EJECTED! And the Moveable Feast

I remember the first time I was at Jesrad Seraph's island at dawn, and I suddenly saw a mastadon and a giraffe come lumbering over the horizon. I first saw the camel meandering around in A'ksha, and had seen Jesrad riding out through the brand-new northern sims one night and hopped on, but that was a different effect. The effect of seeing moving, living animals come over the horizon was one of a startled: "My God, I'm in a world."

It's at those moments you realize what's missing in Second Life: movement not by our own agency. That is, I move all kinds of stuff around like a sturdy carpenter, gliding it on the XYZ axis all night long. Or somebody might lob a cage bomb at me and I'll go hurdling across the sim. This is my agency, and some other avatar's obvious agency. But what we usually don't see is movement by some agent that is not ours, but an animal's, or an NPC. That kind of startled "OMG it's alive" that you get from a really realistic NPC or a very skillfully crafted animal hasn't been so developed in SL.

I have a couple of turkeys made by Frans Charming that I put at the Gilded Cage Discussion Club in Derwent just to see them waddle around -- they help create that feeling of "world". They often walk off the world, the dummies, and I have to fetch them out of lost & found. When they first came out with the flexible prims, the eeriest thing about them was to see the way they wriggled and bucked and swayed in odd ways. Somebody left a gumby-like moving stick figure waving at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and thoroughly creeped me out. Jessica Ornitz made the blanket on the donkey in Memory Bazaar, our newbie orientation project, with flexiprims -- and the thing jerks slightly not as if in the breeze, but as if inhabited by a legion of bed bugs. Particularly funny to watch is the flexiprim hair. No doubt somebody thought that having hair swish back and forth would be sexy. It is...kinda...but also a bit gross, frankly, as you sit with someone on the couch, and their hair keeps oddly swishing around as if you are in an aquarium.

Movement...something alive...the world pushing back...the moment when E.T. rolls back the ball...this is what we've all been waiting for. I knew it was special when newbies and returning oldbies who had mothballed their accounts said it was special -- artificial intelligence, growth, realistic flora and fauna. It was this week's "Business Week" for new memberships.

Hamlet blogged it...so did many others; Raph Koster pronounced these ecosystems "the future of dynamic world environments". Laukosargas Svarog, an old and honoured SL resident, made a special island in which the flowers and trees grow naturally, i.e. from seeds, and the climate changes, adjusting to the growth -- there are clouds, rain -- everything. Amazing! I'll bet even Philip Linden doesn't get to feel as god-like.

I remember first meeting Lauk when she came to contests we had at the club in Refugio. Back when I was a naive nOOb, I thought I was helping to get attention to what I saw as under-noticed artists and architects. I remember the gorgeous fountains she made.

Of course, Lauk, on the forums, turned out to be like a lot of the "creative intelligentsia" of SL, the tekkie wikinistas or FIC and their likeminded ones, who have a very rigid set of views -- rigidity that curiously conflicts with their ostensible free creative spirit. These include:

o a desire for favouritism to be shown to the creator class on the basis of their god or junior-god status
o hatred of the hoi polloi, the masses in their suburban tracts
o contempt for the mixing and matching and chaos of the mainland
o dislike of capitalism or even any kind of profit-making commerce
o heightened belief in one's own superiority

o a conviction that profit-making activity doesn't belong in SL because either it's a game, or it's an altruistic utopian commune.

I could go on. There are a hardy crew like this, as we all know. I remember first tangling with Lauk on the Community Round Table. We were discussing the problem of public space and how to make it available. Since I spend a lot of time and effort on this issue, I really become annoyed when people bleat and carry on about how there are no parks or meeting places and it's all malls and commercial strips in SL. This is horseshit.  Many people put a LOT of time and effort into creating just these parks and meeting places often at their own expense, and it is wrong to denigrate their efforts by calling the mainland a "landfill" as Lauk has done five minutes after departing the mainland for a private island.

