Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
gutenberg.org
gutenberg.org
It was at least the first time I read it.
Also, I think the “comm” described in Eastern Standard Tribe is the first time a smartphone was practically described with functions we had later in the iPhone (payment, maps, pervasive information, camera, image and video sharing). I wondered if phone designers ever drew inspiration from Doctorow’s specific books.
What I mean to say is, trust-fund kids will still be alive and well in some form in a post dollar world.
Whuffie seems like it would open up that definition to a wide range of careers and interests (artists for example), but would still suffer from some of the nepotism after the initial uptake of the value system.
I'm also wondering how one could redistribute Whuffie in a charitable kind of way
I don’t think whuffie automatically make things more meritocratic. Maybe it would just go in the other direction where things would be more about what people like socially…so popularity. So if anything it’ll be more political and cliquey.
Regarding your “nepotism”, I think it would just reflect human nature in the sense that even now children of respected parents —say, the child of a respected physicist—is afforded a sort of social standing and goodwill, and kind appraisal, because of how people appreciate their parents. But if the child is bad then that won’t be extended and it won’t save them. Similarly, if the child acts in a way that people see as against the good legacy of their parents, it wouldn’t save them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong looking kindly at the children of people you like. But I don’t think that’s really the kind of nepotism that you’re against, is it? I don’t know tho.
I know there’s other kinds of nepotism based on supposed influence or whatever, which I think is more what you’re talking about here, but I think they may be may be less under that reputation system. The example you cite of the guy’s girlfriend (I think)—a child of prominent Imagineers-I imagine her whuffie accrued simply because she wasn’t all bad and people respected her parents. It wasn’t the pernicious kind that I think you’re so against. So perhaps there’s a distinction you’re interested in considering more then.
Anyway, those collectively form part of what are just the negative side. Which I think would be less commanding and influential than the positive side.
I definitely think there is a positive side of whuffie where if you’re doing good work, which people respect, that isn’t in the current system necessarily remunerative—like in the story, the guy is earning lots of whuffie from being a missionary and helping people out— then you’ll always have more than enough. Where is in the current system you wouldn’t.
And I think that positive benefit far outweighs any amplification of already pre-existing negative human traits.
But of course I haven’t yet lived long enough in this particular version of the future so I could be wrong. Maybe it will turn out to be disaster or maybe we’ll all end up hating it.
But I think it’ll be fun to try, don’t you?
as long as it’s not administered by some centrally controlled government or state, where it could be tied to how compliant you are with not spouting “dangerous misinformation” or whatever the heresy of the day is deemed. Haha
Minor correction: influential good parents. good is the important thing here otherwise there’s more suffering than opportunities, which only hampers not supports. Not to wish poverty, but there can be goodness and even less suffering in relative poverty. It all comes down to how good people choose to be.
I'm sure at least somebody was thinking about that because Doctorow's books are popular, but all that specifically happened is vendors discovered if you tell people that the handheld computer you're selling them is a "phone" they'll buy that, and then of course they actually wanted a handheld computer, so they'll keep buying them even as actually they now realise they don't want to make telephone calls.
Both Android Inc. and the Apple secret project to develop their smartphone pre-date Doctorow's novel. Which doesn't mean he knew about them, but it means he couldn't have inspired these efforts.
The handheld computers aren't specifically doing those things, they can just do whatever, because they're a general purpose computer, and the features you listed are among the popular things to use that for. I guess maybe they needn't have happened to have cameras, but given how cheap that is to do it's not a big surprise.
The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age is maybe more directly inspirational, various technologies are clearly inspired by the Primer which substantially pre-dates them because it's from a time (the mid-1990s) where many people don't have Internet access.
So much this.
And we expected tablets to become more popular, but instead phones grew to the max screen size that still allows pocketability.
The book was written when slashdot.org was really big, it basically invented the "Karma" system. There was this idea of user generated and curated content being a bright happy new future, and DAOITMK basically shot that idea dead by showing all the faults such a system would have. Of course subsequent sites (re: reddit) have exhibited all of those flaws. HN stays reasonable because of the mods, but even so the culture is a lot different here than it was 10 years ago. When I first created an account here short comments almost always got downvoted, posters who didn't have anything substantial learned to stay quiet.
(The downside of that culture is people learned to type intelligent sounding long form fluff!)
Slashdot did for a long time - though there were caps on it. I used to see if I could get it to the top limit, down to the bottom limit and back to the top in a single day. It wasn't really all that difficult.
And kuro5hin had particular flavors and you could sort in thread but I don’t think you could see if particular flavors summed for a particular person.
The book itself is great too. I still think about a lot of the concepts to this day.
Was a small screen, but workable at the time.
I used iPad note format to read my copy.
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Her reaction was "Wow, I can't believe they just got rid of the keyboard, this is gonna be huge".
E.g. here is Content...
https://craphound.com/content/download/
DAOITMK is here:
It looks like there was briefly a giveaway of Walkaway and as a result it's on the Internet Archive, but I've not checked it.
Curious though, is there a way to get it on an iPhone in the built in Books app?
I think the point was more about the kind of social credit system, in that sense it seemed not to be able to decide if it was depicting a utopia or dystopia. But please tell me if I'm way off, interested in hearing what people felt about this book.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8086
Which gives you different formats, and links to the author's other works.
That's why I posted this link not another one.
That idea floated to the top of my my a couple of times during the COVID crisis when I was feeling misanthropic.
I, too, thought about this quite a bit when observing the anti-vax movement.
I read “about this book” but it just wanted to tell me about copyright and publication details.
But that tagline applies to nearly everything Doctorow's written.
Really a good study in understanding that just growing till we produce "enough" is not going to solve critical human problems. There will still be serious conflict, and the solutions to those are not economic growth.
And the current season of Adventure time which is set in an alternative future Disneyworld.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20716878 - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
Down and out in the magic kingdom – A tale of software consulting in the midwest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11595120 - April 2016 (126 comments)
Edit: neither link are about the book.