Makers by Cory Doctorow (best romance ebooks .TXT) đ
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distinctive solutions. Take dishes: every dishwasher should be designed with a âcleanâ and a âdirtyâ compartmentâbasically, two logical dishwashers. You take clean dishes out of the clean side, use them, and put them into the dirty side. When the dirty side is full, the clean side is empty, so you cycle the dishwasher and the clean side becomes dirty and vice-versa. I had some sketches for designs that would make this happen, but it didnât feel right: making dishwashers is too industrial for us. I either like making big chunks of art or little silver things you can carry in your pocket.â
She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the siteâlots of feelers from blog âmicro-labelsâ who wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, sheâd made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, sheâd outstripped her own old salary. Sheâd covered commercial blogs, the flamboyant attention-whores whoâd bought stupid cars and ridiculous bimbos with the money, but sheâd always assumed they were in a different league from a newspaper scribbler. Now she supposed all the money meant that she should make it official and phone in a resignation to Jimmy, but theyâd left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying goodbye to her old life.
âSo I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches awayâif someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your person, theyâd have to wand you, and youâd know about it.â
âYeah, that was bull,â Perry said. âI mean, sure you canât read an RFID unless itâs been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and sure you canât do that from a hundred yards without frying everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those things had caught on, thereâd be exciters everywhere and youâd be able to track anyone you wantedâChrist, they even put RFIDs in the hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!â
âAll true,â Lester said. âBut that didnât stop these guys. There are still a couple of them around, limping along without many customers. They print the tags with inkjets, sized down to about a third the size of a grain of rice. Mostly used in supply-chain management and such. They can supply them on the cheap.
âWhich brings me to my idea: why not tag everything in a group household, and use the tags to figure out who left the dishes in the sink, who took the hammer out and didnât put it back, who put the empty milk-carton back in the fridge, and whoâs got the TV remote? It wonât solve resource contention, but it will limit the social factors that contribute to it.â He looked around at them. âWe can make it fun, you know, make cool RFID sticker designs, mod the little gnome dolls to act as terminals for getting reports.â
Suzanne found herself nodding along. She could use this kind of thing, even though she lived alone, just to help her find out where she left her glasses and the TV remote.
Perry shook his head, though. âWhen I was a kid, I had a really bad relationship with my mom. She was really smart, but she didnât have a lot of time to reason things out with me, so often as not sheâd get out of arguing with me by just changing her story. So Iâd say, âMa, can I go to the mall this aft?â and sheâd say, âSure, no problem.â Then when I was getting ready to leave the house, sheâd ask me where I thought I was going. Iâd say, âTo the mall, you said!â and sheâd just deny it. Just deny it, point blank.
âI donât think she even knew she was doing it. I think when I asked her if I could go, sheâd just absentmindedly say yes, but when it actually came time to go out, sheâd suddenly remember all my unfinished chores, my homework, all the reasons I should stay home. I think every kid gets this from their folks, but it made me fucking crazy. So I got a mini tape recorder and I started to tape her when she gave me permission. I thought Iâd really nail her the next time she changed her tune, play her own words back in her ear.
âSo I tried it, and you know what happened? She gave me nine kinds of holy hell for wearing a wire and then she said it didnât matter what sheâd said that morning, she was my mother and I had chores to do and no how was I going anywhere now that Iâd started sneaking around the house with a hidden recorder. She took it away and threw it in the trash. And to top it off, she called me âJ. Edgarâ for a month.
