Second Life Views is a program that has proved controversial not only because I objected to it. Of course, on the forums, it's mainly only Cocoanut standing up to the small but persistent inner core of the forums who keep defending the status quo ante ("Founding Fathers Syndrome") even to the point of hysteria. But there are enough other voices resounding on forums and blogs and in world that I hope the Lindens reconsider their notion of forming a permanent resident advisory board.
Some on the forums have purported to find some analogy between our making Metaverse Justice Watch last summer, in its original incarnation, and this "permanent resident advisory board". Of course, there's a big difference: we were self-selected, and all we did was petition the Lindens. To be sure, we were stuck petitioning them like boyars appealing to the tsar, or guilds appealing to the king, in a medieval set-up, not like customers, more like supplicants.
Four things resulted from this meeting -- other than the vilification we were subjected to on the forums.
1) First, the one request we had, for the Lindens to develop and relase their employee ethics requirements, was fulfilled. They did this after about 6 weeks. From discussing this topic, many believed that Lindens were not allowed to maintain big businesses and earn money, lead big non-profit projects, or garner reputational enhancement or extend it to partners or friends. The ethics manual of sorts, a rather wan and thin document (though it's good *something* exists) didn't really clarify this issue at all. Later, we were to watch aghast as Lindens in fact maintained their big RL or SL projects -- finally the attention brought to this issue compelled BuhBuhCuh to "out" that he was Ben Linden (more on this another day -- it's funny that after all the thuggish threats made against me by Hiro and others, the outing proved to be a big non-event for this Linden and his pals, and I think most people didn't notice, didn't care, and haven't glommed on to him anyway now that they know his "true identity").
2) The second thing that happened is that we were told that neither land nor wealth were recognized as stake in SL, unlike RL. This reified the content-creators hold over SL, to our dismay, and helped preserve the model of SL as "Content Tsar's Kremlin" -- create or die, be a creator or be a consumer, etc.
3) The third thing that happened is that while the telehubs weren't on the agenda, contrary to popular hysteria, when they *were* put on the agenda later in the summer by some in the same group as the original MJW, the Lindens took the meeting, took it seriously, and agreed to the buyback. I think it's one of the few times when we can point to the Lindens actually heeding something the land baron lobby said, and acting on it (I suppose their willingness to put in telehubs in the northern atoll continent was another concession, except later it seemed Lindens were letting us know that telehubs were planned for the Iris Moth temple anyway, and I suspect that what the Lindens had really been about last year with first the atoll continent, then the map, and then p2p was trying to do something that was originally supposed to have all 3 things at once: a spectacular new continent with an intriguing legend; no telehubs in it to mar the experience; and the map and p2p to be able to hop all around it with ease and preserve its pristine beauty. But coding being what it was, they had to sequence these developmental phases.
People imagine the land lobby to have all kinds of clout; in fact the Lindens are always breaking their backs. It's been rather sagely pointed out by a smart friend that the land glut continues on the auctions: the Linden has devalued another 5 percent in the last month, but land price has only increased by 1 percent, and that doesn't even fit their notion of expanding to meet the population. Something's up.
The failure of the land lobby to get their way is just part of life -- interest groups don't always get their way. If it were a company and customers, it wouldn't matter. If it were a guild and the Middle Ages, it would be too bad too if the landowners failed to beat the craftsmen. In a country, however, it does matter.
4) The fourth thing that happened is that seeing this grassroots organizing by a group of its highest-paying customers, bar-none, the Lindens reacted by attempting to subtly co-opt it. First, they sat idly by as the "community" savaged all the people in MJW (to this day, the forums freaks are still ranting about an alleged claim that we all called everyone else "tourists," when this was only one part of what Anshe said, and was meant in the most ordinary way -- that many, many, MANY people drop into Second Life and NEVER COME BACK (something most people don't even want to talk about, until it gets on a Harvard blog, and then finally Hamlet nee Linden blogs about it). And LL even cooperated in the splitting of MJW -- manually removing me from the group at Anshe's behest -- and enabling MJW to be made into a farcical political theater occasionally taken over for laffs by Jauani or one of the other regs like Nolannash or Enabrat.
