Tiger's Tales

Now ol’ Shelly didn’t have the best business model. Her little seashore shop sold a product that anyone walking by could pick up out of the sand for nothing but a little back flexing and sandy hands. (And with a re-purposed pooper-scooper cane, even those costs could be eliminated.)

In second life, we have no production costs either. Make one, and from then on it’s pure profit. The problem comes when you realize it’s all just data…

Music first became a physical thing in 1877 with “Mary and her Little Lambs” first hit single. For over a hundred years, even while the physical shape changed many times, that tie to the physical world was unbroken.

And then (if “then” can be used for something that, viewed locally, was quite gradual) music became data. And without a physical presence, it became knowledge… For what is data without the mind to experience it? (This isn’t to say that minds are all that great, just that data is pretty worthless without them.)

Oh, music wasn’t first. Words were the first to exist as pure data, usually while moving from place to place in semaphore, telegraph, or smoke signals. It’s easy to reproduce words from memory, so copying is a snap.

But few of us can recite an entire novel word-for-word from memory. Passage through a brain isn’t a valid copy option for longer works. The same goes for music — While you might “know” a song, you probably couldn’t reproduce it, in its entirety, from memory.

But now we have mechanical minds, and they CAN “know” a whole set of encyclopedias and recite it on command by heart. They CAN know the most elaborate orchestration and recreate it perfectly.

In the beginning, words and music were free. No one could buy or sell them except perhaps to pay for their initial creation. Then they became physical things and there was a market for them, same as for pottery, swords, or 10 penny nails.

Now they are ephemeral again and new ideas are being worked out to hold onto those slippery markets. Apple’s iTunes made it easier and faster to get your ephemeral music than hunting the track down on P2P and waiting for the download to trickle in from Timbuktu.

Shelly found her niche, eventually. She imported shells from other beaches (often in exchange for her own) so she had some that couldn’t be found on the beach outside. Coupling that with her sideline of buying up middle school shop projects and hotgluing shells to them, she was keeping herself in SPF 30 and mai tais just fine.

But still, people WILL come in off the beach to buy, for 39 cents, the very same Trapdoor Murex they could pick up out of the surf themselves because A) they don’t know any better, or B) it’s more convenient.

Okay… There’s nothing about permissions here. In fact, I’ve made little mention of Second Life at all. If there’s a connection, it’s just to say that Second Life is WEIRD. It’s unlike anything else. It’s data masquerading as physical objects. And the illusion is so complete, that people insist on sticking with physical concepts of ownership and marketing and even space, when the “reality” of what they are actually dealing with doesn’t fit any of those models.

Not that I blame anyone for this. It’s not like there ARE any models that DO fit. Oh, there are some that seem to at least lean in the right direction. But if they lean anymore they’ll just fall over. They still don’t fit this wacky “world” we find ourselves in each time we log on.

No… I think we really need to let loose the bounds of what we know and step out into the void to think new thoughts. Because new thoughts are needed for a new environment.

But that person reading over your shoulder (not YOU good reader, never YOU) is probably too scared to let the Shore of the Known slip from view. “Throw out ownership,” I cry, “and replace it with Creator, Possessor, and Permissions!” To which Mr. Backseat-Blog-Reader shouts, “You can’t do that! Someone will walk off with my stereo!”

But it’s just one idea of many, all of which will be tried somewhere by someone in the fullness of time. I know, because I’m full of it them!

Oh look! A Trapdoor Murex! I just saved 39 cents!