So imagine this. You enter the UN building and find a seat on the floor. You’re there to hear Thomas P. M. Barnett, author of “Blueprint for Action” speak. But it’s all virtual reality. You are there in Avatar form via a computer with the hardware for it. Thomas P. M. Barnett is there in Avatar form.
What do you think about this?
I read the NY Times article on this virtual “vacation” spot called Second Life. If it mentioned Thomas Barnett I missed that part. But being a curious sort I bopped on over but the idea I got from it was all role-playing and that doesn’t interest me, nor does signing up with a credit card for something free for seven days. But I was reading about how great the graphics were. Nothing really there to show me how fine they were so I did a Google search for Second Life graphics. Of course, clicking on a pic I first found myself at a blog interviewing what may be a college student who has her own club at Second Life (you can make real estate transactions with real hard money to purchase space to construct large-scale environments). Sex, sex, sex. Lap dancers etc. You know that’s going to be big at a place like this. Not interested. I move along and I forget how I ended up reading about Thomas P. M. Barnett’s virtual appearance at Second Life but there I was and I thought hmmm this is interesting, or is it, not the book but a communal virtual presentation-talk. He’s even sent along a digital autograph for in-world signing, though what in the world that could ever be possibly be worth I don’t know. A digital autograph ain’t an autograph.
The transcript for the event is now up here along with images of the online presentation.
Along the way I got a look at some other pics grabbed from Second Life and for all the talk of how great it is I’m not very impressed, such as with the pic displayed here at Newsweek online.
Here are cyborg marsupials who showed up to protest the building of the virtual UN.
Alot of Second Life, from what I’ve observed at least in the few screen grabs I’ve looked at, is fantasy/sci fi oriented.
And a person with a blog called “Second Thoughts” didn’t like the building of the virtual UN either and commented, saying:
Thank God somebody showed up to protest this little infant Bolshevik-in-its-cradle. Why do only SOME people get to make a UN, half in secret, away from the rest of the world? Huh? Who empowered them to do this? They think because it’s a virtual world, that they can just build a pretty UN and then populate it with themselves and 39 other people on a sim — which is all the sim will hold? They say, oh, it’s just a build, just a talk, just an experiment, so shut up — but…why should I lend it any legitimacy, and why do THEY get to pick the powerful symbols of the UN?
…
Somebody else said this “UN” should have seats or “regional groups” for furries, norms, robots, elves, vampires, etc. Huh? Why? Because those are visible groupings that actually likely make up a minority of the 67,000 subscribers?
I find it uber-annoying that some high-end Internet tekkie-wiki intellectual types think they can set up democracy islands, government experiments, UN buildings and all the rest of this in SL by just parachuting into this world and stepping completely over and around all its existing indigenous social structures and groups. Some of these people are the very same ones that screamed at the appearance of grassroots SL-based (not RL-based) groups like Metaverse Justice Watch or Concerned Residents.
Now here’s what’s really trippy.
Homeland Security has staked out turf at Second Life.
“Response” is the name of a private (but publicly accessible) island that happens to be owned by a top East Coast University. It’s been built to resemble a small town in New England, not to evoke nostalgia, but to simulate and model emergency response behavior to very real dangers (fires, structure damage, and so on) in an online world. This morning, the leader of that university project (whose avatar is a cybernetic humanoid alien) will be giving a presentation on his work– which happens to be funded by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Educators and government/military officials have been exploring the national defense utility of online and virtual worlds for years, but now that they’re doing so in a public setting in Second Life…
Hunh?
Now, of course, everybody has probably already heard about this except for me. I’m probably the last to read about it.
I have to admit, that…an example…ok, if Haruki Murukami was giving an online talk at Second Life I’d be tempted to sign up and listen and would love to hear some back-and-forth, a question and answer session. There’s something attractive about the idea of guiding an avatar into a room and sitting it down and waiting for a speaker to “appear”. But what to wear? Most of the avatars I’ve seen for individuals who would portray themselves as women (assuming some men do as well) seem to want to communicate sexy young females. I would hope they’d also have something more suitable to the over-the-hill set who isn’t inclined to play Rock Hudson “Seconds”. An aging, sagging avatar. Toss a sweater and jeans on it. Presto not-so-chango. Aging does things to one that one would prefer not, but hell it happens and I wouldn’t feel right parading around as this and then having to apologize for what I actually am. Though for pity’s sake I hope you don’t have to look at your avatar all the time if you don’t want to, would be nice if you could do a subjective POV rather than objective, because seems it would be pretty wearying and tiresome otherwise, always looking at “yourself”. Just like I wouldn’t want a mirror in front of me while I’m talking to someone else real life. I’d rather be looking at them.
