Last year Douglas Rushkoff posted his second novel, Exit Strategy, on the World Wide Web and invited readers to annotate it. Over a thousand people from around the world participated in the project by adding their own footnotes. (Rushkoff calls Exit Strategy an “open source” novel.) Structured as a found text, its central premise is that the manuscript was written in the near future, then hidden online and discovered after 200 years. Because society has changed so much, an anthropologist has annotated the text for his 23rd-century contemporaries. Exit Strategy‘s print version contains Rushkoff’s 100 favorite annotations from his reader-participants, including some from Australia, South Africa and Croatia. Its publisher, Soft Skull Press, sees Exit Strategy as an “ever-evolving organism,” and will update future editions. The author’s portion of sales of the book go to charity. Rushkoff speaks at the Regulator Bookshop Thursday, June 27 at 7 p.m. Call 286-2700 for details.
