Eastern Standard Tribe

Eastern Standard Tribe. Cory Doctorow. Tor Books,2004

Reviews

From a review at http://www.sfsite.com/07b/ea180.htm

"Instantaneous global communication has produced a newly-emerging social structure in which people organise themselves not necessarily by the geographic area in which they live, but by the sub-culture they most personally identify with. Thus Art, who identifies with the culture of the American East Coast, has adjusted his personal work/sleep schedule to allow him to live in sync with people who live in the eastern United States. More and more people around the world are doing the same thing, producing a world where traditional boundaries mean less, and the effects of sleep deprivation are a truly serious problem."

From Amazon.com

"Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is a soothsaying jaunt into the not-so-distant future, where 24/7 communication and chatroom alliances have evolved into tribal networks that secretly work against each other in shadowy online realms. The novel opens with its protagonist, the peevish Art Berry, on the roof of an asylum. He wonders if it's better to be smart or happy. His crucible is a pencil up the nose for a possible "homebrew lobotomy." To explain Art's predicament, Doctorow flashes backward and slowly fills in the blanks. As a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, Art is one of many in the now truly global village who have banded together out of like-minded affinity for a particular time zone and its circadian cycles. Art may have grown up in Toronto but his real homeland is an online grouping that prefers bagels and hot dogs to the fish and chips of their rivals who live on Greenwich Mean Time. As he rises through the ranks of the tribe, he is sent abroad to sabotage the traffic patterns and communication networks in the GMT tribe. Along the way, he comes across a humdinger of an idea that will solve a music piracy problem on the highways of his own beloved timezone, raise his status in the tribe and make him rich. If only he could have trusted his tightly wound girlfriend and fellow tribal saboteur, he probably wouldn't be on the booby hatch roof with that pencil up his nose."