Name: Walkaway
ISBN: 9781786693044

Walkaway

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza―known to his friends as Hubert, Etc―was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be―except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society―and walk away. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life―food, clothing, shelter―from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system. It’s still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it’s war – a war that will turn the world upside down. Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences.

What Hacker News says

AnimatsAug 2026

Title is unrelated to content.

If you want "a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools" read "Walkaway", by Cory Doctorow. This is the 3D printer fantasy future, where everything can be made easily with small and easily available high-tech equipment. It sort of works in the story. But in reality, 3D printers aren't that good. Somewhere, you need aluminum smelters, steel mills, and copper mines. Those don't scale down well to desktop size.

What this article is talking about is the classic pastoral dream, along the lines of Thoreau's "Walden". Walden is a bogus hermit life. Thoreau had income from a publisher in New York and well-off friends nearby he could and would visit for dinner. Or perhaps the hippie / Whole Earth Catalog dream. We know that doesn't work all that well.

Arguably, we've achieved pastoral life at scale. It's called suburbia. All the pastoral elements are there, in miniature. For a lot of people, that's good enough. If you scale up your own space beyond that, the maintenance gets out of hand. I have a friend who has ten acres and horses, and she's always painting or hauling hay or dealing with some water or power problem. If you farm, it's even harder.

How does the author propose that this work?

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komali2Jul 2026

Personally I'm thinking the solution will be establishing parallel forms of mutual aid and organization with the goal of making the State and capitalism obsolete and moot. Why would I buy food when my neighbors and I grow and share more than enough? A stretch goal but I don't see any other path. At least trying to reach it makes for lots of fun projects like gardening, homelabbing, setting up federated software, etc.

Further reading: Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, The Anarchist Cookbook by Keith McHenry (and look into Food not Bombs, Food not Lawns etc while you're at it), and various solarpunk copium like "A Half-Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys.

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komali2May 2026

Well, in that case, my "how" has always been along anarchistic lines: establishing parallel forms of resource distribution, establishing habits and communities of mutual aid, and in doing so, delegitimizing and rendering obsolete the State, capitalism, and systems of hierarchy.

Fun techcentric utopian speculation about this: Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" and Ruthanna Emry's "A Half-Built Garden."

Essentially, can we leverage our current post-scarcity society to expropriate everything people need in a sustainable way that cuts capitalism and the State out of the loop? For example, why would people buy food if they can get it for free from farming syndicates or similar? (see: Global Village Construction Kit, Food Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns) Why would people buy medicine if they can print it for free from pirated recipes? (see: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective)

I see the Right to Repair and FOSS movements as a foundation to build upon for this. Anarchism (or at least, anti-capitalism) exists right under everyone's noses, in all the FOSS software installed on their computers. Existent example of people laboring without profit motive and contributing to the commons.

My personal life goal is to figure out how to capture that same energy to tackle the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy.

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komali2Sep 2025

Unfortunately the fight seems to be enormous. It's not just this little slice of computing freedom, it's all the random bullshit that various world governments get up to that I keep seeing in EFF newsletters: big tech enforcing government censorship or ratting you out to your government that's having a play at fascism, or making you verify your identity to access services, or trying to get access to your encrypted communications, but on top of that it's also: weaponizing copyright law to get you in trouble for repairing things you bought, choking out small businesses that might compete with regulatory capture or copyright shenanigans, shadowbanning your content if it doesn't look nice next to coca-cola ads (everyone putting little stars on sui*ide or whatever other nonsense), adding fees on all your payments or completely un-humaning you if you don't pay to play (credit card companies; UK allowing "CC only" shops).

Not to be the strings on the pegboard guy, but, it's all looking to be connected, and it's all looking to be the natural outcome of organizing our societal value systems around profit motive and letting gigantic inhuman profit-seeking algorithms (corporations) run rampant and allowing capital to be transferable to political power.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow seems the most feasible path forward for people that are tired of this sort of society. Modern society seems too prepared to be able to overcome with widespread revolution, and in any case such an overthrow seems too vulnerable to co-opting by bad, authoritarian actors.

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capncleaverJun 2025

If you have not, do read Cory Doctorow's 'The Lost Cause': it features a rebuild like this (no robots tho iirc.) You might like his mid-singularity novel Walkaway, too :)

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komali2Jun 2025

> It’s hard to imagine a socialist order run by device-addicted zombies, increasingly disconnected and semi-literate

I agree that smartphones are harming us. I also agree that capitalism has at best served out its purpose and needs to be replaced with another means of organizing society and distributing material and labor.

However, the Soviet Union banned blue jeans and rock and roll and a very resentful population thus smuggled these things and associated them with counter culture and revolutionary mindedness, basically the opposite of what a socialist would want - we're supposed to be freeing you from the company that wants to wage enslave you and reward you with a drip feed of treats you don't really need, not making you want the treats even more!

Banning doesn't seem to work. I banned myself from reddit and got addicted to twitter, banned myself from Twitter and got myself addicted to Hacker News, then YouTube, then BlueSky, then nextdoor... Clearly there's a root issue I should be targeting instead, similar to how all my exercise is for naught if I can't get my diet in order. I think these kinds of behaviors are similar to the things that plague a capitalist society - we seem to know that smartphones and doom scrolling are bad for us, but we seem unable to stop. Some of us are trying dumb phones, or apps that limit time on certain apps. The best solutions we can come up with exist within the system we're addicted to - we need a company or app developer to save us from ourselves, and by the way the new Light phone is 600$. The incentives will never be aligned - the best (under capitalism) dumb phone manufacturer will be the one that can have the highest sales volume through addicting people to their phones and building in enough obsolescence to require people to get new ones. Or Light phone will just get cannibalized by a trillion dollar company it has no resources to resist at some point.

I think one of the key things leftists (using the global definition, not the Americanized version) need to figure out this century to accomplish our goals is how to help people empower themselves to escape the things they know are bad for them, or enjoy these things to a certain point but not be dragged beyond that point by profit-minded capitalist entities.

I see efforts on this front in the FOSS/fediverse space. Self hosted Instagram that lets you sort new posts by recent and doesn't try to psyop you with boobs blood or rage into staying on the app longer than intended. Alternative clients for YouTube that let you aggregate creators from other platforms and block channels you never want to see (did you know this isn't possible on YouTube?).Music sharing platforms that give the majority of revenue to the artists.

I think these efforts are good and might be the solution. I like Cory Doctorow's anarchist-aligned philosophy in "Walkaway" that basically amounts to "build alternative ways to be for people that make them ask why'd they bother with the capitalist mode at all."

I still think there's some more fundamental psychological angle we need to figure out, a human-centric something that doesn't need any distribution other than word of mouth that can help people resist the psychofauna capitalist entities use to ensnare people. Maybe I just have utopian thinking or maybe I read Snow Crash too many times have have magical thinking about the power of language and ideas. I certainly would love some magical way to finally solve my addictions and maladaptive behaviors.

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