For the Win by Cory Doctorow (short books to read .TXT) 📕

and they wordlessly disentangled and went back in. Someone had mopped up the vomit, using the rags that the badmashes had left behind and then kicking them in a reeking ball in the corner. Yasmin sat down at a computer and logged in, listening intently to the chatter around her, catching the order of battle, while Ashok went to his computer and got ready to talk to Big Sister Nor.
#
The day the strike started, Wei-Dong was in the midst of his second special assignment -- the first one had been to bring over the box of prepaid cards, which had been handed off into the Webbly network to be scratched off and then keyed in and sent to Big Sister Nor so she could portion them out to the fighters.
The second assignment was harder in some ways: he was charged with finding other Mechanical Turks who might be sympathetic to the strikers' cause and recruit them. Wei-Dong had never thought of himself as much of a leader -- he'd always been a loner in school -- but Big Sister Nor had talked to him at length about all the ways in which he might convince his fellow Turks to consider joining this strange enterprise.
Technically, it was simple enough to accomplish. As a Turk, he had access to the leaderboards of Turk activity, which Coca-Cola Online made a big deal out of, updating them every ten minutes. The leaderboards listed each Turk by name and showed which parts of the game he or she hung out in, how many queries she or he handled per hour, how highly rated the Turk's rulings and role-play were rated by the players who were randomly surveyed by a satisfaction-bot that gave out rare badges to any player who would fill in an in-game questionnaire. The idea was to inspire the Turks by showing them how much better their peers were doing. It worked, too -- Wei-Dong had spent many a night trying to pump his stats so that he could get ahead of the other Turks, scaling to the highest heights before being knocked down by someone else's all-night run. And, of course, when you pulled ahead of another Turk, you got to leave a public "message of encouragement" for them, no more than 140 characters so that it could be tweeted and texted straight to them, and these messages had pushed the boundaries of extremely terse profanity and boasting.
Wei-Dong had a new use for the boards: he was using them to figure out which players were likely to switch sides. The game-runners had created a facility for bulk-downloading historical data from them, and Turks were encouraged to make crazy mash-ups and visualizations showing whose play was the best. Wei-Dong had a different idea.
For weeks now, he'd been downloading gigantic amounts of data from the boards, piping it all into a database that Matthew had helped him build and now he could run some very specialized queries on it, queries like, "Show me Turks who used to lead the pack but have fallen off, despite long hours of work." Or "Show me Turks who use a lot of profanity when they're filling in the dialog for non-player characters." And especially, "Show me Turks who have a below-average level of ratting out gold-farmers to the bosses." This last one was a major enterprise among Turks, who got a big bonus every time they busted a farmer. Most of the Turks went "de-lousing" pretty often, looking to rack up the extra cash. But a significant minority never, ever hunted the farmers, and these were Wei-Dong's natural starting point.
He had a long list of leads, and for each one, he had a timetable of the Turk's habitual login hours and the parts of the world that the Turk worked most often. Then it was only a matter of logging in using one of the Webblies many, many toons, heading to that part of the world, and invoking the Turk and hoping the right person showed up. It would be easier to just use the Turk message boards, but if he did, he'd be busted and fired in seconds. This way was less efficient but it was a lot safer.
Now he was in the Goomba's Star-Fields, a cloudscape in Mushroom Kingdom where the power-up stars were cultivated in endless rows. Players could quest here, taking jobs with comical farmers who'd put them to work weeding the star patches and pulling up the ripe ones. It was good for training up your abilities; a highly ranked Star Farmer could get more power-up out of his stars.
And here was the farmer, chewing a corn-stalk and puttering around his barn, which was also made from clouds. He offered Wei-Dong a quest -- low-level, just pulling up weeds from some of the easier-to-reach clouds, the ones that weren't patrolled by hostile Lakitus. Wei-Dong accepted the quest, and then opened a chat with the farmer: "How long have you owned this farm?"
"Oh, youngster, I've been working this farm since I was but a boy -- and my pappy worked it before me and his pappy before him. Yep, I guess you could say that we're a farming family, hee hee!"
This was canned dialog, of course. No Turk could ever bring himself to type anything that hokey. The farmer NPC had a whole range of snappy answers to stupid questions. The trick to invoking a Turk was to get outside the box.
"Do you like farming?"
"Ay-yuh, you might say I do. It's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"
Wei-Dong rolled his eyes. Who wrote this stuff? "What problems do you have as a farmer?"
"Oh, it's a good living -- when the sun shines! Hee hee!"
