I'm not surprised that Tateru is adopting the Platformist's take on this, that this is "all about hardware". Of course, even if class 5 servers came down in price, they hardly dropped 60 percent overnight now, did they! Computers don't slash *that* far down *in a day*. But of course, the desire to relativize and diminish the sense of land and economy in SL is very powerful in the Platformists, and they would like land to be rolled out like toilet paper for pennies, to be stacked up and not dependent on proximity of servers or contiguousness, and for the balance to shift to created content, not land, as Qie put it so perfectly (for that point of view).

Yet Linden Lab achieved the massive participation in virtuality that it did precisely because it created -- and defended for a time -- the metaphor of land as a commodity, and a free market as the basis for a free society. If there were no private property, no means to make a business, no means to hold and express value, how many people are really going to want to play virtuality for long? The sense of place and property aren't just necessary fictions -- people need them to bother with virtuality.

Killing off this metaphor may give a huge sense of smug satisfaction to Platformists who think the "world" should just exist to be a string of sandboxes for prototyping and stadiums to have business mediums in, and not any kind of deep and rich *life*.

But then...who will pay the bills? The people who bought the land metaphor may be scorned; they pay the revenue for this company, which did not yet make another type of business model.

The common fallacy is that you cannot make virtual land value hold, because it is "endlessly available" and you can always "print one more". But...you can't. It is tied not only to servers but to programmers and software creation and upgrades. So the package of materials sold as "Second Life" are usually constructed into a land metaphor, and the Lindens really shouldn't be so harshly deflating and destroying the metaphor.