By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
I wonder if decades from now scientists will discover that all virtual, controlled worlds tend to entropy and collapse. Certainly they tend to large wealthy disparity and inequality but that is not something I have socialist beliefs about -- nationalizing all industries and handing out minimal payments to everyone. I have liberal democratic beliefs that would say you regulate the market and have the rule of law and ensure both equality andability to build up equity. The universal basic income was tried in the Soviet Union when they sold factories and gave every worker a share, but soon racketeers bought up the workers' shares and oligarchs took over the state's property and means of production, etc. etc. Second Life achieves this too with inflation, sinks, and losses.
I think the economy for some people works great and for other people works so poorly they leave SL or grow inactive.
What's Wrong
o Skilled designers, graphic artists, coders can make products that sell for high prices; they can make 6-figure incomes as we know from the Bonniebots very impartial but still useful if abusive "leaderboard" now removed; but their chief feature often is they don't participate in the world. You're a furniture maker in France; you make the top furniture, either most popular or considered most fancy; you put out your vendors in a store, in the MP, at an event, and then go back to RL where you have more interesting things to do; SL may only be one of the online creative content things you do; or it may be a big deal but you have other fish to fry and don't need the world. You are a platformista.
o Land dealers above X number of sims -- I am going to say 100 minimum and not even -- probably 500 is now needed to make even a modest RL living now -- these are people that might have more stake in coming into the world and interacting with customers at least and keep up with trends and social phenomenon and problems like the imposition of PBR, but you don't really need to be here, and hire staff. Light wolder tending toward platformista.
o Small business people with a range of shops from rentals to gatcha resales to breedables to lower-end appearance marketing like shapes or style cards or adaptions of skins to fit a bigger creator's breedable or body -- worlder, as they need to interact with customers and follow trends and maintain visiblity at social events.
o The lion's share of the log-in, who come to shop and socialize whose creativity is usually limited to decorating first themselves then homes if they have them -- worlders.
In other words, the people who make the most money from the platform are the platformista people who likely log in the least, and the greatest log-ons -- and their locations -- the worlders -- are going to be very disparate fro the accounts paying the bills.
Who should Linden Lab serve here?
Obviously, they need to serve the big guys who are the engines of the economy, like comparisons to the 19th century robber barons, if you will, who ultimately redeemed themselves by ploughing their assets, ill-gotten or not, into charity like hospitals and universities.
Charitable activities are huge in SL -- everyone is asked to give to music and the arts in tips at performances but this is peanuts compared to the enormous industry of American Cancer Society and Relay for Life. So the Medicis and the Cornelius Vanderbilts of SL can either donate their content to the cause 50% or 100% or they can use their assets to buy the donated or raffled content.
But none of this charitable activity is directed toward sustaining the vast population of newbies and newbies logging in from Brazil or Mexico or Poland or Japan or Turkey -- they all have to depend on donations from their fellow country people with that country or language group, as is the case in RL immigrants' communities. These people don't buy islands; but there are more of them -- way more -- and they are the customers of those with the island or even Mainland rentals or presumably leveling up to reach Bellisseria status with a premium account (but my sense is that most of Bellisseria consists of non-coastal Americans and West Europeans.
You may or may not be bothered by large wealth disparity -- I personally don't think you fix this artificially in any way by making committees of your fellow idealogues and taking over the government, as both AOC and Musk wish to do in their own ways in their own belief systems.
What mitigates this?
o The stipend -- 150, 300, 500, 650 - it does in a sense make "all premium account holders equal" although of course RL circumstances override that. We'll never know what a world would be like with ONLY the stipend because even in worlds where there is no legal conversion to real currency, like the Sims Online, it happens anyways because people illegally sell the simoleons. I think the stipend has:
a) not kept up with inflation;
b) has been diluted by the imposition of state income tax in the US on the whole premium cost;
c) been devalued by the devulation of the Linden dollar; in February 2023, 242 was a realistic cashout number; today, only 247 is. The higher that number, the lower the value against the US dollars.
The Lindens deal with disparity and inflation in fact by devaluing the Lindens, and taking longer now -- 5-7 days -- for the cashout.
That means newbies coming in can feel like they have $1000 dollars in their pockets (although they rapidly learn they need 10 times that amount to really look good and compete in the dating market) but creators are getting objectively paid less -- $3.85 per $1,000L. It may not seem like that big a disparity but it ads up, given RL inflation and higher prices for food and fuel.
