Category Archives: Blog

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Second Life is a feudal system

a castle in Second LifeThe Yale Law Journal has been doing an interesting set of discussions on the legal and economic aspects of synthetic worlds and metaverses. Bruce Sterling flagged one up that analyses the land ownership system in Second Life, and concludes that the closest real life analogy to the system would be good old-fashioned feudalism:

We can resolve this tension by describing a user’s interest as seisin rather than as ownership. A tenant seised of land had sworn homage to the lord from whom he held. In exchange, the lord symbolically delivered the tenant into possession. Thereafter, the tenant owed the lord various services and feudal incidents, and in return the lord was obliged to defend his possession against outsiders to the relationship. Every element of this system maps cleanly onto Second Life. A user swears homage by clicking “I agree” to Linden’s terms and conditions; Linden delivers her into possession by changing an appropriate database entry. She owes tier fees in place of feudal incidents; Linden defends her possession via software-based access controls.

Sub-letting is pretty common in Second Life as well, which just goes to enhance the analogy; given Linden Lab’s history of making sweeping, drastically unpopular and incontestable choices about the way they run their virtual world, I doubt you’d have many objections to the analogy from residents, either.

But what does this mean for the legal types themselves? The report concludes:

This analysis of the feudal dimensions of Second Life should make us optimistic about the legal future of virtual worlds. After all, for all its flaws, feudalism was a functional organization of society—indeed a better one than some of the alternatives.

In other words, “leave it be, it’s getting there slowly”. Eventually synthetic worlds with the complexity and infrastructure to support modern property rights will emerge… at which point the nice guys from Yale will no doubt find they’ve have been beaten to the punch by a stampede of virtual ambulance-chasers. [image by Torley]

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Where will we send our trash now China doesn’t want it?

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scrap wasteIt’s no secret that a lot of the West’s waste ends up in China and other far eastern countries. What you may not have realised is that a significant number of people make a living from sorting, reclaiming and reselling that waste; used plastics to packing chip factories, for example.

Or rather, they used to make a living doing it; now, scrap trading in China has fallen at the hands of the global economic slump:

Minter says the predicament is typical of the trade. “People would borrow money from relatives and buy a container of scrap and then throw all that money back in and reinvest it. Great if it goes up – but the moment it starts slipping, especially if it’s slipping 20-30%, you’re finished,” he said.

Even if you’re so hard-hearted as to think that the economic fate of Chinese scrap workers is no big deal to you, the consequences of this are going to be felt in your world too: China used to import scrap and waste from countries like the US and the UK. Now there’s no one who can make a meagre living by cleaning up behind us, we’re going to have to start doing it ourselves. [image by Paul Goyette]

Blog

Neurocosmetics: wireheads for congress

neurospasmNeurocosmetics has yet to take off in the backstreets of Birmingham, but is likely to change everything, at least according to Marcel Kinsbourne in his Edge question answer:

…the novel method of deep brain stimulation (DBS), by which electrodes are inserted into the brain to stimulate precisely specified locations electrically, is already used to correct certain brain disorders (Parkinsonism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

Not only are the targeted symptoms often relieved; there have been profound changes in personality, although the prior personality was not abnormal.

A patient of lifelong somber disposition may not only be relieved of obsessions, but also shift to a cheerful mood, the instant the current is switched on (and revert to his prior subdued self, the instant it is switched off). The half empty glass temporarily becomes the glass that is half full. The brain seems not entirely to respect our conventional sharp distinction between what is normal and what is not.

Paging Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain Banks, Greg Egan et al – but how will society change when people are free to choose their personalities at a whim?

In fact, could that be the solution to the Fermi Paradox? Could it be that all technological civilizations advance to the point where they develop a technique for inducing whatever their alien equivalent of permanent happiness is and then stop developing?

If you can track down a copy Arthur C. Clarke’s The Lion of Comarre deals with a similarly themed subject rather well.

[from the Edge question][image from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³]

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Teh intarwub – still killing reading, apparently, despite the evidence otherwise

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rabbit reading emailO NOES!!!1 Teh webz be steelin ur brain-bukkitz! This doom-mongering about the internet and its insidious power to erode literacy just never seems to go out of fashion with opinion columns, but I’m surprised to find this one on The Guardian‘s technology blog, courtesy of one Naomi Alderman. Here’s a few choice snippets (because, y’know, I doubt you can be bothered to read the whole thing):

… reading on the internet isn’t the same as reading a book. Recent studies have indicated that online reading tends to break down in the face of “texts that require steady focus and linear attention”. University teacher friends have told me that some of their freshers have started to write in a similar fashion to the way we apparently read online. All the right keywords are in the right paragraphs, but the sentences don’t follow on coherently from each other. Their essays are meant to be skimmed, not read.

[snip]

My family is fortunate to have preserved some of the hundreds of letters my grandmother exchanged with her brothers, Alan and Henry, while they were fighting in the second world war. They didn’t write these letters to improve their skills in comprehension and composition; they did it because it was the only way to stay in touch. If they’d had mobile phones and been able to call each other every day, I’m sure they’d have done so.

Blah blah blah. TL; DR, complete with a reference to WW2 to shame us in the light of the sacrifices of our elders, who had the dignity to sit in muddy trenches writing letters while they waited to be shot to burger meat. But for the classic “everything was better in the old days” capstone quote:

But while I hate to side with the neophobes I can’t help feeling a little concerned; as the loss of the ancient Greek oral culture shows, ways of thinking and using our brains can disappear for good.

YA RLY; new ways of thinking are always bad news, aren’t they? Hey, if it hadn’t been for those damned Greeks and their progressive philosophies, we’d still be sat in little stone houses thinking that lightning storms were the gods playing war… how far we’ve fallen since then! [image by tm lv]