Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

Hubert, Etc didn’t roll his eyes. His generation perfected lockdown, getting their systems to go fully dark on their way to parties. It hadn’t been easy, but everyone too lazy to bother ended up in jail, sometimes with their friends, so it became widespread.

Seth’s comedown had plateaued. He was a perfect oil-painting of “Man with drug hangover,” in grubby colors, a lot of shadow and crosshatching.

On impulse, Hubert, Etc let her feed it to him. It was surprisingly good, and the clink of the fork on his tooth made him shiver like an amazing piss.

“I don’t think I’ve ever traveled this fast in city traffic,” he said. Jacob gave him a fatherly wink. Natalie reached across the large internal compartment and gave her dad a sock in the thigh. “He’s showing off. There’s custom firmware in these, lets them cut the clearance envelope in half, which makes the other cars back off because we’re driving like unpredictable assholes.” “Is that legal?” Hubert, Etc said. “It’s a civil offense,” Jacob said. “The fines are paid by direct-debit.” “What if you kill someone?” Seth got to the point. “That’s a criminal matter, more serious. Won’t happen, though. There’s a lot of game theory stuff going on in the car’s lookahead, modeling likely outs and defectors and injecting a huge margin of safety. Really, we’re playing it safer than the stock firmware, but only because the car itself has got much better braking and acceleration and handling characteristics than a stock car.” “And because you’re terrifying other cars’ systems into getting out of your way,” Seth said.

Seth grinned at Hubert, Etc meaningfully, a silent comment on his romantic feelings for Natalie. He wasn’t in the mood. He’d held a dead man in his arms. He was bloody, tired, and nauseated.

She staggered upstairs and Hubert, Etc stretched out on the least cluttered sofa, eyes closing as he pressed his face into the cushions’ seam. In the brief moment before sleep, he saw the twisted body of Billiam, felt a phantom sensation of the pulp of Billiam’s skull in his fingers. He had a toe-to-scalp shiver, up and down twice before it subsided and he mercifully slept.

“It’s the height of self-serving circular bullshit, isn’t it? ‘We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED.’ The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactively obvious bullshit you could spot it from orbit.”

She froze him with a look. “Haven’t you figured it out? Giving money away doesn’t solve anything. Asking the zottarich to redeem themselves by giving money away acknowledges that they deserve it all, should be in charge of deciding where it goes. It’s pretending that you can get rich without being a bandit. Letting them decide what gets funded declares the planet to be a giant corporation that the major shareholders get to direct. It says that government is just middle-management, hired or fired on the whim of the directors.”

“I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”

She made an impatient noise. “Bullshit. I’ve got zero tolerance for not speaking ill of the dead. Billiam was sixty percent good guy, forty percent utter prick. That puts him in the middle of humanity’s bell curve. He hated bullshit with heat from the center of the sun. He was my friend, not yours.”

“And I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.” “That’s exactly right,” she said. “His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”

The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. “It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.” “That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”

“Don’t make me join the walkaways, Etcetera,” Seth said. The thing inside Hubert, Etc’s guts roiled. “Was that where I was headed?” Natalie caught his eye. Her face shone. She was beautiful. She had zits, a sprinkle of freckles, the sclerae of her eyes were pink and her lids were red-rimmed. She was brimming with life, sorrow, and whatever he’d felt when he realized that the whispered conversations about money and jobs that all the grown-ups had all the time were the outward reflection of deep, unending terror. A fear that gnawed at every grown person. A primordial terror of the tiger outside the cave.

There were as many walkaway FAQs as walkaways. The impulse to walk away was bound up with the urge to write Thoreauvian memoirs about societal malaise and the tradecraft of going off-grid in the age of total information awareness. They included appendices summing things up for the tldr crowd, with videos, darknet links, shapefiles, and wetjet formulas for making your own crucial frontier enzymes and GMOs. Some of this was radioactively hot, the kind of thing that’d get you watchlisted so hard you’d have to fight through the clouds of drones to go out for milk, but there was nothing in it about weapons.

That pretense – researchers called it “networked social disattention” but everyone else called it the “How’d that get there?” effect – was a vital shift in the UNHCR’s distributed shelter initiative.

The three looked at each other and Gizmo shrugged and said, “Hell yeah.” He shrugged out of his pack and let it fall to the floor with a thump that made Limpopo jump. Jesus fuck, what were these noobs hauling over hill and dale? Bricks?

Before long, there was a steady rocking rhythm to the B&B that Limpopo fucking loved, the hum of a complex adaptive system where humans and software co-existed in a state that could be called dancing.

