Second Thoughts

The Group Tools

The group tools need to be fixed, and the Lindens are fixing them.

Be careful what you wish for, you might get what you want.

What are the Lindens doing to the group tools? We really have no idea. Philip Linden has made one set of statements on Metaverse Messenger -- Robin Linden and Jesse Linden have made some vague follow-up in the community round-table-turned-city-hall that has become the former small-group sessions overtaking even the old town-hall format (which is why Midtown Bienenstich started to call it "city hall").

When the world reaches a size and complexity where people begin to talk about "city hall" instead of "town hall" you need to fix the group tools. The Groups Are the Government. And the Group Tools Are the Governance.

What would be ideal for the group tools?

My concept of 24 togglable functions. Rather than focus on the nature of the group, or merely enhance the old tools, or privilege one type of group over another, or one type of social system over another, my system would make a set of customizable, configurable tools that enable any founder to create any type of group, up to and including one that would remove him, himself -- or enable him to rule with an iron fist.

Many, including the fellow who nominated me for "best thread of 2005" for my post "The Groups Are the Government," didn't like my preamble explaining how existing tools are socialist, and we need to make them capitalist.

But in fact, this age old struggle between individualism and collectivism, between profit and creation of wealth and distributive justice, between the Western corporate structure of a CEO and his board of directors and the Asian structure of a General Secretary and a Politburo, between groups working with a responsible manager and the rule of law in by-laws and groups working under dictatorships of either a strong-man or an aggressively-obedient group enforcing group-think. So you can't side-step these largely social-structure issues. And I think in the SL context, it's only fair for capitalists to say they'll allow socialism (they're the liberals, after all) in order to isolate and marginalize those few socialists who keep going on about how we need to remove "evil capitalism".

Equating investors and managers with evil capitalists and evil dictators is exactly what's going on again, however, in the name of not only socialism but "freedom from dictatorship," and it means the simple problem of tools that might very well separate a man from his investment, labour, and wealth are still being cooked up at the Lab out in California.

How to respond?

First, get the facts. We have none. We have the vaguest of impressions, anecdotes, and anxious discussion. I just wrote to Philip in the evening and said, "Please come inworld and have an informal talk in Dore when you're free to anyone who can show up to just explain the bare facts of your covenant and zoning notions." I told him a letter would be coming soon from residents asking for a town hall.

Friday night, when a group of us interested in zoning -- those who came to a publicly-announced meeting on the events calendar of a regularly-scheduled discussion club, including several who had been in numerous meetings on zoning -- tried to grapple with the practical measures to take, we did the following:

1) Nominated several people to make a kind of committee to draft a letter, go to the Lindens, ask for a town hall on zoning and group tools -- but a town hall that would have a panel of experts speak first, then plenty of time for Q&A. These were Gwyn Llewelyn, Justice Soothsayer, Cocoanut Koala -- taking responsibility for getting the Lindens first of all to articulate their plans publicly -- which they have not done -- and do it so in the most open format for the community possible.

2) The letter proceeded to get drafted, but along the way hit some political snags -- somebody interested in boosting the world-governance functions of Democracy Island asked that the Linden-sponsored town-hall zoning meeting be held on Democracy Island -- I nixed this idea (and hope it won't go forward) because I do not want Democracy Islanders arrogating to themselves the function of convening and promoting and moderating sensitive and difficult community meetings especially on issues about which they have absolutely no experience -- like the struggles of people on the mainland to zone their sim (struggles utterly alien to them as islanders).

3) Suddenly, without notice to any of us in the Friday night meeting, Gwyn convened an out-of-schedule Thinkers meeting Sunday afternoon at 1:00 p.m. at Neualtenburg, allowed Thinker Prefect Traxx Hathor to speak at length without any pushback against his ideas and notions of "dangerous individuals" and "dictators" (see below) that ran completely counter to the sense of the group on Friday (including her own alleged opinions and concerns expressed at that time) -- and had him post a transcript of the meeting -- and also make his own interventions, over which of course she supposedly had no control, nor attempted to make control.

Startled at this high-handedness, and stunned, I simply informed her that it was really mean-spirited not to have invited us to her meeting of "Thinkers" -- especially those "Doers" like myself from the Friday night meeting who actually run land groups and can actually speak up practically against hysterics and fear-mongerers like Traxx, who call individuals who pay for a sim and tier it and put a business enabling hundreds of people to have land and homes on it, "individuals to be feared in Second Life" or "dictators".

I cut her friendship card -- not ever something I do lightly -- and I won't be speaking to her again on these issues unless it's in public with plenty of witnesses, with more than 2 others also to hold her to account. Back-rooming and back-stabbing and public posturing on the forums on this type of hugely controversial and difficult issue of importance to many in the community are simply unacceptable.

In short, a typical inworld power-struggle has begun over a feared Linden change, much disinformation is going around and speculation, and people are jockeying for position to make sure they, and they alone, are heard and heeded by the Lindens.

Non pasarant.

So in this situation, I can only point out the obvious once again: "nothing about us/without us".

So here are my suggestions:

1) The Lindens need to convene a meeting in-world with those who run land groups currently for businesses or group projects (i.e. as distinct from their residences). To dilute the meeting with those who do not, who are speculators, fear-mongers, socialist kibbutzers, etc. is completely unfair and unjust. They already have the forums to hear out those types; Lindens need to be willing to heed those who actually live and work and struggle with groups day in and day out.

They should be doing nothing that separates any individual who makes investment of time, talent, and treasure in this treacherous world of theirs from their money and land.

2) The Lindens need to convene a town-hall type meeting, but moderate it a hell of a lot better than they have been. A very strong-voiced and muscular Linden at least 7 feet tall needs to STAND UP at the start of the meeting and SHOUT that the meeting is MODERATED with the use of the soap-box or IM'd speakers list, not sit for 10 minutes while everyone jeers and catcalls. This meeting could have such a panel of experts as we had indicated, but also plenty of time for Q&A. Two hours is reasonable.

3) Lindens and Thinkers alike need to stop citing -- and dangerously nerfing policy around -- this fake, hypothetical, utopian "group of equals who all shared equally in purchase price and all share in tier on one sim to do some marvelous project."

Such a group does not exist in Second Life.

No, it does not.

Please cite it if  you think it really does. We'll pick it apart.

If you thought it existed, it's because you don't realize that in 99 percent of the cases, one person pays most of, if not all, of the tier, or most of, if not all the purchase price, then gets others to help. There are many reasons for this, among which the bad group tools figure prominently -- but mainly it's because one person usually has to take responsibility.

The tools reform must proceed from a rich and robust recognition of this REALITY and not be built from a vaunted, fake, hypothosis that there are groups of well-intentioned, noble individuals each of whom puts in equal amounts of tier and each of whom paid an equal portion of the purchase price and therefore each of whom equally needs to be protected from some putative rogue one of their equal members who rampages like a dictator. If a group and a situation actually like this can be found by day with a microscope, great, but they are really not in existence and everyone knows it.

The tools could PROMOTE such collaborative groups into being, by making it safer to donate tier, safer to share money -- but I doubt that degree of complexity is going to be addressed now.

What we need to look at is groups as they really exist now with their real features, how to enhance and protect and promote them, summon others into being, and make zoning possible.

As has been aptly noted in the Thinker's meeting, the Lindens are likely holding out the concept of quickly-reformed group tools as a way of assuring new sim buyers -- especially buyers of these new continents of 10-40 sims! that they will not have to suffer any Lazarus type problems.

Those existing universities who have lots of students to make up members and even officers of a group, and who have the grant money to hire consultants -- like Democracy Island -- could then buy landscaped contiguous mainland sim batches and have their groups (in which one person will have have the grant recipient or Principle Investigator's authority to expend a grant) without fearing Lazarus or other types of griefing.

Those old SL businesses that grouped their land with alts or their inworld hubbies, on not-new sims, dotted with Lazarus, will likely be out of luck. They will likely also face a removal of the 10 percent bonus -- as payment for the new group-tools protection and as a further belt-tightening measure by LL--, and will likely either be forced to covenant with strangers, or covenant only parts of sims, and still live with Lazarus.

Mostly, what the Lindens will ultimately achieve is privileging of the covenanted groups. New people buying new continents and covenanting their land, or very old beta-testers who formed fiercely-loyal tribes and easlily make groups on old sims -- will then be upheld as the "better groups" who have more protections against griefing, more options for participation, protection against "dictatorships". With better tools, safer sims, they'll have more attractive sims -- more business.

Anyone who doesn't go along with this convenant, who keeps the old group tools as they are, or who merely remains as sole owner of his land and business, will be pointed to and scolded as "a dictator" or "not covenanted" -- and possibly even hounded out of business, given the evil, malicious capacity for group persecution that always prevails in SL. At any rate, unable to address the problem of Lazarus without taking on the problems of covenants, they'll have less attractive sims.

Suxxors to be them!

As I understand it, it's not that I should fear a new system where new sim owners and covenanted groups will be portrayed as the safer, better, better-looking sim groups, while those of us on the older mainland sims without covenants, or without groups, or with groups that don't use the new tools as the Lindens wish for their socially-engineering purposes. It's that I should plan for it.

The Real Dictators

By announcing that he is planning on changing the group tools, Philip Linden, unwitting or not, has sparked another power struggle in SL and caused a great deal of debate, sometimes anguished. The news in his latest Metaverse Messenger interview that he would be creating some kind of group powers to "covenant" land and zone sims has been met with mixed views -- many are very happy that he's trying to think of a way to get rid of the Lazarus Divine problem, without seeming to encroach upon freedom of expression. Others are alarmed at the power that appears to be given either to the founder, or to the abstraction called the covenant group itself -- depending on how you look at it, depending on your experience of groups in SL, and depending on your own personal or group agenda.

The first sally in this propaganda war, not surprisingly, comes from Traxx Hathor, he whose avatar "Nobody" handily won the election in the Sims Online Test City by urging everyone to "vote for nobody because we don't need a government" (hahaha). In TSO, it was a laugh; in SL, it is sinister. In TSO, you vote for "Nobody" and "Nobody" could try to be ruler -- but the lack of RL money, very limited and rigid game tools, etc. means it doesn't go very far and you can always laugh and log-off.

