For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  They drank their smoothies. There were murmured conversations, and it seemed like a lot of people were trading their chips back and forth. Connor laughed to see this, and he wasn’t the only one, but it was all in fun. Twenty dollars was the going rate for an hour’s rental, after all—the exactly and perfectly rational sum.

  “Give me your poker chip for twenty minutes for five dollars?” The asker was at the young end of the room, about 22, with a soft, cultured Southern accent. She was also very pretty. He checked the clock on the wall: “It’s only half past,” he said. “What’s the point?”

  She grinned at him. “You’ll see.”

  A five-dollar bill was produced and the poker chip left his custody. The pretty Southern girl talked with another girl, and after a moment, $10 traded hands, rather conspicuously. “Hey,” he began, but the Southern girl tipped him a wink, and he fell silent.

  Anxiously, he watched the clock, waiting for the 20 minutes to tick past. “I need the chip back,” he said, to the Southern girl.

  She shrugged. “You need to talk to her,” she said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder, then she ostentatiously pulled a paperback novel—The Fountainhead—out of her backpack and buried her nose in it. He felt a complicated emotion: he wanted to laugh, and he wanted to shout at the girl. He chose laughter, conscious of all the people watching him, and approached the other girl, who was tall and solidly built, with a no-nonsense look that went perfectly with her no-nonsense clothes and haircut.

  “Yes?” she said, when he approached her.

  “You’ve got my chip,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I do not.”

  “But the chip she sold you, I’d only rented it to her.”

  “You need to take it up with her,” the girl who had his chip said.

  “But it’s my chip,” he said. “It wasn’t hers to sell to you.” He didn’t want to say, I’m also pretty intimidated by anyone who has the gall to pull a stunt like that. Was it his imagination, or was the Southern girl smiling to herself, a smug little smile?

  “Not my problem, I’m afraid,” she said. “Too bad.”

  Now everyone was watching very closely and he felt himself blushing, losing his cool. He swallowed and tried to put on a convincing smile. “Yeah, I guess I really should be more careful who I trust. Will you sell me my chip?”

  “My chip,” she said, flipping it in the air. He was tempted to try and grab it out of the air, but that might have led to a wrestling match right here, in front of everyone. How embarrassing!

  “Yeah,” he said. “Your chip.”

  “Okay,” she said. “fifteen dollars.”

  “Deal,” he said, thinking, I’ve already earned $45 here, I can afford to let go of $15.

  “In seven minutes,” she said. He looked at the clock: it was 11:54. In seven minutes, she’d have gotten his $20. Correction: her $20.

  “That’s not fair,” he said.

  She raised one eyebrow at him, hoisting it so high it seemed like it’d touch her hairline. “Oh really? I think that this chip is worth one hundred twenty dollars. Fifteen seems like a bargain to you.”

  “I’ll give you twenty,” the redhead said.

  “Twenty-five,” said someone else, laughing.

  “Fine, fine,” Connor said, hastily, now blushing so hard he actually felt light-headed. “Fifteen dollars.”

  “Too late,” she said. “The price is now twenty-five dollars.”

  He heard the room chuckle, felt it preparing to holler out a new price—$40? $60?—and he quickly snapped, “Twenty-five dollars” and dug out his wallet.

  The girl took his money—how did he know she would give him the chip? He felt like an idiot as soon as it had left his hand—and then the experimenter came in. “Lunch!” he called out, wheeling in a cart laden with boxed salads, vegetarian sushi, and a couple buckets of fried chicken. “Poker chips!” The twenties were handed around.

  The girl with his money spent an inordinate amount of time picking out her lunch, then, finally, turned to him with a look of fakey surprise, and said, “Oh right, here,” and handed him his chip. The guy with the red hair snickered.

  Well, that was the beginning of the game, the thing that turned the next five hours into one of the most intense emotional experiences he’d ever taken part in. Players formed buying factions, bought out other players, pooled their wealth. Someone changed the wall clock, sneakily, and then they all spent 30 minutes arguing about whose watch or phone was more accurate, until the researcher came back in with a handful of twenties.

  In the sixth hour of the experiment, Connor suddenly realized that he was in the minority, an outlier among two great factions: one of which controlled nearly all the poker chips, the other of which controlled nearly all the cash. And there was only two hours left, which meant that his single chip was worth $40.

  And something began to gnaw at his belly. Fear. Envy. Panic. The certainty that, when the experiment ended, he’d be the only poor one, the only one without a huge wad of cash. The savvy traders around him had somehow worked themselves into positions of power and wealth, while he’d been made tentative by his bad early experience and had stood pat while everyone else created the market.

  So he set out to buy more chips. Or to sell his chip. He didn’t care which—he just wanted to be rich.

  He wasn’t the only one: after the seventh hour, the entire marketplace erupted in a fury of buying and selling, which made no damned sense because now, now the chips were all worth exactly $20 each, and in just a few minutes, they’d be absolutely worthless. He kept telling himself this, but he also found himself bidding, harder and harder, for chips. Luckily, he wasn’t the most frightened person in the room. That turned out to be the redhead, who went after chips like a crackhead chasing a rock, losing all the casual cool he’d started with and chasing chips with money, IOUs.

