I have recently read this book for several reasons, one of which was that I wanted to read Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) and thought I should read this first. More specifically, I am currently working on a writing project concerning the relationship between SF and Socialism (broadly conceived, including libertarian and decentralised varieties) and Doctorow is on my initial list. To this end, I’m also participating on a couple of panels at the imminent 80th Worldcon, Chicon 8: ‘Better Worlds Are Possible’ (Airmeet 3, Friday Sept 2 at 8:30 AM CDT/2.30 PM BST) and ‘Systems of Governance in SFF’ (Airmeet 2, Saturday Sept 3 at 8:30 AM CDT/2.30PM BST), and Walkaway is listed in the blurb for the former. Finally, and most importantly, I have been meaning to read both Down & Out and Walkaway since reading Jo Lindsay Walton’s article ‘Estranged Entrepreneurs and the Meaning of Money in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom’ (Foundation 137, Winter 2020, 62-80). This was shortlisted for the BSFA Best Non-Fiction Award in 2021 and I reviewed it as part of my shortlist review (some of the content of which I replicate here).
Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom is a satire set in Disney World in a post-scarcity, post-death, post-money future. The plot ostensibly concerns a struggle to take over the running of two famous attractions in Liberty Square, the Haunted Mansion and the Hall of Presidents, but the chief interest of the novel lies in the view of the wider surrounding society, including its reputational economy of ‘Whuffie’. Whuffie, Walton tells us, is not really that similar to the reputation metrics of social media; it can’t be simply stated as a score in the same way as one can enumerate their instagram followers. He cites Doctorow’s 2016 Locus Online article, ‘Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies’, to the effect that Whuffie is ‘a score that a never-explained set of network services calculate by directly polling the minds of the people who know about you and your works, reducing their private views to a number’ (Walton 2020: 67). Furthermore, Whuffie varies according to how respected person B is by the people that person A respects, so any one individual will have different Whuffie scores from different people. To be Whuffie-rich, as Walton puts it, is to have the best seats in the house or the most coveted voluntary jobs. Whereas, being Whuffie-poor as Doctorow describes it in the novel is profoundly alienating:
This is how you hit bottom. You wake up in your friend’s hotel room and you power up your handheld and it won’t log on. You press the call-button for the elevator and it gives you an angry buzz in return. You take the stairs to the lobby and no one looks at you as they jostle past you.
You become a non-person. (Doctorow, Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom, Harper Voyager, 2010 [2003], 183)
To be clear, aside from the ‘invisibility’ this isn’t the same problem as being poor and homeless in today’s US or UK. Doctorow’s protagonist, Jules, who is now on the skids, has already described an earlier period of his life when he was as ‘Whuffie-poor as a man can be’:
I slept in a little coffin on-campus, perfectly climate controlled. It was cramped and dull, but my access to the network was free and I had plenty of material to entertain myself. When I couldn’t get a table in a restaurant, I was free to queue up at any of the makers around town and get myself whatever I wanted to eat and drink, whenever I wanted it. Compared to 99.99999 percent of all the people who’d ever lived, I had a life of unparalleled luxury. [….] The number of low-esteem individuals at large was significant, and they got along just fine, hanging out in parks, arguing, reading, staging plays, playing music. (150-1)
Sounds like fun. Indeed, Jules thinks of this situation as being ‘Whuffie-poor and fancy-free’ (150). Although he is not so happy about it when he does eventually ‘hit bottom’, this idea of being able to start again presents the positive aspect of the society. In this respect, the novel sends out something of a mixed message because although it satirizes aspects of a reputational economy, it has an upbeat ending (I was feeling low when I read it and it cheered me up). In the end, the sense of possibility outweighs the irritation of the most ‘popular’ kids at High School being able to lord it for life.
Walkaway is a loose prequel which explores the events eventually leading to the society seen in Down & Out. As Walton comments, ‘the novel’s title is likely an illusion to Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ (1973), but it might also communicate the urge to walk back some of the utopianism of Whuffie. [….] Whereas Down & Out tends to treat meritocracy as a problematic but still promising ideal – one which might just be redeemed through new techno-social infrastructures – Walkaway declares that meritocracy is an unsalvageable scam’ (Walton: 63-4). I think this idea of an authorial negative reaction to Whuffie is probably correct; it’s supported by the fact that Doctorow describes Whuffie as ‘dystopian’ in the above-mentioned 2016 Locus Online article. Yet these ideas are implicit in the satirical nature of the original novel even to the extent that, although Jules does eventually get his Whuffie back, the happy ending lies in the fact that he does ‘walkaway’ from the planet thereby relating personal development to spatial experience. Walkaway, as I will discuss in a future post, is a far more comprehensive discussion of these issues and, indeed, very much an explicit rejection of meritocracy as ‘self-serving circular bullshit’. However, the principal difference between it and its predecessor is that we have moved beyond the stage of that type of satire with the emergence of the brutal reality of the twenty-first century, which is that the super-rich (or ‘zottarich’, as Doctorow calls them) are in the process of seceding from the rest of humanity, taking all of the wealth and resources with them.
Prospective Cultures 