Then they made the Community Round Table. This was going to serve as their cleaned-up, controlled version of a residents' lobbying group by taming and neutralizing it, citing the Big, Bad, Unruly Town Hall meetings. They looked blindly at the audience of these meetings that were so griefed, and refused to admit that it was just W-HAT and their hangers-on and plausible-deniers inworld.
They handily booted me fro the CRT mailing list early on using various subterfuges, but then the CRT got overrun, too, and presented them with a problem: how could they meet privately with the people they liked, and get away with it, with all the scrutiny?
Indeed, one of the main reasons that FlipperPA and the Lindens want to get the hide-from-map function going in the game is so that they can meet with each other, and big clients, and whomever they want, without any transparency, or any pubilc accountability. They want secrecy, invisibility, and most of all, a free-hand to do their thing without complainers or exposers getting in the way.
Making this ResGov, patterned after the ResMods, or one could point out, the Quislings or the satraps or the Russian overlords of the 'stans, the Lindens can feel less nervous about this big world they can't even physically see anymore with all these people on it.
They know that while everybody bitches about resident government, they will roll over supinely and take it up the ass sublimely if it is something like this, where the "company" invokes a "focus group" and the need to listen to its "customers" in the usual consumer model.
One of SL's Greatest Economic Minds (yes, Jamie, there's more than one!) said at the Sutherland Dam last night that I need to drop my "mercantile model" because Lindens are going with a "consumer model" for their business and economy.
Except...I didn't think up the mercantile model, our um progressive Lindens did. SL is nothing so much like a company town of the 1930s, and their corporate philosophy stems from the most ancient and creaking idea of one big CEO and loyal family members, some of them literally relatives (the Lindesidents), and the numerous tool and die makers or welders or clerks or typists spread out through the mammoth chain of factories and franchises all over the land. There's nothing at all modern and "consumer oriented' about this -- in fact those of us with inworld businesses and customers are forced either to go out of business due to rising costs and rapid inflation, or mimic the LL old-fashioned top-down hierarchical model as we queue up and wait for attention from the Concierge, pay heavy taxes to advertise our wares in Classified, pay land fees that would make a Russian serf quit-renter blush, constantly double our prices, and suffer occupational hazards of all sorts that aren't even really studied properly yet by science or government.
In fact a consumer-oriented model (everyone things this is going to be open-source) is years away, possibly even light-years away. In fact, just like they dumped a lot of people off the world with the removal of events grants and development incentive (and now are monkeying even with the payouts to their instructors with a new voucher proposal (!)), so they will dump off many amateur sim owners who rent directly from Governor Linden when they go open-source. Where will those consumers go? They'll be forced to queue up to the few prosumer/satrap overlords whom the Lindens will have developed by that time as the Game Masters, the few who will get licensed copies of the software and either have their own servers or get special discounts on the servers, wholesale. In fact, the model is more like Moscow, the Central Committee, the regional party secretary, and Bishkek than anything recognizable modern, free, flexible, and equal.
Only when Second Life becomes more like Napster used to be, where people buy and sell worlds and their contents peer-to-peer with out queuing up to Linden Lab, anshechung.com, or SLboutique.com, could there be a real "browser" and "Internet-like" experience like Walker is always talking about on 3pointd.com
Some competitors to LL are already thinking in talking in those terms, where there will be home-brewed light and portable Worlds for Windows or something, but it's not there yet. What's far more likely is this oligarchic model we have now -- which isn't an accident. Many people especially on the forums think of our current actual Second Life, with its brutal prices, land fees, and auctions won by mainly one company, with hugely stratified land prices and a land glut, as somehow just an aberration, something that is this one person's fault, or something that is corrected by this or that little measure, especially of the bromide type, such as "learning to understand this is a GAME and having some FUN in it!"
Instead, people must realize that it's this way because it *is* this way. As much as the Lindens are enlightened despots, enlightened game gods, as much as they listen more to their customers and by contrast with the Sims Online are a benign tropical paradise dictatorship, the fact is, they are still despots. Code is law. Cory reigns supreme. There is no voting "no". Robin gets to pick 8 people...and 8 more...and the IRC channelers get to cluck or whistle in approval or disapproval. This is how it is. You couldn't change this unless you bought out Linden Lab -- the only way to overthrow it literally -- and that's not going to happen client-side.
