Like much of the best science fiction, Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, For the Win, is set in the future, but its themes are rooted in the present day.
For the Win has the world as its canvas. Its characters start in the industrial slums of China and India, and the adventures take us from there to the posh corporate offices of America.
But the novel isn’t limited to the real world. Much of the action also takes place in cyberspace—the world of online, multiplayer games.
“It’s a book about gold farmers, who are people who do repetitive video game tasks in order to amass virtual wealth, which they then sell through the game market to players who are either too busy or to lazy to do those tasks themselves,” Cory said in an interview, “It’s about what happens when they form a trade union.”
In addition to writing For the Win, Cory co-edits the blog Boing Boing, and is author of other books including Makers and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. I interviewed him for my podcast, Copper Robot, in Second Life. You can listen to the whole interview here: MP3. [To download, right click and “save target/link as”.]
For the Win weighs in at 480 pages of adventure, as it follows its teen Chinese, Indian and American heroes through two continents, across the Pacific Ocean, and into a variety of epic fantasy and science fiction gaming worlds. The characters of For the Win fight to get decent working conditions and pay from the bosses who work them in digital sweatshops.
One of the things that impresses me about For the Win is that it starts with a silly premise—a trade union of gold farmers, people who play online games for a living—and quickly delves into some of the most important issues facing the world today: The disparity between rich and poor countries, and exploitation of workers. The novel blossoms.
That shouldn’t be surprising, according to Doctorow. “Economics is a game. Even economists look at game theory. It’s all about people agreeing to play by a set of rules, and pretending game tokens have intrinsic value. A lot of people have written a lot of ink about whether money is worth something, whether gold is worth something. Whatever value it has comes out of a consensus, and that consensus is not so different from the consensus that virtual gold is worth something or that Monopoly money is worth something.”
Science fiction, says Doctorow, is more about the present than the future. “Science fiction uses changes in the world to illustrate what’s going on in the world today. It uses a kind of warped futuristic mirror to tell a story about the present day. I think even when a writer doesn’t know they’re doing it, they often end up doing it.
“[Isaac] Asimov, for example, clearly was reflecting on things like the New Deal when he started writing about rational technocratic governments that sit down and plan out thousands of years of future history in order to ensure maximum benefit. He really was talking about his present-day technology but coating it in futuristic clothes. He may not have known it, but in hindsight we can see that’s what he was doing.”
One element that I find interesting about Asimov is that his Foundation stories deal with a secret cabal that conspires to manipulate the entirety of human history—and Asimov sees this as Utopian. For Asimov, this secret cabal are the good guys.
Doctorow responded, “Then there’s the idea that they can actually do it. I don’t know which is weirder, the idea that it’s OK to have a star chamber that has humanity’s best interests at heart, that figures out how to manipulate us to do the right thing, or the idea that it would be plausible for them to have done it, that you can actually engineer the future by forcing people into certain pathways that would then produce deterministic outcomes that were stable for hundreds or thousands of years.”
In 2004, Doctorow did a cover story for Wired, interviewing the director of I, Robot, and re-read all the Asimov robot novels in preparation. “What struck me was that he was setting action not just hundreds, but sometimes thousands of years in the future, in which robots were still being made the same way, in which there was some stricture that forced people to build robots with the Three Laws in them, and people weren’t allowed to stray outside that. And I thought that was the most regulated future I’ve ever seen. Implied in Asimov’s work was something like an FCC sitting there punishing anyone who tried to build a robot that didn’t comply with the Three Laws system.”
Doctorow wrote a short story based on the insight, which appears on Scribd: “I, Robot.”
Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, was influenced to become an economist by Asimov’s psychohistory. He’s a science-fiction fan, and videotaped a conversation with sf novelist Charles Stross at last year’s WorldCon.
But back to For the Win.
Cory’s first attempt at a story based on the premise of unionizing gold farmers was Anda’s Game, published in Salon in 2004. The idea was sparked by a talk he’d heard at a game conference by a man who was paying kids in Latin America to play games and sell their winnings to other, wealthier players. “People really liked the idea,” Cory said. “More and more of this stuff started to happen, and people credited me with predicting it, which was really funny, because of course I didn’t predict it, I observed it. I sometimes say that good science fiction predicts the present, and that’s more or less what happened here.”
I’ll have more from my interview with Cory another day.
Photo of Cory by NK Guy.
Mitch Wagner is a fan, freelance technology journalist and social media strategist. Follow him on Twitter: @MitchWagner.
I’ve just started “For the Win”and so far, so good. Definitely an outlandish premise at first sight, but he handles it so well it soon becomes apparent that in today’s world, it’s not that farfetched at all. And that’s mind-blowing.
Just finished reading the book. Cory got most of the milieux right (so far as I can tell) and the characters are appealing. However, I couldn’t believe in his unions, or their improbable successes. He postulates a patois of English, Hindi, and Chinese, which enables the kids to communicate: not likely on a mass scale. He imagines characters who transcend national and religious divisions — again, not likely. Yes, you can get globish and globalism at hacker/maker/peace activist/environmentalist gatherings, but that would be a very small, very elite group of people. Probably not Dharavi slum kids, or kids from China’s inner provinces.
