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danieldwilliamI’ve recently finished two books by Cory Doctorow. I’ve read a couple of his short stories and really enjoyed them. I was less taken with the novels.
I read Eastern Standard Tribe and Makers in that order. I enjoyed Eastern Standard Tribe more.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a first person narrative about how the protagonist ended up in a mental health hospital and how he goes about trying to leave hospital following a break down that flows from a failed romantic and business venture. Our hero thinks he is being bilked out of a fantastic business opportunity by his girlfriend and best friend. He thinks they have conspired to have him committed so they can steal his business. He also thinks he is secretly working for a Tribe based around using social media on Eastern Standard Time. He believes himself to be sabotaging a rival tribes reputation. Any and all of this may or may not be true.
Eastern Standard Tribe has a really interesting unreliable narrator. He is obviously suffering some mental health issues, or at least a combination of extreme fatigue and emotional stress, which is making his decision making processes less than optimal. He may, in fact, be mentally incompetent. So far so good as unreliable narrators go. What made the main character interesting for me was that he may be deluding himself about the whole Tribe thing. Tribes may or may not exist. They may or may not be coherent enough to have a group identity that transcends employer or nation. They may or may not be organised enough to have saboteurs. They may be a nothing more than the fantastical projection of a troubled man on to some out of hours social media acquaintances.
I also appreciated the speculative nature of the science fiction. Here is some technology. Here is how it might shape society. Here is a story that is not an essay that makes you think about.
So, an interesting character, decent narrative, interesting speculative elements. Not a bad book at all. I wasn’t struck with the notion that this was the future but I was encouraged to think about the different way people might interact with each other and the effect this might have on their political loyalties and their mental health.
The Makers is a less good book.
I wanted it to be better than it was. I think it needed to be shorter.
It is the story of the a group of entrepreneurs who are the standard bearers for New Work, a movement that attempts to combine endemic unemployment, easy Intellectual Property rights and a good dose of entrepreneurship along with a distributed co-op model of corporate management. The first third of the book follows the characters and through them the movement from its start to its eventual failure. The idea is fascinating from an economics and entrepreneurship point of view. This is a thought experiment about what happens when technology means that everyone has access to an intellectual property solution to almost anything and that barriers to entry are so low that the unemployed can use their low reservation wages and opportunity costs and just have a go. Does the mass scramble to find valuable applications for existing technology lead to a new industrial revolution or a quick and dirty Ponzi scheme. In an economy like this do all economic decisions revert to the short run cost of labour? All interesting stuff. Very interesting.
The characters are robust enough to hold my interest through the thought experiment. They weren’t of much interest in themselves.
The last two thirds of the book is less good. I’d go as far as to say actively bad. The characters who were a pilgrim’s guide to the new economics of the early to mid 21st Century become the focus of the story. They weren’t interesting enough to carry a further 400 pages. I kept waiting for the book to return to the economics but it didn’t. I huffed and puffed my way through the rest of the book. I wanted it to return to the conflict between nimble, shallowly capitalised small partnerships and co-ops and large IP lawyer heavy mega-corporations. I wanted discussion about the conflict between value creation and value appropriation. I wanted our heroes to go back for round two. I wanted to find out what happens to a retirement plan when you can’t make meaningful investments in capital because all forms of capital have been rendered short term investments.
It didn’t. Mainly. I think it tried but it didn’t succeed. It maundered through the break up of the partnership of the two entrepreneurs. One of the heroes sold out. The other one didn’t. The bad guys seemed to win and everyone loves Disney. I didn’t find the characters interesting enough to follow their relationship to its death. In a fable about economic models I want economics.
What I took from the novel was that the author thinks that if only things were different the overwhelming coolness of guys like the author will make them rich and famous and well, cool.
I think it would have been a much better story if it had stopped at the original failure of New Work. That was interesting. By following the characters long after they stopped doing anything interesting I think the book lost the initial impact of the New Work experiment. The characters weren’t interesting enough to justify 400 pages of, well frankly, indulgent coolness. Great speculation, mediocre characters, overly drawn out story. An excellent novella ruined by the addition of an overly long and dull sequel.
