Academic cheating and plagiarism: the obesity of the mind

There's a perennial journalistic genre, effective because news readers skew older: why kids today suck.

The latest reason is because, as students, they cheat and plagiarize so much. The New York Times has dealt with this pressing issue a couple of times in the past month.  Here they handled how to keep kids from cheating on tests, and here about  plagiarism via cutting and pasting.

First:  is this new? No, of course it's not new. Schoolwork is hard and challenging, and when it isn't hard and challenging it's boring and repetitive. Many students want to evade its demands a lot of time, and pretty much everyone does at least some of the time.

Also not new is the posture that none of that work is necessary, and is actually hazardous to the sensitive youthful psyche. The argument now is that, since sampling, collaboration, and pastiche are the way we live now, and so schools should reflect that reality.

And the last thing that isn't new is that that posture is one taken by lazy and corrupt fools who are desperate to be liked. Every student knows that "work in groups" really means "rely on smart and motivated students to do most of the work". And a bland defense of "that's the way we do it anymore" is at least worth a try, to see if some clueless instructor actually buys that story.

When people sample, pastiche, reference, and satirize, they don't claim the original works as their own.  They may proclaim a kind of dominance over them, or label them as superceded and irrelevant, or use them as springboards for their own creativity, but that those bits are not the actual creation of the compiler is usually not at issue. Allusion is the highest form of literary connectivity, after all. We can't write without all those other writers.  This, too, is nothing new.

So don't give me "the information doesn't seem to have an author for these kids." When they turn their papers in with the plagiarized material, they do claim an author:  themselves.

People cheat because they are tempted to do so, just as they eat too much because they are tempted to do so. So we don't learn and we get fat. We are weak and fallen creatures. Our job is to work to surmount our fallen state, develop habits that allow us to work honestly and fairly, and to give credit to the hard creative work of others. Hard, certainly. Fraught with the possibility of failure, definitely. Impossible?  I don't think so.

A dumb logo for a useless coin

Why are there still pennies?

The Federal government keeps making them, but clearly doesn't take the poor things at all seriously, because they've taken away the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse, and replaced it with....

something that looks a lot like the logo of a service station or maybe a brand of motor oil from the 1930s:  "Defending your engine from corrosion!" It looks best on a rusty sign swinging in the breeze in the background of a dramatic confrontation between the detective and the killer greasemonkey.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it.  But the Lincoln penny (originally with the wheat ear reverse) went into circulation in 1909.  A penny in 1909 was worth the equivalent of $0.24 today--in other words, it was a quarter (and, to bring the point home, my keyboard doesn't have a cent symbol on it, because who needs it?)  That actually seems a bit steep as your smallest coin.  But now it is a pathetic remnant.

The Lincoln Memorial one is the one I grew up with, which incidentally made the penny the only coin with a presidential portrait on both sides, since you can see a tiny Abe in the Memorial as well as on the obverse:

 Cab drivers in Boston used to point to this as the inspiration for our little-loved City Hall:

Just turn the coin upside down:

 Maybe.

Well, someone thinks Brain Thief is funny

When writers say a reviewer "gets it", they mean the review is positive.

My novel, Brain Thief, is supposed to be a work of snarky humor which is also suspenseful. Needless to say, this is a difficult thing to achieve.  The two mental states are somewhat in conflict. I still think it was worth doing.

Still, the suspense seems to have thrown some reviewers.  Those people have to read too fast.  Fortunately, you don't have to.

This guy understood it, and also quotes one of my favorite rants by Bob, the waiter at Near Earth Orbit, the diner where a lot of the story ends up happening.  It's one of those reviews that really lets you know whether you would enjoy the book.

Or not.

How old is your evil child?

Here, free to a good home, is a possible study for literary sociology: an analysis of writers who wrote "evil child" fiction, and how old their oldest child was when the stories and books were written.  You know the kind: beautiful, normal-seeming child either suddenly turns evil, or is revealed to be evil all along. People are impaled, other children tortured. The world might even be at risk?

My hypothesis? Their oldest child had just reached adolescence. Your nice, sweet, adorable offspring is suddenly demanding, angry, duplicitous, independent, and utterly irritating. For a writer, life isn't just life, it's material. You can channel your despair ("this is the result of evil forces beyond my control") while simultaneously giving a sort of comfort ("it's not your fault").

