Valleywag Goes Downhill

Sigh.

When I first came across Valleywag's rather narrow-minded attack on Anshe Chung recently, I assumed this was just the kind of editorial misjudgement that happens when publications aim to go beyond the usual pap served up by mainstream titles. As an ex-editor and ex-publisher, I can forgive this kind of thing.

But upon reading this subsequent story, entitled "Virtual world's supposed economy is 'a pyramid scheme'", I'm forced to conclude that Valleywag is simply desperate for attention and thinks that choosing a high-profile victim for its attacks will garner it some traffic (and it's correct, of course: after all, even I'm giving it some).

You can get the gist of the piece from the following:

What you're left with is lots of people putting USD in, and a small group taking those USD out, leaving the rest with no financial claims on anything - just an imaginatively sexy avatar.

Oh, yes, silly me: that's what Second Life's all about, isn't it? Putting money in to get money out. Forget about all that creativity or community stuff: after all, that's just reducible to an "imaginatively sexy avatar", right? (Via Slashdot)

Update: The Man in this sphere has spoken, and all is clear:

It's not a con game. It's a village-sized market. In fact it's a tourist attraction-type village: the big numbers of the people you see are one-time visitors. Newcomers are arriving in droves. Land speculation is rampant. But it's not thick; it's tiny. Not a ponzi scheme: a little mini gold rush.

Virtual Copyright: A Palpable Hit

This is rather amusing:

Anshe Chung Studios, Second Life’s biggest property developer, is pressing media outlets to take down photos and video of a griefing attack against its eponymous founder, claiming that reproducing the images violates copyright.

The point is that taking a picture of someone in the real world for journalistic purposes would generally be fine - you don't have a copyright in your appearance, since you didn't do much to create it.

But in Second Life, things are rather different. People spend plenty of time creating themselves, and copyright for that digital creation is explicitly vested by Linden Labs in those creators. So Anshe Chung seems quite within her rights to demand the takedown.

Of course, being within her rights, and being right are two quite different things....

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.