Steve & Mike,
Very interesting! Mike, I know what you mean about your feelings about
your house burning. I've had similar thoughts before and wondered what
to make of them. There is an aspect to our consumer culture that is
troubling in a way that has nothing to do with standard leftist
anti-capitalism, and yet I think a number of people on the left feel it
intuitively, as do some libertarians. Yet others (some in the "Walk for
Capitalism" participants come to mind) seem positively eager to
celebrate not only freedom, but consumerism, without a second thought.
Steve, I'm curious to hear more about the Ultima Online world and how
that played out. What happened after what you describe? Was the game
shut down, or did it recover? Were you a participant? Is any of this
written up somewhere?
Yours in liberty,
<<< Starchild >>>
I think my house owns me.
There was a game called Ultima Online that tried to make a closed
ecosystem except energy input (like the real world) where trees were
harvested for wood, sheep for leather, animals and plants would
reproduce, etc. Products made from them would decay with use so
everything would recycle and the game would, in theory, self regulate.But something strange happened. All the forests and animals disappeared
and just a barren landscape was left and it wasn't fun anymore. The
game designers started looking around and found that there were people
hoarding thousands of, say, shirts or shoes in their houses where they
were never used. They had no intention of selling them, they just
wanted to *own* them. It's as if there is a hoarding instinct. Perhaps
these people also had the strange feeling that their collections
somehow owned them.I wonder how much this happens in the real world and what the ultimate
effect of it will be.-- Steve
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