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When the means of production are cheap, copyable, and held in open designs, a community under attack loses little by abandoning its infrastructure and rebuilding elsewhere. Exit becomes a stronger strategy than defense, because the attacker spends heavily to seize something the defenders can reprint. Power that depends on controlling scarce physical assets loses its grip once those assets stop being scarce.
The book argues that material abundance already exists and that deprivation under the 'default' economy comes from property rules, not from real shortages. The ultra-rich ('zottas') defend those rules through a meritocratic story in which their wealth proves their worth. In that story, luck and inheritance get recast as merit, and inequality comes to look deserved instead of designed.
Walkaway researchers fleeing the default economy work on mind-uploading. After a scientist named Dis is killed, her scanned mind is run through repeated simulation cycles until it stops collapsing and becomes a stable, conscious upload. The walkaways release the technique freely. That breaks the zottas' hoped-for monopoly on immortality and prompts violent attacks on walkaway settlements, which respond by abandoning sites and rebuilding elsewhere.
Walkaway communities treat work as a gift, and they argue over whether to track who contributed what. The case against tracking holds that ledgers and reputation counts quietly bring back the competitive, status-hoarding logic of the market they left. Seen this way, bookkeeping is not a neutral tool but a value system: measuring contribution changes why people contribute.