Virtual Economies! Ludocapitalism! Bullets! (A Q2 FY'08 Update)
It's been a busy few months, not that you'd know it from the pace of updates around here.
Or maybe you would. I suppose, after all, that if the Internet has left standing even one detectable difference between the professional writer and the "amateur," it's that the professional writers' blogs reliably go dead when they actually have work to do -- procrastination being the mother of 99 percent of blog writing, and more writing being typically the working writer's least favorite form of procrastination.
But I digress, which is also typical, and also partly why I'm loath to check in here when the workload gets heavy. I mean, one minute I'm logged into Blogger bent on dashing off a quick, three-line announcement of my latest low-profit side project, and next thing you know I've spent an even lower-profit week unwinding the four-year narrative behind said project.
Perhaps the lesson is that there'd be more profit all around if I were to save the narratives for paying gigs and approach this blog thing here as more of a never-ending bullet list. In which spirit I present herewith, and without apology the accumulated bullet points of my fiscal year to date:
Made my debut as a professional artist on March 13, more precisely, when after two all-nighters in a Belgian hotel room completing the aforementioned handbound copies of Play Money, I handed them over to the organizers to be marketed alongside other art objects in the festival's "Art for Sale" vending-machine exhibition
Made my debut as a professional artist, just in case that wasn't clear
I'm digressing, aren't I? Sorry!
Vacationed March 19-25 in Costa Rica, home of Latin America's least remarkable national culture and most adorable local fauna (may I recommend the squirrel monkeys?)
Gave another talk on virtual economies and ludocapitalism, April 2, at Rochester Institute of Technology, invited there by the awesome Elizabeth Lane Lawley
Gave another talk, yes, but not just yet another talk, no, this talk was the 2008 Harry J. Skornia Distinguished Lecture in Public Broadcasting, delivered by me to the assembled bright minds of the University of Illinois's fifth annual Communication Collaboration Conference, April 11, on the subject of, um, virtual economies and ludocapitalism
Gave a talk, April 19, in Gijón, Spain, at Homo Ludens Ludens, "an international exhibition and conference examining play as a principal element of today's world," which was a lot more interesting than it sounds, and yes, the talk was about virtual economies and ludocapitalism, except I changed it up this time with a daring and perhaps deranged consideration of possible connections between the rooms in China where gold farmers work live and the Chinese room invented by John Searle as a thought experiment in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, about which more later, I expect
Sat on a panel on Relationships between WoW and the "Real World", May 10, at Day 2 of Convergence of the Real and the Virtual -- "The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft," at which, curiously enough, I said very little about virtual economies, ludocapitalism, or anything else, it being just about all I could do to sort out who among the chatty throng of blood elves, Taurens, trolls, and orcs assembled for the event in the sewers of Undercity were my co-panelists
Attended an NSF-sponsored workshop on Productive Play, May 16-18, at UC Irvine, California, where I expected to spend the weekend talking about virtual economies and ludocapitalism but instead embarked on a stimulating tour of every subject you'd imagine coming up with Thomas Malaby, Tom Boellstorff, T. L. Taylor, David Shaffner, Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar, Pavel Curtis (!), and similarly insightful veterans of online games' long march to academic respectability packed into a room together with bottomless free coffee for two days
Wrote sundry short items, throughout April and May, for the UK daily Telegraph, on topics ranging from sex with robots to the future of the Internet to the rise of the brickfilm auteur because, it turns out, there actually are other things to talk about besides, well, you know
To Lake County, With Love
Today I honor the people of Gary, Indiana, and their heroic stand against the forces of quite possibly irredeemable jackassery in Tuesday's primary election. I honor them with a juliandibbell.com first: A poem of my own composition, entitled Indiana Toll-Road Freestyle (.pdf) and written a couple years back, mostly during the reveries of my twice weekly commute between South Bend and Chicago. (Heartfelt apologies to Rakim, Eminem, and other rappers whose flow I seem to have had the nerve to think I could textually approximate. Much love to Lake County.)
12:49 PM
Friday, April 25, 2008
Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"
Regular readers of the Daily Telegraph's book-reviews section may already be aware of my feelings on the matter, but I don't mind saying it again: Clay Shirky's new book kicks some serious Web 2.0-punditry butt.
1:58 PM
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Dept. of Mixed Bags: MY TINY LIFE Is Free At Last!
