Walkaway by Cory Doctorow is the first book tackled by our Economic Science Fiction reading group. In this thread, I am going to try and extract some of the salient economic theory as underpinning the world of Walkaway, one comment per concept or relevant excerpt from the text. Anyone is welcome to do the same, of course.
I am going to link to Wikipedia when I can, to papers when I must.
In chapter 1, the character of Jacob Redwater takes on the role of standing for capitalism, and standard economic theory.
Natalie looked grim. “You tell me. That factory we switched on last night. It was worth more as a write-off than it was as a going concern. Some entity that owned it demanded that it sit rotting and useless, even though there were people who wanted what it could make.”
“If they wanted the factory, they could buy the factory,” Jacob said. “Then make things and sell them.”
“I don’t think those people could afford to buy a factory,” Hubert, Etc said, glancing at Natalie for approval. She nodded minutely.
“That’s what capital markets are for,” Jacob said. “If you’ve got a plan for profitably using an asset someone else isn’t using, then you draw up a business plan and take it to investors. If you’re right, one of them will fund you—maybe more than one. Then you sell what you make.”
“What if no one invests?” Hubert, Etc said. “I know a ton of zepp startups that died because they couldn’t get money, even though they were making amazing stuff.”
Jacob took on the air of someone explaining a complex subject to a child. “If no one wants to invest, that means that you don’t have an idea worth investing in, or you aren’t the right person to execute that idea because you don’t know how to convince people to invest.”
“Don’t you see the circularity there?” Natalie said. “If you can’t convince someone to pay to turn on the factory to make things that people need, then the factory shouldn’t be turned on?”
Natalie (later Iceweasel) and Hubert, Etc. (later Etcetera) are Jacob’s opponents in this discussion. Their main argument is that the people who could do something with the abandoned Muji factory have no money to buy the factory. This leads to unsatisfied needs and unused manufacturing capacity: a situation similar to that described by Keynes’s theory of effective demand (but not identical: Keynes has in mind a situation in which unused labour and unmet need coexist).
However, Keynes’s theory is a short term one. In the long run, neoclassical economics has argued, prices of things (like unused factories) and of credit will adjust until the “useless” capacity is scrapped, and the “useful” one finally sold to someone who will use it. Jacob makes exactly this point:
“Oh, please. Private property is the most productive property. Temporary inefficiencies don’t change that.”
But Natalie and Etcetera are not interested in discussing inefficiencies:
“Only kleptokrats use terms like ‘temporary inefficiencies’ for wasteful abominations like that Muji factory.”
Natalie sees the Muji factory story as one of artificial scarcity, and artificial scarcity requires an agent that creates the scarcity. In other words, it is a story of power, not of economic exchange between equals. With this passage, Walkaway disposes of mainstream economics altogether. Its economies (both in default and in walkaway) can not be described as a special case of the neoclassical model.
An attractive element of modern standard economics is that it is micro-founded. First, the individual agent’s behavior is modeled, and an equilibrium for the model is found. Next, economists build mesoscale models (for example, partial equilibrium models for a specific market) and macroscale ones (for example, general equilibrium models for the whole economy). These are built in such a way that the lower-level equilibria generate the upper-level ones: zoom in onto a general equilibrium model and it resolves into individual consumers and firms making their choices.
This consistency is useful and elegant. Alternative economic systems should also be micro-founded to be taken seriously. Walkaway, it seems to me, makes an attempt at building a micro-founded model of a whole system (the walkaway economy), but it comprehensively rejects standard micro. It eventually replaces it with a micro behavior of its own, but of a very different kind. I can see four moves:
Expose standard micro as based on flawed assumptions.
Argue that the behavior of individual agents is based on intersubjective conventions. This shifts the argument from economics as we know it to political economy, the border land between economics and moral philosophy.
Propose a political economy that works well with digital commons, and re-build a micro model based on that.
