Second Thoughts

Whiteboarding

When Walker breathlessly blogged the appearance of a whiteboard made by AngryBeth Shortbread in Second Life, even titling the story, "Getting Better Business Efficiencies," I certaintly raised an eyebrow.

I was stunned that in the week the that Lindens unveiled the new, reformed group tools, a revolution for collaboration and organization in SL, Walker chose to utterly ignore that story, and focus on this "whiteboarding" story. I chalked it up both to him not really "getting" groups in SL and their importance, and also to the numerous wonky wiki discussions people have had about whiteboarding, sometimes begging the Lindens to do it, and how important this is to tekkies, who imagine themselves endlessly having chalk talks somewhere in the Metaverse, I guess, writing formulas across a board with mad, scientific abandon  -- but of course, whiteboarding, signifying the ability to say stuff to other people, and have all of you edit it together -- is important to everyone else, too.

Even being a big admirer of AngryBeth and frequent visitor to her shop, I was naturally skeptical because getting a REAL whiteboard in SL is very elusive, as I have come to understand through many a trek and long hours examining different products for the purpose. A whiteboard and shared texting or wordprocessing is something I wanted since the very first month I spent in Second Life, asking in vain as a clueless newbie why someone couldn't help me make some really efficient Yellow Pages.

AngryBeth makes her whiteboard available for $1; the hardened world-flyer like myself frequently notes ascerbically to tenants who get TVs or furniture for $0 or $1: "Hey, you get what you paid for: $1 worth of stuff." That may seem unkind, especially given the 50 hours that AngryBeth put into this product -- no mean feat, given the laggy, crashy, fiddly, annoying HARD work of trying to make something -- anything, even a motel -- in Second Life. So she deserves a breathless blog or two or five, but then, after spending two hours on trying to unpack the invention, I get to do a more sanguine blog, too.

Tekkie-wikis in SL could sure use another layer between themselves and the general user public. The absence of that thick, robust, common-sense layer is what is missing in Second Life, big time.

What makes this tree comic so funny is the depiction of the technical solution as the one where an elaborately looped item, very elegant in appearance, actually puts the swing on the ground, no longer up in the air, and no longer a swing.

The one thing they all do is make assumptions about understanding how to use things, and the one thing many do is put web guides up on the web, in lieu of putting even the simplest "Quick Start for Dummies" INSIDE the product itself. I strenuously try to notify them to put the notecard inside -- in the product, inworld, where we are using it. Forcing people to tab down their game -- something not every game weathers so well; forcing them to take focus out of the world, loss of immersion, etc. is something that people just don't want to do. And it's frustrating when you can't open a notecard that tells you "get started quick this way". Some, like Timeless Graffiti, have learned to do this, though their cards still have way too many commands -- something all of these products suffer from is the need to first make channels, like "/413" or "/1" then type various commands -- instead of having pushable buttons.

In time, one imagines the interface will spring up between tekkiw world-item-inventors and people like me. I actually have a pretty good deal of facility with these things, having logged in months of person-hours on them in SL. And here's the big problem with this "whiteboard" -- it's not a whiteboard in the fullest sense of the word. In fact, it's more of a blackboard, or a kind of communal um...tekkie wiki -- a fetishistic item that will help a tribe have an identifying tool/symbol rather than actually use the tool to accomplish actual free collaboration.

It has space for only 24 letters on it. 24 -- yes.

See, that's the problem no one has been able to beat yet, and AngryBeth in fact takes a step very far backward on this -- a step cloaked by all the other bells and whistles she has -- and doesn't even provide as much letter-writing spaces as Timeless, who has about 242 I believe, or Leboard's, a lesser-known board which has 192 and more attractive prims to house them in, or Foolish Frost's, which also reaches whatever that known limit is, that was established years ago by Xylor Bayclef and never beaten -- because the number of letters has to do with the number of prims I believe or something, and thus has to do with linkage and sim capacity and script capacity -- or you'll be forced to upload $10 page after $10 page of pre-set, Gutenberg-type press trays of text you typed in word or notepad and put into Paint or PSP and copied as a jpeg into the game.

OK, so AngryBeth's improvement is that you can move this text around up and down using the arrow keys, and also overlay it on some background like a world map. Still, with only 24 letters, you have a label or a sentence, not collaboration on text.

First off, I should have said that rezzing the ABS whiteboard takes some smarts -- she provides 4 items in her folder of N, W, E, S for a *reason* which is that the thing doesn't work if not pointing the right way. Now, you'd think, if you avatar points his face north, and north is the mini-map or large map north of SL, that you pick "north" from the 4 choices. Wrong. You pick "west" because...well...I don't why, I suppose because the flat back of the thing isn't what is facing north, nor its flat face, but it's lefthand, thin edge. Whatever.

What ABS's whiteboard does have, and which made Walker all tingly no doubt (if he in fact ever attempted to use it, can't tell) is that it has shapes, shapes that you can put on with a tool and manipulate -- and also various other tools like pointer, cross-hair, etc.

It kinda reminds me of the Play Shapes Capt. Kangaroo used to have on his show, later adapted by Blues Clues.
I find the concept of putting shapes up on a board irksome. That may be an idiosyncratic response, due to having synaesthesia, whereby I already have coloured shapes for every concept already visible in my mind's eye.

But there's also something phony about the concept. In RL, at least in my RL, which many not be saying much, I don't see people manipulating shapes on whiteboards at various conferences, seminars, workshops, of which I've been to zillions.

That is, what most people do that I see nowadays is bring Power Point slides. They fuss over the projecting of them endlessly, often cutting into their talk time as their laptop or the beam isn't working. The Power Point, unlike the elaborate diagramming of sentences or outlining of essays that we were taught by the good Sisters of St. Joseph as aids to thinking more rigouressly and clarifying thought, in fact diminishes and dumbs down the mind and its coherent thought processes, and substitutes them with pablum -- the kind that sticks on the wall and is hard to get off.

The whole idea of mind-mapping I find pretentious and annoying, and I'm surprised not to see any criticism of the concept, which is right up with there with Wikipedia, Power Point, Google, and other "social software"  -- turning the minds of this and the next generation into jello.

I was hoping the otherwise very astute Fool Quest would have something ascerbic to say about this mind-grabbing under the ruse of mere "description" ("predictive descriptedness")-- but he proved to be the same, drooling and blithering idiot on the subject as many others, claiming that all sorts of magic and super-powerful stuff happens with mind-maps to make people brainstorm, access their right-brain thinking, and collaborate -- as if these things were not mere theories and memes of their own -- scientifically tested here and there, to be sure, but of course distorted in silly and unproductive ways once they reach the level of mass popularity as memes.

Someone making a mind map going into a conference is actually inflicting a kind of violent act on the thinking of others there (and Fool Quest has outlined some of those brain-storming killers as the stifling of "unfounded conjecture" -- he quotes Popper on how important it is to tolerate that form of Socratic dialectic in debate). Someone making a "mind-map" often intends for others to follow -- lead by interpretation.

By the same token, whoever wields the mind-map program (and the original programmers of the mind-map software themselves have these social-engineering aspirations as well) wishes *control over others' thinking*. The "collective" is put forth as "the absolute good" and the "compromise for the sake of collaboration" in reaching the glorious end-product mind-map is sanctified as the most glorious goal (all of these technologies lately are triumphs of form over function). But of course, as we've seen from my previous discussions and links on democracy and groups, all that's happening is that one or a few people with an agenda are trying to get the others to fall into place. The mind-map sticks; it's the meme; it's saved and duplicated and goes on shaping. That tree always only had 3 possible forks coming out of it; that relationship that showed 6 versions of possible outcomes could never be restricted to the practical 3 because, well, the mind map *made it so*.

Recently, I went to an all-day conference for RL work that had one of those annoying mind-mapsters nattering away in the background, with roughly 80 percent of the people there completely unaware that there was even a thing called "mindmapping" being trotted out by frequent-flyers on the conference circuit. Like Robbie Dingo's wierd whisperer thing, which makes Deridda hash out of chat and pitches up words heard repeatedly to a drum-beat, this conference facilitator I saw, who had no doubt been at some paid-for-by-work seminar in some resort locale, and had obviously learned stuff like this rather uncritically, took words out of our previous emails suggesting topics or raising concerns and threw them up on a flow chart sort of construction on a "whiteboard" (which, as so often happens in these cases, was really a blackboard, i.e. one person, with the power, pushing the message, with the tool, not a true collaboration -- just because it's white doesn't mean it isn't black). None of us at this conference got to go up and move or change the 'whiteboard's" memes -- there it was, set in stone by someone who had mastered the flow-charting at some seminar, was now inflicting it on our sub-conscious, and who hadn't even put time or a procedure in place for the rest of us to *go up and contribute or even edit/replace parts of the 'whiteboarded' text*.

The concepts were jumbled and marched along in a progression that she felt would represent harmony, resolution of conflict, and happiness for all concerned, but like most complex and messy issues, required more a management of such conflict and recognition of it, than a false wiping away of conflict, in the radical "clean slate" mode which Fool Quest very rightly illustrates, quoting Karl Popper, as the fascist impulse -- society is always to be "made new," or contradictions are always to be "resolved," and there is always to be triumph of some aesthetic and of course a new world order emerging from the ashes.

And that's just the problem -- one senses with these inventions that they are driven not by RL or SL exigencies, but just by the act of invention itself. I have no idea whatsoever how many inworld or outworld conferences and seminars ABS attended, perhaps loads. After all, this is supposed to be an "educators' tool" and not any sort of rough-and-ready socializing board as I'd like to use it for in the infohub, to enable people to post jobs or personals or how-tos or whatever.

A particularly exciting (at first) prospect on the ABS whiteboard was a background that had YES, NO, MAYBE and ABSTAIN (put as outside the circle -- a good example of how visuals and mindmaps make people seem "beyond the pale" simply for refusing to participate in something that may feel rigged).

But...to operate the voter and make it work, you have to also first overlay, then manipulate the coloured shapes and place them on Capt. Kangaroo's Play Shape board. That means first accepting an unnerving message, "This object would like to operate on your avatar's controls, ok?" -- something newbies may be gun-shy over. I know when I got those "animate your avatar" things I thought they were malicious scripts -- instead, an ex-friend at the time who was highly tekkie told me they WERE malicious, although of course they weren't, they were just those drink-scripts that animate your avatar in clunkier ways that he can be animated in TSO by just chosing off a pie menu more smoothly.

In fact, pondering all this now, I'm realizing that the drop-down blue menu, which often is slow and laggy, causing you to click it impatiently, causing it to drop down AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN, prompting "ignore" sometimes, falling again and again on your horizon like a guillotine, is really, well...clunky. Old-fashioned. The teksters need to come up with some other thingy than this. This is whack. It's slow and in your way.

So after clicking through blue menus, you now have your entire avatar animated just in order to move this shape, and you sort of hoist it into place with the arrow keys.

But wait!

I have a better idea!

There's the Linden voter, of course, some of that Lame Linden (TM) content from the old telehubs that I put BACK into the Ross infohub mainly because some of it, like that voter thingie and the prefabs, in fact are NOT so lame.

But even Max Case's voter just...works better! His is clunky, the buttons are too big and close together (the Linden design was better) but it's easy to edit the script with a question (unlike the Linden April 2003 Votemaster). At the Memory Bazaar in Ross at the Infohub I helped to develop, built by Jessica Ornitz, I am trying it out with the question: "What should we do about the problem of clubs lagging sims?"

In short, AngryBeth's whiteboard is likely to be blogged, memed, blogged, and memed again and again and again, taking advantage of the legend around its creator, as well as the awe-inspiring mystique (erm...bullshit?) surrounding the "RL education in SL" stuff, the unfamiliarity with SL of most of the people jumping in with both feet, the desire of many earnest educatory types to aquire E-Tools for Learning and suchlike and...like the cross-country skies in Bohos in Paradise, never leave the garage shelf. It's a kind of totem, and emblem, an artifact like wearing a useless SL Telus cellphone on your belt that says, "Look at me, I am Collaborative, I am Hive Mind!" In fact, I suggest many an E-ducator will buy it and put it up like a big prop in their "virtual classrooms" and *never use it*. It will be like those abacuses you see next to the electronic cash-registers in Russia, which people REALLY use to total your purchase. In fact, I dare say Felix Frankfurter's Government-on-a-Prim, which merely contains Notecard Giver, Notecard Taker, and Hover Text, available at Pharos, is a lot more useful for more collaborative excercises in SL.

OMG! Never, never hit the little button with the arrows on the lower right-hand side of ABS's thing. It contains a screen that says "aspect ratio". I'll be honest and tell you I don't fully understand what that is, but I think it's like we like to call "sizing" in Home Economics. If you do press it, and chose 4:1, the entire thing will resize and the clickable menu itself seems to disappear no matter how many times you bang on it. So I'd recommend not bothering with it.

There's many more hours for me to spend on this, of course. And I suspect for someone else who is skilled at Useability and helping to make version 2.0.

What we need is a real whiteboard. That is, a message board that has the message visible, not tucked inside a sticky-like prim with not even a word visible, as the useful, but still frustrating "Oh, Snap" corkboard by Makaio Stygian. It needs to throw up text, and even 242 letters is ok as long as they aren't robotic space age glowing or slow to rez text, but just plain ordinary typeface easy to view and rez quickly. Such text, if you set the permissions on, should be able to be edited -- in whole or in part -- by other avatars.  It should absorb multiple edits and multiple avatars.

