I butt pluged it

ren

Are you looking over your shoulder at me when you write?! Hope not!

Hey, I used to go to Smith and Wollensky’s all the time, to be sure, in the grill room in the back. The fried onion strings are great. If you need to pick the one place in New York that actually does the “New York Strip Steak” right, that’s the place. But it’s overpriced. You could get nearly the same thing at Tad’s, without the fabulous onions of course, and for a fraction of the price.

You know, a mutual friend of ours had the really final mot on this thing, and I won’t embarass him in case he needs to keep his bridges unburned. He said, basically: “You’ve heard of the smart money? This is the dumb money”. The smart money is on X, on virtual worlds, on the most cutting edge blah blah thing that can be defined by people in buttery-soft loafers. The dumb money is still money though. And there’s still a lot of it to blow.

Next stop: take over or overthrow Terra Nova. Or make a parallel academic site to it.

There are other ways and places to join the conversation. You can participate by going to metaverse meetups, or by being a metaverse blog hound, and possibly even by being an academic. I’m just pointing out that most of the other participants in VW 2007 seemed indifferent to the conversation in any form other than talk about ROI. An elitist thing to say? Well, if you can take an elitist stance towards the Country Club/Smith and Wollensky crowd, then hell yeah I’m an elitist and I’m not going to apologize for it.

Exact quote was:

I don’t know who the tall chick with the beard is but she sure is smart.

It happens to all of us; we lose interest in our shiny new thing, and move on to something else. I think Philip is kind of there.

Regarding his speeches, they are pretty much predictable now: 1/3 part childhood memories, 2/3rds part “I’m a visionary.” Honed to an art, even. It’s good for getting investors, but I think maybe even there it gets old after a while.

Wonder what he might be interested in doing next?

coco

I’ve always thought that people have different genders inside them than are in their physical manifest, and that’s why they pick the opposite in the Metaverse.

I believe it was Heraclitus in fact who famously said “Although reason is common to all men, most men behave as if they have their own understanding.” And they do — most people who are smart and doing something creative often really do have a special understanding that is superior and not accessible to all but then…they don’t realize they are multiplying because of the factors of their age, and other equally great minds in fact reached that in fact not-so-special understanding, too — so it happens that the particularly bright really suffer from the complex, “we’re the smart ones surrounded by idiots”.

Of course, often they are right. I can certify that there are some real mediocrities hanging around the Metaverse, especially the types that try to force you first to shake their hand, then tell you their avatar’s name to grief you, when you find out they are notorious griefers and stalkers and assholes.

The people sweating in the poplin suits, however, aren’t so stupid, Uri. Some from Columbus, Ohio may be sweating — or may be not. It’s the nature of the Metaverse that it may be happening in Columbus, Ohio and not in Austin or Ann Arbor or New Yori. Some of them sweating are merely working out — fear will drive them to amazing heights of performance, and they’ll be the ones making the money and you won’t.

And…they’ll be the ones paying for it. Somebody always has to pay.

There wins the advertising accounts — which is why I awarded them the half-time score, but I’m not awarding them the win on the conference (stay tuned for my blog). But you don’t know that some kid awakening today in Columbus, Ohio who obtained his ticket to the Metaverse by Virtual Laguna Beach isn’t the next community leader who leverages the content and forces even the game company to change its ways. I pick Columbus, Ohio simply because it’s in flyover territory for the bi-coastal set and my mother’s side of the family were settled there for a time.

It’s often the case, Uri, as you know, that the mediocrities and the not-so-brilliant but just stupidly persistent or egotistical or feted are the ones who write and get their books published, and you don’t, for all kinds of reasons, even being the smarter and by far the preferred read.

You may have decided that the smart set of the Metaverse are now all collected by Redpoint Ventures at Megu via Tony Walsh. Ok, but not the only smart people and only for today. That’s how it is in the Metaverse unlike any other place we’ve been in before. Like *you* said about Hilton Head where Philip was headed, “it must not be interesting if I’m not there” any one of us smart people could say about Megu.

And what the job of the intellectual is in this environment is just not to get bought. Just to keep thinking independently and creatively. Just to keep creating, and not get bought by any man in any suit or woman in non-suit, for that matter.

