Excerpt from "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"

A novel in progress by Cory Doctorow

http://craphound.com

doctorow@craphound.com

12/13/03

--

"I took a holiday last week," Lyman said. "Me and my girlfriend.
We went to Switzerland to see the Alps and to visit her sister,
who's doing something for the UN in Geneva. So her sister, she's
into, I don't know, saving children from vampires in Afghanistan
or something, and she has Internet access at the office, and
can't see any reason to drop a connection in at home. So there I
was, wandering the streets of Geneva at seven in the morning,
trying to find a WiFi connection so I can get my email and find
out how many ways I can enlarge my penis this week.

"No problem -- outside every hotel and most of the cafes, I can
find a signal for a network called 'SwissCom.' I log on to the
network and I fire up a browser and I get a screen asking me for
my password. Well, I don't have one, but after poking around, I
find out that I can buy a card with a temporary password on it.
So I wait until some of the little smoke-shops open and start
asking them if they sell SwissCom Internet Cards, in my terrible,
miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they look at
me and say, 'I have no clue what you're talking about,' shrug,
and go back to work.

"Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one,
the guy tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since
they're in short supply. The cards are in short supply! Three
hotels later, they allow as how they'll sell me a 30-minute card.
Oh, that's fine. 30 whole minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And
how much will that be? Only about a zillion Swiss pesos. Don't
they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh sure, two hours, 24
hours, seven days -- and each one costs about double the last, so
if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much as
you'd spend on a day's worth of connectivity in 30-minute
increments -- about $300 Canadian for a week, just FYI.

"Well, paying 300 bucks for a week's Internet is ghastly, but
very Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits
of cheese at breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But Three
hundred bucks for a day's worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I
was going to have to find a seven-day card or bust. So I ask at a
couple more hotels and finally find someone who'll explain to me
that SwissCom is the Swiss telco, and that they have a retail
storefront a couple blocks away where they'd sell me all the
cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.

"By this time, it's nearly 9AM and I'm thinking that my
girlfriend and her sister are probably up and eating a big old
breakfast and wondering where the fuck I am, but I've got too
much invested in this adventure to give up when I'm so close to
finding the treasure. And so I hied myself off to the SwissCom
storefront, which is closed, even though the sign says they open
at nine and by now it's 9:05, and so much for Swiss punctuality.
But eventually this sneering kid with last year's faux-hawk comes
out and opens the door and then disappears up the stairs at the
back of the show-room to the second floor, where I follow him. I
get up to his counter and say, 'Pardonnez moi,' but he holds up a
hand and points behind me and says, 'Numero!' I make an elaborate
shrug, but he just points again and says, 'Numero!' I shrug again
and he shakes his head like he's dealing with some kind of
unbelievable moron, and then he steps out from behind his counter
and stalks over to a little touchscreen. He takes my hand by the
wrist and plants my palm on the touchscreen and a little ribbon
of paper with zero-zero-one slides out. I take it and he goes
back behind his counter and says, 'Numero un!'

"I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go
through the motions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day
card. He opens his cash-drawer and paws through a pile of cards,
then smiles and shakes his head and says, sorry, all sold out. My
girlfriend is probably through her second cup of coffee and
reading brochures for nature walks in the Alps at this point, so
I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes a moment to snicker
at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those, too. Two
hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.

"Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop
in hand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to
SwissCom's network, a credit-card in my other hand, wishing to
give them some money in exchange for the use of their network,
and instead, I have to go chasing up and down every hotel in
Geneva for a card, which is not to be found. So I go to the
origin of these cards, the SwissCom store, and they're sold out,
too. This is not a t-shirt or a loaf of bread: there's no
inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are
just a convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need
to do to make more numbers is pull them out of thin air. They're
just numbers. We have as many of them as we could possibly need.
There's no sane, rational universe in which all the 'two hour'
numbers sell out, leaving nothing behind but '30 minute' numbers.

"So that's pretty bad. It's the kind of story that net-heads tell
about Bell-heads all around the world. It's the kind of thing
I've made it my business to hunt down and exterminate here
wherever I find it. So I just wrote off my email for that week
and came home and downloaded a hundred thousand spams about my
cock's insufficient dimensions and went into work and I told
everyone I could find about this, and they all smiled nervously
and none of them seemed to find it as weird and ridiculous as me,
and then, that Friday, I went into a meeting about our new
high-speed WiFi service that we're piloting in Montreal and the
guy in charge of the program hands out these little packages to
everyone in the meeting, a slide-deck and some of the marketing
collateral and -- a little prepaid 30-minute access card.

"That's what we're delivering. Prepaid cards for Internet access.
Complet avec number shortages and business travellers prowling
the bagel-joints of Rue St Urbain looking for a shopkeeper whose
cash-drawer has a few seven-day cards kicking around.

"And you come in here, and you ask me, you ask the ruling Bell,
what advice do we have for your metro-wide free info-hippie
wireless dumpster-diver anarcho-network? Honestly -- I don't have
a fucking clue. We don't have a fucking clue. We're a telephone
company. We don't know how to give away free communications -- we
don't even know how to charge for it."

eof