Whuffie

Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and his short story "Truncat". This 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 term has since seen some adoption as a synonym for social capital, including its use in the title of the Tara Hunt book The Whuffie Factor.

In 2016, Doctorow stated that Whuffie "would make a terrible currency."

In the novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, industrial-era economic constraints and scarcity-management regimes have been made obsolete by technology: Whuffie has replaced money, providing an esteem- and admiration-rewarding motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person's Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation and is gained (or lost) according to a person's favorable (or unfavorable) actions. Public opinion determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable. The Whuffie of one who rudely pushes past others may suffer, as she incurs the disapprobation of those pushed, or witnesses of the event. A much-loved symphony, on the other hand, continues to earn the composer Whuffie as more people enjoy it. Some judgments contributing to an individual's Whuffie are automatic and require no conscious thought on the part of others, as all possess brain chips. As brain dumps allow machines to carry consciousness, the machines can do the thinking for people and allow them to know the results automatically.

Two different methods are explained as being right-hand (the amount you directly attribute to an action) and left-hand (an aggregate of the right-hand Whuffie of the people who have given you left-hand).

Example: A person gave me 50 right-hand (direct) Whuffie for a song I wrote, that they like. I also received 100 left-hand Whuffie from the people that that person has also given right-hand Whuffie to (indirect).

While there are few details in the novel of how this system actually works, it is described in idealistic terms:

A person with a score of 0 is just as capable of giving and revoking Whuffie as someone with a score of 1,000,000. The person with the million-point score would be invited to parties and elite events while his bottomed-out counterpart would probably not even be allowed into reputable clubs or restaurants; but both of their opinions on someone else would count for the same amount of gross Whuffie.

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