Just coming from four days of the "State of Mind III" conference, a rich feast of cross-disciplinary engagement, and the Second Life Community Conference, I'm still collecting my thoughts and clicking on some of the conference videos. First, don't worry, the Metaverse didn't really launch without you, if you didn't have the price of airfare to New York, or didn't know anybody who could TP you into the SL inworld sims. I'm fairly certain it's going to be big enough to accommodate way more than the egos on display at this confab, but small enough to hold in your hand.
Second, to beat the Herald to their photos of debauchery. Sure, those rumours are true, but you either knew that already or didn't care and if you care now, screw you. And yes, I danced with Anshe, but, it's not like you think lol...it was just that the scene was so much like The Sims Online, that it seemed perfectly natural that when you come in a room to mingle, you're going to click on somebody and ask them to dance the jitterbug or something. You don't get to do that in Second Life; but somehow SL facilitates you to go on to do that in First Life.
I also had the rich satisfaction of slashing Hiro Pendragon to ribbons with my air sword, without any resistance -- robots are still picking up the tiny pieces of Hirolet off the floor of Off the Wagon on Macdougall Street as we speak. Sweet! Hiro always tries to get the last word, however. "Passion, Prok, passion for Second Life. THAT is what we have in common!"
The scene at the opening party of SLCC -- SOPPIER as I tended to call it after SOP -- wasn't Star Wars bars. There were no feathers or capes or fox tails, although a couple guys were wearing kilts which I think is the Next Big Thing. It was one of those awful, noisy bars in the West Village with sawdust and vomit and Bud on the floor downstairs and really loud music ranging from Cream's White Room to...um...Lola...and then White Room again and then something that looked like a big log-inqueue on the way up to a table of food which forced you to make the delicately nuanced choice of whether you wanted this viscous doughy greasy cheese-melted thing or that one.
It was like a Masked Ball, only in reverse. Everybody flipped everybody's playing card to see their avatar's name and compare it to their RL face and body. I don't think anybody really cared that much to find out what anybody's RL name or occupation or location was but they definitely wanted to walk around 3 times in a circle and sniff their private parts like dogs.
Will they forget that somebody turns out to be twice the size in RL that they are in simulated life the next time they meet them? I found after TSO RL conferences that really nothing much changed. You might spend a little more time inworld together after that and have a bit more understanding but since the very substrate for your relationship in the first place was second and not first life, well, where else could it take place but in the ether?
What does somebody look like in RL is a question you don't really wonder...until you might spar with them on the forums or just the opposite, wonder idly if your online romantic relationship could go offline?
Well, I won't single out any one person, but let me give you a sense of the collective scene -- geeks -- people with no lives lol. Lots and lots of really overweight, unattractive women, and geekily dressed women, and lots and lots of either tall and overweight and permanently semi-drunk men, or tiny little geek guys with really wispy beards. And I say this with full knowledge that like Dolores Claiborne, "I ain't gonna be doing no beauty pageants today." Clearly, the rich fuel driving Second Life is the yearning for the power, beauty, and interest missing from First Life. No matter. It's ok. These are the kind of people who make revolutions. If the socially inept get together and make something, it will be awhile before they bring the ept along, but the ept will come.
You do start to get an insight about the forums, however. SL's forum is a pretty small hot-house orchid greenhouse, with a lot of 30- and 40-something older women fighting either each other or 20-something men. The men all hate their mothers, because their mothers didn't nurse them in childhood and instead, went to work, so on the whole, they have little respect or admiration for older women. The women all hate the young men because they seem like their sons -- spoiled brats who kinda got in the way of their careers anyway, and who haven't amounted to much. No wonder the SL forums don't work.
The collective portrait is one of a lot of pasty-faced pudgy geeks who are online way to much, and if they have "a life" it's intimately wound up either in SL itself or some other online function. That's the first pan. Of course, when you zoom in you find all kinds of very interesting stories of first as well as second lives but the first impression is hard to ditch -- let's face it, SL is geekworld on crack.
