Like his character Julius, Doctorow is an archetypal geek, from his nerdy Drew Carey-style glasses to the bright yellow cell phone dangling from his cargo pants. I caught up with the prolific (and apparently highly caffeinated) Toronto native in his office at the EFF, where a blueprint of the Haunted Mansion hangs over his desk.
This will make me sound like I'm behind the times, but this is actually the first time I've read an entire novel on screen.
It would make me pretty happy if this book contributed in some way to the idea that reading books on the screen is good. I know that there's a meme that floats around that says, oh, reading off a screen is hard, and no one wants to do it and so on -- despite all the evidence to the contrary. Most of the people I know read off a screen for 12 hours a day.
I won't deny that there's a sentimental frisson of good feeling you get when you pick up a physical, paper book, especially one with your name on it. Books are nice, but they're not as nice as we make out.
I think that, ultimately, the role of books in the world of electronic publishing will be much like the role of live music in the world of recorded-music publishing. We'll still have plenty of paper books, but that will be dwarfed by the enormous size of the electronic-book universe.
You've written several novels, you're at work on two more, you work for the EFF and you've got a popular blog where you post 10 or more items a day. Where do you find the time?
Well, sleep is for the weak. I'll sleep when I'm dead.
The thing about it is that there is synergy. The stuff that I do for BoingBoing is basically research in support of EFF and the writing, and the blog is how I keep track of it. By doing it in public, I get lots of suggestions, and I also get a lot of feedback. BoingBoing is a net time saver because I get more research done with less effort, and I keep track of it better than I would if I were doing it privately.
The research that I do on EFF issues is also feeding the fiction. I published a story last August on Salon called "0wnz0red," about digital rights management and trusted computing. That came straight out of a briefing I got here.
In your book, you have a sort of alternate currency called Whuffie. The characters are constantly checking one another's Whuffie scores and looking for ways to earn more Whuffie. Can you explain the idea?
Well, currency is a way of keeping score today. Whuffie is how much esteem people hold you in. Currency is a really rough approximation of Whuffie. You can't really get a job without esteem. You generally can't get a mortgage with no esteem.
In the book, I have this sort of magical McGuffin technology, which is something that can automatically find out how you feel about everything that you have an opinion on. Then, someone who has a high opinion about me can ask me -- without any kind of conscious intervention -- how I feel about you. They can just ask the network, "How is it that Cory feels about you?" And that gives them some idea of how much time of day they should give you.
It sounds a little like walking around with your bank balance displayed in a box above your head at all times.
Well, it's true. Except, you know, we already do this, in some way. As currency is a rough approximation of your Whuffie, the things that currency affords, like your style of dress, your haircut, all the semiotics of your presentation, are descended from Whuffie. It's just that Whuffie's harder to [fake].
The Internet has made us very socially deviant, in the sense that social norms are enforced by groups. If you have some incredibly strange idea of, for instance, wearing underwear on your head, generally speaking, there is social disapprobation that keeps that factor in check. But on the Internet, you can basically exist in the communication spheres of people who have the same value system as yours, no matter how weird it may be. On the Internet, you don't get that pressure to return to a norm. In some ways, Whuffie is a way to make you more socially normative. It's not necessarily a good thing.
Why did you call it "Whuffie"?
The word is what we used in high school instead of "brownie points." A friend of mine pointed out, given the era that I went to high school in, that it almost certainly came from "The Arsenio Hall Show": "Woof, woof, woof."
Most of the book takes place at Disney World, and the plot centers around various factions' attempts to control the Haunted Mansion there. You seem a little fascinated -- almost obsessed -- with Disney.
(points out a large collection of Disney paraphernalia in his office) Yeah, I'm a little obsessed. There's so much to love and so much to hate about Disney World and about the Disney corporation that it's the perfect obsessive material for someone who wants to mine the cultural space.
I was raised by schoolteachers, and my grandparents were snowbirds. Every winter they would fly south to Fort Lauderdale to a gate-guarded, seniors-only community called Century Village that my dad likes to call "Cemetery Village." We took Christmas breaks in Lauderdale, and it was just about as dull as you can imagine for an eight- or nine-year-old. So we would get in the big, gas-guzzling land yacht that my grandfather drove, and we would go to Disney World for a couple of days. Christmas weekends every year, during my whole adolescence, were spent at Disney World, and I just became completely obsessed with it.
Walt's genius was that he would come up with incredibly novel, innovative things that could only be imitated after a couple of years. Meanwhile, he would have this very healthy margin until his competition figured out what he was doing and drove the price down to a competitive level. Then he would do the next thing. But when Walt died [in 1966], they just stopped doing that. They just started doing the same thing. They basically built a twin of Disneyland in Disney World, but bigger.