The pictures inside it shouldn't wipe out by resetting messages under them or wipe out by moving the arrows, as Timeless' seems to do and Angrybeth's appeared to do as well-- this is the single greatest reason I don't use Timeless', it simply constantly wipes out everything and despite thoroughly reading the instructions over and over, I can't seem to find a way to hold the pictures in place and not wipe them out from page-turning (in that sense, Hiro Pendragon's old "Hiro TV" as I call it, a picture slide show that merely advances the photos inside a prim on a timer, is easier to use and easier to set up).

So if I write a text, you add a line, somebody else edits us into a paragraph, sooner or later it should be allowed to stick and stay and save if desired. Then it should be able to be attached to a picture, like caption. That picture could move, but the text stays linked. Or they all replace. Ideally, it would take a landmark inside a prim or as such tied to a picture. This was my query back a year ago when I first encountered Timeless; he erupted into irritation and fury, expressed as the put down that he was busy with custom projects into the year 2006, witheringly implying that I was too entitlement-happy by suggesting such a thing, and I commented laconically on his poor customer service.

I don't expect somebody to script for a year or for even five minutes for my benefit. I do expect them to entertain unfounded conjecture, however; that is the hallmark of an open mind and open collaboration in an open society.

Crystal Ball: Will LL Sell Out?

Dr. Meridian Maginot reads the Magic Compass...

Everybody always speculates whether the Lindens are going to sell out Second Life. This is almost the favourite SL parlour game, where everybody gets out their pads and pencils (Ok, well, their typed chat) as they are sitting around their laggy, crashy sims in their prefab houses and chat up a storm.

One thing Adam Zaius is doing lately is putting out the story to "just a few close personal friends privately" (that's how you best ensure that EVERYONE will be chatting it up EVERYWHERE pretty soon) that "Philip is so rich, that he doesn't need venture capitalists and will put his own money into the SL if need be to keep it going."

Madam X knows the future...

Um...that reminds me of how kids used to talk up in the tree house about their dads. "Well, MY dad is SO rich that he could buy this whole block." "Well, MY DAD has SO MUCH money that he could buy this entire town!" etc.

I personally accosted Philip Linden last year at the SLCC and asked him this question, which he's probably heard a million times but -- why not a million and one? He said he'd never sell -- but of course, I'm familiar how this works. We all remember Will Wright, Maxis, at EA.com.

And in RL, too, you've seen it happen, as it does in SL, where somebody seems to disappear for long lunches...long talks...they come back somewhat glazed...then there is talk about joint projects, cooperation, mergers...and then press releases (Shaun Altman is really good at imitating the feel for those at Cyberland) to the effect, "Joe Schmo will remain very much hands-on, working as a consultant to the new team..."  meanwhile Joe is busy actually teaching his job to Vikrem in Bangalore, and his desk is getting ever and ever closer to the door...

So it seems eminently reasonable that some larger thing like a Google or a Sony or a Bill Gates or a Ted Turner Better World Foundation or SOMETHING could buy out the Lindens and appear to leave the frog intact in the snake, performing various smoke and mirror tricks.

But why speculate endlessly? You won't get the Lindens to tell you, but then, ask knowledgeable people. And...don't just ask their competitors or fawning dependents in the game industry itself or the whole Metaverse Medicine Show filled with quacks and tonics to revify your avatar, ask people who actually observe business start-ups of various kinds, investigate them, and write about them.

So I caught up with my friend Ouchquack Stern, a pal from TSO days in fact, and asked him to read the crystal ball.

But not before consulting the inimitable Dr. Meridian Maginot on Pharos Island, who turned over some very, very good cards for the game. He did concede that he can't really read the game's fortune properly until either Governor Linden herself comes to visit him and roll the dice in person OR until something that Governor Linden owns can be placed on the Magic Compass board. I tried grabbing a Governor Linden tree and hoisting it over some sims but it got lost and I can't think of anything Governor Linden has made (let me know if you can!) but here it is:  all bearish and all good (but no proof that this doesn't mean a buy-out.

So then I tried the Magic 8-ball, that's always pretty good for the yes/no questions, and Dr. Maginot also consulted the Ouiji board - but nothing but haze came up due to the lack of the presence of Governor Linden, or at least Philip Linden, himself.

Still, when asked whether LL would sell Second Life in the next year, the answer came back:

OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD.

Meaning...it won't sell? Or...it will sell?

Drat, these damn crystal balls!!!

Well, Ouchcrack just had a much more matter-of-fact way of addressing the problem -- watching the typical course of start-ups; not pretending that an Internet/virtual world start-up is some kind of "special thing" that is "oh-so-different".

When you do that, here's what you come up with, my interview is cut in places just to stay on topic. We started talking about the problem of griefers, and the problem of how LL refuses to return to the credit-card validation:

Ouchquack Stern: can't they bring it back
Prokofy Neva: they don't wish to budge on this
Prokofy Neva: people have had numerous campaigns, meetings, protests, etc
Prokofy Neva: they are refusing to move
Ouchquack Stern: it's a horrid idea, but I know why they are doing it
Ouchquack Stern: it's the venture capital
Prokofy Neva: well they want to show volume sure
Ouchquack Stern: yeah
Ouchquack Stern: they got their second round last Feb. Look for that to run out about 12 months later.
Ouchquack Stern: That means that they have to bring in a third round or sell to a major media player in 12 months
Prokofy Neva: is that the formula?
Prokofy Neva: see Adam Zaius who is big friends with Philip
Prokofy Neva: he is putting out the story now that Philip is so rich he will fund it himself
Ouchquack Stern: I don't know Adam
Prokofy Neva: which sounds like provincial big talk to me
Prokofy Neva: well he's one of those old FIC types, he runs Azure
Ouchquack Stern: And yes, I covered venture capital startups for 4 1/2 years. that's pretty predictable now
Ouchquack Stern: Philip is swimming in deeper waters than his pockets can handle
Prokofy Neva: I would think
Prokofy Neva: and the guy who made an outmoded office product Lotus 1-2-3 -- I mean, how much of a horse is that to back?
Prokofy Neva: well why would VCs need to have volume when they know it will be fake?
Prokofy Neva: to me the daily cash take-home is more important
Prokofy Neva: on the world i mean
Prokofy Neva: they should judge it by that
Prokofy Neva: if they judge it like a country instead of a MMORPG they need to look at the GNP
Ouchquack Stern: what you say is prudent... but how many dot-coms in 1999 were going for profitability? It was "Eyeballs" that got the VC
Prokofy Neva: where are the eyeballs in SL? they are atomized and fractured
Prokofy Neva: the whole concept of media planners and eyeballs is outdated
Ouchquack Stern: Look, at best SL is running deep second behind WoW.
Prokofy Neva: for this
Prokofy Neva: there is no mass media here
Prokofy Neva: there are venues like the golf course
Prokofy Neva: that have interactive content where they could have some branding
Prokofy Neva: or they need viral campaigns of products
Prokofy Neva: and various asyncronous things to keep avatars visiting, music to listen to etc
Ouchquack Stern: VCs always back the second and third runners up
Ouchquack Stern: you're missing something
Prokofy Neva: well im just following the reality of Reuben's campaigns
Prokofy Neva: he is going for the one-hit wonders
Ouchquack Stern: every account is like an eyeball in that it has potential profit if properly exploited
Prokofy Neva: first car, first played-out 80s musician
Prokofy Neva: well but you can't REACH the eyeball
Prokofy Neva: effectively
Prokofy Neva: there is no mass media, no more than 40 on a sim
Prokofy Neva: things like communities like Dreamland and Ravenglass then on 55 sims mean something they should care more about
Ouchquack Stern: you are doing it again
Prokofy Neva: I'm telling you the reality of how they cannot reach people
Prokofy Neva: unless they stack 40 to a sim
Prokofy Neva: or have a venue that 40 parade by every hour
Ouchquack Stern: see. you ARE doing it again... talking about facts, and sense, and reality
Prokofy Neva: only if they sell something cool like a TELUS phone
Ouchquack Stern: don't kill the dream baby
Prokofy Neva: oh well I'm happy to talk hype
Prokofy Neva: hype is that they will all buy the TELUS phone
Prokofy Neva: because Reuben got some copy for it
Prokofy Neva: he got like 7 media blogs, 3 game blogs, 1 RL media outlet
Ouchquack Stern: :D
Prokofy Neva: so if he runs 12 of those a day, he will keep getting clients
Prokofy Neva: they're happy, he's happy
Prokofy Neva: but the world doesn't grow from that
Prokofy Neva: unless they get more of a sticky formula there to keep avatars coming to their stagesets
Prokofy Neva: I mean, did you go and sit on Regina Spektor's store lot and listen to her whiney music?
Prokofy Neva: I did for like one minute
Prokofy Neva: lol
Ouchquack Stern: I like the 'user generated content" concept of SL. And I believe in its internal free market... but RL money will fuck up the vision of the people behind SL
Prokofy Neva: well they could have a more or less peaceful coexistence
Prokofy Neva: http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2006/08/23/a-gallery-of-virtual-firsts-from-second-life
Prokofy Neva: but it requires some nodding to the locals and incorporation of them
Ouchquack Stern: Well, I think SL will make it through the hard times.. but here is what I see in my crystal ball...
Ouchquack Stern: Starting in late November there will be LL layoffs galore
Ouchquack Stern: By February it will be bought by a major media company
Ouchquack Stern: There will be a reorganization of upper managment and many key staff
Ouchquack Stern: And by next summer it will stabilize but there will be more pay-to-play components
Ouchquack Stern: with some real marketing, and a ton of magazine ads
Ouchquack Stern: starting in September and running through Xmas
Prokofy Neva: what will happen to our land?
Prokofy Neva: why media? why not entertainment/gaming like Sony?
Ouchquack Stern: minor but unessential changes to the user agreement and maybe tiering
Ouchquack Stern: Sony is a media company
Prokofy Neva: ok I see your point
Prokofy Neva: Time Warner something like that
Ouchquack Stern: yeah... and PSP
Ouchquack Stern: In the end, it will be ok
Prokofy Neva: what will happen to Philip? Who will they fire?
Ouchquack Stern: but we're in for six months of hell starting in late Nov
Ouchquack Stern: Phillip is ok, he and a couple other founders will go to the Board... become instant multimillionaires because of their stock
Ouchquack Stern: sure, quote me
Ouchquack Stern: they will all be tied to 1 or 2 year contracts to continue in some kind of advisory fashion... and when that time runs out they'll announce their new idea and jump ship
Prokofy Neva: well my theory is a variation of this
Ouchquack Stern: because the advisory thing is a crock, once on the board they have little todo with operations
Prokofy Neva: this is what I started saying a year ago
Ouchquack Stern: done. what's yours
Prokofy Neva: 1) they will sell the blingtard list to Sony and have Sony take over management of the private island sales -- Anshe must be brought to heel
Prokofy Neva: 2) Anshe will storm out because they will simply bring in more huge deep pocketed island buyers
Prokofy Neva: and have their own island developers from china to outdo her
Prokofy Neva: 3) they will have LL form a 501-c-3 called Metaverse Research institute or something and pension off Pathfinder, the educational projects, etc. to that
Prokofy Neva: 4) they will offer some very special types like Adam licenses of the game to run their own continents
Prokofy Neva: but then Sony will object and they will sell them out
Prokofy Neva: 5) they will close the mainland
Prokofy Neva: Philip will find the educational thing too lame to play with but continent management for blingtards isn't intellectually thrilling
Prokofy Neva: so he and Cory will go somewhere else with some other geeked out thing
Prokofy Neva: maybe he will get to keep the name Second Life even and have some smaller SL 3.0 version of it
Prokofy Neva: but that isn't how it works
Prokofy Neva: yes yes
Prokofy Neva: I know where I need to go now
Prokofy Neva: because I will not have land in January lol
Prokofy Neva: thanks for concentrating my mind
Prokofy Neva: I must become one with the blingtards
Prokofy Neva: well I'm not a follower of start-ups and such as you are
Prokofy Neva: but my feeling is that they are not a profitable company at heart
Prokofy Neva: they are a Lab
Prokofy Neva: those that want to do Lab will get government grants and do Lab
Ouchquack Stern: I agree
Prokofy Neva: those that want to do commercial entertainment stuff will do Sony
Prokofy Neva: so I can see them sort of partitioning it
Prokofy Neva: apartheid
Prokofy Neva: No matter how I parse it though, I see the mainland as having to go
Ouchquack Stern: well, if they just let it grow naturally and kept their overhead)(staff) to a bare bones ... it could grow on its own to something powerful, and profitable
Prokofy Neva: which means I'm fucked
Ouchquack Stern: but they're not
Prokofy Neva: yes if they had the luxury to go slower
Prokofy Neva: I have no idea what the cash burn is on this place
Prokofy Neva: but it's got to be fairly steep
Ouchquack Stern: look at the job openings. they're hemorrhaging
Prokofy Neva: I took that to mean they're growing tho
Prokofy Neva: they have 100 Lindens now
Ouchquack Stern: not only that, but look at the TYPES of jobs they're looking for
Prokofy Neva: 50 telecommuters and 50 office
Prokofy Neva: well but they are ADDING Lindens
Prokofy Neva: there is no hemorrhage at all
Prokofy Neva: except economic forecasters
Prokofy Neva: they canned all of them
Ouchquack Stern: that IS  hemorrhaging
Prokofy Neva: 3 economic forecasters isn't hemorrhaging
Ouchquack Stern: hiring people is a bad thing
Prokofy Neva: that's just shooting the messenger
Prokofy Neva: well they have lots of Lindens now with names like Amber
Prokofy Neva: Amber is good at working with people
Prokofy Neva: she's a people person
Ouchquack Stern: lol
Prokofy Neva: well?
Ouchquack Stern: there shouldn't be more than 20 Linden
Prokofy Neva: they are very useless
Ouchquack Stern: 10 would be better
Prokofy Neva: I try to get some of them engaged
Ouchquack Stern: lol
Prokofy Neva: you know Lindens sit in the sandbox bagging people selling stuff
Prokofy Neva: I try to hustle them around the grid more to my malls being nuked
Prokofy Neva: I try to give them an incident per night to work on geez
Prokofy Neva: I figured out that they were disappearing people
Prokofy Neva: it finally dawned on me
Prokofy Neva: I made a list of 100 incidents
Prokofy Neva: not a single one on the blotter
Prokofy Neva: most of the people deleted now
Prokofy Neva: so they just delete people
Prokofy Neva: it's like Argentina under the Generals
Ouchquack Stern: they absolutely delete Unverified. I haven't confirmed deletion of others
Ouchquack Stern: have you?
Prokofy Neva: hmm good question -- I think so yes
Prokofy Neva: but I wil watch that
Ouchquack Stern: me too
Ouchquack Stern: but I totally agree with you when it comes to unverifieds
Prokofy Neva: I made bunches of alts but finally the system told me I wasn't allowed anymore
Prokofy Neva: and I protested
Prokofy Neva: because shit how come all these kids can do it and I can't?
Ouchquack Stern: you can bypass that
Prokofy Neva: one problem I had is I forgot my passwords
Prokofy Neva: and since I had made up yahooo emails and forgot those too
Prokofy Neva: I can't find my alts
Prokofy Neva: LOL
Prokofy Neva: ROFL
Ouchquack Stern: lol, make a freaking Notepad
Prokofy Neva: I had one but I lost that too
Prokofy Neva: I have what I call "SL Census"
Ouchquack Stern: lol
Ouchquack Stern: :D
Prokofy Neva: try to keep track of at least the money making ones
Ouchquack Stern: are they still pushing out the dole to pre 666ers?
Prokofy Neva: yep
Ouchquack Stern: that's going to have to stop
Prokofy Neva: yeah
Ouchquack Stern: do you look at their data on the website about sinks?
Ouchquack Stern: their "source" volume outweighs "sink" volume, but at about 1/2 the variance that it had just 6 months ago. They're desperate to boost sinks and drop sources.
Prokofy Neva: yes I know I watch it
Prokofy Neva: and that's why they will be killing the free events
Prokofy Neva: and charging $50 per event listing
Prokofy Neva: and other things like that'
Ouchquack Stern: yeah, we'll see a lot of that
Ouchquack Stern: and some things will dive into RL money too
Ouchquack Stern: oh, enough pessimism... here's what I like very much about SL making it as a business
Ouchquack Stern: I love the fact that they made tools, opened them up to users, and required the users to make the content.
Ouchquack Stern: That  alone is GENIUS
Ouchquack Stern: I also like how attentive LL is to most (not all) user wants and needs with regard to development tools
Ouchquack Stern: I also think that the virtual market they have is freaking fantastic. I'd like to see it expanded to have things like virtual commodity's trading and maybe even instead of groups... corporations that produce dividends for its members based on the profitability
Ouchquack Stern: of their jointly owned method of production
Ouchquack Stern: I think the laissez-faire (mostly) attitude of this place is its sole saving grace
Ouchquack Stern: power here comes by giving power to the members
Ouchquack Stern: I really believe that
Ouchquack Stern: and Wow isn't doing that
Prokofy Neva: yes Cyberland gives dividends
Ouchquack Stern: does it really?
Prokofy Neva: yes
Prokofy Neva: and yes, you're right, the formula is amazing
Ouchquack Stern: I've been waiting for that!
Prokofy Neva: but they need the rule of law and disputes settlement
Ouchquack Stern: that's a HUGE good sign
Prokofy Neva: well buy into Cyberland
Prokofy Neva: www.slsolutions.org
Ouchquack Stern: lol, I'm just here for fun... I don't need to strike it rich. My money goes to my partner so she can buy sexy stuff
Prokofy Neva: He goes along with the game fiction
Ouchquack Stern: :D
Prokofy Neva: I used to day trade it then sold it at a profit last summer
Prokofy Neva: I felt when they went into private islands it was stupid for me to keep stock in it
Ouchquack Stern: heh heh
Prokofy Neva: because it was competing with my mainland rentals
Ouchquack Stern: I heard a fun thing about the mainland a couple months ago
Ouchquack Stern: too boost commerce and tourism... someone proposed a foot race between two points on the mainland
Ouchquack Stern: but I've been thinking how people could cheat
Ouchquack Stern: so I think this will work better
Ouchquack Stern: the organizer make an object like a bicycle(slow) that cannot leave the ground, cannot be flown without breaking,  but can traverse terrain at a constant rate
Ouchquack Stern: then we hold a huge race and see who can cross the continent fastest
Ouchquack Stern: it would be fun
Prokofy Neva: yeah
Prokofy Neva: I remember Cubey Terra walked around the mainland
Prokofy Neva: I had an alt that got like half way around
Prokofy Neva: it may be growing at a faster rate than you can traverse
Ouchquack Stern: really?
Prokofy Neva: what's odd to me is your conviction that LL will not fail
Prokofy Neva: most forums types think they will
Prokofy Neva: that the assert server, etc. will give out
Ouchquack Stern: Oh, there will be technological and economic rough spots... some very disconcerting... but the basic business model of the game is good.
Ouchquack Stern: Unfortunately, I don't think the business model of the company is as sound. They will have to stop hemorrhaging. Layoffs are certain. Another round of VC or a sale is certain. I think a sale is more likely.
Ouchquack Stern: Anyone who is likely to buy it has the ability to promote SL well. And they'll have some other ways to cut costs and boost income.
Ouchquack Stern: I can speculate about other revenue sources, but its  pure speculation and I'm not too confident that I can predict them.
Prokofy Neva: well don't forget that the NSF or Soros or some science or educational thing could step up
Ouchquack Stern: well, I gotta go to bed
Prokofy Neva: kk
Ouchquack Stern: Let me know if you need anything else for your paper
Prokofy Neva: ok
Ouchquack Stern: I'll be on tomorrow
Ouchquack Stern: Is what I am saying really not being said by others?You know I don't read the boards.
Prokofy Neva: no it's not!
Prokofy Neva: that's why I'd like a fresh take
Ouchquack Stern: weird
Ouchquack Stern: but VC backed startups have some predictability.
Ouchquack Stern: I've covered more than 500 startups since 2000. All were looking for VC.  Some got it. And they had similar behavioral patterns based on a very few things like burn rate, adoption, sales growth and among media things like stickiness and target demographics.
Ouchquack Stern: anyway, gotta get my room ready for students tomorrow.
Ouchquack Stern: gnite

