WIJFR: Makers

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Covering the transformation of Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) into a network of tiny teams, journalist Suzanne Church goes to Florida and the inventors behind it all, Lester and Perry, who have more ideas than they know what to do with. The New Work takes off, with a mini-startup in every abandoned strip mall in America. But suddenly, it crashes, and things get really interesting. Lester and Perry build an interactive ride in an abandoned Wal-Mart, a nostalgia trip through their glory days, that catches the eye of a vicious Disney exec—and the old corporate giants fight their last battle against the new economic order.

Earlier this week I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” (the e-pub version through Stanza on my iPhone). This is the sixth Doctorow novel I’ve read and the second one that has a lot of Disney stuff in it (the other being “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“). Since I live near Disney World and tend to go there a lot (we’ve had resident annual passes for the past few years), it’s fun to read Cory’s books that involve a place he obviously has a thing for as well.

I’ve heard Doctorow say on podcasts in the past that he doesn’t really predict the future so much as “predict the present” … taking something that already exists and tweaking it just enough to make it seem like he invented it (you can read his own words on the process in this Guardian article from last year). In the case of “Makers,” Doctorow takes the old dot-com bubble and transforms it into New Work. Instead of the frenetic rush to build web sites and web services that defined the dot-com era, New Work is similar to the early PC days: hobbyists in garages toying with old junk (like discarded robotic Elmo dolls), inventing completely new things with corporations trying to monetize the whole thing.

The protagonists of “Makers” are Perry and Lester, two Florida inventors who are brought into the New Work craze by its founder, Landon Kettlewell. Suzanne Church, a tech journalist, is brought on board to document the “experiment” and blogs Lester’s and Perry’s exploits as they experiment with building useful stuff out of junk. The first half of the story documents the rapid rise of the New Work phenomenon (along with Lester’s and Perry’s celebrity status thanks to Suzanne’s blog) and ends, predictably, with the crash, much like the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The story then shifts to some years later, with Lester and Perry still in Florida now running an interactive ride in an abandoned Wal-Mart. The ride is a series of dioramas and the riders themselves can vote on whether or not they like a particular exhibit. Based on the votes, the ride is dynamically changed by various robots so it’s never the same ride twice (think “It’s a Small World” meets Digg … wouldn’t it be great to be to able to vote out some of those annoying singing children? ;-)). Eventually, the code is open-sourced so other rides are built by hobbyists around the country. Using a kind of internet-enabled version control software and cheap 3D printers, the rides are linked so that changes to one can affect the others.

Can you see why Disney suddenly plays a part in the story? Disney Parks Corporation, or more specifically, Sammy the Disney exec, is our story’s antagonist. Attendance has been dropping at the Disney parks so Sammy has been secretly driving from Orlando to ride Lester’s and Perry’s ride, intending to steal ideas to implement back at the Magic Kingdom. He discovers that some Disney material is being inserted into the ride by its fans. The inevitable lawsuits follow as Disney tries to shut down the rides. This of course raises the ire of the “makers” around the country and it escalates from there. Lawsuits upon lawsuits spawn an entire new type of economy: litigation investment funds. Will The Rides remain open? Can they beat Disney at its own game? Will Lester and Perry sell out so they can just continue to “make cool stuff?”

This was a fun read, especially since I actually went to Disney while I was reading the book. I could almost see the FantasyLand turned GothLand that Doctorow describes in “Makers.” It helped that the rear portion of FantasyLand is actually under construction, complete with the “go-away green” walls that Sammy sees as he walks around the park in the story.

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