Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗

This is at least two orders of magnitude harder than you think it is. There aren’t enough junk computers in all of Toronto’s landfills to blanket the city in free wireless. The range is nothing but three hundred feet, right? Less if there are trees and buildings, and this city is all trees and buildings.

“Two: don’t bother. The liability here is stunning. The gear you’re building is nice and all, but you’re putting it into people’s hands and you’ve got no idea what they’re going to do with it. They’re going to hack in bigger antennae and signal amplifiers. The radio cops will be on your ass day and night.

“What’s more, they’re going to open it up to the rest of the world and any yahoo who has a need to hide what he’s up to is going to use your network to commit unspeakable acts—you’re going to be every pirate’s best friend and every terrorist’s safest haven.

“Three: don’t bother. This isn’t going to work. You’ve got a cute little routing algorithm that runs with three nodes, and you’ve got a model that may scale up to 300, but by the time you get to 30 thousand, you’re going to be hitting so much latency and dropping so many packets on the floor and incurring so much signaling overhead that it’ll be a gigantic failure.

“You want my advice? Turn this into a piece of enterprise technology: a cheap way of rolling out managed solutions in hotels and office towers and condos—building-wide meshes, not city-wide. Those guys will pay—they pay a hundred bucks per punchdown now for wired networking, so they’ll gladly cough up a thousand bucks a floor for these boxes, and you’ll only need one on every other story. And those people use networks, they’re not joe consumer who doesn’t have the first clue what to do with a network connection.”

Kurt had stiffened up when the rant began, and once he heard the word “consumer,” he began to positively vibrate. Alan gave him a warning nudge with his elbow.

“You’re shitting me, right?” Kurt said.

“You asked me for advice—” Lyman said, mildly.

“You think we’re going to bust our balls to design and deploy all this hardware so that business hotels can save money on cable-pullers? Why the hell would we want to do that?”

“Because it pays pretty well,” Lyman said. He was shaking his head a little, leaning back from the table, and his posse picked up on it, going slightly restless and fidgety, with a room-wide rustle of papers and clicking of pens and laptop latches.

Alan held up his hand. “Lyman, I’m sorry, we’ve been unclear. We’re not doing this as a money-making venture—” Kurt snorted. “It’s about serving the public interest. We want to give our neighbors access to tools and ideas that they wouldn’t have had before. There’s something fundamentally undemocratic about charging money for communications: It means that the more money you have, the more you get to communicate. So we’re trying to fix that, in some small way. We are heartily appreciative of your advice, though—”

Lyman held up a hand. “Sorry, Alan, I don’t mean to interrupt, but there was something I wanted to relate to you two, and I’ve got to go in about five minutes.” Apparently, the meeting was at an end. “And I had made myself a note to tell you two about this when I discovered it last week. Can I have the floor?”

“Of course,” Alan said.

“I took a holiday last week,” Lyman said. “Me and my girlfriend. We went to Switzerland to see the Alps and to visit her sister, who’s doing something for the UN in Geneva. So her sister, she’s into, I don’t know, saving children from vampires in Afghanistan or something, and she has Internet access at the office, and can’t see any reason to drop a connection in at home. So there I was, wandering the streets of Geneva at seven in the morning, trying to find a WiFi connection so I can get my email and find out how many ways I can enlarge my penis this week.

“No problem—outside every hotel and most of the cafés, I can find a signal for a network called Swisscom. I log on to the network and I fire up a browser and I get a screen asking me for my password. Well, I don’t have one, but after poking around, I find out that I can buy a card with a temporary password on it. So I wait until some of the little smoke shops open and start asking them if they sell Swisscom Internet Cards, in my terrible, miserable French, and after chuckling at my accent, they look at me and say, ‘I have no clue what you’re talking about,’ shrug, and go back to work.

“Then I get the idea to go and ask at the hotels. The first one, the guy tells me that they only sell cards to guests, since they’re in short supply. The cards are in short supply! Three hotels later, they allow as how they’ll sell me a 30-minute card. Oh, that’s fine. Thirty whole minutes of connectivity. Whoopee. And how much will that be? Only about a zillion Swiss pesos. Don’t they sell cards of larger denominations? Oh sure, two hours, 24 hours, seven days—and each one costs about double the last, so if you want, you can get a seven day card for about as much as you’d spend on a day’s worth of connectivity in 30-minute increments—about three hundred dollars Canadian for a week, just FYI.

