Makers by Cory Doctorow (read this if .txt) 📕

the seat of our pants here because you haven’t sent us a pilot.”
“You need an MBA to tell you not to turn your workplace into a slum?” Kettlewell said. He was boiling. Suzanne very carefully pulled out her pad and wrote this down. It was all she had, but sometimes it was enough.
Kettlewell noticed. “Get out,” he said. “I want to talk with these two alone.”
“No,” Suzanne said. “That’s not our deal. I get to document everything. That’s the deal.”
Kettlewell glared at her, and then he deflated. He sagged and took two steps to the chair behind Perry’s desk and collapsed into it.
“Put the notebook away, Suzanne, please?”
She silently shook her head at him. He locked eyes with her for a moment, then nodded curtly. She resumed writing.
“Guys, the major shareholders are going to start dumping their stock this week. A couple of pension funds, a merchant bank. It’s about ten, fifteen percent of the company. When that happens, our ticker price is going to fall by sixty percent or more.”
“They’re going to short us because they don’t like what we’ve done here?” Perry said. “Christ, that’s ridiculous!”
Kettlewell sighed and put his face in his hands, scrubbed at his eyes. “No, Perry, no. They’re doing it because they can’t figure out how to value us. Our business units have an industry-high return on investment, but there’s not enough of them. We’ve only signed a thousand teams and we wanted ten thousand, so ninety percent of the money we had to spend is sitting in the bank at garbage interest rates. We need to soak up that money with big projects—the Hoover Dam, Hong Kong Disneyland, the Big Dig. All we’ve got are little projects.”
“So it’s not our fault then, is it?” Lester said. Perry was staring out the window.
“No, it’s not your fault, but this doesn’t help. This is a disaster waiting to turn into a catastrophe.”
“Calm down, Landon,” Perry said. “Calm down for a sec and listen to me, OK?”
Kettlewell looked at him and sighed. “Go ahead.”
“There are more than a billion squatters worldwide. San Francisco has been giving out tents and shopping carts ever since they ran out of shelter beds in the nineties. From Copenhagen to Capetown, there are more and more people who are going off the grid, often in the middle of cities.”
Suzanne nodded. “They farm Detroit, in the ruins of old buildings. Raise crops and sell them. Chickens, too. Even pigs.”
“There’s something there. These people have money, like I said. They buy and sell in the stream of commerce. They often have to buy at a premium because the services and goods available to them are limited—think of how a homeless person can’t take advantage of bulk-packaged perishables because she doesn’t have a fridge. They are the spirit of ingenuity, too—they mod their cars, caves, anything they can find to be living quarters. They turn RVs into permanent homes. They know more about tents, sleeping bags and cardboard than any UN SHELTER specialist. These people need housing, goods, appliances, you name it. It’s what Tjan used to call a green-field market: no one else knows it’s there. You want something you can spend ungodly amounts of money on? This is it. Get every team in the company to come up with products for these people. Soak up every cent they spend. Better us providing them with quality goods at reasonable prices than letting them get ripped off by the profiteers who have a captive market. This plant is a living lab: this is the kind of market intelligence you can’t buy, right here. We should set up more of these. Invite squatters all over the country to move onto our grounds, test out our products, help us design, build and market them. We can recruit traveling salespeople to go door to door in the shanties and take orders. Shit, man, you talk about the Grameen Bank all the time—why not go into business providing these people with easy microcredit without preying on them the way the banks do? Then we could loan them money to buy things that we sell them that they use to better their lives and earn more money so they can pay us back and buy more things and borrow more money—”
Kettlewell held up a hand. “I like the theory. It’s a nice story. But I have to sell this to my Board, and they want more than stories: where can I get the research to back this up?”
“We’re it,” Perry said. “This place, right here. There’s no numbers to prove what I’m saying is right because everyone who knows it’s right is too busy chasing after it and no one else believes it. But right here, if we’re allowed to do this—right here we can prove it. We’ve got the capital in our account, we’re profitable, and we can roll those profits back into more R&D for the future of the company.”
Suzanne was writing so fast she was getting a hand cramp. Perry had never given speeches like this, even a month before. Tjan’s leaving had hurt them all, but the growth it had precipitated in Perry was stunning.
Kettlewell argued more, but Perry was a steamroller and Suzanne was writing down what everyone said and that kept it all civil, like a silent camera rolling in the corner of the room. No one looked at her, but she was the thing they were conspicuously not looking at.
