Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

belligerent.

“Only kleptocrats use terms like ‘temporary inefficiencies’ for wasteful abominations like that Muji factory.”

“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 patted the wall with a perverse, unacceptable proprietary air.

That’s what walkaway is – not walking out on ‘society,’ but acknowledging that in zottaworld, we’re problems to be solved, not citizens. 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.

The opportunity cost of not having the right salad fork when she wanted a salad was lower than the opportunity cost of not being able to go where she wanted to go, without hauling mountains of pain-in-the-back stuff.

“That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. 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.”

“Gallows humor,”

Your people are all fighting self-serving bullshit, the root of all evil. There’s no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you’re a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who’d do your job every bit as well. Especially when you’re supporting the one person who really can’t be replaced.”

My dad used it to explain paying his workers as little as he could get away with, while taking as much pay as he could get away with. I told him: he might have an ‘indispensable’ skill for running the business, but he couldn’t do it himself. The reason everyone else shows up to help him isn’t because of his magic ‘indispensable’ skill, either. It’s because they need money, and he has

“You’re assuming that because zottas talk about meritocracy, and because they’re full of shit, merit must be full of shit. It’s like astrology and astronomy: astrology talks about orbital mechanics and so does astronomy. But astronomers talk about orbital mechanics because they’ve systematically observed the sky, built falsifiable hypotheses from observations, and proceeded from there....

you proved I was a plow horse whose poor lips had been scarred by the bit in my teeth as I pulled a cart for the man with the whip and the feedbag.

Limpopo sent around this meta-analysis from the Walkaway Journal of Organizational Studies that compared the productivity of programmers. It broke out the work programmers did as individuals and inside groups. It found that even though there were programmers who could produce code that was a hundred times better than the median – one percent as many bugs, one hundred times more memory efficiency – that this kind of insane virtuosity was only weakly correlated with achievement in groups.”

insouciant messiness,

I’ve got their private messages, I can do adversarial stylometry to impersonate them in text and voice – we’ve done work on voices.”

“Weird isn’t the opposite of sensible. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

“We’ve sat through this movie before.” Kersplebedeb touched his nose in a gesture Etcetera eventually recognized as meaning “on the nose.” “In the nineteenth century, the rich had the same pattern – one kid from each family got the name and the estate, everyone else became a comfortable nonentity, or, if they were very lucky, got married off to someone else’s number one. Then came the colonial era, new worlds to plunder, and whoosh, geometric expansion for two generations, long enough that there was no one alive who could remember a time when the dynasty was a straight line instead of an expanding tree of fortunes.” “What happened?” “They ran out of colonies,” Kersplebedeb said. “What happened when they ran out?” “Oh!” Kersplebedeb took a long drink. Sighed as his adam’s apple worked. “World War One broke out. They turned on each other.”

she got squirrelly.

We could constrain our sims to spaces where we value nature so much that we prefer to be disembodied and not a force for its destruction, to experiencing it directly.”

“Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.”

“The universe hates us. We are temporary violations of the second law of thermodynamics. We push entropy off to the edges, but it’s patient, and it builds, and when we take our eyes off of it, kerblam, it’s back with a vengeance.

The smell suffused

She gulped, sobbed, then brayed,

“So what we’re doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It’s all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That’s realism, but everyone whose hopes weren’t dashed started off by having hope. Hope’s the price of admission. It’s still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it’s our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can’t win, and whose winners – the zottas – get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope’s what we’re doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”

“WE ARE WELL and truly at vuko jebina now,” Tam declared. She’d learned the phrase from Kersplebedeb, who said it was Serbian for deepest boonies, literally, “where wolves fuck.” Tam loved this phrase, to no one’s surprise.

She had to connive to stay off meds,

She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts.

involuntary slapstick

and then they send you home with a zombinol pump in your appendix and your smile stapled on with sutures.”

“Yes-no. Map the social graph, find the leaders, dox them, discredit them. Kidnap if you have to, but that makes martyrs, so not so much. Better to make them busy with fighting fires. I know other contractors who’ll crawl a culture’s chat-channels and boards and model the weak points, find the old fights that still simmer, create strategy for flaring them. So easy to infiltrate. Once they think they’re infiltrated, they point at one another, wondering who is a mole and who is true. It’s neater than bodies swinging from lamp posts. Tidier. Not so many flies.”

“‘By coming here, we make ourselves independent. We’re like the tribal elders in the north pole, who’d go out on ice floes when they couldn’t hunt anymore, getting out of the way and not being a burden on the productive ones.’

There’s two ways of thinking about it: either the squeaky wheel gets the grease or the nail that stands up highest gets hammered.

keeled over.

sheened to the waist with water.

lush curls of hair on her legs and tufts peeking out of her armpits.

Reading her notes was like chewing glass.

encapsulating the data and preflighting it to see whether it was likely to run in a given sim. It’s a confidence measure for every brain

“Of course like me. What was my job, if not keeping rich people from being pitchforked by poor people? When technology made surveillance cheaper, calculus changed. They could hold onto more money, dispense with pretense that being rich was from doing well, go back to idea of divine right of kings, people born rich because fate favors them. It was more cost-effective to control people who didn’t like this idea with technology than giving crumbs to support the fairy tale of rewards for virtue.

money is a measure of worthiness, the more money, the more worthy. They say, ‘it’s a way of keeping score.’

She’d promised herself she’d never end up like that, decades of aging, falling apart in the company of a silent, farting lump of a man, racing to see who reached the grave first.

if he wanted to feel dysphoria, he should try being born trans,