In December of 2004, a 22-year-old Australian gamer spent $26,500 of real money to buy a virtual island in the online game Project Entropia. Its game developers described the virtual island as containing “…beautiful beaches ripe for developing beachfront property, an old volcano with rumors of fierce creatures within, [an] outback… overrun with mutants, and an area with a high concentration of robotic miners guarded by heavily armed assault robots indicates interesting mining opportunities…” Though the sheer dollar value of the purchase may strike us as a fairly outlandish (pardon the pun) sum to be laying out for a castle in the sky, the virtual real estate market is booming; it’s quite possible that this young Australian gamer will even turn a profit on his virtual property once he has rented, leased, or sold plots of his island paradise to other online gamers. It is not only virtual real estate, however, that is being traded online.

As a result of the wide-spread popularity of MMORPGs – an acronym which stands for massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games – virtual objects of all kinds have begun to emerge as sources for potential profit. Online site No Sweat, describes the trajectory of online trading as follows:

“In these games, as in other role playing and computer games, over time one acquires possessions, skills, rank and so on. Often, moving on in the game is a long, slow tedious process — and many computer gamers look for short-cuts to get beyond the lower levels of the game. In MMORPGs, those shortcuts might involve getting hold of objects (including virtual money) from other players. Those objects can be traded. Which means that outside of the virtual worlds, trading can also take place. Many players seem willing to part with their cash (real-world cash, that is) in order to buy virtual objects in the games.”

The end result of this virtual trading is staggering; as virtual world critic Julian Dibbell points out, the economic yield of virtual commerce is very real:

“[I]n an academic paper analyzing the circulation of goods in Sony Online’s 430,000-player EverQuest…an economist calculated a full set of macro- and microeconomic statistics for the game’s fantasy world, Norrath. Taking the prices fetched in the $5 million EverQuest auctions market as a reflection of in-game property values, professor Edward Castronova of Cal State Fullerton multiplied those dollar amounts by the rate at which players pile up imaginary inventory and came up with an average hourly income of $3.42. He calculated Norrath’s GNP at $135 million — or about the same, per capita, as Bulgaria’s. In other words, assuming roughly proportional numbers for other major online role-playing games… the workforce toiling away in these imaginary worlds generates more than $300 million in real wealth each year.”

Even more alarming, however, is the fact that this virtual economy has begun to employ exploitative methods more commonly found in the “real world.” In a recent U.S. court case, a member of the online gaming world of EverQuest sued Sony Online for its newly enacted ban of virtual object trading. During the course of the case it came to light that the plaintiff had been running a series of Mexican sweatshops in which workers were paid to play these online role-playing games and to virtually farm, forage, and otherwise produce virtual objects that were then sold for real U.S. currency on E-bay and other online trading houses. And this is hardly an isolated incident. According to an article by Tim Guest , in mainland China “people are employed to play the games [from] nine to five, scoring virtual booty which IGE [Internet Gaming Entertainment] can sell on at a profit to Western buyers.” And a California-based company known as gamersloot.net was employing Romanians to play MMORPGs for ten hours a day, earning $5.40 a day, or the equivalent of $0.54 an hour.

Insofar as these virtual worlds are capable of producing objects which seamlessly enter into our real-world economy, items that are priceable, desirable, and scarce, if not exactly material or useful in the ways that we are used to, and insofar as these virtual objects have a real effect on the “real economy”, the distinction between the virtual and the real seems to have become disturbingly attenuated. The fact that these virtual objects are as exchangeable as any other material commodity seems to suggest that, at least from money’s lofty perch, it looks like dollars all the way down.

MMORPG programmers, in fact, have become quite adept at tweaking these online economies. The Economist reports that programmers

“routinely produce the virtual equivalent of an antiquities market, creating overwhelmingly high demand for certain virtual objects that have no other utility within the game, a demand based on nothing more than the sheer scarcity of a given item. They control the inflation rate of their online currency by having players sink huge amounts of virtual gold and platinum into exorbitantly expensive luxury items [according to an online report, neon-colored avatar hair dye has recently become the luxury item par excellance] that can only be bought from non-player merchant bots, effectively taking large sums of money out of general circulation.”

