For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  So he used the rented PC to sign onto his account and started filling in the paperwork to apply for the job. All the while, he was conscious of his rarely-used email account and of the messages from his parents that surely awaited him. The forms were long and boring, but easy enough, even the little essay questions where you had to answer a bunch of hypothetical questions about what you’d do if a player did this or said that. And that email from his parents was lurking, demanding that he download it and read it—

  He flipped to a browser and brought up his email. It had been weeks since he’d last checked it, and it was choked with hundreds of spams, but there, at the top:

  RACHEL GOLDBERG—WHERE ARE YOU???

  Of course his mother was the one to send the email. It was always her on email, sending him little encouraging notes throughout the school day, reminding him of his grandparents’ and cousins’ and father’s birthdays. His father used email when he had to, usually at two in the morning when he couldn’t sleep for worry about work and he needed to bawl out his managers without waking them up on the phone. But if the phone was an option, Dad would take it.

  WHERE ARE YOU???

  The subject line said it all, didn’t it?

  Leonard, this is crazy. If you want to be treated like an adult, start acting like one. Don’t sneak around behind our backs, playing games in the middle of the night. Don’t run off to God-knows-where to sulk.

  We can negotiate this like family, like grownups, but first you’ll have to COME HOME and stop behaving like a SPOILED BRAT. We love you, Leonard, and we’re worried about you, and we want to help you. I know when you’re 17 it’s easy to feel like you have all the answers—

  He stopped reading and blew hot air out his nostrils. He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years. Why not just stick him in a box and lock it until he turned 22?

  He began to hit reply, then realized that he was logged in without going through an anonymizer. His guildies were big into these—they were servers that relayed your traffic, obscuring your identity and the addresses you were trying to avoid revealing. The best ones came from Falun Gong, the weird religious cult that the Chinese government was bent on stamping out. Falun Gong put new relays online every hour or so, staying a hop ahead of the Great Firewall of China, the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-controlling server farm that was supposed to keep 1.8 billion Chinese people from looking at the wrong kind of information.

  No one in the guild had much time for Falun Gong or its quirky beliefs, but everyone agreed that they ran a tight ship when it came to punching holes in the Great Firewall. A quick troll through the ever-rotating index pages for Falun Gong relays found Wei-Dong a machine that would take his traffic. Then he replied to his mom. Let her try to run his backtrail—it would dead-end with a notorious Chinese religious cult. That’d give her something to worry about, all right!

  Mom, I’m fine. I’m acting like an adult (takingcare of myself, making my own decisions). It might have been wrong to lie to you guys about what I was doing with my time, but kidnapping your son to military school is about as non-adult as you can get. I’ll be in touch when I get a chance. I love you too. Don’t worry, I’m safe.

  Was he, really? As safe as his great-grandparents had been, stepping off the ship in New York. As safe as Lu had been, bicycling the cracked road to Shenzhen.

  He’d find a place to stay—he could google “cheap hotel downtown los angeles” as well as the next kid. He had money. He had an SSN. He had a job—two jobs, counting the guild work—and he had plenty of practice missions he’d have to run before he’d start earning. And it was time to get down to it.

  Part II

  Hard work at play

  They came for the workers in the game and in the real world, a coordinated assault that left Big Sister Nor’s organization in tatters.

  On that fateful night, she’d taken up the back room of Headshot, a PC Baang in the Geylang district in Singapore, a neighborhood that throbbed all night long from the roaring sex trade from the legal brothels and the illegal street-hookers. Any time after dark, the Geylang’s streets were choked with people, from adventurous diners eating in the excellent all-night restaurants (almost all of them halal, which always made her smile) to guest workers and Singaporeans on the prowl for illicit thrills, to the girls dashing out on their breaks to do their shopping at the all-night supermarkets.

  The Geylang was as unbuttoned as Singapore got, one of the few places where you could be “out of bounds”—doing something that was illegal, immoral, unmentionable, or bad for social harmony—without attracting too much attention. Headshot strobed all night long with networked poker games, big shoot-em-up tournaments, guestworkers phoning home on the cheap, shouting over the noise-salad of all those games, and, on that night, Big Sister Nor and her clan.

  They called themselves the Webblies, which was an obscure little joke that pleased Big Sister Nor an awful lot. More than a century ago, a group of workers had formed a union called the Industrial Workers of the World, the first union that said that all workers needed to stick up for each other, that every worker was welcome no matter the color of his skin, no matter if the worker was a woman, no matter if the worker did “skilled” or “unskilled” work. They called themselves the Wobblies.

  Information about the Wobblies was just one of the many “out of bounds” subjects that were blocked on the Singaporean internet, and so of course Big Sister Nor had made it her business to find out more about them. The more she read, the more sense this group from out of history made for the world of right now—everything that the IWW had done needed doing today, and what’s more, it would be easier today than it had been.

