A clash of models
3pointd.com reports that a Second Life server emu is out there, raising the question of what the world looks like when there’s multiple servers to log into. There’s already been some discussion of what happens to the current Linden business model on the day that there’s lots of hosting choices — sort of like a much more sober version of the issues that arose after the CopyBot scandal.
Meanwhile, MTV starts talking about launching more worlds over on Wired.com, focusing on closed worlds that they can monetize by classic methods: selling items, advertising to kids who log in, and so on. I find it somewhat ironic that There had it right all along, they just hadn’t found the right marketing partner: clearly, what they needed was a hefty dose of horny teenagers (the article reports 300,000 signups in 10 weeks).
Both articles come to us thanks to Mark Wallace. But one appears in the big corporate news aggregator, and the other in the scrappy little indie blog. Being who I am, I actually found the 3pointd article before I found the Wired one.
In some ways, that’s illustrative of the whole question of the right approach to media: newspapers versus blogs, TV versus YouTube… and now, even virtual world versus virtual world. Consider these two quotes:
Part of the value of business investment in Second Life relates to the ease of travel between properties. A host-your-own metaverse doesn’t necessarily care to be interoperable. Even if today’s property owners were able to transition inexpensively to a number of metaversal hosting services in the future, I’m guessing that some owners will become the gatekeepers of their own walled gardens, refusing to “play nice” with the rest of Second Life.
(from Clickable Culture)
“If you look at our monetization on a viewer basis for Laguna Beach, we’re making pennies a person,” Yapp says. But, he says, visitors to Virtual Laguna Beach might buy a DVD of the show, a branded T-shirt, or a virtual T-shirt for their avatar (in-world currency can be purchased with a credit card at an exchange rate of 180 MTV bucks to the US dollar). And hardcore fans will be able to get virtual crash pads and flirt via VoIP when MTV launches a $6-per-month premium service.
(From the Wired article)
Fundamentally, we’re talking here about an issue of ownership. Who’s the captive audience? In the case of VLB (and WoW, and so on), it’s about selling ads because you hold eyeballs. In the case of SL server emulators, it’s almost the reverse: the operator is the captive, beholden to the creativity of the users, who are broadcasting back, and out. Philip Rosedale has laid out the thought that long-term, SL would be in the position of network operator, not world operator.
In some senses, the question is whether you want to be a TV show or even a TV channel — or a whole cable network. One thrives on specificity, the other on variety. One is about ads, the other about monetizing consumers (as well as potentially adding advertising into the mix). One desires exclusivity, the other wants inclusiveness as long as the content carries justifies the resources it consumes.
Until now, everyone has pretty much played in the content provider area. It’s been about what you can make, and how many people you can get to show up. Part of the reason is that the sorts of businesses that networks have built have all historically been built on limited infrastructure. The phone company was able to be a powerful company because laying line was hard. Cable companies carve up the landscape into areas where they have cable laid. But in a web world, lots of folks have infrastructure (my hosting provider notwithstanding, lately).
Content is still king, of course. The network still needs the shows. But it’s an omnivorous hunger. Almost any show will do, barring radical branding conflicts. Perhaps that’s why Viacom’s new Nickelodeon world; isn’t lumped in with the MTV ones — or for that matter, NeoPets.
In the end, both bits of news point towards the growth of virtual worlds as networks rather than as shows. It’s not a new trend, given past experiments like Station Pass and the like — but perhaps it’s inevitable, given that the worlds themselves sit on top of the most successful networked technology mankind has yet developed.
26 Responses to “A clash of models”
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Mark Wallace made a good find picking up the libsecondlife chatter about having made a “rogue server”. Tony Walsh, whom he cites, in fact blogged his piece because he read and cited my article which opened this discussion at this phase — I realized what Mitch Kapor was saying in his Davos interview to Reuters, that they will devalue all our land.
I realize you’re up at the top of the meta-blogosphere and the underlings who first blog a story aren’t always on your radar, Raph, so I thought I’d weigh in. I’ve had to take all kinds of crap for having raised this discussion, as if I’m a) a rapacious landlord bent on gouging people (false, I run a small business that in fact subsidizies newbies and a land preserve on the mainland, which isn’t very lucrative) or b) I’m a gullible and stupid “investor” in “land” in SL and now I have to suck it up and suffer the consequences for putting money into a big hole in the Internet (false, I’ve always analyzed exactly what’s happening in SL and the fact that they’re selling the rope to hang us : )
I know there’s tremendous ecstasy, fantasy, and illusion about what open-sourcing means. We’re told 100 times a day on SL-related forums and blogs that we must genuflect constantly to the Open Source That Makes the Internet What it Is Today, etc. We’re banged and savaged and harried if we point out that having walled gardens…even not very steep walls, but just protective walls…to hold value, to keep life civilized is some hopelessly benighted and backward illusion. Well, I’m the first to bang on country clubs in SL and criticize them for stuffiness and arbitrary behaviour.
