two ways, and you’ll find that out — ya gotta own slaves, or ya gotta be a slave.” Things go downhill rapidly from here. The Gismo’s inventor and his family are enslaved, the physicist is murdered, and by the opening of Chapter 4, we’re centuries into the future, a feudal, barbaric society built on Gismo slavery, a dystopia of abundance.
C You’ll find no better, more prescient parable about OR the internet wars than A for Anything. Today, we’re discovering that the internet can make formerly scarce ITPCEELNAT OSI SVME ESO.RDEESDTOROURCSTI TOHNAN information — everything from how-tos for turning Silly Putty into a trigger for an aerial kite photography
rig to, naturally, Hollywood movies, Top 40 music, and
popular novels — into abundant information. After
Iall, the internet is a machine for copying bits cheaply,
N 1959, MASTER SCIENCE FICTION AUTHOR quickly, and without any control.
Damon Knight published a novel called A for Now, there are businesses built on scarcity of
Anything, a thought experiment about uncon- information — publishing and filmmaking, record-
trolled abundance, that happened to predict the ing, and even some trades like travel agents and
internet wars 40 years before they began. consultants. These businesses have honorable
It reads like a story ripped from today’s headlines. and talented practitioners who bring home the
Chapter 1: A retired banker finds a hand-built invention bacon because the information they peddle is
in his mailbox with a typed note explaining that this scarce. Abundance will put a lot of these people
is a Gismo and that it will duplicate anything it out of business. It’s a damned shame.
touches, including other Gismos. It’s a shame if you’re one of the few people who
Chapter 2: We meet an FBI agent who’s been thrived on scarcity. But if you’re one of the millions
knocked unconscious by the Gismo’s inventor. He who will benefit from abundance, it’s the best news.
comes to and phones the head office. His colleague Ever. If we figured out how to make free hot meals,
laughs at him and tells him the world has dissolved it would be bad news for restaurateurs, and maybe
into chaos as countless Gismo owners are rioting in we’d see less investment in cuisine, but you’d have
the streets. to be out of your mind to tell the world’s starving
Chapter 3: We meet the Gismo’s inventor. He’s millions that we’re going to try to rid the world of
holed up with his wife and kids in a mountain cabin self-replicating dinners to keep the Golden Arches
outside L.A., watching the craziness he has wrought in business.
unfurl below him. A colleague, a hyperkinetic theo- The dominant narrative of a world of abundance
retical physicist who always dreamed of being a is the dystopia. The music industry and Hollywood
rocket scientist, finds him in the cabin and talks want you to believe that infinite, uncontrolled
excitedly of how the Gismo will change space travel: replication will destroy our society, like the foolish
“Put your rocket motors underneath, all you want. Marine in A for Anything.
With the Gismo, you can have ten or a million. Now But creative destruction opens more doors than what about fuel ... We make our fuel as we need it. it closes. Abundance needn’t mean slaves and Forget about your goddamn mass-energy ratios! I barbarism — it can just as easily be a rocket that can jack up the goddamned Mormon Temple and can take the Mormon Temple to the moon. take it to the moon!”
An ex-Marine shows up at the cabin, commanding a convoy of bomb-rigged cars chained together, each driven by a slave. The Marine has gotten the lay of the land: “Ya gotta have slaves now... [You think] every guy goes off with his own Gismo and that’s it? Not on your sweet life, mister. There’s just
Cory Doctorow ( craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist. He is co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing ( boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, and The New York Times.
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