In this thread on the CRT, Lauk dismissed my offer to provide public spaces for symbolic rents as "all this commercial crap". I had placed  no such restrictions on these rentals. They are houses and ampitheaters and lodges and spas, with no giant "Ravenglass Rentals" billboard or even tasteful sign or notecard giver. That isn't the point at all. The point is to get the spaces used, and to have familiarity with the communities. Evidently Lauk can't conceive of business with social responsibility or business with any kind of taste...except her own, of course. She sells tree houses and all manner of stuff in her stores, but that sort of commerce isn't "crap" because, well, it's hers, and not somebody else's whose tastes she doesn't share. That's the way of SL.

When I chastised her for having an "allergy to commerce" by so haughtily dismissing my offer to provide public space, which people on the thread were claiming was in short supply in SL (it isn't), bang, Pathfinder, who has long had a grudge against me, booted me from the list. He did this in a really heinous manner, making up a "one strike and you're out" rule and disseminating it *after* he booted me, as the record shows. (My first offense was called "disclosure" for taking an abusive email filled with verbal harassment some asstard sent me, and posting it to the list -- in a frustrated effort, after several direct emails weren't answered, to get the Lindens to realize something urgent -- that their listserve was enabling some idiots to write people on their personal emails, because it was showing them; furthermore, their list was borked in various ways.)

Armed with determination after that experience -- so unjust and so typical of these Lindens who can allow one resident to slam another and call them "filled with commerce crap" but not allow another to say "you have an allergy to commerce" -- I took on Lauk when she posted this huge socialist manifesto to the forums. It's a long-winded screed, so let me give you the highlights...except I just did -- what it boils down to is the idea that creators should be favoured, the mainland is crap, capitalism is evil, etc.

"75% of the grid is basic prefab, what I call "middle american suburbia". (okt it's slightly insulting but it's what I call it." Here, Lauk reveals her hand as the typical Brit with a bug up her ass about Americans, hating them for their mass tastes. Well, get over it. Just like Lauk fled the mainland for the private islands, gosh, I can think of some starving people who fled the British Isles in RL for America for...all kinds of reasons, eh?

1 percent of the mainland is of interest to Lauk. OK, that's how it gets, the funnel narrows and narrows until finally you are a screeching hysteric, neuralgically demanding aesthetic perfection by your lights...until another enraged tekkie wiki creator-fascist aesthete comes along neuralgically to claim *their* vision of perfection...You wonder if she can grant autonomy to even this created flora and fauna...

Lauk was also busy in the forums commandeering the FIC and the forums regs to join in a land preserve effort -- well more on that another day, a separate topic I've studied for a long time with my own preserve.

My topic today is -- hey, I'm warming to it! -- Our Walled Garden. Tony Walsh once called SL the "walled garden," and I imagine I wasn't the only one who thought of the Secret Garden. He no doubt had in mind the high-end computers and DSL line that keeps out the poor and the developing world from this flower of Western technology, this Garden of Unearthly Delights.

But what I often notice about it is the vision of aestheticism, which is so zealous, so fierce, so just plain neuresthenic, as to constitute a kind of cult, really, a form of touch provincialism that makes SL almost unbearable at times. A certain faction of the FIC has a "fuck you hedonism" perspective that says "I get to do What the Fuck I Want On My Land." Another faction celebrates aestheticism to the point of being moronic. They are merely two sides of the same coin: a desire to control others, either to make the kow-tow to anybody's bad build, especially my own, or to make them kow-tow to my aestheticism. Either way, the individual is diminished.

There's much to argue with Lauk about -- and indeed I did that in my "Get Off Our Backs" Thread. I also had another intervening encounter when I saw her casually announce that she was selling Orwood, her sanctuary containing the legendary Lauk's Nest. I was amazed that she didn't put up an offer to people to preserve it. She offered it for sale, at a not-bad price. Random Unsung offered to put tier on it, which wasn't really that much, but urged her to help find others to support the cash purchase, or wait on collecting the cash. Only one 512 donor could be found. Despite events in world, notices on the forums, etc. -- finally she shrugged off all "public land preserve efforts" in favour of selling it to a private individual who had vowed to keep it as it was. Whatever.

