Walkaway: A Novel

Walkaway has been described as a utopian novel in a rising sea of dystopias, although I'd say it's actually both utopian and dystopian.It takes place in the 'middle distance' of the future; cars are still a thing, and they have wheels that roll on the ground, space travel isn't really a thing yet - humankind is essentially still bound to the Earth. But number of current-day issues have reached their logical culmination; from everyday technology (drones everywhere, 'interface surfaces' stuck to things instead of touch-screen smartphones, 3D printing 'fabs' are ubiquitous, capable of printing machines, clothing, and food) to the Big Issues of our time: Social inequality is extreme, with the overwhelming majority of the populous trapped in a struggling middle-class of insecure wage slaves, ruled by a tiny over-class of 'zottas', the hyper-rich owners of everything, from real estate, through business and roboticized industry, to intellectual property -  Capital in the Twenty-First Century  taken at its word. In addition, climate change has raised sea levels, flooding major cities, and pollution has rendered others unliveably toxic - great swathes of civilisation lie abandoned and in ruins.At this intersection of technological advancement an eco-social catastrophe, three initial protagonists, Hubert, Seth, and Natalie decide to become "walkaways", joining a 'post scarcity' movement that rejects the premises of the materialistic, hierarchical, and clearly unsustainable "default" civilisation they find themselves in, and, rather than resisting or trying to change it, they simply 'walk away', leaving behind not only possessions, but the very idea of ownership, money, work, and social status. The walkaways have no formal structure or organisation, are simply a collection of people living ideologically and literally outside normal civilisation. They occupy abandoned land and, using 'fabbers', FAQs, and software, they construct machines, buildings, and everything else they need, using 'feedstock' scavenged from the surroundings. Designs and systems are open-sourced and constantly improved on by whoever wants to work on them. Similarly work that needs doing on their pop-up settlements, from construction to food preparation, is picked up by whoever wants to do it, helped and highlighted by ubiquitous smart technology, all powered by wind and sun.The trio wander and learn the walkaway terrain, make friends and lovers, with imminent disaster always looming - from internal philosophical conflicts and power struggles to increasingly lethal incursions from the "default" world, which sees the walkaways as more and more of an existential threat. They discover a community of scientists working on the ultimate act of walking away - the abandonment of biological dependency; developing the means to 'scan' the important parts of a person from their neurological structure, and 'sim' them on a digital substrate - i.e. upload minds into computers, making not only material but also temporal scarcity irrelevant. The walkaways want to eliminate death, and they want to open-source it so that everyone, not just the zotta overlords, can enjoy the benefits of disembodied immortality.As so much good science fiction is, the novel is essentially a vehicle for Doctorow to explore philosophical ideas and take them to logical conclusions. Much of the dialog is essentially 'Socratic'; two or more characters ostensibly 'arguing' about something, as a means for the author to explore a particular set of opposing philosophical positions. The topics are wide-ranging. 'Open-source' development and organisation feature large in the walkaway world; putative meritocracies are examined through a couple of different lenses: the zotta's, personified by Natalie's father, believe themselves to have floated to the top of society by their own genius, rather than their privilege, but also the walkaways themselves debate about their own social organisation, and whether work gets done more efficiently when 'merit' is rewarded by formal kudos or by the privilege of having exclusive right to particular work. In a nice twist, those with merit are labelled 'snowflakes', an epithet currently reserved for 'bleeding-heart liberals' by the 'right' in the real world, but used in Doctorow's world to apply to decidedly right-wing capitalists and others who feel their talents grant them divine rights not shared with commoners.The 'mind-brain' problem (complete with oriental room) is given an airing, along with some discussion of the possible socio-political consequences of widespread immortality. Interestingly, although the scientist walkaways predict some specific outcomes of mind-uploading, they don't actually play out that way in the novel (although the reasons for this aren't directly explicated).However, rather than have the characters duke out all the issues raised, some of them are simply 'givens' in the walkaway universe; economic inequality, the militarised police state, anthropogenic environmental catastrophe. The injustices of these have terrible consequences in the story, but they're not 'solved' by it, and this is the dystopian facet of the work. Its utopia, on the other hand, is represented by ascent of the walkways, from an underground, marginal movement, through increasing persecution as their numbers and relevance swell, to finally (and arguably too sweetly) they become the 'default' themselves, by sheer force of numbers (and of course the efficiency, justice, and 'rightness' of their way of life).Along the way, there are lots of opportunities to explore both neat and terrible technologies, including realistic extrapolations from the state of the art, and actually real (if currently less ubiquitous) things, some interesting uses, and drawbacks to, cryptography, changes of social norms around drugs, sexuality and gender, and race (it's a surprisingly long way into the story before we find out that one of the protagonists is black, and the relative irrelevance of this fact is nicely achieved). And Doctorow gets to air many of his memes - individuals failing to recycle their way out of global warming; only those who tread water against all odds suriving shipwrecks, economists being to one-percenters as court astrologers were to kings...For me it was just the right mix of extrapolation from the familiar with some new ideas; allowing this particular reader to both feel like he knows some things, and learnt some things too. I imagine it would be a vindicating romp for faraday-cage-wallet-toting, gait-altering, cyanogenmod-installing, cypherpunk githubbers everywhere.As other reviewers of other novels have put it, "the only thing wrong with it is that you can't put it down". Not even if it's 3am. This is why I shouldn't read novels - they're a recipe for sleep deprivation.

