Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“trustafarian” and “fauxhemian”

That’s what it comes down to. It’s a big world, and most of it is fungible.

With this global audience kibitzing and sniping, Limpopo tore Jackstraw a comprehensive new asshole. She called him on every crumb of bullshit, found crashed projects where gamification had run wild, so financialized that every incentive distorted into titanic frauds that literally left structures in ruins, rotten to the mortar. They were existence proof of the terribleness of his cherished ideas. She pointed out that getting humans to “do the right thing” by incentivizing them to vanquish one another was stupid. She found videos of Skinner-trained pigeons who’d been taught to play piano through food-pellet training and pointed out that everyone who liked this envisioned himself as the experimenter—not the pigeon. It got ugly. She’d bruised his ego, met his condescension by treating him to a slice of the assholery he’d directed her way. He lost it. Comprehensively bested, he went negative. The problem was Limpopo’s vagina. It made her unable to understand the competitive fire that was the true motive force that kept humans going. Competition carved the gazelle as a perfect complement to the leopard. Competition whittled the fangs and leaps of the leopard into the gazelle’s inverse. Competition sorted the performers from the takers. It let the visionaries whittle their project into a masterpiece.

We both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.”