Gingrich's Second Life on Ryan Lizza's New Yorker Blog!

I sent a Tweet about Newt Gingrich's Second Life to Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker's political correspondent and among the best in the business, and I'm happy to see he's just blogged about it on the magazine's site. Lizza goes the extra mile and connects Newt's avatar days to his fascination with Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and even took the time to listen to Newt's SL talk much farther than I could bear. Which means he found this excerpt from Gingrich's metaverse lecture:

I think 3-D Internet in all of its various forms is going to become one of the great breakthroughs of the next ten years and helps us create what I’ve described as the world that works, and I think it’s important to recognize that this is rapidly going to extend beyond gaming. As Second Life C.E.O. Philip Rosedale said in Wired magazine, “I’m not building a game, I’m building a new country.” I think it’s a parallel country, it’s a parallel that enables us to do things that would be much more difficult to do in the real world.

Does that mean if things don't work out with his real world campaign, Newt will run for President of SL?

Comments

[Mike]

Wow, so not content with making everyone's First Life miserable, now he wants to ruin our Second Life? Fascist little Nazi-wannabe troll.

[Pussycat Catnap]

This is just so 2000-and-late...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cKnTLrDbcw

Its been how many years since all this happened?

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Aw...c'mon Mike. I don't care much for RL Newt the politico, but I'd vote him King of The Linden Metaverse in an SL second. He's a wonderful throwback to 1930s-style technocrat like Technocracy, Inc.'s Howard Scott.

In SL, for just a few thousand L and tier, Newt could build that lunar colony and the big space-mirror things he talked about. They could light up the fake highways.

He could hand out fake laptops (wait...Web on a prim..working fake laptops) to every child avatar in-world. He needs to be held to these promises.

[Kitty Revolver]

Hamlet I think you would like The Digital Sublime by Vincent Mosco. In one of the chapters he discusses Gingrich's ideas about the Internet and how it can lead to the end of politics, essentially saying that democracy should shift from a real life activity to a direct democracy using the Internet.

The whole book is a really fascinating take on the myths that the rise of the internet, that are essentially the myths that older technologies have promised, but failed to produce.