The underlying textural substrate to every sim...
You thought because SL's Most Successful Capitalist and Greatest Economic Mind Jamie Bergman still posted obsequious fealty to the forums so often that we still had a King Philip.
You thought that King Philip still existed because only this morning, Walker posted on the SL Herald that "King Philip Joins the Podcast Cast"
Yet if you listen to that podcast, you realize that our monarch has fled his throne; worse, he has betrayed the Motherland by listening to Bad Advisors and Corrupt Foreign Influences.
If Justice Soothsayer were a Righteous Man, he would issue a warrant for the arrest of this failed King on charges of treason; yet Democracy Island is silent, its traffic fallen to the lower double digits...The Motherland is in Danger...the Motherland may be no more...
Indeed, forget about Anshe Chung's ban (she's back!) and the grave threat to the independent Continent of Dreamland, or the Independent State of Caledon, we may not even have a world by morning, as our Monarch has GOM'd our very world.
Those of us who support the "Country" school of interpretation about Second Life are often described as hopeless romantics or hopeless losers who actually gaze out to Linden sunsets on open protected Linden seas while they admire their kitchenettes and rest from their poseballs. We're supposed to respect that the Platformers really have it right, with their dismissive attitude to the world and the people in it, as it serves merely as their "RL in SL" 3-D resume coathanger and at best, a server load-test. We're supposed to believe that the Platform Uber Alles is what even *gives* us a country anyway.
Bollocks. We know we could make a country of a house of cards, like kids playing with a cardboard box and a stone, if we had to -- the country is us, and we'll take it with us if we have to go, like immigrants everywhere since time immemorial...indeed, to be human means to be an immigrant on these very shores of life itself in our first world...far from our true home...
And the Platform had better serve that country, and know it's place, or the country will reject them, and the people will flee -- to other better worlds and "verses" -- uni, multi, meta, beta, and "last-same-as-the-first".
What hath Philip wrought? Well, for the full monte, listen to the Pods, but here are some hastily transcribed comments in black, with my comments interspersed:
SL is a new sort of space between people
I do have to wonder if Philip Linden is even remotely on the same page as Will Wright and his theory of "possibility space". I actually think, even though both of these men are Spiel Konig types, they have very different outlooks on communities. Whatever they might tell you as theory, you can read it in the interstices of their games -- and Will's game and Phil's game, as those of us on the short end of these sticks can tell you, are very, very different games.
In Phil's game, when you reach out your little avatar hand like a magician to right-click and edit a thing you see, the entire game heaves your little avatar's viewpoint away from the thing you're trying to see. That supreme act of violence, repeated millions of times of day for avatars, says it all.
In Will's game, you reach out your little avatar hand to another avatar and *shake it*. Three years into Phil's game, you can't shake somebody's hand, even if you want to spend $200 -- people have made "fuck me 3 ways from Sunday" animations but not a handshake.
In Phil's game, you have the supreme joy of making some little nothing tshirt with a library texture and hearing a "kaching" in the cashresiter as someone buys it; in Will's game, your avatar does this completely stupid little WOOT arm-pump each time he merely completes a chalkboard.
Reading about the kinds of game spaces there are, I couldn't help thinking of this famous quote:
Eleanor Roosevelt
"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
Eleanor Roosevelt |
Talking about these interactions in a new technology like Second Life, Philip says:
Whenever those things come around and they are primarily driven by users...Those types of phenomena seem to advance in a sneaky, organic way on everyone, and they seem to always come out of right field [rant about AOL]...That walled garden of content...most of the things those people put in the chat room is crap...Things like SL and the Internet which are really driven by the emergent actions of a large number of people, they always sneak up on you....
That's why I bother. This stealth stuff is really going to take over perceptions and thinking in a very short time, and it will be too late to change it very soon.
Because SL remakes the physical world...because the law or the culture that emerges will also necessarily be different...while we think of it as a country...there is a sort of difference that is written into the nature of SL, things are just different there, it's simulated on computers.
So...SL isn't a country. That is...it's not a country like a RL country. If it's a country...well..it's more about something that is "just different here" that is all in the SIMULATION and of course those who CONTROL that simulation. So profound is the self-awe and hubris of these simulators and controllers-of-simulation that they actually pride themselves on "remaking the physical world". Men and women still have to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom...but that's all something that will seamlessly be wired between first and second lives some day apparently.
So...there really isn't a country...there's a simulated....thingy...which is mainly about what is "on the computers" -- hence for a priest-like class of wise men and acolytes who can translate the arcane needs and feeds of these machines into Rule and "code as law."
