[wordup] Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

[Adam Shand]

Cory Doctorow is one of my co-colaborators on the Wireless Commons 
project and in general a pretty cool guy.  His new book has just been 
released and you can learn move about it at the URL below.

Other then I think it's cool, the reason I'm mailing it out to ya'll is 
that he's also released it under a Creative Commons license which means 
that not only can you buy it from Amazon (and hopefully the bookstore 
nearist you) you can also download the book for free.  Snazzy.

Disclaimer:  I haven't read it yet so I can't offer opinions.  I will be 
  buying a copy though since I don't much like reading on a my computer.

From: http://creativecommons.org/learn/features/doctorow
More: http://www.craphound.com/down/

Cory Doctorow

Interview by Glenn Otis Brown
Photo by Richard Kadrey
January 2003

I got to feeling like I was someone special -- not everyone had a chum 
as exotic as Keep-A-Movin' Dan, the legendary missionary who visited the 
only places left that were closed to the Bitchun Society. I can't say 
for sure why he hung around with me. He mentioned once or twice that 
he'd liked my symphonies, and he'd read my Ergonomics thesis on applying 
theme-park crowd-control techniques in urban settings, and liked what I 
had to say there. But I think it came down to us having a good time 
needling each other.

I'd talk to him about the vast carpet of the future unrolling before us, 
of the certainty that we would encounter alien intelligences some day, 
of the unimaginable frontiers open to each of us. He'd tell me that 
deadheading was a strong indicator that one's personal reservoir of 
introspection and creativity was dry; and that without struggle, there 
is no real victory. . . .

On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and 
one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was 
present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They 
all liked it. I collected my sheepskin and went out hunting for Dan in 
the sweet, flower-stinking streets.

He'd gone. The Anthro major he'd been torturing with his war-stories 
said that they'd wrapped up that morning, and he'd headed to the walled 
city of Tijuana, to take his shot with the descendants of a platoon of 
US Marines who'd settled there and cut themselves off from the Bitchun 
Society.

So I went to Disney World. . . .

--from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the first novel by blogger, cultural 
critic, and Electronic Frontier Foundation wonk Cory Doctorow, entered 
the world January 9, 2003. Wired's Mark Frauenfelder calls Down and Out 
"the most entertaining and exciting science fiction story I've read in 
the last few years," and Bruce Sterling declares, "Science fiction needs 
Cory Doctorow!"

Doctorow has published Down and Out under a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons: Your novel revolves around a power struggle over a 
Disney World of the distant future, and your promo materials for Down 
and Out describe you as a Disneyphile. What led you to set the story on 
Walt's turf?

Cory Doctorow: I grew up with grandparents who lived in a gated 
retirement community in Fort Lauderdale. My folks -- both teachers -- 
and I stayed with them most Christmas breaks, and we'd always make a 
pilgrimage to Walt Disney World. Those WDW experiences permanently 
embedded the Disney Parks -- their design, their cultural significance 
-- in my psyche.

Disney's a sterling example, moreover, of the value of the public 
domain. People who are naive about the idea of the commons frequently 
ask whether it's too much to ask that artists make their own, original 
works. But Disney showed how plumbing the public domain for familiar 
stories (Alice, Snow White, Mu-lan, etc.) and reimagining them vividly 
can create new and culturally significant art.

Walt himself was full of grandiose, hubristic, science-fictional 
notions. The original plan for Walt Disney World called for a domed city 
(based loosely on the Progressland Walt built for General Electric at 
the 1964 World's Fair) -- the original EPCOT (Experiment Prototype City 
of Tomorrow), in which tens of thousands of employees would live under 
corporate law whose premises would follow Walt's nutty and sometimes 
saccharine ideals for social Utopia.

He was part of a tradition of crypto-fascist Utopian American 
squillionaires that includes Henry Ford, who required the captive 
laborers of his doomed "Fordlandia" rubber-plantations-cum-communes to 
drink Tom Collinses (Ford's favorite tipple) in favor of the traditional 
local hooch.

CC: Did legal concerns -- say, over referring to Disney by name in the 
story -- ever give you pause while writing or shopping the book?

