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

stuff that you didn't
fast-forward, the stuff you listened to and kept. Unless, that is, you've got
more than, say, 10,000 songs onboard. Then you go free. It's counterintuitive, I
know, but just look at the numbers."

"OK, OK. A radio with a fast-forward button. I think I get it."

"But?"

"But who's going to want to use this? It's unpredictable. You've got no
guarantee you'll get the songs you want to hear."

Art smiled. "Exactly!"

Fede gave him a go-on wave.

"Don't you see? That's the crack-cocaine part! It's the thrill of the chase!
Nobody gets excited about beating traffic on a back road that's always empty.
But get on the M-5 after a hard day at work and drive it at 100 km/h for two
hours without once touching your brakes and it's like God's reached down and
parted the Red Seas for you. You get a sense of *accomplishment*! Most of the
time, your car stereo's gonna play the same junk you've always heard, just
background sound, but sometimes, ah! Sometimes you'll hit a sweet spot and get
the best tunes you've ever heard. If you put a rat in a cage with a lever that
doesn't give food pellets, he'll push it once or twice and give up. Set the
lever to always deliver food pellets and he'll push it when he gets hungry. Set
it to *sometimes* deliver food pellets and he'll bang on it until he passes
out!"

"Heh," Fede said. "Good rant."

"And?"

"And it's cool." Fede looked off into the middle distance a while. "Radio with a
fast-forward button. That's great, actually. Amazing. Stupendous!" He snatched
the axe-head from its box on Art's desk and did a little war dance around the
room, whooping. Art followed the dance from his ergonomic chair, swiveling
around as the interface tchotchkes that branched from its undersides chittered
to keep his various bones and muscles firmly supported.

His office was more like a three-fifths-scale model of a proper office, in
Lilliputian London style, so the war dance was less impressive than it might
have been with more room to express itself. "You like it, then," Art said, once
Fede had run out of steam.

"I do, I do, I do!"

"Great."

"Great."

"So."

"Yes?"

"So what do we do with it? Should I write up a formal proposal and send it to
Jersey? How much detail? Sketches? Code fragments? Want me to mock up the
interface and the network model?"

Fede cocked an eyebrow at him. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, we give this to Jersey, they submit the proposal, they walk away with the
contract, right? That's our job, right?"

"No, Art, that's not our job. Our job is to see to it that V/DT submits a bad
proposal, not that Jersey submits a good one. This is big. We roll this together
and it's bigger than MassPike. We can run this across every goddamned toll road
in the world! Jersey's not paying for this -- not yet, anyway -- and someone
should."

"You want to sell this to them?"

"Well, I want to sell this. Who to sell it to is another matter."

Art waved his hands confusedly. "You're joking, right?"

Fede crouched down beside Art and looked into his eyes. "No, Art, I am serious
as a funeral here. This is big, and it's not in the scope of work that we signed
up for. You and me, we can score big on this, but not by handing it over to
those shitheads in Jersey and begging for a bonus."

"What are you talking about? Who else would pay for this?"

"You have to ask? V/DT for starters. Anyone working on a bid for MassPike, or
TollPass, or FastPass, or EuroPass."

"But we can't sell this to just *anyone*, Fede!"

"Why not?"

"Jesus. Why not? Because of the Tribes."

Fede quirked him half a smile. "Sure, the Tribes."

"What does that mean?"

"Art, you know that stuff is four-fifths' horseshit, right? It's just a game.
When it comes down to your personal welfare, you can't depend on time zones.
This is more job than calling, you know."

Art squirmed and flushed. "Lots of us take this stuff seriously, Fede. It's not
just a mind-game. Doesn't loyalty mean anything to you?"

Fede laughed nastily. "Loyalty! If you're doing all of this out of loyalty, then
why are you drawing a paycheck? Look, I'd rather that this go to Jersey. They're
basically decent sorts, and I've drawn a lot of pay from them over the years,
but they haven't paid for this. They wouldn't give us a free ride, so why should
we give them one? All I'm saying is, we can offer this to Jersey, of course, but
they have to bid for it in a competitive marketplace. I don't want to gouge
them, just collect a fair market price for our goods."

"You're saying you don't feel any fundamental loyalty to anything, Fede?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"And you're saying that I'm a sucker for putting loyalty ahead of personal gain
-- after all, no one else is, right?"

"Exactly."

"Then how did this idea become 'ours,' Fede? I came up with it."

Fede lost his nasty smile. "There's loyalty and then there's loyalty."

"Uh-huh."

"No, really. You and I are a team. I rely on you and you rely on me. We're loyal
to something concrete -- each other. The Eastern Standard Tribe is an
abstraction. It's a whole bunch of people, and neither of us like most of 'em.
It's useful and pleasant, but you can't put your trust in institutions --
otherwise you get Nazism."

"And patriotism."

"Blind patriotism."

