Infinite Space

Physicists, gamers, Web designers and developers and engineers took up (with a vengeance) the question of whether or not the Net and the Web was an Infinite Space, forever expansible. Most felt that while Web Space was infinite, desirable property isn't. Also comments about crackers, cryptography, gaming, virtual property, the future of the Net and the Web, and concerns about whether real world property laws apply online. All in all, a great cyber gab-fest, pro and con.

E-mail poured in all weekend about Infinite Space -- whether or not space on the Net and Web is forever expansible.

This was an offshoot of columns and discussions here last week about whether new connective technologies like eBay combined with the millions of middle-class Americans pouring onto the Web were escalating the concept of virtual property, already a custom on some gaming sites.

On the subject of Infinite Space, I heard from physicists, academics, engineers, gamers, computer execs, developers and designers some very brainy geeks who offered smart and diverging theories.

While a majority of e-mailers thought virtual property was a big idea whose time had come, there were also skeptics claiming this idea wasnt really anything new.

In one sense, theyre right. Gamers have been trading virtual parts, symbols and characters for awhile. But the impact of new technology is often felt when new and middle-class users mainstream it, not when pioneers invent it.

Linux isn't new either, but that doesn't mean nobody should write or talk about it. As open source reaches critical mass, it becomes significant. Same with other technologies from the phone to modems to computers themselves. Hackers were patching together BBSs from the earliest days of networked computing, but it wasnt until many more people, from housewives to business owners started pouring online that the Net took off. As more and more people -- most armed with credit cards and checkbooks -- continue to explore and use the Net and the Web, expect continuous and unimaginable change. But most of you know that.

Note: Lots of people wrote asking if I was changing my column format to include more of my e-mail responses. Yes, I am. An interactive column should, when possible, include more voices than one. Not only do I get sick of myself, but I get especially weary of getting so much smart and thoughtful e-mail nobody but me ever sees, while the often highly testicular public posts on Threads are visible to everybody. Many visitors, lurkers and readers confuse Threads with reality. It is one reality, but not the only one.

People have a perfect right to flame, but as my e-mail (and every other Slashdot writer and author demonstrates daily) smart lurkers constitute the vast, unseen majority of Slashdot readers. They also want to be seen and heard.

So here are just a few of the posts pro and con -- responding to my columns about virtual property and my questions about whether space on the Net is an Infinite Space:

Boredom is More Significant, from: Stephane Lajoie

"Is Net and Web property infinite? That is, is the Net so expansible that it could never be overcrowded and congested?

If you abstract away things like bandwidth and hard-drive storage (which seem to grow fast enough anyway), the answer to the first question is yes: the net is infinite. But you seem to imply that the second question is the same as the first, which it isn't.

Crowdedness happens in a specific physical place. We can say that New York City is crowded, while Arkansas is close to empty. If we extend this concept to the net, you can say that slashdot.org is crowded while kgjrhegh.com is empty (the DN isn't even registered, anybody could move in there for free; not anybody could move in to Microsoft.com though).

The same thing happens in physical space: if you abstract away things like the currently limited means of transportation, you can come to the conclusion that living space for humans in the universe is infinite. But just like people go to slashdot.org and not to kgjrhegh.com, you won't see people moving to Mars en masse even if affordable transportation becomes available: there just isn't anything fun to do there. I think it is Linus Torvalds who said that in a few decades, the primary motivation for people to do "anything" will be fear of boredom.

The limit here isn't free domain names or available land in an online game. It's the attention span of people. People buy powerful characters in UO to get attention from other players. Once the game become dated and people start moving to Everquest, Asheron's Call or others, these characters will loose all their value because there won't be anybody to show them off to.

You can't open a 20 screens megaplex in Nowhere, Arkansas. You can't sell web adds at kgjrhegh.com. Hope I could keep your attention for that long :).

PS: The Cyber-Movers example was kinda weak. I mean, it's a bunch of engineers copying files around and setting up domain name servers. Hardly the signs of a revolution if you ask me :). Still, very interesting subject matter.

PPS: I like this format of writing series of articles instead of moving on to a new subject for each article.

Stéphane Lajoie / Ludus Design

Nanotechnology and other answers, from Rob Jellinghaus:

"Is Net and Web property infinite? That is, is the Net so expansible that it could never be overcrowded and congested?"

This question is familiar in another domain: nanotechnology. The general form of the question is, "Given sufficient technological development, are resources potentially inexhaustible? And if so, what happens to the economy?"

In general, it is scarcity that creates value. In a world where there are infinite amounts of everything, there is no reason for everything not to be free. But when there is only so much of something, then competition arises for that scarce resource, and suddenly you need a way to determine who needs/wants/deserves it most. Presto: economics.