Proceed to derive meso- and macro-level behavior founded on those new micro models.
In the rest of this post, I go through each of these steps, one section per step. There is a section 5, just a quick recap and conclusion.
At the end of Chapter 1, Etcetera explains the tragedy of the common to Natalie:
“Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day’s grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn’t anyone’s, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there’s nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead’s sheep.”
[Natalie]: "A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”
“It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said. “It’s obvious bullshit for anyone whose sweet deal doesn’t depend on it not being obvious.”
Tragedies of the commons happen because people are cold-blooded, selfish maximizers of their own utility. We all know this not to be true: calculating, selfish behavior happens in humans, but is far from the main engine of what humans do. And yet, the abstraction serves two purposes. As economists know, it makes human behavior tractable with the math available in the 1840s; this gave us an elegant, micro-founded model of the whole economy. But it also justifies giving Jacob Redwater and his peers domain over all things – it makes it moral, since all those other sheep-grazers are so amoral (“some selfish dickhead”). The same powerful people fund economics departments and co-opt economists into prestigious jobs: no wonder Natalie and Hubert encourage us to look for other possible foundations for economic behavior that do not have such a glaring conflict of interest problem.
However, tragedies of the commons are not inevitable. We will come back to them in section 4.
Jacob Redwater thinks that wanting to “be that bastard” who will overgraze the common field is human nature. The impulse to greed and appropriation is hardwired in our neurons. Standard microeconomics agrees: just assume it, and build your model on top of it. Doctorow thinks that human societies can, to a certain extent decide what they want to want, and then socialize their members to want those things. In part, this is just obvious: in the real world, parents are forever trying to teach small children not to prevaricate others, to be mindful of other’s needs, to wait for their turn etc. To a large part, they succeed.
In the world of Walkaway, walkaways are forever trying to internalize the heuristics that work well to navigate their lifestyle, some of which are counter-intuitive not only to us readers, but to them. This is explained by example in chapter 2 by Limpopo to Natalie (now become Iceweasel), Etcetera and Seth. Natalie:
"I’m not supposed to trade anything for anything else, it’s all a gift, like the Communist parties. That part I understand. But when we do our parties, we don’t care how much you take because at any second the cops are going to chase us out and destroy whatever’s left over, so you can have whatever you can carry. Out here, you want people to magically not take too much but also not earn the right to take more by working harder and also to work because it’s a gift but not because they expect anything in return?”
They stared at her. She shrugged. “That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt—it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.”
She shrugged. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”
And again:
“Back out there in ‘default reality’ […] you’re supposed to be doing things because they’re right for you. […] Out here, we’re supposed to treat generosity as the ground state. The weird, gross, selfish feeling is a warning we’re being dicks. We’re not supposed to forgive people for being selfish. We’re not supposed to expect other people to forgive us for being selfish. It’s not generous to do nice things in the hopes of getting stuff back. It’s hard not to fall into that pattern, because bribery works.”
The language of effort (“we are supposed/not supposed to…”) and self-reprogramming (“the feeling is a warning that…”) is evident. But the results are worth the effort, because in the end, as Limpopo says:
“‘The stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”
In other words, “human nature” leaves a lot of space for deciding how humans interact to produce an economy. This decision is collective, hence political. Doctorow is making the shift back from economics to political economy. This latter term was replaced by “economics” in the course of the 20th century, emphasizing the mathematical side of economic modelling and de-emphasizing its political and moral side. Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and Marx believed these sides to be very important, and economics itself to be a branch of moral philosophy. Doctorow clearly agrees.
As we have seen, Doctorow believes human nature to be less rigid than standard economics makes it to be. But if humans are programmable, what should we program ourselves for? And what, specifically, would be the object of programming?
The answer seems to be this: we should program into ourselves an ethos that supports practices of networked collaboration, aimed at the production of commons. This is my own conclusion, but I think it is supported by plenty of material in Walkaway itself (especially Chapter 2) as well as Doctorow’s Crooked Timber essay originated from an online discussion of the novel. In the author’s words:
It’s a novel about solving Ronald Coase’s coordination puzzle using networked tools. (link Doctorow’s).
