Second Thoughts

Guess Who Won SL?!

  Gentlemen explorers from the big East India Companies of the world will need to cross the native-woven rope-bridges of virtual worlds carefully to avoid plunging into the shark-infested waters of committing pre-fab placement faux pas.

Silly me, I used to think that you won Second Life by skillingskillingskilling learning to build, beating the bosses in sandboxes while showing off your kewl gear purchased at the avalon island, camping at town hall meetings with Lindens, leveling up, leveling up, acquiring first the calling card of a telecommuter Linden...then an office Linden...then even Philip's card...winning a big quest (building contest) and being allocated free Linden land or winning a half or full island to build a game or something...then, the heady trip to California, the job interview...and walla, you are Lindenized (TM) and must *never, never, NEVER tell your original resident alt name!).

Along the way, of course, like the features of other power games like WoW or Ultime Online, you can get special features and open up your own server (well...in SL...get a closed, off-the-map, hidden private island, or start your own alt or keep an alt in high-profile business even while being a Linden, with access to internal knowledge of the BLOTTD, heads-up on the next patches, and connections!).

You might then begin to play Strategic SL with the heavy hitters -- getting a real-life media hit here, getting a real-life building contract there, leveraging your IRC buddy lists. Even I have managed to collect some 25 points in Strategic TSO just by showing up and logging on and going to SL Future Salon (oops I gave you a walkthrough AND a cheat there but heck, I need to level the playing field!).

Partly, it's just sheer dumb luck. I got the 5 points for the Pathfinder bear before Pathfinder figured out he hated me. I even *gave it back to him* in protest over the NolanNashstalking thing, a forums joust, and then later he apologized for letting me be mauled on the forums and sent it back (like I said, sheer dumb luck - I'm not going to get that lucky twice!).

Another time I picked up Philip Linden's calling card for a whopping 15 points. Some days, you just get lucky! I'm probably the only person in the game who triple-negrated Philip Linden audaciously for his wrecking of the GOM AND impudenly tp'd to him once, leveraging the p2p2me of a more favoured son whose card I had, who probably got Philip's friendie the honest way, and said bluntly, during the first hour Philip logged on and was all happy and giddy about p2p in the new patch: "Philip, p2p sucks, the sims are all set to 128/128 default landing points so you teleport into a wall or water or peoples' pose balls, plus, everyone will start ptp2u'ing on your HEAD!!!!".

"Whaa...???" he queried. "Give me your friendship card, and I'll show you!" He gave it to me -- like I said, 95 percent of Strategic SL is just sheer "being in the right place at the right time" and having enormous testicularity.

I backed off to my own home, then p2p'd into his favourite club again RIGHT ON TOP OF HIS HEAD.

"Oh," he said.

Strategic SL is so much fun... I won't reveal all my other points I've collected, in part because some are secret and in part because the HUD counter thingie doesn't work right yet. But...

ALL OF THAT IS FOR NAUGHT NOW.

Because while I was busy in RL, they got a new game patch (these patches are invisible to non-strategic SL players and can only be perceived as a tendency to grid-crash and grey-square more that month).

THERE'S NOW A WHOLE NEW GAME WITH ALL NEW RULES!

That its, sure, we can go on playing that old Strategic SL, like chumps with paper and pencil and Dungeons and Dragons. We can just not download the new game patch, but then, the Lindens can't promise absolute tip-top optimal performance!

So, back to the skill-grind...the levels..the bosses...the long AFK pauses and the hurrying home from work to see if your sim that you left in a macro with a rock on your enter key is so red he died...or worse, skipping work to camp a rare monster with loot who is spawning...like Lawrence Lessig spawns at the Free Culture meeting locations sometimes...

Strategic SL 1.5 isn't completely out of beta..not all the bugs are out, but I think you'll find that the graphics, the interest level, the immersiveness, are all really stellar. For those of you who don't have the graphics card horsepower to play (you'll need to be a master in RL of CAD, PSP, Maya, and have a RL architecture degree from a university somewhere between the 30th and 60th parallels), well, too bad for you.

In fact, you're not likely to get any cheats, walkthroughs, hints, potions, helms, or swords from anybody tethered, as Sherry Terkle very aptly put it in a talk she gave in Second Life, to the virtual world. In fact, the more *untethered* you are, the better!

I'm still working on the hacks (I need find more 13-year-old kids to put to work on this), but let me at least tell you the score:  who is winning Second Life (Strategic 1.5)?

Answer:  some of the same people -- hey, maybe its *the very same* people who won old Strategic 1.0:

Barnesworth Anubis

Amani Moselely
Quidel Cela
Bill Stirling
Ben Linden
Cory Linden
Siggy Romulus
Cienna Rand
Porky Gorky
Cadroe Murphy
Michael Richard
Laukosvargas Svarog
Baron Grayson
Angstrom Kivioq
Ace Cassidy
Jimmy Kirkorian
Xandi Mars
Ingrid Ingersoll
Enexile Matador
DavidDM Therian
Apollo Korvin
Dee McLean
Ante Flan
Chrystin Hathor
Dane Zander
Cory Edo
Cienna Rand

See, Strategic SL is not about getting to be a Linden. That is so 2005! That is so yesterday's newspaper! Strategic SL 1.5 is getting a RL job in SL -- but not just one of those sheep-dip jobs, a job from the REAL big places! Like Microsoft! Or...if not a job...at least having your work shown in their space so that really important people like the ebay guy can see your work.

As you can see, it's an interesting mixture of old FIC like Siggy, newer FIC like Ingrid and Cory Edo; Lindens (well it's just their freebie stuff), excellent crafters whom everyone recognizes like Baron Grayson and Dane Zander, people with unique looks or inventions like Cadroe Murphy (the circle form), Ante Flan (the crashing waves), and what you might call the Indigenous Adapters look -- Lauk's tree house.

Eric Rice in RL (Spin Martin in the game), is a very kewl guy. I had never heard of him, but that means nothing, as I'm very far from kewl myself. People I talk to haven't heard of him, either, and so I try to explain, well, he's this guy on the Internet. Who has podcasts and stuff. They seem perplexed. Well, he has like tekkie news on his blog and kewl stuff, I supply, helpfully. Still bewildered. Well, I finally say, he's important, trust me, because he has MAKE magazine on his island. What's MAKE magazine people ask me? Well, it's just the kewlest thing on 3 legs, please, I inform them, witheringly. OK, I'm told by my interlocutors, who still aren't impressed. Well, look at THIS I say! I mean, is that a kick-ass build or WHAT? (Rez Menoptra is a RL architect, who has a graduate degree in architecture, works with his wife, Endira. They have a RL business contracting with clients to do virtual projects, includin SL builds).

Well...he brought Microsoft into Second Life, DER, I finally explain in exasperation.

How, you ask? Well, I'm not sure exactly, so I'm trying to piece it together from clues, not having gotten the memo myself. Microsoft came into Second Life on little cat's feet, Tony Walsh reports in Clickable Culture. Zero and Walker were first on the story, so I'm merely following their well-blazed trail.

Not being real estate peeps, however, neither Z or W thought to look under the hood at the land, the objects on it, the build, etc.. I noticed that the island where they are has a land group with all new people in it no one has ever heard of -- well, those are probably the 10net.com staff or something. Maybe Linden alts, who the hell knows. The group has no tier in it -- but as my betters have patiently explained to me, islands don't *have* tier. They just get billed $195. They don't go up and down levels, etc. Duh. I knew that. But didn't think of how it would work in a group. On Democracy Island, I see one owner, for example, and wasn't sure exactly how groups do own islands -- and how you can distinguish between a group owning, i.e. with one person paying that $195 per month on their card, and having the island just deeded to you from another entity, say, Azure Islands' Nexus Nash or Dreamland's Anshe Chung. Or...LL. Interesting to contemplate! Surely, Microsoft would buy their own island?

Clearly, the stealth-entry of MS was carefully planned. Well, maybe casually tossed off kinda like Eric's elaborately-casual hairdo (his website informs us he's one of the hottest geeks on the Internet (his splash page has a quote from Fashiontribe saying, "Geeks just don't come any hotter!"). I still remain loyal to Philip's geek-hot hair first, of course.

I suppose if you're a large entity in RL and you want to enter sim-life, you have several routes you can go, and take any meandering paths combining some or all or none of these, although usually some of them are required for the really big mega-projects:

1. Hire natives for mere kopecks and have them do all the weed-whacking and wild-pig-hunting for awhile (these are enthusiastic fanboyz or people willing to be paid in Lindens or nearly-nothing in US dollars that translate to more in their home countries).

2. Hire sherpas (these are more sophisticated natives or regional experts, i.e. little Internet start-up firms who got in during the beta) to do more complicated heavy lifting and path-clearing and building, plus laying of campfires, and who need U.S. dollars for payment and lots of time off to go to gaming industry conferences and drink with Urizenus Sklar.

3. Hire gentlemen explorers (these white guys cost more but are still willing to scramble with very light go-bags and hit the ground running) -- these are more the RL-beyond-SL types with companies that do not rely exclusively on virtual worlds to survive but already have their own business without them; be prepared to be put on hold or to be told that "gosh, my offline IMs must not be clearing the servers".

4. Hire gentleman scholars (this would be someone like Edward Castranova who starts billing even for the time it takes for him to open and delete your email and schedules phone calls from even CNN only on alternate Tuesdays).

5. Hire the World Bank (under the guise of helping to educate the natives, this clumsy entity will leverage more funding than the hired guns in 1-4, but will drown some of the villages it purports to save with the new dam it builds).

6. Hire the Chinese, Russians, or Indians (competent, quick, motivated, hungry, good DSL lines, low-cost, and -- they'll have a cousin who is in the ministry that holds the keys to your visa AND your construction permits).

7. Hire the British (savvy, kewl, expensive, but...without what the Germans call luft, of lift-off power, so...you hire the Germans after the natives have slaughtered the first team of British, often handing them their engineers' heads literally on a platter like they did those telecom dudes in Chechnya. Then, after the Germans, Spanish, Belgian, and maybe a few Georgians and Kyrgyz have been shot...bring in...

8. Hire the Americans -- expensive, loud, crushing the competition, brash, wrecking as much as they create. When the dust settles and everything's been bought out and merged and reconfigured and repurposed, you'll be ready to...

9. Hire a small international Portugese-Polish-Slovenian-Chilean training firm that specializes in fixing up people problems and training even skilled professionals to adapt to new environments ROFL.

10. Getting the Congress of the United States to pass a bill mandating your virtual world in every public library at the taxpayers' expense (we're not there...yet : ))

I'm thinking Eric fits in somewhere between 2) and 3). I don't know whether he just decided to come in there on his own, or whether they hired him, and how that worked, but I'm thinking...he didn't have a huge budget because...

..it's all prefabs on Microsoft's 10 Island.

Spin was able to build the little 10 guy mascot.

Prefabs, you say? Well, yes, prefabs. As in Barnes' Pre(fab)ulous homes! I don't know if this was strategic or accidental, or both, but if strategic, I think it's brilliant. Instead of splashing on to shore in big army boots, backed by gunboats, waving around bayonets and blasting Bruce Springsteen in the background, you sort of work your way in, "empowering the local talent." You scour around the world, shopping, shopping. You talk to people, learn who's in, who's out, who's hot, who's not. You hang out and watch stuff. You go to events like the Future Salon or the Thinkers and you see what people are wearing, and you click on their picks. You pick up Ingrid's furniture, and then by clicking on her picks, you get to the rest.

Eric Rice's picks are a little novella of their own (like anybody's in SL!) -- and a taste-making industry influencing little SLYSPACE all their own (still trying to think up what to call the SL avatar's myspace thinger):

MechMind Industries, Midnight City, Multiverse Records and Radio, Nexus Prime, Nexus Prime AGAIN (Tyrell Corporation), Slackstreet Business District, Special Occasion Shops, Swell Second Life's Men's Clothes, the GNUbie Store.

Like the balloon's that formed with whoever you came into contact in TSO, the picks tell a lot about a person's networking in SL.

Well, are you starting to get it a little bit better now? Aimee's sim, FlipperPA's land in Indigo, and the mysterious Tyrell Corporation (the group Tyrell in FIND GROUP shows the founder as "nobody" (!) because they are long since excised from the resident list, I guess, and the members are all charter members you've never heard of who are probably Linden alts and such).

