Adding to the Whuffie

I have to admit I felt like I belonged in the House of Innoventions as I sat on the sofa reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in Mobipocket eBook format on my handheld.

At first I had to scroll through what seemed like reams of text about the eBook's license agreement. Believe it or not, the Creative Commons license Doctorow used to publish his eBook (for free) at the same time as Tor published it (for sale) in print version, is one of the things that made the book famous.

So, once I got past the innovative distribution model, and the fact that the text of my book was slowly scrolling past while I reclined on the sofa, how was the book?

The very first words that scrolled down the page had me hooked, because I was immediately reminded of one of my favorite books of all time- Steel Beach by John Varley. Like Varley, Doctorow built a world in which death is no longer a concern- but figuring out how to live forever is. I would have been more than happy to read about the adventures of long-lifers who live in Disneylands, moonlight as composers from time to time, and are trying to understand how to keep living on and on and on.

But as the progress bar on Mobipocket lengthened, I found that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is in no way a rehash of Steel Beach. Why? The antagonist in Varley's novel is techology gone mad (an AI computer). The antagonist in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a human being gone mad.

What has caused antagonist Debra to go mad?

Whuffie.

Doctorow based the most interesting technology of his novel- Whuffie- on today's online communities (not surprising given his reputation as co-editor of the Boing Boing blog). Currency has been replaced by "Whuffie," a measure of a person's reputation. Whuffie means everything that money means in our society- power, privilege, an apartment without cockroaches, friends, lovers- and it can only be gotten by making contributions to the community.

Debra plans to revolutionize Disney's Haunted Mansion ride by "flash-baking" visitor's brains with the experience of the Haunted Mansion instead of letting them interact with the ride's animitronics and cast members. The result of her innovative contribution: heaps and heaps of Whuffie.

Jules goes head to head with Debra's attempt to Whuffie hoard (suffering the consequences of temporary death and disconnection from the online community in the process) "to take a stand against the dehumanization of the park" (wikipedia.org).

The result is a book about keeping human beings from destroying the world as we like it. It's a shift from the fear John Varley described- namely that human beings are unable to control the technology they create. Doctorow isn't worried about what technology can do to man, he's just worried about what man can do with technology.

That, to me, is the scarier question.