Fiction 15 Feb 2004 11:10 am
Eastern Standard Tribe
Eastern Standard Tribe
Cory Doctorow
One of the original things about this book is that the author released it online, for free, under a Creative Commons license. What that means is that you can download it, print it, even redistribute it, provided that you do not make commercial use of the material and do not remove the author and license information.
There is, however, no reason to pay more attention to the media more than to the content. The story of the book is very original as well, and makes for a gripping book.
The premise is that, with the world being more connected each day, there is a good chance that the people and the culture that you feel more connected to are not the ones “local” to you. Information flows too easily, and people know more about other parts of the world than they did at any time in the past. Thus, you’re not stuck with the culture, friends, family and neighbours you were born with: you can pick your own! Selecting people with interests, opinions and ways of life that are similar to yours, and picking from anywhere in the world, you can form your own circle of friends, even if it’s made entirely of people whom you’ve never seen.
However, it is very possible that most of them live somewhere else, in another timezone; they are probably clustered geographically, but they may not be that close to you. So, in order to connect with them, you need to follow their time patterns. Soon enough, you’re waking up in the middle of the night to talk to people who are at the beginning of their day; you also go to sleep very early, because that’s when they go to sleep. That’s it: you’re a member of the tribe now.
The book, set in a not-too-distant future, shows a world where tribes are semi-formal groups of people, with plans, agendas, spies and enemies. There’s the Eastern Standard Tribe of the title, but also the PDT, the GMT and so on. Our here, Art, is a ESTer infiltrated in GMT, acting as an agent provocateur; he’s also a brilliant UE (user-experience) engineer, and his ideas are what make the plot of the book click.
It’s a very good “social science fiction” book, and I recommend it as a good, light read.
By the way, the author has also wrote a short article for Wired, with the same title, where he touches on the same idea.
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