book review An awesome book by Cory Doctorow which a solarpunk society exists outside of “default”.
Interesting tech
There is interesting technology in the book which are captured in some of the quotes below.
“Because it’s fast-acting. It was ditch water an hour ago. We sieved it, brought it up to room temp, dumped in the culture. It’s live, too — add some precursor, it’ll come back. Survives in your urine. Just save some, you want to make more.”
“Communist beer?” Hubert, Etc said. The best bon mot he could scrounge. He was better when he had time to think.
They also had zepplins, called “bumblers”, which roamed the sky under minimal power. Folks there rode the air streams.
“Meta,” she said. “Or something like it.”
He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance — a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miserable lot. In his day — eight years before — the scourge had been called “Now,” something they gave to source-code auditors and drone pilots to give them robotic focus. He’d eaten a shit-ton of it while working on zepps. It made him feel like a happy android. The conspiracy people had said the same thing about Now that they said about Meta. End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro-status-quo.
They have touch interfaces woven into their clothes
He rubbed the interface strip on his ring finger and muttered “contact details,” held out his hand. Her hand was warm, rough and small. She touched a strip she wore as a choker and whispered and he felt a confirming buzz from his system, then a double-buzz that meant that she’d reciprocated.
[H]e played an old acoustic minigame he’d been addicted to as a kid, matching the rhythm and pitch of the tones in his earbud with finger-taps and whistles.
The suit’s interface surfaces were three generations removed from the ones the game was designed for, and were specialized for wildly different purposes to the surfaces he’d grown up with. The game was a lot harder until he tweaked the way the interfaces registered.
Iceweasel endured a new kind of captivity with the South Bend walkaways, her skin dyed three shades darker — she had to take tablets, every morning, and it got a little splotchy anywhere her skin creased — wearing fingertip interface surfaces that looked like affectations and got in the way but ensured she didn’t leave behind any fingerprints; wearing colored contacts and letting Nadie gum long-lasting glue between her smallest toes on each foot to change her gait.
Robo-restaurants
They found a booth, the table lighting up with menus as they sat. The menus in front of each of them grew speech-bubbles as the automat’s biometrics recognized them and highlit their last orders, welcoming them back. Hubert, Etc saw Natalie had ordered lasagna with double garlic bread the last time, and it had been four years since she’d placed that order. “You don’t eat here often?”
The new Fran’s felt haunted, and the feeling was, ironically, most intense during special events with live servers instead of automats. Live humans bearing trays of food highlighted the fact that the restaurant was designed for free-ranging, dumb robots and a minimum of human oversight.
Fancy autonomous cars.
“He’s showing off. There’s custom firmware in these, lets them cut the clearance envelope in half, which makes the other cars back off because we’re driving like unpredictable assholes.”
“Is that legal?” Hubert, Etc said.
“It’s a civil offense,” Jacob said. “The fines are paid by direct-debit.”
“What if you kill someone?” Seth got to the point.
“That’s a criminal matter, more serious. Won’t happen, though. There’s a lot of game theory stuff going on in the car’s lookahead, modeling likely outs and defectors and injecting a huge margin of safety. Really, we’re playing it safer than the stock firmware, but only because the car itself has got much better braking and acceleration and handling characteristics than a stock car.”
“And because you’re terrifying other cars’ systems into getting out of your way,” Seth said.
“Right,” Natalie said, before her dad could object. He shrugged and Hubert, Etc remembered what she’d said about his being “old rich,” unconcerned by the idea that anyone would resent his buying his way through traffic.
They raced through city streets. Natalie closed her eyes and reclined. There were dark circles under her eyes and she was tense, had been since her dad turned up. Hubert, Etc tried not to stare.
Within the book, they had a strong opsec culture, driven by things like raids of their parties or over protective “zottarich” parents.