In SL, sounding the alarm about "not having government so you won't get dictators" is populist, and is the best form of cover to stealthily take over groups that will form ostensibly to ditch or prevent dictators -- and become the worst kind of dictators themselves (aren't they always).

In defense of his notion of "evil dictators" who form groups and then wish to expel those who go against their original goals -- a seemingly legitimate and normal concept -- in the Polysci forum, Traxx sounds the self-serving alarm: "Other people in the group cannot get rid of the founder nor the founder's alts, which might be the only other officers. However the founder can boot any member whenever he chooses for whatever reason or excuse."

You might ask why such officers wouldn't just pull their tier and make their own group? Only in a situation where all had pooled money and collectively bought a sim could this actually create a problem -- that scenario is so rare in SL that to build an entire toolset around it is absurd. The much more common format is one person taking responsibility for a sim in a world where he accepts enormous cost and risk.

Yet "Individuals have proven to be very dangerous in SL," said Iron Perth in a discussion Thinker and Nberger Gwyn Llewelyn convened in Neualtenberg (a discussion put on at the last minute, out of schedule, to which many of us who had been deeply involved in discussing the issue with Gwyn just the night before were not invited.)

"Agree, Iron," said Traxx -- and of course, what they mean is individuals who dissent from the sort of group-think that groups like Thinkers and Neualtenberg, and the forums royals can conceive, and disseminate with an iron hand not only in the forums, but in the world.

"even group foinder myust bve subjest to expulsion by THE FREAKKIN GROUPP" says Elizabetha Pirandello -- in a matter that is typical of the hysteria that develops when somebody like Traxx whips up the notions of dictators in a group -- so that a person who spends time and money on land could be expelled from his investment by a mob!

How could it be that these very aggressive and very opinionated beings -- themselves individuals attempting to influence everybody -- could so tendentiously issue Edicts Against the Individual, that sacred being forming the basis of any rule of law or democratic society? And in the SL scenario, that sacred being who PAID FOR IT DUH?

It's demagoguery of groups and collectivism, pure and simple. They'd like to set up some straw man like Prok, "that banned forum troll" as "a dangerous individual" merely because I refuse to go along with group-think, and stick to my own views of the state of affairs in SL and am not intimidated from expressing the truth as I see it.

And if invoking the terror of the Dangerous Individual is not enough, Traxx is at it again with the demagoguic "taking advantage of newbies" -- the old "think of the children" gambit.

Of course, it's hard to imagine a person who is responsible, who makes an investment, who wishes to have a good business, that is going to "take advantage of newbies". Those types are usually alts who flip land or don't really have public, esablished personas. But it's often been a refrain of Traxx's -- because of his own baggage -- that my plan for tier donation is a "scam of newbies". Of course real newbies and real oldbies who have taken part in this simple and normal program find it is nothing of the kind. Paying a person for first land (something I will do occasionally) at a fair market price is not a scam and never taking advantage of them. When I think of the hours and hours and HOURS I have spent in SL in the last year helping newbies, often to buy land effectively, without any interest of my own in it, and more often than not, in the rare cases I do buy their land, getting stuck with unsellable lemons in Lemon!

But if you want to gin up a lynch mob on the forums or in the world, just scream "newbie exploitation" at the top of your lungs, and someone is sure to feel like the charge sticks.

It would be good if Traxx Hathor, Iron Perth, and others concrerned about dictators on the grid could provide actual facts and cite actual situations that actually illustrate their rabid notions.

Let them come up with their inworld experience of *land-owning* groups (of which they have precious little) -- groups made up of people other than one special partner or their alts -- or shut up.

I fight every day against Lazarus Divine, using all kinds of methods. But I wouldn't go around screaming hysterically about "the dangers of the individual" due to Laz. They'd like to describe someone like Lazarus Divine as a "dangerous individual" but that's not the focus to make -- they reach for recipes like land bans, and mutes, and shuns for a problematic character like Lazarus, when what is really needed is The Rule of Law -- which means a focus on law, not its breakers, and a focus on the sanctity and primacy of the Rule of Law -- not the breaker of it or the enforcer of it. When the Lindens can invoke 3 TOS and CS clauses against Lazarus, they will have bolstered their own Rule of Law; they will have enhanced their credibility; and they will have dealt with Lazarus without in fact harming him or obliterating him as an individual -- if he is willing to stand down in deference to the law as promulgated.

It's not Lazarus who is the dangerous individual. The dangerous individuals -- in terms of the health of the body politics -- are weak-willed Lindens who cannot enforce the Rule of Law -- their own Rule of Law.

This is how democratic and liberal societies of the West have been run -- safeguarding the rights of the individual while safeguarding the state that guarantees those rights; protecting the individual from the oppression of the non-state mob or the state. More despotic societies of Eurasia, Asia, Africa and elsewhere in the world have reached for collectivism, suppression of the individual as Dangerous, and other cultural and political modes that privilege the group over the person -- for all kinds of historical reasons.

There is no need to replicate this in Second Life, whatever its multinational character; there is a reason why both Europe and North America are filled with Asians and Eurasians fleeing despoticism, especially scientists and intellectuals.

The twentieth century is littered with failed experiments in collectivism, leading to the deaths of millions; let us heed them.

Many of us in business have long wanted Linden Lab just to make what we view as "normal group tools to have a normal company with a normal CEO and board of directors". As we don't find business or "capitalism" any kind of "evil," to us it seems perfectly natural that tools that can help such normal corporate structures come into being should be created and enhanced by LL.

After all, if someone wants to make groups that enable hippie communes, or art collectives, which to come into being, where everybody shares and the group imposes its will on the individual, they can do that - using existing tools, or their needs can be accommodate in the reforms.

But various factions, ranging from socialists who hate business, to Randists to authoritarians who hate individual rights, to some of the new celebrators of "the social revolution in groups" that Beth Noveck is touting, are hastening to get their hands on this process so it can serve their ends -- to privilege collectives because collectives are easy for a strong-willed individual or group of individuals to manipulate -- especially, ironically, when individual rights are crushed and groupism is invoked.

A common populist approach of authoritarians is to claim they are overthrowing dictators. In Traxx's mind, there is always someone "trying to take us over" or "trying to establish a government" or "running groups and newbie scams and rental agencies to establish dictatorial powers, etc." Yeah, that's me, and his baggage there is clear. But as it happens, this kind of clamour and noise about dictatorships instills fear into many people, and they rush like sheep to embrace whatever modification they feel needs to be put into place to prevent this -- without really looking at how group tools really play out inworld.

It's hard for me -- or any other people who spend real money and real time on this world -- to understand why the founder of a business -- the person who spends his own money to purchase the land and pay tier, and works his own hours and labours to create something -- should be called "a dictator". In fact, he's merely someone making an investment and taking responsibility. That person in turn needs to find either 2 other alts to be officers, due to the flawed nature of the tools currently, or very, very trusted friends.

If he finds he has treacherous officers, he needs to be able to boot them, or members. After all, it is his money and tier. In situations where there is a group made up not of alts or officers as distinct from members, there is the issue of how a group of officers behave to each other. Linden tools cannot fix human nature. There will always be rogue, griefing, and treacherous officers.

But a founder who faces them must have the right to boot them -- on his own, with tools he controls. He can opt to give those same powers to others. If they do not like his methods of rule, they are free to form another group. It's only $100. Traxx and others handily forget the way in which most people deal with griefing officers or those who betray them (and they ought to remember!) -- the founder just forms another group around the first group and puts the reliable people into it, and moves his land.

Of course, in a case where the founder and the officers all own land, and any one of them can seize it, the Lindens end up being called in, as happened with GIGAS. Though rare, the tools should be accommodating to this situation. And again, there can only be a plea for discussion, wisdom, and democratic participation in the devising of this solution.

It does no good to label a person concerned about others screwing him out of his land, his work, his business, as a "dictatorship" whose "dictatorial powers" need to be curbed by a group.

In a group where, say, six people all put in, say, 512 and all are equal in terms of investment and tier, then perhaps their covenant at the outset might work. But what happens if the founder has to leave SL? What if any of the original members who understood the essence of the covenant cannot be reached or go away for extended times? There are so many awful scenarios that happen in SL that they must all be examined seriously.

The problem is that any officer can sell the land out from any other officer, even if they have not paid for the land, or paid tier. This problem has caused enormous grief and loss in SL, and the Lindens are right to address it.

Prior to 1.7, there was a worse problem -- any member, but especially rogue griefing members who joined a group just to grief -- could pull an anonymous switch called "officer recall" and paralyze the group to new membership. That targeted officer could not invite any other officers or call any proposals -- he was frozen. A group could remain paralyzed this way (as Ravenglass Rentals often did). The only work around (which not everyone new) was to leave the group, and have another officer invite you back in. That unfroze it and ended the process. The problem is that you took your tier with you when you left the group, and if you did not have an alt or trusted friend to invite you back in, your group would be dangerously untiered and subject to Linden seizure. On the whole, a nasty business.

chad statosky, CEO of Nexcom, employer of Traxx Hathor, who is on the board of Nexcom, admitted to me openly that he used officer recall to grief me and harass me due to past disputes. This kind of behaviour is despicable, but there is nothing in the TOS to prevent it. Mercifully, it's gone now, though some keep screaming on the forums about it.

Why? Because in getting rid of that evil power of anonymous freezing and griefing, the Lindens could not leave well enough alone. They could have merely left "officer recall" as a function for officers only. They didn't. Instead, they made it so that founders of groups could ask to have officers removed by calling the LL 1-800 number. Then they'd be manually removed.

Wierd, eh? Government interference, quiet phone calls -- very unsavoury. Anshe did this to me in Metaverse Justice Watch, and enabled Jauani Wu to keep griefing the group. It's the sort of thing others felt they had to resort to in order to get rid of griefing officers -- but it's unacceptable state interference with groups.