Actually, even with 200,000, all of us in SL are probably separated only by three degrees of separation, not six, as in RL, so I'm pleased to see that Eric Rice, this really kewl Internet dude, shopped at Special Occasions like I did once and maybe talked even to that same girl I did! So, like, I'm one link away from him! Plus, frankly, I knew Ingrid before HE knew Ingrid! I go back all the way to TSO with Ingrid! Uh...Erm...ok, that was the best I could do, sorry, since I cut Barnes' card : (

So...10 Island then has a rather, well, hmmm...eclectic look. There's Barnes' Sea Wave house that I like to pride myself on being the first to show off inworld back in the Refugio club days...perched on top of Blanc Noir's module (Blanc being Cubey Terra's alt for doing module thingies). Porky Gorky is probably an alt, too, and he has contributed something blindingly white in the Adam Zaius style of toilet-tile production. Bill Stirling who is very good with textures, fences, walls, etc. for these kinds of island looks was a must. And of course, how can we do without Ingrid's Home Store furniture. Ingrid's card was cut ages ago, I routinely clash with her on the forums, and she's quite mean to me (so I dish it right back), but gosh, I can't imagine Second Life without Ingrid's furniture! Nor can you! I just bought the Bali set, have you seen it? I have spent ages trying to get *just that shade* of olive green and can't do it. She probably has a secret formula patented for that RGB number combo, but each time I stop in my office, I fiddle on Toast's pot for practice, trying to get *just that shade*.

A friend with a more discriminating artistic eye than I visited the 10 island and pronounced it "a crap build".

But, I disagree. It's not a crap build. It's not a build, technically, but an erm...potpourri. It's an indigenous campsite that the sherpas/gentleman explorer have laid out for their first reconnaissance mission. It's not crap. These are *our people*. These are the people that we, as the worlders of Second Life, can be proud of. These are all those people who came in here and worked for nothing in their spare time to perfect their craft and get really good. Now, to be sure, some of them also slept their way to the top, possibly, or simply go on the IRC channel a lot, but that doesn't mean they aren't talented!

I do have to chuckle that when I first visited 10, to come to this much-ballyhooed party of theirs, I didn't see anything from Siggy Romulus. Whew, that was a close one, sez I! Today, when popping in, I saw that ghastly basket-weave gazebo was up...and I'm sure that nasty turd-brown shingled beach house isn't far behind! Somebody probably put a bug in Spin's ear that you cannot have FirstIsland without a Siggy.

Oh, I forgot to explain what FirstIsland is. FirstLand is those 512s that you get for free with the $9.95 like a bag of chips on the bus to Atlantic City? Your first land is always in some crappy newbie hell surrounding by spinning pink dildos lagging the sim, and the objective in your first skill-up of Strategic SL is not only to get out of that hell-mouth of SL by selling the plaguey thing, but getting a Linden liaison to visit your land over some 3- or 4-way border-blocking griefer issue so that you can get that all-important first Linden calling-card you need to get on your way up the levels.

In fact, frankly, nowadays, I find people are *deliberately getting their friends to block them on 3 sides* just to speed up that first calling-card giveaway. Jeez. In my day...oh, never mind, let me explain some more about 10.

FirstIsland is what the Lindens give you for free, or what you get with your government grant and 501-c-3 status for $950 instead of $1250, or which you write off as "server storage space" (I wish I could get my clients to buy THAT one on my expense accounts! "Uhh, yeah, sure that $195 a month in server storage space are all big reports and digital photographs from Uzbekistan.")

Cienna Rand is there with some kind of graphics thing...there's a sculptured, rideable horse by Dee (who early on decided that if she was going to compete with Starax, it would be by picking one animal, and doing it WELL!)...and then some very new talent -- can't be sure whether by an alt or a genuine newbie.

All these years, we've been to those god-awful town hall meetings in Pooley-Brampton? And we sit around that awful campfire with these pointy sticks with the one lame marshmallow on them. I don't know about you, but *my* marshmallow, even being virtual, is getting a bit soggy and is long past the sell-by date.

No fear, this new guy, named Angstrom Kivioq, has made a plastic bag of marshmallows. I was thrilled! He's also the same guy who made that Starax-like white sculpture of a fist on the beach clenched at the sky. It was Tony Walsh who pointed out that this was really the only iconic reference to Microsoft. Unfortunately, the marshmallows aren't copyable or for sale, but I suspect not all the MS people worked the game levers yet.

I went to their party, and found nobody else was there but me and them. I rapidly realized this wasn't a kewl party if I was at it, sheesh, I mean, how lame can it get??? But silly me, figuring if it was on the events list and was Microsoft and blogged by Tony and Mark, it would probably have not only 40 avatars, but Hamlet in his blindingly-white Jesus suit. I got there early to just get my ass on a chair before the sim split up, and went AFK.

When I awoke, a girl was trying to get her animations to stop -- you know how that happens when you get a drink of beer but then the damn thing won't STOP??? Four or five of the other MS operatives were spread-eagled in Appearance mode struggling with the sliders.

A guy in a bear costume/skin that itself was what I might tactfully call 'a sim lagger' helpfully told the kids that they should get out of appearance mode, as it was lagging the sim!

I gave some of them some newbie help cards and chatted but nobody was paying any attention to anyone else because people were crashing, relogging, struggling. You know, SL.

I hung around for about 20 minutes clicking on stuff and trying to strike up conversations with people with funny names, then gave up lol. I'm sure the party got started right after I left!

Well, so that's Microsoft. Are you starting to fill in the dots? Yes, they need to put out more freebies -- they've got a lame t-shirt and nothing clickable! Come on, this is Microsoft, not the Shelter or Prok's Seafood after all, surely they can make interactive scripted clickable thingies? Call Cristiano -- why wasn't he in on the ground floor on this one?

And the activities have to have more em....content than just beer drinking and appearance-mode spread-eagles -- and I'm sure that very, very soon, there will be very kewl industry bleeding edge conferencing and podcasting and all that good stuff, only more likely out of the Slackstreet Business District that Spin built on another island.

But...don't worry. Yes, MS is here. No, they're not going to buy up all the islands...yet. They're not going to flood your village. They're just going to prefab you to death and make SL fashion faux pas like putting Barnes on top of Cubey and Lauk next to Porky Gorky. But...it's SL. Be thankful they didn't make a big spinning pink dildo.

Grid vs. Portal?

How Croquet does the portal thing.

I imagine that the debate over grid vs. portal will shape up to be something like the controversies of PC vs. Mac or cloth vs. disposable. And while everyone is debating these topics heatedly, they won't even notice how these polar opposites are busy converging.

I'd always heard of portals, of course, ever since, I dunno, reading about tesseracts or things like the Woods Between the Worlds. And with SL, there's been constant discussions about this on the forums for years, and it usually boils down to some tekkie-wiki type spouting with exasperation about why he can't have a world where he can just layer up builds in the sky and have portals, instead of having to have everything contiguosly and more or less happening on the ground. Those spouting the most in exasperation tend to be younger, male, and programmers. They just want fun stuff to fool around with, and the householding/playing store/playing whatever aspects of SL don't grab them as much. They hated telehubs with a vengeance precisely because even though they WERE portals (see!!!) they were portals that ported you to a spot but then made you slog over avatar traps and malls (or so they said -- these types of malls/telehubs were actually in a distinct minority as I constantly tried to prove to anyone I could grab on to.

Walker had a blog showing how Croquet had a little window open within a window, see, and that seemed pretty neat, but frankly, distracting.

"One of the most intriguing things about Croquet is that Croquet spaces can be connected via 'hyper-portals,'" writes Walker (Mark Wallace is his RL name), so that a number of users could create a web (as in 3D Web?) of connected Croquet spaces and even spaces within spaces, etc. That’s right in line with a vision of the evolving 3D online space as a number of tangentially connected 3D spaces, rather than the contiguous Grid of Second Life."

I guess I find the Windows approach to worlds, that we're stuck with from Microsoft, more than a little annoying. I actually hate Firefox too in the way that it makes tabs of stuff that get tucked under, asks you whether you want to close tabs, destroys and closes windows you wanted to keep open, etc. But I don't like the fan-tan spread of applications/"windows" that those Ibook Mac laptops give either. They loom up at me unexpectedly sometimes when using the Mac laptop to get on SL and I hate that. I don't really know *what* I want, maybe a deck of cards, maybe something I push around with one finger like in that movie with Tom Cruise about seeing into the future. I imagine I'd learn to screen out little windows popping up all the time. They'd feel like advertisements to me.

But...I'm sure it doesnt' have to be all or nothing. I mean, we're people who like other people and like to have things at least a little bit like earth, being able to see stuff by ambulating around. I don't like the Port and other builds in SL that are layered up like Legos with matchbox boxes and matchbox toys. They seem stupid and ugly and inconvenient to me. And frankly, in them, convos carry if they aren't separated by more than 20m2. Nobody really has beat that, though in a previous version of SL, there used to be an option to have a convo only with that one avatar near you that only he'd hear (why did they remove that, I wonder? It was there when I came in September 2004).

I'm not sure the thing that Walker is so excited about, the 3-D Mashup, the 3 Point D, the 3-D version of the web, is really so all that. Fred Limp's piece at this link, in fact, tells you the truth about this situation:

"There are some interesting philosophical issues here. For example, Antione de Saint-Exupery said, “A person taking off from the ground elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding.” Perhaps, but it’s also possible that small-scale 3-D views and abstractions can isolate us from the reality that maps and images represent, providing an unsupported sense of omnipotence."

AN UNSUPPORTED SENSE OF OMNIPOTENCE might be the hallmark, the banner, the clarion call of the FIC and SIC in SL. Who are these guys??? (And as I commented on Walker's ESC-sponsored blogola, the 69 people who are going to do the Road Map of the Metaverse (do you want to barf? Sounds like you better pack some sensible shoes and a BIG lunch with nutritious snacks!) contain...six women only. Hmmm.

When I tuned into the grid/portal thing in SL, it's usually be with SNOOPYBrown Zamboni or another "futurist" talking about how he wanted to walk right into portals here and there. I think they did this in Snowcrash. And I'd think to myself, these kids just want dorm rooms, you know, like co-ed dorms that you just walk around in each others' rooms all the time. Maybe that's fun when you're 20. But even 20-somethings like to occasionally "shut the door baby, don't say a word" when they hang their halo on their girlfriend's bed post, no? Am I missing something?

The single biggest tenant complaint I get isn't even "they broke in on me when I was on the pose balls" but "they broke into my house and used my pose balls when I wasn't there." Imagine that! People don't like portals. They don't want portals open -- at least not to their bedrooms. They want their space, they like it contiguous, and they hate it invaded.

I'd have to hear SNOOPY and the other ESC natter on more about how they envision their portal existence but I think it's part of a kind of souped-up Mr. Roger's Neighbourhood. I log on to SL. I go and visit some kindly neighbour, who I proudly boast isn't my contiguous neighbour and isn't even in America but who is a portal away in like Indonesia or something and I can say "won't you be my neighbour". Ok. Then I click and visit, like, a king or something. Or Mr. Green Jeans. Help me out here, I'm not remembering the stuff Mr. Rogers did and it's kinda blended with Capt. Kangaroo here. But...it's basically just kids' TV. You know, Blues Clues. Go here, do that, see this, click on that, look behind here. Don't sit still in your seat because, well, you have ADD. Wait. Um. I think it's not fashionable to call it ADD anymore but ADHD. Wait. CAPD. No. Wait. KID. Kinetic Interactive Disorder, the inability to be alone with your thoughts or even be alone with another and share your thoughts without multi-tasking in a thousand other windows.

Well, I will think about this a whole bunch more, but meanwhile, I have to tell you about something cool Anshe Chung did while everyone was debating all this. She just *made* these little thingies called "Touch Portals".

Anshe's TOUCHPORTAL instantly transports you out of her Mainland plots for sale into Dreamland.

I first noticed one in one of those impossible to spell or remember Korean "down under" sims. Gah, if you thought the moth names were bad, I actually can't even FIND some land I bought AND rented out and have NO idea where it is because I can't remember its name or even the first couple of letters. It's embarrassing. I can only hope that the box will expire and call me that way lol.

I was flying around some Ansheland -- which BTW is going down in price out there -- and dithering about the view. Great piece of land. But...something in the water in the view. Something that looked stupid, and maybe not the kind that would go away in 30 days. Plus, junk on the Linden land. Typical Sl situation. I was going to buy it and wait it out but then...something caught my eye. I realized that Anshe had for awhile been putting something different/extra on her land. She used to have stand-up Chinese-style signs. People bitched about them. So she laid them flat. She'd put out flowers. Now she has this little pretty rock formation with flowers and a...something.

What is that something?

I flew over and zoomed in. It looked like a sort of compass. It was round, glassy, and with a metalic setting. TOUCH PORTAL it said.

Wow, I was thrilled! I love stuff like that in Second Life!

So I touched. It immediately pulled up the map, only a nicer, smaller version of the map (the map always annoys me every night. I am always tugging on it, pulling on it, trying to get it to rez, blah blah). This tighter-formation of the map rezzed up, probably using that new map API thingie they have going. It had a kind of bulls' eye on it. You then clicked, and it took you directly to Central Park...or a kind of centralized Anshe hub.

Anshe in Central Park discussing her temporary account closure earlier this month, and the concept of her own currency.

In the centralized Anshe hub were spokes leading out to all her now 100 or more sims. It's really quite something to see. You gaze out over this vista, and you know behind the horizon are a host of worlds within worlds, Arabia in Ak'sha, ice in Winter's Gate, etc. Anshe's now gone into the content line too, as this hub contains prefabs -- and btw not made by the new Chinese people with the last name ACS but older residents I never heard of (accounts purchased perhaps?).

