Walkaway

A fun, Fascinating, Idealistic, Horny, “saved by technology”, “saved by community” story about the future.

A wonderful inditement of “down and out in the magic kingdom“ which was a post scarcity future where karma was the currency. The only character that wants that in this story is a complete idiot. However, it shares a lot of the same ideas and explores them in significantly greater depth. It’s also better written, with the advantage of about 20 years of practice between the two releases.

My only complaint while reading was that it was about a third too horny for my tastes. It was tasteful more or less and respectful. But Doctorow obviously enjoys writing sex scenes.

However Doctorow always shines when showing us how technology impacts society, and how when people take control of their technology communities can take advantage and flourish. I honestly think his vision what might be possible is more interesting than replicators and transporters. Significantly more possible in the very least.

You learn what the term walkaway means early on, and I honestly think that’s the biggest stretch in the book (besides the far future technology in the end of the book). There is barely a corner of the earth that isn’t own or patrolled. I’m a city kid so maybe that’s not true and the expanse of the undiscovered country is still vast. But 50 years into the future when this takes place, it will be less likely than today.

And the action scenes were plentiful and exciting while not being unplausable. Drone warfare is already here and this doesn’t ignore that in the least.

Overall, a lot of fun, a great book and Cory Doctorow particular genre.

Walkaway by @pluralistic@mamot.fr has been described as a utopian novel in a sea of dystopian alternatives, although I'd say it's actually both utopian and dystopian. It takes place in the 'middle distance' of the future; cars are still a thing, and they have wheels that roll on the ground, space travel isn't really a thing yet - humankind is essentially still bound to the Earth. But number of current-day issues have reached their logical culmination; from mundane technology (drones everywhere, 'interface surfaces' stuck to things instead of touch-screen smartphones, 3D printer 'fabs' are ubiquitous, capable of printing machines, clothing, and food) to the Big Issues of our time: Social inequality is extreme, with the overwhelming majority of the populous trapped in a struggling middle-class of insecure wage slaves, ruled by a tiny over-class of 'zottas', the hyper-rich owners of everything, from real estate, through business and roboticized industry, to intellectual property - Thomas Picketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" taken at its word. In addition, climate change has raised sea levels, flooding major cities, and pollution has rendered others unlivably toxic - great swathes of civilisation lie abandoned and in ruins.

At this intersection of technological advancement an eco-social catastrophe, three initial protagonists, Hubert, Seth, and Natalie decide to become "walkaways", joining a 'post scarcity' movement that rejects the premises of the materialistic, hierarchical, and clearly unsustainable "default" civilisation they find themselve in, and, rather than resisting or trying to change it, they simply 'walk away', leaving behind possessions, the very idea of ownership, money, work, and social status. The walkaways have no formal structure or organisation, are simply a collection of people living ideologically and literally outside civilisation. They occupy abandoned land and using 'fabbers', FAQs, and software, construct machines, buildings, and everything else they need, using 'feedstock' scavenged from the surroundings. Designs and systems are open-sourced and constantly improved on by whoever wants to work on them. Similarly work that needs doing on their pop-up settlements, from construction to food preparation, is picked up by whoever wants to do it, helped and highlighted by ubiquitous smart technology, all powered by wind and sun.

The trio wander and learn the walkaway terrain, make friends and lovers, with imminent disaster always looming - from internal philosophical conflicts and power struggles to increasingly lethal incursions from the "default" world, which sees the walkaways as more and more of an existential threat. They discover a community of scientists working on the ultimate act of walking away - the abandonment of biological dependency; developing the means to 'scan' the important parts of a person from their neurological structure, and 'sim' them on a digital substrate - i.e. upload minds into computers, making not only material but also temporal scarcity irrelevant. The walkaways want to eliminate death, and they want to open-source it so that everyone, not just the zotta overlords, can enjoy the benefits of disembodied immortality.