How to get around this problem?

My solution, which I will write about separately, is to create 24 functions and have the founder toggle all of them individually for each person who joins, so that if he wants 3 other officers he trusts, he can make all of them have exactly the same powers as he does; if he doesn't fully trust them, or merely wants to hire employees, he

But the Lindens, not focussing really on groups, civil society, types of groups, or anything in the larger picture, and once again, seeming to be in a hurry to change something to solve a social problem (Lazarus) are hurrying...and hurrying means they have cooked up something else, called "covenants".

What's not to like about covenants? Seemingly a group of people in grouped land or a project or any sort could set up rules that anyone with, say, a building above two-storeys would be removed. The founder would deputize officers who would guard the covenant and essentially have the power to return prims. It's not clear whether the old problem of officers being able to sell land out from others would remain, but we can rapidly see the huge flaw here: 

What might the Lindens do to really fuck things up? I can imagine one thing might be to make it so that if you want to group your land, the price you will pay is to take on board a collection of officers and members who at any time may turn on you, for any reason, often of the literalist kind, and expel you from your own group, for which you not only paid $100 to form, but paid for land and tier.

That is, you will not have the option with grouped land to NOT have a convenant (let's hope the Lindens are smart enough to avoid this!) but will be forced to take one on.

By empowering groups, the Lindens could wind up stepping on individual rights, and the rights of investors.

Let me give an example. Let's say I have a rule that you can't build over two storeys. Indeed I have such a rule. I find it's a good one to prevent people from both building stupid plywood skyscrapers on 1024 m2 of land, or building ugly things that block the view of those behind. Two storeys, even if not the prettiest, usually sits more lightly on a neighbour and his view than three.

Very rarely thought, you get someone who asks to have three storeys. You look at the situation, and you see, for example, that they have a three-story castle, but it's really more like 2.5. Or they have two storeys, but an interesting sculpture on the roof. Or they have to their backs another sim, with a wall, and they don't block anybody's view. Your intent for your law was to prevent obstruction of views and make neighbours get along. That is your deep and wise intent. Any literalist can come along and make a superficial case that three storeys is breaking the law -- though it bothers no one in that specific instance, and a good tenant with a 2.5-storey castle who stays a month is better than 3 bad tenants who churn through and put up purple trailers that you can't really ban under your lax rules.

In other words, in making laws, you have to have discretion and common sense. You can divine the intent of the law -- but literalists, especially literalists with bad intentions to harry and harass you and the group, can invoke the literalism of the law (the letter and not the spirit) and claim that you must be ejected from your group, that your tenant with the castle of 2.5 storeys must have their prims removed, against your will, against theirs, merely because, say, somebody wants that lot for themselves, or just wants to annoy you.

It's hard to know how these new technical tools will be able to have content as distinct from functions. At the end of the day, the group will be something fairly primitive for this reason -- it is not a human brain functioning at the helm, but a machine of code.

What it might do is have officers who can return prims -- or members who can return prims -- if all click off a box called a "covenant". That means while Philip Linden could not find the will within himself to enforce at least 3 clauses of the TOS about Lazarus (disturbing the peace, etc.) wishing to protect to the end the right of land ownership and the right to do "WTF on my land", he could engender a situation in grouped land where a tier-payer or purchaser of land could be ejected for what others perceive about him -- in good faith or in bad faith will be beside the point as the tools will be colour blind and valueless and wisdomless on these matters, in the hands of the "group".

How will "the group tools" address a covenant-breaker? Most likely, they'll do it in the old template of the "officer recall" -- by a vote set to either 2/3 or majority. In the same way as an officer recalled in the old version, a covenant-breaker might find himself frozen, and the group could be frozen, too, as the concept is that new members could be mobbed in to vote one way by the targeted covenant-breaker. Progress, hmm???

Traxx envisions a group with his alts and his one trusted business partner -- the only kinds of land groups he puts tier, money, and time in. But other people all over SL have very, very different kinds of experiences.

For example, I have land groups with dozens of people who donate tier, as ordinary members, not officers. This is a service to them, so they can get a discount off their rent. It isn't much of a boon to me, in terms of discounting my tier bill, as at my tier level, I buy in half sims, so 5120 of tier one way or another in a group can't discount a bill necessarily. Furthermore, I open myself up to huge risk because at any time, these individuals could pull their tier out from the group and leave my group undertiered. I wind up having to keep in extra just to avoid getting exposed to seizure of land by Governor Linden. The advantage of this system is that the entire group then gets 10 percent more land for each donation -- which I use to buy more primland, and sell the prims at a discount in batches as an addition to existing land. It all works out well, but of course in the new version, something could be broken in this model.

The Lindens might make it that anyone putting tier in a group -- a land group with tier donors -- will be equal, and either able to sell land (as formerly officers only could do) or return prims from land.

Granting the right to return prims to anyone other than an officer or manager is a huge potential menace. Any tenant who doesn't like another tenant's build could return their prims merely by the fact of being in the land group as a donor -- or merely as a member, for that matter. Returning prims has to be left to the discretion of the manager, to avoid conflict among members and avoid griefing and overage of prims -- it is he who must think always of the good of the group, because the tendency of one member might be to put out a huge stockpile of high-prim Linden bears forcing every prim in the sim to go back into everyone's inventory -- as does happen.

Could the Lindens actually contemplating such idiocy, and could someone like Traxx actually applaud the right of ordinary members of a rentals group having the right to return ANYONE's prims in the entire group? Little neighbourhood busy-bodies and Cuban-style block watchers?

Sure they could. Because they're all about empowering groups to effect change -- and as we all know, empowering groups often means that one person with an agenda promoting a group can slip in always behind the scenes and influence it far more than a sole manager, who must take responsibility for his actions publicly and soley.

In Traxx's horror-scenario, "You have to figure out how that powerhungry individual could exploit fundamental human motivations like greed, fear and the desire for attention. Obtaining supporters by exploiting these factors, the powerhungry newcomer could use this system to extend dictatorial authority over one sim after another. The result would be a de facto SL-wide government."

Yet that power-hungry individual is more likely than not to be merely one among the most aggressively obedient majority in a divided group, the most rigorous group-thinker and the most zealous and vicious upholder in a legalistic and literalist way some notion of "group covenant" that has no basis in the spirit of the law, and no ability to become flexible in the face of real-life exceptions (like the 2.5 castle with its back to a high wall on another sim, bothering nobody.)

The Lindens need to be extremely clear-eyed, and really drop any hint of utopianist social-engineering on this one. The potential for menace and loss of hundreds of RL dollars is just to great -- we see that now with their Lazarus-faire attitude on the mainland.

In changing the group tools, the Lindens are also likely to do another belt-tightening measure -- getting rid of the ten percent bonus. They may go in a direction of reform that they'll claim makes groups safer from griefing, and the price they'll extract will be shaking loose people who use officers to make groups and get the advantage of the tier bonus.

While having safe alts is even urged by the Lindens themselves as a protective measure, and is a perfect legitimate and normal function now, by changing the tools or making a claim that it is no longer necessary to have alts as officers to protect one's land (let's say), they'll force people to become sole owners of land -- or else form groups that open them up to the risk of covenants that could terribly hobble just ordinary management and business on a day to day basis (in the name of shriekers like Traxx who are all about covering up their own tracks by howing that we need to be "curbing dictators" by scare-mongering everyone about "dictators").

What will this mean in practical terms?

If I can't have a group for rentals -- because the new convenants will be either unwieldy, or risky, or difficult -- then I can no longer have members join a land group and SET HOME TO HERE. This is a HUGE blow to the rentals business. People will say that in the era of p2p, you don't need SET HOME anymore -- but especially for new people, it's necessary -- they often get lost. I use TP HOME all the time -- many do.

The grouped land also gives an instant list of all parcels, visible to any tenant -- they can pull out the land tab and see all the land available to rent, where they might like to move -- or if they are just joining to browse.

The group gives the manager an instant tool to communicate policies and news and events to all the tenants -- of course he could make a separate group for this purpose, but it's better to have a handy menu to see who actually joined the group to set prims and become a tenant when managing the group -- some would not join a non-land group if they didn't have to set prims.

There's another very important feature which is the ability to temporarily undertier the group in order to make a sale out of it -- a necessary step because of the silly equal distribution of all the money from the sale of the group to every single member of the group even if they never paid a dime for it.

In short, management requires a great deal of responsibility, expense, and labour. It's not dictatorship, but democracy to build a society of groups that have as their leaders people who show responsiblity and make investments and put in labour.

It's the worst kind of irresponsible and even criminal collectivism to enable those who don't have responsibility and don't make purchases or work to have the right to harm others who have.

Democracy of the liberal free-market type requires making group tools that enable businesses to forthrightly, freely, and without harassment, make investments and make profits for the welfare and prosperity of themselves, their customers, and the society at large. To view this normal process as "evil" or "first world" or "greedy" is not only wrong; it will kill this world if this normal process is suppressed.

Meanwhile, we must watch out for the real dictators, those who claim that an individual with rights -- rights that really ought to accrue to him due to his purchasing of a sim and paying its tier -- do not make him a dictator but a responsible manager.

However the Lindens modify the group tools, they need to make the changes opt-in or opt-out, and they need to calibrate them carefully. They cannot be harsh and Darwinistic as they were in suddenly removing the telehubs and putting in p2p in a matter of days; they must be willing to roll back changes if they see they are causing horrors.

Most of all, the Lindens simply must listen to and heed those who actually work with these group tools day in and day out -- not just to Thinkers, but to Doers.

"A Sea of Concrete Sustaining an Archipelago of Egos"

I spent the day yesterday attending the opening of Democracy Island -- gah, being online that long is bad for your health. My main take-home impression is a sea of white concrete sustaining an archipelago of collegiate egos who believe they are doing the Next Big Thing but whose product so far (perhaps mercifully) is rather thin on the ground. In fact probably the most interesting piece of it was up in the air, a model of a prospective park in RL Queens, though for the life of me, I couldn't understand why people didn't use the very real capacity of SL to build a park replica, even at scale, using virtual ground, trees out of the library, etc. instead of making this cardboard cutout. I think it had something to do with the exigency of HiroTools to make something called a "doodad" that is copyable...maybe exportable from the game? I'm hazy about the reasons for this...