The bathroom was the kind you saw in showrooms. Active noise-cancellation ate the sound of the water; smart jets’ algorithms increased and decreased the pressure, predicting what he wanted sprayed and how hard; interactive surfaces turned anything into a mirror at a double-tap, giving him an unnerving look at his ass and the back of his head; air-circulators bathed him in warm breezes after he turned down the water, simultaneously drying the bathroom’s surfaces of condensate.
You told it the kind of building you wanted, gave it a scavenging range and it directed its drones to inventory anything nearby, scanning multi-band, doing deep database scrapes against urban planning and building-code sources to identify usable blocks for whatever you were making.
see: Projection Mapping
Its major feature was the projection-mapped lighting that painted surfaces and items throughout its interior with subtle red/green tones
I’m Limpopo. What do you want to be called?” The phrasing was particular to the walkaways, an explicit invitation to remake yourself. It was the height of walkaway sophistication to greet people with it, and Limpopo used it deliberately on these three
That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt — it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.”
Meanwhile, we’re ready to do measurements and styles, right?” They did, letting the stables’ cams image them and then sanity-checking the geometry the algorithms inferred.
nanofiber insulation
structural cardboard doped with long-chain molecules that off-gassed something
Piss clear.” It was a walkaway benediction,
yogurt studded with pistachios and tailored culture they assured her would moderate her stress, which explained why they were so fucking laid back, despite being firebombed.
That’s Disjointed. She was a bombing casualty. Her recording’s only a couple of days old. She thought this might be coming. CC’s got her running across the whole cluster.” “That’s a brain in a jar?” Iceweasel said. “Mind in a jar,” Sita said. “The brain’s ashes.” Gretyl shivered.
They logged it with the master load-balancer, which all the top comp-sci types fiddled with. “Load-balancer” became a conjurer’s phrase, curse and invocation. Something was always wrong, but it did miracles, because the collection of motley devices, sprinkled around the tunnels, linked by tangles of fiber in pink rubber sheaths, delivered compute cycles that made Dis leap into consciousness.
occasional downtrodden servant-types. How many of those has your father got working for him, anyway?” “None of them work for him. He uses a service that sources them on an as-needed basis, using realtime bids. There are a few who show up every day because the bidding algorithm recognizes their performance metrics, but the occasionals are one-timers.
The drones were clever enough that they were already on their trail. They’d sent status updates helpfully informing her that if she could get more computing power for an inference engine to make better guesses about likely trail-ways, they would be more efficient.
Evidentiary.” A line of red lights along the compartment’s ceiling began to pulse. “Everything we say and do now is being recorded on tamper-evident storage. The car will transmit a hash of the video to a federal data-retention server at ten-second intervals. Everything we say is admissible in any court in Canada or any OECD nation.
She’d had an earbud implanted a couple years before, when she’d started to have trouble with her hearing after a bad fever that crossed the country. The bud murmured a translation to her that only sometimes entered the realm of machine-trans garble.
Seth wheeled in an insulated chest. He popped the lid, releasing fragrant steam. There were showers at the spacies’ compound, but swollen numbers had driven everyone to the wikis for alternatives from other walkaways and the towels were a winner. It wasn’t easy to bathe yourself with them, but that was a feature, not a bug, far as most people were concerned.
But this issue’s been discussed and the consensus was that we didn’t want leaderboards. They produce shitty incentives.” She held up her gloppy hands. “I’m in the middle of something. Why don’t you put it on the wiki?”
“Is that the rule?”
“Nope,” she said.
“So why should I do it?”
“Because that’s worked before.”
Wiki / Network
She lofted network-node bumblers on a coverage pattern,
The bumblers reported in. Something had used them to connect to the walkaway net, a couple klicks upwind, just as she’d thought. With luck, it would be refugees and not other would-be relief workers, or worse, looter-ghouls.
The walkaway net had high-speed zones, and this had been one of them, but the major hard-line links had been destroyed in the blaze and they’d dropped back to stupid meshing wireless and there was only so much electromagnetic spectrum in the universe.
