Welcome to the Social

Sooooo.... Zune.

Anyone heard of it?

Our good buddies in Redmond decided to try their hand at beating Apple at their own game. First of all, good fucking luck, guys. It's one thing to go into an established market and lowball your way into the forefront. It's quite another to try to transform over two decades of brand image already established in the minds of consumers. Oh, and let's not forget they're competing with a brand image that is currently considered the pinnacle of cool. So cool, in fact, that it's cooler than beer amongst college students. Good. Fucking. Luck.

But, putting aside the fact that Microsoft is totally fucked on this business venture, let's look at the Zune a bit more in depth. The tagline for the Zune is "Welcome to the Social." If you know how the Zune works, this is an obvious reference to the fact that Zunes can be used to wirelessly share music with other Zune users. This also happens to be the only real selling point for the Zune. It's social. If you've been anywhere on the Internet for the past few months, you'll know that sharing is all the rage: sharing bookmarks, sharing pictures, sharing videos. All this sharing is sure to make the world a better place, giving dirty hippies from all over the world hope for a new tomorrow. And that's what MS is trying to cash in on.

With the Zune, you can share music with your friends. But it's the kind of sharing that comes with strings attached; when you send a song, it says, "You can have me, but only for three plays or three days, then I'm out the door." Even if it's not a stolen song, even if the artist wants you to share the song with your friends. Hell, even if you are the goddamn musician, you gotta play by the 3-plays-or-3-days rule. Microsoft ends up taking the single redeeming feature of an otherwise mundane device, and cripples it at the whim of the record companies... yet all the while trying to cash in on the granola-karma-Woodstock vibe.

Free love is one of those things that's great in principle, but in practice, it always costs something.

Fictional Worlds

Now, I can't really be one to judge others' use of escapist alternate realities, but does anyone else find it weird that Second Life has taken off? Maybe weird isn't the right word... maybe prophetic... ?

Whenever I read about SL, I get flashbacks to reading both Jennifer Government and The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. I mean, here we have this world that is, just like the early Internet, wide open. Initially populated with artsy hippie types, businesses have been quick to establish themselves, what with there being an exchange rate between the in-game Linden Dollar and the US Dollar. And now... now all the big players are getting involved: automotive companies, computer manufacturers, entertainment networks, news agencies. It makes sense: their audience is here, and some really cool shit is happening in-world.

When the singularity hits (and Ray Kurzweil promised it would), it's gonna leave the world looking a lot like SL, so better get prepared now. And even if we never do get a singularity, it's still worth jumping on the bandwagon. Fictional worlds tend to have a habit of forcing themselves into our everyday reality.