(2017-07-12) Cory Doctorow's Fully Automated Luxury Communist

On Cory Doctorow's 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism Civilization' (Automation)

Is this a dystopia in Walkaway, or a Utopia?

for me, the thing that cleaves a utopia from a dystopia is what [essayist and critic] Rebecca Solnit says cleaves a disaster from a catastrophe: It's what we do when things go wrong.

I think science fiction is not predictive in any meaningful way

But I also think that prediction is way overrated

I'm not a fatalist. The reason I'm an activist is because I think that the future, at least in part, is up for grabs

What science fiction does is not predictive, but it is sometimes diagnostic

Walkaway is in some ways a prequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I certainly reread Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a pen and a highlighter and some post-its and made tons of notes before I started work on Walkaway, and I have a whole file of themes that I wanted to pick up.

some of it is wanting to respond back to the people who read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as a utopia and who didn't understand that there were dystopic elements.

It was a very mixed future. Reputation Management economics have the same Winner-take-all problem

I stole it from Slashdot's karma [system].

The mainstream Walkaway world is called Default, which is a term I stole from Burning Man.

they use software from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees to figure out how to recombine that to build a kind of fully automated luxury communist civilization, where you go on a scavenger hunt, you find all the stuff, and you build a huge Dr. Seussian amazing luxury hotel that anyone can stay in and that anyone can be the czar of and that anyone can contribute to.

And it's pretty stable because it turns out the Default doesn't mind having an escape hatch. Bohemians are cute, right?

But then a group of scientists who've been working in Default, figuring out the secrets of practical immortality for the superrich, decide that they don't really want to be complicit

bring them to the rest of us, and then the superrich realize that they're going to have to spend the rest of eternity with people they think of as being unworthy. And that triggers the Hellfire missiles and all-out war.

the job of a Science fiction writer is not to map the territory, but to point out that there's territory to be mapped. There is a game we play when we argue about policy or tell stories, and the game is What's in the Frame?

Science fiction is about pointing out that there are things that are out of the frame [in real life] that don't properly belong out of the frame, whose ruling out is arbitrary—or customary, which is another way of saying the same thing.

I'm actually working on the thing that underpins screen open-source software, which I think is like Coasian coordination. Abundance is this triangle.

Up here is what we want

how much you want is obviously elastic

And then over here is how much we can make

But all of the real action is over in this other corner, which is logistics. And that's getting the stuff that people want to the people who want it after you've made it.

So you're over here imagining the logistics part of the future. But we're currently culturally perseverating over there in the manufacturing corner.

The thing that free and Open-Source software has given us is the ability to coordinate ourselves very efficiently without having to put up with a lot of hierarchy. To be able to take things that we've done together, where we've reached a breaking point, and split them in two and have each of us pursue it in our own direction, without having to pay too high a cost or even have a lot of acrimony.