Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts

Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts

By Cory Doctorow

Kickstarter? Hacker, please. Getting strangers to combine their finances so you can chase some entrepreneurial fantasy of changing the world by selling peole stuff is an idea that was dead on arrival. If your little kickstarted business is successful enough to compete with the big, dumb titans, you’ll end up being bought out or forced out or sold out, turning you into something indistinguisable from the incumber businesses you set out to destroy. The problem isn’t that the world has the wrong kind of sellers; it’s that it has the wrong kind of buyers. Powerless, diffused, atomized, puny, and insubstantial.

Turny buyers into sellers and they just ed up getting sucked into the logic of fail : it’s unreasonable to squander honest profits on making people happier than they need to be in order to get them to open their wallets. But once you get all the buyers together in a mass with a unified position, the sellers don’t have any choice. Businesses will never spend a penny more than it takes to make a sale, so you have to change how many pennies it takes to complete the sale.

Petard, a tale of just deserts. Photo by Elena

Back when I was fourteen, it took me ten days to hack together my first Fight the Power site. On the last day of the fall term, Ashcroft High announced that catering was being turned over to Atos Catering. Atos had won the contract to run the caf at my middle school in my last year there, and every one of us lost five kilos by graduation. The French are supposed to be good at cooking, but the slop Atos served wasn’t even food. I’m pretty sure that after the first week they just switched to filling the steamer trays with latex replicas of gray, inedible glorp. Seeing as how no one was eating it, there was no reason to cook up a fresh batch every day.

The announcement came at the end of the last Friday before Christmas break, chiming across all our personal drops wih a combined bong that arrived an instant before the bell rang. The collective groan was loud enough to drown out the closing bell. It didn’t stop, either, but grew in volume as we filtered into the hall and out of the building into the icy teeth of Chicago’s first big freeze of the season.

Junior high students aren’t allowed off campus at lunchtime, but high school students – even freshmen – can go where they please so long as they’re back by the third-period bell. That’s where Fight the Power came in.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.