Still, forums skirmishes, ideological differences -- frankly, it would never occur to me to hold such things so close as to actually ban a person from my land, or refuse to talk to them and put them on mute (there's only a few truly psychotic or maliciously persistent that I'd do that with). If someone does a good build, and it gets mentioned by the RL media as a coup for SL -- you could only be happy for them and SL.

When I flew off to see Lauk's new island Svarog, that was honestly all I had in mind. I was well aware of all her cranky views, hatred of the mainland, and hatred of people like me with their "tasteless mass taste". Too bad. Even the masses get to go to the park on Sundays and gawk at the Botanical Gardens at the Queen's Palace.

I flew around looking for the growing things -- other than something that looked like a dandelion fuzz after you blow it, I couldn't seem to see much. Suddenly, I caught sight of Lauk herself, with her wings and white dress. I couldn't quite see what she was doing, but it seemed a magnificent scene, so I took a picture. I believe that people who appear on sims open to the public shouldn't be fussy about having their picture taken. I don't think that's why Lauk ejected me, however.

First, I was ejected from what seemed like just one area of the sim. I seemed to be able to fly normally and even light in another part. I figured it was just what I had read about on Hamlet's blog, that occasionally when experimenting she had to eject people for various reasons, I think she said only 8 are being allowed on the sim at once.

So I started down the garden path when WHACK another freeze and eject hits me and a message that I'm not wanted.

I IM'd her and tried to ask if she was banning me, and for what reason. No answer. It's simple, however: she doesn't like me, doesn't like what I stand for, doesn't like my views, or my expression, or my debates against her own point of view. That's all it takes to put someone on a banned list in the Walled Garden. Banned not for griefing or destroying property, but for speech, and speech not even in the world. That's the way of Second Life, and that's the way that Philip Linden wants it when he celebrates "civic redress".

This is how it will be. The Archipelago of Egos. People like Lauk who consider themselves not only more refined and more creative (and in fact may be) but who consider their views on land, the economy, and society to be superior, will seek out likeminded, form sims with them, and keep others out. And...why shouldn't they? Isn't that what freedom is all about, freedom to be you and me and keep the other assholes away?

Of course, such a world made up only of likeminded under glass, in a bell jar, watching things grow and admiring each other endlessly, might get a bit...claustrophobic.

I was thrilled to read what Raph Koster wrote on this subject:

• What is your greatest fear for the future of networked technologies?

  "Humans grew up in tribes where you didn’t get to pick who else was in your tribe. We grew up in situations where we had to learn to get along with people who had opinions that were different from ours, and networked technologies are allowing us to form tribes that are homogenous. They’re allowing us to find groups of people who are just like us. And I think it’s wonderful to be able to find my tribe of people who read the same books I do and like my music and watch the same TV shows and in general share the same view of the world. That’s wonderful, because it makes you feel like you’re not alone any more. But on the other hand I think it’s incredibly important for the human race to be exposed to multiple viewpoints and to get to interact with people that we wouldn’t necessarily interact with if given our choice. One of the real risks in the networked environment is the lessened friction of connecting with people. People will choose to hang out with people they already know. They will choose to read the books they already know they will like, rather than taking a flyer on something new. Statistical analysis shows that this is the case when we look at all of the communities of interest that have formed on the internet. You can graph, for example, what political books people read, on Amazon, and what you find is Democrats won’t read the right-wing books and Republicans won’t read the left-wing books and almost no books cross the divide and are read by both, and that’s a very dangerous thing for our political establishment. That would be my worry about this low-friction information culture. Biology teaches us homogenous cultures are not a good thing – they’re very vulnerable."

I couldn't say it better. So...I won't.

Comments

[Cocoanut]

"Still, forums skirmishes, ideological differences -- frankly, it would never occur to me to hold such things so close as to actually ban a person from my land, or refuse to talk to them and put them on mute (there's only a few truly psychotic or maliciously persistent that I'd do that with). If someone does a good build, and it gets mentioned by the RL media as a coup for SL -- you could only be happy for them and SL."

Nor would it occur to me.

I have had nothing but positive experiences of Lauk since I first met her when I was new and had flown to her money tree.

