Doctorow — Walkaway
Cory Doctorow, Walkaway (2017). Novel.
The Story
In a near-future of extreme inequality, people begin “walking away” — literally leaving cities to build commons-based communities in abandoned exurban landscapes. They’re not revolutionaries with a program. They’re people who decided the default system has nothing left to offer them and started building alternatives using open-source technology, fabrication tools, and gift economies.
The novel follows several characters across walkaway communities and their confrontations with “default” society — the capitalist world they left behind. Default alternates between ignoring the walkaways and trying to destroy them, because the walkaway communities represent something more threatening than opposition: they represent irrelevance. If people can meet their needs outside the market, the market loses its leverage.
The Economics Problem as Decommodification
Walkaway communities solve the economics problem by removing housing, food, and fabrication from market logic entirely. Everything is open-source. Building plans are shared freely. Fabrication equipment is communal. Food is grown or produced collectively. No one pays rent. No one has a mortgage. No one profits from providing shelter.
This is more radical than the CLT-LEHC model — Wellspring still operates within market structures, uses conventional financing, and exists inside the legal and tax framework of the United States. But the direction is the same: sever the link between housing and speculative value, reduce the cost of living through shared infrastructure, remove the extraction mechanism.
Doctorow’s walkaways demonstrate what happens when the extraction mechanism is removed completely: the cost of a dignified life drops dramatically, because most of what makes life expensive is profit extracted at each step, not the actual cost of materials and labor. The CLT-LEHC model achieves a partial version of this — carrying costs pegged to actual costs (mortgage + maintenance + reserves), not to market value.
The Library Economy in Practice
Walkaway communities run on exactly the library economy principle, and Doctorow is unusually detailed about the practical mechanics:
Shared fabrication. Communities have workshops, 3D printers, CNC machines, and communal kitchens. Anyone can use them. The equipment is maintained collectively. Designs are open-source — if someone builds a better chair, the design is shared and anyone can make one.
Contribution without accounting. There’s no ledger. No one tracks who contributed what. The principle is radical abundance: if the shared resources are sufficient, free-riding is a non-problem because there’s enough for everyone. People contribute because the work is visible, meaningful, and socially rewarded — not because they’re tracked.
Maintenance as culture. The communities that work are the ones where maintaining shared infrastructure is a cultural norm — where people clean the kitchen after using it, fix the thing they broke, and teach others to use the equipment. The communities that fail are the ones where maintenance is nobody’s job.
This connects to the Wellspring design challenge: the library economy needs a maintenance culture, not just a maintenance budget. The shared tool library works if residents feel ownership of it — if maintaining it is an act of community membership, not a chore imposed from above.
The Demutualization Threat as Narrative
The central conflict of the novel is that default society tries to recapture, co-opt, or destroy the walkaway communities. The mechanisms are familiar:
Legal re-enclosure. Intellectual property law is deployed to criminalize open-source designs. Default claims ownership of the ideas walkaways are using freely.
Military suppression. Private military contractors are sent to dismantle walkaway settlements. The physical commons are destroyed.
Cultural absorption. Default offers walkaways comfortable lives if they’ll come back and play by the rules. Some accept. The absorption is as threatening as the suppression — it drains the communities of their most capable people.
This is the Demutualization threat dramatized. The CLT’s legal protections — ground lease, resale formula, charter provisions — are the institutional equivalent of what the walkaways have to defend through improvisation and resistance. The advantage of the CLT model is that the protections are encoded in law before the threat materializes, not improvised after.
Building Community from Strangers
Walkaway communities are formed by people who don’t know each other — arriving with different backgrounds, skills, motivations, and levels of commitment. Some are idealists. Some are refugees. Some are curious. Some are broken. The community has to be built from scratch, without pre-existing social bonds.
Doctorow’s treatment of how trust emerges among strangers is worth reading against the Intentional Community Failure Modes catalog. His findings (rendered as fiction, not social science):
- Shared work builds trust faster than shared values. People who maintain a kitchen together trust each other before they agree about politics.
- Transparency substitutes for accountability. When everything is visible — who’s contributing, who’s using what, how decisions are made — formal accountability mechanisms become less necessary.
- Exit is the safety valve. People can leave. No one is trapped. The ability to walk away from walkaway is what keeps the community voluntary — and voluntariness is what keeps it healthy.
The Technology Question
Doctorow is a technology optimist. The walkaway communities have access to fabrication technology — advanced 3D printers, automated construction, materials science — that doesn’t quite exist yet. The novel sometimes reads as though sufficiently advanced 3D printers solve the coordination problems that Ostrom’s institutional design is actually needed for.
The corrective: technology enables but doesn’t replace governance. A shared 3D printer is still a commons. It still needs rules about who uses it when, who maintains it, who replaces the filament. The Ostrom principles apply whether the shared resource is a medieval irrigation system or a 21st-century fabrication lab.
Wellspring should take from Doctorow the principle (shared infrastructure reduces costs and builds community) without taking the assumption (technology makes governance unnecessary).
The Interstitial Challenge
The novel’s political economy is more binary than Wellspring’s situation: you’re either in default or walkaway. The project is interstitial — working inside existing structures while building alternatives. The messier, more compromised position of “walking away while still paying property taxes” is the reality Doctorow’s novel doesn’t have to navigate.
This is the tension Wright identifies in Envisioning Real Utopias: interstitial strategies succeed when they fill a genuine need and achieve economic viability, but they’re always at risk of being absorbed by the system they’re embedded in. The CLT’s structural protections are the answer to that risk — but the answer is institutional, not heroic. It’s less dramatic than Doctorow’s walkaways defending their communities against armed assault. It’s also more durable.