The point of walkaways was living for abundance, and in abundance, why worry if you were putting in as much as you took out? But freeloaders were freeloaders, and there was no shortage of assholes who’d take all the best stuff or ruin things through thoughtlessness. People noticed. Assholes didn’t get invited to parties. No one went out of their way to look out for them. Even without a ledger, there was still a ledger, and Limpopo wanted to bank some good wishes and karma just in case.

While they’d gabbed, three other walkaways prepped tea, hand-finished scones and dainty sandwiches and steaming pots and adulterants arranged on the trays. She consciously damped the anxiety at someone doing “her” job. So long as the job got done, that’s what mattered. If anything mattered. Which it did. But not in the grand scheme of things. She recognized one of her loops.

“It doesn’t work at all in theory. In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more. In theory, someone will walk into this place when no one’s around and take everything. In theory, it’s bullshit. This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.”

Limpopo remembered Langerhans’s certainty, his low, intense ranting about the coming age of immortal zottas whose familial dynasties would be captained by undying tyrants.

That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens’; it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.

Talking about ‘taxpayers’ means that the state’s debt is to rich dudes, and anything it gives to kids or old people or sick people or disabled people is charity we should be grateful for, since none of those people are paying tax that justifies their rewards from Government Inc.

“Those people can be most easily rounded up and institutionalized. That’s why they can’t run away. It’s monstrous, but we’re talking about monstrous things.” “That’s creepy,” he said. “And cinematic. Do you really think zottas sit around a star chamber plotting how to separate the goats from the sheep?” “Of course not. Shit, if they did that, we could suicide-bomb the fuckers. I think this is an emergent outcome. It’s even more evil, because it exists in a zone of diffused responsibility: no one decides to imprison the poor in record numbers, it just happens as a consequence of tougher laws, less funding for legal aid, added expense in the appeals process... There’s no person, decision, or political process you can blame. It’s systemic.” “What’s the systemic outcome of being a walkaway, then?” “I don’t think anyone knows yet. It’s going to be fun finding out.”

that was the deal when you were a walkaway. Skin is skin – interesting, but everyone’s got some.

They ambled over, and as always happened in the baths, Limpopo found the stimulus had dissolved any sense of nudity. Even their eyes on her body didn’t awaken any feeling of nakedness. It was the psychological equivalent of the ringing in your ears after a long-humming refrigerator compressor shut down. The baseline hum of worry about her appearance, where she was hairy, what the hair looked like, where she had fat, where her bones protruded, where her skin was striated with stretch marks and where it was curdled with burn-scars, all ceased to matter.

They showered again in the communal antechamber, floatingly relaxed. Without saying a word – without it being overtly sexual – they scrubbed one another’s backs. Sexual or not, there was animal pleasure in being groomed by someone, and it deepened the feeling of sweet, tazzy decadence.

“Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, ‘the stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”

Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.

If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt – it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.” She shrugged. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”

Generosity is a folk tale about what happens when people look out for themselves. We’re supposed to ‘just know’ that selfishness is natural.

but being a walkaway is ultimately about treating everyone as family.”

“Okay, treating everyone like you’d want your family to treat you.” “Christianity, basically,” the sarcastic one said, making a cross of his body, drooping his head to one side, and rolling his eyes up. “Christianity if it had been conceived in material abundance,” Limpopo said. “You’re not the first to make the comparison. Plenty of these places have grad students – poli sci, soc, anthro – trying to figure out if we’re ‘post-scarcity Fabian socialists’ or ‘secular Christian communists,’ or what. Most are funded by private-sector spooks that want to know if we’re going to burn down their offices, and whether they can sell us anything. A third of them go walkaway. Meanwhile, we’re ready to do measurements and styles, right?”

They were still for a long while, fish tickling them. The fish made it weird. She and Etcetera were the main attractions at someone else’s orgy, their own contact saintly in its chastity. Their fingers moved in the tiniest of increments, spreading, entwining. It may have taken thirty minutes. Each of their hands was saying, “Is this okay?” and waiting for the other’s to move, “Yes, it’s okay,” before moving again. They were sending pulsed SYN/ACK/SYNACKs over a balky network.

The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That’s why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”

They took long walks, not talking, listening to birdsong and the crunch of their footsteps in the snow. There were deer in the woods, usually far away, but once, a doe came close enough to touch, stared at them with spellbinding animal frankness.

“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgment, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”

“I’ll think about it.” She knew he wouldn’t. The idea that there wouldn’t be leaders in the race to build a leaderless society offended him in ways he wouldn’t let himself understand.

