This day, that age: What happened today, 3 days back. A clipping from an old newspaper
After digitizing every molecule in space, the world was befuddled with the next big slump. We forget that an ip address has become the physical representation for you, me and everything. ‘Send me a mail to 192.168.1.1’ became outdated as numerics now captured 5 dots(IPV6). As close as it came to being online, it didn't have the gall to pull economies out of recession. Reserve banks and Governors were befuddled as to how to stimulate an economy of ‘surpluses’ and companies were at pains to subsist on a paying model. And then a certain website came out with the biggest invention of them all.
'Virtual'isation of gifts. What this idea did to the world economy is unique. People flocked in droves as they saw virtual endless benefits in it.
You could buy a virtual home while people imagined how to eat, drink and make merry besides the daily rituals in it... The better part of this was imagining how your virtual friends did it. Imagination had a huge part to play in the success of this invention/product. You could virtually imagine 100's of physically impossible postures; about 100s of dishes and how you could virtually eat it in millions of ways at a zillion virtual places. Ah! the life (Day dreaming. Do we need a reason? Remember Mungeri Lal and his Haseen Sapne ?!?).
Virtual dating became a hit as you could date an actress/actor/girl/boy of your choice at any destination of your choice for 150 points. It also led to virtual marriages and virtual kids and buying those ‘virtual ‘dream’’ homes.
By giving a virtual representation to your dreams at the site through product pics, the disappointment was obvious. If you received the gift of a virtual laptop, you could imagine it going down all the time while you typed on a virtual keyboard, while it did no virtual work. You could however delete it at your will if you didn’t like a friend or had a recent tiff. People sent gifts to all friends in a frenzy. It triggered a boom in the site first and unable to cope with the demand, triggered a boom in the other sites thus conclusively on the economy. How? If there are limited gifts at a site and you wanted to gift something unique to a friend at an additional cost of points, people were more than willing to design new gifts. This drove people to spend countless hours thinking of new gifts since the site now allowed customized mods. There were specialized sites which provided custom mods to people who had to purchase it from their site. The gifts became massive while the demand rose a million fold as people unlocked value in gifting. The drive was so huge that you even began to earn points back on gifting a friend!
It was referred to as a post-VG (virtual gifts) world and a pre-VG world to indicate the huge progress made. Governments got into it seeing a profit. They now taxed a virtual tax on the gifts you sent to friends. They also charged a virtual gift tax and a shipping tax. Postal charges were extra too. There was a bigger tax for international friends. People began purchasing multiple gifts for the person they loved.
This got the site to introduce another key feature which stimulated the virtual world. You could now send barbs, bullets, dung, or kill people you hated for a price of 1000 MS points. Killers took up these killing contracts for more -2000 points. The more they added to their list, the bigger was their reputation. The expression ‘To offline a person’ was coined as more people took up killing.
Last month, the company decided to cash in on the bourses looking at the quarterly visits. They priced their IPOS at a medium price and people expected it to be a huge success. On the day of the IPO, people were befuddled. They had forgotten how to apply for IPOs on real paper. People stopped visiting the site and the site had to revert back to a new conjob (read that as invention) to attract people. The site tried to attract people through their own site to invest in the IPO. Unfortunately the IPO failed. When a news channel contacted a disgruntled member of the site, the reply was, 'Why invest money for points? They are different.'
The site had forgotten - Real people spend real time and real money gathering virtual points on virtual space. Real people also spent 'useless' money on maintenance, internet charges and other overheads while being awarded virtual gifts.
- Sd
Disgruntled reporter
This reported event took place a few days back. Those primitive people – All they ever did was day dream. It appears the lack of excuses for daydreaming made imagination a huge success. Sad to say that one of my ancestors was likely involved with it.