SNOWCRASHING INTO THE DIAMOND AGE 2 (PART 2-B): An essay by Extropia DaSilva.
Continued from PART 2-A
Is the latter peril really a bad thing? Such a declaration would appear to stand in contrast to the dream of a life free from toil. This vision can be traced back at least 23 centuries, to a time when Aristotle wrote, in ‘The Politics’, ‘we can imagine managers not needing subordinates and masters not needing slaves…if every machine could work by itself…by intelligent anticipation’. And here it is again, this time from a quote in ‘Time’ magazine, 1966: ‘By 2000, the machines will be producing so much that everyone in the US will, in effect, be independently wealthy. How to use leisure meaningfully will be a major problem’.
Ah, there’s the rub. It is generally taken as axiomatic that loosing jobs must mean the loss of meaningful activity. And if you examine that Aristotle quote closely you will notice an imbalanced benefit. It is the MANAGERS who no longer need (human) subordinates, the MASTERS who no longer need (human) slaves. It’s an imagined world in which the elite exchange human labour for machines, flexible enough in limb and just flexible enough in mind to be trusted to perform its role in the workforce (but, presumably, not to question its lot in life). But Aristotle makes no suggestion that the displaced subbordinate class has been lifted to the status of ‘master’ (in fact, the passage is actually his pragmatic defense of slavery in his own time). We like to think slavery has been abolished now, but the other assumed axiom is that the loss of your job must mean the loss of your income. How would the labouring classes raise the funds needed to become a factory-owning capitalist, if his or her skills have lost all monetary value?
Then again, isn’t the promise of molecular manufacturing that nobody NEEDS to work? If it lowers the cost of capital and profoundly raises the abundance of goods and puts the means of production in everyone’s home, then (as SL resident Ralph Radius asked) ‘why wouldn’t a world of nano be divided into purposeful people and those who hang out? Living will be virtually free’. What might be wrong with this picture is that it assumes a lowering of the COST of manufacturing means a reduction in the PRICE of goods and services. As we have seen, Berube anticipates that this will not be the case (at least initially) because nanoproduced goods and related services will carry the R+D surtax of molecular nanotechnology. As for the hypothetical ability to bring forth an abundance of products (and the implication that they will be given away to anyone who asks for it), perhaps artificial constraints like IP rights will limit this scenario, as is the case with hypothetically copyable product in SL. Some of the products made possible by molecular manufacturing could create huge incentives for profit taking. Nano-manufactured computer components, by today’s standards, would be worth billions of dollars per gram. And something like food has large and intricate molecules providing its taste and smell, minerals for nourishment that would require much research in order to handle them in a nanofactory setting, and it contains a lot of water, which is a molecule that tends to gum up the components of the nanosystem. I’m not saying that compiling food is impossible, only that compiling food from chemical feedstock would be a very stiff challenge. Will this basic requirement of life be distributed for free, or will there be a heavy R+D price imposed on it, as is the case with lifesaving medicine?
ENCAPSULATION.
Having decided everything will not be ‘free’ once nanosystems become widely available, we seem to have leapped to the opposite extreme, that their products and services need to be very expensive. We also seem to be assuming that molecular manufacturing must exclude the majority of the populace from gainful productivity. What underlies such assumptions? Most likely, it is ‘complexity’. Productive nanosystems would be the most sophisticated products ever built. There is no precedent for a process that combines 10^25 parts to form a single object in manufacturing today. Some assume that using such immensely complicated machines must require a great deal of skill. ‘Yeah, all those unemployed steelworkers can be retrained as molecular biologists’ was one sarcastic reply to the suggestion that the age of molecular nanotechnology need not mean the end of gainful employment. But is this a safe assumption to make? Possibly not. After all, do you need to be a mechanic in order to use a car? There was a time when this was indeed necessary. Lifting up the hood, tweaking and fiddling around with the engine was not an indulgance for the hobbyist or an occasional annoyance for the stranded motorist, it was a regular part of car ownership. One can well imagine early car drivers fearing that if automobiles became more complex all but the very best mechanics would be excluded from motoring. Cars did indeed increase their complexity, but they also became more reliable; easier to operate.
