Loring Wirbel's Reviews > Walkaway

When I was 12 or 13, I stumbled upon anarcho-syndicalism of the Bookchin/Rocker variety and was convinced it was solely capable of saving the world. At age 16, I saw Kubrick's film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and found myself adamantly rooting for the omnipotent state, since it appeared to be morally superior to the violent autonomous gang member Alex. If Cory Doctorow's unique novel Walkaway serves no other purpose, it can be an antidote or foil of sorts for Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Sure, every variety of anarchism holds fatal flaws, but at the end of the day, the state truly is something that must be foiled at every turn - not through violence or alternative modalities of power, but through walking away. The Zen deflection of power is the toughest and most radical thing we can do, and Doctorow shows us methodically and carefully what this can mean for our post-scarcity futures.

The basic premise of the story is a near-future dystopia/utopia (reader's choice) in which human social and political relations have grown so toxic, millions of people decide to walk away, becoming voluntarily homeless and withdrawing from most social interactions. The walkaways do not stay in urban areas leaving "Will Work for Food" litter, but instead opt for new kinds of toxicity, homesteading in polluted lands that have been declared national sacrifice areas in a world succumbing to pollution and climate change. The ultra-rich need little people to justify their power concentration, but there is little left for the people to do, most jobs having been automated. Instead of being given a guaranteed annual income, the people are left in cities as detritus. Yet the rich have to treat the walkaways as though they were the ultimate terrorists, because they dare to reject the existing hierarchies of power.

Doctorow, founder of Boing Boing and a cyberpunk long before you ever heard the word, is an ideal vehicle to carry many practical messages of possible futures. The only thing saving this book from an automatic five-star rating is that the language does not always have that special grace of a Pynchon, Powers, Atwood, Gibson, or Hallberg. Occasionally, the dialogue needs to carry forward a goal of explaining important cultural or political truths in the new walkaway world, and as a result, characters sound a trifle too self-aware and verbose. But that hindrance is limited to dialogue alone. In descriptions of natural phenomena or sex of any variety, Doctorow excels in his use of language. At other times, the fast-paced narrative is closer to that of an adventure novel. In this instance, it is perfectly OK, because Doctorow gives us a complex and empathic adventure story without parallel. In developing new slang, however, Doctorow can get too hung up on slogans that seem silly, or that have already been appropriated by the right wing - "special snowflake," for example - if I never had read the words (and he uses the phrase often), the book might be a more enjoyable experience.

Walkaway bears some superficial resemblances to A Clockwork Orange in carrying a language and lexicon of its own. The ultra-rich 1% are "zottas," the organized world that passes for the real world is "default," and new processes of growing and creating food bear words we're not quire sure about, such as "feedstock" and "scop." Once the rhythm of this cyber-libertarian walkaway world has been established, the details of what terms may mean become less important. We flow in a walkaway world that long ago accepted the sexual, gender, racial and even species diversity that caused so much pain early in the 21st century, a world that has (at least in theory) adopted the Zapatista ideology of power - power is never to be sought or won in a revolution, it is to be deliberately dissipated and dissolved from the foreground. Obviously, there is still violence when the default world tries to attack the walkaway world, and occasionally there is violence within the walkaway world when individuals retain obsessions with power, or when they cannot adjust to a world that accepts no form of meritocracy whatsoever. And this is Doctorow's point - if you seriously desire to walkaway, you must relinquish any sense of how you can be recognized, any sense of ego.

Of course, the appeal of achieving a type of immortality through the preservation of brain-wave patterns is Doctorow's way of gracefully suggesting Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation strategies. It becomes impossible to tell which instantiation of Limpopo or Etcetera is "real," or indeed if a soul (or pattern of neural network activations) can be said to be more real in one body or another, or within a distributed set of compute platforms. Again, the story behind the science and behind the anarchist philosophy is that the ego must be relinquished before the apparent ego achieves immortality, or something resembling immortality in such a limitless future.

One would expect a compassionate and powerful person like Doctorow to be able to describe a variety of alternative families, not just LGBTQ parents, but those who choose new ways of defining relationship units altogether. Each type of family feels as natural as any other, and Doctorow is clever at recognizing the desires and whims of children. When Doctorow describes the communities of resistance that sprang up across Canada as the default cities began breaking down, you can see that his description of the Idle No More movement of First Nations radicals is meant to pay homage to both Occupy, and the nationwide revolt of First Nation bands that rocked Canada in 1995. There is a lot of history of radical organizing in these pages, and a lot of history of the future that has yet to be experienced, at least for those of us who have not yet learned how to remember forward, and are shackled by our sequential illusions of time.

Doctorow might be criticized for giving us a stereotypical view of Natalie/Iceweasel's "zotta" father, Jacob Redwater. Could a ruthless holder of 1% power and privilege really sacrifice his family and millions of people worldwide to hold a small financial gain over others in the ultra-rich community? Even if Redwater seems an archetype, Doctorow's point seems to be a comparison of 1% zotta privilege and white privilege: The 1% (or most of them) truly believe in their heart of hearts that they were biologically meant to rule the planet on behalf of the 99%. If any member of the zotta class was to make any break in the armor, it would create a societal collapse as any sense of appropriate hierarchy was broken down. In that sense, it is somewhat like the otherwise intelligent and liberal people who believed in eugenics theory early in the 20th century. Redwater cannot envision a world of default rupture in which hierarchies collapse and the world goes walkaway, because that would imply everything the zottas knew about biological and social destiny was wrong.

When walkaways suffer injustices at the hands of the zottas, the video and documented results are instantly fed globally to other walkaways via new forms of darknets. Default society desperately does not want to create martyrs, to raise rallying cries that "This will be another Akron!" So something tells the reader that even if the book ends sadly, it cannot be through the employment of extreme violence by zottas, because martyrs would be guaranteed. But to achieve a society that is walkaway by default, the walkaways must perform much more than the DIY technological miracles they accomplish throughout the book. (Special mention must be made of Etcetera's fleet of zeppelins, a 21st century equivalent of the 19th-century Chums of Chance zeppelins in Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day.) The walkaways must accomplish much more than the mere avoidance of violence, so as not to be branded "terrorists." They must burrow into the minds and assumptions of the defenders of 1% culture, and ultimately make society collapse by getting the zottas to internalize the belief that they themselves have been living lies, and are individually of no worth to society through their money and power. Their only worth comes through the diffuse power of walkaway.

Even though this book may not go down as a classic of literature, it is a powerful story of societal and cultural reformation that will challenge virtually everyone's assumptions about what it means to hold or accept power, what it means to work without ego for a more just planet, and what one gains and loses by simply walking away.