An Ansheland prefab available at the Central Park hub, made by Billia.

I have property in Ansheland and go there and to visit other sometimes, but there's nothing like flying around it and really spending time on it. To be sure, the bounce script problem really harms the experience. People don't like portals, they like homes. They bounce you all to hell, with aggressive warnings and angry hits. I hate this shit, and it's the fodder for angry discussions at times on the Dreamland list. Master Quatro seems opposed, but approaches this problem like a Linden, half-sad, half-powerless, fully determined not to mitigate against the "I get to do the fuck what I want on my property" school of world management. There are rules in Dreamland; bans of bounce scripts isn't one of them. Indeed, people deliberately move to Dreamland precisely so that they can deploy their bounce scripts and then fuck away to their heart's content, secure in the knowledge that not only will no one visit them and interrupt their sex balls, even MORE important,no one will go on their balls when they're gone (and even WORSE offense, because part of the whole Bobos in Paradise thang is to have expensive stuff that you keep in a kind of suspended animation for your exclusive use, when you can make the time or feel like it).

But...even with all those scripts here and there, it is still possible to take a pretty breath-taking journey through Dreamland. The Anshe-haters and skeptics need to do this to see what's up -- it's pretty impressive, pretty immersive, and manicured to a T. There are no uglies. And people make their own houses and yards and stay away from the ugliness somehow, even tho there really isn't such detailed rules on this. This is the miracle of Second Life, without Lindens.

I IM'd an Anshe operative to see if I could get a TOUCH PORTAL of my own. I'd love to put a TOUCH PORTAL on some dodgy crappy lagged out snow somewhere, and then TOUCH PORTAL out of there into the haven of Dreamland (or my other chosen location) whenever it became too much to bear. TOUCH PORTAL isn't the portal that SNOOPY imagines tho. Both worlds remain on the ground, contiguous, geographically interesting. It's just you go from one to the other through that door, however. I don't arrive in the air, in a box. Or in the air, next to floating geometric shapes, or...nowhere but on some vista near the end of which I can glimps the Palm at the End of the Mind.

The Three Worlds of Second Life

The real world in SL is the replica of the RL Dublin...

Today I logged into Second Life after a really rough long holiday weekend. Ordinarly, I suppose (if there is anything that's ordinary about SL), I'd be hugely busy with customers new and old and it would generally be good for sales. This weekend was no different -- if anything the promise of a long week off, far from driving people outdoors, seemed to make them come and try SL, and there were lots of new move-ins.

But meanwhile, with the old two steps forward, one step backward phenomenon, I dealt with the worst griefing and problems in the history of my own Second Life.

Friday, the grid was crashed -- most likely by the Plastic Duck gang, a W-HAT faction which I always point out is a faction that, like Arafat's faction, always refuses to renounce terrorism or recruitment of new members with extremist ideas like making wreckage attractive. The name of the griefer with a "Red Helix" self-replicating object that overloaded the servers was "Jew Stein".

Some people like FlipperPA grasped that there was something anti-Semitic about taking such a name in Passover Week. I don't know if he or others thought more deeply about this age-old problem, which is that the crash came on Good Friday, the date marked in the Passion story as the day Christ was crucified. Thus, the ancient anti-Semitic notion, discredited by tolerant religious leaders in all faiths now, that "the Jews are to blame for Christ's death" was reiterated in an avatar taking the name "Jew" so that everyone would instinctively, before they had a chance to think about it, "blame the Jew". Awful stuff. And typical of this faction which often takes names of a racist or anti-Semitic sort of association.

So business was of course off as the Lindens struggled to get the grid working again, and then I found the next day I was attacked yet again in one of my communities. Either one concerted group, or a happenstance severl, have been attacking my communities with fire prims, huge high-prim weapon caches, overloading the sim, bothering tenants by flying around and returning when banned, poking objects into the house, and a new one I saw at an event griefing, by an asswipe named Irvin Maltz -- taking a long attachment to his avatar, an eyeball on a stick, and using animation override I guess, parking himself on neighbouring land I couldn't ban him from, and poking that piece of his avatar into my house. Nice!

A real worlded project...a RL replica...but you still can't walk in and buy a newspaper. Who cares if avatars can't get newspapers in their hands? Let them go read third-party sites on the web...

The worst was a horrible particle spewing attack of ugly porn from various objects thrown around -- and until I could get into debug/render/types/particles to turn the particles viewing off at least, I couldn't see what I was doing. A friend helped to solve the problem and we got rid of it, but not before 2 people moved out in disgust, thinking I was doing it to them because a group object was invaded.

I will continue to keep my groups open, I think the value of an open system is greater for convenience and what it means for the world than the losses that occasionally happen from its misuse. Still, it turned into a HUGE nuisance as more objects were found to be strewn around randomly, in enough places so that I had to methodically go through every single community to remove anything suspect. Lindens, completely preoccupied or exhausted from their larger grid attack, couldn't be of assistance.

Then, last night -- hours and hours of down time again while I can't log in -- and before that, no scripts working, no notecards opening, and angry customers clamoring. WHY IS YOUR LAND LAGGY???

I had to stay on many extra hours to solve all the problems, and for some, it just wasn't quick enough. What a turn-off for new people!

So I'm logging in and chatting with my friend, a clothes designer, and another friend, a content-creator, and they seem perplexed. They haven't experienced any difficulties. They were able to log on. They didn't notice anything. Yes, the grid was down for awhile, but so?

Reflection work done by building other prims below, flipped.

And it dawned on me what a different Second Life they live in -- they live in the First World! Either they were one of the early creators, scripting or building or designing and the actual status and shape of the world isn't really of HUGE significance. The world is their canvas, like it says on the can. They scribble on it. Tear off a sheet. Put out a new one. Try this, make that, erase it, go to this sandbox, hang out here, hang out there. No need to settle. No need to worry how the world "looks" if it doesn't rez -- and it probably rezzes faster on a large, empty public sandbox or a private island they either got in the Games contest or were allowed to settle by wealthy friends or they bought themselves.

Once on the chosen SL place, they don't have to go out, they script or have their nose in a building, fussing and fussing with all those wonky tools to do stuff in SL. Flying? Lag? Videos not working? Music streams crapping out? Prim drift? Crashing of sims? Houses exploding on sim seams? These aren't part of their normal experience. They never see "grey ssquares" because...they never try to go anywhere. They're there -- more in their minds or their desktops in PSP than in SL; more on a private island or half out of SL completely in another window...

For a designer or scripter, if SL is down, what does it matter? They get more undistracted time in PSP or whatever other program they are using -- why really go inworld? SLexchange.com or SLboutique.com keep selling copies of their products endlessly...they only need a tiny space for a tiny cube to contain the items they sell. Why go in world, and get frustrated?

Or take the next generation of SL, the SIC if you will, the Superior Inner Core. These are people who might be old, and evolved into "RL Work in SL" or be new, and have just discovered SL and can write it off as a business/university/government expense account. Or they already own their own consulting or programming or design firms and this is just one of their projects for clients.

These people may have to step into SL a bit more, but chances are they'll be on a private island sim, or again, in another utility outside of SL, or in their RL clients' office. If the world doesn't work, it's an annoyance, but ultimately, the world is shelf paper, rolled out to be designed on, a platform -- and that means something you step on, and build a foundation on to scaffold up something *else* which is the main attraction. SL then is merely a media bells and whistle, or something groovy to ad on to an existing campaign -- and SL is only one of many stops on the Metaverse Highway as we know from reading Walker Spaight's Electric Sheep Company-funded blog.

Originally the term "first" and "second" and "third" worlds correlated roughly with Europeans, Asians, and Africans.  The term evolved to signify different stages of development. In our 3-D world, nothing sequences in such linear fashion, and all three worlds are interpenetrated and no doubt there are even 4 or 16 worlds of sorts.

In the thirld world, then, of Second Life we have the people who actually have to live here. The poorest put up with the worst conditions -- the lag, the confusion, the hard slog. They try to have fun or try to work. Most succeed. They don't really push TOO hard tho if they're there to be entertained -- it's only their entertainers breaking their backs, pushing tiny prims beyond their endurance, staying up late, not billing their hours...

They don't parachute in like high-priced $500/day consultants living in $375/day hotel rooms with huge expense accounts parachuting into RL third-world disaster scenes or transitions to democracy or World Bank projects. They might have a long history of already living in the country but living at a completely different standard of living than the poorer natives by virtue of their skills or education, like Western missionaries or aid workers living among the African refugees.

The road ahead of us out of our Second Life, out of our world...

Increasingly, I see a huge gulf widening between those people who are doing the "RL Work in SL Work" gig and those who run businesses what I would call "inworld" businesses in SL *on the terms of the world itself*.

Awhile ago I IM'd Philip Linden with my little epiphany that there's a world of difference between people who say they "use" Second Life -- the preferred groovy buzzword that people like Pathfinder get everyone to say to show they aren't really *in* the world even though they are *of* it -- and those who say they "live or work in SL".

You either live Second Life; or you have a Second Life or you *use* Second Life -- and all the ensuing circumstances that entails.

There's a tremendous amount of angst and controversy around this topic. The energy that someone like Jauani Wu puts into trying to discount someone like me as a "hobbyist" or a "dilettante" or the energy that Traxx Hathor would put into trying to discredit me as someone who couldn't make my business pay are likely in direct proportion to their own insecurities as virtual world builders who are in a neo-field in which they don't have the RL credentials -- yet, anyway -- that match the equivalent skill/job in real life.

But what is real life and what is a virtual world? There are all different ways they can overlap and cross and interpenetrate as I've just said.

There is now an elite corps in SL that are hugely smug about their accomplishments, hugely arrogant, and hugely unbearable. They constitute in part the Platform Party that Aimee Weber identified -- people who make things in the world and fool around with stores and clubs themselves, but also do Real World Gigs like build a planetarium or have a RL-related fashion show. (There's a kind of grey area involved in calling something that's an Internet site like Style Hive a "RL thing" as so distinct from the "virtual thing" of SL when the "RL thing" on the Internet itself is obviously already kinda virtual, being on the Internet lol.)

This elite corps prides themselves on knowing best, running the place, and putting others in their place. Dealing with them is always a chore. You think they'd be so far beyond us all now, unskilled peons that we are, that we wouldn't run into them anymore, yet they keep turning up. A fair organized by The Sojourner this week which I had thought was to be celebrating non-profit groups and work in SL suddenly fetched up with a "RL in SL Work" display by Kim Anubis, about whom I've written repeatedly here. Apparently, that was fine, because the intention of the fair wasn't to only celebrate non-profit groups, said the organizer, but to showcase...groups in general. But of course, not groups with names like Vampire Dyslexic Furry Lesbians, but groups that seem to fit that sort of leftie liberal NPRish SL shtick that we've all come to know...and hate...even if we are liberals ourselves, just because of the smugness and insularity involved. Groups that are all about vanity-showcasing people's 3-D resumes so they can get more jobs in the metaverse and squire around clients like Harvard University who haven't figure out yet that they don't really need to pay $15,000 to terraform and build up a sim.

In the economic and class wars of SL, it's clear that people who make their business in SL, who take in Lindens, and then use Lindens to either pay staff or buy supplies or invest in the world or cash out to pay tier or pay RL bills -- well, they are lesser beings. Fools that they are, they bother with Lindens and worry about the value instead of taking PayPal real-life dollars.

The REALLY important people -- most important to the Lindens, too! -- are the "RL Work in SL" gang. Important for developing the platform (although whenever I try to think *just what have they done for us lately*, and just how they actually develop the platform, I draw a blank, but that's probably because I'm not tekkie-wiki enough). AND important to show off as people "able to make a living in SL".

Of course, from deep within our world's perspective, a person on a RL Work in SL trip is merely somebody who has a kind of camp-chair set-up or a money-ball of a far grander sort! He sits in an office and his boss or his client pays the bills. He doesn't have to scamper around personally like an idiot trying to figure out how he will get this laggy, crashy, hard-to-learn *game* to yield income on its own terms, eating the dogfood. He doesn't have to think about traffic, or compelling content or copyright theft or land griefers or ugly builds appearing in the water.

Much of the time, he isn't even IN SL -- those times he is in it, he's on a cool and calm private island, far from the vicissitudes vexing the inworlder business person struggling with grief, lag, crash, theft, disputes and the eternal need, on the mainland, to "buy the view".

In a way, my divide identified here among the worlds is about private islands versus mainland, where it often plays out -- but not necessarily. It's also merely about levels and classes and access to skills, investment, and connections.

The world was once Second Life, when anyone could swim in it and the world itself could make them a professional. Now the world's fabric is basically ripped -- or to continue the analogy, the water is drained from the pond -- and this was said to be necessary to make it "compete" -- and only professionals will really be able to make money from it.

