Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (e reader manga .TXT) 📖

The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped micro-dreads, and an attitude.

“So here’s what I don’t get. You’ve got the Market wired—”

“Unwired,” Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look.

“Unwired, right.” The kid made little inverted commas with his fingertips, miming, Yes, that is a very cute jargon you’ve invented, dork. “You’ve got the Market unwired and you’re going to connect up your network with the big interchange down on Front Street.”

“Well, eventually,” Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front Street, the Market, open networks… it had no focus, it wasn’t a complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He’d tried to explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she’d been totally lost.

“Eventually?” The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who’d been volunteering in the shopfront when he’d appeared.

“That’s the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference.” Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed.

“Okay, that’s the goal.”

“But it’s not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as providing the network itself—hell, the network is people. So we’ve got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in.”

“And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?”

Kurt nodded vigorously. “Zactly.”

“And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?”

Alan nodded slowly. “We’ve been thinking about a mapping application—”

“But we decided that it was stupid,” Kurt said. “No one needed to draw a map of the Web—it just grew and people found its weird corners on their own. Networks don’t need centralized authority, that’s just the chains on your mind talking—”

“The chains on my mind?” The kid snorted.

Alan held his hands up placatingly. “Wait a second,” he said. “Let’s take a step back here and talk about values. The project here is about free expression and cooperation. Sure, it’d be nice to have a city-wide network, but in my opinion, it’s a lot more important to have a city full of people working on that network because they value expression and understand how cooperation gets us more of that.”

“And we’ll get this free expression how?”

“By giving everyone free Internet access.”

The kid laughed and shook his head. “That’s a weird kind of ‘free,’ if you don’t mind my saying so.” He flipped over his phone. “I mean, it’s like, ‘Free speech if you can afford a two-thousand-dollar laptop and want to sit down and type on it.’”

“I can build you a desktop out of garbage for twenty bucks,” Kurt said. “We’re drowning in PC parts.”

“Sure, whatever. But what kind of free expression is that? Free expression so long as you’re sitting at home with your PC plugged into the wall?”

“Well, it’s not like we’re talking about displacing all the other kinds of expression,” Alan said. “This is in addition to all the ways you’ve had to talk—”

“Right, like this thing,” the kid said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small phone. “This was free—not twenty dollars, not even two thousand dollars—just free, from the phone company, in exchange for a one-year contract. Everyone’s got one of these. I went trekking in India, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know what they use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind of abstract expression, but actual talking.”

The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenly he was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He had that fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, from the people who believe.

Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular intern had responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant to see through the bullshit, but just the opposite.

“But that’s communication through the phone company,” Kurt said, wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn’t see how sucktastic that proposition was. “How is that free speech?”

The kid rolled his eyes. “Come off it. You old people, you turn up your noses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cell phones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate with each other—even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on this stuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from the polling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to sound the alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines, twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of the presidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of the corruption hearings.

“And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how important phones are to democracy, there’s always some old pecksniff primly telling us that our phones don’t