Wagner James Au sez, "The event mentioned last week in Boing Boing with Julian Dibbell creating an avatar and selling a virtual edition of his latest is up now on my blog, a fascinating 5,000+ words on the future of online worlds, and of work online."
… If you had gone to Babylonia or whenever 10,000 years ago, and said 'Hey, 10,000 years from now, the economy you think of as the economy, the growing of grain and baking it and distributing it and all that stuff, and the system you think of as sort of spiritual and ephemeral, the priestly stuff of knowledge work, those roles are going to be completely flipped around, with esoteric, highly mediated financial transactions constituting BY FAR the majority of economic activity on the globe…' they would have laughed at you. Or made you their rain god.And the evolution of a play economy would work very similarly, with the economy itself creating its own needs, which feed on themselves with especial voracity and velocity because there's less and less physical stuff involved to slow it down. Until voila, yeah, we still need agricultural workers and accountants and systems analysts and so forth, but of course all the REAL wealth of the world is being made here in these little worlds that used to be dismissed as mere games.
(Thanks, James!)
