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.
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