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danah on Knol: “content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation”
See also Doc; Knol is a community site without community.
Vimeo Commits Suicide
Insulting and expelling their biggest users in a Friendster-esque move.
Always Use Zipcode
Experimental postal hacking.
Farhad Manjoo Misses the Point of the Long Tail
It’s not the height of the curve that matters, but the area under it .
Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest
Some biting entries, but why are all the scientists white males?
A Still Life in Google
Philipp Lenssen is an Internet treasure.
Brad DeLong Is Confused About His Western Themes
Best use of embedded YouTube videos in a blog post ever.
Stopping Google
The Boston Globe discusses search engine law policy; don’t miss the illustration, which makes Google look like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
How to Make Icons
A/k/a “Andy Pressman’s Sexxx Farm,” it’s old but still amusing.
Is Gold Farming Mandatory? A Question in Applied Virtual World Ethics
7 November 2007
— 2 Comments
The following propositions are at least plausibly true:
At least on some ethical theories, is it not therefore mandatory to purchase farmed gold? If you use money you’d spend on your personal entertainment to do it, you make the gold-farming sellers better off, cause no significant harm to yourself, and hurt only the entertainment of the other players. Suppressing the trade in farmed gold means impoverishing people in developing countries—for the sake of players’ fun. It’s possible to justify that, but it takes some contortions.
Some people will object that the inhabitants of a virtual society should have the right to choose the rules they will live by. That objection begs the question of who the inhabitants are, and why the interests of the gold-farming poor can be ignored. If the claim is that by entering into the virtual world, all participants have agreed to a rule against gold farming, the reply is that the choice to enter or not to enter is not as meaningfully free for the professional as it is for the player.
This question is one instance of the larger question of global inequality and justice. Indeed, recognizing the larger question provides a stronger counter-claim: there might be better ways to alleviate inequality than by buying farmed gold. (On the other hand, gold farmers are to most accounts highly industrious and developing sophisticated computer skills, so this might be a comparatively effective form of wealth transfer. Back to the first hand, the developed-country middlemen or developing-country elite capital owners might be taking most of the surplus. And so on and so on.) What gives the social question of farmed gold its piquancy is the collision of player and professional, so that the one might seem to have a special ethical duty to the other, a duty that both transcends the general moral claim of redistribution and is also profoundly shaped by it.
Of course, this is only the weak version of the argument. The strong version maintains that one has a duty not merely to buy farmed gold in the worlds one participates in, but in fact to join virtual worlds for the sole purpose of buying farmed gold. Morally mandatory leisure, if you will.
amused
04:43 PM on 9 November 2007
The author should consider working an extra hour at Starbuck’s and sending that money to someone who needs it, instead of having the same thoughts on the same topic that thousands of other academics and students have already had.
Spending hours reading and writing redundant blogs for personal amusement while people elsewhere are starving right now is morally dubious at best.
Hey, why stop at gold farming? There are opium poppy farmers in Afghanistan just trying to scrape together a living: your propositions seem to apply to their situation, too (except maybe the one about opium poppy farming being fun).
If you want to give money to gold farmers, why do you feel you need to buy something from them rather than just giving them it?
Richard