The New Group Tools: Free At Last!

The group tools reform is coming today in the 1.12 edition, and it will very likely revolutionize Second Life, making it possible for the first time to have more coherent business organization and more meaningful and lucrative employment.

With the new free accounts pouring in, and many non-Americans arriving to tip the scale away from 75 percent US to 57 percent, the group tools combined with the ease of access to virtual worlds and interaction with the real world projects might provide a historic opportunity for globalization to work in humane ways that it has often not worked in many places in the world.

As I sat at a friend's house last night, suddenly a man named Miroslav literally dropped on the couch from the sky, in his white newbie shirt, and asked in English "can please for me to work" and said he spoke Czech. I had to tell him in Russian to go look for work in clubs, because the tools aren't ready and tested yet. But perhaps in 2 weeks I'll be able to send him out for the day cleaning up stray prims and unchecking SEARCH ads in the parcel for occupied rentals. So Miroslav and the legions of New Europeans and Asians coming into SL may be the first real beneficiaries of group tools as all kinds of operations in SL now can turn over the reins, often very jealously held, of land control, to others with safety.

Of course, many imagine that what non-Americans will be able to do is to use their higher education or eagerness to learn new technology via the Internet to do more sophisticated programming, design, and artistic work -- and that's obviously the dream of Philip Linden. Yet the overwhelming majority of new residents from the Americas, Europe, and Asia are not skilled -- at least not yet, and will need entry level jobs of all types -- something SL hasn't been very good at supplying except in the world's two oldest professions, prostitution and real estate -- and even in these and other economic sectors in SL, enormous improvements in organization and branding and marketing are about to be made possible with the tools -- freeing up people bogged down with the heavy burden of group management and having to do a lot of work themselves, unable to get help.

For the first time in SL history, the group tools will move away from the haphhazard hipppie dope-smoking drum circle, where all income was distributed equally regardless of work or investment, and where -- as so often happens under such utopian socialist projects -- the land held in common could be stolen out from under the group by any one officer.

And for the first time, without risk to their investment, sole proprietors, start-ups, investors, dreamers, designers, can hire help. Help they need to grow and to make the economy more diverse and support more people.

Today, that yawning hole in the tools that enabled socialism-as-crime to be committed over and over again, and to hobble investment by making risk and exposure too great, is closed. This is a monumental achievement for the Lindens. Some of them didn't think it was very important when the first started out. It wasn't necessarily *their* idea ever to use groups for land business or to have groups be as much in demand as they have become.

As we know from their old movie, what they felt important was making stuff, shooting it up with bombs, designing cute gators, and collaborating scientifically and creatively in a virtual space about the making of the virtual space itself.

Now, the game-gods or world-makers are moving away from the Golden Age of mythological heroes -- focusing on themselves and the overall creation -- and putting the tools of world creation in the hands of replicators in the Iron Age.

Oh, you say, they already put the tools of creation in users' hands, ages ago? Even giving them IP?

But that was for content creation -- textures, scripts, vehicles, skins, clothing. And mainly for sole proprietors or very, very trusted mom-'n-pop shops or fiercely tribalistic clans. It wasn't for social constructs more diverse and open to the public, for organizations, businesses, educational institutions.  And there is a difference. There's content. And then there's form and function. Having done a great deal for the content piece of it, the Lindens have finally gotten around to the form/function piece -- and that should help the world, if all goes well.

I think some people would give me credit for having been a very early advocate of fixing these group tools. In the Poltical Science forums on April 26, 2005, I made a post proposing that the Lindens end the favouritism of socialism and allow both capitalism and socialism as opt-in choices, and granulate the functions or roles in the groups to encourage business development and the growth of civil society without so much risk to investment. I listed all the group functions and explained the problem of how land got stolen or undertired by rogue officers, demolishing projects.

Of course Cubey Terra, being a beta tester and early adapter, in the same thread said that *he* had proposed a similar idea on April 23, 2005 in the "features" section addressed to the Lindens directly, also making a list of functions (I didn't notice his post, different in concept from mine, when I made my own).

In fact, our ideas, though externally about reform of the tools and sharing some things in common, weren't similar. And in fact I had presented mine on notecards to Lindens many months before that, and we had discussed how to create assocations of land owners and users and zoning earlier in 2005 at a community meeting at Pathfinder Linden's office at which Blue Linden, Jack Linden, and Robin Linden were also present.

Cubey focused on the issue of officer recall and how to improve that; but as early as 2004 I had urgently begun to campaign vigorously against any officer recall system at all. I found it was almost never used to remove tyrants, as was its idealistic intent, but only used by either rogue or disgruntled rank-and-file members to bully and harass someone legitimately in authority *because they were paying tier or had organized investment or activities for the group*.

Being myself constantly targeted by officer recall of the malicious type, I had a long, long struggle to get the Lindens to recognize the problem. When I first protested in alarm that a griefer had entered the group not as a tenant, but merely to flip officer recall to freeze and harass the group and prevent new memberships needed to set prims on group land, Blue Linden told me I had better campaign to hold my seat in the officers ranks (!) -- though of course I had purchased the land and paid tier on it, and there was no issue of any legitimate grievance from a tenant.

It's hard for people to remember that level of misunderstanding, and those awful struggles of a very long year or 18 months now, when now, they feel like "but everybody has said like forever we need to change the group tools".

To their credit, when I filed enough abuse reports, and explained to enough Lindens that actual practice in land groups was that officer recall was only being used to grief, to their credit, they finally removed it completely. Not without some real howling and squawking by socialists on the forums, however, who bitched that tyrannical land owners or social group officers would now hold sway. Well, fortunately, the tekkie "dissent option," helped pave the way there, whatever it's problematic nature as a method, and Lindens were able to say: "Make a new group then."

Then there was the painful process of the covenants groups that had six sessions and which contain within them a huge mish-mosh of issues like zoning, covenants, and justice, amidst plans for group tool reform. Finally, through their Love Machine Hive Mind BLOTTD thingies, the Lindens got going on the group tools. I understand Brent Linden was the main programmer to thank for their reaching completion. He and others should go down in history as being the creators of the first machines in the Metaverse to ensure freedom and governance by the people, for the people, and of the people.

That is...if there are no unintended consequences -- and there always are!

I've been in to test the group tools as much as I can, but unfortunately, because they are complex, daunting, and the patch you need to get into the preview simply refused to load for me for a whole week or more, I couldn't do as much as I wanted to study them. Regrettably, testing time came right in the middle of the worst wave of griefing I've ever experienced in SL -- a by-product not even so much of all the new accounts, but of the new Linden determination to do nothing more about policing and justice, but to "leave it to the residents" -- a dubious decision that even the best group tools cannot sanctify or justify.