Most writers are really pretty lazy, so domestic situations are a natural. You don't even have to get up from the kitchen table (except maybe to pick your demon-possessed offspring up from the police station).

Of course, I am much too lazy to back this up with serious statistical research. But if someone is looking for a thesis topic in modern competitive academia and want to do it using a kind of literature you already read for fun, this might be a good one.

Just mention me in your acknowledgements.

My online friendship deficiencies

Nowhere are my personal deficiencies more clearly exposed than in trying to manage our now ubiquitous social media. Most people I know are on Facebook and participate avidly.  They have Twitter feeds.  They up and downvote things, write comments on blogs, post photos on Flickr, and, in general, polymorphously interact with huge numbers of other people.

To me, it all seems a little too much like work. I open up Facebook.  Tiny faces of various people I know, have met, or have confused with someone else appear, with their pert comments on their meals, their flight delays, their opinions on global warming, their daily word count. And below each of those are people responding to those comments, with an affirmation or an additional observation...it makes me tired just thinking about it.

I know I need to do participate, if only for professional reasons ("Hey!  Buy my book!"), but even with that brute goad, I do it only reluctantly and fitfully.  Today, for example, was a beautiful day, so I worked in my garden and read a book outside. I even dozed off in the sun. I'm telling you, because I'm making a point, not, like, actually telling you that I worked in my garden today, because that doesn't actually tell you much of anything--except that I was out of contact with everyone except my immediate family.  I might have answered the phone (landline, if you must know) if you called me, but not even a guarantee of that.  I did have a fight with my wife about money, so perhaps I should skip that immediate family thing too. It doesn't always work out that well.

Many people my age, and significantly older, are participating fully, so I don't even have my advanced years as an excuse.

So what gives? A mandarin disdain for current trends? An eye to the eternal? Smug, above-it-all arrogance?  Early signs of Alzheimer's?

Any and all of those things may be true, but the real reason is laziness.  Modern society is just too demanding. I love you all, really I do. But save your news for your annual Christmas letter.  If you send it a few months late, as is only proper, I might have time to get to to it.  How interesting about Junior's new braces!  Sorry about the job!  My, haven't they grown!

That's really about my speed.

The pleasures of peer review

I just got back from Rio Hondo, a writer's workshop run by Walter Jon Williams and Maureen McHugh, in the mountains above Taos, New Mexico. Rio Hondo is a peer workshop, where a group of writers (12 in this case) get together to read and critique each others' work.

I don't know if other genres have such workshops, but they are very much a part of the culture of science fiction and fantasy, starting, I think, with Milford, started by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm in the 60s. Most writers I know were indoctrinated early, at Clarion, a workshop where students spend some weeks with a succession of instructors.  I never went to Clarion, though I had a friend in college who did. At that time, I had no interest in becoming a writer. That just happened as I got older, and by the time I realized it was a big part of my identity it seemed too late.

Plus, like many of you, I am not a joiner, and like to pretend I am not affected by trends. Nevertheless, given my spotty career, I was pleased to be invited to this one, and had a great time. Many of the attendees like to cook, and Rio Hondo is known for the quality of the food. Plus, it's up in the mountains, with some great hiking trails. I can't sit still for that long, and afternoon hikes kept me balanced.

I have never intimately involved in the science fiction community, so it was great to meet a whole bunch of new people, all whip-smart and a pleasure to be around. Aside from Walter Jon and Maureen, attendees were Daniel Abraham,  Karen Joy Fowler, Ty Franck, James Patrick Kelly, David D. Levine, Kristin Livdahl, Ben Parzybok, Diana Rowland,  and Jennifer Whitson (who writes as Jen Volant).

I'm used to getting up early, but Diana was always up before me and got the best seat, by the window, every morning.  She also makes a mean chicory coffee. 

I'm pleased to carry on a writing career while working full time, but Ben and Maureen do the same while running companies, and having to take meetings and resolve other issues during the course of the workshop.  Diana and Daniel had deadlines, and worked on their books. I just ate, hiked, and talked. David and Jen are both intellectual resources on areas of interest to me (interface design and organizational behavior, respectively), and were willing to share their knowledge. Ty has a intimate grasp of every part of popular culture, and one evening gave a bravura performance characterizing every nationality's favored form and style of horror movie. Walter Jon led our hikes and managed the rest of our affairs.  Karen told stories of workshops and Hollywood.  Kristen educated us about animals and their humans (she runs a pet adoption agency). And Jim Kelly was as charming as a ruthless story doctor can be.

