thing collapses in a heap of broken links and fractured ideals.
Indeed, the inspiration for OpenCola was to see if the ideas from his unpublished novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, would work. In the novel, death, disease and poverty have been eliminated, and warring groups of Disney freaks fight for the right to maintain the rides at the original theme parks. The book is a result of Doctorow's quick education in project management, and the concept of whuffie points as the currency of an all-important reputation economy plays prominently in the novel. Doctorow admits there's significant overlap between OpenCola and his fiction. "One of the things we say in our investor presentations is that we are going to put a label on OpenCola that reads, 'Warning: Portions of this software conceived by a science-fiction writer. May not work as advertised.'"
Mark Frauenfelder is a writer and illustrator in Los Angeles.