Ultima Online could probably, in principle, expand their cyberverse to accomodate the influx of people craving land. But it's not clear that they should. The scarcity of land there is greatly increasing the value of each individual property, perhaps intensifying the fervor of their citizens, and certainly buying them advertising that they couldn't buy with their own money (your article being a great example). In other words, by keeping their virtual real estate scarce, they are more effectively competing for the attention of the world's gamers, by making it clear just how valuable that real estate is.

In fact, UO (Ultima Online)perfectly exemplifies the two resources that are _not_infinite, and will never be: Human attention, as all domain name squatters know, is finite. There are only so many eyeballs, and only so many hours in a day that those eyeballs can be looking at your little corner of the cyberverse. UO is competing with Everquest (which is coming up fast). Catchy domain names ("slashdot.org") for instance, will always be more valuable than clunky ones ("www.mybiglongcompanyname.net").

- Computing and, especially, network resources are getting exponentially cheaper, but as exponentially more people go online, it remains fairly costly to serve large audiences. UO definitely incurs ongoing costs in hardware, network maintenance, and operations management, to keep its servers running; if they were to expand their universe infinitely, their costs would also expand infinitely. Later.

Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking questions,

Liberating the Lurkers, from Dana Ryder, IMMSystems:

"Congrats on the new format, if thats what it is. You are liberating the Lurkers! Posting comments like you are is the only way some of us can get our ideas out and hear the good ideas of others. The rule on Slashdot Threads seems to be that the dumber one is, the quicker you are to claim youre smarter than everybody else, or that you already knew everything everybody else is saying. I cant fault anybody for being stupid, but boy, are these people proud of it! Slashdots columns on Virtual Property were talked about all day at my company keep ?em coming!"

Of Course Not, from: Randall L Joiner:

"To your question about Infinite Space

There are several answers: Of course not, physical (hardware) resources are limited by definition, and thus, eventually will run out. Within reason, yes, it's infinite, as tech grows, space keeps getting cheaper, there will always be room of some sort.

The question really is, is valuable web property infinite? Many people have already answered that, and from the skim I did, most seem to think no. I have to disagree to an extent. Since games and sites only seem to hold interest for short time periods (game attention spans often measure in hours of game play), and people are constantly searching for the next game, I would guess that the interest of the gamers will constantly be going through these stages:

1. New game hits, is relatively unknown.

2. Some gamers become regulars, game grows to a small number of players.

3. Game catches on in the main stream, many people start playing.

4. The original players start tiring of it, (for various reasons) and sell out.

5. Older players go back to stage 1 with some other new game. I think we'll start seeing stage 5 in about 6 months to a year with Ultima. I give Diablo as an example... Few still play it, because everyone's jumped to Ultima. The new up-and coming is EverQuest. It's part of the game cycle, only now we have the middle-class coming in throwing money around. I want to know what's going to happen when the mass evac happens for the next great game, and the fools are stuck with character's they've spent loads of $ on, and are now not worth anything, and no one is around to play the game with? Even the "rich" couldn't keep up for to long, constantly buying new characters for each new game.

Another problem I don't think you've thought of... What happens if there's a network down time? What happens if/when a hard-drive crashes and wipes out any record of you having owned the property?

If I were the company running the hardware those games are running on, I'd make damn sure I had a clause stating they aren't responsible for lost characters/property/etc...

Another problem. What happens when (not _if_) someone hacks a game and suddenly goes nuts with it? How about Virtual Theft? If I cracked the game, steal your house that you just paid 100,000 for, what recourse do you have? Then there's the difficulty with calling it property... We have a bung-hole load of property laws in the states, but do any of them apply to cyberspace? How about in a game where killing and taking property is a legal action? If I kill your character and taken the property you just bought, do you have any legal recourse in RL? No, I really don't consider that a silly problem either, as I've read some of the things people have gone to court over (and won!) that are much much more silly. Altogether, I'm just completely amused by the concept, and consider this just one more proof that most people really don't understand what the world or the net is really about."

Please! Absolutely Nothing New Here, from: thom stuart (painfully):

Much as it pains me every single time I realize it, I'm afraid that I have to report that once again you're picking value out of vapor and getting all excited about something that, as always, isn't exciting or new at all.

I'm tempted to launch into an extensive diatribe, but i've got work to do today. Suffice it to say that the "virtual property" that's got you so frantic in the last couple days is nothing more than a sale of service.

It's amazing that you're managing to misunderstand this to the extent where you think there's something new. Every month i buy a package of 'minutes' for my mobile phone from my wireless company. These are just numbers in a computer, of course - am I purchasing "virtual property" here? And, if i am, haven't people been doing that for years?