I am pleased to announce that my first book, the widely cited but long out-of-print MY TINY LIFE: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (Being a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle and the Author's Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO), can now be downloaded in its entirety in a handsomely formatted PDF edition, completely free of charge. Or, if you prefer, the fine folks at Lulu will package up a perfect-bound paperback version for you at the shockingly reasonable price of only $17.48 ($5 of which goes straight to me). Either way, you get what for the last eight years or so could not be had for love or money: A brand new and fully authorized copy of MY TINY LIFE, yours to read, lend, dog-ear, shelve, and otherwise make use of in whatever way your heart desires and copyright permits.
I am pleased to announce this, yes, but I'll be honest with you: I'm not nearly as pleased as I was hoping I'd be.
I was hoping, actually, to make a rather grander announcement, one that I've been looking forward to through years of anxious and improbably complicated preparation but now, at last, should probably just hand-deliver straight to the shitcan of my broken dreams. I was going to announce today that MY TINY LIFE had been liberated -- not merely launched anew but born again under a Creative Commons "copyleft" license and thus set loose for any passing amateur to upload, remix, mashup, and otherwise repurpose in all the many fruitful ways that copyright, precisely, fails to permit.
Except it hasn't. And while the long, sad tale of how it came to this could easily be reduced to a couple sentences (and probably should), I'm going to risk a fuller telling now because, well, there's the off chance I am not the only person on the planet for whom it's news that carving out a little open space in the midst of the existing intellectual-property regime could possibly be as difficult as this.
God Help Me, It's True: I *Was* on Charlie Rose Once
Just when I'd finally convinced myself it was all a bad dream I had sometime between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the flight of the white Ford Bronco, the evidence resurfaces:
Skip to about 35:00 or 36:00. See the guy with the tragic early-'90s ponytail sitting to Charlie's left? Apparently that's me.
The discussion, I believe, concerned some kind of enormous alternate-reality chamber (recently declassified by NASA maybe?) in which people from all over the world were meeting to engage in social and even sexual interactions so arcane in nature that Mr. Rose needed it all explained to him by a panel of experts consisting of myself, Dr. Ruth's evil clone, and Ensign Wesley Crusher. I may not have all the details right, but that's as much as I can figure out for now, because I'm just not strong enough to watch this with the sound on.
Somebody please tell me it's not as mortifying as it looks.
7:33 AM
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
PLAY MONEY Goes Soft Great news, flexible-media fans: Play Money, my latest book, has just been relaunched in a convenient, low-cost paperback edition -- complete with a handsome new cover image (custom crafted by top-tier Second Life prim-sculptor Aimee Weber) and over 50% fewer typos!
1:53 PM
Thursday, August 30, 2007
The Best of Technology Writing 2007
I came home yesterday afternoon to a happy surprise: a box containing five pristine, shrink-wrapped copies of The Best of Technology Writing 2007, fresh off the UPS truck. This delivery and a token hundred bucks were my entire compensation for permitting the anthology's publisher, the University of Michigan Press, to include an article of mine in the collection, and I have to say I'm feeling very nicely compensated right now.
Look, it's hard to explain. I do understand that the plummy Steven Johnson quote on the book's cover ("just superb") doesn't necessarily reflect that fine tech writer's opinion about my own contribution or even, given the nature of blurbs, any honest opinion at all. I'm also pretty sure that, as is conventional with these sorts of collections, the bulk of the selections were made by some uncredited editorial functionary before it fell to the editor of record, legendary tech writer Steven Levy, to make the final cuts.
Still, just knowing that anyone in a position of editorial authority found my efforts serviceable enough to line up alongside pieces by Clive Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Howe, and the other tech-journalism luminaries assembled here is probably as close as I will ever come to the warm endorphin rush of getting tenure.
Oh, and as for that article of mine that made the cut, it's called "Dragon Slayers or Tax Evaders," and it's a report I wrote for Legal Affairs magazine about my vain attempts to get a straight answer from the IRS on the taxability of virtual assets. You can read it here if you like. Or if you prefer, you can read it in one of those pristine, shrink-wrapped copies I found on my doorstep yesterday. I'm keeping one of them for myself, but the rest are going out at my expense to the first four people who ask.
11:53 AM
kicks some serious Web 2.0-punditry butt.