Another, perhaps better, example is computers. The first operational computers were built by a ten-thousand strong team of elite thinkers, lead by Alan Turing. They were a top-secret military tool; 2,400 valves all put to the chief purpose of decoding Nazi transmissions that had been scrambled using a cipher machine known as ‘Enigma’. It not only required rare skills to construct these mechanized wonders, but also to operate them. A later computer (ENIAC) typically required eight hours of repair for every eight hours of use. Who would have believed that, one day, computers with hundreds of millions of parts, able to outperform those early examples by eight orders of magnitude, would be a standard feature in people’s homes?
The fear that technology will become too complex for all but those highly skilled in some niche discipline is a recurring theme. Another fear is that skills will be lost because of technology. Such concerns did not begin in the 90s with the arrival of competent spell-checking software and the worry that a strong knowledge of grammar would be lost. Nor did they arise in the 70s, with affordable pocket calculators and the fear that fundamental skills in maths would be eroded. They didn’t begin in the 20th century at all, or even the millenium. As far back as 470 BC, Socrates feared that the development of the alphabet (which had been in use for over 100 years) would ‘create forgetfullness in learner’s souls…they will trust to external written characters and not remember of themselves’.
You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who regarded literacy as a skill that enfeebled the mind today, although you may well hear such voices of concern regarding the tools built into word-processing software or learning aids freely available on the Web. And yet, in both cases there is a common theme. Technology does not just cause the loss of skills, it ENABLES the loss of skills. That last point is expressed by the term ‘encapsulation’, which refers to technology that has become hidden in everyday society, despite being in widespread use. It can be hidden in a literal sense. Personal computers began as home-built construction kits, assembled by keen enthusiasts who obviously became familiar with its innards. These days we buy laptops and risk loosing our warranty if we open them up. But mostly the technology becomes hidden because it does its job with minimal fuss. The TV simply starts transmitting sound and visuals. We no longer need to fiddle with manual controls for horizontal and vertical synch, because you get a stable image at the press of the power button. The telephone simply connects your call. Remember how there was a drive to teach everybody binary, in anticipation of the ‘computer age’ when we would all need to know how to write assembly language, but now packaged software enables anybody to get Pcs to perform useful tasks, not just programmers? Well, in 1910 the rate of growth in the telephone industry prompted a Bell Telephone statisician to project that every working-age American woman would be needed as a switchboard operator. In his book ‘Future Hype, Bob Seidensticker reasoned that, according to the definitions of 1910, every single person who uses communication technology to make a call or surf the Web is (thanks to automatic switching technology) connecting calls and doing the job of the switchboard operator. In 1911, the philosopher Alfred North made the following observation: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them”.
Let’s stick with computers a while longer. Earlier, I asked, ‘how do your write…a million billion lines of code when such an endeavour is out of the question?’ but left this unanswered. A similar dilema was encountered in computer chip design. At first, draughstmen designed computer circuitry by hand, but as the parts counts soared into the tens of thousands and beyond it became impossible to design and layout such chips by hand. Fortunately, ready-made computers were there to open up the bottleneck, and today engineers have access to many powerful CAD tools. Some just enable the computer screen to serve as a traditional drawing board, but at the other end of the scale there are so-called ‘silicon-compilers’. These software systems can produce a detailed design of a chip- ready to manufacture- with very little human help beyond specifying the chip’s function.
It becomes advantageous to develop compilers only when resources are cheap and abundant. If they are costly and scarce, this puts an economic pressure on developing systems that are small and simple, which requires step-by-step human planning. Before the 1960s, processors were orders of magnitude slower and memory was orders of magnitude more expensive than today. This economic environment favoured assembly language and its ability to provide instruction-by-instruction control. But after the 1960s, the number of components rose by a factor of a million, while the manufacturing cost per transister had fallen to mere pennies. Drexler explained, ‘if a 10^6 transister design has an expected market of 10^5 units, then every dollar of design cost per transister adds tens of dollars to the price of each chip, yet a dollar can’t buy much time from a human design team…sillicon compilers emerged…gained a foothold, then steadily improved, becoming an integral part of the design process’.
