Comments on: Recognizing Nation States in Virtual Worlds

By: Alberik Rotaru

Alberik Rotaru — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:06:58 +0000

I’d comment more, Icha, but I’m booked to speak at this fabulous seminar, planned months ago, on the Post-Atomic Economy where we will discuss how the the creation of financial derivatives has set us all free from the boring, prosaic and pre-post-atomic need to ever make any actual stuff ever again. Oh wait.

By: ichabod Antfarm

ichabod Antfarm — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:35:33 +0000

“Scienciness bears about as much relation to science as truthiness does to truth.”

Hehe. Thanks for the clarification, Alberik. I am one of those pre-post-modernists for whom semiotics begins and ends with the OED.

Icha.

By: Alberik Rotaru

Alberik Rotaru — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:14:03 +0000

Actually, the atomic world versus some other particle world language shows one of the serious problems with much of this post-modern post-atomicism. Despite the heavily sciency sounding language there’s often very little connexion between the words that get used and the actual meaning of those words.

Scienciness bears about as much relation to science as truthiness does to truth.

By: ichabod Antfarm

ichabod Antfarm — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:33:57 +0000

When Philip has the power to draft me into the 101st Flying Neko Brigade and send me to Darfur to wag my tail and gesture spam the enemy, I will take this kind of speculation more seriously. I understand there is a great opportunity here to wax hyperbolic about our brave new worlds but it’s all just pixie dust until you can “put boots on the ground”, as it were.

I have more and more encountered the word, “atomic”, to describe the meat that types these words. It is a strange theory of reality to me. If we are nothing but atoms on one side of the glass, and nothing but electrons on the other then we would be wholly quantum phenomenon and, therefore, I should theoretically be able to teleport myself to work every day. I can’t so I think there is an aspect of the phenomenon of “we” that is overlooked by this model; in short, the gurgling bag of blood and bones that is born, pays taxes, then dies.

I am sorry Dusan but the barest notion of a “Nation of Facebook” makes my skin crawl, I should say, makes my atoms, um, makes my atoms… See, atoms just don’t do all those things that make being made up of atoms so much scary fun.

By: Alberik Rotaru

Alberik Rotaru — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:32:52 +0000

Sadly I hit the button too quickly. Mention of social networks will undoubtedly lead someone to mention al-Qa’ida.

ibn Khladun, and for that matter several Christian historians, were describing social networks rebelling against the government in the thirteenth century. Christianity and Islam seem more prone than most religions to generating chiliastic networks that want to change the order of the world by armed uprising. al-Qa’ida is a very old, not a new phenomenon. Some exact analogies off the top of my head would the Anabptist group that seized control of Munster briefly, the long campaign by the Assassins who were eventually suppressed by the the superpower of their day, the Mongols, or the Almoravid and Almohad movements which briefly dominated the Maghreb and Muslim Spain.

Each of these medieval social networks was directed at acquiring actual real estate as is their contemporary successor. The instrument may have changed but the song remains the same.

By: Alberik Rotaru

Alberik Rotaru — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:18:52 +0000

Not sure I agree. All this post-atomic, bytes not bits, stuff was floating around at the time of the dot.com boom. Much of it died with that boom, and the rest fell down on 11 September. Nations are about power and there is very little evidence of social networks commanding any great hard, or even soft, power. The supporters of the two sides in the Gaza conflict at recent SL events seem to have identified somewhat strongly with the chunks of real estate in the first world rather than with each other or their common second world experience.

In ancient times (okay it was about 1996) disintermediation was the rah rah word of the day. Organisations like corporations and governance were about to disappear in favour of peer-to-peer networks. There’s really not a lot of evidence of that happening, of users identifying with a VW rather than their nationality, or of any VW developing the basics of a common culture or political feeling.