Given the sheer oddness of our increasingly digitized economy, how is it, then, that we still tend to view the world (if we, in fact, still do) as a relatively stable place? From what golden coffer do we pluck out that highly burnished but unfounded belief that our money will be worth as much tomorrow as it is today? As Nigel Thrift has pointed out, “…unlike previous times, there is remarkably little anxiety now about the apparent loss of traditional representations of money. Generally speaking, the system of money is trusted.”

That the value of these virtual items, (including various forms of virtual gold which serve as currency in many of these online gaming worlds, and which seem to function and accrue value as any other “real-world” currency would) is predicated upon nothing more than the online gaming communities acknowledgement of their value is, in many respects, nothing new. A similar epistemological structure – one dependent upon our shared belief in the power of socially produced fictions – seems to underpin all of our monetary and financial instrumentation. This begs the question: Does this newly emergent virtual online gaming economy mark a threshold in how we have come to transmit, to produce, and to imagine value? Or is it merely the case that these gamers are a new type of virtual investor, one whose play happens to yield real monetary value and, consequently, produce real exploitative side-effects?

For the last four years, since the attack on September 11, 2001, the political side of the blogosphere has tossed arguments back and forth about cause, free will, and responsibility. I first noticed it in a piece by Hitchens shortly after the attack. September 11th was also the 28th anniversary of the coup d’etat of the Allende government by Pinochet. Hitchens’ invocation of the coup and comparison of the Chilean left with al Qaeda had a simple point. The US had been instrumental in the overthrow of Allende and the massacre of leftists that followed. The Chilean left had a real and deep grievance against the US, yet, we couldn’t possibly imagine Chilean socialists hijacking planes and flying them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of people. The implication was clear: grievances fueled by the sins of the US just aren’t enough to justify the actions of al Qaeda terrorists.

Nothing really followed in terms of the debate from Hitchens’ piece, even though he’d mentioned it a few times. But the question of the role of grievances (in the form of US foreign policy) in 9/11 picked up and keeps popping up. The debate was extended to discussions of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al Aqsa Martyr’s brigade terrorism, and a brief but quickly curtailed discussion of the massacre of children at Beslan a year ago. By the time of the bombings in London, the debate had become clarified.

Few, if any, of those engaged in the back and forths were confused about explanation and responsibility. An action or event by victims can causally contribute to an act of terrorism, but what that means for responsibility was at heart of the issue. In terms of the present war, it’s hard to argue that had the US not been involved in Middle East politics—if it did not support Israel, had it not had bases in Saudi Arabia, and had it not been behind placing sanction on Iraq—the acts would’ve taken place anyway. That claim is a causal claim in the “not without which not” way.

Very few responded to any explanation of terrorist attacks by referring to US foreign policy with accusations of being an apologist for terrorism—after all, no one thinks that a scholar of how the Holocaust happened is letting Nazis off the hook. Moreover, the administration itself had implicitly admitted that US foreign policy (support for corrupt governments) had helped fuel extremist movements.

But the debate wasn’t about cause but about “root causes” and what “root causes” meant for responsibility. More sharply, it raised a question about when explanation melds into a justification or apology for terrorism. The issue led to a brief back and forth between Norm Geras (with Eve Gerrard) and Chris Bertram. The former:

“One morning Elaine dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob’s path in circumstances he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine’s mode of dress is part of the causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for being raped. The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it. Furthemore, even when what someone else has contributed causally to the occurrence of the criminal or atrocious act is wrong, this won’t necessarily show they bear any of the blame for it. If Mabel borrows Zack’s bicycle without permission and Zack, being embittered about this, burns down Mabel’s house, Mabel doesn’t share the blame for her house being burned down. Though she may have behaved wrongly and her doing so is part of the causal chain leading to the conflagration, neither her act nor the wrongness of it justifies Zack in burning down her house. So simply by invoking prior causes, or putative prior causes, you do not make the case go through – the case, I mean, that someone else than the actual perpetrator of the wrongdoing is to blame. The ‘We told you so’ crowd all just somehow know that the Iraq war was an effective cause of the deaths in London last week.”

Bertram’s response was simple.

“One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.”

These discussions were about clarifying intuitions and understanding of cause and responsibility (agency, free will). But it was a spike; discussions continued to be peppered with comparisons with historical examples. Juan Cole in a post had pointed to Israeli occupation as the cause/reason for Palestinian terrorism, a post that drew the following from Jeff Weintraub.