Interestingly, unlike SOP which was made up overwhelmingly of old white guys and only a few younger white females on the speakers' panels especially, SOPPIER had a number of black, Latino, and Asian faces in the crowd and many more women and gays. It just "looks like America more" than SOP's crowd though we're still overhwhelming reflecting the demographics of the geeks and "the intellectual users of the Internet" as Philip put it-- the people who came to all the same parties, whether it was the start of the Internet, or the start of the WWW itself, or whatever.
This will probably change soon. "Just wait til the world grows," like Cocoanut says.
At SOP, if you described your Second Life enthusiastically to one of the old white guys in ties or the young perfectly-coiffed white females in suits, you'd see the little smile creep on to their face. "That's nice, dear," you could almost hear them say, and the head pat was thunderous. If any of them had avatars, they never used them. There was something definitely freaky about referring to your inworld activities in any kind of serious way. When curiously (or perhaps not so curiously), Philip introduced me to one of the law school professors as "a top investor in SL's Cyberland stock market," the frozen smile on her face was something akin to the look you give a colleague when they present you their little five-year-old darling showing off his finger-painted work of art.
I suppose that will change, too, maybe not right away.
Everbody kept talking about platforms...and all I could think of was Ingrid Ingersoll's chunky platform shoes, those high-prim heels that always rez first in my face up in the air whenever I TP a female tenant to look at a property.
I suppose a major highlight of the conferences was being in the Korean karaoke bar with Philip Linden leafing through a gigantic book of songs, looking for his tune. Finally, he stands up and belts out a pretty credible rendition of Pearl Jam's "Jeremy Spoken" -- supplemented by me, Hiro, and this guy from MTV doing the "hoot hoot" chorus in the background. Philip has a big heart. It was hard to get a real sense of the rest of the Lindens since most of them appear to have me on mute. By that I mean there's simple no resonance with them. They walk by you, and you know you are a gray avatar who has rezzed in from a public terminal like Snowcrash. Of course, some of them could be pissed off from the forums, or whatever, but you sense it goes deeper than that. Of course, being probably the most notorious Infamous Antagonist of SL (something that was far too easy to become lol), I imagine that could account for my lack of dance partners.
But I almost felt as if there was just another world, another wavelength and I wasn't given the deeded object to the group to get the stream on group land. The deeded object might be technical knowledge, but even that would not be enough -- only technical knowledge coupled with technical excellence opens up the Hand of Fatima.
I even went out and partied with some of them, taking a hugely long walk through the canyons of lower Broadway and Soho, after deferring to Maxx Monde, who was there wielding a GPS, of all things, in order to find a bar in Manhattan. I was going to take them to a dive that was a mere two blocks from where we were after dinner, but I was afraid to expose Lindens to things like people getting BJs in the ladies' room. I know they aren't so delicate but I didn't want it to wind up in the Herald. So we trailed endlessly behind Maxx, who was charging ahead with buzz-cut beligerence, "shiny lighting the path to victory," and fetched up at the Red Lion on Bleecker, one of those tacky live music beer joints populated almost entirely by tourists. We sat outside in the increasingly cold drizzle shooting the shit, while Jeska looked longingly over at the Ben and Jerries (and finally succumbed). I knew I was definitely the extra piece to the puzzle at this party but I persisted, thinking it might be fun to talk to Pathfinder and Jeska "off hours" and try to understand not only why they banned me, but why they took a wholeheartedly supportive attitude toward this banning, not like "Sorry, company policy" sort of thing. I find that scary, when people can't separate. That is, I didn't at all wish to discuss with them or any Linden these bannings, so as not to dignify them, but I hoped to talk to them on any other of 99 topics to try to get a sense of them as people, and why they think the way they do.