But I can see a mixture of things happening: 1) the Lindens might keep some mainland grid going for testing and prototyping and orientation and may give discount licenses early to a select group to whom they want to pass on the customers and the server code; 2) others will want to host their own or hook up their existing worlds in some way through bridges and passes, but these will be scrappy and possibly even unnavigable as the asssets that everybody most wants are back on the centralized LL server; 3) some big corporations will be able to spend and develop compelling worlds that will have a veneer of open-source street cred but will just be the same-old, same-old.
That’s why I’m not for making the Metaverse like the Internet. Is it REALLY that fun to live inside a web page with 30 strangers, 3 of whome may be crashing your computer or stalking you in RL or shooting you? Seriously, why can’t people have worlds? Raph, your games were all walled gardens — fortresses might even be a better way to describe them. In fact, when people hack, game, exploit, cheat on them, they become less fun.
Long, long before you wrote this blog, I wrote that only shows mattered, that only managed ephemera, events mattered. Events are king, not content. Content is made for events, and then thrown away, so if CopyBot steals it, it doesn’t matter, it’s yesterday’s props to yesterday’s show. A content-maker who works as a builder for a big company in SL now can make a fortune building some realistic set and it doesn’t matter if he can’t sell that build, or keep it from being copied — he’s been paid already. So that whole painfully established world of people making permissined textures and designs of buildings for micropayments only lives on by inertia, ready to be undermined completely as soon as CopyBot and the other bots get working better.
Of course you thought about these things long before I did, but you’re gelling them together now to say something a little different: that all this brave new world stuff is a TV network. You still think it’s going to be about content-is-king and more interactive and cool, if I understood correctly.
But I’ve started tumbling to the fact that under the thin, propagandistic facade of the “interactive, user-made content” show, which is kind of a shill to bring people online off their TV-room couches, there is basically the same old media concentration all over again.
If you watch the different big corporations and their metaversal sherpas in SL, it’s more and more about these companies creating huge events, whether concerts, or big thinky meetings with famous people, or tours of clubs, or openings and happenings that people flock to. Like, right now, even very hip people are flocking to the new AOL Pointe site and sort of tongue-in-cheek jumping on the trampoline, trying the avatar-sticker, skateboarding around, etc. AOL brings everybody together again, who had been scattered off on their laggy sims with their poor FPS struggling with Concierge Lindens and struggling to make amateur content that only a small niche will read or watch or buy.
When I stand on these big, corporate, shiny sims, watching all my old friends even from TSO days cavort around, my heart sinks. It’s like when the Borders and the Barnes and Nobles comes in and ruins your favourite dinky little used book store. You know the new books are shinier and you can drink latte while browsing the new titles, but you know you will never find that wierd book about the CIA and American foundations ever again.
All that’s going to happen, Raph — because it costs so much and is hard to do, like the cable you talked about — is that we will get push media and concentrated media all over again, don’t you think?
The one model that seems to offer a different, less passive scenario can be seen with Pontiac, where you join their island, get some land and a race track, and you build cool vehicles and race them in events. They have managers on site constantly organizing activities. Or the L-word, which is Showtimes’ Second Life for lovers of this TV show about lesbians. OK, these are cool, especially if you are into these niches, but hang around on them…and you get restless and want to go somewhere else. I guess in your vision of how this will work, you will have a kind of Microsoft Network pass that you will either charge up on your credit card or just use after turning over all your ID and shopping profiles and willingness to be scanned, and you’ll jump from ‘verse to ‘verse.
All good, Mark Wallace is especially eager to make it like this, but it makes the Metaverse an inch deep and a mile wide. I think most people want immersion, and want to go deeper. I think the people who manage to keep going the deepest wells will win this.
If the players provide the content, and the client is open-source, and the server is open source, what does Linden Labs do?
If anyone can put up a personal server, then will there be 20,000 servers (one for each of SL’s current land holders), each with only a handful of people in them? If a tree falls in SL world and no one is around, does it make a sound?
Given the 20K hypothetical servers, why would a player be attracted to one over another? (Especially if content is easy to clone with CopyBot, or at least the 3D model part of content.)