Walkaway’s most actionable parts are tips and tricks for better coordination. For example, in open collective efforts it is important to pretend mistakes just happen, and are nobody’s fault – even though, of course, they are.
If you planted a piece of structural steel in a way that the building really couldn’t work with and ignored the rising chorus of warnings, someone else would be told that there was a piece of “misaligned” material and tasked to it, with high urgency. It was the same error that the buildings generated if something slipped. The error didn’t assume that a human being had fucked up through malice or incompetence.
The initial theory had been that an error without a responsible party would be more socially graceful. People doubled down on their mistakes, especially when embarrassed in front of peers. The name-and-shame alternate versions had shown hot-cheeked fierce denial was the biggest impediment to standing up a building.
A whole subplot is dedicated to comprehensively demolishing the reputation economy idea. For us Econ-SciFi types, this is intriguing since the nomad society in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction is based on “reputation servers”. But Doctorow clearly hates it.
You couldn’t be a walkaway without encountering the reputation economy freaks.
Jackstraw (later Jimmy) is the character arguing for reputation to be an explicit, bankable asset in walkaway. It starts with him wanting to install leaderboards on the Belt&Braces building wiki/repo. Limpopo takes the opposite side. For starters, it does not make sense to claim that the person with the most visible contributions is the person who committed most, because everything we do is standing on the shoulders of giants. In her words:
"The most commits in our codebase come from history—everyone who wrote the libraries and debugged and optimized and patched them. The most commits on this building come from everyone who processed the raw materials, figured out how to process the raw materials, harvested the feedstock.”
This not only makes sense, but is fully consistent with economic analysis. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon noted in 2000:
If we are generous with ourselves, I suppose that we might claim that we “earned” as much as one-fifth of our income. The rest of the patrimony [is] associated with being a member of an enormously productive social system, which has accumulated a vast store of physical capital, and an even larger store of intellectual capital – including knowledge, skills, and organizational know-how held by all of us. (reference – quoted by Mariana Mazzucato in her The value of everything)
Jackstraw appreciates that, but those people are not at the Belt&Braces. In his view, the community should still honor Limpopo’s large contribution. But she won’t have it, because it would give her, and everyone else, the wrong incentives:
“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgment, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”
In conclusion,
[…] Getting humans to “do the right thing” by incentivizing them to vanquish one another was stupid.
These statements are important in Walkaway, because they dispose of methodological individualism. The reasoning works like this:
Etcetera felt the tension melt out of his back, replaced with warm purpose. Work needed doing, and he could help. What more could anyone ask for?
What matters, instead, are technologies for cooperation. Groups of humans that are better at cooperating will prosper at the expense of other groups that are not as good. Groups of humans get better at cooperating by adopting systems of rules that make cooperation easier. Therefore, humans are subject to evolutionary pressure both at the individual level and at the group level, and at the group level the pressure is cultural. This is the interpretation proposed by cultural evolution biologists like E.O. Wilson and Joseph Henrich.
It follows that an effective economic theory should not focus on individual behavior as an equilibrium of a set of individual incentives, but on system-level behavior as an equilibrium of interaction protocols.
In Walkaway, the Belt&Braces and other walkaway settlements stand in as examples of how the walkaway economy works at the mesoscale. The full-blown, hard SF world of the final chapters stands in as a walkaway economy at the macroscale. The latter is not as well specified, so we ignore it in what follows.
Most readers will probably like what they see: a mixture of extreme personal freedom (no managers, no wages) and effective cooperation. Once you have replaced the “human nature” of economics with the agreed-upon rules of political economy, and methodological individualism and incentives with a behavioral approach and protocols of interaction, these outcomes make a lot of sense. Part of Doctorow’s argument is that everyone has direct experience of these outcomes anyway.