There's lots you can say about [Disney chairman and CEO Michael] Eisner that isn't very flattering, but the one thing you can say is that under Eisner's leadership, there has been a definite focus on innovation, at least in Florida. At Disneyland, unfortunately, they brought in these idiot McKinsey consultants, they stopped spending any money on R&D and they bought all these off-the-shelf midway rides, with Ferris wheels, for the California Adventure. They built this incredibly dreary, boring, banal theme park that is like an extremely clean but less fun version of the Santa Monica pier, and, unsurprisingly, it's a ghost town. You could fire a cannon down the main drag without hitting a tourist.
In the world of "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," there's no death, there are unlimited resources, nanotechnology can create any object you desire (including a clone of yourself) and energy is free. What were you trying to accomplish by setting the story in that kind of world?
I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics looks like. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with the management of resources that are scarce. If it's valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted].
Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn't a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep s*** grass -- where the more you graze, the more commons you get. So I took the idea of nanotechnology as the means whereby any good can be reproduced infinitely, at zero marginal cost, and tried to use that as a metaphor for the online world we actually live in.
The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier -- television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.
What's your approach to writing?
It's really quotidian. I write a page a day, basically. With novels, once I get the first 20 or 25 percent on paper and an outline done, I usually make that semipublic. I have a list of about 200 or 300 first readers, and I e-mail them my page, every day, even before I spell-check it, hot off the word processor. They keep me really honest. When I miss a day, they e-mail me and nudge me.
I had a really successful experience doing that with my second book, "Eastern Standard Tribe" [due out in November 2003]. I wrote that between Aug. 1 and Dec. 12 of 2001, 60,000 words in five months, and actually managed to sell it within a week of my finishing it.
You've lived in San Francisco a while now. How do you like it here?
I've lived here since September of 2000. Right at the height of the boom.
I really miss Toronto. San Francisco's a really dysfunctional place. It has a lot of the downsides of living in a small town and a lot of the downsides of living in a big city, and it misses a lot of the upsides of both of those places. It's very hard to get from one place to another. The mass transit is so-so. Going from the Mission to downtown on foot feels about 10 times as long as it actually is. It's a Jane Jacobs nightmare of freeway overpasses and single-use neighborhoods.
The weather's OK, although it would be nice if the buildings were insulated, because when it's 40 degrees at night and you don't have insulation or central heating, damn, it's cold.
The thing about San Francisco that keeps me here is the people, the technology. This is ground zero for technologists. This is geek mecca, it's nirvana. But I heartily miss the Northeast. You can see the bones of a great city in San Francisco, and there are pockets of it that are like nothing else on Earth, but taken as a whole, it's really dysfunctional.
Also, I can't get my head around the private-medicine thing. I think this explains a lot about the various geek cultures of the U.K., Canada and the U.S. In the U.S., there is tons of venture capital, so everyone went out and started a company. In Canada, there are tons of socialized medicine, so everyone became a freelancer. If you're a freelancer [in the U.S.], and you're in poor health, and you can't get insured, you are embarking on a kind of slow suicide. And then, in the U.K., they had tons of arts grants, so all the geeks became Net artists, and that's why there's all this kind of strange, situationist, British Net art.
I'm told that Canada spends less money per capita giving away health care than the U.S. spends regulating it. So you're spending more money keeping the HMOs honest than it would cost you to give it away. That's a big difference between the American and Canadian mind-sets.
How many downloads of your book have there been so far?
There have been 47,334 from my site. Ninety downloads since we started talking. I hope to break 50,000 today.
That's just moving right along.
Hell, yeah!
I've been re-reading Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom again, and it really is all that good. If you haven't read it yet, you might want to check out the HTML
version of it online.
Now that it has become apparent that people are ready to look to new ways of managing information, money and intangible assets (such as "knowlege"), it seems like a good time to start talking about what kind of system would be fair and ideal -- just to give us something to strive for as we reshape our future.
Besides being a great read and a lot of fun (which is, of course, always the first requirement of any book I recommend), I feel that this book is an important one, because it really provides lots of excellent tangible examples of how a Reputation Economy might work.
Reputation systems are something that I have been fascinated with and meaning to write about for some time, but there were so many people already writing about them that knew so much more than me, and I realized about this time two years ago that I had so much to learn, I'd better just shut up and learn from other people for a few years before trying to teach anyone else about them.
Basically, in a reputation economy, you are rewarded with points when you do good things for the overall population. These points can vary in value between discounts on merchandise (in certain instances) or simply earning you respect among your peers.
Here's a clip from the Book's Prologue that helps to explain the concept better. (I'm rummaging around for some good papers on this too.)
... Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
More on this soon. I just wanted to get the ball rolling...