Most people can’t be bothered to put up a personal server. Therefore, most people will either use the Linden one (not really being aware of any other specific servers, even if they are aware that they exist in general) or they will flock to whatever player-run server seems most populated and interesting. Maybe it will stabilize into a small number of servers that have thriving communities and one or two big ones, and all the one-off servers that Joe sets up for him and his friends will be ignored by everybody except him and his friends.
After more than 10 years, SubSpace is still going strong. There are lots of servers, but not very many that attract more than a couple dozen people at once. Then there is one server that typically has 400-500 people on it: http://www.trenchwars.org. Trench Wars is the zone with the most heavily differentiated ships. It is significantly different from all the other servers. It is the most interesting to play on because of the variety of tactics and strategies that emerge when you bring together different combinations of the (heavily-differentiated) ships. The trench wars ships each have a very limited subset of the possible capabilities. In comparison, most of the other zones have a bunch of ships that are just variations of the same thing. They can all use all of the abilities, just with varying strengths. So IMO that’s why trench wars remains so popular while other zones slowly fall into disuse.
In the case of Second Life, there is no obvious parallel to the Trench Wars example. But maybe some organization will set up a player-run server with a wide range of really fantastic stuff on it, and thereby gobble up all the potential playerbase.
Prokofy Neva said, You know the new books are shinier and you can drink latte while browsing the new titles, but you know you will never find that wierd book about the CIA and American foundations ever again.
The thing about this statement is that it strikes me as something that was supposedly fixed by the Internet era: that famous Long Tail. I’d be surprised if you didn’t know that term by now. (Based on the various readings I’ve done on it, I think the Wikipedia article does a fine job of describing it to people who don’t know what it is.)
So, Prokofy, responding specifically to that, I have to ask you: why can’t the Long Tail deal with this, too? Niche up and connect by aggregation?
Prokofy Neva said, We’re told 100 times a day on SL-related forums and blogs that we must genuflect constantly to the Open Source That Makes the Internet What it Is Today, etc.
Odd. I would disagree with the Lindens about that statement: it just reeks of fallacy, but I’m not sure which one. Open source is indeed what made the LAMP structure great. The LAMP stack is what makes the Internet great. But open source is not why the Internet is great, neither Web 1.0 nor Web 2.0.
I’m pushing my memory and knowledge, yet… nothing. Oh. But the LAMP stack isn’t actually great because of open source; that’s just one (very important) reason. It’s great because it’s free. That’s what the big deal is, isn’t it? It’s not the code itself that’s the big deal; it’s the fact that it’s available at all. For free.
Granted, I don’t know the actual argument they’re making, so maybe they make more sense than it seems. =P
moo said, Most people can’t be bothered to put up a personal server.
Ergo, the Internet returns. We’ll have colo sites for 3d hosting, too. This is the kind of thing that can and will get cheaper, smaller, faster.
Raph, thanks very much for quoting me, but how about some specific attribution so readers know who wrote it and where it can be found?
See you at SXSW!
Whoops, apologies to Tony & Prokofy — Prokofy I had meant to link you alongside Tony above (and do now). And Tony, you’re right, in my head I was thinking “Huh? they’re both quotes from the already-linked articles I’m contrasting, displayed in parallel, what’s so confusing?” until I realized I was the one confused, because of course they weren’t. So attribution is now added.
Even with open source, even with low-cost government servers with vast tracts of nearly free land, there will still be places that are popular, and that will drive the value train. Content, push media entertainment, big-name events, are all means to temporarily increase the popularity of a venue and the attached properties. In RL, proximity, density, and land value were/are mostly tied to transportation limitations. Will teleportation change the destination value of a rich-content congregation center? It mysteriously seems that popularity is self-propagating. And SL has a leg up in that regard, other worlds notwithstanding.
The story is far from played out. Key is the link between human inspiration and creativity, and the low barrier to entry. A corporation must always justify its expenditures to stockholders. Their SL forays must ultimately show profitability, or the internal SL evangelists will get canned. The inspired artist or small biz owner can just stay on and on, and adjust the mix to suit until s/he blue-screens. Every TV show has a life span (except for “As the World Turns”, apparently). Glitzy corporate draw has little prospect for longevity because it taps into a shallower well. Little bookstores are safe. The human spirit prevails.