This point is, I believe, best made by David Graeber in his treatment of communism in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The argument goes like this: stipulate that communism consists in adhering to the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to her needs”. Then, writes Graeber,
Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, “Hand me the wrench,” his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, “And what do I get for it?”—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that “communism just doesn’t work”): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them. [emphasis mine]
In these cases, communism is simply more efficient. No need to keep scores of who got what for what; no need for currencies, value storage, means of exchange. The overhead is low to the point of vanishing, especially if “the most commits come from history”, and most important things have a public good nature, like infrastructure and digital commons. Doctorow clearly thinks this to be the case. Limpopo:
The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That’s why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it’s down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can’t personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that’s something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it’s you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.”
So, walkaways build an economy by the simple expedient of making it easy, efficient and pleasurable to work on common projects. Special emphasis is given to the production of public and common goods. This is not necessarily far-fetched, even for economists: Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom showed that collective choice and institution design can beat “human nature”, and ensure long-term stewardship of depletable common goods, with no tragedy of the commons. At this point, the low overhead of communism kicks in and makes them vastly more efficient than anything in default.
An interesting component of efficiency is that stupid shit simply does not get produced. This is because you cannot blackmail people into doing something they don’t believe in by leveraging scarcity, so there are no jobs. As Gretyl says:
“As though we need jobs! I mean, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I never want to have a job again. I do math because I can’t stop. Because I’ve found people who need my math to do something amazing. “If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest.”
Making it easy, efficient and pleasurable to work on common projects is by no means easy. Walkaway contains plenty of interaction protocols meant to make cooperation easier. The bucket brigade concept is presented as a textbook example of how cooperation should work:
Bucket brigades only ask you to work as hard as you want—rush forward to get a new load and back to pass it off, or amble between them, or vary your speed. It didn’t matter—if you went faster, it meant the people on either side of you didn’t have to walk as far, but it didn’t require them to go faster or slower. If you slowed, everyone else stayed at the same speed. Bucket brigades were a system through which everyone could do whatever they wanted—within the system—however fast you wanted to go; everything you did helped and none of it slowed down anyone else. [emphasis mine]
Many obstacles to cooperation are psychological: ego, guilt, vanity. So, walkaways pay attention to defuse these things as much as possible.
One piece of walkaway-fu was to apologize quickly and thoroughly when you fucked up.
Or
The core idea was that radical or difficult ideas were held back by the thought that no one else had them. That fear of isolation led people to stay “in the closet” about their ideas, making them the “love that dares not speak its name.” So lovedaresnot (shortened to “Dare Snot”) gave you a way to find out if anyone else felt the same, without forcing you to out yourself. [A detailed description follows]
Or my favorite: when Limpopo is confronted by Jimmy’s militia having taken over the B&B, people suddenly start to hoard stuff, as they are (rightly) worried that it will become scarce under the new regime. So Limpopo makes tea, passes it around and finds in her bag warm clothes to give to people who are less well equipped than she is.
As soon as she shared, the hoarding impulse melted.
This is consistent with Chwe 2009, Communication and Coordination in Social Networks.
At this point, I think I have made a case that the economics of Walkaway does, indeed, fill our bill of “imagining an economic system completely different from what we have”. Human nature is conceived as leaving plenty of space for “programming” societies by educating individuals. The engine of progress is competition between different protocols for cooperating. Individual freedom guarantees efficiency, because people will not waste their time making stupid shit like network-connected 200 EUR garbage bins. The economy of Walkaway produces different things, in different ways and for different goals than the default economy we all live in.