For one, the ramp-up isn't going to be such smooth sledding. The tools, with the usual brown wonky Linden interface that always looks to me like something my Dad used to tinker with in the garage, are as complex as trying to manage one of those old fashioned switchboards. In the old days, we used to sit at gigantic boards in a swivel chair, gulping caffeine. Calls would come in and we had to react quickly, answering and switching the lines to their destination by moving these heavy wooden dowels with the connecting wires into the right slots. When the calls completed they would have to be moved around again. There were internal and external calls. You had to keep in mind all the people in the office or even building and their usual callers to try to keep a jump on things.

That's how I think of these tools -- you must have in mind not only all the people in the group, but what their wires will be -- what holes they will be plugged in to, who else they will talk to, and where you will turn them off.

So, for example, a person you would like to work with you could be awarded the right to remove prims from the parcel; set ban lists; set the URL for the music; deed the video -- but not sell the group objects, nor sell the land. He'll talk on line 5 but not line 10. He'd still have to call you as the higher-ranking owner to undeed the video unless you decide that you'll have no other group objects than the deeded TVs for him to address.

The new tools could in theory allow anything from the old hippie commune where everyone is equal and anyone can steal the land to a modern CEO and his board of trustees, his line staff and his customers. All could have gradations of control or access to land and money and objects.

Thus, the new group tools are an opening up of the world, in the sense that they create many, many new opportunities for more deepened webs or wires of connection between people. Instead of running a business by yourself you can hire someone to help, now able to not worry about trusting that they won't steal your land or stuff.

In fact, the help wanted section suddenly began to fill up with ads of a more higher and complex sort than just "club bouncer" or "pole dancer" this week -- and it's a shame the Lindens are closing the forums right when the group tools are coming in and people need to find others to fill up their groups and businesses and try out this new granularity. The presence of the new group tools is a powerful argument to keep the classifieds and new products and land for sale forums. Why? Because while groups can now communicate within their own circles more easily, with an end to the clumsy "vote" hack to send a message (you can now write a normal group-IM type of message for online or offline and even circulate inventory), they can't communicate with the incoming new pool of talent and labour anywhere else but the now-closing forums -- as they are being sent to the fractured fairy tales of a million outside.

So moral of the story here: keep the classifieds as the group tools are broken in and developed. Whatever curious reason was used to justify their elimination -- revenue from more classifieds? -- can surely wait 8 weeks or more. In fact, I'd advocate leaving them completely. It's unfair to fete oldbie content creators once again letting them shine in the helper building forums and stick it to the newbies entering content creation and the land sector by stripping away *their* forums.

So...what's not to like about these new group tools? Well...we have to see them. Every other Linden patch from time immemorial, especially biggies, have huge buggyness. All it takes is one sort of bug that involves members becoming officers and stealing land, or group land sales not registering anywhere, or other bugs we've already had in the system, to really mess up these tools. Lindens never roll back. Being a Linden means you never say you're sorry. So whatever mess and hack and workaround they might inflict on us later today could set back business for weeks and weeks, just when it is hoping to recover from the summer slump.

But...they always get it fixed eventually so...what else is there to worry about?

Lots. Because the world will get more closed even as it gets more open.

Before, I simply had all my groups on open enrollment. I was probably the last of the mainland rentals agents to do this. I did this despite griefing, despite misuse of group membership to plan malicious scripts in group-shared objects. I stuck diligently to this idea to keep it possible for anyone to come and rent without waiting for me to invite them, so that renting was instant, less costly in time and money, and more self-service. It was also an ideal that the society was kept open -- anyone could join, agree to the simple rules, and live without clearance from me -- I could operate on the assumption that all people are to be trusted to come and follow the rules; that the fact that a tiny minority do not shouldnl't close up the world and make bans and red lines and invitation-only and gated communities for everyone else.

Now, while I can keep open groups and people can still join and become members, member status is only a kind of holding pen. They'll be able to put down prims and set home to here, but then begins the discretionary process. Should all be given the right to ban? No. Because in a big apartment with lots of transients, there are always some percentage who are griefers and who will then grief by banning everyone and closing the building to those trying to return home.

Should all be given the right to deed their TV? And then undeed it by buying it back? Well...no, becaue then some will begin to go around stealing TVs in some areas.

And if tenants are given the right to ban, will they fill up the world with even more ban lines? Very likely, yes.

Suddenly, the open and equal society becomes shattered, and a second, discretionary, judgement look has to be given. Is this person in an objectionable group? Do they look like an alt? Are they griefers? Do they have no payment information on file? All of these loaded categories will be deployed now by legions of newly-empowered "executives" in an ownership role where they will now be able to wield more authority. This is why some people fought the changes to the group tools -- they didn't want these types of fiefdoms to emerge. But griefing has forced people to drop their ideals.

Another down side to the tools is how they will help to bolster illiberal societies. You can't get to pick and chose once you decide to have democracy and make a machine to fulfill it. So some will use them to install ruthless authoritarian or even totalitarian regimes on their sims, with the Gorean and BDSM lifestyles being most emblematic of this style of life, but with many romantic partnerships also increasingly made unequal as one partner becomes owner and prevents the other from selling or moving prims and becomes abusive. Sex clubs run by ruthless pimps might become more ruthless; mafias who only role-play on their own land might get a grander appetite to really organize their crime with these really new helpful organizational tools. They'll be for everybody. And we'll get to see who does best with them -- and it isn't necessarily going to be the most attractive of societies or cultures.

The thin layer of those in the "intelligentsia" of SL -- the educators in RL, the artists and various RL projects might make vigorous use of the group tools -- or might ignore them completely as they ignore completely other "inworld" features of SL that are unrelated to their RL offices. SL is a place to jump into like a pool, or go to like a web page, not a world. They don't need groups to work -- they have them working out there in RL.

In all of these side effects or major dramatic effects, the Lindens will only be able to say, "Well, we gave you the tools, it's not our fault, it's up to you."

Of course, the Lindens themselves might make use of these tools, and do more than just have Jeska martial her legions of illegitimate helpers (I'm REALLY torqued at these mentors lately, yeesh, they are out of control) to try to have even more power and prestige than they do.

For example, Governor Linden, God bless her, could make an appearance in a group besides Azure Islands *cough* and make a task force of land preservationists. These green clean types could be given the rights merely to return non-group set prims and put autoreturn on for 5 minutes on Linden land, or possibly even given planting rights. They could go around picking up the trash off Linden land and clearing abandoned land. With the granulated perms, Governor Linden could be sure that no one would steal her land out from under her, but just do the grunt work that her employees on her sprawling Mainland estate can't get to even when they use their spare nights and holidays, as some of them do.

Of course, sharing the world management tasks through group tools is a very controversial topic -- because if the Lindens also made an events calendar management group and gave some resmod busy-bodies the right to remove yardsales or even yardsale content, you'd be hearing some screaming from people like me.

Still, when it comes to removal of trash from Linden land versus removal from residents' land, this could be a boon.

As with all innovations, which come at frightening speed and always have awful side effects, this patch is likely to have some awful things we don't know about. But there's no question that what the Lindens have done here is do something they didn't plan from the start, and which they didn't even like to do from the start: really give the world to the people who pay for it and live in it. For this they must get a huge round of applause not only from this current generation of users but from future users to benefit in years to come.

Making a Civil Society in SL: Broken Windows

Mitch Kapor, from whom we never hear much, has made a significant speech at SLCC -- an event about which we've learned just far too little from most of the fan bloggers, and coverage of which we now have thanks to the diligent efforts of the consummate virtual world journalist Walker Spaight/Mark Wallace.

It's hard to know where Mitch really sits in the LL food chain, given that whacky Love Machine stuff they have with distributive decision-making and people like Jeska and Pathfinder allowed to rule entire sectors with an iron hand without any evident adult intervention or supervision.

Is he "large and in charge"? Or is he sitting atop a pyramid that is so complex and busy and unpredictable that no one, least of all him, can really run it? Does he ever get inworld on an alt? What kinds of reports does he get? Does he *want* to know or is it better not to?

Do his ideas mean anything? Not being a tekkie, I can't really tell this adequately. I will say bluntly that Lotus 1-2-3 strikes me as something that was an example of an early word-processing/office product that failed and was OBE'd. I'm sure that's not the politically-correct thing to say, but I simply am old enough, and have been in enough offices, to remember the facts about this. It was hyped and touted and pushed on people. They were subjected to learning experiences with it, and partly used it but you'd also find them constantly defaulting back to older technology. Of course, my experience of Lotus was more about the "notes" than the "spreadsheet" but I bet there are others of my generation out there who will know exactly what I'm talking about -- there's a reason why we all are using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel today and not Lotus. So there's a message here somewhere, about people who make incredibly big deals and important things and are very smart and go down in history as being revolutionary but...other stuff comes along and you wind up using that.

I'm sure many people will be parsing what Mitch says this week in terms of his reliance on Philip's vision of the Holy Grid the One Grid All Hail the Central Grid.  I'm not one to tout  the de-federalizing and Balkanization of countries, so I'll leave that to them : )

But let's look at what he had to say about "civil society," a subject about which I'm of course passionately interested, both RL and SL:

"The final thing the company has to do, there needs to be a kind of civil society, the equivalent of rule of law conditions, so that people can come and do whatever their thing is without unwarranted interference. My vision is that over time the governance of Second Life passes much more to residents and structures run and managed by residents and groups of residents. That’s a large challenge to figure out how to do that, nobody has ever done anything remotely like that that I’m aware of, but the future is going to be in a kind of world which is of, by, and for the residents of it, and it will become increasingly indistinguishable from terrestrial reality. There will be a huge number of issues about what that means. There will be problems that will consume everybody’s energy and attention that we cannot even articulate today.”

 

Please, please, please, all you Platformists, all your World-haters, all you Webbers, all you hectorers and lecturers who are constantly telling us that Linden Lab is a software company that cannot have a democracy and cannot permit resident governance: there it is, large as life, twice as natural, from the top dog himself: "My vision is that over time the governance of Second Life passes much more to residents and structures run and managed by residents and groups of residents."

It's funny how Mitch does concede concepts of "the rule of law" and "civil society" but I can't be sure how much real exposure to these concepts he's had, and why, within seconds of affirming them, he immediately lurches into an idea that what civil society means is "people can come and do whatever their thing is without unwarranted interference." To be sure, non-interference of the state, carving out an independent or "third" sector away from the state or from business (often aligned or intertwined with the state) is a very vital thing for human dignity and progress. Non-interference is great -- and we want that in the worst way when it comes to things like arbitrary banning of people from PG for wearing or arbitrary seizure of their land -- these are the sorts of non-interferences that you really have to look at.

But...there's a lot more to civil society than the concept of "everybody gets to do what they like" -- because, of course, there are some basic principles of respect for the individual as well as the collective built into it.

I always figured I could go to the very earliest of founders and the very top of organizational pyramids in your quest to find the seemingly inexplicable foundations for the prevailing ideology of Second Life I like to call the "fuck-you hedonism" school of behaviour. This is the "I get to do Whatever the Fuck I Want to On My Land So Fuck You" school of community construction. It's reaped enormous rewards for the Lindens financially, because it drives the auction flywheel at an astounding pace, making people flee their first lands in knock-kneed terror at the griefing-builds and extortionism and land-swooping going on all around them and makes them buy elsewhere on the grid; it makes them flee with cynical, jaded determinism from their starter homes of 1024 or 2048 to that seemingly gleaming fresh auction land parceled by land barons now; and finally it carroms them at rocket-like escape velocity into the pancaked blinding whiteness of private island land when they finally just get fed up with all those other people who want to do "whatever the fuck they feel like doing" not only on *their own* land but *anybody else's*.

 

So Mitch should be pleased, re: "people can come and do whatever their thing is without unwarranted interference." They're coming, they're doing, and harried Lindens and exasperated rentals agents are hardly interfering in the personal freedoms of the most feted generation of Americans since World War II.

In fact, with Aimee's blog bringing in AOLers by the boatload now, all kinds of kids with numbers in their name are landing in Second Life as if it is a giant world constructed them for them to try to break and destroy. They perceive their first task as getting some guns and a plane or armour to fly around and grief people and play games like "Let's cage-bomb the mall manager".  The world isn't their blank canvas; the world is the scrolling, already-finished backdrop of their solo video game which unfolds beautifully as they fly around shooting shoppers and residents they view with the same vicious glee as they view NPCs, bosses, and other players in first-person shooter games. Of course, those "other players" thought they were building "their world, their imagination" when they settled earlier than the AOLers. When asked to desist, the AOLers sometimes turn out to be as young as nine years old. When told to stop griefing and they will be abuse reported, if they are older and nastier with their language, they'll tell you they will "jizz all over you," and also remind you that "this is just a video game so shut the fuck up".

Mitch Kapor probably hasn't spent the kind of quality time I have with the droves of new customers LL's free-for-all unaccountable accounts have produced inworld, so he probably can't really hear the resonance that is to be had with a phrase like "so that people can come and do whatever their thing is without unwarranted interference."

Or perhaps he shrugs about the Mainland -- Lindens never really have any really good ideas for the Mainland and prefer not to think about it, in the hopes it will go away (and they may get their wish).