And Hiro, who apparently is a paid consultant for this grant-funded and non-profit-discounted isle, has made some sort of module called a Cosy Deliberation Chamber (R) or something like that which features an...um...inspiring backdrop of the Manhattan skyline (Hiro being from the Tri-State Area) which if you click, zooms you up into the sky, not for cybersex, but to make sure your Important Convos About Democracy aren't heard by others. There's Nota Bene of course, which might be called Proka Bane, for the time I've spent arguing with Zarf Vantongerloo about his (IMHO) decision to (in violation of ethical rules) continue running NB as a high-profile and feted business while going over to the side of the Linden feds.

Um..inspiring skyline for Cosy Convos.

I'm the first one to say the Lindens need to outsource the social problems and social crises they've generated with this world. Like the Kyrgyz, they probably need to invite in Americans and Russians to help do some of the thinking and heavy-lifting...but that doesn't mean they invite in corrupt Turks. That is, when you need overlords, there are different schools of thought by dictators on this question. Some opt to make overlords out of existing minority and hated populations, so that the oppressed minority has to deal with the afflication of one of its own turning, or be bought off by one of its own turning. Another school of thought says bring in a completely outside minority with no local roots so as not to be corrupt. The Linden dictators really ought to at least try a mixture of the two.

Watch those sneaks! If they turn from parlour pink to Commie red, break this glass, call me!

I want to think a lot more about Democracy Island, its miles of blazing concrete, its stupendously pretentious US Supreme Court, which all the demo-denizens were affectionately calling SCOTUS. The modestly-named av Justice Soothsayer had spent the previous evening assuring us that SCOTUS-among-us was going to just be about prototyping, experimenting, talking about RL stuff. But of course...within seconds of opening yesterday, with prompting from James Miller, Justice and others began talking about how they'd work on inworld disputes, and perhaps be a "place where" people can come and discuss, or get help with or devise strategies, for how to deal with disputes. Of course, that quickly morphed from being merely "a model" or "a place where" to "the entity that does the dispute resolution." This is where I began to cry "hell, no" because SCOTUS-among-us has not been elected, appointed, or created as part of a viable government with three branches such as to provide the kinds of checks and balances once needs upon something that might have the external build of SCOTUS, but has the internal feel and reality of a Vyshinsky troika operating off the cable car on the train out of Moscow to Yakutia.

Justice explained to us that originally he wanted to have the court on "my land". Of course, you can put anything on "my land". I do my poor best to run all of SL off Prok's Seafood and Salsa in Baileya, as many know, and have even issued coins there, but heck, even with the camp chairs, I can't boost the traffic up over 1000 ROFL.

But he, like me, rapidly concluded that 8192 m2 was not enough for Justice. Barbarra Blair put in helpfully that actually a Wild West hanging-judge type of operation might work best on a 1024 m2 LOL.

So he moved SCOTUS-Among-US to Demo Island (DI) where he had the scope and breadth to properly mount his build. Frankly, I had to ask this fellow, who told us openly that he is a professor of a midwestern college in the United States, whether he had the time and resources to provide justice for a complex, multinational virtual world operating 24/7. He said he didn't.

As you know, I'm heavily critical of Beth Noveck's theories, and have become more so, and have sounded the alarm to all the ingame Libertarians and Anarchists about this new more virulent form of Collectivism in Cyber Clothing taking root in the world.

Among the many helpful convos at DI last night, I learned from Hank Hoodoo that Wikipedia.org. which I often regard with thinly-veiled scorn, was founded by a guy who believes in Ayn Rand's stuff. Imagine. I boggled.  Well go and google. It helps explain "what's wrong" with the whole Wikipedia ethos, and it's why, when people like Lindens and such go to make a world, you peer really, really closely at their ideology. In fact, when Philip says to me "what's all this crazy talk about ideology?" I peer even closer, because people who say they have no ideology, or are "above" ideology, can often be more scary.

You see, this is the problem with this whole world of ours. Some people make it their college term papers, like those 2 kids who made the Metaverse Superior Court, fiddled around a little, and I think didn't even convene once (did you see them convene? I didn't). A few people like me sent them cases to discuss -- they ducked (one involved a Linden, though they said they'd take up cases involving Lindens). Then they got busy with the paper chase.

See, college professors on grants, and kids doing papers, don't feel the urgency that I might, with actual RL money of my own, and more RL time, invested in this world, to fix its many urgent social problems. It's a nice Power Point, it's a nice confab, but it's not real. For me, and many others -- and I don't mean Anshe Chung or Hiro Queso but many many others who may not even spend much time or money -- the world is more important than that. It's not just a glorified slide projector. I'd like those parachuting in to help write its Constitution, like all those Americans who parachuted in to write the Kyrgyz Constitution, or Russians who parachuted in to help military security, to think a little about all the indigenous people who already live in this country and already have many, many norms, codes, laws, mediation styles and "best practices" of which these people have no clue -- because they don't care. They are polishing their resume, and readying themselves for the next gig.

Nevertheless, I returned to DI several times, and I hope to return in the future to try to argue with these people and in my own inimitable way, knock some sense into them. Many people hate my insult-radio style of discourse. I know of no other way to break through the crystalline cyber arrogant smugness of these people especially server-side. Tony Walsh finds what they are doing scary if they mean to apply it to RL. Scary, sure! I immediately find it scary if they wish to apply it to our SL. And frankly, all their protestations that they "aren't a government" or "aren't trying to impose a system of rule or law on SL" are utter baloney and don't hold an ounce of water. Why?

1) The Lindens have on many occasions explained that their long-term goal is to find ways not to rule this world, but have the residents themselves rule it -- possibly by hosting their own servers, but possibly in other ways in which they retain control, possibly through the use of their overlord class of mentors, greeters, helpers, etc. Linden, which is called Linden Research, and calls itself a Lab, provided this island with the educational discount. Thus, as in RL, it has a rate at which, we, on commercial sims, even if we do philanthropic work, don't have. It pays $900 for the island and only $150 for the tier. The Lindens put great stress and take great pride in the educational projects, violating their rule of Lindens not joining resident groups by letting Lindens not only join, but become intimately involved in, these groups. Clearly, they see them as the wave of the future in helping to develop not only programming but policy.

2) The owner of the island, and the collector of all the dwell is SNOOPYBrown Zamboni. Great! There's always another guy to buy the island, as Kenny Linden so wonderfully explained it to me! (especially at these prices!). SNOOOPY is not just some guy, though, he's the head of SL Future Salon, a very high-profile ingame events convenor with hugely high-profile RL people like Thomas Barnett attending the session and guarantee positive and saturation coverage each time from Hamlet Linden. SNOOPY is part of accelerating.org which has some of the top brains in the business on the Internet and cyberspace working these issues. SNOOPY was a convenor of the SLCC last fall and remains heavily involved in shaping the thinking around the architecture and content of SL. Just because he doesn't sit in a camp chair in SL or work the Tringo or run an inworld business, and thinks SL is just a tool for his overall work about virtual worlds, doesn't mean that Dr. Zamboni doesn't have ambitions to influence this world as well as the whole Metaverse.

3) If it were closed, and admitted no one, then I guess we couldn't complain in some regards. But since it first worked in secret to set up then went public to be able to get social legitimacy, it's going to have to sustain public criticism -- it has aspirations of influencing the community of it doesn't stay like a locked page on a website with students only accessing it. Whether it hopes to use visitors as merely a server load test or fodder to test various tools or theories, it still has notions of influencing virtual world policy, especially THIS virtual world. That means government!

4) DI has already had enthusiastic and not-so-enthusiastic coverage, and will get more. It's a showcase for Beth's ideas about a "revolution in social groups" which some of her evangelists like Jade Lily are already touting at community meetings (which is why I got up at the community meeting to counter them with some caution). These ideas, sadly, are sure to take root with some, if not all, or at least the most important Lindens, and will, as I've always said, constitute the "Groups Are the Government" issue.

5) Beth Noveck has been the chair of the very prestigious and influential State of Play conference providing cross-disciplinary discussions between people in the gaming industry, law, computer science, Internet policy, etc. Linden Lab funds this conference every year and provides speakers, and frankly, they are rightfully the stars of the show. In other words, Beth is feted in RL, which is about as feted as feting goes -- her avatar, Lawlita Fassbinder, will never enjoy such feting LOL.

6) On the DI charter, it says "to create civic spaces in SL". Well, my fellow avatars may don their sunglasses such as to sit and stare out at the acres of blinding white concrete and tip their little avatar heads up in awe at SCOTUS-Among-US, and maybe take a ride in the nifty Cosy Cabin Deliberator, but...hmmm...what is a civic space? This is why we have to worry...it's as if the engineers and architects are saying "build it and they will come," or "we will build a replica of a government building, and that itself is the content, and that itself is enough to fill the content". Tip:  Normally, first you have a government, then they build the buildings they need.

7) The combined brain power and press power of all those involved in this exercise, with their access to RL press, their prestigious institues and universities, their blogs, will ensure that they get maximum coverage for these ideas in RL and in SL -- they aren't just some project. Therefore thinking people need to become much more engaged with this project, and not assume that becaues they say they are only goin to "do RL stuff" that it doesn't matter, or because they are going to affect "SL stuff" that it doesn't matter -- it matters!

A frustrating coda:  much discussion was held about the inability for this Democracy, like any other, to produce a tool (yet) where people can put their ideas up on a board easily, and have others also write on that board, or edit their text, or leave answering text when the other is offline, etc. etc.

I could add we had this simple ability in TSO on our lots using the existing tables and bulletin boards -- I could write something, and merely leave it open for others to write, too. Simple to program, no? That no one made this for SL two years ago baffles me, but I guess it's because they were busy looking at the blinding concrete sea sustaining the archipelago of egos rather than real stuff of democracy.

