Makers

by Cory Doctorow

  “I see,” Perry said. “Kettlewell didn’t mention this.”

  At the junkyard, Tjan wandered around the Elmo-propelled Smart car and peered at its innards, watched the Elmos negotiate their balance and position with minute movements and acoustic signals. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” he said. “You guys aren’t temperamentally suited to doing just one thing.”

  Lester laughed. “He’s got you there, dude,” he said, slapping Perry on the shoulder.

  Suzanne got Tjan out for dinner that night. “My dad was in import-export and we travelled a lot, all over Asia and then the former Soviets. He sent me away when I was 16 to finish school in the States, and there was no question but that I would go to Stanford for business school.”

  “Nice to meet a fellow Californian,” she said, and sipped her wine. They’d gone to one of the famed Miami deco restaurants and the fish in front of her was practically a sculpture, so thoroughly plated it was.

  “Well, I’m as Californian as…”

  “…as possible, under the circumstances,” she said and laughed. “It’s a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you were in B-school when?”

  “Ninety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know.”

  She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. “I hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though,” she said.

  “Oh, you will,” he said. “You’ll be remembered as the chronicler of this—what Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing.”

  “What you’re doing, too, right?”

  “Oh, yes, what I’m doing too.”

  A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. “I should have them build some of those,” Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAP’N JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE.

  “You think they can?”

  “Sure,” Tjan said. “Those two can build anything. That’s the point: any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. That’s where we’re at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. It’s a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. That’s new and it’s what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, too—bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show.

  “We’re going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn’t been imagined a year before.”

  “That’s a pretty unstable market,” Suzanne said, and ate some fish.

  “That’s a functional market. Here’s what I think the point of a good market is. In a good market, you invent something and you charge all the market will bear for it. Someone else figures out how to do it cheaper, or decides they can do it for a slimmer margin—not the same thing, you know, in the first case someone is more efficient and in the second they’re just less greedy or less ambitious. They do it and so you have to drop your prices to compete. Then someone comes along who’s less greedy or more efficient than both of you and undercuts you again, and again, and again, until eventually you get down to a kind of firmament, a baseline that you can’t go lower than, the cheapest you can produce a good and stay in business. That’s why straightpins, machine screws and reams of paper all cost basically nothing, and make damned little profit for their manufacturers.

  “So if you want to make a big profit, you’ve got to start over again, invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows up. The more this happens, the cheaper and better everything gets. It’s how we got here, you see. It’s what the system is for. We’re approaching a kind of pure and perfect state now, with competition and invention getting easier and easier—it’s producing a kind of superabundance that’s amazing to watch. My kids just surf it, make themselves over every six months, learn a new interface, a new entertainment, you name it. Change-surfers…” He trailed off.

  “You have kids?”

  “In St Petersburg, with their mother.”

  She could tell by his tone that it had been the wrong question to ask. He was looking hangdog. “Well, it must be nice to be so much closer to them than you were in Ithaca.”

  “What? No, no. The St Petersburg in Russia.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  They concentrated on their food for a while.

  “You know,” he said, after they’d ordered coffee and desert, “it’s all about abundance. I want my kids to grow up with abundance, and whatever is going on right now, it’s providing abundance in abundance. The self-storage industry is bigger than the recording industry, did you know that? All they do is provide a place to put stuff that we own that we can’t find room for—that’s superabundance.”

  “I have a locker in Milpitas,” she said.

  “There you go. It’s a growth industry.” He drank his coffee. On the way back to their cars, he said, “My daughter, Lyenitchka, is four, and my son, Sasha, is one. I haven’t lived with their mother in three years.” He made a face. “Sasha’s circumstances were complicated. They’re good kids, though. It just couldn’t work with their mother. She’s Russian, and connected—that’s how we met, I was hustling for my import-export business and she had some good connections—so after the divorce there was no question of my taking the kids with me. But they’re good kids.”

  “Do you see them?”

  “We videoconference. Who knew that long-distance divorce was the killer app for videoconferencing?”

  “Yeah.”

  That week, Suzanne tweeted constantly, filed two columns, and blogged ten or more items a day: photos, bits of discussion between Lester, Perry and Tjan, a couple videos of the Boogie Woogie Elmos doing improbable things. Turned out that there was quite a cult following for the BWE, and the news that there was a trove of some thousands of them in a Hollywood dump sent a half-dozen pilgrims winging their way across the nation to score some for the collectors’ market. Perry wouldn’t even take their money: “Fella,” he told one persistent dealer, “I got forty thousand of these things. I won’t miss a couple dozen. Just call it good karma.”

  When Tjan found out about it he pursed his lips for a moment, then said, “Let me know if someone wants to pay us money, please. I think you were right, but I’d like to have a say, all right?”

  Perry looked at Suzanne, who was videoing this exchange with her keychain. Then he looked back at Tjan, “Yeah, of course. Sorry—force of habit. No harm done, though, right?”

