Second Thoughts

BAD IDEAS: GET OFF OUR BACKS!

Well, I've only got a few hours before I must set aside my valiant fight against the FIC, in favour of doing my novel for the month of November. Not sure what to call this genre I'm going to be working in -- it's kinda like a nov-o-drama...nov-o-rama...a graphomaniac...um, kinda like a graphic novel, only 3-D, not machinima because in SL you aren't a machine...the avatar as the character of a living 3-D novel...it's not really a novel then, it's a movie, but since there's so much text involved..hmm...anyway I will be exploring these themes in the nov-o-dram-eo very soon, but meanwhile, such BAD ideas have been posted on the forums I MUST RESPOND because I know some residents and even some Lindens are nodding in approval.

First, I'm hoping Cocoanut will say a lot more about the mentor who is badgering her and harassing her and lashing out her poisonous tail on the forums, whiplashing her with set-up Linden warnings. If she won't, I will very soon because this sort of thing has to be exposed.

Now, as to the mauvais idees du jour. Not surprisingly, the commerce-allergenic Lauk, and the Euro-socialist-turned-capitalist-wage-slave Eggy Lippman (sorry, Eggs, but there it is) are up to their coniptions again about the unwashed masses interfering with their game play.

I've reflected before on this really dreadful concept of "United we stand; divided we run free at last" destructive, destabilizing concept of the body politic and civil society that the tekkie wikinistas are purveying in their mind-memes across the grid.

They all want to have little special enclaves where they can throw up the gates, mist up the surrounding area to prevent seeing any blight, and, um, I dunno, do what little special enclaves do when they can all hold hands around the campfire together and sing Kumbayah.

First, Eggy's vision:

- Color coded sim rating overlay, for starters. We had it on the hand drawn maps in 2003!
- Built-in support for Communities, separate from the current group system - groups of loosely connected individual sims or parcels that list themselves as belonging to a certain theme
- Color coded Community overlay on the map with mouseover description
- To keep things in theme, you need to have some membership management mechanism
- Facilitate parcel mobility so as to allow users to progressively aggregate parcel communities into a contiguous region over time
- Facilite the moving of islands belonging to the same Community into closer proximity on the map (right now you charge USD$50 for this, IIRC?)
- Linden would create a few seed communities (say, Sci-Fi, Medieval, etc) where players could list themselves, later adding the ability to create our own community for a price.

I'd love to have more information about the grid, but not for the sake of Balkanizing the grid, but for helping it to become coherent to itself and others. I'm leaning toward the One Grid sort of concept that I'm figuring is something like the One World thingie of the 1930s, but only because I'm thinking the grid, like the real world, is interdependent, and that creating some overarching values and norms of at least some minimal sort of the TOS variety if something else is required for civilization. I don't think creating all sorts of independent colonies run by arrogant tekkie and artie fucktards is really progress, silly me. I imagine they will break down into warring principalities...but maybe first they'll run up smack against the real problem of all these colonies: cost. Before, they could have a parcel, a half a sim. Now, to get their "freedom," it has to be a whole private island or nothing. That gets expensive, and my guess is that all this 'run free at last' stuff is just going to run out of tier money and be back poking around the mainland before you know it.

Eggy's colour-coding idea fits in with the more-knowledge concept and I'm all for it. I often wonder about land I'm looking at to buy whether it is M or PG and they don't tell you unless you land there first. Annoying.

As for built-in support for Communities, I think this is net-nanny, nanny-state, communist tripe. We don't need some government to set up this infrastructure for it. Anshe has already done this sort of thing in ruling with her iron fist. She's made some of her communities themes. If you don't mind having kind of ersatz, water-downed themes that don't really grow indigenously from a real sense of place and community action, and you don't mind getting the message "furries go here, Germans go there, gays go over there," well, it's ok, but I think people probably want some more freedom that that. These categories are going to be hard to define, and even harder to enforce. Hell, people can't even agree in the events working group started by the Lindens about events categories. what if I'm a gay, German, Furry? Do I request a pass so as to fly across all three of these sims?

So I'd be inclined to leave the identification and sorting of communities to the residents themselves by the naming of their sims and leave the Lindens/government totally out of it. Getting them in on this act only feeds their tendency to set up a corporatist fascist-type society/government of guilds and classes which is anethaema.

I'd especially hate any kind of membership management system run by Lindens, and not by people who make communities. Fix the group tools, and people can do this themselves. Give them more control and trusting ability in the tools, they will do this without having to make super-structures. And even without tools, leave top-down management out of it. People can already make groups well enough without messing with them.

As for moving parcels around, this is silly. What, we take 10 parcels off a sim and move it together somewhere out in the void...and leave what...blank space? new land? first land? on a server? Huh? But what happens to the geographic sense of place the Lindens are making on the main grid? I find this pretty serviceable stuff. They have telehubs -- which yes, are needed to create centers and which still have value for shopping -- they have dams and roads and lakes and builds of various kind that have meaning. I'm all for leaving that there and let people try to get along better. After all, it's the inability of the fuck-you hedonists to cede anything to the principle of rights for all that is at the root of this problem. Everyone wants the right to do what the fuck they want to on their property, although things like lag and particle and ugly views intrude into the enjoyment of the game for others. Some basic civilization norms could be disseminated better, but this will require the hard-core FIC giving up their hammerlock on the game's mores and norms -- since they don't reflect what most people want.

I don't want Lindens doing more content and building for this game. They do too much. It's supposed to be created by users. If someone wants to make Medieval World, let them buy a sim and make it. Keep the Lindens/the federal government/net nanny players like mentors OUT OF IT. The Lindens could, on the other hand, point toward better management of the grid with soft, generic, recommended zoning on the auctions. They could say for a telehub and near-telehub sim "these are the club and shopping zoned sims" and for sims located 800 meters from the telehub "this is the residential sim." There merely label it. People will do their own enforcing. It is soft, not hard law. It is doable merely by putting up a sign. Their inability to get over their own rigid liberal social-engineering codes is preventing them from just trying to point in a better direction -- and residents will take care of the rest.

Now, let's look at Lauk's post. Lauk is the person who, on the Community Round Table, had to answer to my good-faith offer to give no-rent or low-rent sims for various events with "I don't want orgies of advertising" and "all this business crap". I don't let neuralgic commerce-allergenic statements like that sit there and go on meming up the servers. I fight back. It doesn't matter if Lauk is 'a nice person' who 'makes beautiful things'. This utopian hegemonic attitude -- shoving the socialist utopia on everybody -- has to be stopped in its tracks.

Here's a point by point rebuttal not only to her, but to Gwyn, who was nodding, and the rest of the FIC:

This is a topic close to my heart and, as someone who has now spent a year consolidating my holdings in SL, I think I've a reasonably informed opinion.

Yeah, I've done the same thing, so I have an informed opinion, too, but it is diametrically opposed to yours, and I think my opinion is probably in line with a lot more of the player population than yours, so I think you can no longer safely go on merely insisting that the Lindens follow what you say.

Here are are some of my interrelated ramblings ( possibly the longest post I've ever made, please accept my apologies now ) ...

** Mainland Sim vs Private Island ownership.

I believe if you possess an entire sim, you should be entitled to use the estate tools, including land texturing and full landscaping. The current system of private island sims serves no purpose( as far as I can see ) other than to provide LL with the $1200 setup fee. I abhor that and smell a tinge of corporate greed that seems inconsistent with the rest of LLs dealings.

This is socialist clap-trap and guilt-tripping. The social-minded Lindens are actually charging the lowest they can for these islands, and simply had to raise their price when it became clear there'd be a much huger market for them once Anshe got into the island business and now has something like 70 of them. The islands have more features, more custom service, and have the full-time services of 2 Linden staff people on them. They cost money. Therefore it is not "greedy" to charge more for them but REALISTIC and JUSTIFIED and thank God, the Lindens made this distinction to value not only their own labour, but the extra value that developers and residents put on to the islands and their features.

So you might ask: "What about the discontinuity this would cause" ?
I say open your eyes and take a look around the grid ....

** The grid

What a pile of poo the mainland grid system is !

Um, no, actually not. I own about 10 sims worth of land, spread over about 40 sims. I and my neighbours have gone to huge amounts of effort to keep the sims nice, not laggy, residential, or mixed with shops. The hundreds of customers I have come and go through these areas are appreciative of it. There are dozens of other rentals agents, some with way more land than me, that do the same thing on the mainland. There's no poo on our land -- the only poo we're dealing with is the constant interference that socialists are making in our ability to do business freely in a free market.

To be sure, the mainland is filled with blight. But it's not blight to everyone. A lot of it is newbie freedom. These ugly builds and one-month clubs, and malls and so on that people try come and go and fade within 30 or 60 days and the sims settle down. They start to look decent and usually some set of forces come along to right them -- either one person or one group buys up all the land and at least makes it one sort of thing or some group settles down and makes residences on the sim and lives prettily happily. This is a natural process and should be left alone, except insofar as the federal government should be pressed into service more to disseminate more basic norms of good neighborly behaviour. A public service would be to take the rotation script out of the library, so that people avoid experiments with giant rotating crap and rotating signs on their stores as a free and immediate given.

Over the past week I spent maybe 3 hours, possibly more one night, simply flying around the grid. I do this periodically because I like to get out and explore. Most times I island hop for reasons I'm about to describe, but this time I decided to go around the mainland because I hadn't for ages.

What did I find ?
- 75% of the grid is basic prefab, what I call "middle american suburbia". ( ok it's slightly insulting but it's what I call it )

TOO BAD. That's how 75 percent of the people WANT IT. This game has SEVENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE IN IT NOW.  Sorry, but socialists, aesthetes, and tekkie-wikis can no longer dictate the norms of the grid. People are free, they buy land, they pay tier, and this is what they want. It's actually an improvement over the idiotic sim-lagging sandbox experimenting that we had to face on many sims a year ago, where it was routinely accepted that asswipes could run submarines all over a sim and bomb everybody and lag the sim down to 37 just as a "cultural norm" from the tekkies -- sending all the householders packing. If people want to make a middle American suburb -- let them. It's a free country. If you don't like it, don't fly around the grid and look at it, don't scream about the grid -- which is way bigger than you -- go back to your sim, go get a private island, and put your trees and birds and socialist cooperatives on your sim and STFU. Really, that's all that can be said about this -- the Lindens cannot be in the business of legislating a tiny minority's aesthetic tastes and imposing them on the majority.