The 'make money in SL' articles -- very, very soon! -- are going to switch from breathless stories about Anshe, to stories about Electric Sheep and their herd. Anshe and her husband and staff, who work like dogs night and day doing the really hard slog of world-building inside the world itself (as distinct from model-building for clients in the outside world, or prototyping for the 3-D resume hanger known as Second Life) - they are going to likely recede from the stories.

In their place, will be stories about fabulous avatars of RL groovy geeks who build cities or live music venues or rock-band "mini-worlds" or university classrooms or other types of places for virtual reality -- and never have to have their tiny avatar hand ever touch a devalued, ridiculously low-cost Linden.

Here's one -- in response to the debate now about the removal of dwell, and how venues will survive. For our new denizen of the second world, Lindens and their rates don't even matter -- why bother?

Boliver Oddfellow

CEO Infinte Vision

Join Date: Sep 2005

Location: The Rainforest

Posts: 230

Funny thing is there are many of us myself included who do make a good living in SL and NEVER cash out a single L. Why? I charge real world USD and get paid that way. Those of us and there are a few who do Sl projects for Rl corps enhnce the Sl experience and never cash out a single L.

As for camping chaird I do hope they leave, and yes the box office willbe used and hopefully by event producers smart enough to deliver content worth paying for

__________________
Infinite Vision: Specialists in Virtual World Projects

*****

How nasty and arrogant! The concept that there are "many of us" who actually make RL dollarized incomes (where they have no expenses) are estimated often to be around 3,000 -- but we can't be sure if that number includes people who bill their hours, get pensions and insurance, and have paid vacations LOL. The number of people with THAT kind of "RL job in SL" are probably more like 300, if not 30 -- simply judging from the number of sims and the things on them.

But...Like it's a plus for the world that someone doesn't take in Lindens -- the currency of our realm -- and cash them out -- as the rest of the plebes have to? Like dollarization is a good thing?

Gah, this is awful stuff. We're just the server load test for people like this -- we're supposed to come to this fancy venue, be thrilled with all the um compelling content, and reward the fellow with at least traffic statistics? Or perhaps Lindens in a tip jar for a live musician? Or? What are we even *for*?

Like Lewis Nerd, who constantly assures us he's only in SL to "have fun" and "doesn't need dwell" and "doesn't care about content sales" and just builds out of the joy of his heart, Boliver is also free to have "fun" because he's getting paid by a client or a business expense account to do a job -- making something in a visual world -- but not one that he has to make work in any kind of internal world economy. It alreadys works in his external, real-world economy. Why bother worrying about it in the silly inworld terms which only look like a game to someone like Boliver? He only takes real dollars!

He might have rentals or musicians or have some other income-generating scheme -- but as he's telling us -- it's in real dollars, not chump change.

The rest of us toy-worlders, with vendors or rentomatics or accounts taking Lindens still -- we're the chumps!

And yet, how could it be different, the way the Lindens have made this experience? They aren't going to keep providing incentives, or payouts, or pogey of any kind -- they're done. They can't be spending money on this. They don't even care if you figure out how to script a Box Office device to charge tickets, like the Foundation for Rich Content, or make a HUD attachment to tip land owners $1 (as Yumi Muramaki has cleverly done) -- it's completely irrelevant to them building their 3.D web.

The more people like programmers, artists, designers, educations who use SL merely as a program/social software/platform to do their RL things they do anyway in meat-space or the Internet in general, the better! That raises the tone, makes it intellectually and artistically superior, and moves the Lindens farther down the road to glory, letting the Tringo and the sex-scorts and the camp-chairs recede in the distance as so much chaff in the wind.

Why make a world?

Dwellfarers Unite!

I remember when I saw Kazanture's post the other day complaining that it was ridiculous that he, as a land baron, was getting Linden dollars ($200-250 a day!) merely for the fact that he had land for sale out, and people came to look at it and trafficked in dwell points.

I remember making a mental note that if now people like him (is he a barely-guised alt? or a shill? or more likely just a regular bell-weather kinda guy?) were complaining, the Received Wisdom was going to kick in big time, and the Lindens would be removing dwell soon.

So they did -- Philip announced yesterday that there was so much new money pumped into the economy from dwell payments that they'd have to tweak the economy to fix it.

We all know that camp chairs have fueled this phenomenon, whereby rows of AFK zombies just sit on your land and amp up your traffic to the point where the Lindens are hosed for dwell dollars and you essentially buy your way not only on to the top of the popularity list of the "top 20, " but on to what was called "dwellopers" which was just phased out March 31 -- where the Lindens paid you real USD to play their game and create "compelling content" for people to come to your lot. Of course...money trees, money balls, dance pads end up costing you more than you ever get in dwell payments or dwellopers' awards but with the drop in the Linden dollar, getting USD payments or steady income sources have been important for many entertainers.

BTW, money trees are one of those things that the FIC endlessly argue aren't like camp-chairs, but it's like saying white-wine spritzers aren't alcohol, but a can of Bud *is* alcohol. It's one of those drugs the FIC take and pretend it's "medical marijuana" -- money trees supposedly salve the philanthropic souls of the FIC, but in reality, they keep nOObz trapped on land just as long as camp chairs, to get the payouts, thereby upping the dwell, thereby keeping the FIC and SIC in the traffic numbers they don't deserve from their actual content. I speak as a user of money trees myself, so I know how this works. I view them as loss-leaders to help you find newbies who are then your potential rentals customers. Works great for me -- even if dwell ends tomorrow (which it will).

So, we're all against inflation, we're all for ending all this flood of useless printed money into the economy, right?

Well, wrong. At least, I'm not for ending dwell like this, in this sequence, now, and in this fashion -- due to the usual unintended consequences, the unforeseen hardships, and the lack of a plan to prevent yet another "sticking it to the mainland" situation and yet another "let's privilege the private islands" situation.

And I can tell I'm right when I see Gwyn Llewelyn, resident Socialist Social Engineer of Neualtenberg AND Enabran Templar, resident Darwinist Capitalist Bot Maker, both on the same hymn sheet, both not only cheering on Philip Linden, but chortling with a certain glee about their fellow residents who are now going to be having to pull in their belts. "Too bad you based your business model on welfare," Gwyn quickly replied to my protest about dwell, in the usual FIC/SIC hortatory fashion of people who never take risks and get paid pogey out of the game in other ways, like claiming it as RL work, RL work write-offs and expenses, or merely as reputational enhancement. They don't have to care about the inherent integrity and coherence of the world itself -- somebody else is always paying for it, not them.

I had written Gwyn that if I couldn't advertise my parcels in FIND, I'd maybe have to go out of business.

Is this because I depend on dwell to make a living? Not at all.

Let me explain -- and try to indicate one of the many Unintended Consequences from the Law of Unintended Consequences we can expect from the precipitous end of dwell and the method of sequencing.

I suppose I'm not a typical landlord in that I let my tenants collect the group dwell. It's just one of the many features I put in my rentals back when I began to try to compete with Anshe Chung, Blue Burke, and others who had all the rentals sewn up. It means that tenants might get a dollar or two extra now and then in their inbox just for being in my group. Sometimes, if the group is small, as I sometimes make it for someone renting larger parcels or doing a certain project, the officers collect as much as $100 a day. But normally, after paying the parcel feels, it essentially cancels out, with a bit of a sweetener. A reason I offer free FIND ads is precisely because the traffic generated from all the parcels everywhere is normally plenty to cover something like 75 ads or so -- even when communities are at full occupancy, I keep the ad up to say, SORRY FULL TRY X, for people looking around from place to place.

I'm sure an unintended consequence of this current reform is now the necessity to figure out how else to get these fees paid.

We could debate whether of not they should be paid at all -- most countries have either governments or large companies that provide yellow pages for free. You don't have to pay to be in Google; you don't have to pay to be in your city's yellow pages unless you want a large half page ad or something. In the same way, we all wish the FIND in SL worked better, and was free. Instead,it's $30 per ad to use, so it functions like a classified. Many people never put themselves in FIND as a result. The hits to the data base are probably enormous; the Lindens feel justified in making it a money sink to automatically debit $30 from your accont.

So let's say you're happy to pay this, as I am, because FIND generates most of my sales -- how will you pay it now that dwell is gone? Well, you can't let the debit now circulate against all the tenants. If you do that, they will howl, seeing a negative against their account. It would be one thing if it debited as a visible charge that said "$2 parcel fees" -- they might resign themselves to that being part of their rent or something. But it doesn't. It comes right out of their stipends, invisibly, as members of the group. It just disappears, so that when they get their stipend, it says $496 or even $477 of the group has a lot of ads. If they get $50 elsewhere in total from the group's traffic, they are mollified (and even so, every once in a while you get a character who obsesses about this and even my long notecarded explanation can't help). But now? With ONLY getting a debit? Of course not, and no one can subject them to it.

The hacks around this system are two that I know of:  one, you sell yourself 16m2 of land -- you take 16m out of the group or another group, by selling it for $0 to yourself, keeping it as group land, then you set it for say, $1500, and then buy it from yourself so that the $1500 distributes equally all through the group, compensating people for the parcel fees debit. That's ok as far as it goes, but people don't always figure out that the $5 they might find missing from their stipend is the same $5 coming in as an unknown "gift" from a land sale -- when they don't recall ever selling land or know what's up. This only breeds fear and suspicion. Another problem is that you can't always know exactly what the parcel fee is if you aren't scrupulously keeping track -- and what if you have hundreds of ads?

Another hack is to close the group to membership (mine are all on open), and set a ridiculous membership fee like $1500 and then have yourself leaev and join to force $1500 to flush through the system. But as far as I know in the latest versions of SL (this changed awhile back), membership fees now only distribute to officers, not members. There's also the risk that someone will join if you leave it on open and get whacked with that fee; even if you close it and monitor it you still have the problem in a large group that someone will leave, just before the benefit, and yet still get whacked that week by the parcel fee.

All in all, these hacks/workarounds aren't a good, permanent solution for groups to pay their parcel fees for FIND. We could hope that the group tool reforms could include a way for managers to direct cash into the group's kitty that paid off the parcel feels. But they may not come soon enough.

We could hope that the Lindens could just SHUT OFF the automatic debit of FIND fees to groups UNTIL they find a better way for groups to pay rather than circulating debits to everyone -- but they aren't likely to pay attention to this idea, and there are likely to be forums FIC who will scream that the groups are getting a freebie on a sink everyone else has to pay (I'm for giving them this temporary freebie, as there aren't THAT many of them!)

So what will a manager of a large group have to do, in order to keep a live, updatable FIND list with ads changing frequently?

Ungroup the land. That way, the parcel directory fee will debit just that one owner and one account. This is, of course, a HUGE chore and carries with it constantly the risk of blowing off buildings set to the group, etc. because the only way to do it is to sell land out of the group to yourself as an individual for $0. Having to do so many repetitive tasks of $0 sales ALWAYS leads to mistakes where land is accidently avavilable for $0 -- it's just a statistical given, even if you are smart and savvy and follow all the error messages and the ARE YOU REALLY SURE messages.

But even if you get through that, you have then the nasty surprise the Lindens are whacking you with now TWICE, on top of the loss of the (minimal) dwell payments: you lose your 10 percent tier bonus for the group, which enables groups to get more tier to apply to land without tiering up additionally.

The 10 percent tier bonus is one of those things that both Darwinists capitalists and hard-left punitive socialists have in common, which is why you hear Jauani Wu AND Enabran Templar AND Hiro Pendragon all urging for it to be removed. The main reason, however, they wish to have it removed is class warfare: the 10 percent bonus rewards a class of people they are not in: land developers who group their land and stay on it, and provide content and services. Those who campaign against the 10 percent bonus are either content creators or builders or private island deals, where the 10 percent bonus doesn't hold.

Those of us not in the extremist classes are all urging the Lindens NOT to remove the 10 percent bonus. Indeed, I even suggested to them if they are determined to remove it, as they are all incentives, then they should sequence that first, THEN dwell, so that people who formerly grouped their land and got no benefit from dwell due to its huge circulation, could now reformat their land and at least get the benefit of dwell for a few months as individuals before they then also lose the 10 percent bonus. I kept raising this sequencing issue and of course no one knew what I was talking about and ignored me.

So now, instead of a more rational sequencing, in their zeal to remove dwell as the easiest and least painful incentive to remove for them that avoids the screaming from the loudest people, they are also taking a second whack at mainland groups and forcing them to ungroup to be able to advertise.

For smaller groups like Lusk or Boardman or something, it won't likely matter -- people will just communicate among themselves and figure out that they all have to eat the parcel fees.

Some will simply take out their parcel ads. So at the one time when they need to really hustle to get customers, and more paying customers because dwell has been removed, they will be whacked, unable to advertise except in Classifieds.

Of course the forums "experts" will tell everyone to go pay for Classifieds -- $50 not $30 -- and STFU. But the problem with Classifieds is that they don't search as nicely. They don't give the nice field free of clutter that FIND does. In any event, even if we make the switch over entirely to $50 classifieds, they don't stay checked off like FIND does unless you unclick it, and they will require constant attention.