  That footage got downloaded a couple hundred times that night, but once it got slashdotted by a couple of high-profile headline aggregators, she found her server hammered with a hundred thousand requests. The Merc had the horsepower to serve them all, but you never knew: every once in a while, the web hit another tipping point and grew by an order of magnitude or so, and then all the server-provisioning—calculated to survive the old slashdottings—shredded like wet kleenex.

  From: kettlewell-l@skunkworks.kodacell.com

  To: schurch@sjmercury.com

  Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?

  This stuff is amazing. Amazing! Christ, I should put you on the payroll. Forget I wrote that. But i should. You’ve got a fantastic eye. I have never felt as in touch with my own business as I do at this moment. Not to mention proud! Proud—you’ve made me so proud of the work these g
uys are doing, proud to have some role in it.

  Kettlebelly

  She read it sitting up in her coffin, just one of several hundred emails from that day’s blog-posts and column. She laughed and dropped it in her folder of correspondence to answer. It was nearly midnight, too late to get into it with Kettlewell.

  Then her computer rang—the net-phone she forwarded her cellphone to when her computer was live and connected. She’d started doing that a couple years back, when soft-phones really stabilized, and her phone bills had dropped to less than twenty bucks a month, down from several hundred. It wasn’t that she spent a lot of time within arm’s reach of a live computer, but given that calls routed through the laptop were free, she was perfectly willing to defer her calls until she was.

  “Hi Jimmy,” she said—her editor, back in San Jose. 9PM Pacific time on a weeknight was still working hours for him.

  “Suzanne,” he said.

  She waited. She’d half expected him to call with a little shower of praise, an echo of Kettlewell’s note. Jimmy wasn’t the most effusive editor she’d had, but it made his little moments of praise more valuable for their rarity.

  “Suzanne,” he said again.

  “Jimmy,” she said. “It’s late here. What’s up?”

  “So, it’s like this. I love your reports but it’s not Silicon Valley news. It’s Miami news. McClatchy handed me a thirty percent cut this morning and I’m going to the bone. I am firing a third of the newsroom today. Now, you are a stupendous writer and so I said to myself, ‘I can fire her or I can bring her home and have her write about Silicon Valley again,’ and I knew what the answer had to be. So I need you to come home, just wrap it up and come home.”

  He finished speaking and she found herself staring at her computer’s screen. Her hands were gripping the laptop’s edges so tightly it hurt, and the machine made a plasticky squeak as it began to bend.

  “I can’t do that, Jimmy. This is stuff that Silicon Valley needs to know about. This may not be what’s happening in Silicon Valley, but it sure as shit is what’s happening to Silicon Valley.” She hated that she’d cussed—she hadn’t meant to. “I know you’re in a hard spot, but this is the story I need to cover right now.”

  “Suzanne, I’m cutting a third of the newsroom. We’re going to be covering stories within driving distance of this office for the foreseeable future, and that’s it. I don’t disagree with a single thing you just said, but it doesn’t matter: if I leave you where you are, I’ll have to cut the guy who covers the school boards and the city councils. I can’t do that, not if I want to remain a daily newspaper editor.”

  “I see,” she said. “Can I think about it?”

  “Think about what, Suzanne? This has not been the best day for me, I have to tell you, but I don’t see what there is to think about. This newspaper no longer has correspondents who work in Miami and London and Paris and New York. As of today, that stuff comes from bloggers, or off the wire, or whatever—but not from our payroll. You work for this newspaper, so you need to come back here, because the job you’re doing does not exist any longer. The job you have with us is here. You’ve missed the night-flight, but there’s a direct flight tomorrow morning that’ll have you back by lunchtime tomorrow, and we can sit down together then and talk about it, all right?”

  “I think—” She felt that oh-shit-oh-shit feeling again, that needing-to-pee feeling, that tension from her toes to her nose. “Jimmy,” she said. “I need a leave of absence, OK?”

  “What? Suzanne, I’m sure we owe you some vacation but now isn’t the time—”

  “Not a vacation, Jimmy. Six months leave of absence, without pay.” Her savings could cover it. She could put some banner ads on her blog. Florida was cheap. She could rent out her place in California. She was six steps into the plan and it had only taken ten seconds and she had no doubts whatsoever. She could talk to that book-agent who’d pinged her last year, see about getting an advance on a book about Kodacell.

  “Are you quitting?”

  “No, Jimmy—well, not unless you make me. But I need to stay here.”

  “The work you’re doing there is fine, Suzanne, but I worked really hard to protect your job here and this isn’t going to help make that happen.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If you want to work for the Merc, you need to fly back to San Jose, where the Merc is published. I can’t make it any clearer than that.”

