Bruce Sterling, 'Maneki Neko' (1998)
Joshua Raulerson writes in Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century:
Bruce Sterling’s 1998 short story ‘Maneki Neko’ is an early example: set in an early twenty-first century Tokyo seemingly on the verge of economic Singularity, it is a light utopian farce about a network-mediated gift economy orchestrated by mysterious – though apparently benevolent – machine intelligences. The protagonist, Tsuyoshi Shimizu, is a video technician who enjoys a first-rate professional reputation and plenty of satisfying work, but has no job and earns no money. Boxes of deteriorating videotapes – mostly other people’s old home movies – arrive anonymously in the mail; Tsuyoshi converts them to digital format, cleans them up, and sends them back much improved. When he runs across particularly interesting or historically relevant bits of footage, he uploads them to vast, wiki-like nonprofit databases maintained by data-hungry ‘net machines’ which, while they never pay cash, ‘were very polite, and had excellent net etiquette. They returned a favor for a favor, and since they were machines with excellent, enormous memories, they never forgot a good deed.’