I hung and hung, and was just getting Pathfinder to tell me his cats' names or something, when I made the mistake of darting out front on the sidewalk for a cigarette. I was talking to some Quebecois tourists about bilingual policy right in front of the bar for a few minutes then went back inside. They were gone. Pathfinder and Maxx Monde had scrammed, no doubt congratulating themselves for dumping Prok ROFL. I'm sure that was the highlight of their trip, and I'm glad to have supplied it.
Three best take-home quotes for me from this experience (not to be attributed and probably not to be taken to the bank lol)
"See, I'll never let a 25-year-old kid from New Jersey take over the Metaverse, don't worry."
"Fraud is fun!"
"Linden Lab will never ever EVER take away your wealth and land."
Ah, well, my world, my imagination! One can dream, can't one.
Hamlet had a whole workshop talking about himself, which I sat through about half of, and I pestered him several times during the conference to ask him what his story's angle was going to be. He first blandly informed me that he wouldn't be writing about the SLCC because his beat is inworld, and this was (what I call) outworld. Then he allowed as whether the story of how residents of SL related to each other after meeting each other in RL -- how people who used to hate each other in SL or on the forums will now come to appreciate or even like each other after some RL Bruderschaft.
Uh, no. I found that meeting the SL folks in RL pretty much clinched my dislike for them on the forums or in the world and I'm certain it was mutual, that it confirmed what was intuitively felt about others from their SL presentation of self in the avatar, and that while you might be able to clear up some misunderstandings or catch up on some horridly distorted game of broken telephone and unravel the knots, you would still end up thinking deep down somebody was a rabid fucktard. Perhaps with slightly less passion, however, if they turned out to be like anybody, like you, with kids, bills to pay, bad bosses at work, and relatives caught in Katrina. There was one slight and very young fellow who was a particular nuisance in the game to me that had a touching story of making his way up to New York from way down south, with a loan from his grandfather, then wandering the strees of the city trying to find the address, so hungry was he to have a seat at the Metaverse table.
Did everyone think I'd now junk my concept of the FIC? Hell, no. In fact, it's worse than you know...
Start with the grown-ups' conference -- turns out that those fascinating workshops you saw with famous tekkie type commentators like Clay Shirky? Those were closed, invitation-only. If you asked the organizers, how do I get an invitation? They'd say they just didn't know. If you asked Lindens, they would talk about the weather. The website didn't inform you, however, that the opening night dinner and the next day's workshops were NOT open to the public, or that if you paid a fee for the conference like anyone else, that it would not include these features. So it was rather annoying to show up to the registration table, find my nametag, get the packet and the swag bag and then be told that I couldn't get admission to the dinner, that it was only for workshop participants and panelists. Bleh. I cooled my heels outside for awhile, waiting to see if some of the Herald boys would come along so I could tag in on their heels like a piece of toilet tissue. Nothing doing.
I was just about to flag a cab home then I saw a bounding, tousled-hair youth of 40-something animately talking to some famous computer guy. That was Phil of course -- or Philip as I was later informed that he prefers to be called. Now, had I been a 7-foot-blonde real estate magnate in a tuxedo with blueprints for dozens of malls and residential communities under my arm, and also among the top leaders of the (kinda) loyal opposition, he'd have been forced to stop and shake my hand. Instead, I didn't go up to him and he passed me by without a second glance, even if I looked like a large percent of his game's demographics LOL.
Later, I found out Anshe, and this one and that one of course had networked or buttered-up the right folks and gotten in to the closed workshops. Which aren't in the videotape archive. Ah, well, we'll hear what they said soon enough on the blogs, no?
So I was sure to arrive early for the "industry breakfast" about virtual stockmarkets the next day, and this time I was sure to march up to Philip Linden in my 7-foot-real-estate-blonde-avatar and inform him that I was Prokofy Neva -- the accent is on the second syllable. After the shocked look, he gave me a big smile and a big hug. I was surprised by that. In RL, I've been kicked out and banned from countries, and from floors from the State Department and such, and I don't run into those people who booted me later and have them hug me, no. Here, I've been permabanned from the SL forums and banned recently from the Community Round Table list, but there's still a hug -- which I think has to do with me paying them the ultimate compliment: taking their game extremely seriously.
