"Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza was too old to be at a Communist party. At twenty-seven, he had seven years on the next oldest partier. He felt the demographic void."
An entertaining novel depicting a technocratic future where people drop out of "default" society in order to build
another based on more egalitarian and Eco-principles. It reads like a series of philosophical discussions inter dispersed with violent confrontations between the two societies. It's the ideas here that are the great draw - Doctorow knows his stuff, and his criticism of capitalistic societies are spot on. What I struggle with are his conclusions. I admire his idealism and ability to
extract the optimistic visions out of the software developer mindset, but many of the solutions he proposes feel a bit naïve in their post-scarcity. For example, much of the Walkaway culture is reliant on 3D printing which assumes that there's unlimited machines, raw materials, and internet capacity. Regardless, it's a thought provoking book that paints an attractive picture of an alternative society that answers much of the criticisms and failures of late capitalism.
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