Part 28 (2/2)

Perry found himself giggling. ”You're the best, man,” he said to Lester. ”It's good that there's at least one sane person around here.”

”Don't flatter yourself, Perry.”

”I was talking about *you*, Lester.”

”Uh-oh,” Lester said. He scooped a double handful of brown M&Ms up from the output hopper and munched them. ”It's not a good sign when you start accusing me of being the grownup in our partners.h.i.+p. Have some M&Ms and tell me about it.”

Perry did, unburdening himself to his old pal, his roommate of ten years, the guy he'd gone to war with and started businesses with and collaborated with.

”You're restless, Perry,” Lester said. He put nine golf-b.a.l.l.s, a ping-pong ball, and another nine golf b.a.l.l.s in the machine's input hopper. Two and a third seconds later, eighty one M&Ms dropped into the output hopper. ”You're just *bored*. You're a maker, and you're running things instead of making things.”

”No one cares about made things anymore, Les.”

”That's sort of true,” Lester said. ”I'll allow you that. But it's only sort of true. What you're missing is how much people care about organizations still. That was the really important thing about the New Work: the way we could all come together to execute, without a lot of top-down management. The bangbanger arms dealers, the bio-terrorists and fatkins suppliers -- they all run on social inst.i.tutions that we perfected back then. You've got something like that here with your market, a fluid social inst.i.tution that you couldn't have had ten or fifteen years ago.”

”If you say so,” Perry said. The M&Ms were giving him heartburn. Cheap chocolate didn't really agree with his stomach.

”I do. And so the answer is staring you right in the face: go invent some social inst.i.tutions. You've got one creeping up here in the ride. There are little blogospheres of fans who coordinate what they're going to bring down and where they're going to put it. Build on that.”

”No one's going to haul a.s.s across the country to ride this ride, Les. Get real.”

”Course not.” Lester beamed at him. ”I've got one word for you, man: franchise!”

”Franchise?”

”Build dupes of this thing. Print out anything that's a one of a kind, run them as franchises.”

”Won't work,” Perry said. ”Like you said, this thing works because of the hardcore of volunteer curators who add their own stuff to it -- it's always different. Those franchises would all be static, or would diverge... It'd just be boring compared to this.”

”Why should they diverge? Why should they be static? You could network them, dude! What happens in one, happens in all. The curators wouldn't just be updating one exhibit, but all of them. Thousands of them. Millions of them. A gigantic physical wiki. Oh, it'd be so very very very cool, Perry. A cool *social inst.i.tution.*”

”Why don't you do it?”

”I'm gonna. But I need someone to run the project. Someone who's good at getting people all pointed in the same direction. You, pal. You're my hero on this stuff.”

”You're such a flatterer.”

”You love it, baby,” Lester said, and fluttered his long eyelashes. ”Like the lady said to the stamp collector, philately will get you everywhere.”

”Oy,” Perry said. ”You're fired.”

”You can't fire me, I'm a volunteer!”

Lester dropped six golf-b.a.l.l.s and a heavy medicine ball down the hopper. The machine ground and chattered, then started dropping hundred-loads of M&Ms -- 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700 -- then some change.

”What operation was that?” Perry said. He'd never seen Lester pull out the medicine ball.

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