I read Eastern Standard Tribe and Makers in that order. I enjoyed Eastern Standard Tribe more.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a first person narrative about how the protagonist ended up in a mental health hospital and how he goes about trying to leave hospital following a break down that flows from a failed romantic and business venture. Our hero thinks he is being bilked out of a fantastic business opportunity by his girlfriend and best friend. He thinks they have conspired to have him committed so they can steal his business. He also thinks he is secretly working for a Tribe based around using social media on Eastern Standard Time. He believes himself to be sabotaging a rival tribes reputation. Any and all of this may or may not be true.
Eastern Standard Tribe has a really interesting unreliable narrator. He is obviously suffering some mental health issues, or at least a combination of extreme fatigue and emotional stress, which is making his decision making processes less than optimal. He may, in fact, be mentally incompetent. So far so good as unreliable narrators go. What made the main character interesting for me was that he may be deluding himself about the whole Tribe thing. Tribes may or may not exist. They may or may not be coherent enough to have a group identity that transcends employer or nation. They may or may not be organised enough to have saboteurs. They may be a nothing more than the fantastical projection of a troubled man on to some out of hours social media acquaintances.
I also appreciated the speculative nature of the science fiction. Here is some technology. Here is how it might shape society. Here is a story that is not an essay that makes you think about.
So, an interesting character, decent narrative, interesting speculative elements. Not a bad book at all. I wasn’t struck with the notion that this was the future but I was encouraged to think about the different way people might interact with each other and the effect this might have on their political loyalties and their mental health.
The Makers is a less good book.
I wanted it to be better than it was. I think it needed to be shorter.
It is the story of the a group of entrepreneurs who are the standard bearers for New Work, a movement that attempts to combine endemic unemployment, easy Intellectual Property rights and a good dose of entrepreneurship along with a distributed co-op model of corporate management. The first third of the book follows the characters and through them the movement from its start to its eventual failure. The idea is fascinating from an economics and entrepreneurship point of view. This is a thought experiment about what happens when technology means that everyone has access to an intellectual property solution to almost anything and that barriers to entry are so low that the unemployed can use their low reservation wages and opportunity costs and just have a go. Does the mass scramble to find valuable applications for existing technology lead to a new industrial revolution or a quick and dirty Ponzi scheme. In an economy like this do all economic decisions revert to the short run cost of labour? All interesting stuff. Very interesting.
The characters are robust enough to hold my interest through the thought experiment. They weren’t of much interest in themselves.
The last two thirds of the book is less good. I’d go as far as to say actively bad. The characters who were a pilgrim’s guide to the new economics of the early to mid 21st Century become the focus of the story. They weren’t interesting enough to carry a further 400 pages. I kept waiting for the book to return to the economics but it didn’t. I huffed and puffed my way through the rest of the book. I wanted it to return to the conflict between nimble, shallowly capitalised small partnerships and co-ops and large IP lawyer heavy mega-corporations. I wanted discussion about the conflict between value creation and value appropriation. I wanted our heroes to go back for round two. I wanted to find out what happens to a retirement plan when you can’t make meaningful investments in capital because all forms of capital have been rendered short term investments.
It didn’t. Mainly. I think it tried but it didn’t succeed. It maundered through the break up of the partnership of the two entrepreneurs. One of the heroes sold out. The other one didn’t. The bad guys seemed to win and everyone loves Disney. I didn’t find the characters interesting enough to follow their relationship to its death. In a fable about economic models I want economics.
What I took from the novel was that the author thinks that if only things were different the overwhelming coolness of guys like the author will make them rich and famous and well, cool.
I think it would have been a much better story if it had stopped at the original failure of New Work. That was interesting. By following the characters long after they stopped doing anything interesting I think the book lost the initial impact of the New Work experiment. The characters weren’t interesting enough to justify 400 pages of, well frankly, indulgent coolness. Great speculation, mediocre characters, overly drawn out story. An excellent novella ruined by the addition of an overly long and dull sequel.