  Here’s the thing, cash should have been king. The cash would still be worth something in an hour. The poker chips were like soap bubbles, about to pop. But those holding the chips were the kings and queens of the game, of the market. In seven short hours, they’d been conditioned to think of the chips as ATMs that spat out twenties, and even though their rational minds knew better, their hearts were all telling them to corner the chip.

  At 4:53, seven minutes before his chip would have its final payout, he sold it to the Fountainhead lady for $35, smirking at her until she turned around and sold it to the redhead for $50. The researcher came into the room, handed out his twenties, thanked them for their time, and sent them on their way.

  No one met anyone else’s eye as they departed. No one offered anyone else a phone number or email address or IM. It was as if they’d all just done something they were ashamed of, like they’d all taken part in a mob beating or a witch-burning, and now they just wanted to get away. Far away.

  For years, Connor had puzzled over the mania that had seized that room full of otherwise sane people, that had found a home in his own heart, had driven him like an addiction. What had brought him to that shameful place?

  Now, as he watched the value of his virtual assets climb and climb and climb, climb higher than his Equations predicted, higher than any sane person should be willing to spend on them, he understood.

  The emotion that had driven them in that experimenter’s lab, that was driving the unseen bidders around the world: it wasn’t greed.

  It was envy.

  Greed was predictable: if one slice of pizza is good, it makes sense that your intuition will tell you that five or ten slices would be even better.

  But envy wasn’t about what was good: it was about what someone else thought was good. It was the devil who whispered in your ear about your neighbor’s car, his salary, his clothes, his girlfriend—better than yours, more expensive than yours, more beautiful than yours. It was the dagger through your heart that could drive you from happiness to misery in a second without changing a single thing about your circumstances. It could turn your perfect li
fe into a perfect mess, just by comparing it to someone who had more/better/prettier.

  Envy is what drove that flurry of buying and selling in the lab. The redhead, writing IOUs and emptying his wallet: he’d been driven by the fear that he was missing out on what the rest of them were getting. Connor had sold his chip in the last hour because everyone else seemed to have gotten rich selling theirs. He could have kept his chip to himself for eight hours and walked out $160 richer, and used the time to study, or snooze, or do yoga in the back. But he’d felt that siren call: Someone else is getting rich, why aren’t you?

  And now the markets were running and everything was shooting up in value: his collection of red oxtails (useful in the preparation of the Revelations spell in Endtimes) should have been selling at $4.21 each. He’d bought them for $2.10 each. They were presently priced at $14.51 each.

  It was insane.

  It was wonderful.

  Connor knew it couldn’t last. Eventually, there would be a marketwide realization that these were overpriced—just as the market had recently realized that they had been underpriced. Bidding would cease. The last, most scared person who bought an overpriced game asset would be unable to flip it, would have to pay for it.

  Rationally, he supposed he should sell at his Equation-predicted number. Anything higher was just a bet on someone else’s irrationality. But still—would he really be better off flipping his 50 oxtails for $200, when he could wait a few minutes and sell them for $700? It didn’t have to be all or nothing. He divided his assets up into two groups. The ones he’d bought most cheaply, he set aside to allow to rise as far as they could. They represented his lowest-risk inventory, the cheapest losses to absorb. The remaining assets, he flipped at the second they reached the value predicted by his Equations.

  He quickly sold out of the second group, leaving him to watch the speculative assets climb higher and higher. He had a dozen games open on his computer, flipping from one to the next, monitoring the chatter and their associated websites and marketplaces, getting a sense for where they were going. Filtering the tweets and the status messages on the social networks, he felt a curious sense of familiarity: they were going nuts out there in a way that was almost identical to the craziness that had swept over the group in the poker-chip experiment. In their hearts, everyone knew that peacock plumes and purple armor were vastly overvalued, but they also knew that some people were getting rich off of them, and that if prices kept climbing they’d never be able to own one themselves.

  Never mind that they never wanted to own one before, of course! The important thing wasn’t what they needed or loved; it was the idea that someone else would have something that they couldn’t have.

  Connor had made his second great discovery: Envy, not greed, was the most powerful force in any economy.

  (Later, when Connor was writing articles about this for glossy magazines and travelling all over the world to talk about it, plenty of people from marketing departments would point out that they’d known this for generations, and had spent centuries producing ads that were aimed squarely at envy’s solar plexus. It was true, he had to admit—but it was also true that practically every economist he’d ever met had considered marketing people to be a bunch of shallow, foolish court jesters with poor math skills and had therefore largely ignored them.)

  He watched the envy mount, and tried to get a feel for it all, to track the sentiments as they bubbled up. It was hard—practically impossible, honestly—because it was all spread out and no one had written the chat programs and the games and the social networks and the tweetsites to track this kind of thing. He ended up with a dozen browsers open, each with dozens of tabs, flipping through them in a high-speed blur, not reading exactly, but skimming, absorbing the sense of how things were going. He could feel the money and the thoughts and the goods all balanced on his fingertips, feel their weight shifting back and forth.