Believe me, it takes some nerve to use up the time of these 11 people on your story.

It was a pleasure to spend time with everyone. Maybe this will get me back into this world a bit more.  I'm sure you will be seeing  the work we read here, and all of it will be worth your time.

Fear and loathing on the bike trail 2010

Food is never just about nutrition, and bicycling isn't just about getting from one place to another.

Well, maybe there are places where it is, but this country is not one of them. Riding a bike always seems to be some kind of statement, while being, yes, a way to get from one place to another, or a fun way to go in a loop through the countryside.

Consider the rhetoric you hear when someone proposes converting a disused railway bed to a bike trail.  Suddenly, the addition of a strip of asphalt a few yards across becomes a vast and unnatural expanse of pavement, and a way for thieves and criminals to penetrate pristine neighborhoods. It  is conceptually different than any of the other roads, parking lots, and driveways that surround it.

You might guess my attitude from my word choice, but, then, I don't own a house abutting on an abandoned rail bed that I've treated as an extension of my yard for years.  I might then be tempted to use the rhetoric of private property to assert rights over property I don't actually own too--good thing for my self-respect I don't.

But only some homeowners consider such things negative. Some people like having paths without traffic on them near their house.  If you count pedestrian and bicyclist deaths by cars as "secondhand driving", cars are way more dangerous to innocent bystanders than cigarettes.  But in this case everyone smokes. Even so, many people find  a small "no driving" area appealing, particularly if they have young children.

Does bike path support or opposition correlate with other political positions nationwide? Or is your position dictated almost entirely by whether or not you bike, or whether or not you abut a railroad right of way? Most politics is not as driven by naked self-interest as most people think, but this is a case where it in fact might be.

But it doesn't take an attack on someone's backyard to bring out the anti-bike in someone. We're all over, we get in people's way all the time, we ride at night without lights, and we act as if the road

The business of life

Next week I'll be off at an all-week writing workshop called Rio Hondo, held at some ski condos up above Taos, New Mexico.  I had a story I thought was pretty much ready, but as so often happens, once I started working on it, I realized that it was nowhere near ready. I rewrote a lot of it.  My productivity would be much higher if I figured out what I was doing sooner.

Ah, well. I get there in the end.

A week of vacation--where I'll be reading and commenting on two stories a day.  I usually don't have the time to spare for this kind of thing, but this year I have a bit of time saved up, and decided to give it a shot. Surprisingly enough, other writers can actually be kind of fun to hang out with.

So that's why I've missed some posts.

The status quo test

Cambridge, where I live, is like most places: propose a change, and you get a lot of meetings where people denounce it.  A new building, a new bike path, a new field house--whatever it is, they're against it. There are some reasons for this. Our town is dense, and each new structure is larger than what it is replacing.

But the rhetoric does get...overheated. When there was discussion of building some structure at Fresh Pond Reservation, someone described Fresh Pond as "Cambridge's Yosemite".  I guess, in the same sense that Joe Sent Me, the bar I like to drink at with my friends, is Cambridge's Mermaid Tavern, and I its little Willie Shakespeare.

This is the thought experiment I perform whenever trying to parse out such changes:  what if what is being proposed were the status quo, and the current status quo what is being proposed?  Would you tear down that apartment building so there could be a parking lot?  Would remove those nicely drained paths from Fresh Pond?  And I love Fresh Pond--the first part of my first novel, Carve the Sky, is set there, in the far future.

And sometimes, sure, you'd go right back, tear that hideous apartment building down and put up a battered old house, throw that piece of "public art" back into cauldron it was poured from.

But you have to shake yourself free from status quo bias. Next time a change affronts you, try this thought experiment to see if it's really the quality of the change, or just that it is change at all.

Just blame PowerPoint

Is PowerPoint the focus of evil in the modern world? Is it the secret cancer that has eaten away at the ability to think clearly, present information to others, and understand the inner meanings of things? Has it made our military weak and obsessed with presentations rather than combat?

