Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom

book by Cory Doctorow ISBN:0765304368

• then read prequel WalkAway

free EBook http://craphound.com/down/

Experience Design, Adhocracy, Economics Of Abundance, Gift Economy

I'd get him to concede that Whuffie recaptured the true essence of Money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented - your personal capital (Social Capital?) with your friends and neighbors - you more accurately gauged your success.

They throbbed with Whuffie, Whuffie beyond measure, beyond use. In a world where even a zeroed-out Whuffie loser could eat, sleep, travel and access the net without hassle, their wealth was more than sufficient to repeatedly access the piffling few scarce things left on earth over and over.

How does Whuffie accumulate? I originally thought of it as explicit, kinda like a blog post/link/rating. But... I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles - sympathy Whuffie - but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em. Does this mean that Dan and Lil's emotional state and its object were automatically "scraped"? Or that other people are watching this scene, and "rating" him? Or what?

User Experience tweaking: It was a delicate process, this business of increasing throughput without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like the thinking that leads to olive-free AirLine salads or cookie recipes that turn to crap as they become cheap packaged goods.

A Side Effect of quasi-immortality: He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiously backtraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people had accorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he had scraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbance in front of their wondrous Pirates.

The AdHoc-s that I worked with all day treated me with basic courtesy but not much friendliness. I guess I treated them the same. When I pictured them in my mind, they were a faceless, Passive Aggressive mass, too caught up in the starchy world of ConSensus-building to ever do much of anything.