Limpopo was proud of herself in that moment. She distinctly felt her mind split in two as she read the vicious attacks. One half, “Limbic Limpopo,” hyper-violent unfiltered id, snarled. It literally made her heart thud and her hands and jaws clench. When she consciously stopped it, she ached all down her neck. Limbic Limpopo wanted to kick Jackstraw in the balls. It wanted to wikify every vicious line and add [citation needed] tags to the insults, signposting them as indefensible ad hominems. Limbic Limpopo wanted to haul Jackstraw out of his bed –a bed that she had assembled and painted – and throw him out buck naked, locking the door and burning his stinky pack of gear.

Poor Jackstraw hadn’t known what hit him. Dare Snot was widely publicized at the B&B but Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand why you might use it, rather than just blamming out your Big Stupid Idea and trying to rally everyone to the barricades. There was a lot Jackstraw lacked the humility to understand. He was one of those people – almost all of them young men, though not every young man – who was so smart that he couldn’t figure out how stupid he was.

You got the world you hoped for or the world you feared – your hope or your fear made it so.

The look she got from the younger woman was so shrewd that she came clean. Or maybe it was the crack. “I’ll admit it. I felt the B&B was ‘mine,’ like my work on it entitled me to it. The truth is even if you’re right and I did more than others, that doesn’t mean I could have built it without them. The B&B is more than any one person could build, even in a lifetime. Building the B&B, running it, that’s a superhuman task, more than a single human could do. There are lots of ways to be superhuman. You can trick others into thinking that unless they do what you tell them, they won’t eat. You can cajole people into doing what you want by making them fear god or the cops, or making them feel guilty or angry. “The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.”

Bucket brigades embodied walkaway philosophy, more emblematic than the consensus wrangle in a circle-of-chairs. Iceweasel’d participated in some default brigades, moving feedstock around for Communist parties, but never any with the gusto of walkabout brigades. Bucket brigades only ask you to work as hard as you want – rush forward to get a new load and back to pass it off, or amble between them, or vary your speed. It didn’t matter – if you went faster, it meant the people on either side of you didn’t have to walk as far, but it didn’t require them to go faster or slower. If you slowed, everyone else stayed at the same speed. Bucket brigades were a system through which everyone could do whatever they wanted – within the system – however fast you wanted to go, everything you did helped and none of it slowed down anyone else.

“I’m not deterministic. Otherwise they wouldn’t have to do lookahead to keep me from losing my shit. I’m sensitive to initial parameters and prone to singularities. So are you. That’s what defines us. Or you. I don’t know what defines me anymore. Oh.” There was another blink-cursored pause. None of this had been in any of the upload dramas Iceweasel watched. She’d gone through a phase, dumb shows about people who put their brains into computers and became multifarious – “Multifarious” was the name of the most successful one, and it had sold to some zotta for like nine billion dollars, with merchandising rights – but she’d gotten sick of them.

“I want a coffium, but I want to sleep. Running on coffium. What was I saying? Immortality. It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power-broker when you know you’ve got eighty years on the planet, and so does he. Doesn’t matter how rich a fucker is, how many livers he buys on the black market, all it’s going to buy him is ten or twenty years. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of, but they get it forever...”

The cursor blinked. Iceweasel was convinced this was for dramatic effect. Dis could scan the logs of all their conversations in an eye-blink, but when something emotionally freighted happened, there was a blinking delay. Iceweasel thought it was Dis’s lack of a body’s expressive range. She found herself interpreting the blinks – this one is a raised eyebrow, that one was a genuine shock, the third was a sarcastic oh-noes face. There were pictures of Dis’s human face in all these expressions and more – stern and lined, with dancing blue eyes; thick, mobile eyebrows and a hatchet-blade nose – but when Iceweasel thought of Dis’s face, she thought of that cursor, blink, blink, blink.

“Okay,” Dis said. “Raised by zottas, so you got a dose of the psychopath’s ability to make people want to like you even as you’re screwing them.” Back at the B&B, Iceweasel became expert at deflating criticism based on her rich parents. Dis treated it with the matter-of-fact brusqueness with which she conquered every subject. Nothing Iceweasel said made a dent in Dis’s rhetoric. “You hate it when I talk about your money,” Dis said. The sim had lots of cameras, and cycles to evaluate their data.

Not having a leader made this sort of thing difficult. It was the inverse bystander effect, the first aid puzzle where the more people there when someone collapsed, the less likely that anyone offered assistance. Surely someone else is more qualified. I should just stand ready to help when the best-qualified person steps forward?

She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command – their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.

“We’re all thinking about our dead. We left dead behind in the fire. That crowd in there has the fever. That Tam didn’t have a chance. No way they were going to slow down, certainly not because they might be remembered as monsters by default. When they think about how the future will remember them, they’re imagining being there in person to defend their honor.”