- 24% is malls and clubs

Good! People like to socialize and go shopping. Thank God for it. It is the lifeblood of the economy. Not everybody wants to sit up in a wacky tree in a raven avatar and spout socialist nostrums. Let them be, and get the hell out of their hair. Go back to your co-op and basket-weave and leave everyone else alone.

- 1% is stuff that I'm interested in.
To me that stinks, just 1% stops me long enough to admire or say wow, awesome!

Um, that would suggest that you are about one percent relevant to this world, and really ought to know your place in it. You can't take this one percent and then flip it and make the other 99 percent bow to your socialist and tekkie-artie vision. Get off it already. Go back and tend your one percent and get the hell out of my garden and my world and the world of 99 percent of the rest of the people. If you think you can expand this cultural and aesthetic norm of the one percent high-falutin types even to five percent, go work on it, but stop looking to bend the Linden project  -- already socialist enough -- to your utopian vision. It rots. It has not merit. If it can expand beyond itself naturally, fine. I say this as someone who has supported fine art and architecture constantly in this world and am prepared to do more of it. But I'm not going to fly in the face of what the democratic public opinion is. It is not the one percent that appeals to Laukosargas Svarog. Therefore
Laukosargas Svarog  needs to get the hell out of our faces and just go do her own thing and consolidate it and stop haranguing and pressuring the rest of us.

When I joined SL I'm sure that figure seemed higher so what's happened ? ...

Uh, could that have to do with your being in a tekkie-wiki with other techno-geeks and graphic artists type who make up a tiny minority? In fact, this game gives many people even with no abilities the tools to become more technically capable and more artistically creative, but you then cannot fault them for using those tools to build a middle-class suburban American dream. I think you'll find a certain percentage of those people actually aren't middle-class or American or suburban, either, come to think of it. What's happened is your precious clutch over this world has eroded -- thank God -- and now it can grow. If you want your own little percentage of it to grow, you need to shut up and get to work -- go make something, like the forum fascists always tell us to do. Go hold an event, a class, go buy a sim and make a world. Get off our backs!

- SL is bigger, much bigger. Bigger and more popular always equates to harder to find the cool stuff.
- More significantly: Many "artists" have got fed up with the mainland and left SL, or obtained private islands and hidden.

So? Let them. They can be smug and happy on their private islands, which may or may become the new golf, the new gated community, the new Bohemia, the new hell on earth. Whatever. Again, get off our backs with it. Make it, and let's see if it is any good. If it's harder to find the cool stuff, then what we need is less whining about it, and less ranting and raving about Lindens bringing this forward, and more resident-based efforts to sustain and bring it forward. Otherwise, it has NO AUTHENTICITY.

Here's a true story...

PersonA comes into SL, buys a bit of land, builds her vision.

PersonB buys the plot next door, builds his vision.

PersonA's vision is poles apart from PersonB's yet they are forced to build up to their parcel boundaries because the parcels are too small. Instant discontinuity

Well, that's partly due to the fuck-you hedonism ethic spread across the grid by you all, with your notions of tekkie-wiki Eminent Domain and Nobless Oblige. The first thing that Anshe does in Ansheland is put her foot down and say you cannot build out to the property line. So you don't. I do the same thing in my communities to the extent possibility. People can be asked simply to consider their neighbours. Most of the time they do!

What have the architectural elite done to build great, viable, good-looking homes (as distinct from sculptures) for 512s and 1024s? I know that Barnesworth, Ingrid, Juro are doing this to some extent but it's not enough and their styles are not for everyone. When the elites shut up and create something that can solve this problem of building to the property line to get space, let's talk. They haven't done this.

PersonC comes along purchases a plot adjacent to A and B. He's an asshole and a newbie, doesn't know about local light, has accidentally switched all his red and blue blocks to light material, swamping A and B with unwanted colour. Will not respond to IMs, has put up NO ENTRY bars on his 512 plot.

Turn your draw distance down, for one. Try to instruct, for another. I find that even non-newbies who are bona-fide members of the FIC are raging fucktards when I gently ask them just to change their for-sale signs not to huge ugly glaring neo boards or spinning orbs but something a little more effective and tasteful. Now, the colour-spread issue is gone in 1.7 but education is needed. Unfortunately, this type of die-hard little asstard on a 512 with lines up and spinning crap is an SL reality few people have successfully dealt with. Usually it goes away in 30 days. I think peer pressure and the dissemination of better norms have just not been tried sufficiently. I routinely negrated anyone I saw building plywood uglies way up in the sky blighting the horizon. Let them go in a sandbox if they want to play, this is a neighbourhood. I found they would build bigger and uglier but at some point, they stopped. I think more willingness to confront this behaviour, and less crabbing to the Lindens about it is what is needed.

I'm all for the use of forums to point out those people by name who do the following:

o build extortionist builds to force a sale at an outrageous price

o builds that lag the sim substantially with scripts, particles, etc.

o builds that obstruct other's access to their land on all or 3 sides

o builds that significantly blight the view for 4 sims and therefore impact on the enjoyment of all of their game.

What I found is that the awful FIC on the forums, starting with Weedy Herbst and many other vicious little net nannies, going back to the infamous Pahoa Jade thread, were so keen to defend the tekkie-wiki-woo of this world, that they failed to see that my norms are not about suppressing people's freedoms on their land, not about enforcing white-picket-fences, but developing a really doable, simple, four-point basic consensus on the worst offenders on the grid. If Lauk has bitching to do about the way the grid looks now, she needs to take that to people like Weedy who were and are such staunch supporters of "I can do the fuck what I want on my land."

PersonA can't sell because of C, so ends up releasing land in order to move fast.

This is indeed where the Lindens practice objective evil and possibly even greed. They let this situation go on like this because it's the single greatest engine to get people to buy more land. They roll out fresh pristine sims with the allure that people can at least escape the ugliness of C, because they don't want to make simple pointers to roughly map out communities in the very broad generic sense ("the shopping community, the clubbing community, the residential community"). People who are in the predicament of C need help. First, they need forums where they can publicize and pressure those who break those 4 norms I've outlined. If their beef is less serious, i.e. like April Firefly just not liking the glaring white of her neighbour's modernistic house in her Victorian beach front dream, well, there's a case where you say "Huge Pine Tree is your best friend...64 draw distance is your best friend...30 days is your best friend...community committees are your best friend."

See, this is why negrates were so great -- a negrate often concentrated the mind wonderfully, and got people to get their heads out of their asses and realize their ugly houses of cards etc were not appreciated by everyone online day after day, while they disappeared to Cancun for 30 days.

I was PersonA a couple of times in the past year.

So? We've all been there. No concrete solution is proposed here (like my four voluntary social norms spreading across the grid as a community consensus that the community begins to demand). Instead, the Lindens are supposed to bend and shift and change and move parcels off sims to voids and attach them to islands, like Tinker toys. It's outrageous.

I see this scenario in varying degrees all over the grid.

It's an exaggeration. For every blighted sim, I can show 10 sims that are doing a lot better than one thinks, as long as you don't expect them all to look like FIC-itecture.

** Point to Point teleporting

Not so long ago I had a long discussion with one of my best SL friends about p2p TP. He is totally against the idea. I am all for it. My 3 hour flight across the mainland grid has convinced even more of the need for p2p.

Go away from my world. There is no reason to demand that p2p has to be incorporated and obliterate my world, and the world of everyone who benefits from telehubs, their centralizing and thematicizing powers, and their shopping. Get off my back. p2p only reinforces little closed, claustrophobic networks of little overbearing assholes. Multiple that, and our world will be unliveable. Let both coincide on the grid.

He believes p2p will prevent people from exploring and has an almost convincing argument.

It's actually an utterly convincing argument. It means no more interaction, chance encounters, and most important, shopping an open, democratically accessible markets not controlled by the FIC and their little commerce circles.

I believe there are basically 2 fundamental types of people in SL: Creators and Consumers.
( ignoring or including those who simply use SL as a glorified chat room )

This is where I say a giant, big, fat GO FUCK YOURSELF as loudly, and as clearly as I can. This is fascism, and it will not pass. There are not two such categories, because creators often consume, and consumers often create -- and the thing they create, which might be an intangible like 'a relationship' or 'a home' or 'a group of friends' or 'a business' is just as valid a form of content creation as somebody who makes wings or the beloved-by-Lindens jet-pack. Once again, get off our backs.

Creators are, by their very nature, also Explorers and of course some Consumers are also Explorers.
Those who are not of the exploring frame of mind, already rely on friends to TP them and so don't see the bulk of the world anyway.

Actually, no. Creators are by their nature in this environment not the open-minded Bohemians and democrats we thought they were in Real Life, but little anal-retentive assholes who wish to control others. They are abhorrent. They flip "no modify" on their free products. They insist everyon p2p to them and don't want anyone to have choice in a marketplace. They are the types that think there should be a central command that force-ports everyone to them the minute they land in SL. Once again, GET OFF OUR BACKS!

Explorers will explore regardless of the existence of p2p TP. In fact oft times a combination of good map detail and p2p will aid exploration.

Baloney. Private islands now need zooming in to be seen. In order to use p2p, you need to know the p to p2, as I always say. This obvious, blatant fact is always overlooked so let me shout it out. IN ORDER TO POINT TO POINT YOU NEED A POINT TO TELEPORT TO DUH. How do you gain that knowledge? Only through exploration, openness, freedom of choice, democratic accessibility, and the presence of all kinds of big gathering places like clubs, not only help islands, can this happen. Most people go to clubs or friends and sort out there, without the technerati getting in their hair. Imagine coming into SL, and not being able to go anywhere to any central location, but having to rely on making a friend or going to an event and having the organizer tp you. It will create a lot of hardship and mainly a brake on freedom. p2p represents closed society. Telehubs and shopping and malls and casinos, as hated as they are, represent open society. If the FIC finds these things unaesthetic, then the challenge to them is to create large public events and large, capacious institutions that can engage and hold large numbers of people in more "aesthetic" or at least meaningful ways. The answer is not to put the California social engineers on this job.

