Walkaway Audio CD – Unabridged, 23 May 2017

Ok, I'm off. Who's coming with? I'm going to follow Cory into the wilderness, ride my bike until I run up against a carnival or a ravine or a stationary friend, and then abandon it to await its next (temporary) owner. I'll build or borrow another when I need it.We have, or _could have_, if the zottas would stop clinging on, all the preconditions for abundance. ("Zottas" are the zotta-rich, the destination 2017's precious bus full of billionaires who currently own half the world's wealth are heading in.) So why not just walk away, take the tech we need to start again in abandoned spaces, and start afresh?As always Cory creates a completely believable world just over the far edge of what is in sight on the technology horizon, and uses it (like Ursula le Guin, or Kim Stanley Robinson) to expose the structures and fault-lines of our tired and unstable social system. He doesn't shy from the huge barriers to positive change that hold us back, but neither is he scared to Think Big and to draw a better future in bold brush strokes that catch at the heart strings and raise the pulse.Why do we need greed? Why do we tolerate riches in our increasingly finite world? It isn't where we came from, social and collaborative animals that we are. As one character says to a zotta:“We’re not making a world without greed... 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.”If I had to name a disagreement with this world view? I don't think that the core of the problem we face is rich people. Rich people are a massive drain on our resources, and we need to guide them back into the human race one day, but by themselves they don't add up to the vastness of insanity that is driving us over the lip of our species' personal lemming cliff into the abyss. Charlie Marx wrote about it in 1844: the key problem is how vast chunks of the results of past labour has become divorced -- "alienated" -- from its creators and turned into a self-perpetuating set of mega-corporations whose mission is the psychopathic pursuit of profit and growth beyond all reason. (See Bakan's The Corporation for a law professor's view of how that happened.)But hey -- we need every glimpse into possible utopias we can find in these depressing times. Cory's book brings those possibilities closer, and I can think of no greater compliment!Buy it.

This is very much an ‘ideas’ book. It tries to extrapolate how a world based on ever-increasing inequality might develop and, in doing so, reaches some striking conclusions. Chief among these is the idea that, in a winner-takes-all, hyper capitalist world the ‘losers’ will eventually opt-out completely and attempt to set up totally separate societies that are fairer in terms of equality and government. Of course, this isn’t a new concept – parts of it can be traced back to Sir Thomas More’s 16th century book Utopia and perhaps even further back to Plato’s Republic. However, it merits revisiting in view of current technological advances, notably in energy generation, new materials, and IT. Collectively, these advances suggest that it will become increasingly easy to set up alternative societies without sacrificing many of capitalism’s advantages. Whether these societies would develop to be better than what we already have is an open question. Certainly, this book glosses over awkward questions about how such societies would deal with people who commit serious crimes.‘Walkabout’ is not an easy read. Its prose style is pretty clunky in places and some of the invented sci-fi jargon requires quite a bit of decoding. However, I liked the use of words like ‘zotta’ to describe people who are so rich that they make billionaires look like paupers. Presumably, ‘zotta’ is a combination of the decimal prefixes ‘zetta’ (10^21) and ‘yotta’ (10^24). More importantly, the sometimes awkward style is totally forgivable in view of the many original ideas contained in the book. Perhaps the most interesting are riffs on the idea that it might one day be possible to scan a person’s brain and capture consciousness in computer software (‘I’m inside a box’). I hadn’t considered the possibility that this could create a situation where someone could exist in human form (a ‘meat-person’) but at the same time be recapitulated in software. Unlike time travel, which creates logical paradoxes such as going back in time to kill your father, it would be entirely plausible for an individual in conventional human form to have a conversation with their software equivalent. This raises interesting questions about individuality and what it is to be human.Given Cory Doctorow's background, the extrapolation of trends associated with informatics are very well handled (at least to me, as a non-expert). However, I was less convinced by his ideas about how advances in medicine may play out. For example, it seems odd that a society that can in effect put brains in boxes and keep them functional, can't tackle tissue regeneration and aging..

Well, I found that a really good read.I'm not sure that I can go with the *detail* of the story, perhaps because I'm not sure if the technology will be available "whenever" to, say, fabricate better fabricators -- though I'm sure scavenging would be a viable option -- or whether we'd have to reinvent the loo roll, the toothbrush, and dry stone walling. There is a helluva lot of necessary infrastructure behind even moderately-complex electronics these days, and if that was compromised, we may find the whole house of cards come tumbling down.Despite decades working with IT, I must admit that the old romantic in me still has visions of hippy communes and dreams of the sort of Shangri-La, away from everything in the Himalayas (or at least the foothills), found in James Hilton's "Lost Horizon".Nevertheless, looking at the overall *pattern* of the story, I really can appreciate the realism, and if the opportunity arose I would be sorely tempted to "walkaway".One thing that did throw me a little, on occasion, was working out who was speaking, without attributions like "Natalie said." Non-technical readers might also be scratching their head wondering what words like "pwned" mean, but that's not much of an issue, and definitions are only a click away.As I say, "Walkaway" is well-worth reading ... and thinking long and hard about.