Hiro sneered at me once during the meeting that they were making something more glorified than "notecard taker" which I I have to say I feel I single-handedly promoted to Pathfinder (and am much hated for , and even get hate mail in my box for). Well, go for it, Hiro, and see if your immense ego and overweening arrogance might still not prevent you from making something that might be of use to another human being.

I hazarded a faint note of criticism of Timeless Graffiti Board, which has limits to character number, and limits to how you can really edit or not in a group (it's still about the best there is) -- limits having to do with the game and prims itself, not with Timeless' imagination. For which I got the usual slew of shit from people who cannot and will not understand that my dispute with Timeless back in the day was a simple matter of his failure to deliver customer service properly, and for his rudeness -- simple matters which he and his pals continue to blow up and incite and attempt to remove me from the game over.

All of this is said to be obviated by Web On a Prim. Well, no. I wish everyone would stop repeating this truism so as to avoid the need for a free press inworld. I still need something that is immersive, inworld, and not crashy. I don't need to be delivered out of the game on to another web page. Yes, to be sure, I might be able then to store text outside the game on a web page, and load it or stream it into the game into the web on a prim function. But I don't know HTML. Nor do many others. Sometimes I can just learn enough to cut and paste what I need to do on a web page, perhaps that will be enough. But it's not a solution for whiteboarding in SL if only the Masters and Holders of the Keys once again get to control publishing, and the rest of us can't just type and have our chat words show up on a board, for others to then edit or respond to and leave in various formats.

Everybody thinks this is a streaming video world of graphics "beyond" words.

Then why do they type so much?

Without the ability to capture chat logs and search them efficiently, store texts reliably and accessibly, whiteboard, blackboard, etc. we can't have a democracy.

Dear Leader hopes in vain that these DI camp chairs will be paying out...

What's Wrong With Democracy Island

In today's Metaverse Messenger, there's an interview with Philip Linden (or perhaps these quotes were taken from some other statement of his, hard to tell), in which he says a very interesting thing (and also some worrisome things about zoning and groups making "covenants" by code and such -- don't miss it).

Linden explained that he frequently
speaks in public about commerce
and commercial applications in SL
because he thinks those are key to
attracting a lot of people.
“But once we’ve reached those
people and gotten them at least a little
bit hooked, I want to see SL
change their lives by empowering,
teaching, and connecting them,” he said.

Uh-oh. I think I'm beginning to get the plan now.

Bring in the door first people who are geeks and kids who find entertainment to be fooling around with software development. Make it especially shiny for them. Dot with people who are managers and events organizer, then stir in liberally cupfuls of land barons willing to pay for huge swathes of the grid for classes 1) and 2) to do their thing on. Pour in half a bag of sugar from basic accounts, the yeast of constant change, whatever -- and you get the donuts.

But...those people aren't very interesting. Who cares about having just 900,000 of them? You'll never get as many as World of Warcraft, the game doesn't work that well, given all the streaming and custom content and patched-together contiguous servers, so now what?

Of course, the "hidden agenda" becomes to emerge -- get them in the door, but then "educate them" (indoctrinate them in a utopian ideology?) to "empower them" (make them fit into your network?). What does it really mean to "hook" people then...lead them somewhere?

You could never ascribe anything evil to Philip Rosedale if you saw him speak in person. As I've noted, he comes across like something that is a cross between motivational speaker Tony Robinson, pop star Donny Osmond, and, well...the Pied Piper of Hamelin -- you know, the one that got all the children to follow him?

I was struck at SLCC by what Philip said he'd really like to do if he "could play SL all the time and not have this RL job LOL" (he said something like that) would be to teach.

But as always with those fascinated with education as a tool to better society, you have to ask, but teach *what* to whom?

So often, the teaching is merely a code word for indoctrination, even of the soft kind, or ideological training, even of the liberal kind, and basically means, "creating the spaces and relationships and mechanisms for passing on knowledge the way we'd like to, about what we want, for the benefit of those whom we chose." In other words, it's a lot like the existing Guild Wars sort of feeling of SL.

When I said the other day on a blog that I wish the Lindens would outsource the social part, since they weren't even doing *that* terrific with the technical part -- and they should just keep those servers working and bring in some experts to deal with the "world issues".

But of course -- *smacks head* -- silly me! I forgot that they don't have to do tiresome things like sort through resumes, make phone calls, and find leading experts on political science, the sociology of groups and communities and such, then try to engage them on stuff like Lazarus.

Why, they already have all these customers who already do stuff like that, which they've actually wooed in.

The educational groups are the one groups that the Lindens feel absolutely unabashed and unapologetic about joining, in violation of their own code against joining residents' groups. Of course, they could point to the qualifer that Robin has endorsed about the joining of groups "for work". For work could have meant temporarily joining Ouranos merely to transfer it's group build to Governor Linden land. Or it could mean joining SL Mentors.

But more often than not it means joining Digital Cultures, Supportforhealing, Bedazzle Studios, CYBER, Inc., The Port, and many other groups that are non-profit or educational related and which somehow, the Lindens do justify "for work" because to them "for work" means anything that advances the company and the platform, broadly understood. No doubt when a few residents that bother with the "fair play" notion bring this up, they just nod and wink to each other about how hard it is to do kewl cutting-edge stuff when you have these boring hags looking over your shoulder and playing "church lady" with the rules, eh?

Well, why would we care, and why would we want to spoil the Lindens' fun with their little edzu friends? Edzu because it's spreading, it wants to make itself known and be visible, and it's not immediately clear that it is a flowering plant and not a weed, and it seems rather hard to eradicate LOL. I'll think of something better soon.

What's wrong with Democracy Island? Why be crabby about something like this? If the Lindens need help in managing the increasingly complex society, what of it? Shouldn't this be a real help to the Lindens and the wider world?

1. Well, maybe, but the problem is...the group has been closed -- and that's understood because it was a university class, a closed, paid-for project for credit with students and texts, likened to a password-protected college web page. But then because it wanted to show itself off, it opened up -- sort of. Before it even had anything to show for itself, SNOOPY was gushing that anyone who was anybody was buying a SL island, and the media was hyping it. So it could have remained closed under the justification of being a university class and left it at that, but instead, it opened to the world to get attention -- then forgot to justify why, then, it was ever closed in the first place!

2. You must join the group to enter the island. I feel very mixed on this group joining stuff. It's on open now, but many people have too many groups with the limited number of 15 and can't spare new ones, especially because of land groups. I know I can't. So it's an annoyance to have to get rid of a group or take yourself out of a group where you are the officer, in order to just visit a place. It means they filter out visitors. That's the idea.

3. Most worrisomely, the project contains not just students and a professor, but FIC types like Hiro Pendragon -- with great uncertainty for the public at large, or at least, let's say the critical intelligentsia, as to "how he got in on this". Because...he ran SLCC? This is how all these incestuous things begin to build on each other.

4. Lurking behind this entire project, unspoken, but implicitly in the hidden agenda, is the groups ideology stuff. This ideology is only positive about groups, and has no theory of malevolence to explain/help counter why things like the Forum FIC happen.

5. The project is calling itself something to design "civic spaces" but without specifying how the civics and the civicus itself get built -- the people, the society, and their chosen leaders. It bypasses all that just like Beth's ideology dismisses all those "pesky middlemen" like politicians and mass media to achieve the "direct" contact with the masses that even the Bolsheviks couldn't dream of. Direct contact that the masses aren't prepared for, of course, because they have no coherent frame that was first presented to them to see what was happening.

6. These prototypes include a U.S. Supreme Court. Leave aside the issue of whether common law and adversarial defense are the most ideal program for a virtual world (I'd argue that they are, not everybody would) and the "U.S" quality that is a turn-off to many. It's just illegitimate when there is no separation of powers that occured first, where Linden Lab agreed to be judged by this court and together with other branches of power agreed that the court would rule against a set of laws that would be the Rule of Law. Without any visible study of actual inworld conditions, Justice Soothsayer is undertaking to provide "models of dispute resolution" -- much like our pal Zarf from the previous post.

Of course "disputes resolution" isn't what the Supreme Court *does* but it might be that this student or professor of computer science or graphics or technology (usually the kinds of people who go about building virtual worlds) reaches for "disputes resolution" because it is easy. The Supreme Court makes rulings on whether an act is Constitutional or not, or whether the law itself is Constitutional -- that's hard.

Courts find someone in violation of the law, they enforce it, and they punish under it. They don't "do" dispute resolution, which is the touchy-feely college thing that people want to purvey now in lieu of things that seem "harsh" like "the law" which they imagine is all predicated on Dead White Guys or something. Of course there are arbitration courts, mediations undertaken by law firms, etc. But that's not the same as upholding the rule of law by finding one party in violation, and the other whose rights are violated. Such law enforcement would involve the kind of condemnation and punishment that the Lindens don't want to do (or allow residents to do under their authoritarian model) -- hence the tropism for touchy-feeling "disputes resolution"

7. As noted, another prototype for "Democracy" is Nota Bene, and as far as I'm concerned, this very important and initially exciting project is totally discredited now by a) combining the independent functions of notary with the simultaneous membership in SL Mediators, which is a secretive and discredited group that has no published track record of its resolved disputes; and b) having the inventor and caretaker of this independent function go and become a Linden, i.e. member of the federal government.

8. Hiro Pendragon has also hinted that there are other "democracy devices" sure to be wheeled out at this traveling medicine show for ailing avatars, since making a democracy machine is no different than making an electronic voting booth; it's what tekkies *do*, now get out of the way.

9. No existing real communities of SL seem to have been incorporated into this Democracy Island -- it's just a self-selected group of friends and colleagues. Well, who could care?  You network, you do stuff, it's all good. Why be grumpy about it? Well, for exactly the reasons Gwyn mentioned about the failure rate of projects that did not take local world citizens involvement into account.