Current macroscopic hardware designs are comprised of relatively few parts and production costs can be expensive. So, naturally, there has been no incentive to develop compilers to help us plan the design of macrostructures. They would not compete with the quality and cost-effectiveness of detailed human design. But, as we have seen, the parts-count of products manufactured via nanosystems (including nanosystem parts) will grow into the trillions and beyond, and production costs will dramatically fall. This would make compilers attractive, even if each compiler-specified system were to waste twice as much space, mass and energy as would a system designed by detailed human knowledge. Therefore, even inefficient compilers would be attractive, and once they gained a foothold in macroscopic design space, we should expect compiler tech to improve, just as it did in computer chip design.
It’s worth emphasising that compilers do not completely remove humans from the design process. Drexler: ’Human design will remain dominant at the level of parts and subsystems (in the form of knowledge built into the compiler) and at the level of overall system organization and purpose (in the form of specifications given to the compiler when it is used). The intermediate levels will be designed, with considerable inefficiency, using algorithms and heuristics that represent a workable subset of human knowledge of design principles’.
So, computers both encouraged and aided the development of design tools that can assist people in planning the manufacture of systems too complex for humans. They also enabled a radical shift in employment patterns, and really molecular manufacturing should be seen as an evolution of the working practices enabled by IT technologies, rather than a revolutionary dislocation from current jobs. This becomes even more aparrant when you consider that a far greater revolution in working practices occurred in our past. When Berube talks about the cost of labour devaluing in the face of molecular manufacturing, it’s hard to shake the conviction that he equates ’labour’ with physical effort, wages earned by the sweat of the brow and all that. 150 years ago, 69% of Americans were engaged in just that sort of work, because they worked in agriculture. Today, the number of Americans working in agriculture is just 3%. As for the rest, 28% work in industrial production and 69% work in the service or information industries. “Increasingly”, an article in ’Forbes’ magazine noted, “People are no longer labourers; they’re educated professionals who carry their most important work tools in their heads…modern occupations generally give their practitioners more independence- and greater mobility- than did those of yesteryear’.
It is expected that, as productive nanosystems become integrated into society, work will shift towards 100% service and information. This is obviously the state of employment in SL today. Whatever work you are involved in, you can guarantee it either involves finding, evaluating, analysing and creating information (in which case you work in ’Information’) or it involves ways of helping other people (in which case you work in ’service’). It is obvious that programmers work in ’information’, but so do lawyers and engineers and librarians and teachers and magazine columnists. One thing that SL has shown is that, at some point, people do not crave standard goods at ever-decreasing prices, but customized goods tailored to meet individual tastes or needs. The opportunities that exist for gainful employment in SL centre almost entirely on ‘providing creativity and originality, customizing things for other people, managing complexity, helping people with problems, providing old services in new contexts, teaching, entertaining, and making decisions‘. I was not quoting a SL analyst, by the way. That list came from a passage written by Eric Drexler, regarding the kind of work that will be valuable in the nanosociety. That SL should favour the sort of work that will retain its value once productive nanosystems become widely available is not all that surprising, since it realises most of the perceived advantages of molecular manufacturing over top-down subtractive manufacturing.
IT’S AN ALAGMIA, STUPID.
People have occasionally wondered what kind of economic system is at work in SL. Rest assured that this is much more than idle ivory tower speculation, because defining Sl’s economy would enable us to anticipate what economic model would develop under the widespread adoption of productive nanosystems.
One possibility is that Sl’s economy is the same as the one we have in RL. This is the viewpoint that the ’NY Times’ article I mentioned earlier subscribed to. According to the article, Sl is a world of ’mortgage payments, risky investments, land barons, evictions, designer rip-offs, scams and squatters’. Where there are shops everywhere ’so it’s easy to say “oh, OK I guess I’ll have a better pair of jeans” ’. Lured in by tales of ’residents (who) lived the American dream in SL and built up L$ fortunes through entrepreneurship’, newbies enter a world ‘where we trade our consumerist-orientated culture for one that’s even worse’.