So I might concede that sure, removing dwell makes sense. But in a land group on the mainland, by signing up for the removal of dwell's consequences, I also get whacked with a brand-new more expensive -- and more complicated -- advertising budget in classifieds, or I lose the 10 percent bonus.

Tough titties you say? Well...why? The removal of dwell will be bad enough for some groups, removing what was for them some portion of their income. Why should these productive people who make activities and services in SL and hold premium accounts and land that the Lindens themselves earn from be whacked so hard as to be whacked THREE times when everyone else is whacked ONCE (whacked by the loss of dwell, whacekd by having to ungroup alnd, and lose the 10 percent bonus, and whacked by having to use classifieds more, and pay $50 instead of $30).

This is what I mean by unintended consequence. Nobody learned of it or thought of it because they never asked -- they had to spring the change on the world quickly to reduce the screaming -- and judging from the forums, those who are actually harmed the most either haven't figured it out yet, aren't on the forums anyway, or feel intimidated from appearing on the forums and saying so, when they will be deluged with a tirade of 30 Darwinistic capitalists and 50 zealous communists who will tell them to get alife, etc.

What I find interesting is the class warfare that becomes so starkly visible at times like this. The people who consider themselves "the normal ones" and "in the statistical middle" and "the average" say: dwell is going to remove some of the fun from the game and is too harsh a whack. They say the Lindens should first reduce their land glut, that forces numerous cheap sales of land and a drive to buy cheap Lindens, and let land rise to its truer value. Or they say reduce all or part of stipends, if they make up 72 percent of the money supply.

What some people enjoy most about SL is the amateur quality. That is, you can get really good at being an amateur, even to the level of a professional.

And the things that people have chosen that work to get people to stick (aside from sex and camp-chairs) are things that people did in the 19th century and much of the 20th century -- the equivalent of parlour games like dominoes, Parcheesi, jacks, Monopoly, etc., word games, association games, story-telling, charades and all the Ingos.

All of those have a family-fun or college-dorm or group feel to them that is enjoyable, but readily seen as amateurish by outsiders. No one pays to play Monopoly or Scrabble or charades or Bingo in their home or dorm or parish hall, and they don't want to do it online, either.

So what Philip Linden or some other Lindens personally like about SL --live music and education -- will be what gets the incentives and subsidies.

RL educational groups or non-profit groups already get a Linden subsidy of having to pay only $150 a month in tier, and pay only $950 for the private islands, instead of $195 and $1250. Essentially, the Lindens are willing to go on doing this for RL entities, but they won't do it for world-created entities of the amateur level.

If a musician with a RL venue and RL skills and RL production costs covered can use SL as an add-on, then they can charge Lindens and people will pay it.

The more than someone has a RL entity, business, non-profit, or government, to cover the cost of SL itself, or cover other RL needs or production costs, the more they can benefit from this world going forward.

So it's another tear in the fabric of the world, or the curtain that keeps the world a special, magical place separate from real life where anything is possible. No one can expect the Lindens to keep paying for such a dream, however.

What's nasty about the Lindens' reforms, as they've carefully calculated them and religiously implemented them for a year and a half now, is that they do not privilege or even incentivize the middle class -- being revolutionary extremists themselves, they can't be expected to do that until it's too late.

The climate on the forums especially, but also inworld, is one of harsh, capitalistic Social Darwinism at one extreme on the right, or harsh, distributive, punitive Social Collectivism on the left, with no room for failure or experimentation or flexibility. That's how the Lindens like it, I've come to see.

How do I know that's how the Lindens like it? Because they let it be.

On the forums, those who don't "get with the program" are alternately pilloried for being poor business managers unable to adapt to changing conditions, or bullied by the collective as poor
socially-altruistic collective-participants in the grander project of making  LL's platform and software work and be competitive. Either way, they lose. They are lozerz.

Someone like Gwyn Llewelyn can lecture me about the need to end "welfare for business" and issue hortatory pronunciations that it's "too bad I didn't have a better business" model -- and be in perfect step with a harsh, Darwinistic capitalist like Enabran (he's really more of a state oligarchist) who would tell me that businessmen don't complain, they make a profit, or they die, due to the demands of evolution. Whether by harsh evolutionary conditions, or by brutal and abrupt revolutionary conditions, the leftists and rightists in the extreme in SL alternate lobbying their Linden factions with either ideology and they succeed, over and over again, because of the ability to grab the levers of most communications system.

If Gwyn says I need a better business model, say, if I depend on dwell in any fashion, why can't I then get her to point out that content-creators who depend on low Linden value and the constant punishment of the land-dealing class also have a poor business model? Because they do -- not only for themselves in the long run, killing off their customers, but for the world in the long run, killing off the world.

The reality is that the broader middle outside these extremes, which sometimes has to become the "radical middle class" to override the extremism of the extremities, can recognize that a mixture of incentives and disincentives are needed and that the greatest -- numerically -- productive forces of the world -- premium account-holders who buy and tier land and put businesses or homes on it -- have to have a say in the world's survival, too, and cannot be constantly called upon to make sacrifices for the good of the extremes. When a middle class cannot thrive, the world can't flourish.

The Lindens are banking on a notion that a middle class of higher-spending end-user sim-buyers and mass content creators are going to come in and make the middle class. Good luck with that!

I'm supposed to lose my ability to pay for parcel fees now, or my ability to collect dwell dollars, for the good of the world and LL's business but...what did content creators get asked to do on the far right or far left extreme?

Content-creators win once again -- they never have to sacrifice as they are king! -- they get to keep their customers who keep using cheap Lindens for a good long while because cheap land is still flooding the market and still finding wholesalers willing to chop and sell it cheaply. The theory is that removing dwell from the system will make the rate of the Linden vs. dollar improve.

Fortunately, we'll get to see how that will not happen, so that the Lindens may AT LONG LAST realize the errors of their ways -- that their land glut and premium account and basic account generosities are the root of devaluation. They picked something that the two vocal and visible extremes wouldn't be harmed by, and which even the middle would be forced to concede is a good thing because no one likes camp chairs (similar to their political sale of p2p as well).

Even if I'm wrong, and the Lindens get the Linden value to improve dramatically, content creators merely raise their product prices at the flick of a mouse in networked vendors using third-party sites. Those rentals agents who aren't Adam Zaius, however, will have a harder time having to make many manual changes in the system; those businesses that are smaller and don't have networked vendors and third-party sites will also not adapt quickly enough to the inflation and die. It's ok! Deaths are *needed* objectively by Social Darwinists for Evolution and by Social Colletivists for revolution -- whether content creation by FIC (goods inworld) or SIC (services to RL outside companies) or whether improvement of the platform by FIC *and* SIC and assorted tekkie-wikis -- those are what have to take precedence now over rank-and-file customes or the dedicated and struggling middle.

What's happening is no different than what happens in many third-world and developing countries, especially after fascism or communism. Indeed, the prosperity of an America is caused by its ability to avoid the extremes and create the buffer of a large middle class.

The Lindens are not going to change, are not going to stop listening to extremes, and not undo the harm they are causing by poorly-time or poorly-sequenced economic changes. So if you don't like it, go to WoW or what is now called Entropia instead of Project Entropia as it is more stable.

But it is still possible that if the Lindens hurry along group-tool reform and improvement of vehicles, they could inject some life into the mainland. They spent all that time and effort and money on making this vast system of roads -- if they finally make something to put on them that is viable, they could do something vaguely similar to what the US did in the 1940s and 1940s after the Great Depression and World War II: build a system of national highways and parks. This stimulates commerce, connectivity, business, recreation, spending of disposable dollars, and creates jobs. The "creates jobs" part comes in inspiring legions of people to make the interesting vehicles they can sell to those who want to travel on roads. Then other people will have a reason to create road houses, cafes, race tracks, stadiums, stores, etc. The only thing missing is the fast food -- as usual, the SL creators will have to substitute fast sex as the only thing that people can still want and get online in a virtual world.

The Lindens need to listen to the people they are harming by the removal of dwell, figure out whether there is still anything they can change about the timing or sequencing of this change, and see if they can't really figure out, if not to incentivize the middle class of non-inventoriable content providers and consumers, at least stop punishing them. I have two groups to join, Mainlanders, to work on mainland issues and reform of the group tools, and Dwellfarers, where partly in jest I have the title Dwellfare Queen, for discussion of these issues and planning concerted action.

Is Business Still A Game in SL?

Grief-build in SL.

I know it's fashionable to talk about "making RL money in SL" and "RL Work in SL" and there's even a Dutch film-maker to do a documentary on this fascinating subject.

You have only to peruse the running news ticker on SL's home page to see the plethora of studies about making a fortune in a virtual world.

Yet, each day we have to ask ourselves, even with all the improvements and more promised changes to come to group tools:  Is business still a game in Second Life?

I think in an immersive virtual world, you can often forget just how artificial it is (and fragile), even if it is the kind of synthetic world that Edward Castranova is rhapsodizing about in Synthetic Worlds:  The Business and Culture of Online Worlds. (I'm reading this now and finding that Castranova is often more persuasive as a psychologist of these worlds than as an economist, where he tends toward the liberal/left memes. His accounts of just how deeply satisfying human beings find it to make transactions, gather things and sell them and buy other things are fascinating, and you start to realize that human beings are simply hard-wired for commerce and competition, and all this stuff that he and other Internet gurus are still peddling about cooperation and communalism belong to the same kind of fantastic realms they cover).

I run a rentals business and I'd like to reflect about what is *still fake* about business in SL because people tend to gloss over these hardships and realities of virtuality and constantly over-compensate.

1. We are a game-patch economy, lurching from game-patch to game-patch.  In RL, the City Council or the Business Improvement District doesn't suddenly shut down traffic and block buildings from view on Times Square and 42nd Street for the day, and then reload them for you to use later. You don't sit it out in a cafe on 38th St because it's "Wednesday, and that's my world's maintenance day."  You don't suddenly become unable to move as you walk on 42nd Street, and mutter to yourself "damn update's laggy".

Solution:  more rolling patches that are under the radar and if necessary to take down the grid, do it at non-peak hours.

2. Updates break scripts.  In RL, the Xerox machine doesn't suddenly stop working completely just because you've decided to add new product lines or features to your business. If you move to a new office or add more features, you make sure that the basics work first -- ordering the DSL line in advance, making the move on a Sunday night, etc. 

Solution: (do Lindens do this?) Keep a list of most basic resident-created scripts for businesses and other projects. Have the really short "mission-critical list" then longer lists of "necessary" and "optimal" and work with residents to avoid or mitigate them -- not just pets like FIC big business, but anyone who submits a proposal to add their script to the mission-critical list.

3. Stipends flood the currency market. In RL, the government doesn't just endlessly issue pay packets to citizens for doing nothing. It can issue welfare of course, and business incentives. That's fine to do! No reason to summarily remove the $500 stipends from premium accounts as such, but something has to be done to soak up the excess Lindens that are all cashed out to make those premium accounts free.

Solution:  Stipends could be pegged to the actual cost of the US dollar. The $9.95 account should include a guaranteed $7.00 US stipend within it as a purchased product line, but then whatever is issued each week should be actually pegged to the LL/dollar exchange rate.

4. Dwell is gamed. In RL, I don't pass a tracker on my way into the Staples so that the government can pay the Staples owner $5.00 for every minute I spend in the store. My foot traffic into his store might not even correlate with his sales.

Solution:  tie dwell payments to frequency and/or amount of actual sales on the parcel, as defined by payments to a vendor, scripted object, or avatar by the visitor, not the owner. Then mall owners have incentive to make the kind of place their tenants can actually transact business in, rather than fool them into renting because camp chairs have created an inflated sense of sale potential. Of course, that still leaves the system gameable to camp chair kings, but since the Lindens are going to phase out dwell anyway, before it is destroyed, the fascinating study of what actually works for sales in SL must be conducted -- currently we have absolutely no feedback from the Lindens, even in aggregate, and businesses within SL aren't talking.

5. Advertising is discouraged and punished.  In RL, if I own property, I can put up a billboard, or I can take out a classified ad, or buy a radio spot for a huge variety of costs. I don't just get to pay the equivalent of a day's revenue for one big spot on Times Square, or relegate myself to being in some tiny neighbourhood shopper.

Solution:  the Lindens need to crack loose lots more advertising space, especially along Governor Linden roads and public areas like Welcome Areas. They need to completely revamp this ridiculous resident ad system with its clunky interface and create, say, large panels with 16 ads immediately visible, with very, very easy drag and drop instructions and interface, not the silly thing they have now that times out before you can even figure out the controls. They need to override the screeching of the forums nutters and figure out some tolerable places for roadside ads on their land that we can buy space on for Lindens, adding to money sinks.

6. Grief-builds are tolerated and even encouraged.  In RL, a man's home is his castle, but he doesn't get to put up a giant spinning purple tower spewing blood particles named "Hell Hotel" without hearing from the zoning board, the police, or even just a neighbourhood association.

