Makers

Cheap fabrication, and a venture-capital thesis built on it.

The New Work movement funds thousands of people to invent things in abandoned strip malls, and for a few years it is the best job any of them have had. Then it crashes, the investors leave, and the survivors end up running a ride assembled from the wreckage of their own industry and fighting Disney over it.

Play as vocation — Work becomes hobby, and the serious people go looking for risk on purpose.

The only work here that shows the full arc — invented work, boom, collapse, and what people do afterwards. Doctorow is unusually clear that the New Work was real work and that its collapse was a real loss.