Eastern Standard Tribe

by Cory Doctorow ISBN:0765307596: Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"

read it for free on my PDA, later bought the paper book

Model-ing Culture affinity as Tribalism.

Tribes based on which Time Zone you related to. Tribes are agendas. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of Getting Things Done. They're competitive. They may not all be based on time zones. There are knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian-rock Tribes, but they've always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than SubCulture-s. It takes time zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction or knitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patrionize a fell Tribesman's restaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because of xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman's taxi will conduct its way through traffic in a way that I'm comfortable with, whether I'm in San Francisco, Boston, London, or Calcultta.

• note that these are all cities. I think these are city-specific tribes, not time-zone-specific. Then when you leave the cities (Urban Archipelago), you're in a different tribe - but do you think a rural-Vermont person will get along with a rural-Georgia person?
• in my experience, being stuck among another tribe makes it harder to achieve/maintain Flow State.

main character is Experience Design-er - the 2 big ideas he works on are

• WiTunes (my name) - a P2P File Sharing system for passing around tunes on the HighWay, with drivers getting paid for sharing a lot, and paying to keep songs as they leave the highway.
  • Mar'2013: Brad Templeton series on the challenges around V2V communications.
• technology to run more "open" Senior Housing (Transparent Society/Reputation Management)