World of Warcraft makes five million dollars each day. That means each year it will draw in almost 1.82 billion dollars for Activision-Blizzard, and they did it by doing everything that proponents of an organic, open and creative Internet would hate. They streamlined through manageralism the virtual world and made it a place where the actions of others rarely have any tangible effect on your actions unless you give them explicit permission.

Timothy Burke on Terra Nova wrote at the beginning of the year that Tron Legacy, far from being a movie worth hating on, actually provided a brilliant analogy to think about history of virtual worlds. This treatment actually revitalized the film for me – where I thought there was only incomprehensible nonsense of “movie magic” there is now an earnest, yet clever story. For Burke, Blizzard is CLU, the majordomo of Kevin Flynn, obsessed with destroying uncertainty through technocratic perfectionism. In his quest for this perfection, he destroys the unpredictable and organic lifeforms that begin to populate the world. Flynn's realization is that to create a perfect and closed system is folly – for it is in our imperfections that we find beauty and meaning in life.

In essence, the world's sublime is revealed through our own inability to perfect it.