Solution: Existing TOS about disturbance of the peace and affecting the enjoyment of SL simply must be used; the language is there and the discretionary power is there: use it. Concerns about user creativity, while valid, shouldn't be invoked to invalidate the SL experience of hundreds of other customers seeking a more stable house-holding environment. If the Lindens are that committed to the necessity of the world having large, spinning, purple boxes with blood spewing out of them, they need to pay for it themselves in subsidizing huge government projects or sandboxes where anything goes, and not impose it on their tier-payers.

Residents should meet the Lindens more than half way here by forming residential associations to file grievance complaints about builds that block movement, significantly lag sim performance, block the view, or extort or verbally harass -- if 10 people owning on 4 sims can collect the signatures for such a review process, the Lindens should put their money where their mouth is and simply move that griefer at their own expense to the government-subsidized sandbox area for his residence. Hey, it's a virtual world, and where you physically play with your Hell Hotel shouldn't matter, should it? Unless you were thinking to force a sale by putting it *right here*.

7. Communists flourish and are encouraged. The SL forums are filled with communists. I haven't seen so many communists in one place since I attended sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. And I mean real communists, not just fake red-under-the-bed-communists -- people who have a zealous utopian communard ideal and are prepared not only to stop commerce and business but hang business people from the lamp posts to achieve their ends. In RL, communist parties are in such tiny minorities in most places that they don't even rise to the level of a letter to the editor. Socialists, while they may be in power here and there in this or that little country, or this or that little Community Board in New York City, don't hobble every aspect of the economy.

Solution:  Have LL make a clear-cut, highly-visible, detailed mission statement on their website that spells out their values and visions for the economy. If they really mean to create a free land market as part of their company's business model and their vision of the world, say so. Put it in writing. That will empower business people merely to cut and paste from the vision thing every time a communist charter member with a free 4096 rears their head on the forums. Cut. Paste. Next.

8. The Anti-Commerce Lobby thrives although this is supposed to be a make-money world. In RL, kids, stay-at-home moms, college students, pensioners, disabled persons, wealthy utopians, and others with either fixed incomes, no income, or unlimited incomes are not only in the minority of any society, they don't enforce their views or their chosen life occupations on the overwhelming majority of the working population who seek income to be greater than expenses. A stay-at-home mom exchanging her labour hours for the greater value of raising a decent human being is a consumer of, say, groceries or disposable diapers, but she doesn't scream at the Gristedes and the Rite-Aid owners for selling her products. The college student gets Dad to pay for his $150 Nikes, he doesn't scream at Nike for making and selling sneakers. The pensioner is taking a well-deserved rest from his lifelong labours where the state extracted his social security funds, and plays chess all day, but doesn't scream at people who pay the taxes to keep the park open where he is sitting playing chess.

All of these people who don't themselves engage in the hustle and bustle of life's commerce don't ask the rest of the world to stop in its track to match their chosen lifestyle. They realize balance and symbiosis is needed, and they don't impose their needs on everybody else to the detriment of all.

Solution:  The Lindens need to create a Small Business Administration. This body would emphatically greet, promote, help, facilitate, and celebrate business. Business Linden would regularly announce advertising opportunities, new platform features facilitating commerce, contests, bid opportunities, etc. and be on hand to incentivize business by leveraging resident-run seminars, helping investors find project partners, etc. -- and thereby create a climate for the forums and the inworld presence that sends a signal that while many people would like SL to be part of their off-hours and entertainment, a good proportion of the people responsible for the Lindens' bottom line want something with far more traction that they wish to combine with their RL needs and aspirations. SL should be big enough to accommodate all these desires without overloading any one of them to the detriment of the world's health.

9. Media isn't Independent or Accessible to Buyers. In RL, I don't have to depend on buying a $90,000 New York Times ad just to advertise my yardsale or my translation services. There's a huge array of radio/Internet/local shopper/etc. advertising space and ordinary flyers on the bulletin board at the supermarket or book store. The media space in SL is not only virtually monopolize by the state of Linden Lab; it's poorly monopolized and limited to GULAG-like stentorian announcements about sims shutting down, with only a tiny audience for Linden Radio, about which most people don't know a thing because they never bother to read the forums or the website itself, since usually they come by friends drawing them to the sign-up page and their parcels inworld.

Solution: Permit, encourage, indeed foster the distribution of free media inworld and free up the forums rules.  Start consciously selling time on the state-run media, without fear or favour, on Linden Radio, in Welcome Areas, at townhall podcasts, etc. And don't charge extortionist rates -- currently the rate for a spot on the Linden's web page under "classifieds" is essentially $100 US or so for 7 days to get in the top 15 -- that's just way too costly at one level, and not costly enough given the eyeballage. Provide a much larger range for ordinary, paid advertising with easy interface and billing.

Ads and consumer advocacy also have virtually no room to grow in SL because of two hugely crippling features of the forums and the TOS. One is the deadly connection between forums expression and expulsion from the world -- this is absolutely wrong and must be terminated immediately -- no one should lose a business or property because of something they typed on a forums. Furthermore, the Lindens need to loosen up their punishment for criticism of business, especially by charter members and FIC/SIC, so that the necessary feedback required in a free society is available to bring about prosperity for all. Concerns about "libel" need to be balanced against the need for the free flow of information and ideas in a liberal economy.

10. Justice is much in demand and never supplied. When leftists and lunatics tackle the problem of resident clashes in SL, they always tackle it from the perspective of "dispute resolution" or "a better business bureau" (about which they often have the vaguest idea). This comes from the touchy-feely hippie commune stuff built into the group tools and imbibed in the Kool-Aid so that it comes out in the very textured grass of the world.

But what defrauded customers, bilked commissioners of builds, damaged property owners, etc. need is *justice* meted out by an impartial and fair due process -- they don't need to sit down and sing "Kumbayah" with grief-builders, fraudsters, copy-cat designers, unscrupulous architects, and shoddy pre-fab makers. That means if I can prove that I spent $100 US on a bunch of crappy prefabs that disintegrated upon rezzing and delinked, without any backup copy, the judge should be able to rule in my favour that the prefab creator should restore my copies. He'll have no power to enforce. But a court like this will have enormous rhetorical value in helping to establish the climate of consumer advocacy and care that is missing from the world right now by *publishing its verdicts*.

Solution: There's only one thing asked of the Lindens to make this consumer-oriented court have some effect: stop the prosecution of people who transfer or publish notecarded conversations. Currently, if a person copies a transcript of their conversation in IMs or inworld in chat, and another person takes it and sends it anywhere but to the official Abuse Report system, he can be prosecuted for "disclosure".

This is an absurd, authoritarian, and MMORPG-type of wizardry that has no valid correlary in the real world. While unauthorized tapings of phone calls may not be admissible in court, while copyright of a letter belongs to its author, presenting these materials merely to being the case and persuade a lawyer or prosecutor that there *is* a case is not grounds for punishment. The *inadmissibility* of evidence isn't cause for *prosecution* for supplying it.

If the Lindens can't see their way clear to dropping this clause, at least for inworld transactions (publishing on the forums might be another order of magnitude), they can at least do this: stipulate that ONLY conversations made in *private IMS* are subject to "non-disclosure* and that anything said in open room chat available in chat history is fair game for distribution. That means that people having interactions with store owners, builders, designers, clerks, etc. can capture their chat said openly in the world, not in IMs, and use them for bringing suit in court.

All of this and much more has to be tackled to get the game of business in SL to cease to be a game.

Taking Over the Telegraph Station

Grabar's famous painting of Lenin at the telegraph post.

(Adapted from Second Citizen post)

I think the Lindens are up to something.

Their grand plan for the SL Forums is to allow them to disintegrate into a million little single-interest, niche, etc. blogs and forums -- that seeming "baby-Bell" demonopolizing approach will actually distract from their stealth GOMing of important formerly-independent sources like the Herald or even Second Cast, which only survived the early days of its infancy before being GOM'd.

Second Citizen, SLOG, SL Drama. SLBBB.com, my blog, your blog, Robin Linden's blog. They hope that people will use up all their energy posting outside the walled garden on the other boards, with varying degress of dramas and freedoms, and leave the SL forums free for people to discuss...I dunno, age play and whether CNET will find the right people to interview? I think soon, soon, we are going to see the Lindens do something wierd around this that will close off our freedoms more.

My guess is that they will do the opposite of a GOM. They won't GOM the forums...they will DE-GOM the forums. They will close general and maybe even land and economy, or just ignore them as they wither up and die. They will announce that far from GOMing the forums they are...freeing them. They will have an elaborate spin on this -- just wait!

I think most likely they'll be announcing some kind of new uploading thinger where your own avatar now can be uploaded to their webpage, so it will get like NeoPets, www.reallifesims.com, www.ratemyav.com, and the Sims offline fan page. This is cheap and easy to do, and given that really only 6,000 people play anyway, it's not that much strain on the servers.

People will start spending less time inside the laggy crashy grey murky world of the SL servers, and more time on their big giant webpage that will be made to compete with MySpace.com and other dating thingies and have all this capacity to essentially make a little SLav.com -- my avatar's picture, maybe his picks and his classifieds, a SLURL to his picks or his classifieds, etc. It will be the avatarization of Second Life -- which has long ignored the avatar in favour of trying to beef up the places where the avatar walks or flies or teleports...but they realize they have to walk the cat back in the other direction too.

Once I have myavatar.com where you can post comments to me or links or whatever, who needs the forums? Blogs, third-party sites, all that stuff will be hived up and linked up and wired up and it will be just so kewl that people like Hiro who think they're so in touch with the bleeding edge will just have a complete SLorgasm over it (and let's hope it's the temp-on-rez type).

 

In fact, if I can shop for my avatar on third-party sites...leave little messages on a myspace.com sort of thing...maybe even dress my avatar there on my desktop...send little photos...send Slurls and text messages and God knows what else...going in world will be something that I will only do on Sundays lol.

Remember when Adam Zaius at secondserver.net and GIGAS was going to take over the SL-related blogosphere and have all these blogs for people he would run (and collect the server statistics on?) What ever happened to that? Guess he got too busy on his other empire projects. Or...Philip told him during one of their tete-a-tetes, let's say, that he shouldn't bother because they're going to do this big website thing that will be better than blogs because it will be...SLAVSPACE!

Obviously, we could all see in one of the recent game patches, the features that showed "upload to web". First, classifieds is going up. Soon, the avatar will go up, too. Then, maybe more stuff.

 

People already make their avatar tabs like little myspace.coms anyway, have you noticed? They used to have just pictures of the obligatory iconic sites like Marcos' tower or the Ivory Tower of Prims. I remember I used to click on people in September 2004 and see the same goddamn thing a million times over. "Gosh, I love Maxx's tower! Woot!"

Today, everybody and his brother pouring in tends to put their girlfriend's picture, a little club they and their friends made on some hard-to-pronounce Latinate moth sim...their RL cat...their business policy--their new and old places where they live. I often see tenants putting a rental lot where they made they home into a pic, and it stays there because it had some special moment for them, maybe a first love, and it stays on their pics like a kind of advertisement. Funny. I'm like that too, I have things in my pics that I just don't let go of, in part because I can't get that picture back again -- it was on the Linden's server, not inside my inventory.

More and more, people will retreat into MyPicks or MySLURLS and leave the big macro-economizing to the "experts" like the Snapshot Baron Cristiano Midnight, the swashbuckling sword-crossed Hiro Pendragon, and of course FlipperPA.

In fact, even Lindens are going to Balkanize, and there will be little grouplets and islets of Lindens here and there that you'll have to paddle fast to catch up to as they float around the private island archipelago. We get a taste of that when we see Cory Linden talking about one thing, and stuff not on the LL official forums, and we see Robin Linden put up on her own personal blog a thing that sounds like it should be some bland corporate announcement in the LL forums, "A Billing Primer". Possibly, she couldn't get clearance in the food chain to post it. Or possibly...posting it is something that someone has to pick off the beloved BLOTTD. Or possible...she wanted any flames about it to be held off-campus on her own blog.

Philip siphoned off the entire country/platform debate and Gwyn's post, with my rebuttals, to his own personal blog months ago -- he could have answered any one of the polysci comments or started his own thread, but he, like many, left the forums in heart and mind ages ago, and never really looked back. With Walker's shiny new ESC blogola, with Clickable Culture, Terra Nova -- who even has time to read throughscatalogical utterances by Siggy Romulus and all the fanboyz jokes on the official forums? They'll just be reduced to something about as interesting as an airport announcement about your delayed flight in...maybe another 45 minutes and people will look forward to reading the SL forums like they look forward to scrutinizing those little tags on your new mattress that say WARNING DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

And that was the idea -- the Lindens are all about finding ways to pour the green dots off something that's a burden to them, to some other place where they can outsource taking care of the green dots. Can you blame them? These are people really seriously believing this "million by the end of the year" stuff -- scary, scary stuff! Of course, their plan on information/mind control was foiled by Your Humble Correspondent to some extent, but the backbone of it remains and must be ruthlessly resisted -- and I realize it's a losing battle but "for us, there is only the trying, the rest is not our business".