Others, though, have questioned this assumption that the SL economy is simply the same as the one we find in the consumer-orientated parts of RL. One critic argued, ‘what Linden Labs has tried to do is replicate the atom-world scarcity rules in a bit-world environment’. In other words, SL really was intended to be the sort of scarcity-based economy we find in RL, but its fundamental reality is binary digits and ‘it is the nature of bits to be easily copied’. Thus, Linden Labs’ attempt to impose artificial scarcity in an online world was bound to fail sooner or later (as if you didn’t guess, this argument was a response to the CopyBot incident).
However, Wagner James (Hamlet) Au identified a flaw in this argument. ‘I think it’s highly debatable whether SL is a scarcity-based economy. I think it makes more sense to think of SL as a brand or even a personality economy in which there’s a high premium in owning content from the most admired creators’.
There was a time when any press release would feature an interview with at least one of those ‘admired creators’ Au referred to. There were two good reasons for this. First, the quality of their work rightfully brought them recognition. But, secondly, it was the simplest way to highlight the fundamental difference between SL and the MMORPGs with which it shares a nominal similarity. A typical MMORPG comes with draconian licensing agreements that explicitly forbid the end user from claiming ownership over the money and objects they quest for. Attempts to sell your wares over eBay and other such sites meets with instantaneous deletion of accounts and removal from the game (not that such measures have prevented the emergence and growth of a market in VR goods. In fact, it is rumoured to value $20 million in the US alone and an order of magnitude higher in Asia).
Of course, SL has quite the opposite attitude, in that the objects you create inworld ARE your intellectual property; you DO own the rights. As Cory Ondrejka explained, ‘historically, what you need to drive innovation is markets, and markets derive from ownership’. So, an interview with one of the revered builders of SL was the most efficient way to get across the message ‘no, this is not an MMORPG’, and if you wanted your reader to understand that SL was serious business, what better way to do that than to refer to the serious money some residents were making for themselves?
But, while it’s undeniable that you can, in principle, earn a good living entirely on in-world entrepreneurship, perhaps those articles were misleading. This was especially true if the implication was that you WOULD make a good living (or any profit at all). Just as Dick Whittington found that the streets of London were not paved with gold after all, newcomers to SL discover this is no quick and easy passage to fame and fortune.
The economics page on SL’s official website provides statistics such as ‘monthly spending by amount’ and ‘unique users with positive monthly $L flow’ (PMLF). Looking at the latter and assuming a PMLF of between $10-$500 makes you ‘poor’ while $500- $5,000+ makes you ‘rich’, one can see that, in December 2007, a whopping 48,904 out of 50,678 users with PMLF were ‘poor’. Much the same conclusion arises if we look at the statistics for ‘monthly spending by amount’. According to this chart, out of a total of 341,791 customers spending money inworld (again, during December 07), 269, 926 spent between $L 1 and $L 10,000, and 71, 865 spent between $L 10,000 and $L 1 million. If we assume the strength of the L$ against the US$ was at its highest, that translates to 269,000 spending between a fraction of a dollar and $30, while 71,865 spent between $156 and $3125+.
What does this tell us? These days, Googling ‘SL economics’ reveals that the most popular interpretation is that, since the vast majority of residents are not making fortunes (or anything like a profit at all), those old stories of SL as a land of opportunity were overblown hype. Gwyneth Llewelyn recently wrote that a favourite theme amongst journalists is ‘to report how SL’s buzz and hype is dying’ leading inevitably to ‘the downfall of SL’. Google corroborates her opinion, because the most popular ‘hits’ are all articles explaining ‘the phoney economics of SL’, ‘VR world’s supposed economy is a pyramid scheme’ and other such analyses that can hardly be described as flattering.