When I study and think about a phrase like his "non-interference," however, I start with the forums. To me, where you have to start with freedom, if you are going to be serious about it, is freedom of expression. You can't cut corners there. And there, you're going to deal with Skokie, and you're going to deal with Times v. Sullivan, and you need to weather that. Freedom isn't what we found on the forums, however; we found ridiculous net-nannying, hysterical concern about how something looked to newbies or investors when those categories of people never even accessed the damn thing; and now a paranoid cloisure of the one thing that could actually help build a civil society in this very Balkanized world -- an open, public forums that provides both help for newbies, free entree into the marketplace with free classifieds, and more sophisticated discussion about the world's politics and land and economy by older "power users".

So, already as far as I'm concerned, LL has a poor score on making a civil society by first running the forums poorly, letting Lindesidents and resmods enforce the limited TOS in a blatantly biased and lackadaisical manner and then trying to uber-sophisticate us by claiming that making everyone run off to bunches of different forums or sit and passively listen to the push-media of Linden blogations are acceptable substitutes -- they aren't.

But, onward and upwards, like every other damn thing they throw at us, we'll get used to their premature removal of the forums just like the premature removal of dwell (which I commented on Walker's blog could have been a way of solving that very problem of power user/clueless newbie gap that Mitch defined).

So...how are we going to do the governance and justice thing? "Over time the governance of Second Life passes much more to residents and structures run and managed by residents and groups of resident. That’s a large challenge to figure out how to do that, nobody has ever done anything remotely like that that I’m aware of, but the future is going to be in a kind of world which is of, by, and for the residents of it, and it will become increasingly indistinguishable from terrestrial reality."

(I'll leave aside the discussion of how in fact lots of people have gone about making civil societys the hard way in real life in the after-math of things like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the fall of Latin American dictatorships that had all the virtuality -- and the monumental ugly totalitarian builds -- of a video game. But that's another blog entry.)

Note that unlike John Perry Barlow, who I can't get enough of lately as I read what in part now looks to me as rather destructive ideological meming (hard to know with disruptive technology and its accompanying ideologies whether its really disrupting what's right to be disrupted because it's old and hidebound, and whether it's also destroying things that should be preserved), Mitch Kapor doesn't hector and lecture and tell you like JPB told the gnomes of Davos that a Better World or a world so different would be made, or as Philip put it "not human law" -- he says "indistinguishable from terrestrial reality".

Well, now, does that mean that it is LIKE terrestrial reality, finally conceding that yes, you need normal governments and laws and institutions, or is he saying that the lawless anarchy of the cruelly content-fascist and social-Darwinist mess and licentious tolerance of griefing and noir lifestyles that is the society of Second Life now going to be imposed on earth and replace its reality? See, that's important to figure out sooner rather than later, eh?

Talk of covenants or the features of this or that island "colony" as Philip has called them is interesting, and can be pursued with people like Sudane Erato, who has opted to allow socialism to fester on her servers, or with Desmond Shang, who has taken a firm stand against letting age-play fester on his servers. The new group tools will give all of us chances to try out our pet theories of social management, and I can't *wait* to see how the Nbergers solve the "ownership Marxian internal contradiction" of the fact that only one person is the owner/title-holder of the sim, and if they give the other people ownership status too, they may or may not have the ability to seize the entire enchilada. I also can't wait to see how Prokofy's dedicated open-enrollment policy for all rentals groups may be forced to morph under an avalanche of people wishing all kinds of granulated perms.

But mostly, covenants and groups can't help us. That's the thing the Lindens and their angel Mitch Kapor have to realize. I can't covenant away a 16m2 extortionist. In fact, even if there were mute tools to erase his textures, I haven't solved a festering land-management problem that could still involve people on little parcels sucking up CPU with nasty scripts or vetoing on everybody else's FPS by deploying 39 in a club every night. No convenant or tool solves the "hell is other people" problem, and that's why there still has to be policies taken from the Linden side to encourage civility.

Here's my wish list of bullets that need to be bitten -- bullets all of us trying to deal with these issues have to bite on our own every day and for which we get a lot of broken teeth:

o Re-visit the extortionist land-sale/grief signing issue left hanging by the mysterious departure of the Bush Guy guy -- a civil society requires that Lindens step up to the plate and enforce their own TOS on two very important points: 1) no spamming (putting identical posters on hundreds of sims on little parcels *is* spamming even worse than notecard or IM spamming, geez) 2) no significant destruction of the enjoyment of Second Life. I realize that extortion is something they can't get a handle on realistically. But let them be open to discussions about how to handle this plague.

o Make a firm, blanket, repeated, MOTD'd, Blogged, Townhalled unambiguous very, very CLEAR policy that SECURITY ORBS THAT DO NOT WARN AND THAT BOUNCE HOME ARE ILLEGAL WEAPONS AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED IN SECOND LIFE, END OF STORY.  No wimpy little "this would be nice," from Lee Linden. No policy from Jeska from 2005 reprinted by residents but something NOW and repeated, and MOTD'd and BLOGGED. Jebus, you'd think Philip owns stock in Psyke's Defense the way he and everybody else has mumbled and ducked and covered on this one. Step up, Lindens. If you can't gain control of civility at this level, don't have illusions of anything grander. Nobody can shoot you and teleport you home and crash your game just because you're flying by, and usually merely because you *live next door*. Their right to bang around on their sex balls doesn't extend to punching you in the nose. They need warnings, and they need not to teleport home, full stop. Police blotters, inworld announcements, and absolutely crystal-clear enforcement by liaisons is needed on this.

o Civilizing missions and messaging at orientation. The gang in Jeska's squads are so bent on how to both make future content creators whom they can apprentice and control and so eager to usher newbies into their commerce circles to buy from them that they forget that they have a world-making mission that needs attending to. They need to have more clear messaging on some basics -- it's not ok to enter people's homes; hey, it's fucking rude and uncouth to go on strangers' pose balls and have sex, get your own damn land and do it on your own place idiot. That's may not be a message anyone can deliver in PG in Orientation, but the idea that trespassing is punished, and not just by land tools, has to be integrated. I'm finding that almost all trespassers verbally abuse, strew prims, put out stupid stuff like penises and turds, so that it's very, very easy to ban them for at least 3 days on a variety of offenses. I'm not seeing these offenses put in the police blotter. Put them there. Make society civil by taking care of broken windows. These are the broken windows.

o Extensive, full, frequent, diverse consultations and dialogues with residents about how resident governance will look and be managed, and refraining from interferencing by not feting and picking one special group of early-adapters, advisors, or other FIC or SIC or any grouping to be "inworld resmods". Letting Second Life be taken over by whatever unholy mixture of greedy land barons, Goreans, and age-players manages to prevail is not making civil society. It's making uncivil society. There has to be a frank recognition that while tolerance of lifestyles is appreciated and necessary, and non-interference is a value, there have to be some very, very basic rules of the road that create a tolerable public commons that is neutral and not hijacked. These rules may not be written; they may never be in the TOS; but they need airing and discussion. One of them involves not letting the orientation space and the newbie space be captured by any one of the lifestyles -- nobody should have to be wrestling BDSMers who want to clank in newbie space with their chains and get angry that some mentor is expressing doubts about them appearing half naked in the welcome area. Sex doesn't belong in PG or the orientation or the learning areas. That's pretty basic.

o Real Life does not trump Second Life. The Lindens have been grossly craven about stampeding to fete real-life educators, real-life non-profits, and real-life business. All of those realies are supposed to be making hay off the fact that it's a virtual world with avatars in it, however, so they can't forget that everybody is an avatar.

It's understood they're going to have their heady little youthful affairs and infatuations with all these things. But in the end, they have to ensure a civil society can take place and that really does mean a level playing field and an end to the pet-and-fete system. Nobody should be allowed to grab a name for their island like "Info Island" as if they are the center of the universe to be the provisioners of information centrally til the end of time with the eyeballs automatically garnered from SEARCH. We have to rely on the Lindens' sense of fairness here and urge them to try to keep the space open. I personally would like to see meetings ONLY of mainlanders on very specific topics because I feel that existing Concierge work and SL Views and the community round table have all skewed toward the content-creation class and the private-island dealers.

I'd like the Lindens to recognize -- because we're dependent on Government Linden -- that group tools and covenants cannot help us deal with sign griefing and security-orb weaponry and rampant griefing (which is not at all diminished by the aggressive orbs, BTW), and that their *policies* are needed as indicated on a few of these broken-windows issues.

I have lots more I've said or written about Ombudsman Linden; about the evils of residence justice if it is troikas or elitist "mediators" groups; and I will return to this. But I think any civil society has to grasp the nettle of broken windows; if it can't attend to those early on, it will neither be civil or a society.

InfoNut Sunday, August 20: Branding Comes to SL

Sunday, August 20, 5:46 am
Total Residents:        542,034
Active Last 60 Days:     239,543
Online Now:     4,580
US$ Spent:     287,356

*Weather Report:
Partly cloudy with mild grey squares, scattered showers of slow TPs; choppy flying. Waved Time Dilation:  99 and Sim FPS:  45. Our Basic FPS:  7.6.

*Headlines*

o Residents Scramble to Find or Promote New Forums as LL to Close Main Official Forums; We Recommend:  forums.slhomepage.com, sldrama.com, sllifes.com and slatenight.com for alternatives to discredited forums.secondcitizen.com

o Toyota Comes to SL -- Shaun and Me Reach Eyeballs Tooling Around Hidden Lakes in His New Scion!

o Anti-Age Play Demo against Daddy's Escorts in Yangpa; Sim Crashes Twice

o SLCC Opens With News of Merger of Boliver Oddfellow and Hiro Pendragon (Double Trouble?); Closes With Philip's Call for a 'Better (and Less Buggy) World'

Linden News:

o WARNING:  Don't give your password to any scripted object inworld; change it if you touch an object that asks that; never give it out to other residents, either.

o 1.12 Group Tools Reform in Preview! Woot! Check it Out and Join Ravenglass Builders Society test group
http://secondlife.com/community/preview.php

Coming Soon: 

o 1.12 Scheduled for Release August 23!

o Tip for the Day:  Aggravated by this "lack of focus" bug that prevents highlighting text as you work? If you need to get your text off "about land" parcel descriptions, position the mouse cursor at the start of the line, then go up to top screen menu to use edit/select all, then ctv-c, ctr-v, copy and paste.

o Linden of the Day:  Guy Linden, for handling the anti-age-play demonstration with equilibrium and a minimum of words quoting the TOS.

o Resident of the Day: Tim Marat, land dealer and grim-baby-totin' man about town
˜™
o Real Estate Find of the Day: Marat's Maryport, 8, 192 m2, $81,200, or lease for $4000/wk, roadside, great seaviews. š

o Product of the Day:  Musashi-Do's Wet Dream Bikinis in 10 colours›, only $60/piece

o  Forum Post du Jour:  "The Tier System Blows, Vote in Prop 443" http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=131040

o Site of the Day:  Tao Takashi's SL Blog Roller
http://planet.worldofsl.com/

o Blog of the Day:  SL Insider Blogs on SLCC http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2006/08/19/making-a-better-place/

o RL Media of the Day:  "Business Consulting Comes to SL" (Chili Carson at SLCC)
http://news.com.com/Business+consulting+comes+to+Second+Life/2100-1043_3-6107513.html

Ask for an InfoNut Terminal On Your Land!

To make a submission, drag your notecard back into this InfoNut box!
BRIEF Classifieds Welcome!‹
Prokofy Neva, Manager, Ravenglass Rentals, Pharos Properties
€
ŒŽ

Why I'm Boycotting SLCC: Bugs, Thugs, and Snuggles

If you're going to San Francisco to the Second Life Community Convention, don't bother wearing any flowers in your hair; you're not going to be meeting any gentle people. In fact, if you're going to SLCC, you're likely to meet some of the most awful people I've ever dealt with in my life -- arrogant, condescending types capable of the most thuggish behaviour -- over a virtual world!

In fact, if I had to give you the sound byte on why I don't wish to participate in a "user's convention" essentially stage-managed by Linden Lab, I think I could sum it up this way: "Bugs, thugs, and snuggles"! The persistenly bad and buggy performance of the software; the increase in griefing including of the really nasty variety that has all the look and feel of RL gangsters, not pretend mafias; and the thuggish manner in which some avatars of big "RL in SL" attempt to get their way and suppress the criticism of others as they snuggle up to the Lindens. Yuck!

As many know from listening to Second Cast, months ago I said I wasn't interested in going to SLCC; it felt like a company picnic (that's the title Johnny Ming gave the cast) and I felt like well, basically, no, I didn't want to go and see FlipperPA get drunk and sing bawdy songs and maybe insult me, and no, I didn't wish to see the denouement of ungainly Maxx Monde's efforts to pick up strange waitresses in bars. Silly me! I'm not cool!

I had practical reasons to wonder why I'd travel thousands of miles across the country and spend what I could spend on a whole private island in Second Life, of course. But over time, this has gelled into a sense that I need to boycott this convention -- and that means the inworld, dog-food-eating version of it, too.

Oh, it's not a big protest. I don't have special t-shirts or signs or petitions as I have for many of my other protests in SL, whether against the spamming and extortionist Bush Guy's signs or the switch to voice in the town hall. One Linden condescendingly told me that they "couldn't imagine what I hoped to accomplish with boycotting SLCC" -- to which I can only reply: I don't wish to accomplish anything. But I don't wish to participate. I've found in life that when you face intractable situations or powerful entities that won't change, there's always one thing you can do: you can simply refuse to confer legitimacy on them. You always have that, your free will and dignity, and that they can't take from you, even in a virtual world in which they believe that all truth resides on their servers.