This is highlighted by the uncharitable treatment that economists get in the book. The job of trashing the discipline is given to Gretyl – ironically, a mathematician. Economists owe much of their discipline’s fortunes to its willingness to deploy in the justification for the position of the ruling classes (“zottas”) at the apex of society:
“Your dad hires economists for intellectual cover, to prove his dynastic fortunes and political influence are the outcome of a complex, self-correcting mechanism with the mystical power to pluck the deserving out of the teeming mass of humanity and elevate them so they can wisely guide us. They have a science-y vocabulary conceived of solely to praise people like your father. "
They are compared to astrologists:
"I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are. No offense to your egalitarian soul, but you lack the training to understand how deeply bogus those neat equations are.”
I don’t completely understand this last one. Still. I rest my case. 
Fantastic stuff @alberto and super helpful thank you. I’m getting to halfway through with some markings and look forward to noting some reflections here in time also, with of course much to discuss at the reading group.
Thanks, but I am still working on it! I need to get to item 4.
Ok, I’m done. This should probably become a polished post, but I am provisionally stopping here and inviting contributions.
I have noticed that most utopians (and dystopians) tend to present their future societies in fully developed form, and pay little attention to how the society we know transformed into the one they depict. This is understandable: coming up with a vision is hard enough without having to figure out the path to get there. However, it can trigger in the reader a sense of “nah, that’s not going to happen”. This is true especially for positive utopias: probably if we lived in one we would not be incentivized to break it, but we cannot see how to get from here to there. The utopia is a Nash equilibrium, but so is the world we live in. The utopia is a superior equilibrium, but we are stuck in this one.
Walkaway is an exception. A near future SF novel, it starts in a society we can completely recognize, give or take the robustness and commodification of some existing technologies (renewable energy production, self driving vehicles, 3D printing). We see the walkaway economy emerging in the course of the novel. Another exception is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy; making a note of that here for future work in the reading group.
There are two steps to morphing a mainly default economy into a mainly walkaway economy: achieving critical mass and what happens at the tipping point.
The walkaway economy would be a privately optimal choice (at least for some of us) if it were already there and we could just join it. When Iceweasel, Etcetera and Seth walk away, they find the Belt & Braces up and running and ready to take them in. Their necessities are met, and they can afford the luxury of figuring out where to go next. This is great, but how did it happen? The clearest explanation, I propose, is Jimmy’s story in Chapter 4. I recommend reading it all, it is also moving from a literary point of view (you’ll find it in section XVII, location 6055 on Kindle).
“What made you walk away, Jimmy?”
“It was debt at first.” […] “Mom and Dad were all over the idea of me going to uni. They’d both gotten degrees and swore it had been worth it, though they would owe money until they died, and neither one had ever held a job for more than a couple years. I once overheard them talking about how fucked it would be if I didn’t get a good job because neither of them had a pension and they’d need me to feed them once they were too old to get another job after the next layoff.
“The pressure was crazy. On the boards, people were saying, hey you assholes, you keep bitching about how everything is fucked up and shit, and there you are, getting ready to play along with it like good debt-slaves. Everyone knows there’s an alternative.”“That’d be us,” Etcetera said.
“That’d be you."
A particularly sinister thing is that Jimmy’s school is pushing students hard to choose expensive education options that push them into debt. The school has an app, supposed to give advice to students about their optimal choice of career, and:
They could only keep their charter if they ran a certain percentage of students through it and they followed its advice. So once you got your career picked by the thing, that was it. Every teacher and administrator knew their paychecks depended on you doing what it told you.
I can totally see this. A consortium of powerful private universities providing funding for schools, then threatening to withdraw it if they don’t send paying customers their way. Or, even better, lobbying for regulation that requires schools to provide a certain number of students to the “universities of excellence”. Apps like the one described already exist.
Debt has been the main mechanism pushing people out of society for five thousand years. In Debt: The First 5,000 Years David Graeber describes the macrocycle that underpinned the societies of Babylonian city-states: people would get in debt in years of bad crop. So they would borrow money, putting up as collateral their fields, then their houses, then their children, then their wives, then themselves. And then many would flee before the creditor could claim them as property, joining gangs of armed nomadic pastoralists that threatened society. At this point, the king would declare all private debt null and void (“blank slates”), debtors would be reunited with their families and return to their homes, and a new cycle would start.