There are a lot of snaps from Second Life at the above linked sluniverse. Snaps of faux beaches, lots of virtual dancing, fashion shows. People go skydiving on Second Life. They eat steak dinners on Second Life. A few very few of the tableaus presented come close to being art, though the pixel quality isn’t there; I can appreciate the direction they’re headed as far as a visual experience. But eating a steak dinner on Second Life I don’t get. Or sky diving. Or flying a kite. And I certainly don’t get virtual eating. Just like I wouldn’t get virtual sleeping.
I’m an old fart, aren’t I.
My son would love it. But it’s for adults with a special section, I think, for teens.
My son, at seven, likes the idea of being a robot. “Robots don’t get cut,” he tells me, and he likes that. I tell him robots don’t feel and that his entire body is a sensory organ. That he isn’t just his brain. That as H.o.p. he reads the world through his body and its senses. “Robots don’t die,” he says, and he thinks that’s a great idea. I tell him that a lot of people have written stories about people who don’t die and that they tend to be very sad stories. He’s seven. He doesn’t get it. He won’t get it for a while, though he has in his possession still nearly every toy he’s ever owned and hates for me to throw away anything broken. He says it’s still good, it means something to him. He’s intent on thinking up how any item in the apartment could be recycled before it’s relegated to the trash bin. “But we can recycle it!!!” he says and tells me how he can make it into a sculpture or toy.
The first book I bought for him was “The Velveteen Rabbit” because it had impressed me so deeply as a child. I bought it before he was born, and a velveteen rabbit. The rabbit came with the book and was kind of cute but mainly I got it because the rabbit in the book only grew legs after it had been loved to pieces, and this rabbit had a square legless bottom. Don’t you know, he never did take to that rabbit and it has stayed on the shelf. Instead he fell in love with another rabbit toy that he carried around for a couple of years, almost always with a plastic crocodile in the other hand, both of which were worn to bits, and we still have them. I’ve only read him the book a very few times.
Second Life. I kept thinking of John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” as I looked at images that played up the role-playing aspects. Tony Wilson decides to cast off his life and become someone new, younger, an artist. And ends up finding his new staged life to be not very satisfactory.
But Second Life isn’t just “Seconds”. It’s not just playing around with another potential medium perhaps for art or animation. It’s not just a place for classrooms to have their own section (which they do, profs and students have their own areas). Not when you’ve got Homeland Security staking out a piece and trying it on for size. Absurd as that may sound. And then a reading for “Blueprint for Action” at a virtual UN? What’s up with that? The virtual UN strikes me as weird. The event doesn’t, a presentation-talk, except the choice of material.
From Publishers Weekly
Military-strategy consultant Barnett follows his ballyhooed The Pentagon’s New Map with this unconvincing brief for American interventionism. Echoing the now conventional wisdom that a larger, better-prepared occupation force might have averted the current mess in Iraq, Barnett generalizes the notion into a formula for bringing the blessings of order and globalization to benighted nations throughout the “Non-Integrating Gap.” A “System Administrator force” of American and allied troops—a “pistol-packing Peace Corps”—could, he contends, undertake an ambitious schedule of regime change, stabilization and reconstruction in Islamic countries and as far afield as North Korea and Venezuela, making military intervention so routine that he terms it the “processing” of dysfunctional states. Barnett’s ideas are a rehash of Vietnam-era pacification doctrine, updated with anodyne computer lingo and New Economy spin. Implausibly, he envisions Americans volunteering their blood and treasure for a “SysAdmin force” fighting for international “connectivity” and envisions the world rallying to the bitterly controversial banner of globalization. Worse, he has no coherent conception of America’s strategic interests; “the U.S. is racing… to transform [the] Middle East before the global shift to hydrogen [fuel] threatens to turn the region into a historical backwater,” runs his confused rationale for continued American meddling in the Muslim world. That Barnett’s pronouncements are widely acclaimed as brilliant strategic insights (as he himself never tires of noting) bodes ill for American foreign policy. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Homeland Security has their own little town in Second Life. And elsewhere in Second Life, at a virtual UN, Barnett talks peace through American interventionism and globalization.
I’m feeling kind of creeped out.
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