** Themed areas or freedom of connection

Recently to my delight I've had people invite me to go live in their sims and build there, I'd love to, but I've grand plans of my own, it's my ambition to own an entire sim by the middle of next year. I'm well on the way now too. I don't particularly want to have to pay $1200 for an island. It's too much unless I can save it up in Lindens!

Um, great! Could you please just go and do that and get off our backs?

I'm sure I could rent land in themed islands but I'm not prepared to be beholden to a landlord other than LL.

Well, we realize you have very delicate sensibilities and the thought of doing anything "mass" or "gross" or "popular" would upset your fine equilibrium. So, um, keep saving, and...get off our backs! Most people will rent in themed islands though, to achieve these goals.

My ideal solution would be for a group of likeminded individuals to say, hey let's take our parcels and join them together to create our vision.

You know something? I like this idea, too. But I'll be the first to tell you that it is about as stupid, ignorant, and utopian an idea there is out there. I'm in the process of proving this once again. People don't like herding. If there is a group of likeminded persons, why, let them group. Let them pool tier. Let them buy a sim. Why make the Lindens stop what they are doing and horse around parcels? That's insane. What the Lindens MUST reply to this idiotic utopian bleating is to say, "Get your friends together, go on the auction, pick a sim for $1000 -- we have LOADS of them -- and BUY THEM. Split up the tier, and run it without us. Buh-bye." That's all there is to it. If you think that the geographic/place/sim/build equity you built up on other sims is irreplaceable, you're wrong. With the capacity to cut and paste and terraform and build just about anything anywhere, there's absolutely no excuse for telling the Lindens to move a thing.

This would mean
- A: Pulling down and rebuilding would be unnecessary.
- B: Themed areas would happen automatically.

No, they don't. Because people don't like herding. Tell you what. Find your group of like-minded friends. Do that much. Stop whining, and DO THAT MUCH. Then get back to us. AFTER you've determined they really existe (because they don't) AFTER you've justified to us why you can't go buy a sim for $1000 on the auction, well, maybe we could hear about why everyone should be stopping what they are doing on the Linden team and moving your parcels and sims around to suit your vision.

Of course I can see a few technical problems, wasted server space and such, but this is a "VIRTUAL" world, it's created with "SOFTWARE" ! eh ?

You know, if I were a Linden, grinding away on these servers day after day trying to make them work, busting my balls, trying to get this thing to stay afloat, if I ever met a person who told me I had to crack off little pieces of the server and put it in other places like this, I'd slap them in the face. Hard. And I just wish that one Linden, JUST ONE LINDEN, would send me an IM in the game, and say, you know Prok, I don't like you, you're a pain in the ass, but I do want to thank you for standing up to this particular BAD IDEA which would involve ridiculous, time-consuming, expensive machinations that no one in their right mind could justify, so THANKS PROK!

Like I said, GET OFF OUR BACKS.

Da Bomb

In case you never get to go over and check out Philip Linden's thinky blog, go see what he just refreshed with:

It isn't often that I come in touch with a subject as big as Second Life, but this is certainly an example.  Over the last 2 weeks, I've seen 'Dr. Atomic' 3 times, which is a new opera created by Peter Sellars and John Adams and showing at the San Francisco Opera...

Check out my post there, but before I wax further eloquent on things like the very first SL sim being called "Da Bomb" (heavy, huh??? and still in existence!) let me go way out on a limb, in the way I'm never afraid to do, and ask whether Philip could be among the first generation in his family -- maybe second? -- to be going to the opera. There's just something about this post that wants us to know that Philip Linden goes to the opera. Three times! Did you know your favourite gamo-techno-geek-dude went to the opera?!

I'm getting this sense I guess, as one whose own ancestors did stuff like hold down the parking lot booth in front of the Hotel Frontenac in Quebec City or manned the saloon on the wrong side of the tracks in Cory, PA. We're only really second-generation opera-goers although actually, I'm going to admit that the opera-going gene is skipping a generation when it comes to your humble correspondent despite at least one opera-directing relative. In New York, I see first-generation-college-educated going to, and suffering at, the opera all the time -- it's the new golf.

OK, Maybe Philip's ancestors had season's tickets to the grandest opera halls of Europe in their day, I dunno, or maybe they were lathe-operators which is why he went into physics and engineering. (actually I think he said at SLCC that he had many teachers in his family). Still, somehow, the idea that he thought to blog about this has some kind of...story behind it.

Now, to his main point! Philip Linden must think that Second Life is like the atomic bomb. That is, it's not as big an idea as the atomic bomb, he admits in his blog, but still pretty big! I'm going to leave aside all the stuff about Oppenheimer and communism and the Soviets because I kinda alluded to that already, but let's just try to think about what it means to sing to your creation, which is like an atomic bomb.

To look at real stories from Oppenheimer's life, there's the one from the interview shortly before his death:

Oppenheimer also recalled the words of the Hindu god Vishnu as that god was trying to compel an earthly leader to follow his dictates. To intimidate the human,Vishnu re-formed himself into the visage of a huge multi-armed writhing figure, enormously immense beyond the scale of simple human proportions.   "Now I am become Death", he told the human, "destroyer of worlds.".

The scary part about Philip's blog -- if you want to skip all that link jumping -- is this:

Could it be that the darkness of that first explosion suggests in the same breath the opposite:  that technology might also be able to save us?  I hope so.

So the first blogger in response says matter-of-factly, hey, why do we need saving? Then I ask -- but technology alone can't save us, the human heart is cruel. Which we knew already from seeing all the people who post on this blog, hmmm?

People who think technology can save us -- well, I don't know where to start with them. I had to battle one of them over on Terra Nova again today (scroll to the end). See, it works like this: 1) technology alone can save us; 2) geeks who run the technology then should rule the world. No thanks!

Well, rather than continue to cross-post myself, let me point out that Second Life is like nuclear fission in terms of its ability to rapidly replicate mind and cultural memes, many of them decidedly sub-optimal. This is where I think it gets really freaky and scary, and like with the RL atomic bombs, there ought to be more rules about where you test this stuff not only near vulnerable human beings like children and old people, but any of us.

What are the resuls of the Second Life revolutionary tool? Well, as I've noted:

o leveraging the middle-aged female capacity (due to employed husbands and part-time employment in the Wal-Mart economy) to good advantage as sexual playmates for the under- or not-yet employed high-school and college aged male -- any tool that can help leverage and economize the labour and cost of gaining the male orgasm will likely be revolutionary and financially successful.

o leveraging the developing world and second world labour for computer programming and graphic arts skills in real time for consumption by mainly Americans

o creation of a persistent, streaming, 3-D, dynamic simulated world where more and more people will spend their time and con themselves into thinking it will save them costs even on military training and prototyping, so that our enemies will be able to sneak in the country on tourist visas and use just basic stuff like box-cutters and the low-grade not-even-high-school equivalency education of airport checkers to take down buildings.

The guy who is quoted today in the Post as saying you can "take two zeros" off the cost of training might as well put two zeros out at desks as the names we should call his employees who are now about useless for real national defense which needs stuff like immersion in the real world of field ops and HUMINT.

I'm trying to picture a country with like even 20 percent of the population "goggled in," i.e. sitting in front of computer terminals 24/7, staring at a screen, with a game going in one window, SL in another, Yahoo Messenger in a third, spread-sheets from work in a 4th, endlessly mouse-clicking, with say, 5-7 percent of them masturbating at any given moment LOL. Is this going to be a country that's easy to take over lol? Well, these are my dark thoughts about it this Halloween Eve...

Sky rockets in flight/afternoon delight...

Geez, It's the FIC Again

Many people think I enjoy obsessing about the FIC (the techno-elite Feted Inner Core at the heart of the world of Second Life) and writing about it over and over again. But it sure does get goddamn boring. And here we go again with possibly the most astounding revelation ever made about the whole Linden-FIC thing:  here we have none other than Cory Linden himself explaining matter-of-factly -- as part of a smackdown of your humble correspondent among the high-falutin Terra Nova blogerati -- that:

As for how prospective LL employees find us -- by my rough count -- at least 1/3 of LL's employees were hired after we met them in Second Life, which is about as many as have been hired based on employee referrals. The rest are the usual mix of recruiters, random meetings, Game Initiative "Breaking In" conferences, and random resume submissions. To my knowledge, none have been hired based on encounters in MMORPGs.

That astounding revelations means that not only are 1/3 of the Linden FIC, as the Herald has reported, but probably something more like 2/3 -- because Cory admits that employee referrals make up "as many". Employees who spent 24/7 in SL and made compelling projects that landed them LL jobs are likely to have friends in SL too -- or RL friends that will tend to be of the tekkie/geek/gamer variety.  Urizenus Sklar over at the Second Life Herald has been rather, erm, graphic about what he thinks this process is akin too but I'd phrase it more delicately:  there is such a thing as eating too much of your own dogfood. I can't imagine the Lindens can ever get the critical distance they need from this galactic enterprise of theirs if they are "all on the same page" as Pathfinder so classically put it that time in the IRC.

And to think this revelation all came about as a study in "World of Warcraft as the new golf" -- a place where anthropologist Thomas Mallaby said on Terra Nova that prospective game devs would go to meet game company execs on their off-hours.

Of course Second Life isn't a game.

Cory Linden is like a rock star. With his non-gay earing in one ear, his untucked shirt and jeans, his combo straight/conservative Naval background and wacky/liberal game dev job today, he cuts an imposing figure. He strides right out into the audience at the SL Community Conference, brandishing his mike, and rapid-fires a bunch of techno-geek talk about server this and Havoc 2 that and XPC the net thing...and then all the geeks go wild, peppering him with questions. "It hurts me even more than it hurts you that we don't have Havoc 2 yet," he moans mournfully, nurturing his mike.

