Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“We don’t do barter. This is gifts, the gift economy. Everything freely given, nothing sought in return.”

We’re playing a different game.” “What’s that?” “Post-scarcity,” said with near-religious solemnity.

Money only works if there isn’t enough to go around—

If you’re doing something for reward, it’s an investment, not a gift.

Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something.

“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.

Owning something that isn’t fungible means that you’ve got to make sure someone else doesn’t take it. Once you let go of that, everything gets easier.”

It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”

“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.

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.

“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too.

“Piss clear.” It was a walkaway benediction, especially in nomadic mode. It was polite to offer unsolicited opinions on your neighbor’s urine. Clear was the goal. Anything darker than a daffodil was grounds for having water forced upon you.

“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.”

There’s more people than ever who don’t have any love for the way things are. Every one of them would happily jettison everything they think of as normal for the chance to do something weird that might be better.”

plural of anecdote is not fact.

We care about Earth and the things that live here because we coevolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years’ worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place.

Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern-matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.