A periodic rant against PowerPoint seems to be a mandatory part of the discourse. But there has been a flurry of it, particularly in its military manifestation.  First the New York Times blamed it for our inability to pacify Afghanistan. Then an ex-Marine writing in Armed Forces Journal blamed it for poor military thinking in general.

Yes, we are at the mercy of potentially powerful cognitive tools that are misused by fools for their own feeble and inane purposes. We know this.

But I find the notion that military briefings have been damaged by PowerPoint to be particularly absurd. Somehow I suspect that these hierarchy-obsessed exercises in obfuscation and butt-covering have always been pretty much the same.

I was a civilian engineer working with the military in the early 80s.  Back then we had no PowerPoint.  Instead, we had another miracle of up-to-the-minute technology: vugraphs and overhead projectors. Vugraphs were transparencies held in plastic frames. You typed them up and printed them. Then you projected them up on a screen. They usually consisted of a bunch of bullet points, incomprehensible acronyms and diagrams, and amusing quotations. I never saw a large meeting of military people where this technology was not used. I presume something similar was used while planning the Vietnam War.

It's not that I love PowerPoint or anything. Like most professionals in the modern American workplace, I have to create, edit, or sit through a large number of long decks with too many bullets. But PowerPoint is but one tiny ridge in the vast nail file that abrades my life. I'm not defending it, but I see no reason why it should get singled out for special abuse.

Bike etiquette: the traffic light

Daily, I commute to work on my bicycle. Since I live in Massachusetts, much of the year is too cold and rainy for there to be much bike traffic to contend with. A windy day in the teens means clear bike lanes and easy locking at my destination.

This solitary period is over, and there are many more people pedaling along with me. But though there are a fair number of people on bikes, I'm not sure there is yet a clear bicycling culture, as I presume exists in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

Cultures are defined not by explicit rules, but by the assumptions and practices that happen without even thinking about them.

For example. You ride at a certain pace. You are faster than some, slower than others (actually, I travel exactly at the best Goldilocks pace). You pass a couple of bicyclists who really don't seem to be working that hard, but then stop for a light.  The people you passed come to the light too...and push in ahead of you.  To me, this would be a clear violation of social norms, if there were social norms. Because, of course, you just have to pass them again, and with Cambridge and Boston streets as narrow as they are, this takes a bit of attention to traffic, etc.  They should recognize their slowness and acknowledge that you deserve to be ahead of them.

Of course, if people faster than you, having passed you, stop at a light ahead, and you don't feel a stop is necessary (e.g., you see it as safe to go through the cross street even though a strict interpretation of traffic signals might indicate that you shouldn't), you feel no hesitation in blowing past them, even though they will then catch up to you and have to pass you, etc. They should stop being such sissies and acknowledge your greater daring.

So, at the very least, you should stop well to the right at a light, leaving room for others to go past you, even if it is red, because it's not your job to enforce traffic regulations. Don't sit in the middle of the space, all wide and sassy, as if you've been riding all winter and feel smug about your own toughness and a little irritated at all these wandering newbies getting in your way.... Of course then you have to watch people pump through intersections when it is clearly rude and dangerous, forcing cars to hit their brakes, etc. and know they are reducing the margin of courtesy that you rely on to get home safely. Sometimes slow people who really don't deserve it leave you far behind as a result.

It really shouldn't be that hard to get it right.  After all, I do.

If commuting is so terrible, why do people do it?

In his Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer points out that when they weight house cost and commuting time, people tend to overvalue extra features of the house and underestimate the misery of extra commuting. He cites one estimate that a person with an hour commute (I presume driving) has to earn 40 percent more money than someone who walks to work to be as satisfied with life.

That's because driving is a gigantic waste of time. No wonder people talk on the phone, text, and try to use their computers while driving. And they have plenty of time for it, if they buy a big house in the exurbs that is guaranteed to have nothing much anywhere near it.

The choice for me was obvious.  I live in a small house close in to town rather than a larger house elsewhere, and have bicycled to various jobs over the past decade.  We own one vehicle.  I loathe commuting. But this choice is not obvious for most people.  Maybe they don't like the small space:  believe me, every time my growing children visit a Midwestern relative with a gigantic suburban house, I hear about it.

But commuting isn't only soul-sucking.  It's expensive.  You have to buy another car just for getting to work (think about how weird that really is), and then pay to maintain it.  According to the the H+T Affordability Index some people are touting, my choice of location may even seem reasonably priced.

