Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow (best reads .txt) 📕

I'm giving you a mild sedative. We can't help you until you're calmer
and ready to listen."

"I'm perfectly calm. I just disagree with you. I am the sort of person who
learns through debate. Medication won't stop that."

"We'll see," the doctor said, and left, before I could muster a riposte.

I was finally allowed onto the ward, dressed in what the nurses called "day
clothes" -- the civilian duds that I'd packed before leaving the hotel, which an
orderly retrieved for me from a locked closet in my room. The clustered nuts
were watching slackjaw TV, or staring out the windows, or rocking in place,
fidgeting and muttering. I found myself a seat next to a birdy woman whose long
oily hair was parted down the middle, leaving a furrow in her scalp lined with
twin rows of dandruff. She was young, maybe twenty-five, and seemed the least
stuporous of the lot.

"Hello," I said to her.

She smiled shyly, then pitched forward and vomited copiously and noisily between
her knees. I shrank back and struggled to keep my face neutral. A nurse hastened
to her side and dropped a plastic bucket in the stream of puke, which was still
gushing out of her mouth, her thin chest heaving.

"Here, Sarah, in here," the nurse said, with an air of irritation.

"Can I help?" I said, ridiculously.

She looked sharply at me. "Art, isn't it? Why aren't you in Group? It's after
one!"

"Group?" I asked.

"Group. In that corner, there." She gestured at a collection of sagging sofas
underneath one of the ward's grilled-in windows. "You're late, and they've
started without you."

There were four other people there, two women and a young boy, and a doctor in
mufti, identifiable by his shoes -- not slippers -- and his staff of office, the
almighty badge-on-a-lanyard.

Throbbing with dread, I moved away from the still-heaving girl to the sofa
cluster and stood at its edge. The group turned to look at me. The doctor
cleared his throat. "Group, this is Art. Glad you made it, Art. You're a little
late, but we're just getting started here, so that's OK. This is Lucy, Fatima,
and Manuel. Why don't you have a seat?" His voice was professionally smooth and
stultifying.

I sank into a bright orange sofa that exhaled a cloud of dust motes that danced
in the sun streaming through the windows. It also exhaled a breath of trapped
ancient farts, barf-smell, and antiseptic, the *parfum de asylum* that gradually
numbed my nose to all other scents on the ward. I folded my hands in my lap and
tried to look attentive.

"All right, Art. Everyone in the group is pretty new here, so you don't have to
worry about not knowing what's what. There are no right or wrong things. The
only rules are that you can't interrupt anyone, and if you want to criticize,
you have to criticize the idea, and not the person who said it. All right?"

"Sure," I said. "Sure. Let's get started."

"Well, aren't you eager?" the doctor said warmly. "OK. Manuel was just telling
us about his friends."

"They're not my friends," Manuel said angrily. "They're the reason I'm here. I
hate them."

"Go on," the doctor said.

"I already *told* you, yesterday! Tony and Musafir, they're trying to get rid of
me. I make them look bad, so they want to get rid of me."

"Why do you think you make them look bad?"

"Because I'm better than them -- I'm smarter, I dress better, I get better
grades, I score more goals. The girls like me better. They hate me for it."

"Oh yeah, you're the cat's ass, pookie," Lucy said. She was about fifteen,
voluminously fat, and her full lips twisted in an elaborate sneer as she spoke.

"Lucy," the doctor said patiently, favoring her with a patronizing smile.
"That's not cool, OK? Criticize the idea, not the person, and only when it's
your turn, OK?"

Lucy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of teenagedom.

"All right, Manuel, thank you. Group, do you have any positive suggestions for
Manuel?"

Stony silence.

"OK! Manuel, some of us are good at some things, and some of us are good at
others. Your friends don't hate you, and I'm sure that if you think about it,
you'll know that you don't hate them. Didn't they come visit you last weekend?
Successful people are well liked, and you're no exception. We'll come back to
this tomorrow -- why don't you spend the time until then thinking of three
examples of how your friends showed you that they liked you, and you can tell us
about it tomorrow?"

Manuel stared out the window.

"OK! Now, Art, welcome again. Tell us why you're here."

"I'm in for observation. There's a competency hearing at the end of the week."

Linda snorted and Fatima giggled.

The doctor ignored them. "But tell us *why* you think you ended up here."

"You want the whole story?"

"Whatever parts you think are important."

"It's a Tribal thing."

"I see," the doctor said.

"It's like this," I said. "It used to be that the way you chose your friends was
by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who
lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could
get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you
know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you'd grow up so immersed
in the local doctrine that you'd never even think to question it. If you were a
genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if
you could pull it off, you'd either gather up a bunch of people who liked your
new idea or you'd go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a
little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people
who didn't get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died."

"Very interesting," the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, "but you were going
to tell us how you ended up here."

"Yeah," Lucy said, "this isn't a history lesson, it's Group. Get to the point."

"I'm getting there," I said. "It just takes some background if you're going to
understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you
finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with
increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city,
chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go
and --" I waved my hands, "be *gay*, right? But if you were from a small town,
you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay -- you might
think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big
cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all
the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that
information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big
cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.

"So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and
territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had
the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around
on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn't long before everyone
knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People
immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of
people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was
religious, but that was just on the surface -- underneath it all was aesthetics.
You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood
prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold
goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course --
jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of finding people like you is
like gravity. Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in
the end -- in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with
the people that are most like them that they can find."

I was warming to my subject now, in that flow state that great athletes get into
when they just know where to swing their bat, where to plant their foot. I knew
that I was working up a great rant.

"Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost
all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a
coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don't need to interrupt
them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer,
you can just open the message again and look at the response. There're all kinds
of ways to interact with our friends over the network: we can play
hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures, code, music, funny articles, metric
fuckloads of porn... The interaction is high-quality! Sure, you gain three
pounds every year you spend behind the desk instead of walking down the hall to
ask your buddy where he wants to go for lunch, but that's a small price to pay.

"So you're a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you're sixteen years
old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of
media on your desktop. All the good stuff -- everything that tickles you --
comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They're making
cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that
they're exactly the kind of people who'd really appreciate you for who you are.
In the old days, you'd pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and move
to your community. But you're sixteen, and that's a pretty scary step.

"Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night,
they're comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, you
can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with
one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.

"Only you can't. You can't, because they chat at seven AM while they're getting
ready for school. They chat at five PM, while they're working on their homework.
Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their *local* times, not yours.
If you get up at seven, they're already at school, 'cause it's ten there.

"So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can
chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, 'cause that's when they go to
bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who
did that kind of thing, but now it's anyone who doesn't fit in. The geniuses and
lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based
on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as
them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too -- gotta be at work with
everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it's open,