“Well, paying 300 bucks for a week’s Internet is ghastly, but very Swiss, where they charge you if you have more than two bits of cheese at breakfast, and hell, I could afford it. But three hundred bucks for a day’s worth of 30-minute cards? Fuck that. I was going to have to find a seven-day card or bust. So I ask at a couple more hotels and finally find someone who’ll explain to me that Swisscom is the Swiss telco, and that they have a retail storefront a couple blocks away where they’d sell me all the cards I wanted, in whatever denominations I require.

“By this time, it’s nearly nine a.m. and I’m thinking that my girlfriend and her sister are probably up and eating a big old breakfast and wondering where the fuck I am, but I’ve got too much invested in this adventure to give up when I’m so close to finding the treasure. And so I hied myself off to the Swisscom storefront, which is closed, even though the sign says they open at nine and by now it’s nine-oh-five, and so much for Swiss punctuality. But eventually this sneering kid with last year’s faux-hawk comes out and opens the door and then disappears up the stairs at the back of the show room to the second floor, where I follow him. I get up to his counter and say, ‘Pardonnez moi,’ but he holds up a hand and points behind me and says, ‘Numero!’ I make an elaborate shrug, but he just points again and says, ‘Numero!’ I shrug again and he shakes his head like he’s dealing with some kind of unbelievable moron, and then he steps out from behind his counter and stalks over to a little touchscreen. He takes my hand by the wrist and plants my palm on the touchscreen and a little ribbon of paper with zero-zero-one slides out. I take it and he goes back behind his counter and says, ‘Numero un!’

“I can tell this is not going to work out, but I need to go through the motions. I go to the counter and ask for a seven-day card. He opens his cash drawer and paws through a pile of cards, then smiles and shakes his head and says, sorry, all sold out. My girlfriend is probably through her second cup of coffee and reading brochures for nature walks in the Alps at this point, so I say, fine, give me a one-day card. He takes a moment to snicker at my French, then says, so sorry, sold out those, too. Two hours? Nope. Half an hour? Oh, those we got.

“Think about this for a second. I am sitting there with my laptop in hand, at six in the morning, on a Swiss street, connected to Swisscom’s network, a credit card in my other hand, wishing to give them some money in exchange for the use of their network, and instead I have to go chasing up and down every hotel in Geneva for a card, which is not to be found. So I go to the origin of these cards, the Swisscom store, and they’re sold out, too. This is not a T-shirt or a loaf of bread: there’s no inherent scarcity in two-hour or seven-day cards. The cards are just a convenient place to print some numbers, and all you need to do to make more numbers is pull them out of thin air. They’re just numbers. We have as many of them as we could possibly need. There’s no sane, rational universe in which all the ‘two-hour’ numbers sell out, leaving nothing behind but ‘30-minute’ numbers.

“So that’s pretty bad. It’s the kind of story that net-heads tell about Bell-heads all around the world. It’s the kind of thing I’ve made it my business to hunt down and exterminate here wherever I find it. So I just wrote off my email for that week and came home and downloaded a hundred thousand spams about my cock’s insufficient dimensions and went in to work and I told everyone I could find about this, and they all smiled nervously and none of them seemed to find it as weird and ridiculous as me, and then, that Friday, I went into a meeting about our new high-speed WiFi service that we’re piloting in Montreal and the guy in charge of the program hands out these little packages to everyone in the meeting, a slide deck and some of the marketing collateral and—a little prepaid 30-minute access card.

“That’s what we’re delivering. Prepaid cards for Internet access. Complet avec number shortages and business travelers prowling the bagel joints of Rue St Urbain looking for a shopkeeper whose cash drawer has a few seven-day cards kicking around.

“And you come in here, and you ask me, you ask the ruling Bell, what advice do we have for your metro-wide free info-hippie wireless dumpster-diver anarcho-network? Honestly—I don’t have a fucking clue. We don’t have a fucking clue. We’re a telephone company. We don’t know how to give away free communications—we don’t even know how to charge for it.”

“That was refreshingly honest,” Kurt said. “I wanna shake your hand.”

He stood up and Lyman stood up and Lyman’s posse stood up and they converged on the doorway in an orgy of handshaking and grinning. The graybeard handed over the access point, and the East Indian woman ran off to get the other two, and before they knew it, they were out on the street.

“I liked him,” Kurt said.

“I could tell,” Alan said.

“Remember you said something about an advisory board? How about if we ask him to join?”

“That is a tremendous and deeply weird idea, partner. I’ll send out the invite when we get home.”