No doubt there are interesting projects for Africa in SL. I don’t see them being run by Africans or covered in African media yet…however you can educate me : )

And of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with intellectual property, private property, and capitalism, which a lot of people in your beloved Third World try to establish in the face of harsh resistants from socialist bureaucrats and kleptocratic tyrants.

IP is about the only growth “product” in post industrial nations for the last 40 years. Everyone in that room- including the book peddlers are selling Intellectual Property, not cans of spam- well maybe they are..

c3

BTW, Tish, this really is pretty *retarded* because there is no “fear” here in these writings. The fear comes from the dinosaur media that is on its last legs. I sure don’t have anything to fear. User-generated culture is forcing the change in the technology. The technocrats are playing catchup. They are the ones who are afraid. Not the user generators. Pushed out from one space that gets commercialized, they go to another. And there’s no “high noon”. It’s a 24/7 battle and will be going on 365.

There really aren’t any “blurring of the lines”. What happens is that some people who live a kind of detached meta-life *anyway* as so-called “intellectuals” (not feeling the world beneath their feet, as Mandalshtam put it) naturally seque into a “metaverse” provided by online chat/immersion. That shouldn’t be mistaken for some sort of amalgam of man and the machine. Nothing of the sort.

For one, men are pretty mechanical themselves. This was discovered by the Sufis, and propagated by figures like Gurdjieff in All and Everything and P.D. Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous. Of course those culty takes on mechanicality have just as mechanical a concept to get out of mechanicality as anything else.

Ugotrade, like a lof of liberal white do-gooders, imagines that she is a caretaker and gate-keeper of bringing in third-worlders into the conversation. In fact, what happens is they walk around her and log on all by themselvse!

The open architecture is a kind of grand metaphor, a kind of market-block, to put down a marker saying “we’re going to be here in this space”. None of it is ready. None of it works. And at a certain point, it works so poorly that you just pick up the regular landline…

One thing is certain (thank God!) Lessig is *not* going to get to grab it. Nor are the Terra Novans and their convulsions about whether Virtuality can help them establish socialism lol.

While everybody at this party imagines they are making the Metaverse — and I’d like to think they/we are — and Uri is laughing and riffing about crustless peanut-butter sandwhiches, fact is, the Metaverse is getting made — Second Verse, Same as the First — over in …. a Brooklyn courthouse…where Stroker Serpentine/Kevin Alderman is taking to court a fellow named Rathe Kenso/Thomas Simon, whom he alleges has stolen his sex beds in Second Life.