As so much good science fiction is, the novel is essentially a vehicle for Doctorow to explore philosophical ideas and take them to logical conclusions. Much of the dialogue is essentially 'Socratic'; two or more characters ostensibly 'arguing' about something, as a means for the author to explore a particular set of opposing philosophical positions. The topics are wide-ranging. 'Open-source' development and organisation feature large in the walkaway world; putative meritocracies are examined through a couple of different lenses: the zotta's, personified by Natalie's father, believe themselves to have floated to the top of society by their own genius, rather than their privilege, but also the walkaways themselves debate about their own social organisation, and whether work gets done more efficiently when 'merit' is rewarded by formal kudos or by the privilege of having exclusive right to particular work. In a nice twist, those with merit are labelled 'snowflakes', an epithet currently reserved for 'bleeding-heart liberals' by the 'right' in the real world, but used in Doctorow's world to apply to decidedly right-wing capitalists and others who feel their talents grant them divine rights not shared with commoners.

The 'mind-brain' problem (complete with oriental room), of course, is given an airing, along with some discussion of the possible socio-political consequences of widespread immortality. Interestingly, although mass abandonment of biology, and social control via fear becoming impossible, are projected as the outcome of mind-uploading, these scenarios don't actually play out in the novel, and the reasons aren't directly explicated.

However, rather than have the characters duke out all the issues raised, some of them are simply 'givens' in the walkaway universe; economic inequality, the militarised police state, anthropogenic environmental catastrophe. The injustices of these have terrible consequences in the story, but they're not 'solved' by it, and this is the dystopian facet of the work. Its utopia, on the other hand, is represented by ascent of the walkways, from an underground, marginal movement, through increasing persecution as their numbers and relevance swell, to finally (and possibly too sweetly) they become the 'default' themselves, by sheer force of numbers (and of course the efficiency, justice, and 'rightness' of their way of life).

Along the way, there are lots of opportunities to explore both neat and terrible technology, including realistic extrapolations from the state of the art, and actually real (if currently less ubiquitous) things, some interesting uses, and drawbacks to, #cryptography, changes of social norms around drugs, sexuality, gender, and race. And Doctorow gets to air many of his memes - individuals failing to recycle their way out of global warming; only those who tread water against all odds surviving shipwrecks, economists being to the 1% as court astrologers were to kings...

For me it was just the right mix of the familiar with some new ideas; allowing this reader to both feel like he knows some things, but also have some new thoughts too. I imagine it would be a vindicating romp for faraday-cage-wallet-toting, gait-altering, #cyanogenmod-installing, #cypherpunk githubbers everywhere.

The only thing wrong with it is that you can't put it down. Not even if it's 3am. This is why I can't read novels - they're the original Netflix binge-watching recipe for sleep deprivation.

I confess I have a soft spot for Cory Doctorow's writing. This book is a brilliant novel, which portrays a plausible future. Walkaways are a different approach to society, based on collaboration, self organisation and freedom. They leave our society, referred to as "default" and live on the fringes of it. They make good use of what we consider waste, they adapt, implement and simply walk away, sort of like nomads, when things get dangerous or when they simply need to.
There's a lot of interesting concepts that are intertwined in this novel, anarchism, 3d printing, resilient networking, immortality through technology, social inequality, pacifism, LGBTQ love, just to name a few.
I will return to it in the future, and will be reccomending it to friends.

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I've re read this book and enjoyed it a lot more than the first time. This time around the story seems more coherent and the themes more urgent, more on point. The theme of inequality and the massive imbalance between the Zottas and the rest of the population seems to be a perfect reflection, almost prophetic, of the things we see in our lives every day.