But when you fiddle the metrics to show that you're doing things the smart way after all, it starts to seem a bit more like a Smugness Index.  You have to beware of that particular metric.

Now, someday I may need to get a job that requires an auto commute.  I've certainly interviewed for them.  What will I do if I have to take one?

Get a travel mug and become best friends with the reporters on NPR, I suspect.  We do what we must.  But my Smugness Index is going to go into the toilet.

But who are you going to shoot at?

As I've mentioned before, I'm pretty much a wimpy blue stater who favors gun rights. Not that I'm likely to own a gun myself, though my teenage son learned to shoot at summer camp and likes to go to the shooting range. Believe me, that's a real Cambridge conversation starter. But the recent Michigan militia arrests have led me to consider how useful guns actually are.

I believe they are a constitutional right, but I have trouble regarding guns as some kind of a means of preserving political freedom.  Say you oppose the recent healthcare reform bill. Great.  I happen to be a wimpy blue stater with a free-market bias, so I might even agree with your position.

Say you even think the whole thing was an incredible abuse of government power, a creeping coup, an example of what elected representatives do when they start to ignore poll numbers--something you used to encourage them to do, by the way.

Anyway, the government is illegitimate, and its actions illegal. Fortunately, you have guns.

OK, great. Who are you going to shoot at? And if you just threaten someone, who do you threaten and what do you want them to do?

Politically motivated people with guns in our society are like drivers caught in traffic. They have immense theoretical power, but that power is chained by circumstance. It doesn't matter how much horsepower you have, or how big your vehicle is.  You're stuck, watching the traffic light creep a little bit closer with every passing minute....

You just hate that damn traffic! That's the problem you want to get rid of. But no matter how many other cars you smash into, it doesn't seem to go away.

So, while in movies, a tattered but proud resistance with comfortable facilities in a remote area holds off an oppressive government whose sexually perverse agents obligingly wear ominous black whipcord uniforms so you can pick them out, here we sit instead, listening to those nattering idiots on drive time radio, wishing we could just shoot someone, anyone.

It's enough to make you turn to fiction.

Can admirable characters get it wrong?

What's the easiest way to make a character seem smart?

Show the character understanding something the reader knows, but that the rest of the people in the narrative don't.  An ancient doctor understands sterilization. A politician in 1913 Great Britain knows that a hugely destructive world war is just around the corner. One character knows another is going to die because of a dream, or a portent, or something his grandmother once said.  The hero knows what is going to happen because of an ancient prophecy, and only fools ignore ancient prophecies.

Note that I said "easiest" way, not "best".  This technique is the opposite of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more about what's happening than the characters do. In science fiction, in fact, the main character often not only knows more than the other characters, he knows more than the reader, and, when you look at it strictly, than the writer. I don't know what the rhetorical term for this type of negative irony is. I just know there is way too much of it.

No one knows the future. That fact is easy to forget, once it's the past. Then even fools know it.

To show a character being intelligent, you have to show that character...thinking. Taking pieces of evidence available to the reader and the other characters, putting them together in a new configuration, and formulating plans based on that.  The actions the character takes may turn out badly--one can only play the odds. There are no guarantees. In fact, showing a character make a plan, have something go wrong because of unanticipated circumstances, and then rework the plan to take those circumstances into account is showing a truly intelligent character.

Now add other intelligent characters trying to achieve their own goals, and you have something like literature.

The Fall of Which Rome?

When people talk about the Fall of the American Empire, they are usually analogizing the state of American now (we've been doing this from about 1950) to the state of the Roman Empire at some point in the 400s. In fact, most people's knowledge of that period tends to be murky at best, but what they mean is the end of a powerful and dominant empire, and its replacement by something else.  This will happen to us in the near future, they say...ignoring how long it actually took the western Empire to collapse, and the Eastern Empire to retrench and restructure.

But I don't see a collapse of that sort as a near-term possibility. The Rome I fear we are actually like is that of the 1st century BCE: the late Republic.  That Rome remained strong on the periphery, and collapsed in the center through vicious infighting through what was once called the Roman Revolution.  The old ramshackle republican system was replaced by a military dictatorship where "the image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence". That collapse doesn't have the clean (if misleading) visuals of barbarians streaming through the gates, and so doesn't get used as journalistic shorthand for what we face.