Even so, it's a brake of sorts and I doubt we can expect LL to increase it at it would add to inflation. $100 more Lindens would not make a big difference for many although it might for those in Third World countries.
What illustrates the crisis?
o lower concurrency -- people can't break into the economy, can't find jobs (they need them), can't find ways to make a friend and leverage up on the socialization ladder to reach their own personal goals of happiness and creativity;
o proliferation of sales and merchant events -- advertisers have every motivation to add to the explosion of new events to make money, and merchants will run themselves ragged chasing them to take part and to keep their customers satisifed.
What results and what worsens the economic crisis?
o with no scarcity, mass replication, and no costs for replication against storage on land or capture of eyeballs in search on MP, people eventually stop buying things because they already have them or have something like them; they are confused with the proliferation of sales and hunts and opt out completely or sample less and less.
What is LL to do?
o They put in a shiny like PBR so that SL is "like" games or "like" "the rest of the Internet" or like whatever other thing they are jealous of in Silicon Valley among their tech bros. The overwhelming majority of the population doesn't care; it works for many but too many suffer from it; it is aggressively imposed on them with no remorse, then they are forced to mitigate it -- this is their usual roll-out pattern: beat up the population severely with a new feature no one asked for but 2 1/2 people in an office hour; 2) let them scream on the forums as they fix bugs; 3) make it seem to merchants that they will be left out if they don't start making PBR content; 4) pick those with PBR content for Shop 'n Hop. This has decidedly mixed success but history tells them they can keep stepping on the weak with poor computers and keep chugging on this and in a year no one will remember it was an issue; to be sure, they will lose X concurrency during this year.
Prediction:
o Ll will impose content creation licensing as a way to pre-filter the unskilled as they "mess things up" for the roll out of new features when they produce sub-standard content (bouncing mesh, PBR with glare) -- blame the adaption problems on the unskilled not just in the masses, but in the content creation class -- they will also be eager to crack down on increasing fraud, third-party sale of Lindens, shared account etc. There.com always did this; most online worlds and games work on that kind of system of app engineers being admitted by discretion. I hope they won't do this but that they are highly motivated to do this is a given.
o LI might consider allowing businesses to put AI robots in SL -- their natural home -- with the promise that the user base who consents to go on those sims will have their data scraped in exchange for tokens or prizes -- there are already chatGPT experiments in SL (I run them and Wastelands has a far superior one with real robust interactivity; there are others). LL will ignore forums harpies screaming about privacy and take the money of Big AI and Big IT to do this as they once were happy to have IBM, Sears, American Girl etc come on the platform.
o LL will close "General" -- they did that in the past at certain turning points, it's too much of a nuisance to moderate the 42 people who post on it. Former Lindens; covert Lindens; FIC; whoever -- need to make an alternative forums outside SL unlike the others that are moribund or too adult oriented in content like Primfeed.
Some Bright Ideas:
o LL should essentially create Spaces (as on Twitter) and moderate them and remove griefers -- these will be like Prokofy's Sutherland Dam meetings only with fair moderation by kicking all griefers, not letting *some* griefers including Linden alts disrupt the meeting because they don't like criticism. Spaces is hugely popular although not spreading widely because of technical and moderation problems but eventually these will be solved. Ll could show how to do it better; with attractive avatars, with geographical contiguity, with legs (dancing); with reputational building across time, etc.
o LL needs to allow commercial activity and placement in search of some Bellisseria areas. Currently the workaround (besides outright violation of the Bellisseria TOS which is rampant) is to use groups and constantly block people from them and to dose out scarce goods like DJ audiences with their tips. For entry level into the economy, many people need to DJ, sell breedables or gatchas, or escort in order to pay for their SL. They shouldn't be harmed in doing this and there should be a) an adult Bellisseria and b) the allowance of tip jars and vendors inside homes in Bellisseria. This is how Ll could help mitigate the economic crisis -- and it is really a crisis for many, and you can't believe the smug NYT articles about "increases in jobs" if you don't ask "but what kind of jobs? And now do people have two?"
o LL should hire some Moles directly out of the user population so that those who play this role anyway for no pay will have more incentive to do it properly, and with some regulation and discipline to entertain others as hostesses, game managers, quest managers, etc. for events, parties and so on. LL needs to make events and access to them fair, which people need for economic and social livelihood in SL.
This is just a sketch so far.