Here’s the skinny on Walkaway so I don’t have to write a book report:From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza—known to his friends as Hubert, Etc—was too old to be at that Communist party.But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be—except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society—and walk away.After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter—from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system.It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it’s war – a war that will turn the world upside down.Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.“If you teach a generation of people they have to step on their neighbors to survive, setting up a society where everyone who doesn’t gets stepped on, the kids of those people will learn to betray their neighbors from the cradle.”I always hope that the revolution will come before we create another few generations of self-centered bastards who only think about money, career, and thirsting after all the crap they can’t afford. I know it probably won’t happen—the revolution, that is—but like I said, I’m hopeful.With his latest novel, Walkaway, Cory Doctrow poops in my cereal regarding those hopes, and instead of a early 21st century revolution, he offers up a near future where the old mighty dollar is still king and the 1% still rules with an iron fist. Zottas—AKA, the one percent of Doctrow’s mid-century—control entire governments and blood thirsty private armies to maintain the status quo and protect their family fortunes. In this world, over half of the population is unemployed, you must take out loans to go to high school, and those individuals who are stuck barely existing on Universal Incomes spend their days in a narcotic haze and—generally speaking—could care less about the world. They are trapped in their circumstances and see little or no reason to change (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).And then, there are the Walkaways.Walkaways are essentially hippies and believe all the hippie nonsense of turning on, dropping out, and creating a society which exists outside of the Zottas realm of influence. The major difference between the hippies and Walkaways is that Walkaways live a world where 3D printing is cheap and efficient, and the world is overflowing with abandon buildings—including dozens of cities that have gone belly up—and other resources that can be repurposed and reused as raw materials. Also, much like the hippies, Walkaways are a fringe element who don’t attract the attention for the most part. At least until they figure out how to duplicate human consciousness and transferring it to a computer network. Yeah, the Walkaways discover immortality and start attracting all the wrong kinds of attention.Walkaway is a fierce, funny novel of ideas. Doctrow seems capable of writing on any subject—from sexuality-to-the definition of consciousness—and somehow manages to cram dozens of post-capitalist philosophies into the novel. This alone makes Walkaway worth reading. However, the bad news is, the plotlines run a little thin amid these next level ideas, which wouldn’t be so bad if the grand thoughts advanced the various plots. And when Doctrow runs out of plot and ideas, he throws in graphic sex scenes. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with sex scenes, particularly in the manner that Doctrow uses them, which demonstrates the sexual freedom of modern North America. But, sometimes too much is just too much, and the sex almost becomes robotic and functions as throwaway scenes more than anything else.Now this necessarily doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend Walkaway. The novel’s cutting humor and bold futurism make it more than a worthwhile read. Just be aware there’s A LOT of mental masturbation going on in its pages, and there’s a better chance than not that you’re going to get a little sticky.

I suspect it’s likely you haven’t read Solnit or Graeber or spent many hours of your time thinking how we could be if we walked away from our current dysfunctional system.So it’s rather wonderful that Cory Doctorow has done all of this - and more. This is a brilliantly woven future fiction with living, vibrant, engaging people (and one of the very, very few lesbian relationships written by a man that feels real. I could list the other male authors capable of this on the fingers of one foot) - it’s a thriller, it’s a work of serious literary merit and in a sane world, it would win the Booker. But above all of these, it’s a thought experiment on how we could live if we woke up from the nightmare of our current dysfunctional system. You’d want to read it for any one of these reasons. Put them all together and it’s absolutely mandatory for anyone who wants to live in a future where we a) don’t dive off the cliff into extinction and b) actually enjoy the lives we lead.

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.

In a near future world, all the world’s resources are controlled by the super-rich (zottas); with 3D printers able to produce anything at all and all the resources controlled by the rich, ordinary people are redundant, and doomed to a life of debt and struggling to get by. Until people start to just walkaway; setting up their own communities with completely different rules. At first, this is merely a thorn in the side of the powers that be; but when scientists at Walkaway University discover how to backup and restore a human psyche, it becomes serious.I love this book. It poses so many questions about the way we should live our lives, and how we should challenge current rules about property and ownership. It does get a bit bogged down in the philosophical discussions at times – but they are necessary to get the point across and mostly Doctorow manages it without destroying the plot line too much. A more important flaw is the retreat into “tech speak” gobbledegook – which is really unnecessary.However, this will still be one of my favourite books this year.

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.

The central theme seems to be that 3D printers could lead to a gift economy if only the profit-driven corporations would remove their sticky hands from control of them. Only thing is, there's barely a mention of feedstocks or energy sources –– it all seems to appear from nowhere... Then I noticed in the book description this is supposed to happen in a climate-changed world, but again, there's hardly any evidence for this in the narrative. Never mind, it's a fun read and an unusual topic, although the possible 'gift' world that's presented doesn't come across as particularly attractive by the time you get to the end of the book!