[SPOILERS WARNING]
Granting Cory the above mentioned things from @2 in the realm of “future” and “fiction,” my larger qualm here was the both the contrived plan of the Webbly’s leadership and the amazing knowledge shown by ‘tweens. One thing that stuck out to me in the book is where one ‘tween slum-child character in India is talking to an actual trained economist and holding her ground in the conversation (even if he is more or less lecturing her about economics).
I also was not a fan of the small interlude-type sections that left the narrative and straight up were from some hipsters’ economics text book. Not so much that they were painful to read, but that they made the section ten pages later where the characters re-hash the entire economic lesson painful. Perhaps I am just being unforgiving of a YA writing style, though.
Oh, and no offense, but you can tell Cory grew up the son of Trotskyist teachers (as Wiki puts it). The obvious rose-colored glamor of a socialist world is laid on rather thick. I was relieved that the Gold Farmers didn’t actually manage to perform the first successful polertariat rebellion (although they did magically come close). On the same token, the Game-Master/Economist that wanted to hunt down and eliminate Gold Farmers altogether was, in my opinion, the hero (and only symapthetic character) of the book. His obvious straw-man-ness annoyed me, though.
I viewed it as not so much a Socialist World, but rather a world where strong unions balance strong corporate interests. When organized labor balances organized capital, it can actually work quite well for both, as can be seen in Las Vegas.
Read it. Loved it.
Hope there will be a german translated version. Would like to put it in the hands of some young friends.
@@.-@ OK, I see the point there, but I still contest it is rose-colored. Strong Unions can also (and have also) become just as much a “monster” as the corporations they were trying to balance. That is personal experience speaking too, as I grew up a company-man’s son in a Southern Illinois town 99% full of union coal miners. Not much of my life down there is clear memory-wise to me, but I remember the fear I lived in from my dad being targeted, and he was a safety man. His job was to make sure the working conditions were good for the miners, and they still came after him to the point that the company had to hire guards to spend the nights at our house. Anyway, I digress.
I guess what bugs me the most was that all corporations are shown to be soulless, uncaring money grubbers (which perhaps they all are to some degree, but not black-and-white), and the polertariat workers are given an almost “noble savage” type-casting. Even the representation of the existing unions just had them as conservative and wary of this strange, new beast and absent of even a shadow of possible corruption or corporate mindsets themselves.
In fact, as I think if over, it comes to me that For The Win is the kind of black-and-white I expect from a fantasy instead of the moral grays I’m more used to in SciFi.
And ’cause I’m going Wall-o-text after my bedtime, I’d also like to say that, as someone who followed the “financial collapse” as it happened and listened to far too much NPR so he could understand it, the fact that the Webbly plan is more or less a digital version of the Sub-Prime Crisis merged with Bernie Madoff was, well, I guess just not that fresh for me. Again, I am probably being overly critical on that, though, as this is a YA novel and the target audience probably wouldn’t see the 1-to-1 correlation as clearly if at all. So, as an explanatory tool for that, it probably is actually rather nice.
The main thing that bugs me about FTW, is SPOILER ALERT – the sheer number of characters who die. And the almost complete lack of reaction from their fellows.
I mean, they could have at least one good breakdown, but, no, it’s all just “OH, WELL, NOW MY RESOLVE HAS BEEN EVER FURTHER HARDENED! FOR THE WIN!” …
R.Fife (#6): No questions, unions can be awful.
And corporations *are* soulless moneygrubbing creatures. It’s the tragedy of capitalism. Capitalism is a wonderful invention, bringing unprecedented prosperity and wealth. But corporations, which are woven into the fabric of capitalism, are feral beasts, tough to harness and always eager to start eating people.
I have a friend who is a staunch libertarian, fiercely intelligent and educated, and (like me) an enthusiastic Doctorow fan. He’s been struggling with “For the Win.” He asserts that unions do not get credit for improved working conditions, it’s just simple economics. When there is a labor surplus, as occurred in the 19th and first third of the 20th Century, working conditions are crappy. When there is a labor shortage, working conditions are better.
In World War II, Americans saw vast improvements in working conditions, because much of the normal workforce was off fighting the war.
In the quarter-century after World War II, working conditions in the US continued to improve, as America was the only industrial power left standing. Our relatively small population was manufacturing for the entire world. The labor shortage continued.
Later in the 20th Century, the rest of the world began to ramp up industrially, and industrial jobs moved to crappy working conditions overseas. The industrial jobs left in the US mostly got worse too — working conditions at slaughterhouses, for example, are horrific.
(Yes, I just called a slaughterhouse an industrial job. Economists are spitting mad.)
Mitch @8
I think I see more eye to eye with your friend, which as a left-leaning moderate somewhat worries me. ;) But I definitely subscribe to the concept that a corporation can gain a certain enlightened self interest where they realize that happy workers tend to be more productive workers. Not all of them in present day (in fact a very small percentage), but look at some of the best companies to work for according to Forbes and such, and you find non-unionized entities like Microsoft and Dell.
And anything with an assembly line is industrial, in my opinion. I’ll stand with you against the economists’ ire on that one.