Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

The Future of Government: Exclusive and Effective?

In Balkinization, Stephen Griffin writes about the efforts to get government and society functional again in New Orleans in “The Katrina Experiment.” In a pair of posts that are, to me, closely related, Michael Froomkin writes about “My notes from the ‘The Great Debate’ at State of Play III” and “Summing Up ‘The Great Debate’ at State of Play III.”

All three are about the interaction of society and government. In Froomkin’s case, they’re discussing virtual worlds: the multi-playered, extended descendants of video games which are now meaningful enough to their players, and sufficiently interactive with the real world that people have been selling items, and even murdering each other, over events that arise in the games.