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.
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.
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