Meat the future

This is a brilliant column on the Second Life phenomenon: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-stein23jan23,0,3223924.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

I have long predicted that virtual worlds would swallow up the real one... that digital reality was far more flexible, interesting, and eventually more compelling and powerful than the real one. Actually, this was even the subject of an 8th grade project of mine! -- we were asked to write a history of a made up civilization in a Social Studies class (Kurt Rosenberg was a fabulous teacher, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto -- where are teachers like that today?) and I wrote about a future society where everyone "lived" in tiny cells, hooked up to feeding and breathing tubes, sensory apparati, brain extensions, and instant communications.. so you can see that this view of mine goes pretty deep.

For the record, I'm not a fan of this development, but it's so obvious that I wonder why more people aren't noticing it.

Of course, this is only a blip on the way to "the system" realizing that it actually doesn't need the human appendages, and the humans agreeing -- as long as they're absorbed into the network and given a "second life".