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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the Cory Doctorow debut that announced a particular kind of near-future SF was going to be a feature of the 2000s. The premise is a post-scarcity society where money has been replaced by Whuffie, a reputation economy that tracks how much other people respect you, and where actual death has been mostly engineered out. The plot revolves around the Liberty Square Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World, which is being redesigned in a way the narrator, a longtime cast-member ad-hocrat, considers an insult.
What Doctorow is doing here is taking the Whuffie concept fully seriously as a social structure, not just as a clever idea. The book is genuinely interested in what people would do, day to day, in a society where money has been replaced by something else, where physical scarcity has been engineered around, and where every disagreement immediately becomes a referendum on reputation. The Disney-fan texture is the chassis. The reputation economy is the engine.
The book is short, dense, and ages surprisingly well. Doctorow released it under a Creative Commons license, which was itself a political move that the book's premises support.
Five stars. An essential piece of early-2000s SF. Recommended to readers who like their futurism with a sociological edge.
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