Tales of cyber-neurosis
October 10, 2008 Leave a comment
Second Life Shrink was featured in the Guardian’s “Letters and blogs” column this week, quoting the comment I made about Vic Keegan’s article on how the financial crisis will affect virtual worlds.
This hasn’t boosted my traffic much – two hits have come via this link so far, according to my stats page – but it’s always nice to know that someone, even an anonymous sub-editor, thinks my writing is worth a mention.
October 8, 2008 Leave a comment
Second Life is commanding approximately 0% of my attention right now, what with the US elections reaching their climax (though that last Obama/McCain debate was far too even-tempered, and pretty dull) and the world financial system melting down before our very eyes.
Even a couple of weeks ago the idea that the UK government would be nationalising the banks, even partially, would have seemed like some sort of deluded socialist fantasy. Now there are plenty people saying that Brown and Darling haven’t gone far enough, and they should have taken the whole system into public ownership.
I have spent years of my life standing on cold street corners, giving out flyers expressing such Bolshevist sentiments, and, a lot of the time, meeting with general indifference. Now that I’m semi-retired from such activity, the message is becoming popular again. I should quit politics altogether; my ex-comrades would be in power within the week.
September 26, 2008 Leave a comment
I was perhaps a bit harsh in my condemnation of the Second Life banking system; it turns out that, compared with our real-life institutions, the virtual Wall Street was a model of financial rectitutde.
This is an old story, I know. Even George W Bush seems to have got his head around the details. I just wanted to put on record my admiration for all the erudite commentators who have filled the financial pages of the newspapers with explanations of the crisis, for the benefit of us poor rubes who would otherwise be completely unable to understand why borrowing money on the short term market, then lending it to people with poor credit histories so that they could buy houses at inflated prices, was a questionable business model. I am sure that there is some really good reason why they didn’t share this wisdom with us twelve months ago.
(In case that last link goes dead for some reason, I’ll note that it led to the “Awards and Recognition” page on the Lehman Brothers corporate website, wherein they boasted that “Fortune magazine named Lehman Brothers the #1 “Most Admired Securities Firm” in its [2007] rankings of ‘America’s Most Admired Companies.'”)
Second Life Shrink 