Here's the Linden's secret plan, which I obtained by ruthlessly questioning a junior Linden who accidently revealed it and then was encouraged to produce it in full in the interests of saving the Motherland:

o have InfoNet take over InfoHubs and push socialist, anti-Anshel line
o have Community Round Table cooptation by Pathfinder take over interest groups like Resident Action Committee or Metaverse Justice Watch or Concerned Citizens (where are they all now, all those concerned, active, justice-seeking citizens!)
o dose out interviews from the main principles to Metaverse Messenger, which is mainly bland and stays out of really heavy politics, to bless it as the Newspaper of Record -- release really controversal stuff like the Covenants on the mainland there first, to trickle it down into the collective mind.
o bless Second Caste and its Permanet Poison Posse Panel as the interpreter of reality and the filler of the airwaves and maintain FIC/SIC control of mind-meme flow. o defang the Herald by slipping something into Uri's drink at a game conference so that all he does now is post gushing little asides about his boy Matt's wondering reporting on the dicks of SL (no, I don't mean *you* Cristiano, I mean the prim/ejaculating ones).
o get Walker coopted first by the FIC; then by the SIC; then have him lured away by GoogleEarther Jerry to make a completely different blog where nobody ever comments--indeed, the transcendental photoshopped shade of blue on that blog is scientifically calculated to induce an alpha state o have the mastermind of this operation, Reuben Linden, disappear from the world list to create plausible deniability and distract from his role in bringing 3 new big RL companies to take over ad space in SL o have Philip do like a gadzillion RL media interviews about how you can make money in SL and how it's a magical place, etc. and keep tekkies at Google.com and Wired titilated so as to distract from the information takeover inside the world
o lots of other stuff I can't even tell you about Honestly, you have to hand it to Kremlinden Lab -- they've done a bang-up job of taking over the telegraph stations, even as they've created this vast hive of illusion that everybody is free and every avatar is his own broadcasting, podcasting, slurling and whirling little indymedia.com. Lenin would be proud.'

"When We All Move There"

Did you miss this?!

Town Hall Q

---

Jeska sent me here with my question cause it came in late:
If you look at how computer operating systems have evolved, and solely on the PC platform, you see that it went from DOS, a sort of 1 dimensional OS with 2D elements. Then building on top of that was Windows. A sort of 2 dimensional OS with 3D elements. Now you have Second Life, which is rapidly becoming - in my eyes at least - a three dimensional operating system with 4D elements (rapid exchange of visual information across time and space).


So....

My question to Phillip is, are you going to take this aspect of SL seriously in the long run or simply follow an MMORPG business model and let SL evolve like any other online "game world" would? It seems if you don't approach it like that, someone else will (Apple?) and in a few years they will have learned from all your mistakes here and made a better and easier version.

Cheers,

-Dak

Philip Linden

CEO/Founder, Linden Lab

Join Date: Nov 2002

Posts: 509

 

Hi Dakind,

I'm not a gamer, and SL isn't a game. From the start, we/LL observed that something like SL would have it's first uses in entertainment, and them grow beyond those uses and people became more confident in the capabilities of the new platform/OS/whatever-we-want-to-call-it. So we focused on making SL very exciting and visceral and inspirational, but not on making it a game.

The future that we are all most passionate about is creating a new version of the world with a fundamentally different and better set of capabilities, and then see what happens when we all move there. This means we want SL to be able to reach everyone in the world, to be able to scale to 100's of millions of users and millions of servers, and to remain an open decentralized system in which creativity rules.

__________________
Philip Linden
CEO & Founder, Linden Lab
blog:  http://secondlife.blogs.com/philip


Ok...beam me up, Scotty!

VOTING NO

Being permabanned from the SL forums, I'm disenfranchised.

I can't put a proposal up for vote on the features voting page.

I think I can vote -- because the system shows my votes being used up when I try to use them.

But for the longest time I couldn't write and post a proposal! (Update:  mysteriously, this just changed???!!! Vote YES for Voting No, Vote 1242!)

Imagine that! Pretty silly stuff -- I'm sure they'll correct this some day. I may have to make a formal request for a change in the terms of confinement.

Of course, one of the requirements of the voting features page is that you first put your proposal in the forums. Not sure how many people really do that, but I'm going to try putting in that "forums URL" spot my own URL here and see if it flies.

I mean, why can't we vote no on the voting thingie? I was telling my son about how I was going to propose this feature, and explaining how on the voting feature thingie, they don't have a "no".

"Well, why do they call it a 'vote', then?" he asked, innocently. Smart kid!

In fact, I'm going to try again right now to post a proposal using not a forums URL but this URL because my hope remains ever alive that the Lindens will some day see the error of their ways and unpermaban me : )

My concept is simple: we need to be able to Vote No.

Every democracy in the world has the ability to vote "no". I mean, even a class in school has the ability to vote "no". Nobody should not be able to vote "no".

Our problem is that with these California social engineers (here I go again), we are conditionalized to optimize the positivity ratio to the proposal by mouse-clicking to move our optimalized choice to a higher ratio of retina-lock-in ratio and thereby inevitably and mechanically move the other proposals down "under the bridge" with "the trolls" -- Darwinian selectivity and somebody's brain neuron project at work.

But...we need to short-circuit all this Skinner's Box stuff and be able to say hell no, we won't go. I mean, a dom might get 327 of his subs to vote for p2p -- but that doesn't mean we should go along. It's popular, p2p. But it's sometimes useful to register a "nay" vote to give a clue as to what other populations might be considered (128/128 lottery problem for example).

If the Lindens could see that 868 people might vote "no" even if there is a hugely popular thing like p2p, that might give them pause for sure -- they might think, "What are we missing?" Indeed, even 127 or 42 might make them think a little bit.

It's called "feedback". We can't be endlessly accentuating the positive. We need at the very least to be able to use up some of our "credits" on a "no" (the 10 votes we can apply to ANY proposition is another silly feature but we can try to get around it another day).

The "no" vote does not cancel out the "yes". I'd puzzled why anyone would think that. It's just registering a "no". The "yes" may still "carry it". The Lindens might still think that if they have 327 votes for a proposal, they should just do the proposal, even if there are 329 or even 462 "nos". But I think it would just help them realize that this system is flashmobbed, gamed, and most importantly -- ignored by 93 percent of the people in the world -- if they could see the "nos".

I'm thinking that even if they put in "no" tomorrow, it wouldn't be used much. Would people want to use up their scarce voting quota on a "no" when it could be a "yes". Therefore, ideally, the "no" vote has to be accompanied by a stop of 10 "nos" -- otherwise they are still pushing us and prodding us and social-engineering us into going up the ladder of the positive.

No Demand?

One of the fictions the Lindens like to tell themselves -- and us (human beings love stories) is that their auction is a system of "supply and demand".

To understand the depth of this Big Lie, you have no further to look then the auctions themselves.

The Lindens claim that they only put out more sims if there are bids on the auction. But everyone knows they put out more sims than people buy.

In fact, quite a few come and go with no bids at all on them.

Quite a few sims only go for $1001 or $1050 because nobody bids -- they might as well just sell the damn things at a fixed price, and then serve as brokers merely to a resident-based auction. Indeed, it's really long over due, and might really smarten up the economy. Just think of a webpage where you could upload any ad for any land at any price and see if someone bids on it, just like an ebay of land. People would get into the habit of watching it and it might sell your land better and faster.

Just look at what we have with our socialist social-engineering instead, however:

Auction Details

Chindo 001 (128,128) 61504 m2

	Chindo 001 (128,128) 61504 m2 Item Number: 0026198369 Starting Bid: US$ 1000.00 Ended 2006-04-09 12:00:00 History: 0 bids High Bidder: — Parcel Information Location: Chindo (128,128) Parcel Size: 61504 square meters Object Limit: 14,077 Simulator Rating: Mature

OK, well, whatever, Chindo, who the hell knows, maybe Chindo just isn't where it's at and is the butt-end of all the sims in the hellmouth of the multiverse.

But what about a parcel like this, in a sim that is actually kinda famous for having a really popular public sandbox, a resident who became a Linden, and other beautiful builders?

Obscure (47,196) PG 5632m Parcel

	Obscure (47,196) PG 5632m Parcel Item Number: 0026198356 Starting Bid: US$ 86.00 Ended 2006-04-09 12:15:00 History: 0 bids High Bidder: — Parcel Information Location: Obscure (56,204) Parcel Size: 5632 square meters Object Limit: 1,289 Simulator Rating: PG Or take this very odd entry (must be a mistake!) Nuba (128,93) - 16320 m2 Bidding has ended for this item Nuba (128,93) - 16320 m2 Item Number: 0026197881 Winning Bid: US$ 0.00 Ended 2006-04-09 13:36:21 History: 1 bid High Bidder: Kenzie Byrd Bid History Resident Bid Amount Bid Date Kenzie Byrd US$0.00 Apr-07-06 13:36:21 PDT system requirements | privacy | community standards | terms of service | dmca | grid status | jobs ©2006 Linden Research Inc. Wow, Nuba used to be telehub land, now it's worth $0??? Or take this -- an entire sim, where the bid didn't even open at $1000 like it normally does! That is in mature! Taken, for a song, by land barons! Triphosa (128,128) - 52496 m2 Bidding has ended for this item Triphosa (128,128) - 52496 m2 Item Number: 0026198329 Winning Bid: US$ 1000.00 Ended 2006-04-08 17:30:00 History: 12 bids High Bidder: Dnate Mars Parcel Information Location: Triphosa (128,128) Parcel Size: 52496 square meters Object Limit: 12,015 Simulator Rating: Mature Bid History Resident Bid Amount Bid Date Dnate Mars US$1000.00 Apr-06-06 18:40:43 PDT Jon Rolland US$1000.00 Apr-08-06 16:51:54 PDT Dnate Mars US$951.00 Apr-06-06 18:40:43 PDT Jon Rolland US$950.00 Apr-08-06 16:51:14 PDT Dnate Mars US$926.00 Apr-06-06 18:40:43 PDT Jon Rolland US$925.00 Apr-08-06 16:50:47 PDT Dnate Mars US$901.00 Apr-06-06 18:40:43 PDT Jon Rolland US$900.00 Apr-08-06 16:36:35 PDT Dnate Mars US$876.00 Apr-06-06 18:40:43 PDT Jon Rolland US$875.00 Apr-08-06 16:35:42 PDT Dnate Mars US$801.00 Apr-06-06 18:40:43 PDT Jon Rolland US$800.00 Apr-06-06 15:29:58 PDT Or look rather at this, to get an idea what demand *really* is -- the new flat fresh brown-sugary waterfront in the down-under south which is heavily in demand and which Anshe tried to monopolize: Gyul 001 (128,128) 65536 m2 Bidding has ended for this item Gyul 001 (128,128) 65536 m2 Item Number: 0026198335 Winning Bid: US$ 1781.00 Ended 2006-04-09 14:30:00 History: 23 bids High Bidder: Jon Rolland Parcel Information Location: Gyul (128,128) Parcel Size: 65536 square meters Object Limit: 15,000 Simulator Rating: Mature Bid History Resident Bid Amount Bid Date Jon Rolland US$1781.00 Apr-09-06 11:30:13 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1751.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1750.00 Apr-09-06 11:29:25 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1701.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1700.00 Apr-09-06 11:28:09 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1651.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1650.00 Apr-09-06 11:27:38 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1601.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1600.00 Apr-09-06 11:26:43 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1551.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1550.00 Apr-09-06 11:25:26 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1501.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1500.00 Apr-09-06 11:25:04 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1401.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1400.00 Apr-09-06 11:24:48 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1351.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1350.00 Apr-09-06 11:22:23 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1301.00 Apr-09-06 08:43:33 PDT Jon Rolland US$1300.00 Apr-09-06 10:12:17 PDT Lala Lumiere US$1201.00 Apr-09-06 08:42:31 PDT Kazanture Aleixandre US$1051.00 Apr-08-06 23:46:38 PDT Marc Woebegone US$1001.00 Apr-07-06 06:47:00 PDT Kazanture Aleixandre US$1000.00 Apr-06-06 12:01:02 PDT

So...land baron Jon Rolland valued this sim and paid a pretty price for it -- and his inworld retail sales will have to reflect his margins. Will he be able to sell it in 30 days?

There are many other tales of interest on the Lindens land auction. One of the difficulties is that the auction functions with an efficient memory-hole. Any bid/sale before 5 days previous is removed -- only the current 5 days are visible, and there's no archive. Tiger Crossing kept the statistics for a time; don't know if these are up to date still. I tried to keep up for a time -- I failed -- just to much work cutting and pasting.

One of the blows for freedom we need to strike in this world of totalitarian information control is to get the history of the auctions in the public domain accessible as a searchable archive. It will function as a kind of rough-and-ready county deed office and we can see who bought what when, and more importantly, *for what price*.