For some reason, I’ve read a number of novels recently set in the near future, working through the implications of environmental catastrophe, economic inequality, technological advances. I’m growing impatient with many of them because they assume people, in a pinch, will turn on each other, that those who aren’t predators risk being prey. Once the threat of fill in the blank comes to pass, we’ll not only lose everything, we’ll be at each others’ throats. This novel is a utopian fork of dystopia by someone who loves technology but doesn’t love the way intellectual property regimes restrict its use. Though I didn’t find it entirely successful as a novel (the prose is . . . prosaic, the technology seems suspiciously failure-proof, and the characters won’t stop talking), it poses an interesting thought experiment: what if, in a world of abundance unevenly distributed, people simply walked away from our market-based assumptions and started new communities based on sharing and repurposing rather than ownership and consumerism? What if we refused to want stuff but instead trusted we could make whatever we needed from scraps? (That's a new wrinkle on "freedom from want.") What if resistance was not futile, but also non-violent? What if all the singular technologies Silicon Valley titans dream about, including automation reducing the need to work, the ability to fabricate all manner of things, and even to overcome death itself, weren’t the preserve of the super-rich but rather were developed by people who rejected a precarious gig economy to make a different and better world?returnreturnIn between long conversations there are battles and kidnappings and sex and mind-bending plot twists as people who die live on as sentient and self-aware backups. Mixed in with “hey, what cool things could we do?” there’s also “what does it mean to be human?” and “why should we put up with things as they are when we could do better? And what does ‘better’ look like?”returnreturnJust as humor is harder to pull off than tragedy, writing hope is harder than writing despair. I appreciated the way this novel takes up the big challenges of our day and imagines not just how bad it could get but what alternatives we could create. Above all, I was grateful for the recognition that we aren’t all helpless or selfish at heart, that we have generous impulses that could save us if we put them to work, that when things go wrong, the neighbors will come out to help. As they do.

Three stars for plot and characters, four stars for interesting ideas, would give this 3.5 stars if I could. Doctorow is a futurist; a tech fan; a forward thinker. His novels tend to explore slightly futuristic dystopias, extrapolating elements of the current direction of technology into a future extreme, and this does the same. It's structured as a novel but I think it's as much an exploration of "what if" that he's working out as he's writing. What if in the future we reach a post-scarcity world where technology (3d printers and such) can provide enough for ALL humans to live in comfort? But of course, those at the top, the "zottarich" (zotta being a bigger number than mega) feel entitled to their far bigger share of the wealth than those beneath them, so the usual problems of homelessness and starvation continue to exist. The gap between the haves and have-nots gets wider, the working class gets poorer and more hopeless, and employment becomes scarcer.

In the midst of this, a movement arises out of the 'maker' culture calling themselves 'walkaways'. The current model of society as enforced by the zottas is clearly not working; so they simply walk away. Walk out into the wilderness, or into unwanted land or even uninhabitable areas, taking nothing but the clothes on their back and portable fabbers (fabricators, the descendents of 3D printers) and sometimes not even the first. And they construct smart encampments based on open-source blueprints and basically live in a socialist commune environment where all work is shared, and the smart buildings automatically highlight areas where someone needs to do something (like fix something, or put away dishes) and (in communities that want to) keeps leaderboards of everyone's contribution ratings.

The story mostly follows super-rich-girl Natalie, disillusioned with her zotta father's selfishness, and a couple of her friends, who decide to turn walkaway and join a nearby community. Over a span of several decades her father tries to get her back through various means up to and including kidnapping; the "default" society they left behind tries to eliminate the walkaways, seeing them as a threat to "normal" existence; and the walkaways themselves become a highly tech-savvy almost guerrilla-type organization creating distributed networks, redundant information-sharing methods, and extremely sophisticated methods of anticipating, escaping, or undermining attacks from 'default' over the years and across the world. Along the way they also discover how to upload human consciousness into computers, a fact which seems as if it should and could have been a bigger plot point in several ways than it actually turned out to be.

The book is used as a vehicle to examine and discuss a lot of interesting theories and ideas, especially the artificial and unstable nature of the zottarich, the potential of fabricators to create a world of plenty, and the idea of communal work-sharing settlements. You may or may not agree with all Doctorow's conclusions, but they're interested to read either way. As a novel however I didn't feel it was quite as successful; it felt a bit disjointed, many of the characters were not particularly likeable, and the plot seemed to come second to the exploration of the theories above. Also lots of random sex thrown in, which you may or may not enjoy but didn't seem particularly relevant.