Review: “Walkaway” by Cory Doctorow
A startlingly bleak and yet uplifting utopian exposé of our current reality
Our book shops, cinemas, and online libraries are flooded with dystopia these days, from the vintage and chilling 1984, to the gratuitous post-apocalyptic film spectacle of Mad Max, or to the young-adult nightmare of The Hunger Games, we delight in these bleak futures. These grim alternative futures give us a strange kind of comfort in our disturbingly dystopian-like reality of pandemics, surveillance, and inequality. At least, we reassure ourselves, things aren’t as bad as that.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is refreshingly, startlingly different from all of these. For starters, it is undoubtedly a utopian novel; a rarity in our cynical post-truth times.
It starts with two of the main protagonists, somewhat jaded 27-year old Hubert and his desperately-youthful-at-heart buddy Seth attend a “Communist party” (emphasis on the “party” part). Young and rebellious types meet in an abandoned factory, using disused machinery to illegally manufacture copyrighted furniture and donate it to the poor, all while drinking free beer cultured from super-yeast and ditch water and dancing to automated music. There they meet Natalie, a strong-willed young woman trying to escape a different sort of hell — her rich and powerful family.
It’s a future just ahead of our own: machine learning and 3D printing have progressed to being able to fabricate almost anything you could desire with an open-source design and the right feedstock, bioengineering makes it possible to create using machines, and energy is cheap and freely available if you have hydrogen cells.
So far, so cyberpunk.
Despite these innovations, Hubert and Seth find themselves struggling to survive in “the world of non-work”. Inequality reigns, student-debt is crippling, automation has cut jobs, employment is unstable and grinding, and a tiny percentage of the population has all the power, both political and financial. Everything is copyrighted to the hilt, and the right to monetise (or leave to rot) reigns supreme. Despite the abundance available to humanity, the vast majority have to work longer and longer hours to have even a small slice of the pie. Sound familiar?
Doctorow masterfully whisks us away with our three protagonists from this frighteningly relatable “default” world into the challenging but ever-hopeful “walkaway” culture — the idealistic or desperate people that chose to “walkaway” from everything and start anew. They survive in a sharing economy out in the abandoned wastelands and ruined towns — no money, no bartering, no ownership, no work hours, no performance checks. They call themselves whatever they please.
“Owning something that isn’t fungible means that you’ve got to make sure someone else doesn’t take it. Once you let go of that, everything gets easier.”
Everyone can help themselves to everything, and everyone chips in with whatever work they feel like doing or can do. With the aid of smart designs, open-source, git-style branching and revisions, and intelligent computer programs, the collective is better than any individual idea. Although there are some natural “leaders” in certain situations, the community strives to avoid this thinking.
“Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide. It’s passive aggressive, but that’s walkaways. It’s not like there’s any hurry.”
If some aggressive, ownership-obsessed type steals their stuff or tries to take over their home, they simply walk away and start over. To quote Limpopo (one of the main characters introduced later):
“We can live like it’s the first days of a better world, not like it’s the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can’t have us. We withdraw our company.”
As I read it, I found myself frequently stopping to read aloud some worldview-shattering quote or idea with my spouse. The novel is chock-a-block with beautiful concepts, and Doctorow digs deep into the pro and cons of such a society. Anyone who has worked with open source, volunteering, or other sharing-economy type projects will recognise these well, and the novel explores the possibility: could the whole world be run this way? And would it be better?
All the while, Walkaway rips forward apace as the greedy world of “default” finally decides that “walkaways” are a threat, and sets out to stamp out our plucky heroes and the “better world” they are trying to build.
Which world will ultimately prevail: one of ownership and investments and greed and “meritocracy”? Or the new world of “post-scarcity” envisioned by the “walkaways”?
As the lockdown world of today contemplates the “new normal” of the future, Walkaway is essential reading. We don’t quite have the technology envisioned just yet, but if and when we do: what will we do with it? Is a sharing economy a valid way to live and organise ourselves? Can humanity make great progress without the competition of market capitalism? It’s not often you get to think deeply on such relevant social and economic issues at the same time as enjoying a thrill-ride of a story. Walkaway is an essay in novel clothing.
Do you think it all sounds a bit far-fetched? I leave you with one final quote:
“Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you’re 30 is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don’t remember what life was like 20 years ago, before walkaways. You don’t understand how different things are, so you think things don’t change that much.”
This is absolutely a five-star read. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
