Well, and I had downloaded Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom onto my hard drive quite some time ago, some months after I became aware that it was available.
And then last week I got it out from the library and read it.
Anyway, it’s an entertaining enough book, in its way, and a lot of the funny stuff struck me as actually funny, which is impressive in a book like that. My problem is that the book is primarily a provocative thought-experiment, and I find the thought experiment annoying in ways that I’m sure have already been discussed to death. Which is my problem ... if I had read the thing last year when everybody else did, I could have been part of the discussions at the time. Not that I would have likely bothered, as the discussions took place on-line, and I would have been even more annoyed by the discussions than by the book.
Still, just to record the thoughts that I’m sure have been kicked around already: I’m assuming that the point of the whuffie thing was not to say that it would be good, but to make us think about the ways in which it wouldn’t be good, and therefore even to mention those low-whuffie Gypsies that were slaughtered and not revived from backup would be heavy-handed. Still. I’m thrilled to death that there aren’t gangs roaming around, high on whatnot, beating up low-whuffie people, but I can’t figure out why not, particularly as you would get more whuffie that you care about from your gang for doing it than down-whuffie from anybody who bothered to find out and disapprove. But, yeah, ok, all those people just weren’t Bitchun, and, y’know, conveniently died and stuff. So that stuff just made me cranky, which is always bad because I’m less likely to laugh at jokes, and more likely to pick fights with plot points.
Speaking of which, all of the major decisions made by the ad-hocs seem to be made absolutely ass-backwards and wrong. That is, the first decision (let’s bypass normal procedure to screw with the ride) is put over on sympathy whuffie and a cute girl. Then, the decision to let the villainess take over is made on rep and nothing. Then, the decision to kick her out again is made on anger and possessiveness. Then, the decision to let her back in again is made on the touching mother-daughter scene manufactured just for that purpose. Then, the decision to kick her out again is made because she turns out to be even more of a crazy monomaniac than the protagonist. Notice that none of this has anything to do with the quality of the ride itself. It was pretty much who had managed to use the best pathetic rhetoric (that is, rhetoric using pathos) to convince the ad-hoc that the other guy had weapons of mass destruction. This combined with the bizarre ups and downs of Dan’s whuffie, where he goes from sky-high to zero and back up and back down without noticeably changing his actual character, seems to make whuffie-based decision-making so obviously bad that it barely seems worth using it to spark discussion.
Then, you know, I somehow hadn’t managed to figure out that Cory Doctorow was Mr. Boingboing. There’s something about knowing that the author has a PageRank of 8 (and another of 7) that colors his whole discussion of whuffie. I’m just sayin’.
Anyway, what is clearly brilliant about the book is that calling it whuffie and portraying it in that way absolutely hits the cultural nerve. I can’t explain it (which in itself is a sign that it hits home), but clearly whuffie is something a lot of us are feeling the edges of, and we want to know what it is, and whether it’s good or bad, and how to use it, both individually in our own lives and together in the broader society. Mr. Doctorow has hit on a nice way to talk about the world, and that’s a tremendous thing. Even if I’m still cranky.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
Funny how our worldviews color our perceptions of (a) whether a given work is utopian or not, and (b) whether the author meant it to be or not.
I knew going into Down and Out who Cory was, and that Whuffie was basically based on PageRank; given that, I assumed that this novel was meant to be utopian, and that the problems with the portrayed world as a utopian world were due to holes in the author’s worldview and/or disagreements over fundamental worldview premises (like human nature and whether authority and government are by and large good things) between me and the author.
But then a while later I heard Cory on a panel at a convention, talking to a roomful of geeks most of whom (I suspect) had read the book as not only a utopia but one they’d love to live in, and he took apart the idea of Whuffie and pointed out a bunch of the problems with it. I’m not sure whether he had a net gain or loss of Whuffie during that panel, but he sure got a fair bit of it from me.
Then again, he’s got lots more than I do already so it’s not like he needs it. 🙂
(My biggest complaint about the book when I read it was that I found the ability to force-grow clone bodies to mature near-instantly wildly implausible, and the whole society falls apart without that. But I had to admit even then that forced growth of clone bodies is a widespread genre convention.)
Anyway, kind of along the lines of your last paragraph, one thing the book did for me is make me think about the flaws in PageRank. It looks on the face of it like a kind of geek-utopian notion, the idea that things with merit will naturally and automatically rise to the top; on the other hand, if you look at it from another angle, it’s just a popularity contest in disguise. The reason geeks like it so much is that for once they (more or less; I’m wildly handwaving here) control the popularity contest; they’re the ones creating the links, so it’s the things the geeks consider popular that rise to the top. It’ll be interesting to see how geeks react as the democratization of the web starts meaning that PageRank goes to the lowest common denominator rather than to the most informative….
And that’s assuming that BoingBoing and Slashdot are, you know, informative. I think it would be more accurate to say that as the geek community becomes more marginal on-line, its own interests become more marginal, and therefore less likely to rise to the top of the meritocracy. This is already happening to a large extent. All your base truly belong to us.
Thanks,
-V.
All your base ARE truly belong to us.
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” “No, that’s ‘A FOOLISH consistency…'” “My point exactly.”
D&OitMK is a great example, to me, of why it’s useful to beware of memes that flatter you. If history is any guide, the nerdy types who I’ve seen sincerely praising the whuffie system as an alternative to currency would be absolutely trampled by a popularity economy, but since the book says that nerds come out on top, well, hey, great, I’m a nerd, I’ll go for that (and I did, too, for about 25 pages).
Myself, I think it’s a fun book for the eyeball kicks if not for the plot, though the former is weakened by inconsistentencies about whether whuffie is a passive measurement or a transaction.