Now...we're supposed to discount this country stuff entirely, we're supposed to discard Philip's famous quote as just an example of him smokin' weed, and we're supposed to wise up to the fact that currency exchange, social and economic classes, massive immigration, control of borders, signing of treaties, etc. doesn't amount to a country.
OK, fine, let's jettison all this country stuff for the moment and just take the company stuff on its own terms.
Of course...the forums armchair analysts, especially those with little or no business experience in RL or SL, are fond of wagging their finger at your and admonishing you to "care about LL's bottom line" and "realize they have a business to run". LL is something more like a government-funded experiment (that's why they call it Lab) or a non-profit venture -- it's doesn't yet make a profit. In fact, it's long-term life might be better secured as a think-tank for the Metaverse rather than a software company, which would be a respectable role for it.
But let's just suppose, given that they are "very close" to being profitable (a few more islands! a few more thousand customers!) that they are a real company. And that what they're holding is a "focus group".
Of course, in "focus group" terms it's a bust -- you don't pick people for a focus group *this* way, reaching for a few categories from A to B.
If there really was a "focus group" being made, we'd see the following avatars who really represent SL:
o big, busty black female entrepreneurs "representin' from Hotlanta" who have sizeable amounts of island or whole-sim mainland land holding and events and/or content business and a heck of a lot more fun in SL than most forums-posters.
o some Victorian-clad Caledonian 32-year-old female lesbian musicians who play live music on weekends
o 40-something part-time Wal-Mart employees who work as call girls at Barbies (male or female in RL; female in SL) and live in Prok's rentals until they can buy their own land
o teens posing as adults with names like 1234KewlRick who are talented weapons makers pulling in as much as $50-100 USD a week
o 30-something American males who are insurance adjusters in RL who find love and big palaces and bling in SL and rent from Azures
o 50 year old programmers literally having a second life with SL and who sample BDSM in lite amounts
o Italian or Arabian princes in RL who are squandering the family inheritance on huge shopping islands, bling, and girls before they get bored and go off and play WoW
Well, you get the idea. Not the FIC, or the anti-FIC but completely other kinds of people -- there are lots, lots more of them on the grid than you or me.
So this isn't about the actual customers, even the actual island-buying, premium-account buying customers, such as to make a focus group. Focus groups, and I've been in them, and also made them, are drawn from your user or subscription base or even funders and they are made up of demographics, zip-codes, etc. We could have a whole long discussion about what a focus group is or isn't, but let's face it, that's not what the Lindens are making when they take Kex Godel or Alliez Mysterio -- these are people that either they expect to tell them about programming issues possibly with a very critical eye and mouth (we keep hearing this claim that there are angry young programmers pissed at LL for all kinds of righteous reasons) or people that they figure will tell them stuff they can't be bothered to find out about -- like how the hell you can make a dime off buying 29 of Philip's pet rocks, also known as islands.
I think this isn't really about getting advice from the People, or the Symbolic Representative Groups, however -- the Sounding Board concept. It's more about the message they want these Platonic Ideals to take *back* to the People.
I think the Lindens honestly function in a kind of cult - the love machine concept, this "we're all in a barn together" office layout (I'd make short work of that, as I think anybody who has ever had to run an office would) -- the fatty breaks, the whatever -- whatever that je-ne-sais-quoi is the Essence of Lindenor that they'd like to get people to grok on in person, since conveying it over broadband proves so difficult. If nothing else, you'll get to smell what kind of air freshener they have in the bathroom and take it from there, and also give us the skinny on whether they meet state regulations for emplyoee lunch rooms.
Now...if we're going to reject this idea that it's a country -- sending messages back to the People who emerge convinced and come back and spread the gospel (no doubt this line item is under the "evangelizing" category of PR) then...we'd have to assume that picking 40 customers (remember there will be more than one group) out of the 24000 online any one day isn't the best way to sample even a company's opinion or even the best way to convince all those skeptics like Prok (or that guy on a Harvard-related blog I was just reading who said his first sign-on to SL "wasn't pretty" and he quit in frustration).
So...let's stick with the company thing a minute. The company and its needs and its bottom line (this is the assignment Surreal and others have given to Cocoanut to work proposals against) is supposed to be Uber Alles, correct?
Wrong. If Second Life, the platform and the grid and all the things on it, were just about One Company, All Hail the Holy Company, it would be utter folly.