âSo hereâs my question: how would you feel if the next time you left the dishes in the sink, I showed up with the audit trail for the dishes and waved it in your face? How would we get from that point to a happy, harmonious household? I think youâve mistaken the cause for the effect. The problem with dishes in the sink isnât just that itâs a pain when I want to cook a meal: itâs that when you leave them in the sink, youâre being inconsiderate. And the reason youâve left them in the sink, as youâve pointed out, is that putting dishes in the dishwasher is a pain in the ass: you have to bend over, you have to empty it out, and so on. If we moved the dishwasher into the kitchen cupboards and turned half of them into a dirty side and half into a clean side, then disposing of dishes would be as easy as getting them out.â
Lester laughed, and so did Tjan. âYeah, yeahâOK. Point taken. But these RFID things, theyâre so frigging cheap and potentially useful. I just canât believe that theyâve never found a single really compelling use in all this time. It just seems like an opportunity thatâs going to waste.â
âMaybe itâs a dead end. Maybe itâs an ornithopter. Inventors spent hundreds of years trying to build an airplane that flew by flapping its wings, and it was all a rat-hole.â
âI guess,â Lester said. âBut I donât like the idea.â
âLike it or donât, â Perry said, âdoesnât affect whether itâs true or not.â
But Lester had a sparkle in his eye, and he disappeared into his workshop for a week, and wouldnât let them in, which was unheard of for the big, gregarious giant. He liked to drag the others in whenever he accomplished anything of note, show it off to them like a big kid.
That was Sunday. Monday, Suzanne got a call from her realtor. âYour tenants have vanished,â she said.
âVanished?â The couple whoâd rented her place had been as reliable as anyone sheâd ever met in the Valley. He worked at a PR agency, she worked in marketing at Google. Or maybe he worked in marketing and she was in PR at Googleâwhatever, they were affluent, well-spoken, and had paid the extortionate rent sheâd charged without batting an eye.
âThey normally paypal the rent to me on the first, but not this month. I called and left voicemail the next day, then followed up with an email. Yesterday I went by the house and it was empty. All their stuff was gone. No food in the fridge. I think they might have taken your home theater stuff, too.â
âYouâre fucking kidding me,â Suzanne said. It was 11AM in Florida and she was into her second glass of lemonade as the sun began to superheat the air. Back in California, it was 8AM. Her realtor was pulling long hours, and it wasnât her fault. âSorry. Right. OK, what about the deposit?â
âYou waived it.â
She had. It hadnât seemed like a big deal at the time. The distant owner of the condo she was renting in Florida hadnât asked for one. âSo I did. Now what?â
âYou want to swear out a complaint against them?â
âWith the police?â
âYeah. Breach of contract. Theft, if they took the home theater. We can take them to collections, too.â
Goddamned marketing people had the collective morals of a snake. All of them useless, conniving, shallowâshe never should have...
âYeah, OK. And what about the house?â
âWe can find you another tenant by the end of the month, Iâm sure. Maybe a little earlier. Have you thought any more about selling it?â
She hadnât, though the realtor brought it up every time they spoke. âIs now a good time?â
âLot of new millionaires in the Valley shopping for houses, Suzanne. More than Iâve seen in years.â She named a sum that was a third higher than the last time theyâd talked it over.
âIs it peaking?â
âWho knows? It might go up, it might collapse again. But now is the best time to sell in the past ten years. Youâd be smart to do it.â
She took a deep breath. The Valley was dead, full of venal marketing people and buck-chasers. Here in Florida, she was on the cusp of the next thing, and it wasnât happening in the Valley: it was happening everywhere except the Valley, in the cheap places where innovation could happen at low rents. Leaky hot tub, incredible property taxes, and the crazy roller-coaster rideâup 20 percent this month, down forty next. The bubble was going to burst some day and she should sell out now.
âSell it,â she said.
âYouâre going to be a wealthy lady,â the realtor said.
âRight,â Suzanne said.
