Q&A with Cory Doctorow

Author of "Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom"

He came to my CMS.400 class to answer questions. Here are some of the things he talked about:

Writing is a way to find out what's on your mind. He talked about one time where he started writing a story and decided where he wanted it end up but then by the time he was getting to the end of the book, he realized that the book was going in a totally different direction. Then, when he reread what he had written in the beginning of the book, he realized that he was thinking about something else the entire time subconsciously.

Writing is also a way to be a fan. In this book, he took ideas from "Overdrawn at the memory bank," Neal Stevenson, Bruce Sterling.

He talked about the guy that designed the haunted house in disneyland. He was an active chess player and if you look on the top of the haunted house you can see chess pieces like pawns, rooks, kings, queens. Other fun facts are that the tomb stones in the haunted house is a credit reel for the people that worked on making it.

He talked about hidden mickeys. How people look for the big circle with two little circles (mickey's ears) everywhere.

He talked about Tolkien and how he decided to create the whole elvish language and write extensively about it because it was a way to escape from writing such a huge novel.

He gets a tax writeoff for visits to Disneyland?

Ideas in his book:
Ad-hocracy, where there are no formal governing forces, just groups of people that come together randomly and decide to do something. The problem with ad-hocracy is that there aren't any rules making it easy to cheat.

Whuffie - his term for the equivalent of money in his world. Whuffie is gained from the respect of your peers. The world is in a state where everything is in abundance and death has been eliminated by technological advances in cloning. You can check each others Whuffie by pinging them (everyone is connected to the network)

The problem with Whuffie and the meritocracy is that it suffers from the power law - the rich get richer while the poorer stay poor because no one pays attention to the people with low Whuffie.

Other things:
Media companies listen to your ideas when they are paying you, but ignore you when you just come to them.

Sony e-ink reader is cool in principle but Doctorow thinks that no one will buy it because even though you only have to buy "one book" for life, most people only buy an average of 2 books in their lifetime.

"It's like climbing a pile of shit to pluck the rose at the top only to discover you've lost your sense of smell along the way"