"So there's no other kind? Just jingoism? You're either loyal to your immediate
circle of friends or you're a deluded dupe?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying."

"So where does informed loyalty leave off and jingoism begin? You come on all
patronizing when I talk about being loyal to the Tribe, and you're certainly not
loyal to V/DT, nor are you loyal to Jersey. What greater purpose are you loyal
to?"

"Well, humanity, for starters."

"Really. What's that when it's at home?"

"Huh?"

"How do you express loyalty to something as big and abstract as 'humanity'?"

"Well, that comes down to morals, right? Not doing things that poison the world.
Paying taxes. Change to panhandlers. Supporting charities." Fede drummed his
fingers on his thighs. "Not murdering or raping, you know. Being a good person.
A moral person."

"OK, that's a good code of conduct. I'm all for not murdering and raping, and
not just because it's *wrong*, but because a world where the social norms
include murdering and raping is a bad one for me to live in."

"Exactly."

"That's the purpose of morals and loyalty, right? To create social norms that
produce a world you want to live in."

"Right! And that's why *personal* loyalty is important."

Art smiled. Trap baited and sprung. "OK. So institutional loyalty -- loyalty to
a Tribe or a nation -- that's not an important social norm. As far as you're
concerned, we could abandon all pretense of institutional loyalty." Art dropped
his voice. "You could go to work for the Jersey boys, sabotaging Virgin/Deutsche
Telekom, just because they're willing to pay you to do it. Nothing to do with
Tribal loyalty, just a job."

Fede looked uncomfortable, sensing the impending rhetorical headlock. He nodded
cautiously.

"Which means that the Jersey boys have no reason to be loyal to you. It's just a
job. So if there were an opportunity for them to gain some personal advantage by
selling you out, turning you into a patsy for them, well, they should just go
ahead and do it, right?"

"Uh --"

"Don't worry, it's a rhetorical question. Jersey boys sell you out. You take
their fall, they benefit. If there was no institutional loyalty, that's where
you'd end up, right? That's the social norm you want."

"No, of course it isn't."

"No, of course not. You want a social norm where individuals can be disloyal to
the collective, but not vice versa."

"Yes --"

"Yes, but loyalty is bidirectional. There's no basis on which you may expect
loyalty from an institution unless you're loyal to it."

"I suppose."

"You know it. I know it. Institutional loyalty is every bit as much about
informed self-interest as personal loyalty is. The Tribe takes care of me, I
take care of the Tribe. We'll negotiate a separate payment from Jersey for this
-- after all, this is outside of the scope of work that we're being paid for --
and we'll split the money, down the middle. We'll work in a residual income with
Jersey, too, because, as you say, this is bigger than MassPike. It's a genuinely
good idea, and there's enough to go around. All right?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"I'm asking you. This will require both of our cooperation. I'm going to need to
manufacture an excuse to go stateside to explain this to them and supervise the
prototyping. You're going to have to hold down the fort here at V/DT and make
sure that I'm clear to do my thing. If you want to go and sell this idea
elsewhere, well, that's going to require my cooperation, or at least my silence
-- if I turn this over to V/DT, they'll pop you for industrial espionage. So we
need each other."

Art stood and looked down at Fede, who was a good ten centimeters shorter than
he, looked down at Fede's sweaty upper lip and creased brow. "We're a good team,
Fede. I don't want to toss away an opportunity, but I also don't want to exploit
it at the expense of my own morals. Can you agree to work with me on this, and
trust me to do the right thing?"

Fede looked up. "Yes," he said. On later reflection, Art thought that the *yes*
came too quickly, but then, he was just relieved to hear it. "Of course. Of
course. Yes. Let's do it."

"That's just fine," Art said. "Let's get to work, then."

They fell into their traditional division of labor then, Art working on a
variety of user-experience plans, dividing each into subplans, then devising
protocols for user testing to see what would work in the field; Fede working on
logistics from plane tickets to personal days to budget and critical-path
charts. They worked side by side, but still used the collaboration tools that
Art had grown up with, designed to allow remote, pseudonymous parties to fit
their separate work components into the same structure, resolving schedule and
planning collisions where it could and throwing exceptions where it couldn't.
They worked beside each other and each hardly knew the other was there, and
that, Art thought, when he thought of it, when the receptionist commed him to
tell him that "Linderrr" -- freakin' teabags -- was there for him, that was the
defining characteristic of a Tribalist. A norm, a modus operandi, a way of being
that did not distinguish between communication face-to-face and communication at
a distance.

"Linderrr?" Fede said, cocking an eyebrow.

"I hit her with my car," Art said.

"Ah," Fede said. "Smooth."

Art waved a hand impatiently at him and went out to the reception area to fetch
her. The receptionist had precious little patience for entertaining personal
visitors, and Linda, in track pants and a baggy sweater, was clearly not a
professional contact. The receptionist glared