Interestingly, our fiction is more cognizant of the resemblance than our journalism.  Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, Robert Harris's Cicero novels, Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mysteries, and the TV series Rome have all been popular, and speak of the corruption and downfall that characterized the period.

Was the Roman Revolution inevitable?  Did the Republic have to end?  Was the price paid for the Republic's dissolution a good one?  Many citizens, cut off from public participation in any event, certainly must have thought the price was more than fair, giving them prosperity and personal security.

The growing deadlock of our own representative republic, with its gargantuan yet petty squabbles over self-inflicted wounds like absurd healthcare financing structures, unsustainable entitlement programs, and increasingly untouchable public sector employees, certainly seems bound for some tour de force "solution" that will lead to a state none of us expect, or want.

Reading about the pompous Marius, the sinister Sulla, the smart-then-surprisingly-dumb Pompey won't provide any kind of specific guide to our era, though it's fascinating. But it's important to see how choices can get made by default, how people can put exaggerated faith in institutions that don't maintain themselves without work, and how a loss of freedom can be greeted with relief by a people who don't see themselves as giving anything important up.

The artist and the real day job

At Arisia (a local science fiction convention) I attended a panel on living your creative dream. The people on the panel were musicians, clothing makers, and craftsmen who had found a way to support themselves with their art, sometimes with the help of a money-earning spouse.  Everyone on the panel seemed tremendously happy, and it was inspiring to listen to.

Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with my actual life. I earn very little from my writing. I don't have a freelancer's temperament. And while my spouse does many things, earn enough money to support the family is definitely not one of them.  I admire and respect those who make it on their art, whether it's writing, or sculpture, or music.  It's just that, after many years, I've been forced to admit that I'm not one of them.

So I have a real day job.  I am a marketing director for a financial services firm.  It's a small firm, and I lost my one staff member in a recent budget cut.  I'm good at my job, and try to devote my days to fulfilling its requirements, and selling our company's products. To all appearances, I am a regular middle-class office worker who keeps regular hours and goes to the gym at lunch.

For a long time I was...I wouldn't say resentful of the need for a day job...but certainly not delighted by it. I figured that real artists, if they did have a day job, got one that indicated their denial of its necessity. They worked in a bookstore, or did fill-in design work, or something like that. They lived like graduate students and didn't give in.

I need to feed my children, have health insurance, and lay away money so I'm not impoverished in my declining years.  And I...OK, I might as well admit it...like living well.  I like not worrying about money, I like being able to go to out to dinner with friends, I like being able to afford car repairs, I like taking a vacation now and then.  So, I suspect, do you.

I also want to work on what's intimately important to me--in my case, my writing.  So (most likely, if you are reading this) do you.

Here's what I can tell you: it can be done. You can work a real grownup day job, with responsibilities, fellow employees who rely on your work, a 401(k), standing committees, office politics, and not enough time off.  And you can feel the passionate joy of creation.  I won't pretend it's easy. The occasional bout of despair is inescapable.

I just wanted to let you know you are not alone.

Charter cities

Yesterday, I talked about the place of the city in science fiction, as was discussed on a panel at Boskone.

A topic I did not raise was the Charter City, as proposed by Paul Romer, in Prospect . Nations are often stuck in development hell because of bad institutions. But because of skewed incentives, there is no way to incrementally improve those institutions.  You're stuck in a kind of local minimum, which takes too much energy to jump out of. Romer's proposal is to allow extraterritorial cities with good institutions (profit motive, rule of law, security of property rights, the kinds of things we take for granted and can afford to take lightly) to operate within territorial nations.  Allow free migration between those cities and their mainland, and see what happens.

Now we've really created a plot engine.  Because there is nothing straightforward about this.  Is this neocolonialism under another label?  Violations of national sovereignty "for your own good" are rightly regarded with suspicion.  But I'm a fiction writer, not a development economist. As far as a writer is concerned, a contradiction in a concept is a plot twist, not a bug.

I suppose the city of Todos Santos in Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty is, in a sense, a predecessor to this concept (I actually found the book dull and never finished it--but now that I'm thinking about it I will try again).  But there are any number of voluntary systems that could be set up, and set into competition.  Of course, national governments would play along, until such time as it did not benefit them to do so.

