[NetBehaviour] Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians.

[xDxD]

Hello there!
> Tony Walsh has, as others do, some doubts about whether Second Life is
> sustainable as a business. But he also poses another question that I
> hadn't come across before: "Is Second Life sustainable ecologically?"
>   

this is a manifestation of one of the things that move me and 
penelope.di.pixel in researching what we are calling NeoRealismo Virtuale.

attitude towards technology (and all that comes with it, including 
virtual worlds) is often bipolar.

example: people talk about the degrees of freedom obtained through 
digital technologies yet they tend to forget that such a freedom depends 
on tons of infrastructure (and on the powers - political and economic - 
that own and control them) including hundreds of kilometers of fibers, 
satellites, thousands of buildings filled with underpaid employees on 
precarious 1 month contracts, tons of equipment that has to be built....

and it's just an example.

cognitive capitalism, and the immaterial economies that come with it, 
uses this separation as a tool to move the struggle for power on a 
"personal" level: from parlaments to lifestyle.

models that are radically new (and sustainable in an ecologically 
integrated way) are possible, but they seem to depend on different 
speeds, hyerarchies and dimensions that the ones currently enacted 
through digital technologies.

virtual worlds are a perfect example for this: as an example (among 
thousands) they could transform business, social, relational models in a 
"sustainable" direction by changing the need for people to move 
geographically. But the significant part of this switch would probabily 
come not with a setup that is similar to teh one exemplified by Second 
Life, but with a distributed one (such as the peer to peer one that is 
being developed with OpenMetaverse), based on small "islands" of peer to 
peer autonomy collaborating to create the "whole".

something that looks like a civil, technologically enabled, anarchy.

it seems as if the the interesting part of the dialogue (and action) is 
really (and once again) moving away from services and turning its 
attention  to the body and to architectural intervention.


byebye
xDxD