Havoc 2 is some kinda physics/movement thing that, if I understand it correctly, will make it possible to play golf and drive cars whole bunches better than you can now in SL. That means, the suburban experience that we just haven't been able to adequately simulate in our world is not entirely out of our reach, we must merely be patient.

At his concert -- I mean talk at SLCC -- Cory also answered my question abruptly, too. After I dug past the techno stuff, which was mainly about "it's on the to-do list," I got my headlines: "No Herald on a prim; no debate of policy on the voting page." You might conflate this even tigher: "No Democracy on A Prim, Says Linden".

What this means is that we will not be able to bring Internet connectivity and linkage into the world, such that people can click on a prim and get immediate viewability of a web page, i.e. the Second Life Herald, inside the world. And the debate on policy means that while the Lindens will continue to encourage voting proposals on game -- erm I mean client -- features, they don't want to have that function used to debate policy, i.e. about a bill of rights. They won't be doing those windows.

I'm glad to hear this first bit, actually, because I think web connectivity merely disrupts the fabric of the immersive world and makes SL more of a 3-D game dev and tekkie resume world than it already is, although I imagine it can be defended with all sorts of educational/political/social applications might also take off. It's going to take some doing. And without the ability to whiteboard -- to stand around and sketch out pictures and words together and change them singly or collectively -- we''ll have to keep using this clunky interface of notecard-SL IM-Yahoo-RL email-f2f meetings that we now have patched together around SL.

But I'm straying from my topic (that never happens!). And that's that a Linden has delivered a smackdown -- and a smackdown that hilariously revealed there is more of a FIC than I could have ever imagined. I thought the Lindens were made up of maybe, oh, 3-6 former residents, some of whom I knew about. I figured the rest came from job fairs that they had at game conferences, or their colleagues in the field, or from other game companies, like the There guy. Anybody can send them a resume, of course, but by saying that Second Life itself is where they want to take a look-see of you, they are announcing their world as essentially still in beta, and still for paid beta-testers. I wonder if they ever use their god-like powers to be invisible and listen in on people's conversation to talent-spot, and check out prospective employees not when they appear dressed in suit and tie with their fabulous portfolio of "visual representations of data" at the Linden Recruiting Center, but when they are humping a hot call girl at Barbie's, or dressed up in their female av sucking dick, or -- if they are the PG sort -- fighting with their neighbours over who is going to get the prim land and who is going to tell that asswipe with the rotating particle-spewing tower to blow himself off the grid. It adds a whole new dimension to the job-search notion, eh, the idea that your prospective employer can snoop on your more private moments in a game?

Robin Linden once said, "The FIC is an interesting myth." Well, actually, it is an interesting actual story LOL -- that gets more banal and dull with the re-telling. Now that we can see practically half or more of Linden Lab is made up of residents -- meaning it is a highly specialized and elite vanguard of people -- I guess we can close the case. The ultimate influence of the game company is to *get a job in it*. Talk about influencing game features! Gah. It boggles the mind.

Just think -- all those resentful fucktards on the forums...hankering to be Lindens...then GETTING to be Lindens...and then using their powers to settle scores. If you doubt that they do that, you have never read Shakespeare or studied human nature in high school.

You start wondering...is it like my old Russian classes during the Cold War? One by one, people would disappear from our ranks. They weren't going to work in academia or humanitarian work like some of us, they were going to go work for the CIA or some other espionage outfit. One day they were sitting next to you struggling with verbs of motion and those awful gerunds ("the having-gotten-up-from-her-chair girl entered-once-quickly-and-left-again the store") -- the next day they had taken off to foreign countries to meet exotic people and kill them. You never saw them again. Or you might suddenly see them years later at a conference with a nametag with some acronymn in a place like Reston, VA and you'd wonder where they were.

In the same way, people who were once very visible characters in the SL world flash across the sky...then disappear. Maybe some of their close friends know that they have Become Lindens. Evidently they must Take An Oath not to reveal the connection between their old SL avatars and their new Linden selves. They can apparently keep those old avatars but there are apparently some sort of rules about how they then deploy them. You start to wonder...where is StoneSelf Karuna? So quick with the put-downs and the set-straights on the forums, constantly getting into every Linden thingie...and now...where is he? Did he Become a Linden? And how about Cubey Terra...did he leave because (as rumor has it) that he was a silent partner in the crashed GOM? Or did he Become a Linden? And if so...WHICH Linden? There are people who try to become Lindens...and fail the final interview stage, but remain in the game. Do they get another try? Will they remain ever embittered, inside the "Walled Garden" of SL as Tony Walsh calls it...but forever outside the Garden Party inside?

All I can say is what I said to Cory in the high-falutin Terra Nova blog:  I invite you to consider what kind of world you are making in this fashion.

Which brings me to my subject today: fighting the FIC. It is so wearisome, and most of the FIC of course is invisible, outside one's reach, either becoming a Linden, or meeting Lindens in secret or semi-secret (like all the Lindens stacked up on the intriguing sim island called Better World the other night).

The FIC who continue to bite on my ankles like noisome vermin include Cristiano, Nolan and their various supporters/alts/fans and the debate goes something like this:

ME:  "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, telling Cocoanut she's a hypocrite for taking two 512 plots for a total of 1024 m2 for $9.95 times 2, when you have a free 4096 for $9.93 in your second year of being a charter member."

FIC:  "You're an ugly old lady who has no life."

ME:  "Given that you benefit yourself from the 10 percent tier bonus on group land, and that the groups that benefit from this include many projects that enhance SL, aren't your motives in campaigning against the 10 percent benefit rather suspect, and revealed to be mainly  those of jealousy, spite, and the desire to prank people and make them cry?"

FIC:  "You're a paranoid schizophrenic living on welfare."

See, it's not much of an interesting dialogue.

So, given that I've decided to write the novel suggested through the NaNoWriMo process starting Nov. 1, something has to give. In contemplating what areas of my various lives have to give, it was a no-brainer to pick:  "answering the FIC on my blog" indeed "blogging at all" and "responding to Herald articles". To these three time-sucks, I could add a fourth:  "fending off and discussing FIC attacks in SL." I'm figuring that with my schedule requiring a 1000-word-a day production or so, I'm simply going to have to conserve my energy.

So, I'm spraying plenty of Cutter around my ankles and putting on my sturdiest socks and shoes and hiking off to NaNoWriMo land now : )

You Knew I Just Had To Do It

The New NIGgers of the Non-Integrating Gap

The new fly-over includes lots of countries your ancestors fled or were enslaved from but a lot of folks were left behind without the price of a ticket to the Core...

The marrying of First Life and Second Life is now complete -- for the first time a non-gamer, non-Internet kewl dude like Cory Doctorow or Richard Bartle has come to speak at Future Salon in SL. Thomas Barnett, a Pentagon policy wonk and Democrat on the rubber-chicken circuit to sell his book, stopped to speak at a crowded lagging sim touchingly called "Barnett Gap" in SL.

For the inappropriate simulated venue of this event -- the UN -- see below.  The last thing Barnett would like to do is cooperate with other countries through the UN; most of his vision at least as articulated to the SL crowd consists of exploiting the UN for a few things like ICC indictments only via the Security Council, and doing all the other dirty and clean work through U.S. power mainly operating alone, or in strict concert with subordinates. I'm puzzled that any center or center-to-right figure these days would want the UN as a backdrop, given not only the Bush Administration's attitude toward the UN but that of many Democrats. It's actually a sign that the killer democracy-attack cadres who thought you could install things like independent TV and civil society in Iraq within 90 days for $1 million are now looking to the UN's reach and the UN's budgets (which the US helps fund) to do democracy stuff -- they worked this into the Millenium Development Goal's much-hashed-over outcome document, they got a democracy fund installed for the SG to use (ostensible for stuff like colour revos in Eastern Europe but lotsa luck on that one) -- but they forgot that the UN, filled with a lot of decidedly undemocratic regimes, doesn't really "do" democracy.

Before starting any colour revos in EE, let's get SL working right, shall we? Poor Barnie showed up as one of those gray avatars logging in from NIG-like "public terminals" in Snowcrash; Hammie looked like he was about to rez a dress; and only Jerry thought to get the Lindens to at least rez his pink Keds for the occasion.

I'm going to give all the Barnett oeuvre a more careful reading on the Internet (I'll wait til the book hits the sale bins at the Strand) but so far, I find it an inch deep and a mile wild -- and the kind of big American 7-lane paved superhighway going out, that gets a dirt cowpath coming back from the rest of the world.

Start with his notion of "The Functioning Core" (feting aside), which roughly corresponds to "the North and West" and the "Non-Integrating Gap" which correspondns roughly to the global South and East...and which has the rather unfortunate feature of creating classes of people across the world to be known as NIGgers most likely....

Is that a socialist red rose peeking out of the left-hand suitcoat pocket of Thomas Barnett? Only the SL rendering engine knows for sure...

From the transcript here, you can see that the vision involves creating a crack, flexible corps of elite warriors skilled in everything from actual battle to nation-development ("pistol-packing Peace Corps"), using something that seems to be an amalgam of Homeland Defense (I'm puzzled that this entity is no longer the laughingstock of Dems like Barnett) and thrust from a putative "Group of 20" which would be 7 plus hmmm India and Brazil and other big populated countries with manpower and budgets. In other words, it's like a RL version of the SL FIC.

As for the oxymoron of pistol-packing Peace Corps, forget about things like August 19, 2003, when the best humanitarians and NGOs the UN had to offer were murdered in Baghdad in a terrorist's bomb attack of the UN compound -- if Sergio Vierra de Miello had only been escorted by a pistol-packing U.S. Peace Corps or packed a pistol himself, a 500-pound Soviet-era bomb seized by terrorists from the former Iraqi government (or maybe those are just the same thing?), wouldn't have killed him and his colleagues...mkay.