The process of growth of the walkaway society is nonlinear. Like most diffusion processes, it seems roughly logistic: a long period of slow growth, then a dramatic acceleration when almost everyone adopts it, then a slow process of decay of the last remaining default strongholds. The period of dramatic acceleration seems to be pushed by three factors.
“There isn’t going to be default world and walkaway world trading people forever. When you have big rich people, and everyone else poor as poor, the result is … unstable.”
It turned on graph theory: once you hit a critical mass of walkaways, the six-degrees thing meant every single rent-a-cop on the line was no more than two handshakes—or family Christmas dinners—away from a walkaway who would shame and sweet-talk them into putting down their weapons.
“The six-degrees thing” refers to Stanley Milgram’s small world experiment, a landmark result in network science. Political scientist Michael Chwe has a more formal treatment of how social network structure influences the possibility of successful collective action in this paper (recommended).
I just discovered that @kevin_carson has a new book in the making that provides a lot of interesting sociological and economic background for this discussion of “Walkaway”. Even the name fits in 
Kevin A. Carson: Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century
Also of note for the topic here is one of his earlier works:
Kevin A. Carson: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto
Enjoy!
Thanks, Matthias! I definitely want to read through the previous thread, because I loved the vision in Walkaway. I wrote a review of it a while back here: https://c4ss.org/content/51195
I just read your review in full. Generally I don’t like fiction too much on its own, but this compact mix of quotes and your substantial anarchist commentary felt right. Loved it. Thanks so much!
In case the e-mail mode of this forum is confusing: the whole thread about Walkaway is here: The economics of Cory Doctorow's Walkaway and all e-mail replies just go to the bottom of it.
Thanks! Does Edgeryders have an email discussion list? I was on the message board/forum several years ago, but I generally lose track of any discussion venue that’s not an email list.
Hello again, @kevin_carson, and thanks @matthias for finding this stuff. I am definitely going to dive in!
Kevin: Edgeryders does not have an email discussion list, it is one.
Let us know if you want help for configuring your preferences.
In addition, there is the special “Mailing List Mode” setting under account menu → Preferences → Email. (Direct link for Kevin would be this.)
When enabling that, I think what it does is send you every contribution in our forum immediately as an e-mail, like a mailinglist does. You can still exclude certain categories or topics by setting them to “muted” in their on-platform notification menus.
Or if you like RSS to follow a forum (I do), we also have that: you can just append .rss to the URL of any category, topic, or the whole site. For the whole site, the feed is https://edgeryders.eu/latest.rss
Thanks!
Possibly of interest: Solarpunk Design by Eric Hunting
Money quotes:
…the original character of Nemo is an Indian victim of European colonialism who is radicalized by the murder of his family by colonialists. He then appropriates and improves upon the technology of the colonialist powers not just to fight against them but to create a model egalitarian society of the future in the secret haven of the underwater underworld, beyond the reach of those colonial powers.
…We see the first clear characterization of this new green-tech Maker-hero in a concept devised by writers/futurists Cory Doctorow and Alex Steffan and dubbed the ‘Outquisition’. They imagined the emergence of a nomadic activist movement from the ‘cloisters’ of eco-villages, hacker/makerspaces, Fab Labs, and online communities (another sort of underworld haven…) in response to the crisis created by the fall-out of environmental collapse and the creeping decrepitude of late-stage capitalism with its entrenched pathological institutions and economics. These nomadic Makers gather to intervene in communities left in crisis as the old system fails them and systematically retreats from the no longer ‘profitable’ mess it created. ‘Hacking’ and repurposing the detritus of the failing Industrial Age culture with their alternative energy, recycling, and production technology, these Maker-heroes create islands of self-sufficiency, seeding the culture of a new Post-Industrial era.