Jack Willliam Bell has started a really interesting discussion about Whuffie and my novel on his Slashdot journal:

In these discussions the usual answer given is that human creativity will retain value and that people would still buy and sell hand-made items, artwork, books and songs. But this rings false to me on a number of levels, not the least of which is the fact that not everyone is talented enough to participate in such an ecomomy. A more important problem with this answer is the fact that, with the exception of hand-made items and original artwork, this actually relies on the continuation of false scarcity by requiring intellectual property limits which could not be maintained in a digitally networked world. (All this was before I ever heard of DRM of course.)

Reputation ecomonies, however, could be based on anything people valued in other people — not just their personal creativity. And such a currency would bring value to the creator of a song even if the song was freely traded without intellectual property limits. So, should money ecomonies collapse, you could still have a valuation system built on how others percieved you.

Canada’s Space Channel has posted a RealMedia stream of me reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

A reminder: I’ll be reading and signing books on Thursday night at Berkeley’s The Other Change of Hobbit (2020 Shattuck Ave, 1-510-848-0413) from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!

A couple weeks ago, I did an in-game “book-signing” and interview in the Second-Life game-world. Wagner James Au, the Second Life “embedded reporter” who interviewed me, has posted the transcripts to the site, in two parts:
Part 1 and Part 2.

“That’s what the immortality in D&O is. You go to a backup kiosk and you decant a copy of yourself into a big storage cloud, and if you die — or even if you have a bad hangover, hell, why not — you have a force-grown clone, and you decant the consciousness into it and you off yourself. (Though [in the book] it’s dressed up in other language. That’s the existential view from today’s POV.)

“But everyone who gets squeamish about the euthanasia aspect just dies. Because they can’t use the backup-and-recover system. And there’s not a lot of social will to advance medical science beyond backup-and-recover, since it solves most every problem.

“It’s like [a medievalist’s view of] nutrition or hygiene. You may actually be right about the ‘ill humours’ that will invade you if you don’t smell like a bear’s [rear end]. But in the meantime, the people who bathe aren’t getting scabies and dying of infections started by the left-behind mouth-parts of dead ticks. And so everyone who thinks that way [about not bathing] ends up dead, and their ideas die with them. (A horribly simplified version of Darwinian mimetics, but you take my point.)

A reminder: I’ll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I’m going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!

The San Mateo Daily Journal has a nice article on my talk at the Silicon Valley Futurists’ Salon meeting last week.

“Has this benefited me?” he said. “I don’t have a firm answer. I don’t have another first novel that I can compare with the sales of the first one to. The evidence points to yes, it’s at least been neutral.”

Many at the salon seemed to agree with Doctorow.

“Someone’s finally saying something sensible,” said Daniel Ford, a 24-year-old graduate student at Stanford University. “I guess the base of it [is] that it’s about [ensuring] creativity. If new technological problems come about you deal with them.”

I’ll be reading from my short story collection and signing books on October 9th, at the Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore in Berkeley from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!

Link

Just a reminder that I’ll be giving a futuristic talk about copyright, DRM, science fiction and whatnot this Friday night at the Silicon Valley Futurist Salon:

We will be back at the Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center just across of the San Mateo Caltrain Station. 11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo, CA 94403 650-341-5560

Link

I’m “appearing” at a book-club that meets in an online roleplaying game called Second Life, this Sunday at 6:30 PM. If you’ve got a Windows box, you can get a free seven-day avatar and join the disucssion!

Cory Doctorow will be the debut guest of the
Hamlet Linden Book Club, the first reading
group (far as we can tell!) to be conducted in
a massively multiplayer online world — Second Life.

This Sunday, Sept. 21, at 6:30pm (PST), Cory
Doctorow’s avatar will appear in the main auditorium
of Second Life, the 3D online society where Hamlet
Linden (aka Wagner James Au) is the world’s
embedded journalist. Cory will discuss his
acclaimed novel *Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom* with an in-world audience of Second
Life residents.

Link

Over on the Whuffie blog (yes, there is such a thing; no, I did not have anything to do with it; and yes, I am immensely flattered), there’s a guest-blogger writing good, scholarly critical analysis of the economics of the Bitchun Society, the world in which my novel is set.

The danger, pointed out in this passage from Doctorow’s novel, in having a completely subjective, reputation-based economy is that it is quite possible for someone like me to be made an outsider from the economy due to actions for which I had no responsibility. Granted, similar problems exist in a cash-based economy. The market could bottom out, as we all certainly know, and I could be left with stock in… nothing. Still, there are objective factors, along with the subjective ones that move the market, that justify such occurrences. With a reputation economy, the threat of being ostracized unfairly is very real, and very much free from the protections of objectivity. Thus, this points to a problem with such a system. I do not think it is a problem that would defeat the system, as a general concept, but it is one that may justify eschewing it as a device for commerce.

The subjective nature of reputation is an interesting issue that goes beyond Herodotus. It is one that troubles modern politicians and entertainers, sometimes rightly, and sometimes wrongly. It’s for this reason that I think X’s website, and Doctorow’s novel, are such interesting topics of discussion. Reputation is a matter that merits consideration, because it is a value that, subjectively, has massive impact on our life — and on the lives of the ancients.

He makes a good point. The problem (OK, a problem) with Whuffie is that it lacks a lot of the critical stuff that makes up the fundamentals of democratic infrastructure, like protection for minority opinions. Some of that is elided by the lack of scarcity in the novel: it’s hard to be a well-and-truly oppressed minority when every material want is answered in plenty, but the social effect of the normative pressure of Whuffie is ultimately highly corrosive.

To put it more pithily: “Popular speech never needs defending.” Free speech shouldn’t be a popularity contest.

Link