So...They're going to tackle that something called the Gap (all those poor folks in the backward, underdeveloped part of the world that aren't on DSL and aren't signed up for the TTD program via USAID (transition-to-democracy) -- I think Barnett needs to come up with something that doesn't sound like a faux high-class medium-brow clothing store where you can get moderately-priced men's khakis).

Here Jerry's cracking the gum again, Hammie is revealed to be wearing his traditional whites, and Dear shows off his newbie stripes.

Your faithful correspondent selected the avatar "Dear Leader" (the title used in dictatorships for people like Kim Il Song)  to appear in the audience, partly to signal the absolute intractability of the Gap when it comes to things like North Korea (and the inefficacy of these sort of kewl cyber wonky American programming ideas for grappling with things like NK) -- although Dear Leader in SL is actually an officer at Free Tibet and the free market TechHeaven ROFL.

Dear Leader asked about Belarus and Taiwan -- to my horror, Barnett had Magic-markered up on his whiteboard (not a REAL whiteboard but a fake one -- we don't have those in SL!) "Lock in China at Today's Price: Taiwan". This Russian scholar might just as well have added, "Lock in Russia at Today's Price: Belarus." IOW, if we would just junk any notion of recognizing Taiwan's valiant struggle for freedom from hegemonic China, we could have the Chinese hyper-power on our side, working with us in the Core (Barnett's not going to have *any trouble* sequing into SL with his notions of an inner core and a gap lol). Now...what to do about Chinese oil interests in Sudan or Chinese indifference to Uzbekistan or Chinese return of Korean refugees or Chinese suppression of Tibet or Chinese...oh, nm, they're on our side now and that's what counts!

So I tested him on Belarus -- which should be an easy one given the educated population, the hard-won united opposition democratically-chosen candidate, Russia's need for a Hong Kong, Germany's need for cheap labour and places to put their car factories, etc. etc. Why go with this Realpolitik crappy deal with Russia called "we get the Baltics and you get to keep Belarus?" Erm...isn't Russia supposed to be part of the Functioning Core we can "work with"? Why consign 10 million people in the last dictatorship in Europe to be dragged down the maw that Russia is heading into now with its increasing KGB-led authoritarianism and rampant neo-fascism? You now have John McCain and even funded Washington think-tanks working on Belarus (that took some 10 years of effort!). It just needs a little push, i.e. more than the $2 mil it might get out of democracy funding, and a conscious Executive Order if not about covert action, then about robust overt action from NED and IRI.

But no. Barnett says "Belarus is not at the top of anybody's list." He's willing to let the independent movement in Belarus be crushed -- though as a freedom account, it's a fairly easy case given that it could be taken bloodlessly if you just stand up to the Russkies a teensy bit -- and thereby prevent the reinforcement of Russo-fascism on things much harder for the West to tackle like Chechnya -- which of course, I didn't even get him started on, so as to avoid a predictable yammer about extremist Islam etc.

Most of the crowd there, which included not so much Europeans (maybe a third were?) but leftist Americans (of which there are no shortage for FIIC events) were decidedly unhappy with Barnett. And as well not only the left should be, but any liberal or even conservative thinking person when contemplating this outrageous projection of American power into various conflict theaters around the world where the reception committees will be decidedly absent....until they spike our boys and girls heads up on the bridges.

Barnett's facile notion of the 1-2-3 punches -- first an indictment from the ICC rammed through the SC, then elite crack troops going in and taking out the perps who are indicted, then some pistol-packin' democracy builder or reconstruction corps marching in -- is so naive and facetious as to be bordering on the irresponsible. But...If any bad guy dares to lay a finger on these lightly armed or unarmed helpers, "We'll lay a Falujah on their ass," says Barnett. Indeed. I just have to wonder if the people of Falujah have been enjoying all this as much.

Barnett's also forgetting that even something like the Darfur indictment wasn't a cakewalk even with his own U.S. administration. It took months of negotiations because in general, the U.S. doesn't recognize or much like the ICC. (If he's going to get into the business of ramming in ICC indictments, I do hope he has a plan for the U.S. returning its signature and ratifying it in a conservative Congress LOL).

Now, a word on format. These SL things just never go well because the Lindens seem to lurch from too much control to not enough. Jesse and Cory were there, but AFK. Hamlet didn't moderate, so people started piping up and typing out stuff. Seeing that Paradigm Brodsky was typing out his leftwing views, I felt entitled to type out my liberal views. Whereupon I got IM'd from a European irate that I was hogging the floor, urging me to "let other speak". I told her that she should just cut and paste because Hamlet was saying "It's Tom's thing," in answer to my IM's urging him to take questions via IM and queue them up for the speaker. Nobody really moderated and finally Hammie kicked in (what you see on Paffy's blog is actually a very cleaned up version of that transcript LOL).

Somebody from among the organizers should have stepped up to the plate and said, "Thomas, to make this more coherent, rather than answering all the questions sent to you on IMs or typed in chat, let's take IMs with questions which we will then queue up for you."

Or not. I actually felt this was enough of an auditorium of adults, without any griefers, and small enough, that it would be fine not only to paste into chat but to have an actual dialogue. After all, why don't we make use of these new-fangled technologies we have like fast flowing typed chat dialogue and the ability for anyone in the room to type out their thoughts? It's really not so terrible.

Ultimately, the degree to which Barnett is willing to step on a Belarus or a Taiwan, forsaking their freedom for the grander cause of the Core and its Integrating Needs, is the degree to which I find his ideology repugnant for Americans and Europeans and others interested in supporting authentic movements of freedom and democracy around the world. These countries you step on now have a way of coming back to bite you in the ass; moreover, there are so many elements of the Core -- including the United States itself! -- that have a great deal of "non-integrating" type populations and attitudes that it would be folly to project the Core's crack troops to anywhere but say, a hurricane disaster or poor inner cities and foreclosed-farming areas of the U.S. Let's start there and see how we do...This isn't America First or Blame America First but just first things first.

UN-Impressed

Yesterday First Life and Second Life collided again as the Salonistas and the FIIC (Feted Inner Intellectual Core--I'm working on thinking up a better name), consisting of Hammie, Paffie, and Ichy (Hamlet Linden, Jerry Paffendorf (as he prefers to be called though his name is SNOOPYBrown Zamboni) and Ichiro Tokugawa launched an inworld simulated UN building complete with a Pentagon policy wonk, Thomas Barnett.

SNOOPY chomped on his chewing gum like a good American kid among all the Euros assembled for the august occasion, even blowing bubbles on a timer.

The full transcript of the meeting can be seen here.

The FIIC taste in avatar runs to bizarre monacles and bejeweled walking canes, when it doesn't take the form of spaghetti monsters, robots, and winged dragons. Here's Paradigm Brodsky.

Lilith Pendragon scored once again with a so-real-it-was-scary av for Bennett himself.

This was the first time that the Future Salon speaker, who was not from the previously-feted game and gonzo Internet world like a Richard Barnet or a Cory Doctorow, wasn't on voice. Thank God! I had rushed home to try to crank up my lousy wireless connection to SL which has sound, but couldn't load all the new game patches enough, and was SO relieved that we could TYPE! Yay! Barnett himself sounded like he had never typed so much in his life.

First, the venue. Thank God, a fellow named Thorn had the wit and verve to put out our SL equivalent of the three monkies ("see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil") in front of the UN mock-up. The UN is the sort of potent world and national symbol that you need to get *right on fast* or it can *take over*. My hats off to Thorn! Many Americans wish that green-glass cement tower would sink into the East River, and if it weren't for the displacement and backwash on to Queens caused by the drowning of the world's largest Job Corps for the Third World and the loss of income to all those families, there are some that might tend to agree even withing "the building" -- which is how the UN people themselves refer to this airless monstrosity of 1950s utopian architecture without a sprinkler system, with such poor security that once a deranged fellow upset about North Korea was able to shoot into the ladies' room in the secretariat building just standing on First Avenue.

Since blogging about the RL UN would take me very far afield from this blog, let me just let Garth Evans, former Australian envoy to the UN, who has been active in reform efforts there, sum it all up for us:

"It is still the piranha pool of diplomats enjoying tearing flesh off each other, to the total exclusion of any enthusiasm for high principle or effectiveness of the organisation."

The good ambassador might well have been talking about the SL forums : )

Moving back to SL, we see that a group associated with the Port (always described as a "Swedish government funded art collective), formed an SL group called "The UN" with the sole officer in the group Ichiro Tokugawa (evidently he just "made it that way," evidently *not* consciously borrowing from the People's Democratic leader Lordfly Digeridoo, who also made himself the sole officer in Resident Action Committee or the People's Democratic Leader Anshe Chung, who broke off form Metaverse Justice Watch to become the sole officer of Concerned Citizens until she could get the kind of officers she could count on being loyal through bussed elections of tenants.

The be-blinged Ichiro Tokugawa, sole CEO of The UN.

Being the sole officer is a very handy thing to be if you anticipate any static from other officers who will become your equals in the group, able to invite others you might not like, or, if you have land in the group, sell it out from under you).

But...so they made something called "The UN" with a bunch of enthusiastic intellectual kids? Well, I immediately reached for my gun on this one. Why? Because just like no one has the right to form a resident government without the consent of the governed, no one has the right to form a UN when there are not even any legitimate states or governments in SL. I really really REALLY will fight hard against ANY effort by little grouplets of self-appointed arrogant tekkies and arties parachuting in and saying "We're the intelligent ones, we're surrounded by idiots" and forming any governance structure of any kind that has no demonstrable legitimacy. Hey, Non-Integrating Gap THIS you interfering mofo.

Mercifully, the Portians didn't situation us architecturally in the Trusteeship Council at the UN, with that dreadful flying woman-bird figure -- but Csven Concord was on hand to play the role of 1960s folk-art flying statues serving as symbols of liberating colonies....and presiding over the suppression of all those liberation movements the UN didn't like, for example, Hungry in 1956.