âI have a buyer, Suzanne. I didnât want to pressure you. But I can sell it by Friday. Close escrow next week. Cash in hand by the fifteenth.â
âJesus,â she said. âYouâre joking.â
âNo joke,â the realtor said. âIâve got a waiting list for houses on your block.â
And so Suzanne got on an airplane that night and flew back to San Jose and took a pricey taxi back to her place. The marketdroids had left it in pretty good shape, clean and tidy, clean sheets in the linen cupboard. She made up her bed and reflected that this would be the last time she made this bedâthe next time she stripped the sheets, theyâd go into a long-term storage box. Sheâd done this before, on her way out of Detroit, packing up a life into boxes and shoving it into storage. What had Tjan said? âThe self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a
She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the siteâlots of feelers from blog âmicro-labelsâ who wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, sheâd made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, sheâd outstripped her own old salary. Sheâd covered commercial blogs, the flamboyant attention-whores whoâd bought stupid cars and ridiculous bimbos with the money, but sheâd always assumed they were in a different league from a newspaper scribbler. Now she supposed all the money meant that she should make it official and phone in a resignation to Jimmy, but theyâd left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying goodbye to her old life.
âSo I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches awayâif someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your person, theyâd have to wand you, and youâd know about it.â
âYeah, that was bull,â Perry said. âI mean, sure you canât read an RFID unless itâs been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and sure you canât do that from a hundred yards without frying everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those things had caught on, thereâd be exciters everywhere and youâd be able to track anyone you wantedâChrist, they even put RFIDs in the hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!â
âAll true,â Lester said. âBut that didnât stop these guys. There are still a couple of them around, limping along without many customers. They print the tags with inkjets, sized down to about a third the size of a grain of rice. Mostly used in supply-chain management and such. They can supply them on the cheap.
âWhich brings me to my idea: why not tag everything in a group household, and use the tags to figure out who left the dishes in the sink, who took the hammer out and didnât put it back, who put the empty milk-carton back in the fridge, and whoâs got the TV remote? It wonât solve resource contention, but it will limit the social factors that contribute to it.â He looked around at them. âWe can make it fun, you know, make cool RFID sticker designs, mod the little gnome dolls to act as terminals for getting reports.â
Suzanne found herself nodding along. She could use this kind of thing, even though she lived alone, just to help her find out where she left her glasses and the TV remote.
Perry shook his head, though. âWhen I was a kid, I had a really bad relationship with my mom. She was really smart, but she didnât have a lot of time to reason things out with me, so often as not sheâd get out of arguing with me by just changing her story. So Iâd say, âMa, can I go to the mall this aft?â and sheâd say, âSure, no problem.â Then when I was getting ready to leave the house, sheâd ask me where I thought I was going. Iâd say, âTo the mall, you said!â and sheâd just deny it. Just deny it, point blank.
âI donât think she even knew she was doing it. I think when I asked her if I could go, sheâd just absentmindedly say yes, but when it actually came time to go out, sheâd suddenly remember all my unfinished chores, my homework, all the reasons I should stay home. I think every kid gets this from their folks, but it made me fucking crazy. So I got a mini tape recorder and I started to tape her when she gave me permission. I thought Iâd really nail her the next time she changed her tune, play her own words back in her ear.
âSo I tried it, and you know what happened? She gave me nine kinds of holy hell for wearing a wire and then she said it didnât matter what sheâd said that morning, she was my mother and I had chores to do and no how was I going anywhere now that Iâd started sneaking around the house with a hidden recorder. She took it away and threw it in the trash. And to top it off, she called me âJ. Edgarâ for a month.
âSo hereâs my question: how would you feel if the next time you left the dishes in the sink, I showed up with the audit trail for the dishes and waved it in your face? How would we get from that point to a happy, harmonious household? I think youâve mistaken the cause for the effect. The problem with dishes in the sink isnât just that itâs a pain when I want to cook a meal: itâs that when you leave them in the sink, youâre being inconsiderate. And the reason youâve left them in the sink, as youâve pointed out, is that putting dishes in the dishwasher is a pain in the ass: you have to bend over, you have to empty it out, and so on. If we moved the dishwasher into the kitchen cupboards and turned half of them into a dirty side and half into a clean side, then disposing of dishes would be as easy as getting them out.â
Lester laughed, and so did Tjan. âYeah, yeahâOK. Point taken. But these RFID things, theyâre so frigging cheap and potentially useful. I just canât believe that theyâve never found a single really compelling use in all this time. It just seems like an opportunity thatâs going to waste.â
âMaybe itâs a dead end. Maybe itâs an ornithopter. Inventors spent hundreds of years trying to build an airplane that flew by flapping its wings, and it was all a rat-hole.â
âI guess,â Lester said. âBut I donât like the idea.â
âLike it or donât, â Perry said, âdoesnât affect whether itâs true or not.â
But Lester had a sparkle in his eye, and he disappeared into his workshop for a week, and wouldnât let them in, which was unheard of for the big, gregarious giant. He liked to drag the others in whenever he accomplished anything of note, show it off to them like a big kid.
