Julius’s rising and falling Whuffie is a form of constantly-tallied wealth in the reputation economy of the post-USA, Bitchun Society. In this world, all are online, never die (unless they want to) and are free to work ad-hoc at whatever they please. Their Whuffie determines whether they can get a hotel room, a car, or a meal, even whether people will talk to them.
Sometimes Julius’s Whuffie is high enough, sometimes it isn’t, in his ad-hoc job at Disney World. Either way is entertaining in Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, a so-called postcyberpunk novel bringing the Internet to SciFi. One thing’s for sure, in my recent reintroduction to SF after years of ignoring it, I’ve found that I can’t take seriously any plot without the Web in it. If you spend a lot of time online, you shouldn’t either. It is the future, as much as the present, after all.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 