Hello there! > Tony Walsh has, as others do, some doubts about whether Second Life is > sustainable as a business. But he also poses another question that I > hadn't come across before: "Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?" >
this is a manifestation of one of the things that move me and penelope.di.pixel in researching what we are calling NeoRealismo Virtuale. attitude towards technology (and all that comes with it, including virtual worlds) is often bipolar. example: people talk about the degrees of freedom obtained through digital technologies yet they tend to forget that such a freedom depends on tons of infrastructure (and on the powers - political and economic - that own and control them) including hundreds of kilometers of fibers, satellites, thousands of buildings filled with underpaid employees on precarious 1 month contracts, tons of equipment that has to be built.... and it's just an example. cognitive capitalism, and the immaterial economies that come with it, uses this separation as a tool to move the struggle for power on a "personal" level: from parlaments to lifestyle. models that are radically new (and sustainable in an ecologically integrated way) are possible, but they seem to depend on different speeds, hyerarchies and dimensions that the ones currently enacted through digital technologies. virtual worlds are a perfect example for this: as an example (among thousands) they could transform business, social, relational models in a "sustainable" direction by changing the need for people to move geographically. But the significant part of this switch would probabily come not with a setup that is similar to teh one exemplified by Second Life, but with a distributed one (such as the peer to peer one that is being developed with OpenMetaverse), based on small "islands" of peer to peer autonomy collaborating to create the "whole". something that looks like a civil, technologically enabled, anarchy. it seems as if the the interesting part of the dialogue (and action) is really (and once again) moving away from services and turning its attention to the body and to architectural intervention. byebye xDxD _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