She lived on walkaway networks. She appreciated the subtle genius in its architectures. Sites that had became unreachable sprang back to life thanks to the questing tendrils of the network’s self-healing, restlessly seeking out new ways to bridge the parts that were atomized by entropy or connivance. The downside was that nothing was ever truly down, and anything unreachable warranted a reload. It didn’t work, but sometimes it did, often enough to keep trying. Dis hadn’t thought about BF Skinner since her undergrad days, but after the millionth retry to reach Seth, Tam and Gretyl, she looked up “intermittent reinforcement” in their locally cached wikip. That’s what it was: intermittent reinforcement. Give a pigeon a food pellet every time it presses a button and it’ll press it when it’s hungry. Change the lever’s algorithm so it randomly drops a pellet and the pigeon will peck and peck, as the pattern matching parts of its brain sought to figure out the trick of a reliable jackpot.
Walkaway net was different from default’s. Its applications were designed for fault tolerance — built with the assumption the machine you connected to could disappear and reappear without warning, as drones, towers, wires and fibers failed, faded or fubared. It assumed it was being wiretapped, under permanent infowar conditions. It insisted on handshakes, signatures and signed nonces to root out man-in-the-middlers. When Dis went from Stanford to Walkaway U, the network had been the biggest culture shock. Slower in some ways, but without the ubiquitous warnings about copyright infringement, interminable clickthrough agreements, suspicious blackouts of “sensitive” resources when global protests spiked.
They both got an offline buzz at the same moment as the walkaway network failed. She could tell, because they both stopped at the same moment.
“Does that happen often?” Etcetera said.
“It shouldn’t happen period. The network’s got redundant failovers, including a blimp. And we’ve got clear skies.”
She got out a screen and prodded with gloved fingers, squinting through the steam of her exhalations. She didn’t use diagnostic stuff often and it took her a while to get it up. “That’s weird,” she said. “Even if everything went blooey, you’d expect it to be a cascading failure. Node A goes dark, node B gets overwhelmed by traffic from it, falls over, then node C gets a double-whack and so on. But look, it lost contact with everything, all at once. That’s like a power-cut, but they’re all on independent power-cells.”
There were vast surveillance nets sucking up every packet that traversed both the main walkaway trunks and the most highly connected default nodes, looking for a variety of keywords, anything that could be fingerprinted as characteristic of Iceweasel or her previous network access, which had been retrieved from the inconceivably vast databases of captured net-traffic. From her typing patterns to the habitual order in which she visited her favorite sites to the idiosyncrasies of her grammar, syntax and punctuation, the surveillance-bots were sieving the network torrents for her.
The network links went abruptly dead, their drones shot out of the sky at the same time as the fiber lines cut off. […] The cameras still brought feeds from outside, because the local net still ran, still spooled its footage for exfiltration to the rest of the world.
Gretyl and Limpopo’s fingers collided as they jabbed the same spots on the infographics, cutting service over to those links, tuning the caches and load-balancers to accommodate a sudden two-order-of-magnitude drop in throughput. Traffic in and out of the prisons was now queuing deeply in repeaters’ caches. Out in the world, other caches were doing the same. The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, Gretyl thought, and grinned at the ancient, pre-walkaway slogan. It had been true for a while, then a metaphor, then wishful thinking, and now it was a design specification.
Meanwhile, the drones’ brief flights had managed to clear seventy-five percent of the network backlogs, massively relieving the congestion on their surviving fiber.
Other choice quotes
She was cheating on her wife. Carrying on an affair with armed insurrection.
you’re just meat following rules.‘”
A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.
If you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading water in open sea, every one would tell you they’re not optimistic. “What they are is hopeful. Or at least not hope-empty. They don’t give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can’t change a fucking thing.
everyone whose hopes weren’t dashed started off by having hope. Hope’s the price of admission. It’s still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it’s our lotto.