The reality of Second Life is that it is about *many* companies. It is a prototype of a web application, a software package that will be part of the 3-D web and what's called the Metaverse. So...how it deals with *companies* now given it's long-term prospects is really important.
And this is precisely what they aren't looking at in any systematic way.
The *companies* of Second Life are people who run businesses in SL. They run content, land, event, venue, or service businesses. These are small, medium, and large. They generate revenue, even if -- much like Linden Lab itself!!!! -- they are "almost but not quite yet profitable". Why only look to the 2000 people who generate $20,000 a year in income by not really billing for their hours and letting their RL gigs feed their online hobby? Why not also look at a lot of other people -- thousands who still manage to cover tier and then some? Each and every one of these little or medium or big operations are tremendously important not only for Linden Lab as a company, but for the Metaverse as a prospect.
Companies. Companies that have other companies, connections, families, co-workers, vendors, suppliers, customers. Very, very few (they tend to be the FIC and *are* the FIC because of this) residents ever use SL in their RL jobs. Of course we know the celebrated Flipper has done this with his gas station, and there are others who are "RL in SL" in ways that are innovative and interesting, though hard to prove valid as a cost center for most businesses.
And of course we have Twentieth Century Fox...once. We have Microsoft...once. We have Wells Fargo...once. We have Warner Brothers...once. Maybe twice. But...their long-term visibility or presence is a wildcard right now.
Resident-created businesses aren't terribly interesting to the Lindens. They actually seem to have a bit of contempt for them, because they've stopped all of their incentives, not even keeping something that would have been a really obvious incentive, like a small business or even any business award that went to avatars that could actually show inworld profit in their accounts over revenue and expenses, or even just substantial revenue enhancement through attempting various strategies. They could even consider bringing back a voluntary leader board of those willing to subject their accounts to such scrutiny.
But...they are far more eager for quick fixes with big-named companies that can ensure huge splashes of media coverage (be sure to read all the way down the comments on this one for a good horse laugh).
Companies that are just companies, in a vacuum, selling widgets, might bring in their main widget-buyers or advisors in the industry known for good widget-making for a confab and a look-see.
But...remember last year when a bunch of people made what they called "RL FIC Invasion of SL?" Flipper was on it, I think, and I remember Jake Reitveld was on it and gave a thoughtful talk about it at the Sutherland Dam. I distinctly remember what he said: "They want resident government, they want the residents to take over the world, they want to make that possible." THAT is what it's about.
So...let's parse this. How can you take over a world, when there is no world? How can you rule a country, when there is no country? The same people who happily tell you to get over your little fantasy that there's a country turn around five minutes later and talk with somber and fake altruistic faces about governance of the complex world of the grid. Somebody has to Help the Lindens because gosh, it's so big now!
So...there's a lot to think about there, but stick with the Big Company among Many Other Companies model that I'm suggesting.
You are a big supplier of servers, a downloadable client to access those servers, the illusion of land, and a kind of very light and largely ineffectual police service. To make that service/company work, you have to have lots and lots of other companies -- virtual estate sellers and renters, builders, scripters, clothiers, events-planners etc. who take care of all these customers who come in the door. Because that's the model -- it's not about making content, pushing it, have the customers burn through it, making more content. It's about putting out the skeleton for others to build content and push and burn through.
Of the people they've picked for round one, two fit that model of companies-within-the-company -- Alliez and Nexus -- and one, Catherine Omega, is related by marriage, as it were, to the chief clothing making and RL-gig-lander and builder Aimee Weber.
Second Life is a nesting doll of companies. Inside the first matryoshka, is the biggest SL company, Anshe Chung. Inside that, is somebody else who buys Anshe's land or rents Anshe's land, and so on, down the line to the littlest t-shirt maker in appearance mode who sells in a first-land shack for $5.
All of the matroshki can only make sense within the nesting-doll set-up. Nobody buys just one nesting doll, or the smallest, or the medium size -- the whole point of nesting dolls is to buy the package.
And each layer of the nesting doll depends on the previous bigger doll to open it up and uncover it -- unless you unpack the dolls, you can't see what is underneath. In much the same way, any business within SL not only depends on LL for its very essence on the servers (it can't exist yet apart from them), it also depends on LL or some other bigger doll within the nest to open up and uncover it -- the dependency is hierarchical.