That was Sunday. Monday, Suzanne got a call from her realtor. âYour tenants have vanished,â she said.
âVanished?â The couple whoâd rented her place had been as reliable as anyone sheâd ever met in the Valley. He worked at a PR agency, she worked in marketing at Google. Or maybe he worked in marketing and she was in PR at Googleâwhatever, they were affluent, well-spoken, and had paid the extortionate rent sheâd charged without batting an eye.
âThey normally paypal the rent to me on the first, but not this month. I called and left voicemail the next day, then followed up with an email. Yesterday I went by the house and it was empty. All their stuff was gone. No food in the fridge. I think they might have taken your home theater stuff, too.â
âYouâre fucking kidding me,â Suzanne said. It was 11AM in Florida and she was into her second glass of lemonade as the sun began to superheat the air. Back in California, it was 8AM. Her realtor was pulling long hours, and it wasnât her fault. âSorry. Right. OK, what about the deposit?â
âYou waived it.â
She had. It hadnât seemed like a big deal at the time. The distant owner of the condo she was renting in Florida hadnât asked for one. âSo I did. Now what?â
âYou want to swear out a complaint against them?â
âWith the police?â
âYeah. Breach of contract. Theft, if they took the home theater. We can take them to collections, too.â
Goddamned marketing people had the collective morals of a snake. All of them useless, conniving, shallowâshe never should have...
âYeah, OK. And what about the house?â
âWe can find you another tenant by the end of the month, Iâm sure. Maybe a little earlier. Have you thought any more about selling it?â
She hadnât, though the realtor brought it up every time they spoke. âIs now a good time?â
âLot of new millionaires in the Valley shopping for houses, Suzanne. More than Iâve seen in years.â She named a sum that was a third higher than the last time theyâd talked it over.
âIs it peaking?â
âWho knows? It might go up, it might collapse again. But now is the best time to sell in the past ten years. Youâd be smart to do it.â
She took a deep breath. The Valley was dead, full of venal marketing people and buck-chasers. Here in Florida, she was on the cusp of the next thing, and it wasnât happening in the Valley: it was happening everywhere except the Valley, in the cheap places where innovation could happen at low rents. Leaky hot tub, incredible property taxes, and the crazy roller-coaster rideâup 20 percent this month, down forty next. The bubble was going to burst some day and she should sell out now.
âSell it,â she said.
âYouâre going to be a wealthy lady,â the realtor said.
âRight,â Suzanne said.
âI have a buyer, Suzanne. I didnât want to pressure you. But I can sell it by Friday. Close escrow next week. Cash in hand by the fifteenth.â
âJesus,â she said. âYouâre joking.â
âNo joke,â the realtor said. âIâve got a waiting list for houses on your block.â
And so Suzanne got on an airplane that night and flew back to San Jose and took a pricey taxi back to her place. The marketdroids had left it in pretty good shape, clean and tidy, clean sheets in the linen cupboard. She made up her bed and reflected that this would be the last time she made this bedâthe next time she stripped the sheets, theyâd go into a long-term storage box. Sheâd done this before, on her way out of Detroit, packing up a life into boxes and shoving it into storage. What had Tjan said? âThe self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a
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