Death and Taxes (and 3D space)

Apparently, the old Ben Franklin quote that “nothing is certain but death and taxes” will become applicable in a new way. That’s right folks, governments are beginning to think about taxing virtual assets that people acquire in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. I came across this article on cnet.com, which talks about the State of Play/Terra Nova symposium, a yearly conference that is held to discuss the social and economic implications of virtual worlds. According to one of the economist quoted in the article, "given growth rates of 10 to 15 percent a month, the question is when, not if, Congress and IRS start paying attention to these issues." The article goes on to talk about estate taxes, and a report that’s been commissioned for next year by the Joint Economic Committee, which will probably really get the ball rolling on all of this. The article definitely gives the sense that taxing virtual assets is inevitable (I mean, that’s basically the article’s title) and is something we shouldn’t be surprised to see in the future. It’s really interesting to see the wide scope of virtual worlds, how they have economies and other aspects that we typically attribute only to the real world. It will also be interesting to see how institutions in the real world will have to learn to interact will virtual worlds, and how we might reconcile the real and the hyperreal.

I ran into one more interesting thing on this site, which made me think back to Lev Manovich and 3D space. Next to this article, cnet had a thing called The Big Picture. Instead of just a list of related links at the end of an article, The Big Picture is a web that a user can navigate and see the connections between events and concepts presented spatially. For the Big Picture web about the taxing of virtual assets, different links within the web are color coded as stories, topics, and companies all related to the article. The Big Picture seems to function as a combination of database and 3D space.