Last year, I went to SLCC reluctantly, because I don't like being bullied, harassed and having my real life linked to my avatar -- which is exactly what I've had to endure all year due to making that linkage. I went only because it was combined with the State of Play III conference which is among the most important in the industry, and probably the only place where law and virtual worlds really get a serious, critical, and expert discussion usually missing from most gaming conferences (though SWSX is shaping up to have some very good panels this coming year).

I don't go to these conferences because I'm a gamer or a fanboy; I'm not. I never played games of the type like World of Warcraft; I hate fanboy culture of the sort that grew up in TSO. I run a medium-sized rental business within SL and try to study the world and how it works. That's interesting to me on its own terms, regardless of what anyone else does around it, but lately, this modest enterprise has become all but unendurable.

My boycott of SLCC mainly revolves around the moral revulsion of dealing with people like Flipper and Jennyfur Peregrine, the non-elected, non-acclaimed "community leaders" of SLCC who merely unilaterally -- just because they have Jeska Linden as an old friend and well, just because -- took on the organization of the conference. Running conferences like this is a thankless task; people were more or less happy with their technical organization of it last year, but it's not an open and transparent process. The community doesn't really participate; there is no community except the clique around some of the Electric Sheep Company people who are the Lindens' Feted Inner Core who have evolved, as one prominent SL business person is just commenting to me now, "as the RL FIC".

Real life always has the cool kids; SL has them too. That isn't so bad; life is like high school, there are always such types; you always have to deal with those inside dopes who have the inside dope. But in Second Life, you feel the pain more harshly on your skin -- they control the economy in more thorough ways than they can in RL, and they control the policies and practices of LL in ways that are hard to imagine in RL, too.

The issue I've already written on here ad nauseum -- yardsales, first-sale doctrine, and the unseemingly overreaching grab of content creators like Stroker Serpentine against these principles -- are a chief emblematic issue for me. Seeing Sibley, the CEO of ESC in New York recently, in the public meeting about the Metaverse, I asked him: what is you policy about yardsales? What is your attitude to first-sale doctrine? Do you believe that because everything in a virtual world is run by software that only those who create and license the software can decide how the world is run and what gets sold as a "by-product" of that software? And...as the Westinghouse or the Ford Motor Company of SL, what have you done for us lately?!

He laughed because like the other handful of 3-D web start-ups, he thinks of himself as a good guy, as the little guy, as the one bravely pioneering and facing the big bad world of giant old media corporations and IT bosses from hell who "don't get it," as the favourite expression of these 3-D guys has it. So it comes as a surprise to him, no doubt, that someone sees him as a powerful force displacing a world that many have known and made livings or tried to making livings in. When I say the experience is not unlike the World Bank coming into China while colluding with the Chinese government and planning big dams that will flood little Tibetan villages, meanwhile hiring a few of the more compliant Tibetans as sherpas -- I'm not kidding. It's *exactly* like that.

I've just come off what turned out to be an all-night shift in SL -- something I normally have to avoid
in SL as I go do my day jobs, too. It would be folly to try to make an entire living and support a family of SL in the land business, anyway, though of course a few like Anshe Chung do this and of course content creators, who have less unbillable scut work and customer service to do, are able to do.

Why? Because of griefing. And that comes to my other sense of "I prefer not to" when it comes to SLCC.

I don't have the protest that Cristiano Midnight and others have about griefing. I welcome the flood of new people, especially Europeans and many, many more Americans of the ordinary type, and the poorer type. That's great! I take all comers, and refuse to put bans on my land to keep out "no payment info on file," something the land tools let you do now. I probably run the last mainland rentals business in SL that has an open system where anyone can come and pay the box, where anyone can refund, and where securit orbs that bounce home are forbidden and red bounce lines are discouraged.

Rather, my beef, which has come to a head in recent weeks, is with the ways in which the Lindens are running the justice system as a whole, and their vagueness and even hostility toward any discussion about what might emerge as a resident-based justice system -- which has some serious pros and cons built into it, given the tendency to fuck-you hedonism and vigilantism already prevalent on the grid. This is all just going way too slow and way too ineffectuallly for me, because it's not an abstraction for me -- property value is something I believe in, even virtual property; property isn't something you roll up like shelf-paper and put away when you're done with your splashy ad campaign; property is home and business and needs to be protected as much -- if not more so! -- as real property even though it is virtual estate. Only such a respect for property and its owners and users regardless of class or caste could form a solid basis for a metaversal civilization; the belief that the foundation of such a meta-world is only to be contained in the knowledge and skills of elite cadres of programmers and graphic artists is a premise I must reject.

I typically spend 3 hours out of the 6 or even 8 I might be able to deploy on SL in a 24 hour cycle handling griefers now. That means chasing, reporting, comforting tenants, trying to get Lindens to act, cleaning up messes. Griefing incidents are still a minority of trouble tickets, and only a handful of tenants are affected by it. But what's happening is that as I have more tenants, and more people come in, and there is greater turnover, there's more griefing -- this is what I tried to explain in the infamous "Abuse Levees are Holding" thread -- whatever the percentage points remaining about the same, the surface area of griefing and those affected by it is much greater.

What I'd like the Lindens to do in response to this alarming trend, that has had awful consequences on user retention and causes inworld business losses, is to have POLICIES not just LAND TOOLS. That is, I'd like them to address more verbally and forcefully and at a higher level basic principles: that property is to be respected; that you cannot trespass and destroy it; that you cannot enter people's homes to harass them; that you should not respond to griefing with shooting back or security orbs that fail to warn and bounce home; and many other things. That is, I'd like them to behave a little bit like the fictional federal government that they have to pretend to be in SL, and have public service announcements on the radio; more effective, civilizing campaigns whether in MOTD or inworld meetings or in something other than their ridiculous new push-media blogs. They don't want to administer the world they created; yet we're dependent on them to administer it because we don't own the servers and don't have licenses to the software; it's the worst of all possible situations and they can only address it at least until they are prepared to issue such licenses by creating an effective, Linden-supervised and accountable justice system.

Instead, the Lindens dump the problem on lower-level liaisons who can't keep up; they tend to focus only on the ridiculously over-covered issues of sandbox sales and sandbox shooting (they should just liberate some sandboxes for both selling and shooting and be done with it) and lately on corporate trademarks because, when all is said and done, we're just the server load test here and the beta testers, the real people -- RL businesses -- are going to need trademark protection of the kind that some guy making a sex bed that some girl sells at a yardsale doesn't really have anyway.

I tried to explain my theory of why the forums are closed -- and why now -- on sldrama.com  IN a nutshell, I was perma-banned because I criticized the Big Five, the five companies which at that time were the FIC untouchables and privileged sons of the beta-testing era. I then reasoned that all of you came to have to be perma-banned too, because increasingly, those of you who are anti-capitalist, or just generally on the left, or liberals concerned about social responsibility of companies (that's where I fit in), would be criticizing the huge disparity of wealth and class emerging in SL.

People like me inside the world in business have had to take some dramatic assaults in the last year. I don't mean the loss of dwell payments or developers' incentives; those of us with companies functioning more like RL companies didn't rely on them.

I mean the assaults of the following type:

o GOMing of the GOM -- the Linden went from a value of $4.25/1000 down to $2.80/1000 and is only now making it's way to $3.25/1000 on a good day

o Summary removal of telehubs -- unnecessarily abrupt and radical decision that lost money both for telehub mall owners and LL itself in buy-backs

o Poor performance with grey squares and slow-loading sims as a routine matter coming as the cost of p2p

o Many days of downtime, and a regularly-scheduled weekly patch -- something actually unheard of a year ago

o Rampant, concerted, planned, deliberate grid-wide attacks by the W-hat faction and refusal to move against the enablers and supporting infrastructure of this faction still run by Plastic Duck, and still active, and still harming people constantly.

o Poor server performance -- sims crash, FPS plummets and never stabilizes on the server side with Time Dilation and FPS fluctuating to very poor levels constantly

It would never have occurred to me 2 years ago, or 1 year ago, that I'd actually have to get out of my beloved business of renting land and homes to people and engaging to the fullest with the world in a myriad of business and non-profit pursuits for reasons that would be related to griefing, or to the huge backwash caused by disparities in the economy.

I've spent 8 hours in SL, many of them devoted to 2 things -- mopping up after griefing attacks and trying to deal with the fact that on two sims, clubs feel they can grab all the FPS of that server and put 20-40 avs on that server (the refusal of LL to either zone, or charge for CPU usage or find some other way of dealing with this hugely unjust situation whereby those with some of the land on a server can arbitrarily decide to deploy a club and hobble and even cripple permanently others who happened even to have been there first, or who even have more square meters, and have residences.)

That experience is completely unlike the experience of those winging their way to SL and chatting on their cells and Blackberries. The emerging New Class of people who make a living exploiting the platform but not having to actually live inside of it are pretty hard to take. It's not about "jealousy" because their profession -- hopping around trying to please finicky clients in hysterical media campaigns and public relations ventures -- is one I'd never want, nor need, not have any interest in.

Rather, it's about the capacity of these people to skew the platform and its features politically, through proximity to the Lindens and RL media, away from the meat-and-potatoes of making the platform habitable toward making it glamorous -- things like flexiprims or "studio-quality photographs".

Finally, I'm glad I'm not participating in SLCC if it is the kind of event Hamlet nee Linden Au is writing about it as -- a kick in the pants to "the old fans" and a push over the cliff of "all those ordinary people" and a conscious celebration of media glitz and hype to be had around the fact that a handful of companies have gotten started in this edgy new profession of 3-D web work, and many more are lusting to get in on what might be the Next Big Thing. That's not a pretty sight to see at all; it reminds one of Gold Rushes and dot.com insanity and lives broken.

"I’m fairly sure the highlight won’t be Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale appearing onstage in a sequined codpiece," gushes Hamlet -- and you can feel the sarcasm and contempt dripping from his voice.

"That was last year, when the inaugural convention (the brainchild of several fans of the user-created online world) attracted a hundred-plus attendees, and resembled a quirky mash-up of Slashdot party, Burning Man, and Star Trek con. (On a dare, Rosedale gave the keynote dressed up to resemble his SL avatar.)"

Oh, aren't we exotic? Why, a veritable Star Wars bar we are!

"But those innocent times are over, and the world which had a scant 60,000 registered users back then now boasts nearly 250,000 active users. Since then, too, the company won Wired Magazine’s Rave award for Business, it’s been featured on the cover of BusinessWeek, and inspired a highly influential article in Harvard Business Review called “Avatar-Based Marketing“, which in turn inspired, well, an avatar-based discussion on avatar-based marketing."

Um, well, let's leave aside the hypey claim about the 250,000 active users -- let's be charitable -- and let's remind everyone who was on the cover of Business Week -- Anshe Chung, the epitome of the inworld business, the hardworking Business Girl, the person who really lives in SL and has created an entire continent of more than 150 islands with a large team of Chinese nationals and others around the world working to sustain this Dreamland. Is she there this year? No. Her husband, Guni Greenstein, is dropping in on his way from other business trips and sustaining at a silver level this year. Is that because avatars like Anshe or Guni are passe, oh-so-2005, and only Metaverse sherpas are where it's at? Of course not. The Harvard guy, Paul Hemp, wouldn't even have a theory, and wouldn't even having anything to write about and talk about at panels about if it weren't for our hard work as avatars living in this world.

Some people will say that those of us who didn't go to SLCC, or don't get to most of these hyped up RL-SL events, have been left behind by progress or don't fit into the new regime. Nothing of the kind. We fit in far better than any of these people because *we live here* and spend more time logged in to this world than any of them -- and that's including Lindens, taken as a whole.

We didn't give up the idea of a Better World. Did they?
Starax's statue of Achilles in front of the Linden Temple in Keswick.

The Legal Nihilism of Second Life

I haven't had a chance to think this topic through properly, but then, that's never stopped me from blogging eh? : )

I've always been profoundly troubled by the essential legal nihilism at the root of the Second Life experience. It works on a variety of levels, with a variety of premises, that work more or less like the following:

o Linden Lab is a private software company, not an elected government and not an international or intergovernmental institution, so it has no need to have its world-product answer to any higher notions of the rule of law as understood by international treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or U.S. law like the First Amendment.

o Linden Lab as a real-life corporation in the State of California has to abide by local law and regulations, of course, and it does that, but its world-product is a fictional metaverse, even if not "a game," and therefore is not subject to the laws of the State of California or for that matter, even the law of gravity.

o Second Life is a world governed by code-as-law. Everything in it is governed mechanically by servers and software.  To the extent that it can have concepts like "democratic vote" or "privacy," it can only be something programmed by a programmer as an emulation of these valued things, but necessarily will have its limitations.

o Concepts from civil societies under the rule of law like "the right to face one's accuser" or "the right to a fair trial" or "the right to counsel and an adversarial defense" or "the right to discovery" have no meaning in the world of Second Life because they are not pertinent to a private software company, or its responsibilies to a private club joined by subscription, even if that subscription is open, free, and on the Internet. These concepts would be hard to administer anyway, and cost too much to staff and organize properly.

