Bill Gates's Virtual Wealth
Here's a very sharp post from Urizenus Sklar, which is a comment on Wagner James Au's post, which in turn was commenting on the news that Second Life has its first (dollar) millionaire:
Anshe Chung has become the first online personality to achieve a net worth exceeding one million US dollars from profits entirely earned inside a virtual world.
As Au points out, Chung doesn't really have this million dollars: her ability to realise it is contingent on all sorts of factors:
If Anshe Chung gradually sold all her Second Life assets over the span of a year or two to prevent market devaluation, and if all the assets actually in the inventory of various avatars working for Anshe were successfully transferred back to her, and if throughout that time the in-world economy remained stable and the population continued growing, and if Second Life did not suffer any serious interruptions of service either through hacking, scalability failures, sale of the company, or other unforeseen acts of God-- why, Anshe Chung's account holder would have, at the end of that long and arduous process, well over $1,000,000.
But as Sklar brilliant notes, Bill Gates's wealth is equally chimerical and contingent:If he started slowly selling his stock, but not so fast that the value tanked, and IF open source software doesn’t wipe him out before he sells and IF Google doesn’t wipe him out before he sells, and IF a lawsuit doesn’t wipe him out first, and IF his business doesn’t get dismantled for anti-trust violations, and IF he doesn’t get shot, and If as soon as he gets his money out he doesn’t put it in financial derivatives and they tank and IF as soon as he gets it out his wife doesn’t make him spend it on starving children in Africa before he gets to stuff his mattress with it, then I suppose he is a billionaire. But what are the chances of that?
Beyond the wit, what this post serves to underline is that there is no substantive difference between "virtual" wealth made in the "virtual" world, and "real" wealth made in the "real" world.
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3 comments:
Money has no value until it is spent.
Yeah, but the article wasn't about Bill Gates, it was about Anshe Chung.
Urizenus Sklar mixed matters, as he usually does. When SecondLifeHerald posts about Bill Gates, should we respond about Anshe? Wait, they wouldn't post about Bill Gates (maybe now they will just to prove me wrong). Their interest is Anshe Chung. Urizenus's interest is in Anshe Chung. Misting Au's article is just classic Urizenus.
Misting is a great way to avoid discussing an issue. Urizenus does it pretty well. But again - Au wasn't writing about Bill Gates. Au was writing about the person who issued a press release through the SecondLifeHerald before she wrote her own, and it would be silly of any of us to think the advertising at the top left of the site had anything to do with it...
Anshe's news in SL - largely overdone. Uri's protecting his interests. Film at 11.
I feel compelled to rush to the defence of my fellow journalist.
You're being a little harsh, I think. Urizenus was using parody to make the point that the issues Au raises about Chang could also be raised about Gates: neither could convert all their wealth to cash overnight.
Sure, it's exaggerated, but there's a fine journalistic tradition of flogging dead horses.
What interested me was the congruence between the two cases - Chung and Gates - and what that said about "real" and "virtual" economies - ie, that there isn't much difference.
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