Wei-Dong smiled a little. Once the NPC started repeating itself, a Turk would be summoned. The farmer seemed to twitch a little.
"Do you have any problems apart from lack of sunshine?"
"Oh, youngster, you don't want to hear an old farmer's complaints. Many and many a day I have toiled in these fields and my hands are tired. Let's speak of more pleasant things, if you please." That was more like it. The dialog was the kind of thing an enthusiastic role-playing Turk would come up with, and that fit the profile of the Turk he was after.
"Is your name Jake Snider?" he typed.
The character didn't move for a second. "I ken not this Jake Snider, youngster. You'd best be on with your chores, now."
"I think you are Jake Snider and I think you know that you're not getting a fair deal out of Coke. You're pulling down more hours than ever, but your pay is way down. Why do you suppose that is? Did you know that Coca-Cola Games just had its best quarter, ever? And that the entire executive group got a 20 percent raise? Did you know that Coke systematically rotates Turks who make too much money out of duty, replacing them with newbies who don't know how to maximize their revenue?"
The farmer started to walk away, rake over his shoulder. Wei-Dong followed.
"Wait! Here's the thing. It doesn't have to be this way! Workers can organize and demand a better deal from their bosses. Workers are organizing. You give it two more months and you'll be out on the street. Isn't your pay and your dignity worth fighting for?
The farmer was headed into his house. Wei-Dong thought for a second that he was talking to the NPC again, that the Turk had logged out. But no, there was a little clumsiness in the farmer's movements, a little hesitation. There was still someone home. "I know you can't talk to me in-game. Here's an email address -- [email protected]. Send me a message and we'll talk in private."
He held his breath. The Turk could have been ratting him out to game management, in which case his toon would be nuked in a matter of minutes and the Webblies would be out one more character and one more prepaid card. But the NPC went into his house and nothing happened. Wei-Dong felt a flutter in his chest, and then another, a few minutes later, when his email pinged.
> Tell me more
It was unsigned, but he knew who it came from.
#
"You should go to Hong Kong," Lu said to Jie, holding her hand tightly and staring into her eyes. "You can do the show from there. It's safer."
Jie turned her head and blew out a stream of air. She squeezed his hand. "I know that you mean the best, Tank, but I won't do it and I want you to stop talking about it. I'm a Webbly, just like you, just like everyone here. Sure, I can broadcast from Hong Kong, technically, but what would I broadcast about? I'm a journalist, Tank. I need to be here to see what's going on, to report on it. I can't do that from HK."
"But it's not safe --"
She cut him off with a chopping gesture. "Of course it's not safe! I haven't been interested in safety since the day I went on the air. You're not safe. My factory girls aren't safe. The Webblies on the picket lines aren't safe. Why should I be safe?"
Lu bit down on the words: because I love you. Secretly, he was relieved. He didn't know what he'd do if Jie was in Hong Kong and he was in Shenzhen. The last of her safe-houses, another flat in a handshake building, was crowded with Webblies, forty boys all studiously ignoring them, but he knew they were listening in. They slept in shifts here, forty at a time, while eighty more went out to work at friendly net-cafes, taking care never to send more than two or three into any one cafe lest they draw attention to themselves. Just the day before, two boys had been followed out of a cafe by a couple of anonymous hard men who methodically kicked the everloving crap out of them, right on the public street, sending one to the hospital.
"You know it's only a matter of time until this place is blown," is what Lu said. "Someone will get careless and be followed home, or one of the neighbors will start to talk about all the boys who trek in and out of the flat at all hours, and then --"
"And then we'll move to another one," she said. "I have been renting and blowing off apartments for longer than you've been killing trolls. So long as the advertising keeps on paying, I'll keep on earning, and if I keep on earning, I can keep on renting."
"How long will the advertisers pay for you to spend three hours every night telling factory girls to fight back against their bosses?"
A smile played over her lips, the secret, confident smile that always melted his heart. "Oh, Tank," she said. "The advertisers don't care what I talk about, so long as the factory girls are listening, and they are listening."
She patted his hands. "Now, I want you to go and find me a Webbly to interview tonight, someone who can tell me how it's all going. Any more protests?"
He shook his head. "Not the noisy kind. Too many arrests." There were over a hundred Webblies in jail, all over south China. "But you heard about Dongguan?"
She shook her head.
"The Webblies there have a new kind of demonstration. Instead of making a lot of noise and shouting slogans, they all walk very slowly around the bus-station, right in the middle of town, eating