Makers
What happens to America when two geeks working from a garage invent easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity, and crowd-sourced theme parks? Lawsuits against Disney are only the beginning in this major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America in the age of open source and its hero/hacker culture.
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14recommend
40mentions
32people
2009–2023years
43% recommend53% neutral5% critical
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- Your response comes a bit across as old-man-yells-at-clouds.gif, I'm mildly amused. ;) If you wouldn't object, I'd like to change you to be a bit more open-minded: read Doctorow's sci-fi novel "Makers" which paints a more coherent, broad picture of a world with similar elements that GP mentioned. Book review: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/cory-doctorow-predicts-the-fut...
- 'The Deadline: A novel about project management' by Tom DeMarco
Critical Chain by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim (sequel to the Phoenix Project)
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Daemon & Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez
The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson
Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
The Blue Ant trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) by William Gibson
Omnitopia: Dawn by Diane Duane
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
Lock In by John Scalzi
Rascal Money by Joseph Garber
- Books are wonderful. There's value in online articles and conversations, but you are likely depriving yourself of a few layers of nuance and enjoyment. No time to start like the present.
Step one: get a library card, and then download the app they provide to access books on your tablets and phone. Then power move find the option to look for "Skip the Line" or equivalent to get a list of books other people are waiting months to read in a queue. Thank me later.
Step two: start listening to audiobooks. You'll start at 1x speed and then gradually move up to 2x, depending on the type of book you're listening to and whether the narrator has an accent. I get through a book every two days by listening during my morning prep, when I'm walking or biking. You will find yourself slowing down to finish chapters in no time. Audiobooks are incredible. There are haters; they are wrong.
I recommend switching up between fiction and non-fiction, otherwise I get exhausted. I like business books (Shoedog by Phil Knight, or The Hard Thing About Hard Things) and books about behavioural psychology; Thinking, Fast and Slow is excellent, so is anything by Malcolm Gladwell. Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari are both great. Authors like Dan Ariely and the Steves that wrote Freakonomics.
Lots of audiobooks are pleasurable in a special way because they are read by the author. For example, literally every book by David Sedaris is best enjoyed when read by David Sedaris. This is also true of good biographies; Failure Is An Option by H. Jon Benjamin will get you kicked out of a restaurant because you'll be laughing so hard.
Fiction is a really personal realm, but I prefer sci-fi and some fantasy. I read Cryptonomicon in my early 20s and loved it, but listening to it in my early 40s was a transcendant joy. Don't be scared by the runtime - you won't want it to end. Other authors I happen to enjoy very much include David Mitchell (Thousand Autumns or Bone Clocks FTW), Cory Doctorow (Makers, Walkaway), Blake Crouch (Recursion), Daniel Suarez (Influx, Delta-V, Daemon), Robin Sloan (Sourdough, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore).
Just to wrap up and repeat what has no doubt been said elsewhere in the thread, fiction in particular is the gateway to empathy and imagination. Reading is a muscle; it gets easier and then it gets addictive. There's a reason people keep doing it, unlike yoga. ;)
- One of my favorite early scenes from Makers by Cory Doctorow comes to mind. (For context, Lester had just brought a homeless woman a doggie bag from Denny's, where they were about to get breakfast).
> Lester joined them again. He was laughing. "She is funny," he said. "Kept hefting the sack and saying, 'Christ what those bastards put on a plate, no wonder this country's so goddamned fat!'" Perry laughed, too. Suzanne chuckled nervously and looked away.
> He slid into the booth next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "It's OK. I'm a guy who weighs nearly 400 pounds. I know I'm a big, fat guy. If I was sensitive about it, I couldn't last ten minutes. I'm not proud of being as big as I am, but I'm not ashamed either. I'm OK with it."
> "You wouldn't lose weight if you could?"
> "Sure, why not? But I've concluded it's not an option anymore. I was always a fat kid, and so I never got good at sports, never got that habit. Now I've got this huge deficit when I sit down to exercise, because I'm lugging around all this lard. Can't run more than a few steps. Walking's about it. Couldn't join a pick-up game of baseball or get out on the tennis court. I never learned to cook, either, though I suppose I could. But mostly I eat out, and I try to order sensibly, but just look at the crap they feed us at the places we can get to -- there aren't any health food restaurants in the strip malls. Look at this menu," he said, tapping a pornographic glossy picture of a stack of glistening waffles oozing with some kind of high-fructose lube. "Caramel pancakes with whipped cream, maple syrup and canned strawberries. When I was a kid, we called that candy. These people will sell you an eight dollar, 18 ounce plate of candy with a side of sausage, eggs, biscuits, bacon and a pint of orange juice. Even if you order this stuff and eat a third of it, a quarter of it, that's probably too much, and when you've got a lot of food in front of you, it's pretty hard to know when to stop."
> Suzanne couldn’t help it; she blurted out: "But willpower --"
> "Sure, will-power. Will-power nothing. The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat -- that tells you that this isn't a will-power problem. We didn't get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn't moral, it's epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That's a maladaptive trait through most of human history -- burning unnecessary calories when you've got to chase down an antelope to get more, that's no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you're not doing this on will-power -- you're doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.
> "Would I like to be thinner? Sure. But I'm not gonna let the fact that I'm genetically better suited to famine than feast get to me. Speaking of, let's eat. Tony, c'mere, buddy. I want a plate of candy!" He was smiling, and brave, and at that moment, Suzanne thought that she could get a crush on this guy, this big, smart, talented, funny, lovable guy. Then reality snapped back and she saw him as he was, sexless, lumpy, almost grotesque. The overlay of his, what, his inner beauty on that exterior, it disoriented her. She looked back over her notes.
- I fell in love with Doctorow's works through Pirate Cinema and Makers. Please grab one of his books when you have time; its worth the read.
- "Makers" is fantastic, and has a lot of fun ideas in it. Doctorow nails the tech personalities in his works very well, arguably better than Stephenson.
