Whuffie

Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities (and most of the luxuries) of life are free for the taking. A person's current Whuffie is instantly viewable to anyone, as everybody has a brain-implant giving them an interface with the Net.

The usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book's world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person's Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person's favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely earn you negative points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-beloved symphony will earn you positive Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

A gross Whuffie score looks the same to everyone viewing it, but a weighted Whuffie score is subjective. This meta-Whuffie takes into account right-handed Whuffie (the kind given by people who have received positive Whuffie from you) and left-handed Whuffie (given by people whom you dislike). Another variety is pity Whuffie, given to those who are down on their luck.

The primary difference between Whuffie and money is that the sum of all gross Whuffie is non-zero. In a cash-based economic system, nobody can gain money without someone else parting with an equal amount of money. In Down and Out's system, a person with a score of 0 is just as capable of giving positive and negative Whuffie as someone with a score of 1000000. The person with the million-point score would be invited to a lot more parties and shows and other exclusive and elite events, while her bottomed-out counterpart would get dirty looks from people on the bus and would probably not be allowed into any reputable clubs or restaurants. But both of their opinions on somebody else would count for the same amount.

Some people have perceived flaws in Doctorow's conception of Whuffie. For example, it might tend to favor popular speech at the expense of public discourse, and it could be frequently uninformative: if a person has a high Whuffie score, is it for guitar playing or auto repair?

A defender of Whuffie might respond to the first argument by saying that the situation described is already the status quo under the money system, and that the concept of weighted Whuffie helps make better decisions on a person-by-person basis, and thus is more flexible than rating someone by their bank account. A possible response to the second argument is that other information besides a raw score would presumably be available on the Net, such as how a person attained each of the individual points that make up their rating.

Increasingly, Whuffie has been used in the phrase Google Whuffie: attempts to increase ones standing at Google, often through illicit means, such as comment, trackback, or referral spam. Google Whuffie is a great thing to have, but it's a terrible thing to try to create.

Doctorow himself might be pre-emptively trying to boost his Whuffie. His first two novels were released under Creative Commons licenses.

Note that Doctorow is not the first to posit such a system. Howard L. Myers wrote of a similar system based on 'Admiration' in his story _All Around the Universe_, written between 1967 and 1971.

See egoboo

Whuffie in the Web

Many community-oriented websites are experimenting with Whuffie-like concepts (Slashdot's karma system, for example, or eBay's feedback ratings). Others look further ahead, at the "next generation" of the web - known as the Semantic Web.

One of the key challenges in developing the Semantic Web is in fact Whuffie, although you won't hear it called by that name.

Built of assertations about facts, the Semantic Web is basically distributed metadata. If one party says "Water is Wet" while another claims "Water isn't Wet", problems are encountered. At this point, Whuffie plays a role: which party is trusted more by others whom I already trust?

One of the key researchers in this area is Jennifer Golbeck, who is performing research on Trust in the Semantic Web (http://trust.mindswap.org/).