Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" tells a gripping, fast-paced story that hinges on thought-provoking extrapolation from today's technical realities. This is the sort of book that captures and defines the spirit of a turning point in human history when our tools remake ourselves and our world. --Mitch Kapor Founder, Lotus, Inc., co-founder Electronic Frontier Foundation
Approx. 52,811 words.
"Damn, you know, it's so easy to get used to life without hyperlinks. You'd think you'd really miss 'em, but you don't."
And it clicked for me. He was a missionary -- one of those fringe- dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate -- you have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda -- but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before.
"How many successful missions have you had?" I asked.
"Figured it out, huh? I've just come off my fifth in twenty years -- counterrevolutionaries hidden out in the old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD site, still there a generation later." He sandpapered his whiskers with his fingertips. "Their parents went to ground after their life's savings vanished, and they had no use for tech any more advanced than a rifle. Plenty of those, though."
