Infographics for a Crisis

Henry Blodget, a disgraced trader, came out with these succinct infographics, summarizing, for presumably the American business community, what had prepared the climate for Occupy Wall Street.

Second Life

• What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned? - Laura E. Hall - The Atlantic

Some discussion of Economics 2.0 (i.e. the virtual economy of this massive multiplayer video game now having real world application): 

• Second Life Founder Pursues Second Chance (Feb 3, 2014) - Re: Philip Rosedale's new startup, High Fidelity.
• Wildcat Banking in the Virtual Frontier. (Feb. 5, 2008)
• The Coming Second Life Business Cycle (Aug. 2, 2007)
• The Virtual Rockefeller (Dec. 2005). 
• Wikipedia entry
• c/f Second Life Maretplace: Where users buy pixilated commodities, for real world cash.

 "This player plays with wind chimes and lights off some fireworks."

 

Second Life Movie 2 

"A couple players line up for a picture."

Second Life Movie 3 
"The group moves on to play a game of darts." 

Second Life Movie 4
"You can become a DJ for other players to dance to."

Second Life Movie 5
"Your house can be decorated any way you want."

Second Life Movie 6
"With just a few clicks, a couple of players build a simple house and even find time to wallpaper it."

Second Life Movie 7
"You can create your new animations and then import them into the game."

Second Life Movie 8    
"Everyone gets down with their elaborate dance moves in a user-made nightclub."

This American Life's The Giant Pool of Money

The Giant Pool of Money.

Originally an on-air radio broadcast, this transcript of This American Life is the best information I have found to explain the origins of our current global financial crisis.

Helpfully, the episode's producers neither assume one to be proficient in the lingual kung fu of high finance, nor posit a master daemon of capitalism as the cause of all woe, previous to considering evidence, group behaviors and testimonials.

It can also be streamed online.

Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism

Insofar as I know, still the most reaching analysis of the Terror against Terror climate of modern global politics.

Among the last things he wrote before his death, Jean Baudrillard's essay: The Spirit of Terrorism.

Myths over Miami

I'm pretty sure what stories have grown up around the spirits and the gods have very little to do with literature.

This article, Myths over Miami by Lynda Edwards, is the closest example I have found to what a literal update of mythology and religion would look like in our culture, between cracks of pale light on the shadowy side of the post-millennium. These childish tales, from brightly chewed up wads of numerous indigenous belief systems indiscreetly and promiscuously borrowed from, mashed together with a child's happy lack of inhibition, combined with a sophisticated take on capitalism as the murder or suicide (murder-suicide) of god are by turns breathtaking, heartbreaking and harrowing.

There is no god but the explanation is theological. And extremely sad. The belief system is also living. Poly-genesis is, here, the result of a secret compact between naive belief systems, folk culture, the heroic (demonic) culture of gangbanging, a repressive system of immigration, a punitive system of homeless shelters and the anti-master dialectic of Judeo-Christianity. These are exactly the sort of stories that achieve genesis by successions of children whispering in rooms (children whispering in rooms being the origins of all magic). Different from various fundamentalisms, the universe these myths describe is recognizably ours, if wretched. Evil is assigned a symbolism of strictly literal and materialistic objects. Transcendence, overcoming is deferred.

The woman who collected these stories is a poet.

c/f How a 1997 New Times Feature on Homeless Kids' Folklore Exploded the Internet