The girl raised an expressive eyebrow at her and smirked. “You think you’re the only one around here who gets this stuff? We’re noobs, not idiots. I’ve been throwing Communist parties for years. I’ve liberated enough matériel to furnish your whole enterprise. Yeah, I took too much shit with me when I left, but that was only because I didn’t know what I’d be getting into. If it’s like this”—she waved an arm around the stables—“who needs it?”
“You’re right, I assumed you were bourgie kids who needed to be led to the greater glory of walkaway philosophy. It’s easy to feel more less-is-more than thou. I’m sorry about your stuff, too. Even though I think you were carrying more shit than you needed, getting jacked feels terrible. It makes you feel unsafe; no one is at their best when they feel that way.” One piece of walkaway-fu was to apologize quickly and thoroughly when you fucked up. It was a hard lesson for Limpopo to learn, but she made the most of it.
The boys were surreptitiously taking items out of their baskets, and she noticed the girl noticing, and they shared a knowing smile and pretended not to notice. Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes.
“Not every place is like this,” Limpopo said. “The B&B is the biggest walkaway place I’ve seen, maybe the biggest in this part of Canada. It’s got a lot of material wealth. Most walkaway settlements have fablab. No one will ever tell you you’re not allowed to use it, but if all you do is drift around, draining hydrogen cells and feedstock, everyone will think you’re a dick.”
The guys rearranged their baskets. “I’m not supposed to trade anything for anything else, it’s all a gift, like the Communist parties. That part I understand. But when we do our parties, we don’t care how much you take because at any second the cops are going to chase us out and destroy whatever’s left over, so you can have whatever you can carry. Out here, you want people to magically not take too much but also not earn the right to take more by working harder and also to work because it’s a gift but not because they expect anything in return?”
They stared at her. She shrugged. “That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt—it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you’re doing right.” She shrugged. “If it was easy, everyone would do it. It’s a project, not an accomplishment.”
Etcetera stretched and his back cracked. His robe fell open, which was revealing in a way that his total nudity hadn’t been. He tucked everything back in. “It’s hard to get your head around because it’s unfamiliar. Back out there in ‘default reality’”—again, she could hear the quote marks—“you’re supposed to be doing things because they’re right for you. ‘What do you expect me to do, pass on this dirty salary money because there was something nasty in its history? I don’t see you lining up to pay my bills.’ Generosity is a folktale about what happens when people look out for themselves. We’re supposed to ‘just know’ that selfishness is natural.
“Out here, we’re supposed to treat generosity as the ground state. The weird, gross, selfish feeling is a warning we’re being dicks. We’re not supposed to forgive people for being selfish. We’re not supposed to expect other people to forgive us for being selfish. It’s not generous to do nice things in the hopes of getting stuff back. It’s hard not to fall into that pattern, because bribery works.
“My folks had this problem all the time when I was growing up. Dad would come up with all these long explanations for why I could only do something I wanted if I did something boring first, that didn’t make it into a bribe. He’d say, ‘You have to eat a balanced diet so you’ll be healthy. Eating dessert without eating vegetables and protein isn’t balanced. So you can’t have dessert unless you clear your plate.’ Mom rolled her eyes, and when he was out of earshot, she’d whisper, ‘Finish everything on your plate and I’ll give you a slice of cake.’ Out-and-out bribery.”
The sarcastic one chuckled. “I’ve met your folks. They were both bribing you, but your Dad was trying to make himself feel better.”
Etcetera shook his head. “It’s more complicated. Dad wanted me to want to do the right thing for the right reason. Mom only wanted me to do the right thing. I get Dad. But it’s easier to get people to do stuff if you don’t care why they’re doing it.”
Limpopo surveyed the boys’ baskets, trimmed to more modest proportions. She nodded. “This discussion usually gets to parenting and friendship. Those are the places where everyone agrees that being generous is right. Your chore list is to ensure that everything gets done. The kid who spends her time watching her sisters to make sure they have the same number of chores is either getting screwed, or is screwed up. It sounds corny, but being a walkaway is ultimately about treating everyone as family.”
The girl shuddered. Limpopo thought she had her number. “Okay, treating everyone like you’d want your family to treat you.”
“Christianity, basically,” the sarcastic one said, making a cross of his body, drooping his head to one side, and rolling his eyes up.
“Christianity if it had been conceived in material abundance,” Limpopo said. “You’re not the first to make the comparison. Plenty of these places have grad students—poli-sci, soc, anthro—trying to figure out if we’re ‘post-scarcity Fabian socialists’ or ‘secular Christian communists,’ or what. Most are funded by private-sector spooks that want to know if we’re going to burn down their offices, and whether they can sell us anything. A third of them go walkaway. Meanwhile, we’re ready to do measurements and styles, right?”
They did, letting the stables’ cams image them and then sanity-checking the geometry the algorithms inferred. The system rendered them in new clothes and let them play with colors and prints. You got this in default, consumerist clicktrances of perpetual shopping, and they clearly knew it. They whipped through options quickly and hit commit and marveled at the timers.
“Six hours?” the girl said. “Seriously?”
“You can do it in less,” Limpopo said, “but this rate allows us to use feedstock with more impurities by adding error-correction passes. Look at this—” She held out her sleeve and showed them a place where a seam had been resealed during fab. “No one said abundance was easy.”
[iv]