In My Tribe: A Brief Review of Cory Doctorow’s “Eastern Standard Tribe”
Book reviews, Reviews No Comments »For better or for worse, the potential social interactions of the average person for the vast majority of human history were incredibly limited. Well up into this century, the average American was buried within a short distance of where they were born, and their opportunities to socialize were restricted to those they could find with the people who lived in their immediate area. While some people migrated to allow themselves to be with people with whom they shared values (an extreme example being the Mormon migration to Utah in the 1800’s), people were, for better or worse, “stuck” with the people they happened to find themselves living near.
Fast-forward to 2008. Thanks to the widespread availability of high-speed internet, more and more human interaction is occuring online. While ten years ago it was feasible to exchange emails and instant messages with people all over the world, it is now possible to share pictures, audio files and videos with people that we would never have an opportunity to encounter in the physical world, and even interact with those people in surrogate forms of reality (Second Life and World of Warcraft immediately come to mind ). We are approaching a point where people are able to participate as members of cultures and subcultures without actually being in the geographic areas where those cultures and subcultures are based. It is clear that this future is almost here, but what really remains to be seen is what form or forms of social organization will emerge as a result.
A unique answer to that question provides the background to Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe. In Doctorow’s vision of the not-so-distant future, a decent-sized portion of humanity has grouped itself into tribes based around (of all things) time-zones. As the novel’s protaganist Art explains it:
Tribes are agendas. Aesthetics. Ethos. Traditions. Ways of getting things done. They’re competitive. They may not all be based on time-zones. There are knitting Tribes and vampire fan-fiction Tribes and Christian rock tribes, but they’ve always existed. Mostly, these tribes are little more than a sub-culture. It takes time-zones to amplify the cultural fissioning of fan-fiction or knitting into a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman’s restaurant, or give him a manufacturing contract, or hire his taxi. Not because of xenophobia, but because of homophilia: I know that my Tribesman’s taxi will conduct its way through traffic in a way that I’m comfortable with, whether I’m in San Francisco, Boston, London or Calcutta. I know that the food will be palatable in a Tribal restaurant, that a book by a Tribalist will be a good read, that a gross of widgets will be manufactured to the exacting standards of my Tribe.
While I won’t go into any great detail about the novel itself (as I do not want to spoil the plot for anyone), I will say that it is an interesting read and that the vision of time-zone-based tribes that put forth by Doctorow really makes the book. And unlike some of his other books, Eastern Standard Tribe is visionary without being patently bizarre and fantastical. It is well-worth reading, especially since the author has generously made the book available for download in a variety of electronic formats (as well as in mp3 audiobook format) for absolutely no cost. While this book is certainly not for everyone, it provides not only food for thought but also a solid introduction to one of the most unique sci-fi writers of the current generation. Given that it costs you nothing to try, I highly recommend that you give it a shot.
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