Suddenly, it's there. The world, in your hands. You realise so completely,
absolutely, that this is one planet, that the boundaries are arbitary, goverment
imposed, totally false.
Then obviously this app didn't teach you anything about population
distributions, natural resources, politics, Colonialism, warfare,
industrial economies, multi-national corporations, etc! You learned a
lot, to be sure, but you sure as hell didn't get the whole picture.
You also realise that this isn't much data.
Geographically, no, maybe not. But one must go beyond geography.
And it makes me want to apply one cardinal rule that strikes me everytime I
write something recursive and beautiful. If you want the system to remain
stable, you shouldn't fuck with it too much. You certainly shouldn't **tweak**
it while you are inside it. Ever been **inside** a VR environment, interacting
like crazy, when it crashes ?? It's bad. Disorientating. Very Nasty. Words don't
even come close to describing the claustraphobia. You rip off the goggles and
grab a breath of air. Not possible inside the simulation we enhabit daily.
Doesn't this posit that "stability is good, change is bad?"
An evolutionary view is that change is not merely inevitable, it is
necessary.
Also, the real world is much more fault-tolerant than VR systems are.
They can take tremendous tweaking and life goes on just fine.
But time's a wasting. We need a five year
plan. Get the globes to places of conflict, to places of learning, places where
computer eguipment has never gone.
Like ghettos? You can work on that now, other people do...
Cheers,
Brandon