fling93 loves fishies

Jennifer Government and NationStates

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Books Inc in Mountain View for a reading by Max Barry from his new novel, Jennifer Government. I haven’t actually read the book, but the premise sounded interesting. Anyway, you can sample Chapter 1 of the book here. And at the reading, Max read the first couple of chapters in the book (um, yes, he did read it aloud for those of you who were wondering if we were telepathic).

Basically, it’s a world where multinational corporations run so much of people’s lives that your last name is the name of the company you work for. For example, one of the main characters is, of course, Jennifer Government, and she does indeed work for the government. Another character is Hack Nike, who — you guessed it — works for next to nothing.

And in Chapter 1 — well if you’re going to read Chapter 1 for yourself, read it now, cuz I’m gonna give away some of the punch line — Hack is assigned to an interesting marketing campaign…

“John here,” the other John said, “pioneered the concept of marketing by refusing to sell any products. It drives the market insane.”

“And now it’s time to cash in. On Friday we’re gonna dump four hundred thousand pairs on the market at two and a half grand each.”

“Which, since they cost us—what was it?”

“Eighty-five.”

“Since they cost us eighty-five cents to manufacture, gives us a gross margin of around one billion dollars.” He looked at Vice-President John. “It’s a brilliant campaign.”

“It’s really just common sense,” John said. “But here’s the thing, Hack: if people realize every mall in the country’s got Mercurys, we’ll lose all that demand we’ve worked so hard to build up. Am I right?”

“Yeah.” Hack hoped he sounded confident. He didn’t really understand marketing.

“So you know what we’re going to do?”

He shook his head.

“We’re going to shoot them,” Vice-President John said. “We’re going to kill anyone who buys a pair.”

Silence. “What?” Hack said.

The other John said, “Well, not everyone, obviously. We figure we only have to plug… what did we decide? Five?”

“Ten,” Vice-President John said. “To be safe.”

“Right. We take out ten customers, make it look like ghetto kids, and we’ve got street cred coming out our asses. I bet we shift our inventory within 24 hours.”

I know it kinda sounds like an anti-corporation leftist rant, but he actually seems more balanced than that. From his About Page:

I don’t believe corporations are particularly good or evil, though; I think it’s a mistake to buy into the idea of corporations as real people. A publicly-listed corporation exists for the sole purpose of making money. It’s not legally permitted to do anything else: that would be a breach of its fiduciary duty to the shareholders. Corporations are wealth-creation machines, and their employees are cogs in that machine, to be jettisoned unless they’re producing. This is not the result of cruel CEOs or greedy executives: it’s just what you get from an entity that has just a single, economic goal. Nobody should be surprised when we discover another corporation putting profits ahead of people’s well-being, because that’s all they’re allowed to do.

It’s a point I heartily agree with. Corporations aren’t people, and shouldn’t be treated as such, because when a corporation “dies”, it’s usually due to inefficiency, and thus is usually good for the economy (and thus, all of us). As for all of the people who lose their jobs, remember that the defunct corporation’s competitors will now gain bigger market share and hire more people. So it makes absolutely no sense to allow corporations to lobby the government at all, since you end up with tons of inefficient companies (like, say, the airlines or the steel industry) being propped up by taxpayer money so they can go on and keep losing more money. Anyway, that’s a topic I’ll return to plenty enough. You can read more about the important distinction between pro-market and pro-business from Sebastian Holsclaw.

Anyway, Max seemed like a very interesting, witty, and articulate fellow, which you can get a bit of flavor of from his writing and his About Page. So the Q&A session afterwards was pretty lively. I myself, being a smartass, asked the question, “Are you ever afraid that the corporations you name in this book are going to come after you and shoot you?”

At which there was much laughter, because I’m such a funny guy. Of course, the answer was no, but he did have an interesting story about the whole lawsuit questions, which of course was the real concern — but not in the U.S., interestingly enough, because we have such a tradition of protecting free speech. The problem he ran into was in Britain, where the publisher sent him the manuscript marked up with all of the places where he could sued over. Eventually, with much consultation with the lawyers, they came up with the brilliant strategy… of waiting to see if anybody sued after the book was released in the U.S. (and people wonder why lawyers make so much money). When nobody did, the British publisher went ahead.

Another interesting tidbit is that the barcode under the eye in the cover is the actual barcode of the hardcover edition of the book, which his publishers thought would be a neat joke. Indeed, he’s been told that it’s actually scannable! I’d instead bought the paperback edition to be autographed, so I didn’t try it out myself (I collect autographs only when the situations present themselves — I also have Peter David and Kim Stanley Robinson, but that’s it as far as authors). There’s also more interesting trivia about the book here. If you’re interested in buying the book, you can get it here.

Max also talked about the free online game he created, NationStates, where you get to create and run your own country the way you want to. It’s not a complicated simulation or anything. The gist of it is that it asks you a few political questions when you create it, and then you receive a controversial issue every day (or two per day, if you so desire) where you need to make a tough decision. The effects of that decision on your country tend to be somewhat exaggerated and usually amusing. For a taste, take a look at my nation, The Free Land of Swimming Fishies, or my wife’s nation, The Queendom of Radical feminists. I presume the main lesson from the game involves the law of unintended consequences.

There’s also a United Nations you can join, where members vote for resolutions, and then (unlike in the real world) the resolutions are binding upon all nations. But I’m perfectly satisfied playing around with just my own nation for now. But if that’s not enough for you, a NationStates community has sprung up which has devised an amazingly intricate system of extending the game to include international trade and military conflicts, essentially using role-playing on the game’s related forums. That part doesn’t really sound like my idea of fun cuz I’m just not that geeky (or at least like to pretend that I’m not), but whatever floats your boat.