Julain Dibbell pioneered reporting from virtual worlds, with his articles as/about Dr. Bombay in LambdaMOO, including his MUD Money piece from '95, which discussed LambdaMOO's Architecture Review Board, a socialist attempt to rein in overbuilding on LambdaMOO. Like many such systems (c.f. the collapse of the Soviet Union), the ARB didn't work very well, and when the VR world Second Life launched, they went for a more market-based economy, including an an in-game tax system. This system makes literal the idea that the power to tax is the power to destroy, since anything built is treated like real estate, and requires the player to pay tax for its upkeep for it to continue to exist, which in turn led to a culture of building for events and taking them down before the tax-bot swept through. Now Wagner James Au is continuing the tradition of in-game/from-game reporting, covering Second Life as a player, and he has been writing about a tax revolt going on within that system:

In late July, a cadre of outraged Lifers began agitating against the Linden tax system, which they see as unjustly penalizing ambitious builders, who contribute so much value to the world. By August 2nd, their cause had broken out into open protest. The first blow was leveled on Americana, the user-driven project to recreate famous US icons in a city space. Dissent appropriately took a very American form: the project's Washington monument had been replaced by a giant tower of tea crates; the baseball stadium rendered unusable by similar stacks; the Route 66 gas station set ablaze by an insurrectionist midget shooting off seditious fireworks...

Au now reports that the Second Life administration has agreed to make changes in the tax system (no permalink - scroll to "Taxman".) However, in the manner of real-world politicians everywhere, they have not specified what those changes are to be. (via TerraNova)