Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I think the BBC and The Well are both tips of the same iceberg, the
"media-sphere", hence same stuff, same time.

Which started me thinking about a comment that was once made about the
IRA, which is that terrorist organisations are fishes in water. In
other words to exist, a terrorist organisation has to be part of and
supported by a broader, legitimate community.

Reflecting on al Qaeda, they too are part of a global, virtual
community: the Islamist movement, many of whose members are scholars
and thinkers.

I wonder whether rogue cyberstates have to have this broader base of
legitimate supporters, at the very least to provide a population on
which the hard core can safely draw for recruits?
  

    
Yah, no question.  But this is natural, given that every citizen of a
cyberstate, no matter how underground, also has to be a denizen of a
terresital nation state.  But maybe the question is whether the cyberstate
needs some sort of legit intellectual vanguard.  I'm not sure whether they
need it, but they obviously have it.
  

    
O.K,, so I guess that radio interview is supposed to play tomorrow morning
on NPR.  Lew Koch (who interviewed me) said that they tried to kill it and
he had to kick and fight to get 10 minutes of it aired.  It would have been
the first time in 40 years that he had a story killed.  I'm not sure if all
this is because of the content (crypto anarchy and whatnot) or the fact that
I'm not very good at soundbites.  Or maybe the content was too subtle to
allow soundbites.  Or maybe I'm just really damn boring on the radio (the
last interview I did was sampled by a trance group for a song called "yes,
I'm listening". Anyway,  it's supposed to be on Monday morning if they don't
spike it again between now and then.
  

    
Although this thread may have wound to a close, I felt I really had to
post this. It's a formalised economic analysis of Norrath, the on-line
world of Everquest.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828

It turns out, in real world, dollar terms, it has a higher GDP per
head than China or India. Disturbing and fun.

Thanks for a very thought-provoking discussion.
  

    
(As you'd expect from the conclusion, the paper makes some pretty
silly assumptions.)
  

    
wowzers.  Thanks for posting that link!