When I was very young, I used to join all kinds of things with names like International This and Global That and World The Other Thing. Doesn't everybody? There is nothing more heady than thinking you are at the forefront of an international cutting-edge movement -- um, you and 6 and a half other people on the lower East side in a walk-up in touch with a couple of Brits or Croatians also in walk-ups in their own countries ROFL. It's all TOO funny!

If they called themselves the "Global Discussion Forum" or "The Foreign Policy Forum" or "the International Affairs Group" or something I could accept Ichiro's argumentation that they are "just a discussion group". But they didn't. They called themselves "THE UN". I think the RL UN, which barely has functioning email and one of the clunkiest websites in the universe, probably has never heard of SL, and may be very slow in taking action against the use of its symbols -- it's as avid on policing them as the White House is about the presidential seal. I doubt this gang in the FIIC pre-cleared this with Kofi Annan (or as I used to call him in my TSO sim parody of the UN, "Coffee Anon").

Well, why fuss so much about the externals and a bunch of people just hacking around? Because that's how governments happen and stuff gets set in stone, if you don't watch out. This group's charter already talks about providing itself for "groups in SL," and there was loose talk here and there about "let's have all the French, German, Spanish, British in SL," etc. takes seats in this pixelated non-entity or -- I'll go you one better, as some said -- let's have the Furries, the Norms, the Bots, the Elves, Gor, etc. etc. take seats. Eh, what fun, arguing with the Goreans whether the person seated is voting of their own free will or is under instructions from their dom.

Perhaps some day there might be a kind of inter-galactic senate of this type -- but first you have to have the countries or parliaments or just plain sims underneath it that have grass-roots legitimacy and chose their representatives to a grid-wide or metaverse-wide entity like "the UN". Then you wouldn't even want to call it the "UN" because whatever emerges out of games and platforms  in the metaverse won't be "nations" but will be these other thingers, they'll be um, socializing monetarized um ermmmmm bodies.

Yes, Dave Linden has got to work on that one. I can see it now. "The United Socializing Monetarized Platforms".

I really hate it when self-appointed arrogant tekkies who are experts on say, physics, or computer science, or artificial intelligence, also figure that all this high-octane intellectual firepower for technical matters automatically entitles them to be experts on the softer, non-technical fields of economics, politics, anthropology, etc. It decidedly does not. Most of the time they aren't really even well read on these subjects, or they think their college courses were sufficient. And trying to add on code or statistical analysis as a substitute for the softer kinds of knowledge and experience and analysis that takes place in those fields doesn't improve them or necessarily add any insights. I'm reminded of how the Lindens are always appearing at town halls laden down with statistical information such as the number of resident-to-resident sales of land in 30 days -- but they can never tell you the socially relevant facts of whether or not this is all back and forth to anshechung.com or whether telehub land is growing cheaper.

So, we just can't have a UN in SL, and if someone wants to "play UN" I will keep calling them on that. It has no representational or even appointed legitimacy of any kind of society or social groups within SL. It's just yet another parachuted-in resume-polisher.

Ultimately, I think it's terribly unimaginative, too, to simply plop down a cut-and-paste of the boring RL UN, whatever its actual value and relevance especially to people in hell-holes and warzones who rely on the UN literally to be fed. Our society in SL (and there are people who *live here* and who aren't just interesting guinea pigs for the Lindens or audience-fillers for the FIIC) needs some kind of forum or town square or auditorium. These Linden builds like Borrowdale have just too much of a federal feel to them, mixed in with that kind of canned-and-forced fun you get at a Club Med vacation in Cancun.

I'm all for having these public meetings take place on residents' lots  but why not places that have more local meaning and use? (In fact, I have to do a separate blog just on how desperately ugly and horrifying these Port builds are in SL with their hideous levels and squares and glowing neon cubes -- I'll bet after a day of pretending that they love this kind of intrusive "people's architecture" even the Port people just want to go play WoW in a nice forest.) And I"m not even going to blog on Euro-hating and Marxism, because you can go see me arguing with Csven on Hammie's blog and I'll return to that later.

"Enough With the Simulacra"

My post at Terra Nova got so buried under the mound of egghead responses to the Architectural Contest held at State of Play that I'm going to cross post it here.

In case you didn't hear, RC Mars, an avatar created by an employee of the American Cancer Society, was chosen as the winner for the build installed on the Linden vehicle sims for the "Relay for Life".

I didn't get a chance to properly hash that yet, but when you see the picture I have to post from that event, you'll begin to see the contours, and why originally I was going to blog it as "Run For Your Life":

I, too, was disappointed by the judges' selections and also by most of the entries themselves -- but for reasons having not to do so much with the specific virtual architecture but with the social and political implications of their appropriation and usage of space.

While I can take a kind of pride that someone from Second Life won, I don't believe the appropriate entry was chosen.

First, the concept of a "public space" implies above all that *there is a *public using it.* This putative public would have been involved in the creation of the public space in some way and would be interacting in the space over time.

In RL, such "ownership" of a public space would happen through elected governments or via private corporations that still feel the need in many cases to adapt or allow for public use of their buildings, i.e. skyscrapers in New York City that still have public-access parks and benches and fountains at their base where people sit and have lunch.

In SL, the rough equivalent to something like this RL public space ownership concept would have to be something that grew and developed as an actual gathering place. For me, if a public space didn't have a track record of high traffic on it, it wouldn't be supported by the SL public as a public space, but would be looked at merely as the highfalutin favourite of judges with refined critical architectural aesthetics of the kind that gave us the famous arguments about the "turd in the public square" in the 1960s-1970s.

First, the virtual space would have to be commissioned or created by an actual resident of the world, someone with understanding not only of the world's technical building capabilities, but its people. Otherwise, how can it be called "public"? For that reason, I would think Lordfly Digeridoo's entry should have won, because he has selected a building that grew indigenously out of the world of Second Life itself, and is in an area that an actual virtual public really comes to (if I can say all those seemingly contradictory adjectives in one sentence). That is, simply put, people hang out there because it's a space residents made and occupied -- it is a public space. (It's not even an especially high-traffic space but for argument's sake, let's say it's more appropriate for the genre.)

But when the American Cancer Society, a huge and wealthy American charity, decides to come into the world, it is not coming into it as a resident of the world -- it's just using the platform as a technological device, a tool, in order to raise its profile and to raise money. It's trying to open up new vistas for its communications and fund-raising ventures. These may be very worthy causes, and forward-looking charities, educational institutions, even governments could be commended for researching and using the possibilities of Second Life and other VWs.

But these entities don't live in the world...at least not yet. In fact, quite often, what they do is come and go. The build for Relay for Life was entirely dictated as an outside venture, sprung full-blown only for that race, then dismantled. In fact, the winner himself said casually that the actual building was "outsourced" -- that is, it was just viewed as a project space and a set of tools, not a world with a public, and a public space that would interact over time. That's how it felt to me.

The Relay for Life was put on Linden sims -- not run through the world itself through all kinds of interesting user-built properties that have been built up over time and have character and a sense of place. The build was just for those three days, and therefore had a kind of hurried, ersatz, fake feel -- a shipyard or docks or bidge which no one ever really had spent any time living and moving and having their being on as a form of second life, but just a prop, a stage setting, for the big ad campaign run by ACS.

It's a noble cause and all that, and some people no doubt had meaningful experiences within SL engaging with it, but at the end of the day, it is a RL venture using the platform imposing from the outside, from the top, with a considerable budget (of time or money), not the user-created "it's your imagination" kind of world that SL is touted as.

Can stage sets built for temporary ad campaigns be called public spaces just because they are three-dimensional? I should think not!

Ad to that the kitsch that is displayed in something like the realistic-looking human mannequin figures with an almost Iwo-Jima-like staging, and you wonder how it could be commended for being especially cutting edge?

Even staying within a conservative sense of architectural, a lot more can be done to adopt SL buildings for the avian creatures that we are there, with opening of walls, roofs, windows and less dependence on the door as an entry-point. Nobody is going to want to sit and stare at a thousand points of light gyrating on a triangle representing data, they look for the immersiveness that comes to them from creating a simulated fireplace and rug.

Posted by: Prokofy Neva | Oct 23, 2005 10:12:21 PM

The Anti-Nuremberg Defense and The Nuremberg Response

Once again, W-HAT, the prankster and griefer group periodically disrupting the lives of some or all Second Life citizens, has struck -- this time, bringing down the entire grid. Or...wait...Was it *a group* that acted, or just one rogue member, who made a "mistake" or "went too far"?

The forums rapidly fill up with calls for hanging parties not only of the guilty individual (already removed by SL by the Lindens) and calls for removing all of W-HAT, but, in rebuttal, indignant outcries (injured but not innocent!) by W-HAT and Something Awful members and supporters who claim that "it's not all of us...it's not the group...it was just that one person...every group has its few bad apples."

Some forum readers find this to be a load of crap, and looking at the pattern of behaviour and numerous event-griefings and offensive "art shows" and such, believe there's no such thing as a merely pranksterish W-HAT, just a bunch of happy-go-lucky fun-loving guys and gals who just like fooling around, and see that merely as the projected PR image of what is really a more gangsterish W-HAT, a secretive group with an agenda and Bolshevik-like tactics and techniques which include automatic denial of group responsibilty or group intent and planning, and automatic pin-pointing of blame and guilt on just one "rogue" member who was either new, or opportunistic, or "made a mistake".

Uh...mkay...why are we not buying this, though, on like round 100 with these asshats?

The infamous defense at the Nuremberg Tribunal was, "I was just following orders." Whatever legalistic obstacles it created, nobody morally bought that then or now where evidence of knowledge of criminal intent or actual criminal intent could be brought forward.  "Just following orders" became particularly morally bankrupt as an excuse when some people were brave and did the right thing and did *not* follow orders.

W-HAT turns that concept around and says the opposite, "They weren't following orders." That one rogue member is just like Bub, the little boy who broke Mr. Johnson's window, in the Norman Rockwellish analogy Aimee Weber has drawn in the forums, and rather than blame all of Bub's dysfunctional family or his crappy school, we should just make the individual take responsibility for his actions and if Bub will work at the deli after school and pay for Mr. Johnson's window, why, the offense is expunged and harmony returns to the land.