  And so he felt it when things started to go wrong. It was a bunch of subtle indicators, a blip in prices in this market, a joyous tweet from a player who’d just discovered an easy-to-kill miniboss with a huge store house stuffed with peacock feathers. The envy bubble was collapsing. Someone had popped it and the air was whooshing out.

  SELL!

  At that moment, his speculative assets were theoretically worth over four hundred thousand dollars, but ten minutes later it was $250,000 and falling like a rock. He knew this one, too—fear—fear that everyone else got out while the getting was good, that the musical chairs had all been filled, that you were the most scared person in a chain of terrorized people who bought overpriced junk because someone even more scared would buy it off of you.

  But Connor could rise above the fear, fly over it, flip his assets in a methodical, rapid-fire way. He got out with over $120,000 in cash, plus the $80,000 he’d gotten from his “rationally priced” assets, and now his PayPal accounts were bulging with profits and it was all over.

  Except it wasn’t.

  One by one, his game accounts began to shut down, his characters kicked out, his passwords changed. He was limp with exhaustion, his hands trembling as he typed and re-typed his passwords. And then he noticed the new email, from the four companies that controlled the twelve games he’d been playing: they’d all cut him off for violating their Terms of Service. Specifically, he’d “interfered with the game economy by engaging in play that was apt to cause financial panic.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” he shouted at his computer, resisting the urge to hurl his mouse at the wall. He’d been awake for over 48 hours now, had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a mere weekend, and had been graced with a thunderbolt of realization about the way that the world’s economy ran. Oh, and he’d validated his equations.

  He could solve this problem later.

  He didn’t even make it into bed. He curled up on the floor, in a nest of pizza boxes and blankets, and slept for 18 hours, until he was awakened by the bailiff who came to evict him for being three months behind on the rent.

  Yasmin didn’t see Mala any more. If you weren’t in the gang, “General Robotwallah” didn’t want to talk to you.

  And Yasmin didn’t want to be in the gang.

  She, too, had had a visit from Big Sister Nor. The woman had made sense. They did all the work, they made almost none of the money. Not just in games, either—her parents had spent their whole lives toiling for others, and those others had gotten wealthier and wealthier, and they’d stayed in Dharavi.

  Mr. Banerjee had paid Mala’s army more than any other slum-child could earn, it was true, and they were getting paid for playing their game, which had felt like a miracle—at first. But the more Yasmin thought about it, the less miraculous it became. Big Sister Nor showed her pictures, in-game, of the workers whose jobs they’d been disrupting. Some had been in Indonesia, some had been in Thailand, some had been in Malaysia, some had been in China. And lots of them had been in India, in Sri Lanka, in Pakistan, and in Bangladesh, where her parents had come from. They looked like her. They looked like her friends.

  And they were just trying to earn money, too. They were just trying to help their families, the way Mala’s army had. “You don’t have to hurt other workers to survive,” Big Sister Nor told her. “We can all thrive together.”

  Day after day, Yasmin had snuck into Mrs. Dotta’s internet cafe before the army met—they didn’t use Mrs. Dotta’s now, and instead met at a new internet shop a little further down the road, near the women’s papadam collective—and chatted with Big Sister Nor and listened to her stories of how it could be.

  She’d never talked about it with anyone else in the army. As far as they knew, she was Mala’s loyal lieutenant, sturdy and dependable. She had to enforce discipline in the ranks, which meant keeping the boys from fighting too much and keeping the girls from ganging up on one another with hissing, whispered rumors. To them, she was a stern, formidable fighter, someone to obey unconditionally in battle. She couldn’t approach them to say, “Have y
ou ever thought about fighting for workers instead of fighting against them?”

  No matter how much Big Sister Nor wanted her to.

  “Yasmin, they listen to you, la, they love you and look up to you. You say it yourself.” Her Hindi was strangely accented and peppered with English and Chinese words. But there were lots of funny accents in Dharavi, dialects and languages from across Mother India.

  Finally, she agreed to do it. Not to talk to the soldiers, but to talk to Mala, who had been her friend since Yasmin had found her carrying a huge sack of rice home from Mr. Bhatt’s shop with her little brother, looking lost and scared in the alleys of Dharavi. She and Mala had been inseparable since then, and Yasmin had always been able to tell her anything.

  “Good morning, General,” she said, falling into step beside Mala as she trekked to the community tap with a water-can in each hand. She took one can from Mala and took her now free hand and gave it a sisterly squeeze.

  Mala grinned at her and squeezed back, and the smile was like the old Mala, the Mala from before General Robotwallah had come into being. “Good morning, Lieutenant.” Mala was pretty when she smiled, her serious eyes filled with mischief, her square small teeth all on display. When she smiled like this, Yasmin felt like she had a sister.

  They talked in low voices as they waited for the tap, passing gupshup about their families. Mala’s mother had met a man at Mr. Bhatt’s factory, a man whose parents had come to Mumbai a generation before, but from the same village. He’d grown up on stories about life in the village, and he could listen to Mala’s mamaji tell stories of that promised land all day long. He was gentle and had a big laugh, and Mala approved. Yasmin’s nani, her grandmother, had been in touch with a matchmaker in London, and she was threatening to find Yasmin a husband there, though her parents were having none of it.