Walkaway (2017) is Doctorow's most ambitious novel and the fullest expression of his political vision in fiction form. An adult novel (his first since makers) published by tor-books with simultaneous free digital release under creative-commons-licensing, it imagines a near-future world in which a significant portion of the population has "walked away" from mainstream ("default") society to build parallel communities based on mutual aid, open-source fabrication, and radical hospitality. The novel is simultaneously utopian thought experiment, political thriller, and serious engagement with questions of automation, post-scarcity economics, and the politics of transition.
The Walkaway Premise
The "walkaways" are people who have left mainstream capitalist society — not through revolution but through abandonment. They live in "communist" communes in the sense that they operate on the principle "from each according to ability, to each according to need," using 3D printing, open-source designs, and automated fabrication to meet material needs outside market exchange. The abundant economy of walkaway is not utopia — there are conflicts, deprivations, and social frictions — but it demonstrates that post-scarcity is technically achievable if the political obstacles can be overcome.
The "default" world they have walked away from is run by "zottas" — an ultra-wealthy elite who maintain control through combinations of automation, surveillance, and violence. The conflict of the novel is the default world's attempt to suppress walkaway, not because it is a military threat but because it proves by demonstration that the scarcity the default world depends on for social control is manufactured rather than natural.
Post-Scarcity as Political Argument
The central argument of Walkaway is that scarcity — in a world of abundant resources and powerful fabrication technology — is a political choice maintained by those who benefit from it. This connects to Doctorow's analysis of switching-costs and platform-decay-cycle: the mechanisms that keep people locked into exploitative relationships are not natural features of economic life but constructed chokepoints maintained by power.
The novel's most provocative gesture is treating mutual aid and gift economics not as idealistic departures from human nature but as the rational response to post-scarcity conditions. The walkaways are not depicted as saints; they are people who have made a rational calculation that the default world's extractive economics are no longer necessary. The idealism is in the premise — that post-scarcity is achievable — not in the people.
Mind Uploading and the Politics of Mortality
A significant subplot involves the development of mind-scanning technology — eventually, the ability to upload human consciousness into digital form. The walkaway communities develop this technology collaboratively and open-source it. The zottas want it for themselves, as a form of immortality for the wealthy. This conflict makes explicit the novel's argument that the relevant question about powerful technologies is not whether they exist but who controls them and on what terms.
The mind-uploading subplot connects to Doctorow's broader concern with adversarial-interoperability: the question is whether a technology will be locked down in proprietary silos (immortality for zottas only) or made available on open terms (immortality as a commons). The digital rights battles over DRM and platform lock-in are, in the novel's extended metaphor, battles over who gets to be immortal.
Relationship to Doctorow's Political Development
Walkaway was published as Doctorow was deepening his engagement with antitrust economics and platform power analysis — the period that would eventually produce chokepoint-capitalism-book and the enshittification concept. The novel's analysis of how power maintains manufactured scarcity through chokepoint control maps directly onto the political-economic arguments of that later work.
The novel was widely reviewed as Doctorow's most serious and sustained political fiction. Reviewers noted both its ambition — the scope of the world-building, the seriousness of the political argument — and its occasional didactic weight. The novel is deliberately written for adults who can sustain the argument's complexity; it lacks the thriller momentum of little-brother or pirate-cinema but compensates with depth of vision.
Mutual Aid Networks and Radical Hospitality
The walkaway communities operate on a principle of radical hospitality: anyone who walks away is welcomed, fed, and housed without preconditions. This is not sentimental but structural — a community that can fabricate what it needs has no reason to impose scarcity, and imposing it would only recreate the extractive dynamics of the default world. The hospitality principle is depicted as the core institutional innovation of walkaway, more important than any specific technology.
This connects Walkaway to the squatter communities of pirate-cinema and to Doctorow's engagement with actual mutual aid movements and solidarity networks. The novel can be read as a utopian extrapolation of the mutual aid impulses visible in movements from open source software to community organizing — a thought experiment in what those impulses would look like if taken to their logical conclusion.