As I mentioned on G+ earlier this week, For the Win is, at its core, Stephenson's The Diamond Age, but featuring present-day MMORPG gold farming instead of near-future nanotech. Loosely, both books are about educating and organizing people, but The Diamond Age is a lot less didactic and, eerily enough, less prone to Stephensonian digressions about all the research he did in order to write the novel.
Interestingly, Doctorow's Little Brother is also about organizing people. That novel has a much tighter plot than either The Diamond Age or For the Win, and I think I liked it best of the three, though For the Win is the "grittiest" and perhaps most realistic in pondering the kinds of bad things that can happen in this world to good people.
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