George shook his head slowly. “You’re wrong, John. Not back to where we were. This morning, we had an economy of scarcity. Tonight, we have an economy of abundance. This morning, we had a money economy—it was a money economy, even if credit was important. Tonight, it’s a credit economy, one hundred per cent. This morning, you and the lieutenant were selling standardization. Tonight, it’s diversity.
“The whole framework of our society is flipped upside down.'” He frowned uncertainly.
“And yet, you’re right too, it doesn’t seem make much difference, it is still the same old rat race. I don’t understand it.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL, DURING ALTERATIONS by Ralph Williams (Astounding Science Fiction, 1958)
I bought a box of SF pulps when I was in my late teens from one of my father’s friends, who kept them in the garage. English editions of Astounding Science Fiction, for the most part. Stories written by authors whose names I barely recognised, despite being a science fiction reader from about as soon as I could read.
I paid more than I could afford for them.
I suspect that one story paid for all of them, though.
It’s a thought experiment. I’d forgotten the opening of the story (aliens decide to Mess With Us) but remembered what happened after that.
We’re in a department store. And someone drops off two matter duplicators. They have pans. You put something in pan one, press a button, its exact duplicate appears in pan two.
We spend a day in the department store as they sell everything they have as cheaply as possible, duplicating things with the matter duplicator, making what they can on each sale, and using cheques and credit cards, not cash (you can now perfectly duplicate cash – which obviously is no longer legal tender). Towards the end they stop and take stock of the new world waiting for them and realise that all the rules have changed, but craftsmen and engineers are more necessary than ever.
That companies won’t be manufacturing millions of identical things, but they’ll need to make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slightly different things, that their stores will be showrooms for things, that stockrooms will be history. That there will now be fundamental changes including, in 1950s-style retailing, in a phrase that turned up well after 1958, a long tail.
Being Astounding Science Fiction, the story contains the moral of 95% of Astounding Science Fiction stories, which could perhaps be reduced to: people are smart. We’ll cope.
When my friends who were musicians first started complaining sadly about people stealing their music on Napster, back in the 1990s, I told them about the story of the duplicator machines. (I could not remember the name of the story or the author. It was not until I agreed to write this introduction I asked a friend, via email, and found myself, a google later, re-reading it for the first time in decades.)
It seemed to me that copying music was not stealing. It was something else. It was the duplicator machine story: you were pressing a button and an object appeared in the pan. Which meant. I suspected, that music-as-object (CD, vinyl, cassette tape) was going to lose value, and that other things – mostly things that could not be reproduced, things like live shows and personal contact – would increase in value.
I remembered what Charles Dickens did, a hundred and fifty years before, when copyright laws meant that his copyrights were worth nothing in the US: he was widely read, but he was not making any money from it. So he took the piracy as advertising, and toured the US in theatres, reading from his books. He made money, and he saw America.
So I started doing Evenings With Neil Gaiman as fundraisers for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and learning how to do that; to make an evening interesting for an audience, with just me and a stage and things I’d written, partly because it seemed to me that one day it might not be as easy to make money from selling stories in the traditional way, but that business might still continue more or less as usual, during the alterations, if there were other thing I could do.
And as the nature of music-selling changed utterly and fundamentally, I just stood and watched and nodded. Now the nature of book publishing is changing, and the only people who claim to know what the landscape of publishing will look like a decade from now are fools or deluding themselves. Some people think the sky is falling, and I do not entirely blame them.
I never worried that the world was ending, because as a teen I’d read a thought experiment in an SF pulp published two years before I was born. It stretched my head.
I know that the view is going to be very different in the future, that authors are going to get their money from different places. I am certain that not all authors can be Charles Dickens, and many of us became authors in order to avoid getting up on stages in the first place, and that it’s not a solution for everybody or even for most of us.
Fortunately, Cory Doctorow has written this book. It’s filled with wisdom and with thought experiments and with things that will mess with your mind. Cory once came up with an analogy while we argued that explained the world that we were heading into in terms of mammals versus dandelions to me, and I’ve never seen anything quite the same way since.
Mammals, he said, and I paraphrase here and do not put it as well as Cory did, invest a great deal of time and energy in their young, in the pregnancy, in raising them. Dandelions just let their seeds go to the wind, and do not mourn the seeds that do not make it. Until now, creating intellectual content for payment has been a mammalian idea. Now it’s time for creators to accept that we are becoming dandelions.
The world is not ending. Not if, as Astounding Science Fiction used to suggest, humans are bright enough to think our way out the problems we think ourselves into.
I suspect that the next generation to come along will puzzle over our agonies, much as I puzzled over the death of the Victorian Music Halls as a child, and much as I felt sorry for the performers who had only needed thirteen minutes of material in their whole life, and who did their thirteen minutes in town after town until the day that television came along and killed it all.
In the meanwhile, it’s business as usual, during alterations.
-Neil Gaiman
This article is part of a series of posts occasioned by the publication of Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, with introductions by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer. Kirkus Reviews called it “a guide to the operation of the Internet that not only makes sense, but is also written for general readers.”