12/26/13 19:32
The U.S. Immigration services
recently granted South Korean Pro Starcraft II player Kim Dong Hwan a P-1A Internationally Recognized Athlete visa. This means that for all intents and purposes, Starcraft is now on par with soccer as a professional sport.
This underscores a much larger trend: That more and more of our lives now play out online (no pun intended). In fact, more and more of our lives
only happen online now.
Besides Facebook, how else can we keep in touch with old school buddies? Or find information without Google? When was the last time you bought a book in the “real world”?
There used to be an acronym that was popular in the IRC days: IRL, that stood for “in real life”. No one uses it anymore, because it's become impossible to separate our online identities with our offline ones.
What happens when we become virtual beings, when
most of our life and identity exists online? What will the world look like when we work, socialize, and learn things mainly on the Internet? This is already the case for some people. What happens when this is true for most of us?
Our political, legal, and economic systems were designed over hundreds of years to work in the physical world. Can they adapt fast enough when things like citizenship and commerce become non-physical? How will issues like taxes and national sovereignty work?
It's not like we
didn't know this was going to happen. But it doesn't seem that the powers that be have
done much to prepare for it.
Related: Society, Tech.