CD: This is one of the most F of the FAQ about the book. The existence 
of the rides at Walt Disney World is a public fact -- like the existence 
of the Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon, or the Starbucks on my 
corner. Copyright and trademark don't exist to enjoin the public from 
discussing and speculating on the existence of actual, no-foolin' 
things, so no, I wasn't worried. The legal department at Tor Books (my 
publisher) put a disclaimer on the printed book that explained that all 
the places mentioned in the book are either fictional or used in a 
fictional context. Imagine someone dumb enough not to figure that out 
for himself. Duh.

CC: Down and Out's protagonist, Julius, has a soft spot for 
old-fashioned technology, like Disneyland's various steel-and-concrete 
attractions and rides -- "rube goldbergs," as he memorably calls them. A 
central struggle in the book, in fact, involves Julius's efforts to save 
the Park's 20th-century "monuments" from being replaced by newfangled 
technological attractions. It's a highly dramatic, even violent, 
struggle. Is there a little Luddite battling the technophile in you?

CD: There are at least two reasons that the fight to keep the highly 
individuated, hard-to-replicate rides is central to the book.

1. I genuinely dislike the articulated simulators (Star Tours, Body 
Wars) that Disney's built. They strike me as really crummy art as 
compared to all the ride-tech that proceeded them. The problem with that 
kind of sim-ride is that they all have the same plot: we are going 
somewhere, we run into trouble, we turn around, we come home. The 
problem is that if we actually made it to our nominal destination, 
Disney'd have to build, e.g., a scale-model Forest Moon of Endor at the 
other end.

2. It's a kind of parable about the inevitibility of 
crappy-but-more-democratic media (i.e., Gutenberg Bibles) over really 
excellent, but harder-to-reproduce artifacts (illuminated Bibles).

CC: Why did you choose to publish Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 
under a Creative Commons license?

CD: That's the most F of all the FAQs I get about this project. I've got 
a response that I agonized over for some while, and it's as good as I'm 
going to get.

     Why am I doing this thing? Well, it's a long story, but to shorten 
it up: first-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers 
don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like 
us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth. I'm not bad at 
word-of-mouth. I have a blog, Boing Boing, where I do a lot of 
word-of-mouthing. I compulsively tell friends and strangers about things 
that I like.

     And telling people about stuff I like is way, way easier if I can 
just send it to 'em. Way easier.

     What's more, P2P nets kick all kinds of ass. Most of the books, 
music and movies ever released are not available for sale anywhere in 
the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc 
masses of the Internet have managed to put just about *everything* 
online. What's more, they've done it for cheaper than any other 
archiving/revival effort ever. I'm a stone infovore and this kinda 
Internet mishegas gives me a serious frisson of futurosity.

     Yeah, there are legal problems. Yeah, it's hard to figure out how 
people are gonna make money doing it. Yeah, there is a lot of social 
upheaval and a serious threat to innovation, freedom, business, and 
whatnot. It's your basic end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario, and as 
a science fiction writer, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenaria are my 
stock-in-trade.

     I'm especially grateful to my publisher, Tor Books and my editor, 
Patrick Nielsen Hayden for being hep enough to let me try out this 
experiment.

     All that said, here's the deal: I'm releasing this book under a 
license developed by the Creative Commons project. This is a project 
that lets people like me roll our own license agreements for the 
distribution of our creative work under terms similar to those employed 
by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It's a great project, and I'm 
proud to be a part of it.

CC: How did Tor Books respond to your decision to use one of our licenses?

CD: Tor is the largest English-language science fiction publisher in the 
world, and they've led the field in innovative practices, especially in 
ebooks. So I'm privileged to have a very forward-looking, progressive 
publisher behind me. What's more, I have a fantastic editor, Patrick 
Nielsen Hayden. Patrick is an old Usenet hand (search on 
groups.google.com to get an idea of how much of Patrick's life has been 
spent on Usenet!), a Linux hobbyist, a blogger, and a hell of an 
all-round technophile. When I pitched the idea of posting the book 
online to him, we had a surprisingly brief and excited conversation of 
how goddamned cool it would be. I'm guessing that Patrick had to do some 
internal selling at Tor to convince the publisher, Tom Dougherty, that 
this would be a good idea, but I wasn't privy to that negotiation.

CC: Your job is to think about the future. Where do you think copyright 
law is headed? What do you think the law as regards to information will 
look like 100 years from now? What is copyright's place in the Magic 
Kingdom and the Bitchun Society -- a world that seems to revolve around 
pop culture and technology?