These premises could be debated, they could be modified, and I have no doubt that other software companies with other worlds will figure out how to modify them and debate them under the pressure of social demand. Why, just today I got in my inbox something called Shared Space for $495 from Caligari that apparently enables people to have meetings and manipulate objects in a 3-D users' space where they can also put in objects with animations. Looks expensive and hard to learn and use, like Croquet. And that's why we don't see competition to Second Life emerging any time soon -- but eventually we will.

All of these premises would be fine to live with as a kind of temporary solution, as a kind of makeshift camp-out kind of experience as we walk West in the great pioneering experience of the 3-D web.

HOWEVER, that's not where Lindens, their sympathizers, their pet groups like the FIC and SIC ever leave it. They are ideologically much, much more troublesome with these concepts, and leave me really worried about how this Metaverse is going to turn out.

Their concepts, based on the preceding idea that "real-life application of law and jurisdiction is limited," then begin to be transcended like this:

o Code-as-law works very well. In fact, we find it works absolutely stellar. Why have "no" votes on a voting mechanism? That just causes negativity and the inability to make positive proposals that administrators can actually work with to change things. It's much better to enable people to do the work of making positive proposals, even 100 different ones all amounting to the same thing, and tell them they have to get 500 votes or we won't pay attention to them.

o All truth resides on our servers. We capture every chat, animation, movement, transaction, behaviour. ALL of it has copies that reside with us. We might or might not dump some or all of this; we're not telling, however. You sign away your rights to privacy with us; and we're deliberately vague about what third-party sites attached to us do with the aggregated and meta-tagged information that they scrape off your avatar and his movements and transactions. Given that all truth resides on our servers, and we don't recognize any chatlogs you gather because a) we forbid the publication on our forums of chat logs and b) you could always be editing and faking them on your side, including outside the SL application, we have no need for adversarial defense, segregation of witnesses, even concepts like facing your accusers. We already know what happened in every single griefing incident, you can't provide any alternative version of this reality because we see everything, so give it up.

o Our abuse reporting system may be overwhelmed, backed up, or dependent on an informers' network of residents willing to report on their fellow residents, rather than our own discretionary surveillance (though that is used, too) but we have the best, most impartial, most wise people administering it. They are fair and just. They shouldn't be second-guessed because a) they have truth on their side as all truth is server-side and b) they are just good, hard-working dedicated and wise and just people in general. You are a troll and even a fucktard for suggesting otherwise. In fact, you must have problems with authority, and be suffering from "control" issues if you can't accept that we are the bestest, wisest, most fair people -- even though of course, we can't tell you a) what percentage of appeals to our decisions are honoured and thereby we admit error or b) just what it is we are really doing with all these cases, only some of which are published on the police blotter and only some of which are resolved by action when "resolved".

o We do so have juries in our system, and your claims that juries and other notions of a fair trial are absent from Second Life are false. Why, when someone is facing a permaban, we have a system where the bare skeletal facts of the case are sent out at random to jurors who then recommend whether a person should be permabanned. Why, sometimes we even heed them. If the names of the people, the precise details of the offenses, and any circumstantial or extenuating or adversarial information is available, why, that's not relevant because a) all truth resides on our servers and b) we have very good and wise pepole and c) we can't interfere with people's privacy and reveal the details of disciplinary actions against them -- although of course, for us, privacy is a very arbitrary thing, because we don't mind if third-party sites scrape data about interactions and proximity and publicize it using our software and LSL calls.

 

o Code-as-law in fact is a great thing. The meat-world, with its democracies and its representational governments and such, is highly flawed. Why, people who get elected are often only the people with the most connections, the best family or corporate ties, the most money, the most ability to get on TV. They aren't really democratic. And institutions like the Congress or the Parliament are corrupt, and are responsible even for allowing unjust wars to be waged on other countries and for graft and pork-barrelling to abound. Therefore, our system that enables masses of people to pull levers, even in a more limited situation where they can't vote "no," is better, because there isn't the ability to corrupt it in the same way. Of course, our system is programmed by an elite task force of programmers, aided by only those residents we like and respect because they have the knowledge/experience levels we can respect, but that's not elitism, that's just excellence, and those of mediocre skills or lesser intelligence aren't able to appreciate that.

o Yes, our platform crashes, our system is buggy, but hey, we work hard and we have dedicated people. What have YOU done lately besides bitch? And furthermore, we recognize internally that our systems are coded simulations or emulations, and we understand far better than you do their limitations, so you really need to cut us some slack and give us more credit for understanding the limits of our Godheadedness here; we know better than you. So shut up.

Probably few people noticed this article in an industry publication called Computer Power User, Q&A With Philip Rosedale.  It meanders along with the usual wow, gee-whiz talk about virtual worlds. Philip, who has a B.S. in Physics, talks about the difference between trying to manipulate the physical world with its atoms and its barriers and its obstacles like mill-work and such, then he moves on to talk about why Second Life is so compelling because of the ease of manipulation and simulation.

Except, underlying this whole conversation is a realization that I'm having about his center of gravity, which I feel is so different than my own and many other people's: unlike the real world, of accident, of God, of Nature, of other people, of randomness and a certain diversity of agents, if you will, which you might or might not be able to appeal to (your landlord, your Congressman, God), the world of Second Life is all controlled by only one thing: the code. That is, it all takes place on servers run by software and programmed by...those most excellent people. So, unlike real life, with its divergency of actors and agents and higher instances of appeal, in Second Life, there's only the one group of agents and the one code -- and then, of course, that special grouplet of friends allowed to violate the rule set for everyone else about reverse-engineering, called "libsecondlife".

Philip at first seems to give a nod to a rule-of-law concept that would be borrowed in its beauty from meat-world -- that the rule of law means that states and people must subject themselves to a higher law, that the state is not above the law, that people cannot be above the law. He does that by implying that the code, once written and executed, is above him or anybody, it has a life of its own.

But...unlike God or Congress or my landlord in RL, all RL powers that have either their own autonomy, or the collectively-granted autonomy of either a political process or a lease, and the ability, in one way or another, to be appealed against, at least in theory, the programmers in a thing like Second Life are not to be appealed against -- and they're only one set of them. They know best. Their code is law, after all. As we know from our first set of principles, and our second reviewed here, they are the bestest, brightest, and most sensitive and wise and talented people.

On top of this hubris and excess comes another common premise seen not only in SL but other game settings -- that game gods, game devs, programmers, are Experts in Everything. They're Experts in Everything because all those other fields in which those other people in the humanities, and not the sciences, were acknowledged experts in, like literature or anthropology or sociology or economics or psychology or philosophy, are all things that, willy nilly, have to be put into code and simulated for a place like Second Life. Everything has to be reduced to a program. So economics, justice, philosophy -- these are all 01010101 routines, a yes/no, a switch, a program, a code. And that's why it's better to let those fields be run by the engineers/scientists/computer nerds who have to reduce those other fields to code -- because they know best. They're the coders. They know how it has to be done. And you are stupid.

If you point out that their LindEx economic system, or their land auction, or their abuse-reporting system and banning system is poor, a bad simulation, a broken simulation, not working to serve the public, they bristle, and get shirty. Why? Because not only are they wise and good and doing the best they can, your assumptions -- that meat world is better -- are belied by the fact that now you spend all your leisure hours with them. They're coding, doing the best they can, to make a virtual world. This is how it has to work, and there are objective reasons for that, and you as a non-coder can't understand that. Meat world was flawed anyway, with its corrupt and its arrogant politicians. If you point out that they emulate much of the same behaviour they claim to have departed from, well, you're a politician, too.

It's understood that the platform might not be the best; perhaps the engines, or the open source software used in it; or this model or that model might not be the best, but *it's the worst except all the others,* like meat-world democracy, and P.S. see above premises: the programmers are the wisest, bestest, kindest and most well-meaning people ever  found in the history of the world to undertake a revolutionary transformation like this so, shut up, you are a feeb and a chode.

If you want to understand this better, read, and re-read this fascinating article. Philip will explain that he's not a gamer. He's a physicist who wanted something that would help him realize the visions for his inventions faster, and more manipulable.

From there, he made this leap:

I always wanted to be able to make things and as a creative person kind of externalize my thoughts in a way that was more facile. I imagined myself sort of standing in the darkness and bringing things into existence around me as a way of building. And I couldn’t do that in the real world. I can think of cool gadgets way faster than I can build them with my hands. We’ve all had that feeling. So I wanted a place where you could just do that, where you could just take your brain and literally manipulate the world around you. And moreover, I always felt deeply that if you allowed a lot of people to do that together, you would get something that was kind of where we all want the world to go.

Oh? We do? We all want the world to go *that way*? Surely not. And that's the problem at the heart of this world that starts as one man's vision to make a playspace for inventions to thrive and live, and a playspace to collaborate with other people also skilled at inventing and making inventions thrive and life -- they have their beliefs, their ideologies, about which inventions are cool, about which people are the best to collaborate -- they have their subjective thoughts about lots of things, really. And they don't necessarily dovetail with any of ours. Yet we have a right to be their, too, in that space and even object: no, the world can't go this way, we don't like it - it's not working!

So where is the legal nihilism, you ask? I'm finding in talking to people in SL even quite educated and experienced that the concept of "rule of law" are poorly understood. Philip recognizes that the law of physics, and the code-as-law created in conformity to them, are higher than himself. And yet...in doing so, he conceives of himself as a marbled statue of a Greek God. He imbues himself with certain imaginary powers. He and his fellow coders are, after all, in god-like fashion, arbitrarily, and sometimes whimsically, controlling this code, making decisions about it, making decisions about people's lives (privacy or no privacy, push or no push) and making them subjectively, outside the coding process itself per se, but in a kind of hive-mind collective tribal process that he has only hinted about with things like his Tao of Linden, or which you can read about (in my case, with mounting horror), in things like this little-noticed discussion of the Love Machine and the software used to govern it.

"PR: What are the physical laws of the Internet? They are not human laws. We have observed that laws like ‘gambling is illegal’ are not meaningful on the Internet. Law is not broadly meaningful on the Internet. So what is the law, then, of the Internet? It’s HTTP. What you can do with that protocol, say SSL extensions, that’s the law, the physical law. Can you securely communicate over the Internet? Yes. So the law is that you can do that. It’s a capability, just like physics. Physics says that you can use electromagnetic radiation to send signals at a distance. Well, the fact that there’s a broadly accepted standard called SSL means that you can basically send cryptographically secure information over a long distance across a network. The code is the law, and the code is God. So people always say, ‘Are you guys gods?’ What I always say to that is, ‘no, but the code is.’ The most broadly accepted versions of the protocol are the physical laws and then by extension, depending on how religious you want to be, they are what we think of as God. So if you were to draw it to mythology, I think the Second World authors are most like the Greek and Roman gods. We’re imperfect. We sometimes disagree. Maybe very rarely we actually fight. And we have certain specializations. There’s a guy here named Andrew who was the first employee, and he’s like the god of weather because he’s a physicist and everybody knows that he worked on the fluid-dynamic systems that are behind the weather. So if anybody is going to twiddle around with the code, like if you want the code to change, if you want the character of physical law to change around how the wind blows, you should talk to Andrew because in a decentralized development environment Andrew might take care of you if you want something to change.

CPU: If I pray to him and sacrifice.

     PR: Yeah, you pray to Andrew, and Andrew changes the weather. So anyway, if I was to do another avatar, I’d be like marble, like one of the Michelangelo slaves or something. I would appropriately fit the concept of an imperfect but inherently human and well-meaning—hopefully, on a good  day—Greek god."

You would never know it from talking to Lindens, of course, who are only drinking one colour of Kool-Aid on this concept, but the idea promulgated by Lawrence Lessig that "on the Internet, code is law" is a controversial idea, and one with many debates all around it from the right and left. On the left, more radical powers inject "critical Marxist thought" blah blah and find ways of justifying "worms against nukes" and such. On the right, net-nanny aspirations and prudishness and religious zealotry, or the desire for heavy political control, introduce various filters, things like the Russian SORM, and all the rest. These are the sorts of things that the Electronic Frontier Foundation addresses.

The Lindens have been powerfully influenced by Lawrence Lessig. He's the one credited with convincing them to give their residents IP so that they could copyright, sell, and make a fortune on their wares.

But...their revolutionary zeal around this concept won't go so far as *really* protecting copyright, as anybody struggling to get answers about DMCA takedown notices or allegations of copyright theft knows. Furthermore, while wishing to adopt Lessig's radical, Marxist-type notions of "all property is theft," etc (take away old dead guy's property and give it to live brown boys, etc.) they don't then insist that the first generation of people who benefit from this concept of the liberated property of a corporation and the liberal understanding of mash-ups swiped from the Internet itself anyway in the form of textures and animations then extend it to the next generation with a robust first-sale concept (hence the screaming about girls who sell big content creator's beds at yardsales without clearance from them).

You'd never know it, of course, from the milieu created around Second Life by its makers, with the hyping through the Hamlet nee Linden Au PR machine of Creative Commons ideology, etc. that there is even a debate around any of these "received wisdoms" (i.e. that code is law; that software governs everything and every property relation; that we are all beholden to game gods).

But there is, in articles easily found like this one, "Cyberspace Self-Governance: A Skeptical View from Liberal Democratic Theory by Neil Weinstock Netanel on the Harvard Law School servers:

Netanel takes on John Perry Barlow's manifesto (Barlow is among the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation):

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
- John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Reading such heartfelt comments from the drum-circle tribalists these days is, well, underwhelming as I fly around combatting griefers and listening to tentants rage at me because I'm not doing "enough" to combat the griefers.

