energy

(Flickr picture NASA/GSFC, woodleywonderworks, Creative Commons License)

(Update: at the end of the text, reference to another, related, post)

Virtual environments help us to make geography collapse, as do other more mainstream tools such as Skype, wikis, WebEx, blogs, forums etc. Virtual worlds help us to engage with others in an immersive way and can be organized in such a way that serendipitous encounters are facilitated. So, will all this help the world to become even flatter?

The new secretary general of the United Nations is about to thank her or his election to various nonstate networks, a loose coalition of NGOs, religious groups, business leaders and local activists. This is only logical after those groups managed to set the international agenda on the environment.

This success was possible because of some terrible climate-related disasters (remember the hurricane destroying part of Wall Street?) and by the use of the ubiquitous internet. Observers saw the shift of power from states to nonstate groups coming when the annual Davos meeting was transformed several years ago. It brought in a host of activists from these networks and has since established virtual meetings where thousands more could participate.

I read all this in an article in the Financial Times of September 14, 2024 . The fictional article is published in Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (large pdf file), a very influential report by the National Intelligence Council.

(adding first results of an in-world discussion about this project, at the end of this text)

How important will virtual worlds become in the global village? In order to answer that question, one has to have an idea what the big issues will be the next 50 years, what "the big picture" will be and how it evolves. Often Virtual Worlds Roadmaps are being studied in splendid isolation from the rest of world history. References are made to the cost of energy or to the financial crisis, but often no attempt is made to describe the issues which will define our planet from now to let's say 2050.

In a previous post, Second Life, OpenSim, Web2.0 point to a different future for the global economy, I used some ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein to get such a big picture.

This time I invite you to consider various concrete aspects of the evolution of the world system, and to meditate what role virtual worlds can play for each of these aspects.

Even though still inspired by Wallerstein's text, the big picture I will present here does not imply one has to agree with his visions. Personally I am convinced that the next 20 to 50 years will be a period of chaos, of unexpected disruptive events, of important mutations in the financial and business world.

However I simply don't know whether this can be adequately described by Kondratieff cycles, or by Wallerstein's vision on the long term evolution of capitalism. I will just list a number of big issues, and I really would like getting feedback on these topics (which issues did I forget, which are far more important than others, extra information) and on the way virtual environments could be involved.

I think the work we would do in situating virtual worlds (and other new media?) in the broader context of the future of our planet, could very well complement work which is being done elsewhere, such as in the Virtual Worlds Roadmap group.

The "big issues" are based on a book and blog (in Dutch language) by Geert Noels, the chief economist of the Belgian investment bank Petercam.

Noels identifies six "econoshocks" which will have an impact on our lives and which can be compared to the Industrial Revolution:

- demographics (including urbanization in Noels' book, but I'll propose to create a separate entry for this phenomenon)

- the shift to the East

- the information- and communication technology

- energy

- the new capitalism

- the green economy

I will briefly discuss those issues, not necessarily sticking to what Geert Noels says (for instance, I added my own take on urbanization, adding the security and geo-political risk stuff, I lumped the green economy and the energy/raw materials stuff together, I have another take on the New Capitalism etc).

I think studying the possible evolution of virtual worlds in relation to the global context can provide new insights, and I invite you to contribute to this text on the MixedRealities Wiki. Of course, all contributors will be free to republish the evolving text as they see fit.