CD: Well, in some ways, this novel is a parable about Napster, and about 
the reputation economies that projects like Ringo, Firefly, Epinions and 
Amazon hint at. In a world where information is nonscarce, the problem 
isn't finding generic information -- it's finding useful information. 
There's an old chestnut in online science fiction fandom that the 
Internet "makes us all into slushreaders." ("Slush" is the unsolicited 
prose that arrives at publishers' offices -- a "slushreader" wades 
through thousands of these paste-gems looking for the genuine article). 
This has always struck me as a pretty reactionary position.

Nearly every piece of information online has a human progenitor -- a 
person who thought it was useful or important or interesting enough to 
post. Those people have friends whom they trust, and those friends have 
trusted friends, and so on. Theoretically, if you use your social 
network to explore the Web, you can make educated guesses about the 
relative interestingness of every bit of info online to you. In 
practice, this kind of social exploration is very labor-intensive and 
even computationally intensive, but there's a lot of technology on the 
horizon that hints at this.

The Bitchun Society of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a world 
where all goods are as nonscarce as information is on the net. (It's 
imaginable that nanofabrication could make such a world possible -- 
"goods" and "information" would be different states of the same thing, 
as "source code" and "applications" are today.) In that world, managing 
the glut of everything -- especially people -- is a matter of exploring 
social networks to guess at the degree to which you should treat some 
resource with respect and attention. [In the story,] I call this measure 
"Whuffie."

Scarcity is, objectively, worse than plenty. When you've got lots of 
some useful object, you're richer than when you have less of it. When 
there's more than enough to go around, the economic value tends to 
plummet, but the utility is just as high. Think of oxygen: on the 
Earth's surface, we're well-supplied with breathable atmosphere. Aside 
from a few egregiously West-coast "oxygen bars," it's hard to imagine 
paying money for O2. But in Heinlein's sf novels set on the moon, 
there's a thriving trade in oxygen. In both situations, air is highly 
useful, but dirtsiders are richer in air than their loonie cousins.

It's a quirk of our economy -- and a failure of our collective 
imagination -- that we view the de-scarce-ification of information as a 
disaster. Our technological history -- literacy, the press, telegraphy, 
radio, TV, xerography, computers -- is a steady march towards making 
information more liquid and less scarce. Towards richness.

At each turn, the mounting plenty has made the information industries 
larger and larger, employing more people, feeding more artists, bringing 
more ideas to more people.

I've got a large, personal stake in earning a living from my writing, 
but as I look around at a field in which the word-rates for fiction have 
stalled at their 1935 levels (not adjusted for inflation), I find it 
hard to imagine that the old economics of publishing will sustain me in 
the manner to which I'd like to become accustomed. There's a new world 
a-borning, a world of information in infinite plenty, and I know that 
there are new opportunities out there. I don't know what they are, but 
I'm certain that diving in with both feet first is a better way of 
discovering them than screaming imprecations at the rising tide and 
chicken-littling about the "thieves" and "pirates" of the Internet. I 
prefer to think of them as "readers."

CC: Who and what -- writers, artists, trends -- have been particularly 
strong influences on your writing?

CD: Well, anyone familiar with science fiction who reads this book will 
discover that I've blatantly ripped off the best ideas of Heinlein and 
Varley. (Varley ripped off a lot of his ideas from Heinlein, of course 
-- "amateurs plagiarize, artists steal.")

More than that, I got a lot of my ideas from Walt Disney, Marc Davis, 
and the other original Imagineers who designed Disneyland and Walt 
Disney World. Walt was a weird and sometimes rather nasty old coot. (And 
Tolstoy ripped off his family to feed his gambling habit -- being a 
great artist is not inconsitent with being a evil jerk.) But he (Walt) 
was also a magnificent entrepreneur, inventor, dreamer, and technophile. 
He and his crew broke a lot of rules to build Disneyland. He fired the 
engineers he'd hired to make Disneyland a reality and poached away his 
best animators from the Studios to make the Park a reality. (The 
engineers would only tell him what he couldn't do, not what he could). 
They built some exceedingly cool art. They invented an entire genre. 
They bucked the bean-counters at The Disney Company who told them it 
wouldn't ever work.

CC: What effects do you think communications technology -- from instant 
messaging to weblogs to hypertext -- have had and will have on the 
English language? On literature?

