Part five of Themepunks, my novel-in-progress, is up on Salon this morning. Themepunks is the story of a tech-boom driven by commodity hardware, three-d printers, and leftover geek talent going begging after the dotcom bust. Part five tells the story of Lester and Perry's next invention, and of Andrea's miserable homecoming to Northern California.
A reminder: I'm reading and signing books in London tonight at the Oxford Street Borders at 6:30PM, along with Pat Cadigan and Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
"Resource contention readily decomposes into a bunch of smaller problems, with distinctive solutions. Take dishes: every dishwasher should be designed with a 'clean' and a 'dirty' compartment — basically, two logical dishwashers. You take clean dishes out of the clean side, use them, and put them into the dirty side. When the dirty side is full, the clean side is empty, so you cycle the dishwasher and the clean side becomes dirty and vice-versa. I had some sketches for designs that would make this happen, but it didn't feel right: making dishwashers is too industrial for us. I either like making big chunks of art or little silver things you can carry in your pocket."
She smiled despite herself. She was drawing a half-million readers a day by doing near-to-nothing besides repeating the mind-blowing conversations around her. It had taken her a month to consider putting ads on the site — lots of feelers from blog "micro-labels" who'd wanted to get her under management and into their banner networks, and she broke down when one of them showed her a little spreadsheet detailing the kind of long green she could expect to bring in from a couple of little banners, with her getting the right to personally approve every advertiser in the network. The first month, she'd made more money than all but the most senior writers on the Merc. The next month, she'd outstripped her own old salary. She supposed it meant that she should make it official and phone in a resignation to Jimmy, but they'd left it pretty ambiguous as to whether she was retiring or taking a leave of absence and she was reluctant to collapse that waveform into the certainty of saying goodbye to her old life.
"So I got to thinking about snitch-tags, radio frequency ID gizmos. Remember those? When we started talking about them a decade ago, all the privacy people went crazy, totally sure that these things would be bad news. The geeks dismissed them as not understanding the technology. Supposedly, an RFID can only be read from a couple inches away — if someone wanted to find out what RFIDs you had on your person, they'd have to wand you, and you'd know about it."
"Yeah, that was bull," Perry said. "I mean, sure you can't read an RFID unless it's been excited with electromagnetic radiation, and sure you can't do that from a hundred yards without frying everything between you and the target. But if you had a subway turnstile with an exciter built into it, you could snipe all the tag numbers from a distant roof with a directional antenna. If those things had caught on, there'd be exciters everywhere and you'd be able to track anyone you wanted — christ, they even put RFIDs in the hundred-dollar bill for a while! Pickpockets could have figured out whose purse was worth snatching from half a mile a way!"
