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Saturday, November 19, 2005 |
LOSING THE DETAILS. A farewell to Second Life's first virtual sweatshop worker.
"I'm at hometown stay with my parents now, they discuss about my future with me," she informs me. "they said that I can't play game for money all my life, so they decide to let me go to school or find other jobs, and i'm still thinking and considering, I can't do a decide..." She's hoping to get a computer of her own that'll let her return to Second Life-- only this time, with her own account. She wants to come back to Second Life, that is to say, as herself. And I write back to tell her she should.
. . .
In her e-mail, she wonders if there are others like her, working in online worlds, turning a virtual wage into something like a real one. "I want to know if there has same peoples in USA or other countrys play game for money too as me," she says. "I want to know if playing game is a new pattern job all over the world or only appear in China." And I respond to her that it is a new kind of job, and not just in China. (Her question makes me suspect she was kept in the dark by her old employer, able to go on the Internet to earn Linden Dollars and other online world currency, but not to learn she was part of a much larger cottage industry.)
"If do that means game still has future," she reasons. "can be a good way to get money to me." And I reply to her that it can be. Only now, I tell her, if she can come back with her own account, the wages she earns will be hers to keep, and her identity hers to own. I hope she does.
[New World Notes]
10:41:34 PM 
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Charitable Computer Nerds Drawn to Africa.
When an average person is charitably inclined, the objects of that charitable impulse are most likely to be local. The local opera company gets a big check. Hurricane victims in a far-away corner of the nation, though their need is larger, get a smaller check. Unfortunates in distant countries get almost nothing. Government policies seem to reflect the will of the average person. Lots of money is spent on domestic programs, helping the people we know and see every day; comparatively little is spent on foreign aid.
For American computer nerds, this relationship is reversed. Bill Gates gets rich. His thoughts turn to malaria, AIDS, and going over to Africa to try to hold back the tide of these diseases. The Google founders are talking about their foundation concentrating on Africa and they just bought a personal Boeing 767 to make it easy to get back and forth. A visit to www.itconversations.com reveals that when techie movers and shakers gather, e.g., at Poptech, they talk about how they are going to fix Africa. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, decided that his next act would be the $100 laptop for children in Third World countries.
How to explain this difference? Perhaps the average person has a lot of emotional ties and uses these to guide his or her giving. Whereas the computer nerd has mostly been isolated from other humans in his or her community. When the time to do something charitable, he does a Web search for "unfortunate losers" and finds out that there are lots more in Africa than in Seattle or the Bay Area. If you have no personal connections and the people to be helped are mostly just statistics, it is just as satisfying to help people far away as geographically close. When the people far away are in worse shape than the people nearby, it becomes more satisfying to help them.
[The folks who've actually spent time in Africa feel a lot less sorry for Africans. One fellow at the Hacker's Conference spent nearly a year on a road trip through Africa with www.dragoman.com. He said "In a lot of the villages where we stayed, folks only have to work about two months per year to pay for all of their food and shelter. They're so much happier than Americans." My friend who work in public health and have spent years in Tanzania don't shed tears for the locals, either. And there is some evidence that Africans may not be as bad off economically as the dry statistics suggest. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2005-10-16-africa-cellular_x.htm notes that "an estimated 100 million of [Africa's] 906 million people" have mobile phones.] [Philip Greenspun Weblog]
10:34:08 PM
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Dave:
A two-page fax from Markos Zuniga (DailyKos) and Michael Krempasky (RedState.org) sent to members of Congress on November 9, apparently on behalf of bloggers, requesting an exemption from campaign finance law. Let's look into the ideas behind this, and who will profit from it, and why. It's not clear to me if this is something we should support.
5:21:36 PM
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. . . network's back . . . yea!
5:04:27 PM
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