“Makers” by Cory Doctorow paints uncertain future(0)
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What’s not to like about a book where the main character is a business columnist at the San Jose Mercury News? But Doctorow’s glimpse at the near future makes it difficult to love. The book hits a bunch of themes that would be familiar to anyone who follows Doctorow’s writing: The nature of closed vs. open systems of innovation; the wonder of making stuff and hacking.
But having just finished the book, it’s hard to say how Doctorow wants us to feel about the kind of future these things are creating. I would assume him to be a champion of open source, but the characters who fall into that camp don’t necessarily get happy endings. And in fact, they help generate a bubble that proves economically devastating not once, but twice. One of them becomes hooked on a future weight-loss program that eliminates almost all overweight people, but eventually turns out to cause horrific health problems. Technology, in this book, causes problems sometimes worse than the ones it solves.
The characters celebrate the world they live in, where the unemployed have built shantytowns from scratch as an alternative to developer driven housing models. But as a model of people making for themselves, well, these shantytowns don’t sound all that wonderful.
In the end, the message of the book is ambiguous. I’m not sure how Doctorow wants me to feel about this world, as intriguing as it is. It seems definitely more dystopian than utopian. And yet, at times he seems to be celebrating it, certainly not condeming it, and certainly never glamorizing it.
That may well be the intention, to leave us feeling ambivalent about where the future it taking us. Makers certainly offers no easy or obvious lessons about these questions. But the questions it raises made it a compelling read.
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