That’s why someone like me has to keep smashing at each feted circle, because thought stops taking place, and people don’t think or try to prevent others from thinking and speaking on something like the Lindens’ forums — even though they imagine themselves to be having “the best” conversation about space, time, and the human condition ther.

Ignoring the exigencies of ROI is something two kinds of people can ignore: the very rich and the very poor.

>Nice take on the night. I suppose every emergent societal shift has the people shrieking like cheerleaders trying to get a return on their investment, and the people who just want to see how things work.

People shrieking like cheerleaders trying to get an ROI are in fact the people *paying for* the next societal shift. They make it happen at one level or another. And the people who think it’s better to “just want to see how things work” and it depends on them only have their heads up their asses if they think everyone will let them just be cool and groovy and sandbox for ever and destroy other people’s possibilities or destroy their freedoms. And the “people who just want to see how things work,” while they may pride themselves on being more clever than others are stupid if they don’t realize the truth already long ago discovered by the Whole Earth Catalogue people: “We can’t put it together; it *is* together” — if they substitute that with “We can’t put it together; but we can take it apart.”

>I wish I weren’t stuck in SE Michigan.

If you are truly the smart and groovy fellow you imagine yourself to be, you will make the Metaverse and all the cool stuff happen even in SE Michigan or in the Metaversal places themselves. It shouldn’t have to wait for the party to get to your town. And it won’t.

>Redpoint cut them from the herd to ask them their own questions, and they weren’t asking about ROI.

Uri, it’s amazing how people *can* depart from their quotidienne concerns about ROI when invited to dinner paid for by others. Good! But then what? Who pays next? And…what, Redpoint, a *venture capital company* is NOT asking about ROI *at some point*? Hello??? That’s simply foolish.

Sure, the salon needs to happen. And we need leading salons. We need 18th century salons for this new thing, which isn’t so new. I found quite a few people experiencing disappointment and annoyance with Terra Nova’s obsession with ludology and gaming and hatred of virtual worlds and even social media; people into social media and virtual worlds are hating on games in stupid ways, too.

We need new academic “schools” and “salons” everywhere, it’s that big a project, nothing short of the next stage of human evolution. And you have to stay independent and thinking, because it could be happening anywhere and should happen in many places at once.

And ultimately, yes, these people with the VC just want to control humanity and shape the next phase of mass media, mass consciousness, politics. So in its way, Uri, it’s *just as much* about control as the control of the users that the uncool game companies want to increase so as to be able to place products. It’s just more subtle.

Just don’t get bought.

>Unfortunately, the school of Athens is currently still in the mindset that you have to be a speaker/donor at VW07 to be important.

Well, they missed some key people like Raph Koster and even they know they can’t do something without Raph Koster. Raph Koster was at some more important tekkie conference that was probably the real place to be anyway *shrugs*.

>The real philosophers were at the meetup event Friday announcing how they are going to reform Patent Law. They were just as cool, but instead of being invite-only, it was an effort to engage the community of talented thinkers as a whole.

I’d tend to have to agree with Hiro here — but not because “patent lawyers” are the Next Big Thing — they aren’t — but it’s just one of the many simulaneously interesting conversations that the Metaverse is producing and it needs to produce now. Many minds have to be thrown at it.

I personally am not at my best conversing about space, time, and the human condition when I have to be at a hot, stuffy, noisy bar.

To the extent that any gathering can be OPEN rather than CLOSED it will be better as long as it doesn’t become so open as to be overcrowded or abusive. People make select little Moet-drinking clubs because they don’t want abusiveness or boring or uncool but then it closes down on itself and grows stale.

The conversation we started as a group in the Thai restaurant and kept going through the stupid bars Flipper likes to pick that were hot and noisy back to my house was about whether or not open source will work as a movement to move all the projects forward, and the mix of proprietary and open source that must be found, something of course heatedly debated. I was glad to have a chance to talk to the LibSL guy and the IBM guy and many others, I’ll try to write more about this.

I wish I weren’t stuck in SE Michigan.

Very interesting writeup.

Flip, I find out you were there with my yellow label baby I’m gonna open a can of whoopass on you.

Hiro, I think the interesting thing about the Redpoint meeting was not so much the people that were there, but the questions that were asked. Yeah it was the same people as on the program, but Redpoint cut them from the herd to ask them their own questions, and they weren’t asking about ROI.

Could they have learned more at the Friday meetup? Probably.