It's especially vexing to see these models being prototyped, vaunted, and sold on the Power Point conference circuit without any field- or reality-testing.  Or what someone might do is come in and have a little focus group with 20 avs they've networked in, and call that a field test.

I can only come to these Worthies with the social demand for accountability given the urgent needs of the world. There are real problems and real conflicts and impossible contradictions in the real world of our virtuality. Who is taking those on?

To say that SL is no more than a slide projector for my RL project about democracy over there in RL is scary, too. Not only because the real *other people* of the SL hell haven't been consulted, but because everyone is so far uncritical of your edzu you are about to spread in RL, without benefit of any critical analysis, is going to foist it on RL populations, no doubt at the taxpayer's dime, as "reality tested in a virtual world" when not even that has been done.

Well, I can hear a dozen fanboyz complaining, why are you so negative? You haven't even visited it yet. Give it a chance, we're just getting started, we need a positive momentum, etc.

Well, no, I'm sorry, no sale.

1. It has been closed, and anything that is closed but then planning to later be open and then spring processes and prototypes on us all full-blown is going to get a closer look from me, and not only me, especially as how it gets Lindens, FIC, SIC, etc. into it without others.

2. It is purporting to create templates for the Metaverse, and that means not only SL but other future worlds, yet it wants to bypass the indigenous cultures with their wisdom of having actually lived on these servers, unlike those Ph.Ds parachuting in with their suddenly-trendy nOOb shirts.

This reminds me a hell of a lot like those $500-day "consultants" that USAID and such used to pay for who would roll into these hellholes in the former Soviet Union to run a "transition to democracy" (TTD) workshop. "Uh-oh, another TTD," local intellectuals would say, rolling their ideas. These were people who had learned democracy and the butt end of what was called "demikratizator" -- the police truncheon used to beat back the numerous demonstrators who came out in full force as more and more freedoms were added on in these countries.

These consultants, whose claim to democracy would often involve not even being in their local PTA or bowling club, let alone any kind of social movement addressing real problems, were more often than not old boys sent out from one of the two top donor party institutes. Everyone was the loser o these TTD expeditions. USAID would have done better taking the $7000 they might have to spend on those consultants and funding a citizens' environmental group for say, a year, which they might be able to do with that amount of money.

3. DI will do the same kind of media hype that they already engaged in and portray SL and its people to the mass media, mainly in a self-serving manner that begins to tout them as the masters and the gurus -- although they have no social legitimacy in this world. They've only made up their own world of Edzu and spread it. OK, that has as much a right to live on the grid as anything, like Gorean or  Ravenglass Rentals or whatever other thing breaks out on the grid, but then, we all have the right to pan it, too.

4. Once bolstered with their game and RL media coverage, the self-serving circle of critics patting each other on the back, the Snowcrash-type elites will be better positioned to better influence us all. As Philip said, he got us in the door as business owners (his belief that the ancient power of snakeoil and get-rich-quick schemes work best with wooing Americans), now he'll sic the SIC on us with their democracy prototypes and group theory, educating and empowering us (they're in power, see, so they get to empower us? get it?).

Blah. Did I sign up for this? Hell, no.

Cut Democracy Island loose and set it sailing away from the mainland and the other private islands, please. Something that gets the non-profit cut-rate sim should have more accountability, not only  in the microworld of SL, where there are tax-payers of sorts who have to pay the commercial rate, but in the real world, where tax-payers accept the tax-exemption and tax-free status of the non-profit academic projects in lieu of having the government collect that same money for roads or Katrina relief because in theory we recognize projects important to the public interest.

I wouldn't mistake the lack of a genuine public interest in these projects now (much less understanding) to be a blessing from the public's interest to pursue them.

I don't hear these Democracy Gurus saying word one about the most egregious problem of democracy in our world: lack of a rule of law and separation of powers.

But let's aim lower and just talk about one technical and ideological problem: lack of the ability to vote no!

Imagine! Like the poor saps in the former Soviet Union, we have a choice between Tweedle Dee and Treedle Dum but we can't vote no!

Democracy Island ought to be called Managed Democracy Island. I'm looking to hearing a lot more about it and its plans to affect our world -- or ignore it and step on it and in fact make discredited our own indigenous devices for democracy which we've been forced to develop out of the piss-poor group tools.

Ultimately, I think this project cannot succeed if it is not willing to listen and learn from lots of different groups in SL, and not just from self-selected SIC resume polishers.

More to the point, no democracy is going to be acceptable to the many people opting for decidedly NON-democratic forms of living on the grid (whether Goreans or various tribal entities like Neualtenberg) (the latter is non-democratic in its restrictions on capitalism LOL). So what is the program for involving them, such that they don't threaten liberal democracy for the rest of us?

The irritation and annoyance the democracy-purveyors have shown thus far on inquiries about what they are up to seems likely to be in direct proportion to how elitist and non-democratic their Program for Society is.

So far, from all appearances, the Denizens of Democracy Isle have a studied indifference if not hostility to the resolution of the burning democratic problems of the day -- telehub compensation, zoning, group tools, Lazarus, interest groups, the forums group-think, unequal enforcement of the TOS, and the absence of really credible institutions to solve these and many other problems.

Democracy Island wants to be left alone so it says it is a normal closed university page. It wants to show itself off so it is open enough to at least Hamlet Linden and 39 on people on opening day so it can crow about how it is providing technology for the future. But it can't have it both ways when it steps on those whose future is already now.

Virtual Democracy is...well...virtual!

January 3, 2006

To:  Zarf Vantongerloo, Thyris
CC:  Robin Linden

Dear Zarf,

I am really shocked and dismayed to discover upon reading your literature that you have added in your description of your own role as notary in Nota Bene that you *are a Linden*.

This is wrong for reasons of conflict of interest but also for a long-standing notion, perhaps not written as "law," that residents that become Lindens are not supposed to continue to have influential and high-profile businesses in world.

Nota Bene, which is celebrated everywhere in the game media, on Hamlet's blog, inworld, on the forums, in the RL media, and centerpiece to the new "Democracy Island," is just that sort of high-profile and influential business.

I don't care what you claim about no conflict of interest. Indeed perceptions and actualities matter, and this indeed a conflict of interest.

Worst of all, it gives the impression that all the hard-won, resident "your world/your imagination" type institutions here trying to help business are merely exercises in resume-polishing to help an individual get a job with the Lindens -- not something beneficial in their own right, for the benefit of the community and the world itself.

It's very important for the virtual world that it have credible and independent institutions, separate from the "federal government".

I had already contacted you about the conflict of interest inherent in tying both the notary service and the SL Mediators -- a secretive group of which I've been critical as you know.

Among my many reasons for criticism of this group is Traxx Hathor's participation in both a forgery of his signature on an agreement between Nexcom and myself, and his reneging on that contract to have him and his partners cease unjustified forums attacks on me -- after first engaging in an unfounded and damaging libel campaign against me.  SL Mediators has no credibility when one of the "mediators" himself comes not only with a history of disputes, but has in fact positioned himself in this business to avoid any criticism of his bad behaviour.

I don't write this lightly, out of any sense of any personal grievance, but with profound dismay and concern for the integrity of this world of Second Life.

I urge you to step down from this business of Nota Bene and turn it over to an independent resident who will not go and become a Linden and then become privy to internal disputes, private business, and many other features of what should be an autonomous sector in this society.

Your promised, from your very first conversations with me, and today in your literature it can be seen, that "not even a Linden" can decipher the hash marks on these documents -- that LL cannot tamper with these business documents.

But a notary can. And you are the notary. AND a Linden!

Like all supposedly coded "failsafe" systems for independence and security, this one broke down due to the "human factor," not to a broken code.

I'm terribly disappointed.

Sincerely

Prokofy Neva

Attached:  Text of Abuse Report Filed

Behaviour
Thyris
1/3/06

Zarf Vantongerloo declares himself to be the alt of a Linden, a software developer, in his literature for his business Nota Bene in Thyris. I view this to be a breach of faith with the community of businesses that rely on this service to be independent, and contrary to his claims that "not even a Linden" can interfere with his hashmarks. It is my understanding that when residents become Lindens, they cannot go on maintaining a high-profile, influential business inworld. This business is even made the center of "Democracy Island," featured on Hamlet's blog, etc. I have urged him to step down. Please clarify your policy about residents who become Lindens yet maintain influential and even intrusive businesses affecting other residents.

IM to Hamlet Linden 1/3/05

Hamlet Linden is offline.
Prokofy Neva: Are you covering residents in the world of Second Life? Or Linden Lab and its prospective and present employees? Was Zarf *already* a Linden when you featured him?
Prokofy Neva: And when you cover Democracy Island, is it as a RL college class with kids who are using this as a model -- when RL is not your beat -- or are you covering it because in fact it *does* have pretentions of creating institutions without any
Prokofy Neva: authentic representation of us residents who *live here and work here* as distinct from people who parachute in from college classes?
Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

IM to Robin Linden

Jan. 3, 2006
Prokofy Neva: I'm absolutey shocked and dismayed that Zarf could become a Linden, yet maintain a high-profile and influential residential business, Nota Bene, that purports to be an independent notary of business transactions. He is one of the centerpiece projects
Prokofy Neva: ...being shown off at "Democracy Island" -- of which I've been very critical for its lack of open participation with other residents, even as it claims to create institutions to serve them.
Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

The SIC

Eric Bulatov's Danger (1972-73)

I really must apologize to my faithful readers -- those who count on me to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted lol (as distinct from those readers who merely spit on my blog).

I've failed utterly to awaken them to what I must now call the SIC. (I'm working on a better term, but this will have to do for now). It may already be too late, it may already be Curtains for the Free World -- you decide. At any rate, what follows are my rather long and rambling (as usual) notes culled from various encounters, readings, perusals of groups, etc. A LOT more study is needed, and a lot more thought. But my feeling so far is one of dismay: that the elite corps and core of technogentsia anticipated in Snowcrash really are coming into being, and coming to a theater near you, so look out!