That ‘NY Times’ article I referred to was therefore one of a great many articles that paint a negative picture of this online world. “What does SL say about us, that we trade a consumerist-orientated culture for one that’s even worse?”. What if this question truly reflects the nature of SL? Does that imply that our future nanotech societies will be dystopian nightmares of rampant consumerism favouring a tiny elite?
Not according to Au, who countered Nick Yee’s question quoted above by pointing out that ‘the latest economic figures simply don’t back up the premise of Yee’s question. In August…91% were spending less than L$ 10,000 (USD 18.50). Only when you get to that remaining 9% do you see any significant spending in terms of real dollars…There’s surely a lot of inworld goods and services that exist inworld, and much of it is trading hands. But what seems more plausible is that the bulk of those transactions are conducted in a barter or gift economy between friends and communities and, just as often, total strangers, sharing and trading what they own. This almost strikes me as a reversal of consumerism as it is commonly understood, for it undermines the economic motives for doing so’.
Perhaps describing this exchanging of gifts etc as being engaged in ‘economic‘ activity is just wrong. This naturally raises the question, ‘OK, but if SL is not an ‘economy’ what is it?’. I think Au has partly arrived at the answer by acknowledging that ’the bulk of those transactions’ are friends and communities and strangers ’sharing and trading what they own’. Now, Robert Levin introduced a new phrase- ’Agalmics’ (he derived the word from the Greek ’Aglama’ meaning ’a pleasing gift’), by which he meant ’the study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods’.
Levin’s concept of ’agalmics’ is therefore the opposite of ’economics’ (which, remember, is ’the study of the allocation of SCARCE goods’). Levin argued, ’we can be certain that, over time, more and more basic goods will become less and less scarce…we need a new paradigm and a new field of study. What we need is ’agalmics’. When it comes to the gift ’economy’ of SL, should we adopt the catchphrase, ’it’s an agalmia, stupid’, in reference to what Levin called ’the sum of the agalmic activity in a region or sphere. Analogous to an “economy” in economic theory’?
Well, this assumption depends heavily on the extent to which SL agrees with Levin’s notion of what agalmic activity is. Earlier, we saw how physical constraints like server capacity imposes limits on our freedom to create in SL. This might imply that SL cannot be an ’agalmia’. However, it’s Levin’s opinion that ’economics’ gives way to ’agalmics’ as a result of the MARGINALIZATION of scarcity, not necessarily its ERADICATION. ’Agalmics goods…are often produced using scarce goods as raw material. An important example is the initial programming work that goes into a free software application. At the current state of the human lifespan, programmer time must be regarded as a scarce good’.
In fact, Levin cites the open source software community as a contemporary example of agalmic activity. This obviously marks SL out as a definite candidate for an agalmia, because it is very much part of the OS model. Levin identifies several key characteristics of agalmic activity. Let’s look at each one and see how well SL conforms to each.
1: ‘Economic trade is finite; when I give you a dollar I have one less than I did. Agalmic activity involves goods which are not scarce, so I can give you one without appreciably diminishing my supply’.
In SL, anything can be transferable and copyable, or non-transferable/ non-copyable. Objects that are tagged as non-copyable/ non-transferable are traded according to ‘economic’ activity, because choosing to pass such items on results in you no longer possessing it. On the other hand, any item that is tagged as copyable can indeed be given away without diminishing one’s supply. In SL’s stores, items for purchase are often (but not always) marked ‘noncopyable’. But what about all those ‘transactions (that) are conducted in a barter or gift economy’ which, according to Au, makes up the bulk of ‘economic’ activity in SL? I think it’s highly likely that these transactions involve items that are copyable, allowing individuals to trade what they own without diminishing their supply. If my assumption is correct, this is ‘agalmic’ (not ‘economic’) activity.
2: ‘It is co-operative. Economic activity often involves competition. Buyers must allocate their limited funds to the supplier who best meets their needs. Since it doesn’t involve scarce resources, agalmic activity rarely involves competition. Efficient agalmic actors know how to encourage cooperation and benefit from the result’.