There is an island in the middle of Lake Minnetonka, MN, where the well-heeled would congregate by the thousands in the summers during the early 20 century. It was cool, temperature-wise, and it was fun. It took some time to get there by train and boat, but many considered it worth the effort. The economy thrived. Then air conditioning was invented. You can guess the effect on recreational density and land value. In this case, technology prevailed. So it will be with SL and its equivalents. So, who is working on the air conditioner?
Thx Raph — rock on.
just a quick note on prokofy’s “events are king” thing.
…nuh-uh.
that’s a bit backwards my friend. the reason being, you can have content without events, but not events without content. events are tools to push content and not the other way around.
content is, always has been, and always will be: king.
and, to this rant about user created content:
nah. it’s more practical than that. there’s no couch-clearing conspiracy. it’s just about satisfying niches.
big, homogenized networks can’t get down to that granularity of content and still keep it cost effective to produce. sort of like how youtube has hundreds of thousands of “channels” and cable can only carry a few hundred. so, they won’t “own” the content.
and people are loyal to the content producers, not the channels. as we all know, you can’t be a conglomerate without owning the content. and you can’t have draconian rules about keeping the content because you won’t get any new content.
people don’t have equity in nbc. they had it in friends.
now, multiply that effect out to the millions. the network becomes the commodity, not the content.
well. i meant it to be a single, quick note anyway.
m3mnoch.
@David:
“So, who is working on the air conditioner?”
And THAT is the 50bn dollar question. There is a reason SL is being discussed in DAVOS IMO. Its not about how the metaverse is going to facilitate massive change, its about how it can be harnessed and co-oped into a revenue stream and whos going to control those channels.
MSM is withering on the vine, and traditional entertainment channels are facing massive revenue shifts, whats more the old mechanisims of reaching a captive/passive audiance do not apply. Further the new modus and demographic has little to no effective measurement mechanisisms, the old modus coupled (see erinMedia v. Neilsen) with new technology is for lack of a better term “freaking” old media out, in short the old models and measurement of consumption do not work, as per Raph: Dinosaurs.
@Mike:
“If the players provide the content, and the client is open-source, and the server is open source, what does Linden Labs do?”
20,000 servers will result in 19,500 craptastic worlds its those 500 good worlds (and I’ll bet you $10 right now that 80% of those VW’s will be “gamey” rather than the flavor of the SL VW) that (maybe) produce something unique (and maybe can figure out monetization), walled garden or not the sweet spot is to be the network that syndicates 20k personal worlds.
Makes me wish There would open source as well…
Look at blog networks like Gawker and Techcrunch, and etc, or WordPress
How many blogs? How many high traffic? How many monetized?
OTOH there are sweeter spots than being the network. But thats all Air Conditioning talk, and I try to avoid getting all “Meta” midweek 🙂
Good midweek reading from Raph and Prokofy, 🙂
There’s a lot of confusion out there about the differences, connections, contrasts and values of: platforms, media, pipelines, communications tools, features, content, events and instances.
Which is fantastic.
Confusion breeds ineficiency, and at this point in time, inefficiency will breed lots of weird genetic mutations where folks try stuff like VOIP vs. Skype vs. broadband phone… and channel-sponsored worlds vs. brand-sponsored worlds vs. game worlds vs world games. And evolutionary processes tend to get much more interesting in a thick, soupy froth where your brand can attach to my product and be shown on his station using her tool on their channel with our technology.
If you look at the progression of wealth in history and how quickly “importance” changes hand, for thousands of years, we had “ownership of land” at the top of the value chain (feudalism and nationalism). Then it was ownership of the stuff that came out of the land (industrialism). Then the ability to move stuff across the land to various markets (capitalism/imperialism). Then the ability to communicate and know about the stuff (information age). Now, we want to know about the knowing with players like Google sitting on top of the chain; meta-information. And brands like Disney, Apple, Microsoft, News Corp, etc. are incredibly important because they help us learn/feel/grow… as opposed to “have stuff.”
The basic building block isn’t food anymore, or iron, guns, railways, phone-lines or even software. It’s getting close to being, as Prok says, “events.” I still say that content is at the heart of what’s going on, because about 80% of the “events” that I value are time-independent; i.e., I control when they happen and there’s no other person involved at the moment I take advantage of the content. Someone else has created the instance, but the “event” that I’m concerned about is either at their point of creation, or when I click. If that’s just semantics, then Prok and I totally agree and what he’s calling “events” I’m calling “content involvement.” NBD. Just linguistics.
Either way, what we are moving from is a world that valued nouns (land, food, iron), to a world that valued adjectives (faster, cheaper, more), to a world that values verbs (connect, compete, enjoy, read, write, socialize, chat, mash-up, rate, tag, search, post, comment).
