Friday, November 4, 2011
Cory Doctorow
It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high -- higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf -- _Tim_, I had to remember to call him Tim -- would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.
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Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.
ReplyDeleteThe term has since seen some adoption as a synonym for social capital, including its use in the title of the Tara Hunt book The Whuffie Factor.