Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few fire-fighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”