  No, he couldn’t. She sympathized with him. She was really well paid by the Merc. Keeping her on would mean firing two junior writers. He’d cut her a lot of breaks along the way, too—let her feel out the Valley in her own way. It had paid off for both of them, but he’d taken the risk when a lot of people wouldn’t have. She’d be a fool to walk away from all that.

  She opened her mouth to tell him that she’d be on the plane in the morning, and what came out was, “Jimmy, I really appreciate all the work you’ve done for me, but this is the story I need to write. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Suzanne,” he said.

  “Thank you, Jimmy,” she said. “I’ll get back to California when I get a lull and sort out the details—my employee card and stuff.”

  “You know what you’re doing, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  When she unscrewed her earpiece, she discovered that her neck was killing her. That made her realize that she was a forty-five-year-old woman in America without health insurance. Or regular income. She was a journalist without a journalistic organ.

  She’d have to tell Kettlewell, who would no doubt offer to put her on the payroll. She couldn’t do that, of course. Neutrality was hard enough to maintain, never mind being financially compromised.

  She stepped out of the coffin and sniffed the salty air. Living in the coffin was expensive. She’d need to get a condo or something. A place with a kitchen where she could prep meals. She figured that Perry’s building would probably have a vacancy or two.

  The second business that Tjan took Perry into was even more successful than the first, and that was saying something. It only took a week for Tjan to get Perry and Lester cranking on a Kitchen Gnome design that mashed together some Homeland Security gait-recognition software with a big solid-state hard-disk and a microphone and a little camera, all packaged together in one of a couple hundred designs of a garden-gnome figurine that stood six inches tall. It could recognize every member of a household by the way they walked and play back voice-memos for each. It turned out to be a killer tool for context-sensitive reminders to kids to do the dishes, and for husbands, wives and roommates to nag each other without getting on each others’ nerves. Tjan was really jazzed about it, as it tied in with some theories he had about the changing US demographic, trending towards blended households in urban centers, with three or more adults co-habitating.

  “This is a rich vein,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Living communally is hard, and technology can make it easier. Roommate ware. It’s the wave of the future.”

  There was another Kodacell group in San Francisco, a design outfit with a bunch of stringers who could design the gnomes for them and they did great work. The gnomes were slightly lewd-looking, and they were the product of a generative algorithm that varied each one. Some of the designs that fell out of the algorithm were jaw-droppingly weird—Perry kept a three-eyed, six-armed version on his desk. They tooled up to make them by the hundred, then the thousand,then the tens of thousand. The fact that each one was different kept their margins up, but as the Gnomes gained popularity their sales were steadily eroded by knock-offs, mostly from Eastern Europe.

  The knockoffs weren’t as cool-looking—though they were certainly weirder looking, like the offspring of a Norwegian troll and an anime robot—but they were more feature-rich. Some smart hacker in Russia was packing all kinds of functionality onto a single chip, so that their trolls cost less and did more: burglar alarms, baby-monitors, streaming Internet radio source, and low-reliabi
lity medical diagnostic that relied on quack analysis of eye pigment, tongue coating and other newage (rhymes with sewage) indicators.

  Lester came back from the Dollar Store with a big bag of trolls, a dozen different models, and dumped them out on Tjan’s desk, up in old foreman’s offices on the catwalk above the workspaces. “Christ, would you look at these? They’re selling them for less than our cost to manufacture. How do we compete with this?”

  “We don’t,” Tjan said, and rubbed his belly. “Now we do the next thing.”

  “What’s the next thing?” Perry said.

  “Well, the first one delivered a return-on-investment at about twenty times the rate of any Kodak or Duracell business unit in the history of either company. But I’d like to shoot for thirty to forty times next, if that’s all right with you. So let’s go see what you’ve invented this week and how we can commercialize it.”

  Perry and Lester just looked at each other. Finally, Lester said, “Can you repeat that?”

  “The typical ROI for a Kodacell unit in the old days was about four percent. If you put a hundred dollars in, you’d get a hundred and four dollars out, and it would take about a year to realize. Of course, in the old days, they wouldn’t have touched a new business unless they could put a hundred million in and get a hundred and four million out. Four million bucks is four million bucks.

  “But here, the company put fifty thousand into these dolls and three months later, they took seventy thousand out, after paying our salaries and bonuses. That’s a forty percent ROI. Seventy thousand bucks isn’t four million bucks, but forty percent is forty percent. Not to mention that our business drove similar margins in three other business units.”

  “I thought we’d screwed up by letting these guys eat our lunch,” Lester said, indicating the dollar-store trolls.

  “Nope, we got in while the margins were high, made a good return, and now we’ll get out as the margins drop. That’s not screwing up, that’s doing the right thing. The next time around, we’ll do something more capital intensive and we’ll take out an even higher margin: so show me something that’ll cost two hundred grand to get going and that we can pull a hundred and sixty thou’s worth of profit out of for Kodacell in three months. Let’s do something ambitious this time around.”