Objectives:

• Although some of the readings (and concomitant lessons) during the ProjectFive unit may not have aged as well as some others, the strategy behind their selection is, I assure you, timeless. In addition to the focus on inventional topoi (place, events, practices), each lesson also concentrated on different components of, and strategies for, composing cultural analyses: using tone (Davis' polemical tone vs. Herron's notalgia/cynicism); inserting a topic into a longer history (Sontag), using transitions and restatement techniques to make a complicated argument accessible (Zizek); deploying a "journalistic" style in gathering interviews and responses form individuals participating in pop culture practice (Dibbell); using narrative arguments (Johnson and Dibbell); and creating "tropes" to organize the argument of a cultural analysis (Johnson)

Virtual Cultures, Virtual Capitalism

Play Money

Life in Parallel: ...now I saw plainly that, at least as far as certain quarters of my brain were concerned, this was more than an addiction. It was a parallel life. A career in fact, and in some ways a career more straightforwardly rewarding than the writing career I had chosen to follow in my real life. And as long as there was room to rise in this career - as long as there were bigger monsters to slay, bigger piles of gold to amass, and a distantly attainable day when I might have some sort of revenge on the prick who'd killed my horse - then I would go on feeling compelled to pursue it right up to the limits of the sensible. (9)

The Unreal Estate Boom

Virtual Capital: ...they were businessmen. Caldwell and his housemates were partners in an enterprise call Blacksnow Interactive, and this was its headquarters. Blacksnow made money selling things on eBay and other online sales sites, and in this, of course, it was no different from the masses of other small-scale businesses that had discovered the advantages of doing commerce over the Internet. In at least one aspect of its business model, however, Blacksnow was distinctive: It sold things that didn't, strictly speaking, exist. (11)

Another World: "This is another world," Caldwell was saying. "The Internet has really affected the world like nobody had understood yet. There's gonna be greater impact, people are gonna be spending more time on their computers. TV is gonna go the way of the dinosaurs eventually. There's more and more people doing stuff online than ever before. There's more women coming online. There's more older people coming online. There's more poor people coming online." (17)

Gold Farming: ...a rented Tijuana office equipped with a high-speed Internet connection, eight PC workstations, and three shifts of unskilled Mexican workers paid to do what employers would have fired them for - play computer games nonstop from punch-in to quitting time. The Mexicans were not, by disposition, gamers. They played according to tightly scripted guidelines given to them daily by their on-site supervisors, and they earned piecework wages, paid by the amount of make-believe loot they piled up. They were farmers for hire harvesting the resources of imaginary worlds, and they made about $19 a day doing it. (19)

Work All Day, Work All Night: Take a moment now to pause, step back, and consider just what was going on here: Every day, month after month, a man was coming home form a full day of bone-jarringly repetitive work with hammer and nails to put in a full night of finger-numbingly repetitive work with "hammer" and "anvil" - and paying for the privilege. When I asked Stolle to make sense of this, he had a ready answer: "Well, it's not work if you enjoy it." (36)

All the Heavens down to Virtual Earth: Throughout the rich Western tradition of utopian thought, the most desirable or all possible worlds has typically been imagined as a realm devoid of scarcity.... Recently, however, a loose conspiracy of visionaries (mostly long-haired, as it happens, albeit unusually well-funded) created an earthly environment that fits the bill more closely than most. With its effortlessly reproducible wealth of data and light-speed transcendence of geography and time the Internet, from the start was rumored to be a place where scarcity had no place. And as anybody in the record business or otherwise dependent on certain scarcities of information for a living can tell you, this rumor has proved in a bewildering variety of ways to be true. (40-41)