The model is Hong Kong, sitting right on the border of China and showing the benefits of capitalism. For one reason or another, it was never forcibly brought into the Chinese sphere. It did have the advantage of a well-structured state (thought given to occasional paroxisms like the Cultural Revolution) to serve as counterparty, not a failed or warlord state.

One interesting suggestion in the comments to the Romer article was to allow such a voluntary city near New Orleans, in the United States.  I think that makes perfect sense.  All jurisdictions should face the prospect of competition. If we are sponsoring charter cities abroad, we should accept them within our own national boundaries as well.

The issue, of course, is the use of coercion and force, when the territorial government loses that competition. States like to maintain a monopoly on the use of force, and they use it against entities that damage their interest. Stalin forced the collectivization of farming not because he thought it would increase productivity, but in order to assure political control of the countryside. He could extort enough food to feed the potentially volatile cities, and rely on the dispersed peasants to be unable to organize to resist. That there were alternative models that would have made everyone materially better off was not relevant to him.  Successful charter cities would face expropriation, invasion, blockade, and deliberately incented immigration, among other threats.

But wealthy, successfuly charter cities would also face the temptation to intervene in the territorial government to get themselves a better deal, instead of just outcompeting it. A capitalist is someone who competes to earn a profit so that he can afford to buy a way out of competition. The system that prevents businesspeople from being able to buy a pass from competition without also taking away the incentives to competition is a delicately balanced one. Subconscious cultuarl assumptions play a big role in how the balance is maintained.

So here's the story:  The Franchise State.  There are several collections of cities (Chinese state-guided development model, North American free competition model, maybe even a European social democracy model, plus a grab bag of other schemes) sometimes right next to each other.  They recruit not only from their hinterland, but from other areas as well, subverting immigration control.  Someone will need to protect them, and keep them from being taken over by conspiracies, combinations, cartels, and other extra-market organizations, as would be inevitable otherwise.  The wealthy city would be tempted to bribe local strongmen for protection, since maintaining your own military is expensive.  Such a city is like a natural resource, and would encourage rent-seeking and stationary bandits, recapitulating the rise of government in the first place.

Refugees crowd the approaches to the city, which has become fussy about who it lets in. Standards have increased, and those who got aboard first are anxious to maintain their favorable position. One can hypothesize a guild of Disruptors, secret officials specifically trained to break down cartels and mutual backscratching arrangements in favor of naked competition.

This all provides an alternate model to the national territorial state, which we have all be indoctrinated to value. But seeing the charter city folks as pure-of-heart libertarians devoted to pure competition runs up against the inevitable temptations of success.  On the panel I set down a challenge: can anyone right a genuinely complex science fictional city?  I think Romer's Charter City concept provides a good template for one, if not for an actual city existing in some actual location.

The city in science fiction

At Boskone, I was on several panels, a couple of which had topics to which I could actually make a contribution.  One was The City and Science Fiction.  My fellow panelists were the charming S. C. Butler (I had enjoyed listening to him on a panel about Revenge at last Boskone), my buddy James Patrick Kelly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Steven H. Silver, who lives near where I grew up, in the Chicago area.

What was interesting about the discussion was that we were either talking about SF cities from long long ago (like Asimov's Trantor), or more recent fantasy cities (New Crobuzon, Ambergris).  SF cities seem sterile planned Brazilias and Canberras, while fantasy cities manifest history, diversity, and conflict.

But the world is rapidly urbanizing.  We spoke in Boston, a cute, tiny, obsolete town, hedged with development restrictions and out of the main flow of global capital (and a place I love).  What could our experience there tell us about gigantic new Chinese cities springing up seemingly overnight, or giant slum of Kibera, near Nairobi, which has a population of over a million?  Those are crucial urban experiences of the 21st century, and will influence events.

We can't leave thinking and writing about these sorts of things to Bruce Sterling.  He can't do everything, and lately has prefered the Balkans.  I'm not Bruce, but I think it's time I gave it a try.

Reading and signing at Pandemonium, Wednesday at 7

Just a reminder, I will be reading and signing my novel, Brain Thief, at Pandemonium Books and Games, 4 Pleasant St. in Central Square, Cambridge, Wednesday Feb 17, at 7 PM.  It's a small space, so let's fill it up!  I hope to see you there.