"We’re not the only ones. Technology has challenged and killed businesses from every sector. Hell, IBM doesn’t make computers anymore! The very idea of a travel agent is inconceivably weird today! And the record labels, oy, the poor, crazy, suicidal, stupid record labels. Don’t get me started. "
“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodities or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.
from chapter one of Makers by Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow's next novel, Makers, is being serialized on Tor.com ahead of it's publication in October. The first of the novel's three originally appeared in serialized form on Salon in 2005 under the title Themepunks . Tor plans to re-post those chapters followed by the rest of the novel three days a week starting yesterday and continuing in to the fall. They have also added very cool illustrations to each chapter from the folks at Idiot Books that will combine in the end to form a giant mosaic.
I absolutely loved the novels first section when it was up at Salon and am looking forward to reading the rest of the book in this serialized format (and than most likely re-reading it as a novel). The novel, or at least the first section, follows a team of hardware hackers immersed in a sort of makers' revolution along with the journalist who finds herself caught up in the events. This post-industrial revolution is comprised of lone cells of entrepreneurs re-purposing the cast off remains of a waste heavy consumer society into new, wonderful and obscure inventions and possibly reigniting the innovation and manufacturing spirit of American society in the process. The driving engine for this change is a rogue CEO, Kettlewell, who delivers the quote above and is determined to retool global industry by micro-funding thousands of individual teams of inventors across the country.
In 2005 the themes and setting of the book were the product of squinting in to a desperate near future. In the current cultural and financial climate however, the story should read as reports from an optimistic version of the present. As always Doctorow shines in making tech/geek gibberish enjoyable to those less fluent in its vernacular. Here he manges again to create a fiction based on complex and serious serious ideas that has at its heart wonderful characters and their very real struggles and triumphs in an age where technology and its effects on daily life are in a maddening state of flux.
It will be interesting to see how the serialization of the book will go over. There have been a few flavors of this return to the dickensesque serial and to my knowledge none have met with massive success. However, the synergy between the themes in the work and the innovative way its being promoted and published make this a perfect candidate for this new twist on a very old format. It certainly doesn't hurt that its written by one of the pillars of the commons and the internet.
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