  Take organizing workers. Back then, you’d have to actually get into the factory or at least stand at its gates to talk to workers about signing a union card and demanding better conditions, higher wages, and shorter hours. Now you could reach those same people online, from anywhere in the world. Once they were members, they could talk to all the other members, using the same tools.

  She’d decided to call her little group the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, the IWWWW, and that was another of those jokes that pleased her an awful lot. And the IWWWW had grown and grown and grown. Gold farmers were easy pickings: working in terrible conditions all over the world, for terrible wages, hated by the gamerunners and the rich players alike. They already understood about working in teams, they’d already formed their own little guilds—and they were better at using the internet than their bosses would ever be.

  Now, a year later, the IWWWW had over 20,000 members signed up in six countries, paying dues and filling up a fat strike fund that had finally been called into use, in Shenzhen, the last place Big Sister Nor had ever expected to see a walkout.

  But they had, they had! The boss, some character named Wing, had declared a lock-in at three of his “factories”—internet cafes that he’d taken over to support his burgeoning army of workers—in order to take advantage of a sploit in Mushroom Kingdom, a Mario-based MMO that had a huge following in Brazil. One of his workers had found a way to triple the gold they took out of one of the dungeons, and Boss Wing wanted to extract every penny he could before Nintendo-Sun caught on to it.

  The next thing she knew, her phone was rattling with urgent messages relayed from her various in-game identities to tell her that the workers had knocked aside the factory management and guards and stormed out, climbing the sides of the buildings or the utility poles and cutting the cafes’ network links. They’d formed up out front and begun to chant impromptu slogans—mostly adapted from their in-game battle-cries. And now they wanted to know what to do.

  “It’s a wildcat strike,” Big Sister Nor said to her lieutenants, The Mighty Krang and Justbob, the former a small Chinese guy with frosted purple tips in his h
air, the latter a Tamil girl in a beautiful, immaculate sari and silk slippers—a girl who had previously run with one of the most notorious girl-gangs in Asia, and spent three years in prison for her trouble. “They’ve walked out in Shenzhen.” She forwarded the tweets and blips and alerts off her phone, then showed them her screen while they waited for the forwards to land on their devices.

  “It’s crazy,” The Mighty Krang said, dancing from foot to foot, excitedly. “It’s crazy, it’s crazy, it’s—”

  “Wonderful,” Justbob said, planting her palms on his shoulders and bringing him back to the earth. “And overdue. I predicted this. I predicted it from the start. As soon as you start collecting dues for a ‘strike fund,’ someone’s going to go on strike. And la-la, here we are, wildcatting the night away.”

  The next step was to head for headquarters, the back room at Headshot, to slam themselves into their chairs and hit the worlds, spreading the word to all 20,000 members about the first-ever strike. Big Sister Nor went to work on a plan:

  1. Spread the word to the rank and file.

  2. Recruit in-world pickets to block the work site so that Boss Wing couldn’t bring in scabs—replacement workers—to get the job done.

  3. Get the strike leaders on the phone and talk about human-rights lawyers, strike pay, sleeping quarters for any workers who relied on the factory for dorm beds.

  4. Get footage and real-time reports from the strikers out to the human rights wires, get the strike leaders on interviews with the press.

  She’d done this before, in real life, on the other side of things, as a wildcat strike leader walking off the line when the bosses at her weaving factory in Taman Makmur announced pay cuts because their big European distributor had cut its orders. It happened every year, but it made her so angry—the workers didn’t get bonuses, sharing in the good fortune when distributors increased their orders, but they were made to share the burden when orders went down. Well, forget it, enough was enough. She’d stood up in the middle of the factory floor and denounced the bosses for the greedy, immoral bastards they were, and when the security moved in to take her, she’d stood proud and strong, ready to be beaten for her insolence.

  Instead, her fellow workers had risen to her defense, the young women around her getting to their feet and surrounding her, cheering her, ululating cries shouting around waggling tongues, cries that bounced off the ceiling and filled the room and her heart, making them all brave, so that the security men moved back, and they’d taken over the factory, blocking the gates, shutting it down, and then someone from the Malaysian Union of Textile Employees had been there to get them to sign cards, and someone had made her picket captain and then—

  And then it had all come crashing down around them, police vans moving in, the police forming a line and ordering them to disperse, to get back to work, to stop this foolishness before someone got hurt, barking the orders through a bullhorn, glaring at them from beneath their riot helmets, banging their truncheons on their shields, spraying them with teargas.

  Their line wavered, disintegrated, retreated. But they reformed in an alley near the factory, amid a gang of staring children, and the women from the MUTE collared the children and sent them running to get milk—cow’s milk, goat’s milk, anything they could find, and the MUTE organizers had rinsed the women’s eyes with the milk, holding their faces still while they coughed and gagged. The fat-soluble CS gas rinsed away, leaving them teary but able to see, and the coughs dispersed, and someone produced a bag of charcoal-filter cycling masks, and someone else had a bag of swimming goggles, and the women put them on and pulled their hijabs over their noses, over the masks, so that they looked like some species of snouted animal, and they reformed their line and marched back, chanting their slogans.