I could subscribe to a paying-members-only web site; I could choose to pay for HBO; I could buy an Ultima Online account or good domain name from ebay. These are all the same thing - I'm buying the right to use a service. Just because Im not getting a physical product in return doesn't make it magic or 'cyber' or anything else you might want to think.

Okay, the UO accounts and domain names might have certain 'added value' in terms of the time/effort invested in bringing them to their current status, but that doesn't make it any different. by buying an account or a domain, the purchaser is simply entitled to access to certain kinds of service in return for their cold hard cash - but hey, who pays in "physical cash" these days, anyway?

Ooh! ooh! virtual property paid for with "virtual money"! another monumental technological discovery from jon katz! better write another /.column about this! please.

Crackers, Gaming and Infinite Space (anonymous):

Here's a copy of the comment I just posted... thought you might like it...BTW great set of articles, and I find your style to finally have settled out into something that doesn't seem megalomaniacal and much more suited to the world you've stepped into.. I've liked about 75% of your articles, those I didn't like were some of the earlier ones:

It's bad enough that hackers are being berated by main stream media for supposedly "stealing" from large, anonymous corporations, can we all see what will happen when the middle class has a vested interest in computer security?

What were to happen if a cracker got onto one of the Ultima online servers, helped himself to some UO Cash and then bought himself whatever he needs? Worse yet: Cracker gets onto the server, figures out some of it's data structure, and decides to get into another player's building and cleans him out?

Crackers/malitious hackers finally have something that has value to steal and they would be stealing from mainstream america instead of the corps.

This can have several consequences as I see it:

First and formost: The biggest hacker backlash in history. You think the Kevin Mitnick case was bad... now the law enforcement officials no longer have to work on the "estimated losses" reported by companies when they get documents copied off their servers (say source code), they have real world price tags on what the damages were.

Moreover, can we really trust mainstream american media to see the difference between hackers and crackers? It's bad enough that they can't do it now when the crackers are just defacing websites.

Secondly: With a bit of luck, this will drive all aspects of computer security forward. I can see dedicated players paying godo dollars for crypto systems that would protect their online assets. As well, Internationalization of crypto technology will be given a big boost as non-North american players will want access to the same quality of crypto as we are privileged to have.

Thirdly: Goverment regulation will quickly be pushed onto the scene. Any location generating real US$ seems to become the target of the US house and senate.

Third, B: TAXATION! As is, it's very difficult to keep the internet taxes at bay.

In the states, the problem seems to stem from the separation of states.. but if people start shelling out cash for virtual property, the likes of which cannot be seen right now, there will be a renewed effort by the USG to tax online transactions.

Fourth: Hopefully this will lead to the apparition of "free" servers that will pop up and have much more room to grow, allowing people to settle in. It'd be even nicer if a "Homesteading" act were to be implemented on UO (specific example) to move over onto the new systems, giving them some sort of bonuses (very much like the development of the "Wild West in early America.)

From Craig Wright: Interesting, But Shame On You!

Virtual Property is an interesting issue but really is nothing new. Buying "space" from a isp for a large website has been around for years, paying someone else to build the website is comonplace, digitizing a photograph, and how about DOMAIN NAMES? - these are all forms of virtual property. Middle class americans have been paying cash for ownership of virtual materials for some time now.

Focusing on some geeks who spend too much on UO characters on ebay and then implying from that fact the economy is undergoing a fundamental change is really quite silly. Put your technophile cheerleader pom poms down and do a little research willyah?

Within the online gaming comunity there are other useful examples of virtual property such as Chron-X, Sanctum and other budding online games working on a far different paradigm than the "service" model of the "pay-as-you-play" games such as UO. C-X and Sanctum are wholly or partially based around the collectable card game paradigm introduced years ago by MAGIC: THE GATHERING.

The interesting thing about the online versions (which have been around for at least three years or so) is that they are ENTIRELY virtual property.

Unlike UO-type games where you have to buy the software and pay an ongoing service fee to keep playing. In these other games the only thing that one pays for is the virtual cards (software free, no fees except paying for more cards should you want them). As one might expect, trading, auctioning, and selling collections has been an integral part in the development of these games. I believe C-X at one time had over 70k accounts and may have plenty more now that they have moved to a Sony gaming site (I haven't played for nearly a year).

As a matter of fact Genetic Anomalies, the company behind Chron-X, began as a company devising a method for protecting virtual property and developed with what they call Collectible Bits (back in 1996 I believe) and designed their the game primarily as a way to illustrate what their software product could do in terms of reducing stealing and hacking problems already the cause of so many problems in various online gaming communities. UO tangent: it is neither the first, best nor probably even the largest of its genre. The 150k players - that's BS, online games inflate their players by counting ACCOUNTS rather than active players, many players play for a while and then either reduce their playing time significantly or stop playing altogether - but their ACCOUNTS are still counted. This is especially problematic with UO as there are a half dozen or so games all currently in stiff competition for the same audience.