Francis took the news calmly. “Sound business strategy. Basically, it’s what I’ve been telling you to do all along, so I’m bound to like it.”
It took a couple weeks to hive off the Home Aware stuff to some of the other Kodacell business-units. Perry flew a bunch, spending days in Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, and Michigan overseeing the retooling efforts that would let him focus on his new project.
By the time he got back, Lester had retooled their own workspace, converting it to four functional areas: communications, shelter, food and entertainment. “They were Francis’s idea,” he said. Francis’s gimpy leg was bothering him more and more, but he’d overseen the work from a rolling ergonomic office-chair. “It’s his version of the hierarchy of needs—stuff he knows for sure we can sell.”
It was the first time the boys had launched something new without knowing what it was, where they’d started with a niche and decided to fill it instead of starting with an idea and looking for a niche for it.
“You’re going to underestimate the research time,” Francis said during one of their flip-chart brainstorms, where they had been covering sheet after sheet with ideas for products they could build. “Everyone underestimates research time. Deciding what to make is always harder than making it.” He’d been drinking less since he’d gotten involved in the retooling effort, waking earlier, bossing around his young-blood posse to get him paper, bricks, Tinkertoys.
He was right. Suzanne steadily recorded the weeks ticking by as the four competing labs focus-grouped, designed, tested and scrapped all manner of “tchotchkes for tramps,” as Freddy had dubbed it in a spiraling series of ever-more-bilious columns. But the press was mostly positive: camera crews liked to come by and shoot the compound. One time, the pretty black reporter from the night of the fire came by and said very nice things during her standup. Her name was Maria and she was happy to talk shop with Suzanne, endlessly fascinated by a “real” journalist who’d gone permanently slumming on the Internet.
“The problem is that all this stuff is too specialized, it has too many prerequisites,” Perry said, staring at a waterproof, cement-impregnated bag that could be filled with a hose, allowed to dry, and used as a self-contained room. “This thing is great for refugees, but it’s too one-size-fits all for squatters. They have to be able to heavily customize everything they use to fit into really specialized niches.”
More squatters had arrived to take up residence with them—families, friends, a couple of dodgy drifters—and a third story was going onto the buildings in the camp. They were even more Dr Seussian than the first round, idiosyncratic structures that had to be built light to avoid crushing the floors below them, hanging out over the narrow streets, corkscrewing like vines seeking sun.
He kept staring, and would have been staring still had he not heard the sirens. Three blue-and-white Broward County sheriff’s cars were racing down the access road into their dead mall, sirens howling, lights blazing.
They screeched to a halt at the shantytown’s edge and their doors flew open. Four cops moved quickly into the shantytown, while two more worked the radios, sheltering by the cars.
“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. He ran for the door, but Suzanne grabbed him.
“Don’t run toward armed cops,” she said. “Don’t do anything that looks threatening. Slow down, Perry.”
He took a couple deep breaths. Then he looked around his lab for a while, frantically muttering, “Where the fuck did I put it?”
“Use Home Aware,” she said. He shook his head, grimaced, went to a keyboard and typed MEGAPHONE. One of the lab-drawers started to throb with a white glow.
He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window.
“ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?”
The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop.
“SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.”
“WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?”
The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third.
Perry ran for the door and Suzanne chased after him, trying to stop him. The cops at the cars were talking intently into their radios, though it was impossible to know if they were talking to their comrades in the shantytown or to their headquarters. Perry burst out of the factory door and there was another shot and he spun around, staggered back a step, and fell down like a sack of grain. There was blood around his head. Suzanne stuck her hand in her mouth to stifle a scream and stood helplessly in the doorway of the workshop, just a few paces from Perry.
Lester came up behind her and firmly moved her aside. He lumbered deliberately and slowly and fearlessly to Perry’s side, knelt beside him, touched him gently. His face was grey. Perry thrashed softly and Suzanne let out a sound like a cry, then remembered herself and took out her camera and began to shoot and shoot and shoot: the cops, Lester with Perry like a tragic Pieta, the shantytowners running back and forth screaming. Snap of the cops getting out of their cars, guns in hands, snap of them fanning out around the shantytown, snap of them coming closer and closer, snap of a cop pointing his gun at Lester, ordering him away from Perry, snap of a cop approaching her.
“It’s live,” she said, not looking up from the viewfinder. “Going out live