Makers by Cory Doctorow

by Marcelo on December 10, 2009

For years Cory Doctorow has been highlighting all sorts of handmade tchotchkes, art pieces, hacked technologies, and creative tinkering on the blog Boing Boing (even today he’s featuring a kickass exploding frame design a cool artist whipped up). His newest novel imagines an economy built on a foundation of tinkerers and artists making cool things out of cheap junk and Linux and dares to posit a new way of doing things that blows all the old paradigms out of the water.

Makers is Cory Doctorow laid bare–his passion for all things handmade and tinkered with, his love of technology and optimism that it can be a force for good in the world, his complicated love/hate relationship with all things Disney, and his belief that the way we live in our world doesn’t have to be so, that even when our institutions fail humans are resourceful enough to invent new ones that work, provided they’re willing to let go of the past and embrace a new order. But it’s something deeper than a techno/economic polemic–it’s a bittersweet ballad about the people behind the ideas, the relationships that fade over time after an intense and heady spring. So many of the encounters Doctorow posits, the story of communities on the road and relationships forged, feel like familiar and personal encounters. This is his most emotionally honest and autobiographical novel since Someone Goes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, which also had that sense that Doctorow was showing us a little piece of himself at the same time he was blowing our minds with new ideas and new ways of looking at the world.

The premise is simple–in a near-future (brought even nearer by the recent economic crisis), an audacious venture capitalist decides to reinvent the way Americans work–by microfunding inventors with great ideas that can be turned around for a quick profit before cheap knockoffs whittle the margins away, which is when the team moves onto their next idea. The idea catches on like wildfire and before long “New Work” has swept the nation, and people who once toiled away in faceless office jobs or have found their training rendered obsolete by new technology have new callings making things with their hands in small communities. The communities spring up from shantytowns in vacant lots, but they’re as real and human as any other city, no matter what the people in power think as they try to erase those communities and stop what they see as urban blight.

All this is enough for any novel, but what makes Makers special is that Doctorow adds so much personal touch to the human stories behind the big ideas. Beyond the heady re-organization of the economy, Makers is a story about a friendship between Perry and Lester, two brilliant tinkerers with disparate personalities. Added to the mix is Suzanne, a blogger covering the rise of New Work, and Kettlewell, the Steve Jobs-esque personality who sees their potential and wants to help them succeed. While they each have their own focus (Kettlewell watches the money while Suzanne watches the PR), more than anything else they all share their love of all this neat new stuff–which is what Doctorow does everyday on Boing Boing.

And I’m just scratching the surface of what’s in this long and completely engrossing book. There’s a solution to obesity with unintended consequences, there’s a massive amusement park war between Disney and Perry and Lester’s open source crowd-tested competitor, and there’s the rise of 3D printers that can make anything out of a plastic-like goop. And just bubbling under the surface there’s the sense that thanks to the Internet and the way it makes knowledge a community resource, the Entire Way We Think About How The World Works is changing radically–that the definitions of ideas like “community,” “family,” “business,” “money,” and “success” are all going to go somewhere that’s so different from where it started that the entire system we’ve been used to for the last few centuries is going to be gone. The feelings of panic and insecurity that this realization brings are probably what prompts so many people to be overly protective of their IP. Soon that IP will be worthless, not because so many people have copied it, but because when those people move on to making their own things after practicing on copying your thing, it won’t even matter that you have the IP.

Perhaps that’s why for me the most interesting character in the book is Sammy, the Disney parks executive waging a one-man war against Perry and Lester’s open source amusement park chains that are cropping up in every major city thanks to P&L’s freely downloadable software. It’s not fair that Sammy has to compete against these start-ups who aren’t interested in making a profit, who just want to build something cool that people will enjoy. It’s not fair that anything Disney puts out as a new product or idea will be reverse-engineered, knocked off, and made ten times cheaper in China within a week. I really felt Sammy’s pain because–and here’s where Doctorow makes the character truly three-dimensional–all he ever wanted to do is what these guys are doing–make cool stuff and have people enjoy it, and instead he’s spending time fighting cool things, doing the exact opposite of why he got into this business. It’s that duality in Sammy’s character that is so real.

When I talk about copyright to anyone in the entertainment industry I get earnest lectures about how people are stealing everything and so many of us are out of work. I get people who say that the only way to save the industry is to wall it off and crack down and make it more difficult for other people to access the content. And I really feel what they’re saying because the perspective of the career worker in the entertainment industry is often overlooked in this battle between corporate fat cats and lawyers and rogue info-hippies. But Doctorow nails the truth–everyone in this business is here because they genuinely love what they do and they want to put out the best product possible. They’re scared of the future and want to protect their livelihood. They believe in the old business model. They also think the YouTube mixes they criticize are super cool, they use the very p2p software they decry to download music, and they freely admit the contradiction.

Doctorow recognizes the different motivations pulling individuals to act in certain ways and the ways they second-guess themselves and contradict their philosophies. He also sees these contradictions in the group of makers, from Perry’s reluctance to allow the new parks to be owned for fear of bringing money into his utopia, to Lester’s love/hate relationship with his body and how he treats others who knew him before a large weight loss, to Kettlewell’s desire to make order out of chaos combined with his inability to thrive in an orderly system.

With so many real three-dimensional portraits, Makers is the rare book that cares more about its characters than the coolness of the world they inhabit. It’s also a love letter to the many nights on the road Doctorow has spent meeting fans, engaging in cool communities, and participating in passionate activism. The friendships the characters forge are hard-fought through a turbulent summer and a bittersweet autumn, but Doctorow has never forgotten that glorious spring.

Makers is Cory Doctorow’s fifth novel, following the success of his YA book Little Brother. Like LB, Makers is available as a free download on his website under a Creative Commons license. It is also being serialized in its entirety at Tor.com. I read it on my iPhone using the application Stanza and found it a very apropos way to enjoy the book.

Makers by Cory Doctorow

FOLLOW

UPCOMING STUFF

POPULAR POSTS

Categories