These genetic mutations — VWs where your brand meets my service/platform — will be most interesting when they give birth to a space where compelling “new verbs” are possible. “Play” is one of the most exciting verbs we have, and “I can play [blank] there” is a fantastic advertisement for just about anything.
I think that one of the srengths of SL is that the [blank] is so bloody wide open. That’s also one of its greatest weaknesses, as many people prefer highly structured play. Josh and Ed’s post about Dragon Kill Points and how much work guilds put into loot tables and the relative value of WoW items is extremely telling. The “philosophical discussions” of how good/bad a particular dagger might be are… incredibly detailed. If someone put that amount of time into learning how to do 3D modeling or Photoshop, they could have real skills in either SL or some other similar venue. Instead… you end up with the ability/knowledge to compete/participate in a hugely regulated play-space that has been structured by someone else.
Give a man the ability to prim any virtual fish and he’ll fart around for a day and then churn off. Sell him the Official Brady Games Guide with a table showing 17,422 varieties of fish and where to find them in-world and he’ll fish for 18-months.
@Andy:
Whew saved me from having to get all meta! TYVM!
Hey you want excruciating detail? You should see my inbox for requested features r/t guild/clan hosting….no I’m serious, the requested toolsets GM’s are making for the guild hosting piece are pretty in depth.
Fishing for 18 months indeed…
Michael,
On the question of the Internet being all made up of open-source, I see this so many times that it’s ridiculous. I don’t buy it, because I never heard it spoken so extremely, and with such zealotry, until I came to SL. So I have to question it. I will try to find some links on it, but it’s basically the argumentation all the posters on the Herald, ESC, the forums, etc. use (more Linden fanboyz than Lindens, but still, they sing along with this hymnbook, too).
If you say, hey, I dunno, I’m not sure I like this reverse engineering of the client, because libsecondlife so far has only made CopyBot, CampBot, and LandBot to grief others, copy their stuff, suck up their campchair payouts, and unfairly scoop up all the cheap land — so what’s to like about opensource? — you will immediately get a ton of bricks on your head, with withering scorn, in which this or that fanboy and libber says to you, “Oh, so you don’t like Mozilla? You don’t like browsing the Internet with a free browser do you? That’s open source,” etc. etc.
To which I continue to object — but Mozilla doesn’t crash my game, destroy my business, or stalk me in RL over its development, and yet the extreme coders and hackers of SL have done all those things.
Whereupon I get the usual forums crap with the pasteups of the definition of paranoia out of the diagnostic manuals, etc.
But it wasn’t fixed? Because, let’s say I go looking for Parthenon Book Store on 4th Avenue, and it’s gone, and I lose hope of finding “America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe” because Barnes and Noble or Borders will find it too heavy to carry. Of course, I could go searching on amazon or abebooks and probably order it by mail, so sure, that famous Long Tail, which yeah, duh, I have heard about many times, will wag for me on that one. But what if I want “The CIA And American Democracy”? It’s not anywhere, let’s say, on any website. It’s not in any existing book store. Well I could try to see if Yale kept it in print or whatever. But what’s more likely is that I will scour my real-life friends in the real world with big libraries and see if somebody can turn it up live.
What I mean is, if I already know this book, its author, its publisher, I can invoke the Long Tale and find somebody in Kenosha who might just happen to be willing to mail it for me for $4.39 post-paid. But what if I don’t have the information? Wasn’t the whole point of going to the Parthenon in the first place was to ask the old guy at the desk what books he had in general about the CIA and how it funded European intellectuals or whatever? Then he’d scan his live, human memory banks and find it for me. Oh, you say, I could have gotten this on Google? Well, not really. Not this book. If I type “CIA” and “American foundations” I might get some hash (try and you’ll see). I feel that Google is often like the Lenin Library: you can get the KGB’s public archives out of it if you know what to ask for; if you don’t know what to ask for, you can’t expect it to be served up.
In short, the Long Tail is human connections in real life, little bookstores, those people in Fahrenheit 451 pacing in the railyard reciting the books. Montague and his firemen — the Internet — has burned so many things away, losing as much as it is saving.
m3mnoch, I don’t know if you are in SL, but you aren’t making sense to me. It’s not true that “ou can have content without events, but not events without content. events are tools to push content and not the other way around.” The whole point of these big worlds’ fairs of big corporations and their big builds is that they have the big event, they hawk their brand, and then the content really doesn’t matter. If it is copied, ignored, falls apart, it won’t matter. The creators move on to the next gig, and make new content. They don’t care if, say, Text 100 or Reuters still have interesting content. And even the corporate clients using these islands created for them by the metaversal consulting agencies don’t really care if this texture or that building or this flower is copyable, kept, sellable, or stolen. Because it’s not pertinent. Events count, not the content made to hold them — the content are merely stage props. And you have to keep thinking up new and better stage props to keep the shows interesting.