Meanwhile, I encourage anybody looking for land to go look at the SL auction. It has real bargains on it, for $4-5/m often for very good PG and M. It's sometimes half as much as what you'd pay retail.

All the sales denominated in LL$ are money sinks -- the Lindens don't keep that (theoretically) and it "burns". But they denominate so many similar parcels in US dollars that you can see they can't help being greedy to resell recycled land for what they can get.

Everybody wants money sinks -- one obvious one is for the Lindens to sell ALL old, recycled, reclaimed land off old servers for Lindens only and let it be a sink.

Philip Finds His Voice But Do We Lose Ours?

The loneliness of the long-distance voicer...

Philip Linden found his voice yesterday.

But have we lost ours?

First, a brief on the yawning digital divide...the divide that divides us not yearly or weekly but hourly.

All of this happened at the Town Hall with the new format -- Philip talked in voice-over audio, and people with Skype were able to call him up on a kind of radio station and ask him questions, even have a conversation back and forth with him, and he answered. Nothing THAT new, but it was considered a breakthrough because trying to wire up all this stuff through crashy, laggy SL is a real chore and technical challenge, but it more or less worked.

But...Something gained, something lost.

In the old days before the Lindens put Voice into the world, I had a friend who had a friend who I'd see around sometimes with an interesting avatar. I didn't know anything about him. I knew his beautiful work in the world, and I could see his interestly-outfitted avatar, which changed now and then. I had no idea actually whether he was "he" or "she" in RL or where he was or what languages were his native languages.

But now I know something about him that he might have preferred simply to leave off his second-life and first-life "resume" on his avatar profile: he's deaf. He can't hear.

Before yesterday, we were all equals, and we all typed, and we all spoke and we all heard.

Now, he can't hear a town hall -- unless of course somebody keeps a running transcript for him. That can be done, but what can't be done is the yawning divide. A sim crack opened up, and some people were on one private island and floated out to sea, and left the others behind. A world that was *supposed to be* about being "better" and removing differences, veiling differences, erasing differences between people based on national origin, race, status, disability -- has had its fabric torn. Maybe torn badly.

I could put in here a long aside about those who aren't hearing impaired, but what you might call *cough* gender-impaired. That is, if anybody had the opposite gender in their avatar, they'd be a bit reluctant to have voice turned on because it would be unable to conceal their gender. Once everybody in public heard a booming male bass voice coming out of that petite flitting little fairy with the filmy, gauzy wings -- her cover would be blown, it would be 10 times harder get everybody to believe in her fairy-tude again...But I don't wish to trivialize my first point.

But...it's not only other categories of people who might like to avoid voiced -- one obvious category is people for whom English is not a first language, and they don't wish to have any accent betray their locations, nationality, origins, etc. I should they'd especially like to avoid coming on with a British accent, revealing to all the Americans who hate Brits the real reason for their fucktard behaviour on the forums, or coming on with an American accent, and revealing to all the Brits who hate Americans the real reason for their sheer stupidity in working the game. And so forth and so on. Call it one more fabric torn -- some people playing in this world with the stage curtains very heavily veil'd o'er the scene already spend a good deal of the "game" trying to tear it back to see what the person "really is" in real life where they are often presumed to have "no life" -- and all this does is make it easier for them.

Richard Bartle wrote a famous essay about these issues for Game Girl Advance:

The context was a bit different -- the importance of trying to suspend belief in MMORPGs. But some of the principles apply...it's an essay that despite its date is still linked on GGA because it is still debated including by Bartle himself at various conferences.

"If you introduce reality into a virtual world, it's no longer a virtual world: it's just an adjunct to the real world. It ceases to be a place, and reverts to being a medium. Immersion is enhanced by closeness to reality, but thwarted by isomorphism with it: the act of will required to suspend disbelief is what sustains a player's drive to be, but it disappears when there is no disbelief required.

Adding reality to a virtual world robs it of what makes it compelling - it takes away that which is different between virtual worlds and the real world: the fact that they are not the real world.

Voice is reality."

Of course, the RL-in-SL people like to turn SL merely into a kind of 3-D resume coat hanger and chat space for their next gig -- the worldness of the world is actually irritating to them.

They'll be the first to say voice is not new in SL. Lots of people have been using Team Speak and Skype and any other program that might be out there to work in groups and avoid those long stupid mad typing sessions where you sit on a prim chair and wait for your fellow avatar to get done waving his hands over an imaginary typewriter. This can take FOREVER. Sometimes people start...type..you hear the typing noise the Lindens have obsessively laid on to the sound track of SL...they keep typing...they remind me of that hilarious scene in that movie was it with Tom Hanks where he goes to the airline reservation desk and the lady types for like 20 minutes frantically in front of the screen and then says...the flight is completely booked. More often than not when that happens in SL it's because someone's game has crashed and their avatar remains connected to the server until unlogged.

Voice can help people building a sim or managing a club or running a RL-related medium -- it moves things faster, people hear tonalities, possibly they trust one another. That's they theory anyway.

The greatest thing about Voice for SL, of course, is that it will remove that last vestigial need to do any typing whatsoever during cybersex. You can just click once on the Play-Sexy device, then hands-free, talk on your Skype...if indeed any talking will need to be done.

But now...a word from our sponsors! The hyperflute! Before Philip was able to work all the levers to get on the air, somebody put on a hyperflute, some kind of electronic music-playing device sold inworld for a few hundred dollars. That advertisement sure assured THAT avatar some traffic and sales...and no doubt other FIC Power Hour aspiring ad-buyers are thinking of the potential with things like Hermia Linden's Tinies skin to Robin Linden's new gorgeous new red hair-do (gosh, I love red-heads, and that hair that is very subtly placed in ringlet curls without any of that hard-edged hoochie-hair look is really yummy -- who made that hair? they should get traffic too!).

Now back to our studio, folks.

Why did we move to voice? Well, in part it was because it turns out that Philip can't type. You know how they have these conversations in offices about really good-looking women they want to hire as secretaries until someone says...but can she type?

That was one problem. But a more urgent one was just the sheer wealth of information and nuances that Philip wants to get across these days that are hard to deliver in cramped half-sentence staccato bulletins. Of course, he could make the IM interface in SL 180 percent more user-friendly with softer edges, more space, and more features like it has in TSO, but that would be going in the not-cool direction of user-help instead of bleeding technology.

Yet listening to his voice-over of more than an hour, I couldn't hear what any new headlines are. There was no news. The same-old, same-old of "Havoc One and a Half...Still Coming!"  "Lincoln Still Dead!"

Still, the telling little asides are all part of building the knowledge base one needs to live in this world.

 

For one, Philip, CEO of Linden Lab, and Mayor of this Global Village, sounds TIRED. It must be one HELL of big job running that server farm with the 6000 people on it at any one time!

Then, there was the back and forth that some of the questioners got, that was permissible because they called in to Philip on Skype, and Jeska wasn't in between merely stripping out their questions if they weren't griefers, and they got to talk to the man directly.

So true to form as an engineer, Philip would tend to say, well, ok, great idea, but what's your plan for that? Where's the to-list? Tell me your voting proposal number.

Voting proposal number.

Wow.

That was the most scary part of this town hall. And if you thought THAT was scary...if you kept listening...you'd hear that Philip also knew by heart the numbers of other proposals and just pulled them up out of the ether in the discussion.

He reads the dumb voting proposals and knows their numbers. So those with ears to hear will listen, and get busy not only making voting proposals, but telling Il Chefe their numbers.

You know, I almost don't know where to start on this one, there are so many things wrong with it, but I'll start with the question I typed to Jeska (after battling with her for 10 minutes where she kept *answering my question herself* and not passing on the question, interspersed with those plasticine electronic customer-service smiles the Lindens beam at you:
: )
: )
: )
"I'm Customer Relationship Manager Linden, May I Help You? : ) : ) : )

FINALLY I framed a question she couldn't answer, so she passed it to El Presidente.

"Why can't we vote 'no' on the voting section on the web page?"

Philip sounded a little bit startled by the question but answered that he and Robin could think about it. Maybe it would make sense.

Of course, I know there are deep layers of conscious or unconscious ideologies at work here that explain why Cory Linden didn't code the ability to say "no" on the feature voter...but we need to keep asking and asking that question.

I don't want to live in a country where I can't vote "no".

The Lindens keep trying to make me live in a platform where I upgrade to optimal positive reinforcement status various proposals that reach a critical level of positivity as others slowly drift down to less critical levels of positivity due to their inability to attract positive-reinforcement yes-clicking mouses within a sufficient window of avatar response-time related to retinal-lock-ratios.

But I definitely want to skip over that forced-march gunky tech stuff that is based on the same ideologies of Google and Slash.dot and Wikipedia and just push at you what some code-is-lawster is pushing on you, and I definitely want to vote "no".

No.

When the Lindens can see a flashmobbed proposal that attracted, say, 327 votes for p2p, they should also see that if there are 536 votes AGAINST it that they have to give some thought about how to phase and implement the thing that they and their friends are excited about.

These Lindens always think they're going to be able to avoid and skip over RL politics and representational institutions. They think by just collecting server data and fixing various sliders and options and user interfaces that you can get government-on-a-prim.

Philip has found his voice, to be sure. But we've lost ours, even if we can fight our way past the filters of Jeska, the Second Cast, the tekkie handling the call-in number or the Skype address.

Before, in the Golden Age of Lindenor, all our questions on the forums, put in the threads, were asked of Philip. People doubt this now, and the people trying to take over the waves are lying about and spinning this now, but in fact our questions in the forums threads were indeed put before Philip.

More to the point, any questions that developed in the room during the meeting were visible, and his answer was visible.

A perfect transcript was instantly created by pressing 'select all' on "chat history".

 

Now all of that is gone -- our voice is lost.

Now, faceless avatars/tekkies/Lindens will filter the questions and relay them to Philip. Well, in part that's life in the big city. RL radio shows work that way. If President Bush does a Fireside Chat you don't get to just call him up directly and bitch at him directly.

In SL, though, we are still small enough of a town at about 6000 people logged on at any one time that knowing everybody else's business, and seeing what fucktards they are on the forums and sometimes inworld, we can't trust some of them if they get at the mike and run the show.

I think voicing helps the Lindens more than it helps us, because we aren't as easily voiced. Tekkies are scornfully and witheringly blasting non-tekkies for their failure to just download Skype for $0 and pick up some cheap pair of headphones. Yeah, I used to have Skype but turned it off eventually, it was too great a distraction.  Headphones, sure. Great. But...someone has to manage the uptake, and you can be sure by next broadcast Johnny Ming will have changed his Skype address, citing "griefers" -- which will also eliminate the ordinary person's right to know a publicly-accessible 1-800 style call-in number to a show.

What's clear from this exercise is that lots of different communication channels need to be opened up for feedback to the rulers in Second Life.

Gwyn Llewelyn would like to have these "interpreters" of the world just "emerge" and just "take power" -- in systems like the ResMod.

People who take power in that fashion don't have social legitimacy, however, whatever their attraction within a narrow circle of elites.

Traxx Hathor would just like to mute and filter out anybody who doesn't seem to be worthy of being "in our channel" and be done with them -- execute them at dawn if need be:

"To the extent that this is indeed a communications medium we can stifle malefactors by refusing to supply them with bandwidth on valuable high signal-to-noise communications channels. For example, on an individual level I like the mute function. It lets an individual explicitly choose to pay no attention to a time-wasting troublemaker such as an IM-stalker. On a group level those who own a communications channel like a forum are under no obligation to provide costly bandwidth to everybody who wants it. It makes sense to ignore those with a track record of grabbing way more than their share of bandwidth to use for self promotion and denigrating whoever is on their hate-list. In both of these cases the owner of the bandwidth is making the decision based on first hand knowledge; it's not some overarching institution doing system-wide enforcement."

This sort of paragraph assumes so much -- that there is a panel of experts who have agreed who is "denigrating"; that the "hate-list" is in fact a hate list and not perhaps merely a small group of people who in fact are hogging the airwaves themselves. An overarching institution creates law that is accessible to all against which they can see how actions are interpreted. The so-called "first-hand knowledge" is inevitably biased and the aggregate of a little elite clump's "first-hand knowledge" is not acceptable to me or the next guy with *different* first-hand knowledge.

I'm going to have to think a lot more about how you can create information channels in this soup -- one hope is that there will be many podcasters, or least 2 more than Johnny Ming and his pals from completely different worlds. Those operating Internet radios they use mainly for music and entertainment have to think a lot more about how they grapple with politics and not leave it to be merely "weather on the ones".

The townhall genre itself is limited, and it's now literally been turned on its ear, and transmogrified into a talk show.

But we need more than just talk shows -- we probably need more do-shows from our Lindens by having them come inworld much more and do focus-groups. I know it's wear-and-tear on them, but they can evaporate about 30 percent of the hatred and static about their incomprehensible decisions and policies if they just *show up* and listen -- not even talk.