By the way, UO is the only one of its genre in which its participants have attempted to bring a class action suit against the company because of their dissatisfaction with the game. The whole genre is unlikely to become a dominant faction within the online gaming community merely because it is so damn expensive to play. There have been dozens of experiments for specific subscription games or subscription gaming sites of several varieties and none have achieved more than moderate success.

I read a few of the /. comments on your first piece and ran across thoughful responses that disagreed with you which also made interesting points -- yet in your article you quote a few imbicilic flames as representative of those who disagree and more thoughtful responses of those who agree. This is a rather cheap way to make your argument appear stronger - shame on you! (Note: I only quote from e-mail, since thoughtful (and non-thoughtful) disagreements are posted openly on Threads. And I didnt get many disagreements last week. I always reflect an accurate balance of criticism versus agreement discussions where everybody agrees are sort of pointless, and, on the Net, impossible. As for nasty flames, they never bother me a bit kind of like mosquitoes or peas off a tank. Knowledgeable or thoughtful criticism, on the other hand, terrifies me).

Comments

Infinite Jest.

[Hacksaw]

It's obvious what is infinite on the Net: arrogance.

Nowhere is it so easy to trash your fellow human beings, with apparent impunity. Worse, because there is no lack of targets, people get good at this trashing. Shades of subtlety color the shit to make it seem like a reasonable response.

Certainly there are bone-heads on the net. Spammers, foul mouthed AC's, identity frauds all lurk, waiting for some chance to use up their 15 minutes of fame. But then you have the next level up, those who attempt to become important by denigrating the writing of others, dismissing it as stale, or the answer as well known.

These are the folks who do the most damage to the net in terms of PR. It's what causes people to brand Netizens as elitist Techno-Nazis.

It's easy to declare someone that is misinformed stupid. But it won't make your life O.K.

Gravitational collapse of information

[jabber]

This sounds a lot like the signal to noise ratio of the net. At some point (arguably already upon us) the amount of junk on the net will overwhelm the volume of useful information, and the net will cease to be a useful resource.

With spam, web pages containing more ad banners than content, and everyone and their grandma 'working the web', we're getting dangerously close to this info-gravitational collapse.

The metaphor holds surprisingly well to layman astronomy. We have certain singularities of unusually dense matter on the net - AOL to name one. This dense matter distorts the flow of information around it, and emits a particularly dangerous form of radiation; MeToo-on radiation.
Ha! While at it, there's the M$sphere firing off FUD particles in every direction. :)

Another perspective is that of the net being a natural resource. The more junk we pump into the datastream, the more polluted and less usable it becomes. Eventually the frogs die off, the lurkers get other hobbies, and the cyber-ecosystem dies.

Add to this the ever increasing complexity of the net, which makes it harder and harder for a bot search engine to tell fact from fiction and content from bunk, and you've got a thicket of URLs that makes me long for the Dewey decimal system at times.

Value of Money

[PeterMiller]

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this in a previous post (actually, someone did talk about the current value of gold and platinum on UO), but with the purchase a virtual real estate and virtual goods with real world money, what it the "real value of money" today?

In today's world, we can see that the actual value of currency is not gold anymore, but what you can purchase. If you can trade currency for goods, and thanks to ebay, trade virtual goods for currency, would you not be able to trade goods for virtual currency?

I have never played Ultima Online myself, but the concept seems simple enough. Property and characters have value in the game, and are only available in limited numbers. People use the virtual cash in the game to purchase goods and property.

Does anyone see the possibility of using UO game cash to purchase real goods? (Like on Ebay or some barter site?)

No taxes, where would you declare them??

Neo for sale?

[ravenskana]

I'm not sure of the mindset of someone who would want a name already in use. Ok, I get the fact you liked -the Matrix-, but taking an *already existing* name at a place like Slashdot would mean you 'inherit' the history and reputation associated with that name.

If I were to buy 'slashdot.org', for example, the value would be associated with what this site has done. If I then removed all the news for nerds and replaced it with sermons for teletubbies or something, then I have devalued my new property.

So, when the next new thing comes along, there might be a rush on acquiring names and characters related to it (I imagine all the new characters in Phantom Menace got taken here in on AOl, etc. shortly after the first rumors and news came out), but trying to acquire a specific name@place that's already being used seems insane to me.

I mean, would anyone want the CmdrTaco name?