Prok: You can find the book you’re looking for in 1,286 libraries worldwide that catalog the title in WorldCat. Go to:
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/39079019?tab=details
And put in your zip or country locator.
People use the term “open source” to mean lots of different things. And the term “sourcing,” too. Some people just throw it around to mean “free.” Which is not the case at all. Sometimes open source is free. Sometimes it ain’t. Sometimes free stuff isn’t open source and vice not versa.
Borrowing things from the library, for example. It’s neither free nor open source, but it *seems* free to the borrower, because you don’t lay out $29.95 for the title when you walk out the door with it. But you have to bring it back. But for many of the books we borrow from the library… wow… what a great deal. The community as a whole benefits, eh? That’s the whole point of libraries.
Same thing with open source in some cases. Lots of people pay a little bit over long periods of time so that value can be concentrated in specific, discreet increments.
As for content/events… if you’ve got a specific event — let’s say a concert — and particular prims, textures, avies, buildings, etc. have been created to inform/inhabit that event… then, yeah… that content is sub-content for that event. I’d say that the event itself, though, is essentially content, too. Someone is using SL as an “event promotion medium,” in which “event = content,” where “content” is just a synonym for “what you get from the medium.” If, however, my entire experience in SL is my “event,” then not even that single “happening” counts as an event for me, eh? Because it is as fungible and intangible as the prims, skins, textures you talk about being expendable in your example. Go down the other way, though, and you can say that every minor interaction with every single virtual thing-a-ma-bob is an event, in which case every individual piece of prim is content.
Just depends on where you want to draw your value line, I guess.
sorry that doesn’t make sense.
in your “big worlds’ fairs of big corporations and their big builds” example, the brand (and inevitably, the products associated with the brand) is the content. content is the noun in andy’s conversation. it’s the subject of whatever is talked about. content is the “what” field when you’re creating a new meeting in your calendar. it’s what you’re there to discuss, to see or listen to.
it’s the reason there’s an event in the first place.
and, more to andy’s point, the nouns are and will be forever more important. they are the reason for the rest of your thoughts.
what’s the point of “faster, cheaper, more” if there’s nothing that you’re making? “i can do it faster!” um. okay. do what faster? the value is in the what. what are you making cheaper and faster?
and to the silly verbs thing? “connect, compete, enjoy, read, write, socialize, chat, mash-up, rate, tag, search, post, comment” connecting what? competing with what? enjoying what? people don’t care about connecting raisins. they don’t care about socializing with rodents.
none of that stands on its own. not verbs. not adjectives. not events. all of those things circle around a topic — content. all of that is qualified by content. all of that is related to and measured against the noun.
for thousands of years it’s been about nouns. and for the rest of existence, it’ll still be about nouns.
m3mnoch.
Absolutely. For those of you not interested in nouns: can I have your stuff?
😉
@m3mnoch & JuJutsu: I never said nouns — stuff — are without value. Clearly, we need things and always will. What I said was that their *relative* value has moved down the chain.
How much was an idea worth back in feudal times vs. a handful of grain or coal or wood? Could you protect that idea? Until the early 20th century, you couldn’t legally protect a trademark… so how much was a picture (which is arguably not a “thing” but a “thing about a thing) that related to your stuff worth, if anyone could copy it without legal recourse?
Transportation is all about verbs. Getting my “stuff” — let’s say coal — out of the ground in Pennsylvania and to the power-plants in Ohio, NY, Illinois, etc. The people who moved the stuff made way more money than the landowners. And then the people who had the information about how well (adjectives) stuff moved from place to place made more money. Information is all adjectives; it is neither thing nor action, but knowing about them both.
So… if you offered me all your stuff, vs. all the information about how you got all your stuff and where you bought it, how you got it, what you paid, who you connected to with it, etc… I might, indeed, take the info. And if it was crappy stuff vs. good info… Or info about hundreds or thousands or millions of users of crappy stuff, and that info gave good insight into how I could sell them more crappy stuff…
And if you offered me some stuff vs. the experiences (the verbs) you enjoyed with the stuff, well… would you rather own the DVD of 1,000 movies or see the movies? Would you rather go on a lifetime of great vacations that involve renting cars and staying in hotels, or own a beat-up car and a house in the sticks? Would you rather learn (verb) skills (verbs) and charm (verb) so that you can be (verb) funny and suave (adjectives) and have (verb) a ton of hot friends, or own a bunch of tacky crap and be alone among a million shiny toys?