I recently invited John Pery Barlow to come and speak or at least hang out in Second Life, because I feel if you're going to have ideologies promulgated like that on the Internet about the glories of cyberspace, you need to come and eat the dogfood and see the results of your handiwork. No fair hiding on the conference circuit -- come and see what it's like, living on the Mainland.

Netanel takes on this cyber-libertarian claim, which might have been drunk with their mother's milk by every single person at Linden Lab:

"The first component, which I will call the claim of liberal perfection, views cyberspace norm creation as the paradigm of liberal rule. It contends that cyberspace self-governance more fully embodies the liberal democratic goals of individual liberty, popular sovereignty, and the consent of the governed than does the "top-down" administration of even the most democratic nation-states.   n20 Cyberians view territorial representative government as a fundamentally flawed attempt to implement liberal democratic ideals. Representative democracy might be the best we can achieve in "real space," where collective action, information, negotiation, and mobility costs make unmediated forms of governance highly impractical. But, cyberians posit, the global networks of digital communication and data storage that underlie cyberspace create unprecedented possibilities to drastically reduce those costs. They offer a wealth of information, instantaneous and inexpensive mass communication, and a seemingly infinite choice of virtual communities, discussion groups, and rule regimes. As a result, cyberians claim, cyberspace not only constitutes a jurisdiction apart from territorial nation-states; it is also a fundamentally more liberal and democratic one.

They run their company with this ardent and even zealous belief; they run the world with this same set of beliefs, often flying in the face of the reality of the brokenness of the ideology. It's good to see a Harvard law professor then take them on (I'd highly recommend cutting and pasting this Internet HTML page with no white margins into an ordinary Word document to make it more readable):

"Cyberpopulism fails to provide a workable mechanism for protecting the liberties of minorities and dissenters. And in attempting to remedy this failing, cyberpopulism moves towards an equally unworkable neoliberal regime of unanimous consent and dissenter exit."

Bingo! Sound familiar, eh? This essay is rich with thoughtful and well-reasoned argumentation against every silly thing you've ever felt uncomfortable about foisted on you in Second Life -- the concept of "the community wants it" or "we are the best and fairest resmods" or "if you don't like it, leave".

There plenty of thoughtful people who consistently argue against the "code as law" extremism implicit in Philip Rosedale's thinking and explicit in the world he has created. They aren't horrible Bushies or neo-cons or anything of the sort, either; they just aren't revolutionary zealots. Volokh has comments on his blog and James Grimmelman is referenced, who gave an interesting talk at SOP III last year -- yet in these very noisy and confusing big conferences with game executives, big business, corporate lawyers, and all manner of things in between, it's hard to hear whether this debate is really being had (although in part, last year, the "Gr8 Deb8" was all about that, i.e. can meat-world law of governments and countries govern this fabulous cool thing called cyberspace and the Metaverse.

" If so, we need to take a cold, hard look at some of the incongruities and limitations of private ordering. An untrammeled cyberspace would ultimately be inimical to liberal democratic principles. It would free majorities to trample upon minorities and would serve as a breeding ground for invidious status discrimination, narrowcasting and mainstreaming content selection, systematic invasions of privacy, and gross inequalities in the distribution of basic requisites for netizenship and citizenship in the information age," concludes Weinstock.

Ultimately -- and I'm going to work on all the interstices needed here! -- I feel that code-as-law is about legal nihilism. It is like the old adage that martial law is to law as martial music is to music.  Code-as-law has lurking behind it the discretionary and arbitrary will or whim of groups of elite programmers unaccountable to any higher law or institution, with absolutely, unshakeable belief not only in themselves as having all the perspective they need to do anything, but that they are Experts in Everything. They hide behind the concept of the Metaverse as needing to be a vast open playspace for people from all different countries to quietly execute the code they think needs to be executed by the lights of their internal, sectarian, and often revolutionary and zealous beliefs. They are unwilling to subject themselves to any higher law or higher power; that contains the seeds of their nihilism.

I could add as a footnote that the term "legal nihilism" is very well understood in Soviet studies precisely because people have to deal with the after-effects of societies destroyed by revolutionary justice that demolished legal systems, lawyers, judges, courtes, etc. and substituted them with terror and the misuse of the law and prisons to punish political dissent and maintain executive power. So that's why thinkers tend to use this term to try to capture the problem of remaking these societies so damaged by the undermining of the rule of law and people's belief in law. "The law is a bridle; it can be turned any which way," is a Russian saying; "Give me the man, and I'll find the case against him," was the adage of Stalin's prosecutor, Vyshinsky." In discounting and repudiating the old meat-world's law and legal systems and institutions like parliaments, the code-as-law crowd put in its place a law that is merely at the behest of unaccountable and arbitrary coders, to which there is no recourse.

Pharos Island TOP PICKS by Ravenglass Rentals

I've been running this TOP PICKS stand inworld for more than a year, trying to refresh it every month or so, more if possible -- it's work! But I find it a great antidote to the forced POPULAR PLACES of the inworld user panel which only shows those sex joints that have dance pads these days, and not much else -- and only 20 of them. With the forums closing, we're going to need a lot more guides and recommendations like this, so I'm going to publicize mine more.

I built it on the principle that only a business is going to support something like this which takes TIME AND EFFORT. (Pathfinder only did like 3 of his "finds" before he gave up, and while doing them would do stuff like put in Ulrika Zugzwang twice, meh). People always start things like this with great fanfare, and when I first started nearly two years ago, I even wanted to have a top picks magazine I was so determined. It languishes and it hard to keep up at times, but over the year, I find this stand built in Ross as part of the Pharos Lighthouse complex by Sulumor Romulus has worked great to make it easier to do.

Five of the top ten are tenants of Ravenglass, usually shops, or sometimes some rental community that has just opened, or something from the SL Public Land Preserve which I founded and have obtained a fair amount of support for. People like to see themselves and others rotate in these picks, and while everybody starts out saying they will pick "the best" they always end up picking their friends -- this way you can see that yes, there are emphatically five slots here filled with paying tenants, and we're proud of it -- it's what enables me to have land and create projects like this.

The other five I discover while flying around, or people submit ideas to me, or I stumble on something while looking at blogs and such.

This week's PICKS, with the slurls built in, or, if you prefer, go to the stand and collect the cards to read and the landmarks and study at your leisure:

1. Ordinal Enterprises in Independent State of Caledon -- pick up the free slurlchatter that enables you to make SLURLS effortlessly while flying around.

2. Moth Temple SL Public Land Preserve in Iris Thanks to Clubside Granville and other donors who help to maintain the preserve, there are more than 10,000 m2 of open water to enjoy around the historic Linden build of the Moth Temple, created by an ancient race of moth-worshippers.

3. Nantucket and Cape Cod Sims Awesome new continent developed by Barb Carson with everything from sea shanties to elegant captain's dwellings, Man-o-War Casino, nautical shops, boating, docks to stroll and lots more.

4. Krystalline Creations in Brownlee Everything from bouncy flexi-prim dresses to plasma chambers in this fun store.

5. !~*~ Pe-JI Japan ~*~! New cool Japanese designer in SL. She's got the best tinted eyeglasses we've seen -- we're wearing them! Plus other funky things like pink heart ukeleles that really play songs!

6. Atoll Continent Landing Boutiques We can't get enough of Waved up north in the watery atoll sims by the Moth Temple. You get the whole amazing REZZUST compound with awesome builds by Rez Menoptra and Endira Udal. Then you get some builds like the pirate radio out there that are so fugly, they cross into that zone of high-octane aesthetics that only Second Life can induce. Open your doors of perception! Also, see real moths (ok, virtual moths) come out at night here!

7. Seattle Shirt Company is a great newbie success story, guy comes into Second Life, makes rock Ts, sells them, does great! You can get Philip Linden's favourite open-mouthed wonder T, and many more.

8. Pirate Kitties are fabulous. Get the cute lunchboxes like the choco cat or first aid kit or the animal top hats.

9. Independent State of Caledon Check out this old-world steampunk sim where they have an old-fashioned telehub that forces you to traverse interesting landscape, talk to people, and browse shops Then duck into Dr. Maginot's home and pick up a bottle of Avataric Rejuvenating Tonic, only $25, guaranteed to reduce and reverse the toxic effects of forums!

10. Slatenight A great new Internet magazine at www.slatenight.com -- not a crappy PDF file! -- and tip-top build inworld, with a very cool interactive percussive talk thingie invented by Robbie Dingo.

Events Calendar is Next, People

Stop mourning the loss of the forums by the world-whacking Lindens and position yourself for the next big battle. They plan this stuff WAY in advance, crafting the social engineering they need to do to put their agenda in place MONTHS before they do something, so there's no sense in playing Monday-morning quarterback on this.

You have to stay three chess moves ahead of these Lindens, 50 would be even better. So what's next? Let's review what's been taken already:

o ratings stipends delta
o instant referral bonuses
o dwell
o developer's incentives
o mainland telehubs and telehub malls (private islands got to keep them)
o auction of new-land parcels less than a sim in size
o events grants
o forums

So what's left?

o events calendar
o 10 percent tier bonus for groups
o cheap search (now only $30)
o cheap classifieds (now only $50)
o subsidized first-land for $512 from Governor Linden
o o bulk discount for tier
o protected Linden land on the mainland
o your land on the mainland

If you don't think they aren't going to systematically pick off everything I've just put on the "what's left" list, I suggest you go back up to "what's taken" list and look at it hard once again, and re-think that issue.

So...events calendar is in their sites next.

We may have thought that we had a victory here flushing out the thuggery of fair-haired boy Stroker Serpentine threatening the poor woman with the bed at the yardsale. He was struck silent -- seemingly.

Not on your life. What he'll be busy doing at the SLCC Summer of Love coming up next week in San Francisco will be quietly telling the Lindens that if they want a *real simple* way of protecting IP for important content creators like him, without fussing with permissions and coding and policies and such, or even making him sweat through DMCA take-down notices, they need only *strike hard at the events calendar*. Closing it down completely, or making it for-pay -- and very high for-pay -- would work *much better*.

So that's what they'll be doing.

Now, do you care about the lifeblood of the economy for newbies, for certain oldbies who live from the world of micropayments and events-related content, for the freedom of our world? Then you will take a stand and fight this.

FlipperPA will also be quietly -- or not so quietly -- telling the Lindens that it is time to end this "eyebleed" of the events list -- the single most ugly thing left now to sully the eyeballs of all those new big company men in suits who are going to be coming into SL now -- and are already here in droves.

You got rid of the ugly customers' builds by making private islands where their blight wasn't visible. You got rid of the forums, where they bitched and crabbed about sims crashing and not being able to click on stuff or find their inventory -- because they live here, instead of treating SL like a CAD program you can parachute into for 45 minutes and take home $500 an hour.

So now what's left is the ugly events list, with its Tringos, its Slingos, its wet t-shirts, and its unruly debates by Prokofy Neva about the forums, the economy, and the fact that they don't even publish one tenth of the actual disciplines cases they actually handle, on the police blotter.

If you can find a way to freeze and kill this newbie micropayments economy that was helping the middle class inworld civilization to increase, then you don't have to worry about explaining yourself in other ways, especially to people who bought sims, put clubs and rentals on them, and then tried to make money back with get nakie by the pool contests.

So Events has to go.

Soon, very soon, some blow-dried cool Californian Linden will appear to tell us that Events Calendar is Taking a New Turn. They'll tell us that there are all these neat things on the Internet like feedster or feedburn or heartburn or whatever these new social calendar things are. Eventster was the one that began to publish SL for awhile. And they'll say, look, it's great you have these events, but put them on your blog or your site and get your friends to read them there. You can put in SLURLs and stuff.

This is where Flipper will handily appear to Help the Community and offer to run an events feed off slboutique.com, which I think he was already doing. Many grateful yardsale girls will run to Flipper, and may not even notice when HE starts to take some fee for posting, or when he monetarizes their presence on his site in some other way. Somebody else of the slstats.com ilk will likely take the seemier feed that Flipper will feel sullies his eyes (he hates Tringo and yardsales in fact) and the Lindens will be able to pronounce Mission Accomplished by saying they got the happy community to fracture into hundreds of fractured fairy tales.

The new group tools will be where you will find out about the really important events then like Kurt Vonnegut or something, and then you'll just have to be on the right friendship network to be able to get an invitation into those august groups.

Somebody like Boliver Goodfellow might well take over events-calendar-casting too and make sure his events are top billing -- there will be many people eager to take over this function because everyone knows that events aren't events, they are a revenue stream for whoever can grab them.
Events mean traffic. Traffic means sales. Sales mean rent.

Everybody who bitched about the events calendar for any reason will now get what they wanted.

What will be lost is the entree level for the clueless newb; the ability to find a new mix of people not dependent on a group or an invitation or a fly through red lines; the ability to have some kind of public messenging system.

Indeed, with the forums pulled -- the only public message board this world had *at all* since it has no mass media -- the pressure to make the events calendar BECOME the forums will be ENORMOUS.

And that is why the Kremlinden Lab General will need to take it down.

So it's important to START NOW not to give this one up without a fight. It means really concerted action. It means all kinds of things from demonstrating in Linden Village to thinking up visible symbols like having everybody send Philip the party hat from the Library to signal that he cannot DARE NOT touch the events list.

I'm serious, they will go after this next. And you heard it here first: the final thing to go will be your land. If you do not want them to take your world piece by piece like this,

FIGHT BACK.

We Are All Permabanned