“[I]n 1922-1923 about a million and a half Greeks fled or were expelled from Anatolia (with several hundred thousand Turks and other Muslims ‘exchanged’ in the opposite direction). Most of these people lived in refugee camps for a while, in both Israel and Greece, but I am not aware that they generated terrorist groups with a policy of systematically murdering Arab or Turkish civilians. . . Did these expulsions ‘provoke significant terrorism on the part of the displaced’? Not that I can recall. . . [I]t is not inevitable, or even common, for large-scale transfers or expulsions of populations (which, unfortunately, have been all too frequent during the past century) to ‘provoke significant terrorism on the part of the displaced’.”

I raise this discussion about terrorism, its causes, and moral responsibility not to jump into it. But it did strike me how an everyday form of Mill’s method of comparison plays itself out in partisan debates. John Stuart Mill spelled out an inductive method of causal reasoning. We infer that for a class or set of instances of phenomena we find a common circumstance or element, we infer that the common element(s) cause the phenomenon. Similarly, if we are facing differing outcomes in which all elements were common save one, we infer that difference is causally relevant to the outcome. These can be joined. They can be measured in degrees, in the sense of the degree to which the common element was present and the outcome covaries with its presence. Get enough causal understandings together (pairing up causes and outcomes, being sophisticated to account for interactions, etc.) and we can generate law-like propositions. While methods of uncovering law have become much more sophisticated, this basic approach remains common in the social science, even though deductive approaches, such as those that are based on rationality, are also very prominent.

Mill proposed this methodology largely to understand natural phenomena and they remain a serious element of how we examine natural phenomenon. Statistical inference is a descendant of this technique. But the social world has been far, far less amenable to the objective that the method was aimed for, uncovering laws, or law-like regularities.

Some time ago, the philosopher Jon Elster argued that the social sciences confront a problem in that the same (social) mechanism can operate in different directions, largely due to differing contexts—but in a situation where we cannot fully specify all the elements of the ‘context’. We are faced with a complex interaction of several mechanisms in way we haven’t fully specified. The social “sciences” don’t quite make the “science” cut for that reason.

The tendency in discussions, especially in political discussions, has been to toss in free will, which is hardly unreasonable. But I’m not sure that comparison will get us there. My belief that the dispossessed have a choice over their response and means of their response doesn’t depend on the information that Anatolian Greeks didn’t blow up civilians. Rather, it depends instead on not being able to see what mechanism would get me there in the narrow comparative case. Add a lot more elements—indoctrination, differing organizational capacity perhaps—then maybe, which has been the response.  But if the debate has reached what feels like a dead end, it may speak more of the kinds of arguments we appeal to.

Happy Monday.

It is 10 pm on Wednesday night and a man is screaming on the 1/2/3 platform at Times Square station. His voice gives no clue as to age or race. It’s impossible even to determine the man’s trouble: his tone is shrill and his words are stretched and twisted to accommodate rage. Walk down the platform twenty feet and discover that the man is Chinese, bald, in his mid-fifties. He is 5’6 or so and portly. In different circumstances, you would not think him capable of producing this noise. The subway arrives and the man boards, amply preceding himself. His voice is undiminished inside the metal walls, and his fellow riders immediately flee to other cars. He doesn’t care. Over the train’s clamor you can hear him screaming all the way to Brooklyn.

It’s an important irony that here in New York, in this city that is the finest achievement of modern American urban life, a city that fairly reeks of cool and sophistication, we are reduced (or refined) to our basest fundamental selves. Stringent isolation and the madness of the crowd coexist here, giving rise to New York’s exquisite hybrids–the stone-faced mothers and muttering businessmen and sly derelicts. Had Darwin lived today, he would not have had to visit the Galápagos to induce his theory. Two weeks in the city–at the Pennsylvania Hotel across from Penn Station, perhaps–would serve him well enough to discern natural selection and test its mettle on the street. Indeed, New York is the result of 7,000 years of urban technology, the fantastic product of art, science and political method, and yet nowhere on Earth offers a comparable opportunity to observe human behavior in its purest instinctual form.