  The police gassed them again, but this time, the picket captains were able to hold the line, to send brave women forward to grab the smoking canisters and throw them back over police lines. For a moment, it looked like the police would charge, but the strikers and the organizers had been feeding a photostream to the internet using mobile phones that tunneled through the national firewall, getting them up on the human rights wires, and so the Ministry of Labour was getting phone calls from the foreign press, who were on the phone to the Ministry of Justice, and the police withdrew.

  The first skirmish was over, and the strikers settled in for a long siege. No one got in or out of the factory without being harangued by hundreds of young women, shoving literature detailing their working conditions and grievances and demands through the windows of their cars and buses. Some replacement workers got in, some picked fights, some turned around and left. A unionized trucker refused to cross their line, and wouldn’t take away the load he’d been charged with picking up, so it just sat there on the docks.

  The days turned into weeks, and they fed their families as best as they could with the strike pay, which came to a third of what they’d earned in the plant, but the factory owners—a subsidiary of a Dutch company—were hurting too. The MUTE organizers explained that the parent company had to release its quarterly statement to its shareholders, who would demand to know why this major factory was sitting idle instead of making money. The organizers offered confident reassurances that when this happened, the workers’ demands would be met, the strike settled, and they could get back to work.

  So they hung in there, keeping their spirits up on the line, and then—

  The factory closed.

  Big Sister Nor found out about it one night as she was playing Theater of War VII, a game she’d played since she was a little girl. One of her guildies was a girl whose brother had passed by the factory on his way home from school, and he’d seen them moving the machines out of the plant, driving away in huge lorries.

  She’d texted everyone she knew, Get to the factory now, but by the time they got there, the factory was dead, empty, the gates chained shut. No one from the union met them. None of them answered her calls.

  And the women she’d called sisters, the women who’d saved her when she’d said enough, they all looked to her and said, What do we do now?

  And she hadn’t known. She’d managed to hold the tears in until she got home, but then they’d flowed, and her parents—who’d doubted her and harangued her every step of the way—scolded her for her foolishness, told her it was her fault that all her friends were jobless.

  She’d lain in bed that night, miserable, and had been woken by the soft chirp of her phone.

  I’m outside. It was Affendi, the MUTE organizer she’d been closest to. Come to the door.

  She’d crept outside on cat’s feet and barely had time to make out Affendi’s outline before she collapsed into Nor’s arms. She had been beaten bloody, her eyes blacked, two of her fingers broken, her lips mashed and one of her teeth missing. She managed a mangled smile and whispered, “It’s all part of the job.”

  The cheap hotel where the four organizers had shared a room was raided just after dinner, the police taking them away. They’d been prepared for this, had lawyers standing by to help them when it happened, but they didn’t get to call lawyers. They didn’t go to the jail house. Instead, they’d been taken to a shantytown behind the main train-station and three policemen had stood guard while a group of private security forces from the plant had taken turns beating them with truncheons and fists and boots, screaming insults at them, calling them whores, tearing at their clothes, beating their breasts and thighs.

  It only stopped when one of the women fell unconscious, bleeding from a head wound, eyelids fluttering. The men had fled then, after taking their money and identity papers, leaving them weeping and hurt. Affendi had managed to hide her spare mobile phone—a tiny thing the size of a matchbook—in the elastic of her underpants, and that had enabled her to call the MUTE headquarters for help. Once the ambulance was on its way, she’d come to get Nor.

  “They’ll probably come for you, too,” she said. “They usually try to make an example of the workers who start trou
ble.”

  “But you told me that they were going to have to give in because of their shareholders—”

  Affendi held up a broken hand. “I thought they would. But they decided to leave. We think they’re probably going to Indonesia. The new laws there make it much harder to organize the workers. That’s how it goes, sometimes.” She shrugged, then winced and sucked air over her teeth. “We thought they’d want to stay put here. The provincial government gave them too much to come here—tax breaks, new roads, free utilities for five years. But there are new Special Economic Zones in Indonesia that have even better deals.” She shrugged again, winced again. “You may be all right here, of course. Maybe they’ll just move on. But I thought you should be given the chance to get somewhere safe with us, if you wanted to.”

  Nor shook her head. “I don’t understand. Somewhere safe?”

  “The union has a safe house across the provincial line. We can take you there tonight. We can help you find work, get set up. You can help us unionize another factory.”

  A light rain fell, pattering off the palms that lined her street and splashing down in wet, fat drops, bringing an earthy smell up from the soil. A fat drop slid off an unseen leaf overhead and spattered on Nor’s neck, reminding her that she’d gone out of the house without her hijab, something she almost never did. It seemed to her an omen, like her life was changing in every single way.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You find out when we get there. I don’t know either. That’s why it’s a safe house—no one knows where it is unless they have to. MUTE organizers have been murdered, you understand.”