Of course, any of the dolls might try to form their own relationship outside the nest, but we don't have a lot of examples of that. In fact, one way to look at it is to see that the big doll is actually a set of littler dolls that it has GOM'd.
Akh, as Tyutechev put it so inimitably, "Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone."
Oh my gosh I've argued in circles in support of both sides and you've deemed me dead wrong either way.
It is true that I don't switch gears in midstream very well. I'm too terse. All those graduate lessons in adding loads of useless verbiage to arugments and switching sides half-a-dozen times to wear people down went over my head.
I bow to your intelligentia ability to shred my arguments and expose me for the shallow fool I am.
It's good that we have persistent watchdogs plugging away, keeping us in line, working brains and fingers to the bone to make the Lindens do the right thing. It's really too bad that you'll never be paid any kind of way for it all, especially the colossal amount of time.
Posted by: Khamon | 06/20/2006 at 11:24 PM
Khamon, it's a fool's errand. I've always said that. Of course you're right, but I just don't believe in Balkanization, so I try to cling to my absurd federalist beliefs, of course in the face of the facts, which all point to the most bloody sort of Balkanization, with all sorts of basement brews that will make the current basement brews look like child's play -- and of course with this weeks' horror, Grim Babies, I guess we can expect it can and will get worse...
It's the definition of insanity, running mainland rentals, and expecting it's going to be different today, or tomorrow. No sooner do I defense-buy a parcel in Cub off the auction, and think, God, I'm done, never again, then whoops, suddenly, for my sins, I see this neighbour's vast plot seized by Governor Linden in Refugio, with absolutely no announcement or expectation, somebody who has been my neighbour with a thriving casino concern for 18 months at least. Boggles the mind. And another HUGE vulnerable patch opens up, and you know this time, no, I can't defense-buy it, I can't even watch helplessly as Anshe chops it and it gets poseballs everywhere for sale, it's going to be far far worse. In fact, all my hard work there for over a year will go up in complete smoke, as the club that will likely buy that, Barbie's, which has not been a nice neighbour in a 100 ways, mainly by putting 33 avs on the sim day after day so that you can't even get home to your property, is likely to buy that patch and control what little FPS I had managed to snag for myself.
I suppose I could keep my part as something like one of those low-prim sims that Dana is selling. A parcel with nothing happening on it at all, where there is no expectation for building or for scripts to execute, just a place to chill. Perhaps I can put out your purple particle tree and look at it fondly and remember better days when I could actually move on that sim....
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 06/20/2006 at 11:50 PM
I must admit that this new 200m-banline thing has really depressed me about the mainland. It was bad enough before, but at least you could zoom up above all the red lines left there by absent landowners and still see the ground. Now it'll just be av pinball, and it won't make a blind bit of difference to griefers because they can just re-register and avoid the block (not to mention drop things from 200m or shoot from outside the parcel).
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 06/21/2006 at 02:33 PM
Oh. And now it appears that LL put this in at the last minute after hearing from a couple of people and not even bothering to consult anyone else about it - when those people *didn't even realise that it would affect whitelists as well as blacklists*.
I am really, really fucked off about this. If there was ever an illustration why they should actually *consult* people rather than just listen to a chosen few, this is it.
Posted by: Ordinal Malaprop | 06/21/2006 at 05:25 PM
People doubt me when I tell them that a tiny group of few are always able to throw the platform their way. This is a good example. p2p is another (while there is broad support for p2p, it didn't have to be accompanied by eradication of telehubs. There was no reason in hell telehubs could not have remained, and facilitated business at some hubs. And the irony of it is, the private islands got to KEEP their telehubs and make people land centrally, and vector, and fly to stuff and fly over stuff to get somewhere, having the business-axis effect that was stolen away from the mainland, where people type in a sim name now and land in the bushes or the water at 128/128 instead of a hub. Bleh. Plus they have grey squares.
The 200 m2 ban seems reasonable on one hand, because an annoying thing about griefers is the way they kept hovering right over your house and lobbing shit in on you. It's that part I wish they could get rid of -- ban me, ban my prims simulataneously, that's how it should work, I guess it's not so easy to code though.
You're right, it harms flying and airways.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | 06/21/2006 at 09:01 PM