Charlie “Hugo Nominee” Stross and I are having a two-week-long discussion on the WELL’s public Inkwell.vue conference, in honor of the publication of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. You can join in by emailing Charlie.

Social incentives are the most powerful forces in our world — the reason
you can’t wear your underwear on your head is because of disapprobation. The
most disruptive thing about the Internet is its ability to locate you in
homogenous communities that embrace the same values as you, so that there’s
no dialectic in socail pressure: IOW, you can spend all your time in
alt.underwear.on.my.head and never get the funny looks that would cause you
to reconsider your fashion choices. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing
(except when it is, i.e., alt.big.nazi.idiots), but it is a powerfully
disruptive thing.

Sidebar: in our second collaboration, “Flowers from Alice,” we deal with
uploaded “people’ who can instantiate many copies of themselves in parallel.
One of the interesting things about this is that it suggests that attention
isn’t necessarily a scarce resource — if you need to do two things at once,
you just make another copy to do it…

I did an Internet radio interview about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, with a program called “The Dragon Page.” It airs Thursday — check it out!

I don’t much like writing multiple stories set in the same universe — making up the mcguffin is half the fun. But in the case of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I’ve written one other story set in the Bitchun Society. The story’s called “Truncat,” and I wrote it for an anthology called BAKKAnthology, which is filled with fiction by writers who’ve worked at Toronto’s Bakka, one of the oldest science fiction bookstores in the world. The edition was limited to 400 copies, and it’s signed by all the contributors. There are only 30 copies left, and there will be no reprint of the anthology. If you want to lay hands on the only sequel to the novel that I’m ever likely to write, you can drop Bakka a line (email or 416.963.9993) and mail-order a copy.

First, Adrian got on the subway, opting to go deadhead for a faster load-time. He stepped into the sparkling cryochamber at the Downsview station, conjured a HUD against his field of vision, and granted permission to be frozen. The next thing he knew, he was thawing out on the Union station platform, pressed belly-to-butt with a couple thousand other commuters who’d opted for the same treatment. In India, where this kind of convenience-freezing was even more prevalent, Mohan had observed that the reason their generation was small for their age was that they spent so much of it in cold-sleep, conserving space in transit. Adrian might’ve been 18, but he figured that he’d spent at least one cumulative year frozen.

Adrian shuffled through the crowd and up the stairs to the steady-temp surface, peeling off the routing sticker that the cryo had stuck to his shoulder. His tummy was still rumbling, so he popped the sticker in his mouth and chewed until it had dissolved, savoring the steaky flavor and the burst of calories. The guy who’d figured out edible routing tags had Whuffie to spare: Adrian’s mom knew someone who knew someone who knew him, and she said that he had an entire subaquatic palace to rattle around in.

A clamor of swallowing noises filled his ears, as the crowd subvocalized, carrying on conversations with distant friends. Adrian basked in the warm, simulated sunlight emanating from the dome overhead. He was going outside of the dome in a matter of minutes, and he had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to be plenty cold soon enough. He patted his little rucksack and made sure he had his cowl with him.

Dylan Tweney has posted the unedited transcript of the interview he did for his piece on SFGate.com.

And, there’s this kind of, you know, tiresome, retrograde, dreary meme that says we have to wait for screens to get sharper, we need digital ink, you need to be able to carry it around, you need to be able to take it to the bathtub, blah blah blah – And to me it sounds like priests sitting around holding a Gutenberg bible, and saying, How can the word of God possibly leap off one of these louche and dirty pages from Mister Gutenberg’s press, you know, that the true word of God can only be carried when it’s hand-illuminated on fetal calf skin by a monk who’s devoted his life to understanding the word. And you know, I think that it’s time for a Protestant Reformation. It’s true that you can’t take an e-book into the tub, and it doesn’t smell nice, and all the rest of it, but on the other hand, you can carry around 40,000 of them on a drive the size of credit card. As someone who owns around 20,000 books and who has put them in boxes and moved them more than once, I can tell you that this is a serious advantage. Right? The other thing is that data is easy to back up. I can back up off site, over night, electronically, to a server in Australia that will survive even if the hemisphere goes, whereas backing up books – I mean, books are printed on substrate that is so fragile that it burns when it comes into contact with oxygen. We actually use that substrate to wipe our asses with. This is not robust, archival material. This is the very definition of ephemeral, that literature is a book written on toilet paper.

BookSlicer — a service that slices up electronic books into manageable little daily chunks and emails them to readers — is serializing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom through February by email. Click here to sign up.

Danny O’Brien’s latest column (login: anonymous/anonymous) in the Sunday Times of London is all about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it’s swell.

The novel takes a fast-paced gallop through a net-inspired utopia, where the only scarce commodity is your peer’s opinion of you, and where competitive acts of generosity are perpetrated by reputation-seeking gangs of marauding altruists. The novel represents such a pleasant ideal that you are happy to buy the hardback afterwards, if only as a physical memento of your online read.

Doctorow’s success must confuse the extremist wing of modern publishing, which constantly tells us how copies of works online are strangling new artists in the crib, while wrapping its own e-books and CDs in endless layers of copy protection.

If Magic Kingdom makes a mark, it will stand as proof that you do not have to treat your readers like suspected pirates to get what you want: a reputation, a living and an audience for your ideas.

Zach at neuroatomik is posting Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on his blog, one chapter at a time, with spaces at the end of each post to discuss the chapter.

This morning’s edition of SFGate is running an interview with me about this book:

I wanted to clarify my own thinking about what a non-scarce economics looks like. Keynes and Marx and the great economic thinkers are all concerned with the management of resources that are scarce. If it’s valuable, it needs to be managed, because the supply of it will dwindle. You need to avert the tragedy of the commons [the notion that self-interested individuals, such as sheepherders, will always use as much of a common resource as possible, such as a grassy pasture, until that resource is totally depleted].

Today, with things that can be represented digitally, we have the opposite. In the Napster universe, everyone who downloads a file makes a copy of it available. This isn’t a tragedy of the commons, this is a commons where the sheep shit grass — where the more you graze, the more commons you get. So I took the idea of nanotechnology as the means whereby any good can be reproduced infinitely, at zero marginal cost, and tried to use that as a metaphor for the online world we actually live in.

The other side of it is this notion that you never really run out of scarcity. There are always limits on your time and attention, there are only so many people who can fit in a restaurant, only so many people who can converse at once. When you are beset on all sides by entertainment, figuring out which bits are worthwhile requires a level of attention that quickly burns all your idle cycles. When everyone watched Jackie Gleason on Thursdays at 9:30, it was a lot easier — television watching required a lot less effort than whipping out your TiVo and figuring out which shows you want to prerecord.