What is the SIC? Well, while I was busy sword-fighting and swash-buckling both on the forums and at my blog here with the old-time beta FIC, whether the Aimees or the Cristianos or the Nolans (shudder), my back to the wall, pinned down by an overwhelming crowd of jackals, there was a smaller, even more inner core in the other hall of the castle, drinking grog, and laughing to themselves quietly at how they had gotten both Prok and their lessers/rivals tied up fighting each other while they ran things because, as I often note about such people, they thought "we're the smart people and we are surrounded by idiots".

The SIC are the Superior Inner Core. Superior, because they are just superior, smarter, more actually capable and intelligent than the forum five percent blowhards, and they do stuff with the Lindens, but way more important than Lindens, they do stuff with Important People in Real Life. Change-Makers. Bridgers. Evolutionists. Future Salonistas. They just get things done, those kind of people described in Tom Clancy novels who believe themselves to be in dangerous, important action and high-performance mode all the time and therefore above the law. They can justify being above the law becuse, why, they are enforcing the law (so they tell us and themselves), and after all, the law is the "code=law" that they write.

"Superior" also gets at their attitude, which is one of even more thorough and scary superiority than the cheap condescending spelling-and-Wikipedia-gotcha stuff of the forums, and superior in the sense that quite a few of them are actually exterior, above, outside of SL, out there in RL where it counts.

SIC also strikes me as a good serviceable Latin term that signals "look here, because this thing may not be what it says it is" and is, of course, that funny verb you only see used about one person siccing another person with a dog, or yet a third aggressive person who will harry and harass them.  That the Lindens will eventually sic the SIC on us, I have no doubt.

WHAT are the SIC? Let's first of all look at it in terms of groups. SIC, way more than FIC, love groups. They love groups that don't have dorky names like Jeska's Fan Club and titles like Jeskeweler, they have terms like Philosophy and Democracy and the United Nations in their names.

Their builds aren't just some Sci-Fi Geek Museum or an ersatz Manhattan like Midnight City, their builds are none other than the actual models of the US Supreme Court, the United Nations, and Democracy.

What do they look like? SIC tend not to be furries but they can often be BDSM, while usually never being Gorean (except with an alt on weekends). They aren't dragons, but wearing a custom-made Lilith Pendragon, if you know what I mean...

For the SIC, far from being an occasion of ridicule, wearing a newbie costume straight off Orientation Island is actually a badge of honour. To show up in a spankin'-new Philip Linden prototyped Alpha Male nOOb outfit is to fairly shout "I'm too cool to actually live here, I just parachute in from RL." A pastel shade for the hair or t-shirt might indicate a few more hours duration -- but there isn't going to be any bling at these meetings, no sir!

SIC organizations and discussion events all seem to have a uniform architecture and modality, too. Often, people type all their half-lines at once interspersing each other like one of those pot-holders your kids make in school, and none of it makes sense but "it's all cool."

The physical architecture is actually hilariously very much like Tringo seating, would they but become aware of it. Metal discs floating in the air in a bid to be arch and cool and modern...a giant flower growing out of the water...a platform doubling as a lily pad that also is supposed to speak volumes about integrated space and various high-toned civic functions -- SIC architecture often hurts the eye more than bling precisely because it is so sharp and shiny. Mint green often figures in prominently as the colour, and earnest things like the Thinker's soap box are sure to be deployed.

SIC actually have RL funding, RL connections, RL fancy email addresses like "harvard.edu" or not-RL-fancy but SL-fancy nslu.edu and so forth -- so expect very very VERY fancy architecture, and not just by hired SL contractors Adam Zaius, Oz Spade, and or the Democracy Island builder DNA Prototype, but probably people who are RL famous -- in time.

Some of the SIC, such as Satchmo Prototype and Csven Concord, pride themselves on being RL consultants, paid to be the Hermes for the less technologically-inclined or future-savvy bosses and clients, into the myriad passages of virtual worlds.

Satchmo carries the modest calling card:

Cyberpunk Community Relations
Future Prototype: The Metaverse Consulting Group
(email)

Groups like RL in SL or Learnland (don't you shudder and think of the Stepford Wives each time you see a term like "Learnland"? I can't help thinking of Eric Bulatov's paintings of Soviet hyper reality), or Jibun (LL's answer to guilt-trippers who would tell them they don't do enough for the developing Third World), or dozens of other educational, non-profit type groups -- the kind of groups my daughter has seen troop through our house and offices numerous times and come to call rather cynically "world-helpers" -- people who fancy themselves as doing the thinking for the world, and then helping the world with that thinking. (I should know, I'm one of them, and that's why I can be particularly deadly in my criticism of them.)

And what of the individuals -- we've noted Satchmo, and Metaverse Manager SNOOPYBrown Zamboni, (who actually prefers to be known by his RL name Jerry Paffendorf) -- but there is also Spengler Roo, Kim Anubis of course whom I've written about in the past for her dichotomies between "my RL work in SL and your world that is my business"; there's people like Iron Perth of Learnland, Pietor Maracas, and many more.

(Sometimes when I study the lists of these groups I chuckle when I recognize a few former tenants known for egregiously violating their prim limits ROFL.)

I've already noted my alarms about Democracy Island.

They used to say about the USSR that it was "four lies in four words." Democracy Island is not democratic; it is, to be sure, a private island but it isn't really an island in the SL world...it's basically a place d'armes of the real world -- a real world that will likely come in and help crush what embryonic forms of virtual free world we had going here before the Lindens tried to turn the whole thing into a flippable web page with p2p.

"I bought an island like you'd buy a web site," one important fellow said. "I've booked the expense of my 4 sims as "server storage space" in my expense accounts at my company," another told me. Indeed. At first, these educational projects said to everyone: we need to be separate, cut off, even hidden. Closed.

Then they started thinking they needed...test subjects?

Democracy Island, despite its name, has been closed -- until it's grand opening coming up Jan. 7. Well, that's because, you know, first they had to hash it out among themselves, *get it right* without people "griefing them" (or criticizing) then lay it on us. Understood. Given that it has the usual suspects like Hiro Pendragon, who ran the SLCC as a closed shop that never had a single open organizing meeting after the very first fake brain-storming session, one has to worry. It has the ubiquitous Hamlet Linden in it. It has people all with the last name "Democracy," presumably a last name installed by the Lindens for a college class.

What could be wrong with such a thing? Wouldn't it be merely sour grapes or jealousy or sectarianism to bash such a thing? That's what will be said about any criticism of it, of course.

Wouldn't we want college courses to interact with SL, to use the world, to have interesting experiences and develop more theory and practice for the metaverse? Well, sure.

Except it is a closed shop. And it is a closed shop with a really Big Ideology of closed shops that it exhibits in the name of openness, collaboration, and flexibility, which comes in things like Beth Noveck's theory of groups on the Internet.

The problem with groups in SL is that they are elitist and exclusive -- and not surprisingly, given their political grandfather not only in Snowcrash, but in figures like C.P. Snow.

Yes, C.P. Snow! C.P. snow and his apologists who try to show that the "third culture" going beyond the first and second cultures is the Way.

A new generation is earnestly turning the pages of "Two Cultures" now, and, hilariously, going back to fight that old battle (in much the way the battles by logical positivists were fought). The theory of the two cultures is that there are basically the humanities and the sciences, and the intellectuals they spawn, and their differences and antagonisms, and the overweening (back then) powers of the literary intellectuals, who had to be overthrown by the scientific intellectuals, to steer the whole world to a saner "educational" approach. Indeed, the love affair with "education" as a panacea for humanity's ills got a good start in the theories of Snow. The Lindens are the political grand-children of Snow and others, although they may not be aware of it -- they too believe that by education, technology and a Good Attitude and Ignoring Trolls, they can create a Better World.

C.P. Snow, who is characterized here as a "bridger", thought that people in the arts and literature were turned in upon themselves and "Luddites" for ignoring or dismissing science. Of course, P.S. science brought them World War I and World War II -- or rather, science made it possible to fight these wars in really horrible new ways. So, hey, they were a bit down on things like splitting the atom.

But...What's funny is to fast-forward this 50 years and see edge.org reworking all this to make it appear that these same intellectuals of the humanities are even more hopelessly "out of it" than Snow thought they were in the 50s, so that the children of Snow weaned on Snowcrash can take even wilder swings at intellectuals they believe to be "conservative" and especially behind the curve.

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others. This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.

How did the literary intellectuals get away with it? First, people in the sciences did not make an effective case for the implications of their work. Second, while many eminent scientists, notably Arthur Eddington and James Jeans, also wrote books for a general audience, their works were ignored by the self-proclaimed intellectuals, and the value and importance of the ideas presented remained invisible as an intellectual activity, because science was not a subject for the reigning journals and magazines.

Frankly, my question now is: how do the tekkie-wikis get away with it?? The tables have turned. It would be utterly unfair to claim that any modern participant of the intelligentsia, even 75-year-olds, are "unscientific" -- all of them tend to have to become conversant in the Internet and other communications devices to an extent that totally dwarfs their engineering grandfathers' knowledge of such things. It's silly to speak of what is actually an utterly scientized and technologized human being in the modern world now as "Luddite" just because they don't spend their days talking nonsense without context about the latest scripty thingie in SL.

Of course, *we know* that this sort of characterization of the intellectuals -- "It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost" -- is in fact an apt commentary on the tekkie wikis themselves.

Indeed, I was so dismayed to sit in on this rather strange very late night talk with Cory Doctorow at like 3 a.m. some weeks ago late one night, organized by Jeffrey Gomez. It was supposed to be a kick off to the novel-writing (or is it navel-gazing?) exercise called NaNoWriMo. But it degenerated into the usual jargonistic rap about this or that technical feature of this or that Internet or communications or chat or 3-d rendering thingie...to the point where you wanted to scream, "but what is all this FOR?" or "But what are you people going to DO or at least COMMUNICATE now that you have all this fabulous tool box for speaking across frontiers???

A lot of these meetings are like boring sports talk -- somebody tells you how they got something Skyped or podcast or hooked up or put on a streaming this or that and linked with Second Life, but when you ask them what all this was "about" they look blankly.

