Duke University’s Gerry Canavan is teaching my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in a class on utopias and he conducted an interview with me on the subject for the course:

CD: I based Whuffie at the time more on Slashdot’s Karma, and I don’t know that Faceook has an exact analogue to it. I guess Facebook has this thing where you can see who has the most inbound links, who has the most friends, and you can “digg” up yourself by getting more of those.

I think that in general we have a pathological response to anything we measure. We tend not to measure the thing we care about; we tend to measure something that indicates its presence. It’s often very hard to measure the thing that you’re hoping for. You don’t actually care about how calories you eat; you care about how much weight you’re going to gain from the calories you eat. But as soon as we go, oh, well, calories are a pretty good proxy for weight gain, we start to come up with these foods that are incredibly unhealthy but nevertheless have very few calories in them. In the same way, Google doesn’t really care about inbound links because inbound links are good per se; Google cares about inbound links because inbound links are a good proxy for “someone likes this page; someone thinks this page is a useful place to be, is a good place to be.” But as soon as Google starts counting that, people start finding ways to make links that don’t actually serve as a proxy for that conclusion at all.

GDP is another good example. We don’t care about GDP because GDP itself is good; we care about GDP because the basket of indicators that we measure with GDP are a proxy for the overall health of the society—except as soon as you start measuring GDP, people figure out how to make the GDP go up by doing things like trading derivatives of derivates of subprime subderivates of derivatives, but which actually does the reverse of what we care about by undermining the quality of life and the stability of society.

So I think that one of the biggest problems that Google has, taking Google as probably the best example of someone trying to build a reputation currency, is that as soon as Google gives you any insight into how they are building their reputation system it ceases to be very good as a reputation system. As soon as Google stops measuring something you created by accident and starts measuring something you created on purpose, it stops being something that they want to measure. And this is joined by the twin problem that what Google fundamentally has is a security problem; they have hackers who are trying to undermine the integrity of the system. And the natural response to a problem that arises when attackers know how your system works is to try to keep the details of your system secret—but keeping the details of Google’s system secret is also not very good because it means that we don’t have any reason to trust it. All we know when we search Google is that we get a result that seems like a good result; but we don’t know that there isn’t a much better result that Google has either deliberately or accidentally excluded from its listings for reasons that are attributable to either malice or incompetence. So they’re really trapped between a rock and a hard place: if they publish how their system works, people will game their system; if they don’t publish how their system works it becomes less useful and trustworthy and good. It suffers from the problem of alchemy; if alchemists don’t tell people what they learned, then every alchemist needs to discover for themselves that drinking mercury is a bad idea, and alchemy stagnates. When you start to publishing, you get science—but Google can’t publish or they’ll also get more attacks.

So it’s a really thorny, thorny problem, and I elide that problem with Whuffie by imagining a completely undescribed science fictional system that can disambiguate every object in the universe so when you look at something and have a response to it the system knows that the response is being driven by the color of the car but not by the car, or the shirt but not the person wearing it, or the person wearing it and not the shirt, and also know how you feel about it. So it can know what you’re feeling and what you’re feeling it about. And I don’t actually think we have a computer that could that; I don’t think we have Supreme Court judges or Ph.D. philosophers that can do that.

Ralph Amissah converted a couple of my books to his really exciting format SiSu. SiSu uses simple human-reabable markup and auto-creates several ebook formats, including PDFs, HTML, Docx, Epub, and plain old .txt (my fave!). I’ve really been looking for an easy way to “single-source” my books from manuscript to finished files, and this looks like a good candidate. Check out the conversions:

Little Brother

Content

The SiSu converter is free/open and runs well on my Ubuntu Linux machine.

Back in Feb 2009, an editor I like asked me to write a short-short story for a series she was putting together for one of the big, slick science magazines. I liked the market, the editor and the premise, so I wrote a piece and turned it in. Everyone at the publishing house was enthusiastic about it, and they sent me a contract, asking me to rush it in so that they could get it into the next issue.

But the contract was awful. It asked for really dumb rights, like the right to make movies and action figures and other stuff from my story, and they weren’t paying nearly enough for that sort of thing. It also had all kinds of indemnity in it — by signing it, I was promising that I’d pay off anyone who claimed I broke any law in any country in which the magazine had assets (lots of countries!).

This isn’t that unusual — but what happened next was. I told them I wouldn’t sign over anything except print rights, and that I wanted the indemnity revised so that I was only guaranteeing that I wouldn’t break US laws, and that I would only indemnify them for finally sustained damages (that is, after a trial and appeal). This is totally standard, something I’ve done with publishing companies like the New York Times, Conde Nast, Time Warner, Nature, etc.

The magazine was willing to take out the rights grab, but they refused to negotiate on the indemnity. Stonewalled. They didn’t answer emails — months and months of emails. When I heard back from the in-house editor, he just said that the CEO wasn’t willing to change this language, ever, and tough. He wouldn’t answer any questions about it — any queries were met with months’ more silence.

What’s worse, I’d already done the work, and I wasn’t getting paid for it. It may seem dumb to write work on spec without seeing the contract, but in practice, this is how it often works. Contracts are pretty standard, and editors work on short deadlines, while contracts departments often seem to exist in their own rarified and plodding universe. I’ve often written a story, had it published, gotten paid for it, and then gotten the contract for it. It’s a dumb and backwards way of doing things, but that’s how it goes sometimes. But it sure made me feel like a sucker and an idiot as email after email disappeared into a black hole. They’d asked me to do work, I’d done it to their satisfaction, and now they wanted me to swallow a bowl of crap before they’d pay me for it. It felt awful, a sense of powerlessness and anger.

Finally, I turned to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grievance Committe. John E Johnson III and Michael Capobianco, two of the committee’s members, asked me for a complete history of all my interactions with the magazine (I’d kept good records). They went to work for me, calling and emailing the editor and his boss. In the end, the magazine wouldn’t negotiate the contract, but they did send me half the money (I’ve just cashed the check) as a kill-fee.

And that’s the point of this post. Many people ask what the point of SFWA is; I’m guilty of wondering this at times myself. But here is something that SFWA does really well: back up individual writers with the collective might of the organization and the tenacity of its volunteers. I can’t thank Michael and John and Griefcom enough. John was kind enough to supply this quote: “Cory Doctorow deserves credit himself. By presenting us with a legitimate grievance, by having kept proper documentation, and by displaying great patience, Cory made it possible for Griefcom to resolve this matter satisfactorily.” – John E. Johnston
III, Grievance Committee Chair, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

I still can’t figure out what the magazine’s angle was here. They’re out my killfee, they never got to print the story, they had to pay a leading artist to produce some really stellar art for the piece that they’ll never get to use, all because they didn’t want to make a totally reasonable, standard change to their contract. Who can comprehend the irrational mysteries of giant media companies?

The lesson is: keep good records, get the contract before you do the work, and when you get the shaft, call SFWA.

Griefcom and You