"Great game," I said to Phil in the bear hug. "I mean, um, monetarized socializing platform...um...thingie with...uh...the socialized monetarizing platform". Gosh, David Linden's phrase for this thingie so trips off the tongue.
Still, when it came time at the end of SLCC to have the big company picnic photo, I stepped outside. Sure, what's a picnic without ants, but I get tired of being an ant sometimes. I ran into Hammie on the way out and told him to be sure to run and get into the picture. I know I don't belong there. It's still a very small village, with a very distinct pecking order, and very distinct town elders and first families, located somewhere in the 16th century, and I'm either in the public stock or getting run out of town on a rail with tar and feathers.
Dozens of people actually came up to me and said "I like your posts, I love reading you on the forums," and either failed to realize I was perma-banned or in fact knew, but hadn't come to my defense then -- or now. In fact, I found few people really even aware -- including El Presidente himself -- about the deadly connection they had forged with the new policy passed in June that says that banning from the forums equals banning from the game. Such an act, were it to occur, would deprive someone of their wealth and land merely on the grounds of their verbal expression. That's an outrage -- that's Russia, that's China. I'm still dying to know, for example, whether Plastic Duck got to keep the sim he bid on successfully on the land auction, or whether he was refunded his bid in full. Not that I care for Plastic Duck, but I do care for due process and the rule of law. The state's removal of your property is a very serious matter, and should not be undertaken on speech grounds, which are not violent or criminal offenses -- or shouldn't be in a liberal, democratic society.
It's hard to know what the Lindens would do in this situation -- they've actually painted themselves in a corner by setting it up so that prominent project directors of landowners in the game like Ulrika Zugzwang can misbehave outrageously on the forums, but the moderators won't permaban her because then that would mean they'd have to ban her from the world, too. If their thought was to scare the bejesus out of bad behavers on the forums, all they did was scare the bejesus out of themselves potentially at losing one of their star pupils like Ulrika or Lektor or Siggy. It's stupid. They should undo this policy. It sucks. It has no deterrent value on bad behaviour, has no credibility, and is unclear as to how it will be executed. Does a person perma-banned from the forums, and then consequently from the world, get any time to shed their inventory and sell their land even for $1/meter to liquidators? As Linden seizes it all, will they provide any just compensation? I imagine not -- we know again from the latest reinforced TOS that it is all lacking in value anyway.
Several Lindens in their remarks, including Philip and Cory, made it clear that they viewed the people at the conference, and those who are early adapters and "intellectual users of the Internet" as Philip phrased it, as the inner core -- and feted indeed in all kinds of ways (even I got the Hand-of-Fatima pewter necklace which Pathfinder assured me has no religious connotations but is meant to signify "see-do," i.e. the eye sees, the hand makes. (Trenton makes, the world takes. At no time do the fingers leave the hand....)
Cory's hour of geek-speak was almost impenetrable but let me give you the headlines: "No Herald on a prim, no debate on policy." We'll not have text/URLs/Internet on a prim in 1.7 for reasons that were unclear to me, and there will be no changes or additions to the voting pages which only addresses game features, not world policies. There was bunches of other stuff about Havoc 2 and back-end this and server-side that and client-side-the-other thing, sprinkled with loads of acronyms. I finally asked this dude who kept saying API API API all the time what it spelled out as. I knew it meant applications, but I didn't know the whole thing. He thought and thought. Then he said "application programming interface". Ok.