In the early 1900s, something like 90% of our GDP was spent on making food and 40% of all family household income was spent on food and clothes. Now we’re down to like 2% of the GDP going to food and 17% of family income on food/clothes. So… yeah, we still need to eat, and we still need farmers. But we don’t measure *wealth* in the same ways anymore.
The richest man in the world is the Lord of Zeros and Ones, eh?
Prokofy says: “So that whole painfully established world of people making permissined textures and designs of buildings for micropayments only lives on by inertia, ready to be undermined completely as soon as CopyBot and the other bots get working better.”
The fundamental fact that you’re missing our on is that whatever is digital can and will be copied. There is no technical measure that will gaurentee that something won’t be copied. This is just a fact of technology, and there’s no way around it.
Now there’s two options: the first is that you try and enforce non-copyability through the courts. This works, and it’s actually the method that people have relied on for a couple of centuries.
The other way is to decide not to bother, that the stakes are too small to justify the investment in lawyers. In this case, you have to adapt your business model so that it doesn’t rely on selling “property”, but instead on “events” as Prok says. Now “events” doesn’t have to mean one-off: an event can be a club that runs continually for years. What it means is leveraging things which are unique: the personality of the club owners, the one-off performance of a band, the things with give the “property” some context.
In the digital world, context is king – not content 🙂
@Andy
I won’t quibble about marginal utility [too many economists in the offices around me] but did feel like it was necessary to point out the reason the
‘adjectives’ and ‘verbs’ have higher relative value is because of the abundance of ‘nouns’. We’re not moving from a world that valued nouns to a world that values verbs; it’s better to say that we’re moving to a world that values nouns and verbs instead of just nouns.
The richest man is the king of 1’s and 0’s. But then again…
http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/01/news/companies/exxonmobil/index.htm?cnn=yes
Prok: You make good points but I mean c’mon seriously not expecting to get flamed in those forums/platforms for being anti-open source is like hitting yourself on the head with a brick and not expecting a headache.
How many of those SL fanboyz as you call them are Linux users and Hackers full time in thier meatworld jobs?
I’m not downing that, I like both open source and proprietary software, I use Mozilla, and IE, I use Linux, OS X and XP, but I’m pragmatic about tool sets, I know some fellow coders who are like religious zelots and view OS v. Proprietary SW as tantamount to a war for the soul of humanity…SL happens to be the first VW that allows for that (in a big way), so combine a OS hacker and a rabid gamer/VW resident, and well your going to get a rabid hacker fanboi for SL. Its not Linear Algebra, just human nature.
Sub-cultures of people interested in the same thing tend to be xenophobic about the non-believer….
@JuJutsu: “Oil” is material wealth in the same way that the word “verb” is, itself, a noun. Oil is only valuable because moving “things” is very, very valuable.
[Yes, I know… we need it to make plastic, too. I’m making a point here… Give me a break…]
Let me jump in here for a minute (feel free to kick me out).
Value are found in the context and in the utility. It’s that whole “if a tree falls in the forest, will anyone hear it” meme.
Verbs, adverbs, and adjectives are all great. But if you got no noun, all that verbs, adverbs, and stuff doesn’t mean much.
As Raph said:
The old models of industrial age was monopoly, control, captives, etc.
The new models of information age is developing to be the Long Tail, Wisdom of the Crowds, Open Source, personalization, etc.
Some would say it’s about the “experience”, the “relationships”, and the “self-actualizations”.
Frank
@Frank, who said: “If you got no noun, all that verbs, adverbs, and stuff doesn’t mean much.”
Right. But if you got all kinds of nouns, all of a sudden the verbs, adjectives and stuff are much more valuable. Because the ability to move, leverage, think, experience, etc. becomes — comparatively — more important.
If I have to spend every waking moment in a quest for food, then your ability to entertain me with any kind of “content” (story, movie, sport, law, education, etc.) is meaningless. Because it will be negative value; it will be a distraction from the noun “food.” If I got none, I die.
