The Kareoke Politics of Virtual World Funding FUD

There are several blipverts touting Forterra and IBM's product for using virtual worlds for unified communications or just, UC for short. You can go read about this, but it seems to be another platform for doing what pretty much everyone else is doing in gaming or social networks. The main difference is it runs behind the firewall. This comes as no surprise.

Meanwhile, the "terrorist coming to a virtual world near you real soon now" meme is also being simultaneously 'verted'. They may be. I hope someone puts the Twin Towers up in Virtual New York to give them a target. It infuriates them to have to knock something down again and again, and really, let's frustrate them for the fun of it.

The reality is these kinds of memes are how our government contractors and their civil servant partners create funding scares. In the bad old days of the Ivan Is Coming Ivan Is Coming, it was the Red Peril. They told us Ivan was twelve feet tall and looking through our kitchen windows at night while our sister's washed the dishes. We all put up hedges at the window and bought automatic dishwashers. It turned out that Ivan was three feet tall and had zits, so we cut down the hedge and kept the dishwasher but bought microwave ovens just in case he was hiding in our cupboard eating our oreos.

Ultimately, the Beltway bandits in the burbs need our money to play with their new toys from IBM and Forterra. And as always, we'll give it to them so they can keep on singing those same old blues still off key but with a brand new boom box.