Now...worried yet? Go back over it again to see the *really evil part*.
"because the law and the culture that emerges will necessarily be different".
Well...why? People are people. Their rights and freedoms cannot be protected merely because it's a simulated by simulators on a computer? Huh? Who are these guys? Just *what exactly* is going to be different about the law and the culture? Whose going to be in charge here?
But go forward 10 years...much more likely that SL will be...A place with a lot of different countries in it. The web kind of identity but mostly a big set of differing communities. Not like a country but a place that has its own laws. that is distinct. I would bet...will probbaly see it more like the WWW.
Well...what isn't "like a country" but "more like a place with its own laws"? You're soaking in it. That arbitrary, vexatious, loathsome things called the SL forums, where there is no equality before the law and no legitimate enforcement and interpretation of the law, is a good example. It's just "a place that has its own laws." What determines "it's own laws" might be the collection of abuse-reports it gets, or the feeling of "fun" that a Linden might feel pulling a job off the BLOTTD.
We will be driven to open it up faster and more...People will probably see it as more like the world..there's great meaning to that, right..its character and its law will be driven more by the groups that are in it than we as the creator of the country could do
Ok, first you think -- wow, great -- it's all going to open up and be faster and faster and free like the World Wide Web! Except...guess what...huge disappointment here:
its character and its law will be driven more by the groups that are in it than we as the creator of the country could do
So...not all hail King Philip, not all Hail the Holy Whole Grid...not even all Hail the Platform...but all hail the multidinuous Groups..."united we stand...divided we run free at last..."...in the atomized masses of groups, Just a Few, Just a Bunch, Just "We're the Smart Ones Surrounded By Idiots" will find it all-to-easy to plant a meme...fix a permission...replicate a function...and control, control, control...without accountability to law...under the guise of Groups and Their Local Culture.
And so lies the tragedy of our weak and hemophiliac King Philip I, our first sovereign, in our sovereign world. Cry for Lindenor, Cry for Secondlifeia, Cry for the World of All Possibilities that was our Homeland. She lies raped, defiled, bruised, and battered across the Platform which sundered her into many pieces...."Thins fall apart/the center cannot hold..."
The King, the Sovereign, abdicates his responsibility, ceding all power to "teh Ppl" who are merely various FlashMobs, SmartMobs, and just plain LynchMobs, loose, roiling, poisonous posses whom the King calls "groups".
Henceforth, all Groups shall reign -- be they BDSM, Gor, Furry, Norm, Blumfield, Boardman, or Independent State of Calendon. Groups without even fixed group tools...with group tools that are likely to have the Fix In for those Just a Few.
Listen. It gets worse:
more greater differences between groups of people...those differencies will be greater than the basic similarities that characterize the essential technologically-driven difference of the space itself.
In real life, we had the realities of our world -- the sun, the moon, the land, the water, the family, death, birth, food, hospitality -- as the substrate that could glue our many cultures together.
None of those things need exist in Second Life; if they exist, they can be turned on and off or switched at the click of a mouse.
So henceforth, no country. No grid. Not even the exigencies of a platform where there are only so many prims, and people should try to share prims. No...No shared commonality of lexicon or vision or indeed even commerce -- the world will dissolve into a million channels where arrogant assholes control the "bandwidth" or the "FPS" and the "mute" and the "ban". A million toggled permissions and settings and features.
There is to be nothing in common. Nothing...nothing at all.
Yet, even as he flees his throne, even as he dismantles his created country and trashes all commonality, he clings to the tattered vision of the One Grid the Hail Holy Whole Grid:
SL has this amazing spirit of support to it...I'm usually on the short end of the stick.
Who among all those groups will promulgate the "amazing spirit of support"? The self-appointed or petted stewards of the world, the Friends of Jeska, the FICs, the SICs, the FOCs?
King Philip then contrasts the inworld "amazing spirit of support" (what is he smoking?? -- he has never met a spinning sign he doesn't like, I guess) to...our hated forums, with their:
biased, negative spirit.
This he blames on
The nature of the interface, the laws of nature.
So...what sorts of affinities will be formed among large groups of people? What will make a group? Um.....:
live music...little cities...largely the same scaled up...lightning rods sort of experiences or pieces of content...fads will be hyper successful
Finally, we will reach the Satori of really living the Sims Online...
May God Have Mercy On Our Souls. The King is Dead! Long Live the King!