This is very unsatisfactory for a lot of people, especially those whacked by first W-HAT, then the Linden's over-ambitious response to it, deprecating the 020 script that makes it possible to spread stuff all over the grid, so that now innocent artificial-intelligence experiences with breeding fish, or innocent management of customized vending machines over a network of sims, and no doubt other innocent and useful things not yet discovered, are borked, too.

The Herald has taken a very fierce editorial line on this issue, with a very graphic headline summoning up visions of June Cleaver with her dress over her head, getting screwed by Eddy Haskell again, who will deny all wrong-doing and say, "Gee, Mrs. Cleaver, what a lovely dress!" with his insincere and evil leering half-smile. That's exactly how the SL public in general feels about W-HAT -- that their proclamations of group innocence are utterly insincere, and all they've done is once again screw everybody this time, losing them a day of service right before an already-scheduled day of downtime for the new patch -- and then some. There have even been calls of RL lawsuits for damages.

Walker Spaight is right -- once again the Lindens, good California social engineers that they are, reached for a coding rather than a policy solution for the chronic problem of W-HAT; "that's what you get when you rely on your code not only to be the law but enforce it."

What would such a policy solution look like? Most people (as I did in the post below about "Broken Windows") are pointing to the need to act earlier even just on the individual-responsibility route, acting more swiftly to close (and remove might be a good idea here, to drain away attention) threads that obvious W-Hatters and SA'ers start, and punish racist and other TOS-violating behaviour inworld.

But what if the Lindens banned the group per se, and any spin-off groups and sympathizers? That would mean taking the concepts of guilt-by-association and collective punishment to cyberspace and applying them more liberally than even a conservative U.S. is willing to apply them, or even a conservative Russia is able to apply them.

The consequences when  you use these principles, which are believed antithetical to international human rights, are that you sometimes hit innocent people who aren't guilty of the charges.

Yet, originally, the Nuremberg Tribunal's charter made use of the concept of group responsibility (Articles 9 and 10): the Tribunal could declare as a "criminal organization" any group or organization of which an individual on trial for criminal acts was a member. That would then make it possible for mass indictments just on the basis of membership alone in say, the SS or HitlerJugend.

In practice, as the trials ensued, this concept of group criminality weakened, in part under Soviet influence, as the Soviets were unwilling to have an international legal concept develop that would then be used against their Communist Party, guilty of many crimes, including mass murder.

The practice of the Tribunal as it developed actually created then a narrow interpretation of group liability. Still, as Joanne Marine has written in a FindLaw essay, these issues are still alive today as the U.S. deals with the issue of membership in Al Qaeda as a marker of criminality. In U.S. history, overly-repressive laws like the Smith Act would punish all members of the Communist Party, say, including innocent utopians as well as those actually knowingly helping to fund Joseph Stalin's murderous GULAG and cooperating with the KGB.

Ruth Wedgwood, a conservative constitutional scholar, revisiting these issues in the US, has said "[j]oining Al Qaeda with knowledge of its purposes means that one has joined in a conspiracy to attack civilian targets and to make war illegally on the United States."

Now, at one level, we're all in a game -- and the Lindens can do what they like. In part because they're highly conscious that it is not a game at many levels, the Lindens don't do what they like on something with this many ramifications, and they don't just band all known W-HAT members and sympathizers and related groups automatically, before they've committed an offense. They could -- because they're a private club with dues to be paid to join (even the free members require submitting a credit card) and a TOS that must be signed, and if nothing else, all W-HAT behaviour fits into the concept of "interfering with the enjoyment of SL for other residents".

Using the conservative interpretation of the right to free association and related Supreme Court decisions, applying it to the SL simulated society, the Lindens could look at the pattern of W-HAT behaviour and say, "anyone who joins W-HAT or related groups is knowingly joining in a conspiracy to attack civilian targets and make war illegally on Linden Lab."

In fact, that would be true -- those rogue members that W-HAT is always claiming plausible deniability over joined W-HAT not because it has quilting bees and Tringo on Sundays, but because it has a rep as a bad-ass gang that puts up outrageous installations, whacks people at events, and gets up to all kinds of no-good. The history of bad deeds is what attracts the griefer personality in the first place. Maybe some of the old and new members of W-HAT think that bringing down the entire grid is "going too far" but they didn't think outrageously offensive depictions of murdered hookers, the Pope, the World Trade Center, etc. was going too far.

Furthermore, as I can personally attest, they routinely grief events, especially events trying to do something positive and visible. For example, when I had my first building contest announcement event, a posse of W-HAT showed up to grief my event, creating an obscene mall stall, mocking me, harassing me, and preventing the people who had come to legitimately find out about the contest from staying. At that time, not quite figuring out who they were, I humoured them, and even posrated one of them for their witty and ingenious avatar.

I'm going to think some more before I call on the Lindens to ban an entire group from SL. Try to think about what it would mean if they ban YOUR group because of the bad actions of a few -- let's take even the wild and wacky and idiotic Metaverse Justice Watch, which has been overpopulated with griefers now, but which I stubbornly remain in -- despite the efforts of people to keep officer-recalling me -- including one "valiant" effort to do this right on the eve of 1.7, to try to make it stick before 1.7 removed the ability of rank-and-file members to call anonymously for a vote to remove an officer. What if the effort to punishment rogues in a group like that is extended to our entire group? As soon as you think of your own group, you'll be all to ready to junk any notion of guilt-by-association, especially in an environment like SL where you have little or no recourse to control the actions of anonymous, alt-making strangers on the Internet.

I'm leaning toward thinking that at this point, however, W-HAT and Something Awful have enough of a pattern of criminal actions and enough evidence of criminal intent that they could safely make the assumption that anyone joining W-HAT or related groups is joining in celebration of that criminal history and criminal intent -- at the very least celebrating it, if indeed not intending to follow up on it.

The Lindens like to find coding solution to things and are always really reluctant just to make a desk policy. I'm always puzzled by that because, geez, they're the Lindens, they run the place, it's their servers. I think they need to think a lot harder about whether they need to be banning this group as a whole and all its members, and related groups when they show a pattern of TOS violations, and group actions (the W-HAT people always appear as a group when they grief events and are in tag-team tandem).

Meanwhile, I know what I'm going to do. Now it's been stated explicitly that Nauv deFarge is associated with Bazelkas Khan of the men's hair and clothing business BAZ, that Huns Valens and Stinqy Queso are also part of W-HAT.

I'm going to eject those members of W-HAT that I see in Metaverse Justice Watch or any other group where I'm an officer, and also those who danced at the victory dance over the crashing of the whole grid. While the jury might still be out on the question of the Lindens engaging in guilt by association or collective punishment, when I, as an individual, ban these people from my land, or eject them from my group, I'm merely exercising MY freedom of association in rejection of *their interference with my freedoms in SL*. That's what it is all about.

The constant call for innocence, rights, and freedoms for W-Hatters utterly overlooks the rights and freedoms that are abridged when they act against any or all of us.

I view rejecting W-HAT and all its works as a civic action that is absolutely justified. While I might be willing to tolerate W-HAT forming a group and having a sim where they can put any monstrosity they like, and let the Lindens deal with it, I don't think they can then take that around the grid and obstruct events, humiliate and harm, and then bring down the whole grid. That's not art. That's abuse coming at you and "significantly interfering with your enjoyment of SL."

I know that all kinds of leftist, liberals, and lunatics will scream at my expulsion of these people from MJW or my land -- but I'd just like to see Jauani Wu and all the rest justify keeping known sympathizers with grid-crashers and griefers in their "justice" group.

I also expelled Nauv DeFarge from a sub-sub-let of mine. I don't want loafers and griefers who don't even pay rent, and who grief events, to be on my property. If the sub-lessee BAZ wants to let his little pal Nauv loaf on his rental, he can find another agent. If my original tenant, Anshe Chung, wants to let her sub-letter Baz let the griefer and loafer Nauv on her rental, she can contact me about it.

Some people are going to let their liberal creeds cripple them from responding effectively to the problem of people constantly trying to destroy society. Some are going to "yes" this position because they fear retaliation if they frequently hold events. When you do that, the very project of liberal society itself is then endangered because of these destroyers of the type who always want elections to bring in their radical agenda, but then you can kiss democratic elections good-bye on the day after they come to power.

I'd also urge everyone to keep a weather eye on all these newbie accounts that have suddenly shown up to make flippant and stupid comments on the forums. These are merely the re-surfaced W-Hatters with new accounts. Watch especially for the name "Sholokhov".

I'm going to continue to think hard about the problem of collective punishment and guilt by association in the Metaverse, but one thing is for certain -- de-coding the ability to perform the crime, and having god-like powers to read all transcripts and have more information to understand intent than any government in history, are not going to be sufficient.

So much for Philip Linden's rosy theory expounded in the Herald interview more than a year ago that when people had the wondrous creative potential of SL in their hands, they'd stop griefing and being mean. It was utterly fallacious, not only because this society introduced terrible inequities like any human society, with possibly more profound consequences, with the content-fascist and creator- Darwinism movements it has facilitated.

Broken Windows

The "broken windows" school of policing says that police should bother to investigate and prosecute broken windows, because leaving broken windows out in the community creates a climate of impunity, and an atmosphere of anything-goes. It starts with the broken windows being left like they are, and nobody doing anything, and it goes on to breaking and entering and then murder. So the theory goes. Many buy it, and many cities practice a policy of cracking down on squeegee men or panhandlers or window-breakers precisely to remove that atmosphere of impunity and indifference to others and their rights to some decency of living without being hassled.

In Second Life, the Californian social-engineers who run this game-space don't seem to subscribe to the broken windows theory. They let anything go on the grid, up to, and including gross and repulsive replicas of Nazi concentrating camps with Jews burning in them, and up to and including gross and indecent replicas of the World Trade Center caricatured with cartoon like sayings such as "I'm falling for you."

