Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

by Cory Doctorow

about displacing all the other kindsof expression," Alan said. "This is in addition to all the ways you'vehad to talk --"

  "Right, like this thing," the kid said. He reached into his pocket andtook out a small phone. "This was free -- not twenty dollars, not eventwo thousand dollars -- just free, from the phone company, in exchangefor a one-year contract. Everyone's got one of these. I went trekking inIndia, you see people using these out in the bush. And you know whatthey use them for? Speech! Not speech-in-quotes meaning some kind ofabstract expression, but actual *talking.*"

  The kid leaned forward and planted his hands on his knees and suddenlyhe was a lot harder to dismiss as some subculture-addled intern. He hadthat fiery intensity that Alan recognized from himself, from Kurt, fromthe people who believe.

  Alan thought he was getting an inkling into why this particular internhad responded to his press release: Not because he was too ignorant tosee through the bullshit, but just the opposite.

  "But that's communication through the *phone company*," Kurt said,wonderment in his voice that his fellow bohemian couldn't see howsucktastic that proposition was. "How is that free speech?"

  The kid rolled his eyes. "Come off it. You old people, you turn up yournoses whenever someone ten years younger than you points out that cellphones are actually a pretty good way for people to communicate witheach other -- even subversively. I wrote a term paper last year on thisstuff: In Kenya, electoral scrutineers follow the ballot boxes from thepolling place to the counting house and use their cell phones to soundthe alarm when someone tries to screw with them. In the Philippines,twenty thousand people were mobilized in 15 minutes in front of thepresidential palace when they tried to shut down the broadcast of thecorruption hearings.

  "And yet every time someone from my generation talks about how importantphones are to democracy, there's always some old pecksniff primlytelling us that our phones don't give us *real* democracy. It's so muchbullshit."

  He fell silent and they all stared at each other for a moment. Kurt'smouth hung open.

  "I'm not old," he said finally.

  "You're older than me," the kid said. His tone softened. "Look, I'm nottrying to be cruel here, but you're generation-blind. The Internet isgreat, but it's not the last great thing we'll ever invent. My pops wasa mainframe guy, he thought PCs were toys. You're a PC guy, so you thinkmy phone is a toy."

  Alan looked off into the corner of the back room of Kurt's shop for awhile, trying to marshal his thoughts. Back there, among the shelves ofmilk crates stuffed with T-shirts and cruft, he had a thought.

  "Okay," he said. "Fair enough. It may be that today, in the field,there's a lot of free expression being enabled with phones. But at theend of the day" -- he thought of Lyman -- "this is the *phone company*we're talking about. Big lumbering dinosaur that is thrashing in the tarpit. The spazz dinosaur that's so embarrassed all the other dinosaursthat none of them want to rescue it.

  "Back in the sixties, these guys sued to keep it illegal to pluganything other than their rental phones into their network. But more tothe point, you get a different kind of freedom with an Internet networkthan a phone-company network -- even if the Internet network lives ontop of the phone-company network.

  "If you invent a new way of using the phone network -- say, a cheaperway of making long-distance calls using voice-over-IP, you can't rollthat out on the phone network without the permission of the carrier. Youhave to go to him and say, 'Hey, I've invented a way to kill your mostprofitable line of business, can you install it at your switchingstations so that we can all talk long distance for free?'

  "But on the net, anyone can invent any application that he can get hisbuddies to use. No central authority had to give permission for the Webto exist: A physicist just hacked it together one day, distributed thesoftware to his colleagues, and in just a very short while, people allover the world had the Web.

  "So the net can live on top of the phone network and it can runvoice-calling as an application, but it's not tied to the phonenetwork. It doesn't care whose wires or wireless it lives on topof. It's got all these virtues that are key to free expression. That'swhy we care about this."

  The kid nodded as he talked, impatiently, signaling in body languagethat even Alan could read that he'd heard this already.

  "Yes, in this abstract sense, there are a bunch of things to like aboutyour Internet over there. But I'm talking about practical, nonabstract,nontheoretical stuff over here. The real world. I can get a phone for*free*. I can talk to *everyone* with it. I can say *anything* I want. Ican use it *anywhere*. Sure, the phone company is a giant conspiracy byThe Man to keep us down. But can you really tell me with a straight facethat because I can't invent the Web for my phone or make free longdistance calls I'm being censored?"

  "Of course not," Kurt said. Alan put a steadying hand on hisshoulder. "Fine, it's not an either-or thing. You can have your phones,I can have my Internet, and we'll both do our thing. It's not like theabsence of the Web for phones or high long-distance charges are *good*for free expression, Christ. We're trying to unbreak the net so that noone can own it or control it. We're trying to put it on every corner ofthe city, for free, anonymously, for anyone to use. We're doing it withrecycled garbage, and we're paying homeless teenagers enough money toget off the street as part of the program. What's not to fucking like?"

  The kid scribbled hard on his pad. "*Now* you're giving me some quotes Ican use. You guys need to work on your pitch. 'What's not to fuckinglike?' That's good."

  #

  He and Link saw each other later that day, and Link still had his twolittle girls with him, sitting on the patio at the Greek's, drinkingbeers, and laughing at his jokes.

  "Hey, you're the guy with the books," one of them said when he passedby.

  He stopped and nodded. "That's me, all right," he said.

  Link picked at the label of his beer bottle and added to the dandruff ofshredded paper in the ashtray before him. "Hey, Abe," he said.

  "Hey, Link," he said. He looked down at the little girls' bags. "You'vemade some finds," he said. "Congratulations."

  They were wearing different clothes now -- double-knit neon pop-artdresses and horn-rim shades and white legs flashing beneath thetabletop. They kicked their toes and smiled and drank their beers, whichseemed comically large in their hands.

  Casually, he looked to see who was minding the counter at the Greek'sand saw that it was the idiot son, who wasn't smart enough to know thatserving liquor to minors was asking for bad trouble.

  "Where's Krishna?" he asked.

  One girl compressed her heart-shaped lips into a thin line.

  And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it's yourfault that something has turned to shit, you have to washshit. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that,step one, she had to get him to stop screwing up.

  "He took off," the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away duringthe day and her acne wasn't so bad that she'd needed it. "He took offrunning, like he'd forgotten something important. Looked scared."

  "Why don't you go get more beers," Link said angrily, cutting her off,and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna's Renfield, arecursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dollsin reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump thatremained of Darrel.

  And that meant that she had to take him out of the company ofhis bad companions, which she would accomplish through thesimple expedient of scaring the everlasting fuck out of them.

  She sulked off and the remaining girl looked down at her swinging toes.

  "Where'd he go, Link?" Alan said. If Krishna was in a hurry to gosomewhere or see something, he had an idea of what it was about.

  Link's expression closed up like a door slamming shut. "I don't know,"he said. "How should I know?"

  The other girl scuffed her toes and took a sip of her beer.

  Their gazes all flicked down to the bottle.

  "The Greek would bar you for life if
he knew you were bringing underageddrinkers into here," Alan said.

  "Plenty of other bars in the Market," Link said, shrugging his newlybroad shoulders elaborately.

  Trey was the kid who'd known her brother since third grade andwhose puberty-induced brain damage had turned him into an utterturd. She once caught him going through the bathroom hamper,fetishizing her panties, and she'd shouted at him and he'd justducked and grinned a little-boy grin that she had been incapableof wiping off his face, no matter how she raged. She would