She was there, and talked to me quite sweetly, and I complimented her little portion of the world profusely. I loved it, and I've always been a fan of her and her work.

Since then, all the experiences of her and with her I can remember have been similarly positive.

But Lauk! What you do here! Banning a person from your land for their positions on issues, or just because you don't like them!

Don't you want everyone to see it?

These people you may not like have friends, like me, who may not like your banning them just because of what they have said regarding issues!

Prok, the end result of this sort of thing is indeed entropy. I have always been totally aghast that people would actually seek out such isolation; would actually turn off others for slight reasons, and turn off the others' friends, to boot. It has a more far-reaching effect than they might imagine.

This does indeed result in "a world made up only of likeminded under glass, in a bell jar, watching things grow and admiring each other endlessly."

As such, it marginalizes its own self.

Because of that, it can never be very important.

OK, so why would people deliberately indulge in this petty sort of thing?

Well, I have thought about it, and think sometimes it might be because other people - regular people - don't really matter to them, since what they are doing is actually making something under a bell jar to then present the bell jar to corporations, as a resume thing of the type you often talk about.

But a lifetime of experience tells me loudly that how you treat the people on your way up counts a lot. Not only are those the same people you are going to meet on your way down, but the truly successful - who are already on top - don't particularly approve of such methods themselves.

If they did, they wouldn't be on top in the first place.

People need to understand that their own circle of friends is not the world. Even particular potential employers are not the world.

If there's a birthday party and everyone in the class is invited except so-and-so and such-and-such because the birthday girl doesn't like them, then that's a party I won't attend.

And ultimately, it's a party that most people won't attend.

I guess there's room in the world for plenty of these little closed bell jar parties, but I don't know why anyone would deliberately marginalize themselves and their projects and ultimately the importance of their contribution in this way.

If I had made such a thing as Lauk has, I would want everyone to see it.

coco

[S McLuhan]

I was trying to explain to my father why it was so important to me to be able to have access to people all across the world from within Second Life - and my exact reasoning was this: that I have greater exposure to a wide range of views and ideas. Thus I too am concerned with the idea of Residents becoming too insular (no pun intended). I strongly believe in the absolute right of all people to be able to share in that which is labelled public; this does not include destructive behaviour, of course, which precludes the ability of the thing to be shared.

[Brace]

I can't comment on these particular circumstances, as I've had no interraction with Lauk or her nest, save it being pointed out to me by someone as I was out testing my blimp.

However, I live by the credo of "Know Thy Enemy". I can't live in any world VR or otherwise without securing at least SOME knowledge and background concerning all aspects, whether I'm in agreement with them or not.

You gotta know your stuff. You gotta share your visions so that others can learn. They don't have to accept them or even like them. But they should have the choice and/or opportunity to be able to see it.

But glomming around in our special little groups and special little islands to the exclusion of "them" or "others" serves noone and nothing save stagnation and the perpetuation of ignorance.

It would crack me up when people would wander into the Hedonist HQ and ask if it was ok for them to be there, or were they interrupting or disturbing anything.

There were NO doors! Just open archways with maybe a phantomed curtain or two. On purpose: Come in, check it out. Hang out or run away screaming. Whatever floats yer boat - but I'm not keeping anyone out.

Pathfinder is not one of my favorite people, but when he wandered into one of my weekend dancing events, he was more than welcome to hang out and enjoy.

The second time Jesse Linden showed up at my NCI class "to check on the host's attendance" I'm guessing - I actually had to tools to kick him into the stratosphere - or to at least try.

Don't think the thought didn't occur to me, because he makes me twitch horribly in the WORST way, and I don't appreciate having one lapse of non-attendance - hey RL gets in the way, and in my book ALWAYS comes first - as an excuse to "keep tabs" on my future classes.

But I just let him be.

Prokovy, I'm not surprised that you get banned and tossed from places based on the most specious and flimsy reasons.

Those folks have gotten the open door on that type of behaviour from LL itself. Banning you from the forums because you dared show their little pets for who they really are.

Heck, you weren't even selling babies in boxes!