Everyone knows what W-HAT is and does. They grief events. They grief individuals. They shoot in no-shoot zones. They make big happenings. I've had them attack me numerous times in all sorts of ways, ranging from leaving prims repeatedly to actually attempting to run me over with a giant replica of the World Trade Center. Maybe it's "art" when it sits on a sim somewhere where I can chose to go and look at it or not. It's not "art" when it comes crashing into me deliberately to harm me and invoke my own personal memories of 9/11 of which they are aware.

W-HAT behaves like the good Leninists that they are. They always, like any terrorist cell, have plausible deniability. It's always "one in our midst who wasn't following partiinost, i.e. party discipline" or "one in our midst who wasn't following orders" or "one who isn't really in our midst but a newbie".  There's ALWAYS a story. It's ALWAYS as fake as a three-dollar bill. It lathers, rinses, and repeats endlessly.

The broken windows that one could see plainly in the days leading up to today's grid-wide attack, shutting down the entire Second Life platform for hours, were in the forums. Here, the perpetrator is seen taunting, mocking, commiting racist language, being argued with, commiting more offenses, and others commiting offenses as they repeat his offenses. The response of poor Jeska, who just does her job in a very narrow and limited sense as one of myriad job duties, was to place an "edited" to note that offensive language was removed. My God, how she could close some threads about really important land, economic, and political issues only after a few comments or pages, but shut this one down only after it had festered for a whopping 21 pages, it beyond me.

It's not just that it is easy to see these things in hindsight. It's easy to see them, period, as patterns. W-HAT keeps spawning new alts. They often use the same or similar names. There are opportunists that use the W-HAT "brand" but W-HAT never really full-throatedly condemned the actions commited by their so-called "non-members" or "younger members." It's always "whoops, I'm sorry. It's time for the community to see that as what it is: a calculated technique, a Bolshevik tactic.

The "broken windows" theory also says that you apprehend kids who break windows, because they may go beyond this relatively minor crime to something more serious.

"General"  -- indeed all the forums -- is creating a sense of impunity. How to handle this? By suppressing free speech? No. It shouldn't be closed. But there needs to be more editorial voices. Whenever speech is removed, a moderator needs to say instantly WHY and WHAT FOR. When a thread is closed, saying that merely a thread has "outlived its usefulness" is a cop-out -- they need to say WHY and WHAT FOR and BY WHOM.

Forums abuses need to appear in the police blotter with the following information:  name of the perpetrator, clear statement of the offense, clear link to the actual offending speach, and name of the whistle-blower. Name of prosecuting Linden would be a nice addition. All of this information, coming AFTER prosecution (not before investigation) would serve as a deterrent.

The police blotter also needs to be archived and acquire a memory so it has some institutional deterrent value. Arranging by category might also be a boon.

When the Lindens can begin to name both names or perpetrators AND those who have blown them in, they can first of all end the sense of "lather, rinse, and repeat" that comes with some of these perps. Secondly, by publishing the abuse-reporters, too, they can ensure that people who take the serious action of blowing in a fellow human being are not doing so merely in anger, over settling scores, or misusing the system. In fact, there will be less ARs if we have this sytem of requiring people to step up to the plate and name their own name when they want to be naming someone else's. It's only fair. Far from worrying about retaliation, which itself can be abuse-reported, we have to worry more about unfair reports, reports to settle scores, and overworked mods taking the easy way out. The person who names a name and gets a "score" with a Linden judgement has backing and protection from the Lindens. The person named can then also appeal if wrong-doing occurred and the Lindens might learn more about the context they need to know. But the entire community will gain by having more transparency, coherence, and authentic deterrent value in the world.

The moderators need to moderate the forums, not the posters. They need to be less driven by ARs, and more driven by their own eyes and ears. Ending the sense of impunity on the forums is the broken windows policing that needs to be done to start creating a better atmosphere of the rule of law, ending the helpless sense of lawlessness, and creating responsibility in the world in general.

Stringing 4096s

Wouldn't you know, with the grid subject to a huge attack on something called "the space server" controlling the rest of the servers, that the forums FIC and their typical targets like Cocoanut have falled to arguing about 512s and 4096s.

It is a known fact that there were some charter-era or beta-tester-era players (note I call them "era players" without obsessing which is the accurate title for these FICers) who purchased more than one 4096 m2 tier-free deal for the year and strung them together. A known fact. One doesn't have to embarass these people by naming their names but they know who they are. I know of at least one well-known person with a popular events lot that personally admitted to me on the record that he did this to string together himself an entire sim's worth of land. That gave him a significant advantage in the game -- a tier-free sim. This is the truth. Efforts to deny it, downplay it, run away with it, just won't fly. It is the truth.

Now, does it matter if in fact all this tier wasn't on an actual sim, but was spread out and only a sim's worth? Or does it matter if a 4096 stringer had all that tier-free land perhaps only for awhile, but then LL cracked down on it? The fact is, he had a significant time of tier-free land -- and lots more than 4096 m2 of it! -- and still does from all evidence. And he's not alone. I've run into dozens of people that have at least one or more 4096s and it is indeed a significant leg-up in the game.

Doing the math and saying it's only $25 or $31 a month for one 4096 is kinda silly, because $31 is still a lot in Linden-dollar terms -- and again, the point is that over time, added up, it is simply a significant advantage. It doesn't matter if this advantage is relatively minor in land baron terms, it doesn't matter if these 4096ers don't even use their largesse to advance their businesses. What matters is that it is a perk that the Lindens dished out to their loyal beta-testers, a genuine asset with value, that for some strange reason these perked are reluctant to admit is even any kind of perk.

What's wrong isn't that the Lindens gave a perk. What's wrong is the thuggish, aggressive, denial of the FIC that they even got a perk. They spend hours screaming about how it isn't really anything, downplaying it, trying to prove there's no perk. But there is a perk and we all see there is. It's like ratings -- the FIC had hundreds of days to collect hundreds of plus ratings that anyone new, especially now, won't have. They will have gotten thousands upon thousands of Linden dollars in payouts for this that translate to real dollars. It isn't jealousy, or "not having a life," or being petulant to point out that these people got a significant leg up in business, a leg up that they achieved not by merits, but by perks. For them to deny it, and claim it matters not is ridiculous. It isn't that it's unfair -- all games, all RL situations, all institutions with seniority have the perks of long living. What makes SL so distorted and dysfunctional, however, is that these perked deny they even have a perk, deny that they got to their economic position at least in part from the perks, and that perhaps they owe something more to the community other than their assholery on the forums. Some of them get that. Most arrogant condescending FICtards on the forums do not. That's why the perk becomes onerous -- it is just one more feature of their impudent and sarcastic forum posturing.

Endlessly, instead of true acknowledgement that they got a deal, we have to hear how they paid for their perks! (It's like the feted Ulrika constantly protesting that she had to pay tier on her purchase-price-free Nberg sim). A whole $225 or whatever! Well, geez, I'd love to pay a one-time, one-year fee like that and have tier-free living FOR EVER. Tier is hard to muster sometimes. Let's say you have a mall or a store, having a free 4096 makes a significant keystone for it that you don't have to hustle to make up. It's work bringing in traffic, getting sales, and getting tier paid. Every little bit helps in those microscopic levels and niches of the LL economy. If somebody thinks their 4096 isn't worth so much, give it to me LOL. See...it is worth something, eh???

It's an advantage, and it shouldn't be undone once LL grants it, but the people who have it should not be silly and claim haughtily it's not a perk. That's just outrageous. It *is* a perk, a significant one, especially if multipled by 10, whether some got it by stringing their friends and friends of friends together in one sim that they really own and manage, or whatever the case.

As far as I know, none of the posters badgering Cocoanut about the 4096 issue have done this stringing per se -- but Catherine Cotton was right to bring it up because we can't know the specifics of every forum heckler and their tier.

I do know for a fact that one of the stringers is a big supporter of one of the badgerers and therefore indirectly contributes to the atmosphere of impunity in the game and in the forums. In fact, I have found him *directly* contributing to his atmosphere of impunity on occasion, and that's wrong.

The 512 is just like the 4096, really, because it's a premium perk. If you get a premium, you get a one-time land for $512. Each account comes with it. Use it.

What's UTTERLY HILARIOUS is for Cristiano to yammer indignantly about his 4096 having to be viewed as a special by others:

"People act like the lifetime accounts were some gift. We PAID for them - I paid $225 for mine in Dec 2003 - some people bought theirs earlier. At that time, we had no idea what the long term viability of SL was. I also pay $300 a month in tier ON TOP of my lifetime account. It was a legitimate offer that LL made at the time, just as any company has promotions. For example, I use the Cloudmark anti-spam service. As I was a beta tester, I pay $1.99 a month now - normal users pay $4.99. Wow that is shockingly unfair, they should get right on that too."

All you have to do to see the hypocrisy is play word substitute:

"People act like the second account with the $512 512 m2 were some gift. We PAID for them. I paid $9.95 for mine. At that time, we had no idea that there was something sentimentally called "Land for the Landless" which was supposed to undo the "inequities" of the "baroned grid". We just bought our subscriptions. The $512 came in the subscription, just as any company as promotions. For example, I buy a ticket to Atlantic City on the bus, and it gives me a round-trip ticket, a coupon for a steak dinner, and some chips. So I went to Atlantic City twice, using my gift which I PAID FOR. Wow, that is shockingly unfair they should get right on that."

First of all, the relationship to the free 512 of tier and the subsidized $512 of land is exactly the same as the paid 4096 in December 2003. There is nothing logically or morally different about it. Both are incentives and perks. Both are legitimate. Both should be used. Both should be used more than once if you can do it because all accounts should be equal. If Linden actually utters a policy forbidding it, or actually codes a function to obstruct it, then we could talk about some misdeed. But they haven't, so we can't. If someone buys a premium account, they are no different than a beta tester getting a present. The present a premium account buyer gets is the cheap $512 land, which he is entitled to take 5 pieces in celebration of his joining the game and supporting the world of SL with his subscription.

Once again, yes, I must do a blog about the antics of Cristiano and his pals, as tired as I am of them, because of their horrid and qualid moral superiority and their browbeating of others.