Second Life, as I remarked in my essay about "Our World is Not Your Business", is then merely a stepping stone, an er...platform...as they like to call it.

Why would I care about the SIC, and why am I now putting them in my sites, and going to go and study them criticially? Because like the FIC before them, which was merely more primitive, emotional, and juvenile (read: more college kids and part-time stay-at-home techno moms, less RL job people), they have sophisticated aspirations of talking over the metaverse. They see themselves at the cutting edge of thinking about it, and pride themselves in *thinking the right way about it*. It's a very august little circle...but actually not so little, as mailing lists of some of the RL groups go up to 500 and reach into the top circles of academe and the U.S. government and journalistic/political/business scene.

These are the Futurists. Watch out, they are coming to YOUR future! Did you invite them? Did you participate? Of course not. Because their land is on group-only, or the group is on invitation-only, or the sim was full when you came to the lecture.

The SIC sometimes put events on the events list, but they don't rely on the eye-bleeding Tringoized list to inform; they have their groups, and spam them. How can you get on these lists? Well, join Democracy Island today, while it is still open! And come on January 7 and make it more...democratic lol.

I had an epiphany about why the Goreans at Port Cos or Fur Nation or the Elves are so hiearchical, closed, tribal, fierce: they have to be to survive the demolition of the virtual world now occuring before our very eyes. Indeed, these severely disciplined and themed types of sims may be the only things that *can* survive in this tidal wave and wash of Real Life about to pour into (and already pouring into) Second Life, and the destruction of the mainland -- what Khamon Fate likes to call scornfully the One Grid the True Grid the Holy Grid.

It's not just that some guy is talking on the forums about Second Life Hospital, and he doesn't mean an RP soap opera, but RL operations done by remote across the world with the 3-D communications capacity.

It's not just that they are allowing the mainland to be griefed up by Lazarus to ensure a) maximum sandboxing creativity rights for the college and educators set they wish to pour into the grid in huge numbers and b) the business advertising from RL companies set that will need to be reassured that advertising will be let to stand and not griefed (allow a griefer to carve out the outer limits of that right not to be griefed -- good idea!).

It's not just that the SIC, like the FIC before then, tend to gush about Neualtenberg and betray their RL lefty leanings -- Satchmo's profile carries a beatitude about Neualtenberg, "Neualtenburg has the metaverse's only elected representitive government" -- well, yeah, 20-odd people on a sim that emerged from their free-simmed predecessor mainland socialist government toy can of course elect  themselves to be a representative government, that's not too hard!  Let them try to stand in anything but their socialism-on-one-sim experiment, however!

And...It's not just the Lindens, who claim they "aren't in residents groups" are now increasingly joining them all over, and not even caring any more about appearances....but...let me dwell on that theme, because that's quite indicative:

Governor Linden, for example, is a member of Democracy Island lol. He's still a member of GIGAS group. Why fool around, Governor Linden, join SL Future Salon, and heck, Club Cherry Charming is a good bet, too! I suppose it won't be too long before we see the Gov sitting in a camp chair at Cherry's, pontificating about web on a prim with Jerry in IMs while he earns back some $3 per 10 minutes after the bath he's about to take on telehub payouts. (I mean, um, after the long funny money printing session he is about to engage in LOL.)

In fact, aside from Democracy Island and Azure Islands (the Gov *does* love his islands LOL!), Gov Linden is a member of the Cory Doctorow Book Club and Barnett Readers (nothing if not well-read, our Gov!). He's also in "Extraordinary Avatar Expo," another one of those precooked federal programs the Lindens cooked up for PR purposes.

Pathfinder is the Linden to watch for the real SIC cutting-edge groups, however:

o  CYBER, Inc. -- a group with Kim Anubis and other Lindens and worthies involved in neutral networks...and linking them to the Internet. Before you get all creeped out and Luddite, think "ear buds" and how you already insert stuff like headphones into your body's orifices, so it's not too far a stretch to think of electrodes or something more intrusive hooking you up better to the 'Net and VWs.

o  Bengal -- a RL education group with Moris Gupte, who figures in many of the groups.

o Digital Cultures -- Tom Bukowski's group (he is an anthropologist studying SL society...which is funny because soon, there won't be much left to study except...all the other researchers who will be invading the space LOL.

o  InfoNet Systems -- meh, Squagmire, winner of the WINDFALL CONTRACT for the Infohubs, whom the Lindens like to pretend isn't a "biased resident business" but something more like "a neutral medium like the air or water" lol.

o RL Work in SL -- Satchmo again, and not only stuff like medical prototyping but even experimentation related to the Dept. of Homeland Security. Now, don't you feel safer?

o SL Education Senate -- meet and discuss education (then why give it the political name of "senate"?). Founded by Squagmire. He of the arrogant and very remote and removed bulletins from the InfoSphere on the forums, justifying InfoFunnel in all the InfoHubs.

o Officer of Meet-up (Eastern US Division) which organizes all the "users' conferences" in NYC/Philly/Boston.

Of course Jesse, Robin, and other Lindens are in the educational groups too.

There are some very important people even in the trifecta of Democracy Island, Better World, and Neualtenberg -- they all go together like an Unholy Trinity.

Educational groups are what they love best. They love them way, way, WAY more than the Events Working Group, which was divisive and just a chore, pulling them away from their fun education stuff. They love it way, way, way, WAY more than stuff like the Blumfield Residents' Assocation, whom they are basically telling ,come February, that their precious Linden-zoning is over, "take a hike, you were just a marketing gimmick".

Then there's...Supportforhealing which has all kinds of support/group therapy events for bipolar and many other medical conditions -- replete with Catherine Linden, Cyn Linden, and other Lindens, including none other than the great Philip Linden himself, and of course, Pathfinder Linden. I don't mean to suggest that any of these Lindens suffer from bipolar, of course.

Except of the bipolarity that comes from saying, on the one hand, that they are never supposed to join resident groups, or to partake in large projects that affect business and society (this is what Christiano Midnight recited on the forums the other day), but joining these kewl groups.

Baloney. Of course they can join groups -- they just have to be the right sort of groups!. When the groups are absolutely critical to their missions, which is developing the platform -- and developing that platform with some of us, but not others of us.

Hehe, we know who we are : )

Vetting. Filtering. Promoting. Persuading. Subtly Influencing. Moving along. That's what all of these groups do to shape the world and to ensure that only the best sort of people get to run it -- by their lights.

The rest of us are...well, a server load test.

To give you idea of how this is going, I was contacted about the opening of "Democracy Island". I was asked to think about speaking, and to work with the topic of "Aimee Weber's matrix" and "maybe think of who else was on that SL political parties matrix and invite them, too."

That is, I was invited to fit into a little pre-formed corporativist cell, when they had already made the thing in their closed shop.

Not, said I. Because I've been heavily critical of Aimee's matrix and I don't want to dignify it by having that as my topic. After a VERY long conversation about all this, in which I explained the differing perspectives of those who live and work in the world and *live Second Life* as distinct from those who *use* (with the accent on *exploitation*) Second Life, I gave up. The next day, I wrote the organizer and said: why not have a broader topic, like "interest and lobbying groups in SL" and how they've gotten started, how they've grappled with issues like telehubs and p2p.

Not, they said, essentially, by just ignoring me. By the time I caught up with them a week later, they'd already invited the safe-as-houses and Philip-blog-promoted Gwyn Llewelyn to talk about "SL and the Web" and the other "safety" topics that only enhance our view of SL, never diminish it with any criticism (of course that's how they think of any criticism, as "diminishing").

As Hiro has rushed to gloat about, the Lindens are now dropping everything and getting us web-on-a-prim. From there, we'll get government-on-a-prim and probably even pizza-on-a-prim, too.

The other night I stood on a sim that was laggy and acting wierd despite past normal performance, simply struggling to get the script "notecard giver" to save properly with its new-named notecard inside. It just wouldn't. It even generated to me wierd error messages like "you cannot save that bad script". I really was in despair. I was trying to do a simple thing -- put in a new landmark and new sign in a new land preserve parcel with a cabin. It was impossible. I had to give up. They can't get stuff like that right, and they will rush to give us web-on-a-prim.

A number of these groups have something in common, besides their prominently displayed Lindens -- Lindens who aren't supposed to join residents' groups, but who join, well, the coolest ones because well, they're cool! Some of these groups got discounted private educational islands for only $900 instead of $1250, and pay only $150 instead of $195 in tier per month. That shouldn't matter much -- but...the rest of us huff and puff to get that same $45 off our tier through chasing dwell and getting the "dwellopers' awards", or seek tier pooling, or try to generate businesses with enough revenue to cover these costs and even pay some other RL bills. No matter, all that endless cycling like gerbils in a cage!

What really counts is to be in these avante-garde/philosophical/futurist/educational groups that make the homegrown Thinkers of Second Life look like the old boys chatting around the cracker barrel down at the General Store.

You'll see what I mean soon enough! Here's John Brockman, again--in 1991:

Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third-culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.

Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others. There is no canon or accredited list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

The role of the intellectual includes communicating. Intellectuals are not just people who know things but people who shape the thoughts of their generation. An intellectual is a synthesizer, a publicist, a communicator. In his 1987 book The Last Intellectuals, the cultural historian Russell Jacoby bemoaned the passing of a generation of public thinkers and their replacement by bloodless academicians. He was right, but also wrong. The third-culture thinkers are the new public intellectuals.

America now is the intellectual seedbed for Europe and Asia. This trend started with the prewar emigration of Albert Einstein and other European scientists and was further fueled by the post- Sputnik boom in scientific education in our universities. The emergence of the third culture introduces new modes of intellectual discourse and reaffirms the preeminence of America in the realm of important ideas. Throughout history, intellectual life has been marked by the fact that only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody else. What we are witnessing is a passing of the torch from one group of thinkers, the traditional literary intellectuals, to a new group, the intellectuals of the emerging third culture...

What do Europeans and Asians think of this??!!