The scary part of the grown-up conference was that the key debate, "Teh Gr8 Deb8" as they called it, came down in favour of a really retrograde concept, which like a lot of turbulent revolutions, is going to masquerade itself as cool and innovative. They decided that law based on territory and national sovereignty was "inapplicable" in the virtual world. I guess they'll go on saying that right up til when somebody pulls the plugs out of their servers and computers -- they we have got to hope they have a first life lol.
One of the keen senses you get from inflections of voice, and looks in the eye, and facial expressions in the RL, not only SOP but SOPPIER, is the tremendous enthusiasm and raw belief leading to a huge outpouring of time and energy of Lindens and residents. Imagine, the CEO of the company and all the staff sitting hour after hour, not only in conferences rooms but in karaoke bars, basically taking annoying customer service questions endlessly, essentially amounting to "Why isn't my game like this? Why is it like that? Can't you make it this other way?"
I mean my monetarized socializing platform, of course.
On the whole, I would have to say that what we had was a Linden conference. We had a highly structured town hall, with some break-out panels in which mainly Lindens, and a few selected high--profile residents got to do push-media, presenting their thoughts and points of views and visions. There was a bit of Q & A, but it all had the town-hall feel -- the need to keep questions very polite and short because we were all breathlessly awaiting the Lindens' pronouncements on this or that issue.
There was almost nil interaction between residents, so vectored were the residents on their Lindens, and the task, as one put it very well, of "getting in to have a pitch meeting with a Linden." Everyone is not only bursting with plans and special offers, they're looking for special attention, too.
A good example of a newer FIC starting to replace forums FIC or early-adapter FIC (although the original royal FIC is far from gone) is the educational FIC. The Lindens love education projects to pieces because it helps them prove that the game isn't a game and has RL applications. So something called the Port with Pathfinder membership and other luminaries has come into being, where there will be a model United Nations built. The talented and diplomatic Jerry Paffendorfer (being tall and thin in a world of fat, short geeks always helps -- Philip must have figured that out ages ago with his teen-throb poster good looks), gets my vote for Most Likely Famous Platform Developer in 10 years time or so, a leader of the SL Future Salon. He's also put together something called Democracy Island with the NY School of Law which sounds fascinating, not the least because all the people have the last name "Democracy" (I'll bet it's really easy to install democracy in such a homogenous population lol!).
Democracy Island, the Port, other projects are going to put together some kind of "discussion facilitator" when they have Thomas Bennett visit next month. In one version, they talked about "the German speakers will sit here, the English there" (like the UN is only about languages lol). In another, they talked about "furries here, norms there" etc. This is just an experiment -- people in RL with RL aims using SL as a kind of demo or toy or...um hmmm socializing monetarized platform? They'll fool around with it and then maybe leave it when they move on to the next resume-enhancer, and who could blame them?
But what kind of effect will this have on the people who live and work in the world? They look at the box from the inside, not the outside, and live and move and have their being inside the space, taking it on its own faith, not as something to be exploited. Did they get to decide that the world will now have a UN-type thingie that will try to facilitate conversations or debates among residents? Was this UN created out of some galactic-senate type of process? Of course not. It was just made up on the fly by geeks, like a lot of cool things are made up on the fly by geeks, without a lot of thought about what people did for centuries in the first world...because that's boring to study, that's old dead white guys, but in the new cool place, you can have devil wings and catch on fire. Indeed.
But, here it is again: "I'm not building a game," he says. "I'm building a country."
Some day, in this country, or in the real world that sustains our "typists," we will have a conference. It won't have any Lindens at it -- either because there won't be Lindens or because Lindens, as federal government officials answerable to or even appointed by parliament, won't be appropriate. Even long before then, we can bring into being that horizontal world that does not vector always to the vertikal of power and subject by having the important conversations among ourselves. There are so many important ones to have. And it's clear that few of them can even be rationally decided as long as a feted inner core will go on looking to Lindens for approval of their own position, or bolster Lindens with echoes of their own positions. I realize it's their world. But we still have our imagination.