If, however, it only takes me (relatively speaking) 15 minutes of my day to earn my daily bread, and a total of 8ish hours to earn enough money to then have 8ish hours to be entertained… and I then have a (relatively) lot of money to spend on a diminishingly important pile of stuff vs. an increasingly interesting pile of verbs… well, I’ve got my main “nouns” covered. Let’s dance, as I like to say.
Books are less interesting than not starving to death, but more interesting than just sitting there. Movies that talk are more interesting (in general) than those that don’t. Color is more interesting than B&W. A choice of 13 brands of toothpaste at 4 different stores within easy driving distance is more interesting (not necessarily more effective) than 1 brand that I drive an hour to get.
3D is more interesting than 2D. Why? Because it offers choices. Note I did not say “better” or, again, “more effective.” But “more interesting.” IE, “able to generate more verbs,” perhaps. Everything that can be done in 2D can be done in 3D, because “3” encompasses “2.” Not that I want to run a Firefox client as my main browser in SL today…
Verb beats noun because verb implies noun + idea or motion. I ain’t saying nouns aren’t important. Stuff is good. I like my stuff. But you can usually take a noun out of the picture and replace it with something else. Whereas the verbs that we value stay pretty much the same, and when we find better ways to deliver them to customers… yowza. Wood is important, yes. Need wood to make paper. Why? Because we like to read. But is the wood as important as the read? Is the oil is important as the go? If you can find a way to make the go without the oil… ba-da-bing.
Doesn’t it have to be replaced with another noun? In other words
The oil can go away but it’ll be replaced by by another noun – hydrogen or ethanol or whatever.
At any rate, the reason Andy’s comment struck me was something in the starting post…
I’m not sure there’s a single ‘web world’, aren’t there multiple ‘web worlds’ predicated on different infrastructures? Lots of [arguably boring] places don’t have broadband. My In-Laws live in one. The ‘web world’ in rural Kansas isn’t the same one as in Toronto. Cable modem > 56k dialup.
Along similar lines, I’ve been reading really fascinating stuff about how cellular telephony is driving economic activity in third worldish places. For some things cellular > landline. But what about web worlds. Someone can access the web via cell phone but will either SL model be accessable and workable via cell phone? Will Project X from Areae?
I can’t fault Andy’s general argument but I have to think that nouns still matter and that all nouns aren’t the same.
JuJutsu: I’m not really arguing the point that nouns don’t matter, nor that they are the same. And my point was exactly yours — that you can replace one noun with another; but you don’t replace one verb (or adjective) with another. If the point of noun-train is to verb-move noun-coal from place to place because you want to use the coal to verb-heat your noun-house… we have some various value judgments going on. The train owner controls the noun-thing, which provides the verb-service that hauls the noun-stuff that accomplishes the verb-goal in the noun-place-thing (house).
Now, you as the end user, care about being warm. That’s a verb-state. If I invent a method that involves say… heating oil instead of coal, which is 1/3 the cost and safer and cleaner to you the consumer, you don’t care that the noun-coal has changed to noun-oil. You care that the verb-heat is the same, but with a better value prop. On the other hand, if I say, “I can do something different with this coal. Same noun, different verb. I can use it, if ground up fine, to make some weirdo chemicals used to improve industrial solvents. Noun-coal, verb-dissolve-PCBs.” You, as the consumer of noun-coal/verb-heat don’t give a crap. As the owner of the coal you do, sure. But almost all economic change is driven by new ways to do old things; not new things to do with old things, except they be part of the former.
As part of that process, what you end up with are some “higher-order” value holdings that are less likely to change over time or flex with shifts in the economy, because they are (to wax metaphoric) related to the value infrastructure rather than simply commodities. Roads are higher on the chain than the things that drive on them, for example, because roads change less frequently. Cars need roads just as much as horses. And the 2007 model cars need the roads as much as the 1963 models. A printing press is more valuable than a collection of books that it prints that may have the same sale price because books can be out-of-date.
I would argue that these “infrastructure nouns” are more verb-y. I would argue that SL is more verb-y than WoW, too, because it allows for more action inside it. Right now, clearly, WoW is waaaaay more valuable than SL. It’s like a pile of gold or an oil well. Very nice noun. And, sure… there’s still lots of value to be had in nouns. I’m not arguing that.
But verbs are more interesting. I’d rather be a printing-press than a book, and if I had to be stuck on a deserted island with one 3D, immersive technology I think I’d choose SL over WoW. Even though I played WoW for (I estimate) 20x as much time as I’ve been in SL. Why? Because I could, given enough time on that desert island, build many WoW-y things in SL. Whereas the opposite is in no way true.
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