Cory Doctorow served as co-editor of Boing Boing for a long time, he’s a major promotor of the Creative Commons licenses, the inventor of the term Enshittification, and these days he’s a prolific author with multiple books coming out every year.

I discovered Cory’s work with Little Brother, a near-future techno-thriller that explores themes of government surveillance, civil liberties, and digital resistance in a world where technology is both a tool of oppression and a means of rebellion. Little Brother came out in 2008, but I only read it in 2017 and I’ve been reading a lot of Cory’s work since then.

The Walkaway book plays out a bit further in the future, in a post-scarcity world. It examines how capitalism is about to collapse, the emergence of “open-source living” counter-culture, and how the two are at odds. The book spans several decades of development of this world, centering on half a dozen or so main characters.

Those characters are (as is often the case in Doctorow’s writing) a bit flat, covering the basic archetypes amongst them, and their development is limited. That said, the technologies covered and how they (can) impact the society is masterful, just as I’ve come to expect from the author. As usual, his writing is at its best when he picks complex technology and explains that (and its uses) in a not-too-complex plot.

I thought Walkaway was a good read, exploring deep technical concepts and post-consumerism in a relatively light way.

I look forward to reading Cory’s latest book Picks and Shovels, which is book 3 (and the origina story) in the more plot-heavy Martin Hench series about a forensic accountant.