CD: As I said upstream, the trend in communications since the dawn of 
history has been increasing fluidity for information, increasing 
democratization. We're in a giant, never-ending permanent Protestant 
Reformation. Whenever we -- as a culture -- have had a choice between 
some medium that makes interesting artifacts and another medium that 
makes less interesting artifacts that are more fluid, we've chosen the 
louche and lowbrow over the pretty and scarce. Illuminated Bibles begat 
Gutenberg Bibles begat cheap, mass produced Bibles begat Project 
Gutenberg Bibles.

You often hear people decrying reading off a screen. They say that the 
text isn't sharp enough, the artifacts less sentimental than paper 
volumes, the infrastructure (computers and Internet connections) too 
complex and expensive. These detractors conveniently ignore the fact 
that literate people, by and large, spend six or more hours reading text 
off a screen. They remind me of the music-industry execs that spent the 
early days of the file-sharing revolution who dismissed MP3 as not being 
good-sounding-enough and too lacking in liner notes to be an effective 
replacement for CDs. They sound like Gutenberg-era priests pooh-poohing 
Mr. Gutenberg's cheap and nasty Bibles: "How can the Word of God 
possibly be represented in one of those tetchy books? Proper Bibles are 
hand-painted on foetal lambskin by Trappist Monks who devote their lives 
to illuminating the Precious Word."

CC: You help run Boing Boing, a leading tech-and-culture weblog. Has 
your experience as a blog publisher affected your writing?

CD: In truth, it's spoiled me. With a blog, it goes like this: I get an 
idea, write about the idea, post it, and five minutes later, get some 
feedback. With fiction, it's this: I have an idea, write about the idea, 
send it to a publisher, argue about the idea, rewrite the idea, argue 
some more, wait a couple years, argue some more, do another rewrite, 
wait a couple years, and then, some day, a physical dead-tree book 
arrives. I'm not a patient person, and the wait just kills me.

CC: How has your work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation influenced 
your work?

CD: I wrote Down and Out before I came to work at the EFF, along with my 
second novel (which Tor will publish next fall), Eastern Standard Tribe. 
But now I'm working on a new novel, whose (admittedly sucky) working 
title is "/usr/bin/god." It's about Singularity mysticism and nerd 
culture, which is full of issues from my work with the EFF. It's a sort 
of expansion of "0wnz0red," a parable about "Trusted Computing" that I 
wrote and which Salon published last August.

CC: In Magic Kingdom, technology has made it possible for people to live 
forever. Several characters "die" repeatedly, only to be re-booted from 
back-up memory, like machines. Did the instant-resurrection prevalent in 
computer and video games influence this aspect of the story? If not, 
what led you to it?

CD: Actually, it was more about backup-and-restore. I started out as a 
sysadmin, and I was just as paranoid about the data of my users as I was 
about my own. I've managed to preserve just about all my mail, all my 
writing, just about everything that I've ever created with a computer 
since I got my first Apple ][+ in the summer of 1979. I back up all that 
data to an off-site storage every day, and back up my important stuff -- 
like fiction and financials -- to a remote server 3000 miles away (just 
in case) in a big, encrypted blob, once a month. All this gives me a 
nice, warm feeling -- especially when a machine is stolen, smashed, 
flooded, or HERFed and I do that wondrous restore and get all my data back.

CC: It sounds as if there's almost an element of salvation in the 
literal saving. . . .

CD: I guess. I think it's more about the end of infocalyptic events like 
the burning of Alexandria. I just finished Bruce Sterling's brilliant 
new book of futurism, "Tomorrow Now," which is mind-blowing and 
provocative as hell. I think the world of Sterling, but I also disagree 
with a number of his theses about infotech. In TN, he does this dead 
media schtick about all the info that's been lost along with the 
platforms that supported it. As I read it, I itched to give Bruce a 
tutorial on the frankly amazing work that's been done on emulators. A 
little-appreciated consequence of Moore's Law is the fact that a modern 
computer has enough power to handily simulate several deprecated 
machines from bygone days -- simultaneously. Practically, that means 
that I can trivially fire up the Logo programs I wrote when I was nine, 
even though -- *because!* -- I'm using a computer that makes my ][+ look 
like a flint arrowhead. Every computer I've bought since the advent of 
harddrives has had more storage than all the computers I owned before, 
put together. When I look at the incredible new archiving projects being 
built on commodity hardware -- like archive.org -- I can't help but 
conclude that the days of information perishing are gone forever.