Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As I've said before, and will surely say again, I think Cory Doctorow is an amazing human being and I am glad he has sufficient influence to force his vision of the future onto reality, at least a little bit. I mean, seriously, if there are any other modern, (relevant*) authors whose entire literary catelogue I can download without guilt or financial expenditure, someone needs to point me to them immediately.
And for a few dozen pages each, Cory Doctorow's books really sing. I mean, really, who else looks at the corporate emphasis** (or lack thereof***) on usability engineering, and takes it to the logical extreme of business entities sabotaging each other by sending in rogue usability engineers to give the companies bad advice and produce products that are non functioning and overly cumbersome to use. . . .....OR IS IT HAPPENING ALREADY!****
Moreover, the plot thread that gives the story structure--Our hero, Art, trapped on the roof of a towering monolithic sanitarium, a pencil up his nose, poised, ready to lobotomize himself--is wonderfully evocative and compelling.
But actualy, the central plot kind of sucks. Art's friends Fede and Linda are obviously crazy from the get go**** and it's not really ever plausibly explained why Art would hang out with losers like them. Nor is the main conceit ever really explained. Art is a brilliant usability engineer. Why on earth would he be more useful as a saboteur...I mean there is no motivation even for the antogonism between tribes, really.
And while we're on the subject, the tribes themselves don't even make sense. Yes, I get it, you start being friends with people in a particular geographic area and you want to chat with them online, this neccessitates a bit of sleep deprivation. But I don't buy for a second, that the only people you're going to want to hang out with live in one time zone, even if you allow for a very generous amount of homophily based movement.
So yeah, ultimately, this book feels like a poorly rehashed****** Catch 22. But you know what, I had fun reading it, I had fun writing the review, and I have no qualms about saying, Go Download All of Cory Doctorow's Books Now. And better still, they're free.*******
* there are hundreds of self-published "authors" for whom this might true, but I don't have time to read them...that's what editors are for.
** Apple, early Google.
*** Microsoft, late Google.
**** See ***.
***** Not that there isn't a delightful irony in the fact that Art's crazy friends are the ones who
try to have him committed, but a small amount of delightful irony does not make up for a large about of crappy plot.
****** Actually, drop the 're', and I hated Catch 22, anyway.
******* Footnote not realated to the text of the review, but I didn't have any good place for it above. One part of the book that I really enjoyed was Art's early foray onto the Eastern Standard Tribe chatrooms. It's a perfect logical enpoint to IRC chat rooms, complete with finding useful services via cryptographically secure means *and* dealing with obnoxious trolls. It's too bad social networking has all but killed off IRC (at least in my tribes, that is...)
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