No doubt, whenever an inworld architect like Scope Cleaver negotiates for the contract to build something like the Estonian Embassy, his prospective client has a limited amount of land (and funds), so only requires a small team of ace designers to construct the virtual property. When it comes to negotiating for such contracts, I think it’s fair to say that this is economic activity.
However, I wonder if, overall, Cleaver feels he co-operates with the architectural community in SL? Does this community freely swap building tips and are customized tools exchanged between fellow architects in accordance with agalmic activity as defined earlier? And not only architects but all creative communities in SL. Does the machinima community, the photographers, the scripters, the fashion designers, ‘encourage co-operation and benefit from the result’. My gut feeling is that they do, but further investigation is required before a more definitive answer can be formulated.
3: ‘It is self-interested. Agalmic activity advances personal goals, which may be charitable or profit-orientated, individual or organizational. An agalmia typically contains both individuals and organizations, with a broad mix of charitable and profit-orientated goals. Agalmic profit is measured in such things as knowledge, satisfaction, recognition and often in indirect economic benefit.’
Obviously SL contains both individuals and organizations who pursue both profit-driven and charitable goals. But the real question is what motivates residents to fill SL with content. Of course, we all know that Anshe Chung and Aimee Weber now have joint ownership of all the gold in the Federal Reserve, since that’s the only way to pay what they are now worth. Ok, I exaggerate but (beyond the necessity of earning money to live) one has to wonder if the financial rewards the elites of SL earn really counts as any motivation at all. Cleaver once admitted to me that he would happily work for free, were it not for the fact that we all need money for daily necessities. Moreover, many of SL’s designers have told me that whenever somebody buys one of their products, what is satisfying is the recognition that what they do is appreciated and valued…and I don’t mean in a monetary sense. And then, of course, there are the masses who stock land with builds, galleries with portraits and sculptures, cinemas with machinima and generally fill SL with content but earn no economic profit for their efforts. I don’t think these people are chasing dreams of financial wealth, I think it is agalmic profit that motivates them.
4: ‘It is self-stimulating. Examples can be seen in free software communities, in which new programmers, documenters and debuggers come from the ranks of free software users’.
Here, I am reminded of an old essay by Gwyn (‘Crowdsourcing in Second Life’) in which she wrote, ‘there wouldn’t be any point of having 3300 sims available on a grid, if they didn’t have any content at all…Instead, Linden Lab learned how to employ the users-very successfully- to develop the content for themselves, without paying a cent’. I could also quote CNNMoney.com who said, ‘near-term, users will create code to address bugs and other problems, as well as do things like enable SL to run on cell-phones, or add support for different kinds of multimedia content inside the world‘.
All of which sounds very much like Levin’s example of self-stimulating agalmic activity. (Why is it self-stimulating? Because ‘everybody is inspired to keep topping each other with ever cooler things’-Philip Linden).
5: ‘It is self-directing. Free software users provide feedback to developers in the form of bug reports, patches and requests for new features. Software projects can be forked by users when an existing developer group is no longer responsive to their needs. Maintainers are then free to adopt the new work or go their own way’.
This very much applies to SL, and can only become more relevant in the future. Just ask Gwyn, who wrote, ‘things like SL Brazil show what will happen in the near future: Companies creating high quality content and providing the whole range of services that LL refuses to do: a special client, a logging-in system, a welcome area…inworld patrolling, technical support…’
6: ’It is decentralized and non-authoritarian. In a free software community, developer groups maintain their position only as long as they are responsive to their user bases. No one is forced to participate in a project, and the projects people participate in are the ones in which they are interested. Involuntary activity places limits on exchange and creates scarcity. As such, it is non-agalmic. A particular agalmic group may be organised in a top-down fashion, and non-agalmic groups may act agalmicly. But alternatives are available and participation is voluntary. Authoritarian systems remove personal incentives for agalmic behaviour’.
