Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“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 orbit.”

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.

The problem is money. Money only works if there isn’t enough to go around—if you’re convinced scarce things are fairly allocated—but it’s the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.”

“I’ve met a lot of cops with bullshit theories about crime and human nature. Generals clearly have batshit opinions about the gravity of ending human life. Every priest, rabbi, and imam seems to know a lot about an invisible, all-powerful being who appears be a fairy tale. So yeah, having a lot of money probably does disqualify you from knowing a single fucking thing about it.”

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 it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”

Everyone talked about special snowflakes, and it was the kind of thing that was an insult from a stranger but not from a friend. You weren’t supposed to need to be a special snowflake, because the objective reality was that, important as you were to yourself and the people immediately around you, it was unlikely that anything you did was irreplaceable. As soon as you classed yourself as a special snowflake, you headed for the self-delusional belief that you should have more than everyone else, because your snowflakiness demanded it.

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.

“You know that they’re just psychos, right? Not geniuses. They’ve got no special talent for making the world perfect, or figuring out the future. They’re just good at game-rigging. Con artists.” She thought about her dad, school friends, their pretense to noblesse oblige and refinement. How they’d herd-mentality into some fad but pretend it was a newly discovered, ageless universal truth—not product cooked up by one of their own to sell to the rest. That was the amazing thing: they were in the business of making people feel envy and desperation over material things and exclusive experiences, but were just as susceptible to envy and desperation.

Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. 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.

In default, unwanted humans work their asses off, scrounging money, scrounging shitty-ass jobs, getting their kids using interface surfaces for whatever learnware they can find and trust. The one thing they’re not allowed to do is put all those labor hours into growing food for themselves, or building themselves a permanent home, or building community centers. Because the system that organizes the land where the homes and the food and the community center would go has decided that these are better used for other purposes.”

She’d had to do dinners with them, fund-raisers, spent hundreds of hours engaged in high-stakes small talk, under her department head’s watchful eye. They weren’t unpleasant to talk to—many were witty conversationalists. But there was something … off about them. It wasn’t until she’d had her crisis of conscience and walked away from Cornell that she’d been able to name it: they had no impostor syndrome. There wasn’t a hint of doubt that every privilege they enjoyed was deserved. The world was correctly stacked. The important people were at the top. The unimportant were at the bottom.

“We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”