Cory Doctorow's new book Walkaway centers on the rise of a counterculture built on open-source technology that fabricates nearly everything from the "feedstock" provided by the refuse and wreckage of a world ravaged by climate change and economic ruin.

In a conversation with Ars, Doctorow discussed that and some of the other underlying themes that influenced Walkaway—including his previous novels, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Makers. He also talked about the role of science fiction in mapping out the future and how close we actually are to a "post-scarcity" world.

Ars: As I read Walkaway, there was sense a revisiting of some old themes for you.

Doctorow: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, like, explicitly. In some ways I thought of, like n- hundred years before Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. One of the things I did before writing it was I took a copy of Down and Out and read it and marked it up with stuff that I wanted to revisit, that I wanted to rethink, that I didn't necessarily agree with anymore, or that I hadn't noticed when I was writing it the first time—implications of ideas that I hadn't thought of the first time I wrote it, that sort of thing.

There are definitely some subtle digs in Walkaway at some of the core ideas in Down and Out, including the idea of a reputation-based economy. You have a confrontation in the book with what a character refers to as "reputation economy freaks"...

I had always thought of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom as an ambiguous utopia. And... I've gotten a lot of e-mails from people who read it, and have said, "I'd like to try to implement [the reputation economy], and the one thing I'm trying to figure out is how to actually measure what people really feel—to disambiguate that. How do I do it?"

But that's why it's science fiction. Because those are the elements that make it a thought experiment. The parts that are... kind of metaphoric or read as analogy. Assume you can do these obviously impossible things—what would fall out of [them]? It's a sort of science-fictional mind game. If[...] something that we knew to be impossible were true, what would fall out of that? And then that allows us to think about what more stripped-down versions of that might be possible in a more imperfect world where the condition can't be realized, but some pale shadow of it could be.

That's science fiction's signature move: magnifying the otherwise blatant and low-level effects of technology into gross phenomena that can be used as a kind of a starting point or a straw man for debate about how we want to use that technology and where we should use it.

I am a believer in intentional technological use: evaluating whether a technology does something you want done, and then using it in a way that maximizes that and that minimizes all the things you want to avoid.

That's why I'm a Facebook vegan. I have ideas about how I want to socialize with people and how I really don't want to socialize with people. And then make intentional choices about technology that are about achieving those particular goals.

Yet it seems like a lot of science fiction is about the unintended consequences of technology, which I think factors into your book and into two other recent books I've read: Elan Mastai's All Our Wrong Todays, for example, which is a book about unintended consequences of time travel; and Tal Klein's The Punch Escrow [which we'll be reviewing shortly] which explores the paradox around teleportation—the idea that it would be essentially printing a new body and killing the other, so it's essentially mass murder. That sort of gets into the moral questions around the "beating death" in your book...

I have a neat way of hand waving all of that away. Assume that there is some combination of both proclivity and philosophy—something poured into you that you learn that makes it totally unacceptable, at least in terms of reincarnating yourself. All of the people who care about those things will be mortal, and all of the people that don't will be immortal, and presumably all you'll have to do is wait a while and then nobody will care about it.

But there's the question of, "Is that really me?"

And that's something I try to engage with in Walkaway, but also in a way that tries to relate it back to questions of, for example: when I take drugs that help me with mental problems, is it still me? Or if I take recreational drugs and act in a way I later disavow, was that me? When I look back on who I was when I did something regrettable, was it still me? These are all versions of the same question.

So, this is a sort of prequel to Down and Out. Is it also a sort of sequel to Makers, at least on the theme of the end of scarcity?

You know, that's an interesting question. I just finished reading a whole ton of essays that a group of academics wrote about Walkaway for the Crooked Timber blog, which is doing a symposium. A lot of them were like, "Well, this is a novel that's about 3D printing producing abundance." I was like, "Well actually I wrote that novel [Makers] 10 years ago." This novel is about coordination changing what abundance is—our ability to, in that kind of GitHub-ian way, make some stuff, and then have someone else make some stuff, and then someone else, and for all three of those things to be captured and combined.

If you think of abundance being a triangle, one side is what we want, one is what we can make, and one is how efficiently we can coordinate and use it. Makers was definitely about what we can make. But this is about using the things we already have—fully automated leisure communism, the ZipCar edition. We have high-quality physical objects, and we don't have to have a personal one because they're all circling in a probabilistic cloud that we can collapse down into "the car will always be there when we need it." That's a form of even better abundance than everyone having their own lawnmower in their garage because, if everyone had a lawnmower, they would also have to have some place to store it.

The question of what we want is the third piece of abundance that I addressed a little in Walkaway. But it's something that's come up a lot in our wider debate, because everyone keeps bringing up the old Keynes essay where everyone will have a three-day week by 2015 and that his grandchildren would lack for work because productivity has increased to the point where we can just fill all of our needs.

We kind of got there, but then we had this advertising innovation to produce more goods than we ever wanted. Even though we can produce enough goods for John Keynes to be happy, we can't produce enough for everyone to be happy in 2017—because we want so much more. And, of course, that's the other way to adjust what our view of abundance is—how much we want. And those three levers—three dials that we can turn—are what determine whether we feel like we're moving into an era of scarcity or abundance.

I think that's why Marie Kondo is so hot. A lot of people are coming to realize that there's a luxury in getting rid of all of your stuff. There's a real class dimension there, too, because one of the reasons to hold onto a bunch of things is because the opportunity cost of getting rid of it means you might not be able to afford to replace it later; whereas, the richer you are, the more you can afford to buy things as you go. Buying your clothes as you travel as the cheap way to not have to carry luggage with you is great unless you don't have enough money to buy more clothes.

The model you use for the walkaway community in your novel and the social behaviors that are exhibited remind me a lot of some of what we see in open-source software communities. You've clearly drawn from a lot of experience there.

Yeah, totally. I mean—I've been in the middle of these fights about things like free and open source software, and whether they're a meaningful category, whether open source is incompatible with free. I've been around people who fork and unfork and refork and merge, and I've kind of lived through multiple versions of that. And I've lived through watching people who open things up and then wished they could close them again, that felt like they made the wrong choice. So having a front-row seat to all that stuff was hugely influential in how I wrote the book.