Nobody is forced to participate in SL, and it’s fairly safe to assume that the inworld projects residents undertake are things that interest them. I do wonder, however, if Linden Labs conforms to the agalmic ideal of a developer group capable of maintaining its position only as long as responsive to the needs of its users. LL is the true owner of SL and, within the TOS, they are the ultimate authority. Of course, users can raise concerns, hold protests and even opt out of using SL altogether. If we all stopped using SL, LL would have no reason to exist. But, I don’t think Levin is talking about software projects simply ending due to its participants becoming too pissed-off to work on it. Rather, he is talking about developer groups being replaced if they don’t run things the way the community likes. It seems to me that LL will maintain their position as the ultimate authority in SL whether the users like it or not.
But, then again, that may change in the future, what with Linden Lab’s plans to make the whole code open source. As Gwyn commented, ‘an open source grid is naturally the dream of everybody who’s tired with LL’s recent strong measures in limiting personal freedoms. By distributing grids all over the world, and interconnecting them together…if your country is restricting personal freedom too much you can jump over to the sims hosted in another country’.
7: ‘It is positive-sum. In games theory, a ‘zero-sum game’ is one in which one player’s gain is another player’s loss. Conventional economies often describes zero-sum games. When two suppliers compete for the dollars of a single customer, or when two government agencies compete with each other for fixed budget dollars, a zero-sum game is being played. A ‘positive-sum game’ is one in which players gain by behaviour which enhances the gains of others. Efficient agalmics is a positive-sum game’.
No one could deny that there are zero-sum games being played in SL. Whenever a client awards a building contract to one group rather than any other; whenever you spend your Linden dollars in this store rather than that one, a non-zero game is being played. And let’s not forget the griefers. But, while zero-sum games definitely happen in SL, so do positive-sum games. Examples would be the people willing to spend time teaching newcomers the basics of using SL, or more advanced courses on scripting, prim-building and such. It would include the bloggers, prepared to spend a great deal of time hunting down the best SL has to offer (or highlighting its deficiencies) and bringing them to our attention. And, of course, it would include the exhange of items in a gift ‘economy’ and the move to open-source Second Life. Teaching people to use SL efficiently and build competently increases the number of residents who can partcipate usefully in SL, bloggers with a good reputation attract a readership that keep them informed about goings-on, giving items away in a gift economy enhances the chances of your generosity being reciprocated and open sourcing SL massively increases the number of people debugging, tweaking, and ehancing it. In such ways, users gain by enhancing the gains of others.
CONCLUSION.
All in all, I think it’s unarguable that Second Life is a textbook example of an agalmia. And yet, very little study of the agalmic activity in Sl seems to have been undertaken. It’s now almost eight years since a little-known professor at the University of Rochester, New York, decided to treat Everquest like a real country and collect macroeconomic statistics like GDP, inflation, productivity and wages. The resulting paper (‘Virtual Worlds: A First Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier’) lifted its author- Edward Castronova- out of obscurity to become a leading authority on the implications of MMOGs.
These days, one is spoilt for choice where looking for information on economic activity in SL is concerned. Putting the keywords ‘Second Life economics’ into Google returns 5, 140,000 hits. By comparison, research into agalmic activity in SL is negligible. The keywords ‘Second Life agalmics’ returns a paltry 292 hits (and none that I looked at were particularly relevant). And yet, there is every reason to suppose that agalmic activity makes up the bulk of interactions in SL, and that it can only increase as LL hands over more and more of its baby to the open source community. A thorough investigation of the agalmic activity in SL by anthropologists, sociologists and economists could not be more timely. ‘As time goes on’, wrote Levin, ‘the technology of agriculture and manufacture teaches us how to produce goods with more efficiency, at less cost. The trend in technology is an exponential improvement of knowledge and capabilities’.
Thus, the driving forces pushing us towards agalmics are inextricably linked with those pushing towards molecular nanotechnology. Our best hope for ensuring an inclusive nanotech civilization (rather than one that disfavours the majority of citizens), lies in studying the underlying mechanisms of agalmic activity in SL and guiding the evolution of the metaverse so that it may act as a bridge, enabling us to make the transition to the Diamond Age as smoothly as possible.
Posted by G.P. on 01/28 at 05:44 PM