This story is about the illicit use of copybot to copy virtual objects in the Second Life virtual world. Please see this cnet report.

The relevance of this to recent debates on Long Tail
about the economics of abundance is worth considering. It reflects
current issues around the disruptive influence of replication tech in
the real world and the internet. There is a nice fractal re-iteration
of the same patterns in the real world, the net and the virtual Second
Life world. These have all involved a disruption of business models
dependant on certain types of scarcity, which threaten the economic
status quo.

It is also interesting that the creators of copybot are open source
developers. Comparisons with the development of Linux, and other open
source software, spring to mind. Sci-fi scenarios of cornicopia
machines also arise.

What I find most significant about the copybot story is that it
suggests that the structure of the human economy is hard-wired or at least
sufficiently culturally ingrained to be amenable to complete
virtualisation.

We have a sense that the economy is an external, immutable reality. The
copybot story suggests that the economy is actually an emanation of
human behaviour.

If this is true, it may be possible to re-engineer the human economy.

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Posted in Economics Main Page by paul bambury No Comments Yet