Clay Shirky's latest has some great bits (and some woolly bits too, I think). Let me quote first, think later.

If you want to see why the tension between the individual and the group is so significant, imagine a world, call it Fork World, where the citizens were given the right to vote on how the world was run. In Fork World, however, the guiding principle would be "no coercion." Players would vote on rule changes, but instead of announcing winners and losers at the end of a vote, the world would simply be split in two with every vote.

And of course, after 20 such votes, you would have subdivided 2 to the 20th times, leaving you with a million potential worlds... Even if you started with a million players on Day One, by your 20th vote each world would average, by definition, one player per world. You would have created a new category of MMO -- the Minimally Multi-player Online game.

His wider points about creating a "nomic world" -- where the rules and the technical infrastructure which embodies them are infinitely, albeit slowly, malleable ("nothing is real, everything is permissible"?) -- are well made, and part of an important discussion.

Important from an online-living perspective because, as Clay says, "we are moving an increasing amount of our speech to owned environments... We should experiment with game-world models that dump a large and maybe even unpleasant amount of control into the hands of the players because it's the best lab we have for experiments with real governance in the 21st century agora, the place where people gather when they want to be out in public".

But also important in the sense that online worlds are a philosopher's mirror to our real environs. Virtual worlds have much in common with the real thing. The real world is more malleable than we're often led to believe. The social institutions we live with are human-built, and human-controlled, and the social order is determined by our own actions. Online social laboratories can usefully inform the political landscape.

In cyberspace nobody really gets killed when people start changing the rules.