New World Newsfeed: Chris Anderson Cites Second Life as Reference for his Next Book

Recent dispatches from the outside world...

Free is the name for the upcoming book from the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine.  His case for rethinking value in a post-scarcity economy, it's likely to be as influential as his last book, The Long Tail. In a recent keynote at Nokia where he offers a preview (Windows video at this link) he offers an interesting case study to bolster his argument, about 36 minutes in:

When you think about it, what Second Life has done is made the physical world, the buildings and things like that, free, so we're now seeing what would happen if electricity was free, what would happen if concrete were free, what would happen if architecture was free, we're running that experiment in Second Life, because the marginal cost of doing so is so close to zero...

The significance of the reference cannot be overstated, because only six months ago, Chris commissioned and published a story decrying the failures of real world advertising efforts Second Life, and after I disputed much of it, explained his editorial reasoning on his blog with a post entitled, "Why I Gave Up On Second Life".  Then just a couple weeks ago, I noticed a quote where he amended that to say,  "We’re bullish on SL as a consumer experience and bearish on it as a marketing vehicle."  Now in this Nokia talk, that statement's been amplified even further, elevating Second Life into a proof-of-concept for his next book's thesis. 

It's an impressively speedy evolution of perspective, but it seems to be part of a larger trend, considering the strong reappraisal by Mark Glaser of PBS and related posts noticed by others.  Gratifying to me is how the focus has moved away from mixed reality marketing-- an important subject, but considering the medium, never the most central one.  Second Life was never the next big thing because American Apparel could build a store inside it, and consequently, was never the next big bust when hardly any avatar shopped there.  Instead, if I'm hearing Chris right in his talk, he's moving in the direction of seeing SL in far more disruptive terms-- as a prototyping platform for the global economy-- something I try to describe in this GigaOM post.

Hat tip: Csven Concord, who has important observations here.

Comments

[Cyn Vandeverre]

We also see what it would be like if anti-gravity was free. A different world, indeed.

[csven]

So you're in Hawaii, eh? ;) Merry Christmas, mon.