We pine in love and we decay in sadness. In shame we cower and from revulsion we withdraw. Fear chases us away. These are retiring emotions. Expressed or simply felt, they are private things, shared and managed among friends, or at least those we know. They emanate modestly, rarely achieving anything like powerful broadcast. Anger is different. Anger is the orangutan’s effulgent orange ass. It exists for its expression, and even in its chastened state we describe it in a way that indicates its volatility: it seethes and smolders, and we step lightly nearby, reasonably fearing its explosion. Internalized, anger is nevertheless evident. The hissed obscenity and the compact jab of an arm (silence! it says, get away!), these are inflections of rage suppressed, and they are obvious to see. They are warnings we heed.

If New York lost Broadway, if thieves looted the Museum Mile and if the observation deck of the Empire State Building were closed permanently for renovation, the city fathers would still have anger to trot out for the entertainment of cash-carrying visitors from the heartland, a sort of ecotourism tweaked for the Ur of contemporary urban landscapes. After all, New York is nothing if not a whore–why not capitalize on its wealth? Colorful pamphlets could be distributed, primers that elucidate the finer points of rage-watching and direct curious visitors to the best blinds in the city. Zagat could compile a survey. Twenty-eight points out of 30 for the corner of 44th and Lexington, where Grand Central Terminal disgorges its fretful loads. Bright red double-deckers could tour the worst traffic snarls and at the same time exacerbate the gridlock, thereby affording their wide-eyed charges the opportunity to be targets of the city’s sporting take on road rage. The Germans and Japanese, the Kansans on holiday, valued, credit-wielding consumers in sherbet bermudas and baseball caps, they would feel a sudden sense of brotherhood twenty feet up as they listened to the narration of their tour-guide (“notice the dents in the hoods of the cabs–bonnets to you Brits–made by the fists of pedestrians”) and pointed out to one another the most fearsome verbal and gesticular threats from these fascinating New Yorkers, ranging free in their preserve.

None is above rage. The extravagantly degreed publisher on his way to work is likely to test his manhood, his courage, by way of the pitch of his shoulders on a construction-narrowed sidewalk. Beneath these skyscrapers and amidst this rush of transit, by God he will not give ground to the slouching thug or the high-heeled secretary as they make their opposite way in the shuffling line beside him. And how many times has he struck another, absorbing the blow of a body as steadfastly as possible, giving nothing away, not even a flinch? Why, every day. Multiple times a day. This is a dynamic city. There’s construction on every block.

Certainly, New York City is a brightly painted streetwalker, vulgar, sexually overt, but it is a debutante and a housekeeper too, and all three ladies are masters of the subtle sneer and the public snub. Rage finds many forms, not least of which are disdain and its underprivileged cousin resentment. The brutality of these expressions takes its cumulative effect, transforming the city into a breeding ground for creeping insanity, making it the de facto capital of lonely mumblers, who quietly suffer the violent discourtesy of thousands in the course of their plodding daily lives. There you go, Chief. No, really, it’s my fucking pleasure. In these poor sensitive souls, whose nerves would be grated by the comparatively mild depredations of a Midwestern city like Pittsburgh or St. Louis, New York effects a paranoia of the chronic, distracted variety. These obscure ghosts, whose eyes remain fixed on the distance or the concrete before them, and whose tolerance for the physical intimacy of subway cars tends to endure for a stop or two at most, these victims are spotted easily for their twitchy gaits and pained faces, and for their hair-trigger shoulders, which tense at the first peal of laughter in the street.

Fifteen years ago, New York received a great deal of credit for its sustained calm in the wake of acquittals for the LA cops who beat down Rodney King. There was wonder in the voices of politicians and pundits, who saw unrest in Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia and Newark, and assumed that America’s shameless skyscraping capital would fall in line with the others. It didn’t. Remarkable, they said, an unlikely development. In fact, if not for the pustulating seam of rage running right down the center of this city, we would have been at each other’s throats. We were physically exhausted from the angry contest of our day, and we had no energy left to avail ourselves of the cool relief of riot. Anyway, we have our own infected wounds from which we draw murderous inspiration. It would hardly do to adopt the rage of another, lesser city. Los Angeles can keep its Kings and Furmans, thank you very much. We’ve got Howard Beach and Crown Heights, Yankel Rosenbaum and Al Sharpton, and apocryphal packs of black teenagers, who wild away a lovely evening under the electric lamps of Central Park.

Jed Palmer

[This is posted by Abbas because Jed had some trouble with his own account.]