Second Thoughts

Depositing to Ginko

I decided the last few days to deposit all my alts' stipends into Ginko, and plan to make an additional deposit. What, am I nuts? Don't I read the Herald, Reuters, and listen to Benjamin Duranske? Oh, sure. But I like to be a contrarian, and I like to see how things work. Sometimes, it's interesting to take another path than the well-beaten one.

What, don't I know Ginko is a pyramid scheme? Well, of course I do, as I've known it longer than any of the people commenting on it. But it's been around now for so long -- three years or so -- and has worked for so many people, that you have to start asking whether the impossible can happen, that even Ponzi/pyramid type rackets work when you have a synthetic world. But...can it go on working? Isn't it a huge scam?! Well, sure, it just might be! So...why am I doing this? Is it because Ginko is my tenant in Ross? No, hardly. They pay something like $288 a month for a terminal, on my dirt-cheap newbies PG sim. If they weren't there, I'd have some other sort of thing like it -- I have a SLEX terminal on the other side. Do I have anything invested in Ginko? No, up until now, if I had an alt with like $1007.37 in Lindens, it was my big nest-egg lol. Did I have Ginko stock? Oh, I had about $10.00 US worth of it at the most on the old WSE, which I wound up losing because when Ginko delisted, I didn't get anything but worthless chits. Would I invest in them on AVIX? No, not after having lost just small amounts on Cyberland and WSE, I'm done with those stock exchanges.

So what is it? The answer is complicated. And it has to do more than anything with a vehement reaction to the kind of approach "the experts" like Duranske are taking. Brags Duranske smugly in a quote from his blog on to Reuters, "“Ginko Financial was supposed to buy one of Second Life’s stock exchanges, AVIX, using money from an IPO that was to be held on, you guessed it, AVIX,” wrote Benjamin Duranske, who has extensively covered the ongoing crisis on his Virtually Blind blog. Wow, GASP, SHOCK, SURPRISE there are self-dealings and interlapping interests in ALL these exchanges and financial services -- so where's the skepticism about everybody ELSE showing up here, including the others Duranske appears to side with from the rival agencies?

“It didn’t happen," gloats Duranske. "Why not? Because lot of smart people who understand finance, law, and ethics showed up to explain why that wasn’t going to work and ask some very hard questions,” Duranske added. “As a direct result, Ginko no longer has an IPO on AVIX, and is, apparently left to drown on its own.”

Second Life Grid Under Attack

The Second Life grid is under concerted attack again, and has been for more than 2 days, but the Lindens are not being up front about what's going on, and their chief mouthpiece, the SL Insider, is deliberately distracting from the real story about the systematic effort to take SL down by one notorious racist griefer group, the Patriotic Nigras, a group related to the b/tards and 4/chan. The purpose of these concerted, deliberate attacks, which aren't done by random script kiddies or copycats, but are conscious, timed, and identical in M.O. to every other attacks, is to paralyze SL particularly for useful purposes, like this last weekend's Relay for Life to raise money for cancer research.

I saw this happening 2 days ago and didn't report it, because I didn't wish to create fodder for griefer victory-dancing. It's always hard to make a judgement about news coverage of griefing, so as not to fuel it, and usually I don't report it for just that reason, but at a certain point, the threshold of "the public's right to know" is reached. These attacks of the last two days appeared like a hundred other attacks I didn't report, which started with the very well-worn, tried-and-true early-warning system: attacking me and a few other prominent people in SL. I've proved to be this sort of early-warning system countless times before, I promptly and repeatedly report to the Lindens, but I never know if they've understood that they should listen when I tell them about an attack.

Here's what's been happening. The first sign of trouble was hundreds of offline IMs, seeming from the following people: Urizenus Sklar, Maldavius Figtree, Mia Linden, Phillip Linden, Frontier Linden. That suggests Uri could be ranting at me or the Herald drahma -- so I log on in a hurry, checking the location of the IM. Sure enough, it's not Uri at all, and of course it's not Frontier or "Phillip" Linden either, who spells his name with one "l". The messages are like this: ATTENTION: THE GRID IS UNDER ATTACK, THE PN HAS CLOSED THIS POOL. ALSO COCKS.

THOUSANDS of them pour into my two accounts, as if spammed from some object. Checking the IMs, I see the owner of an object named "GreySkall Barbosa," aged 1 day, is sending them from this URL, probably a sandbox or land left with build and no autoreturn or something. This was a common griefing tactic a few months ago, as thousands of notecards came spamming into my account from griefers in sandboxes using a notecard created by someone who was NOT spamming me and was offline and oblivious, in order to get me a) mad at that person and b) get me running to the location -- only to find that they were gone, with their spam objects still spamming.

But this time, there were no objects when I went to the locations, which included various sandboxes and odd sims I couldn't figure out, nor were there any notecards. With the objects *named* "Mia Linden" and "Urizenus", it seemed as if it was chat coming from them right near me -- but it wasn't at all, those people weren't even online, I checked.

I reasoned that somehow, these griefers had exploited some new or previously unavailable hole in the client to reach directly into my chat space and spam into it from remote positions. (The chat is only visible to me.) I figured that the new "message liberation" thing could be involved, or some kind of communications server, or some sort of chatting store-and-forward thingie.

Better Business:

Dress up in a business suit, and you, too, can appear to have a better business in SL.

This session 2 weeks ago is very enlightening and so typically Linden -- Chadrick denies up and down that he is GOMing (co-opting) a resident script that does global bans with a veneer of "trust opt-in" -- when in fact LL is making a shareable ban-list that everyone will be able to access. Chadrick forgot to mention this week that Governor Linden would have her own mass ban list -- that came out two weeks later. You know, I throw up my hands. Their neuralgic touchiness, defensiveness, secretiveness -- they're all so awful, and they affect our digital lives so badly. I didn't ask for a shareable mass ban list, did you? If Angel Fluffy and Travis Lambert want them on *their own land* -- let them? Why does that have to replicate over all our land? Why will we feel the pressure to participate when it is globalized this way? And what happens if we ourselves get on Governor Linden's ban list, merely because the vengeful and obstinate security types stick us on there? If abuse reports queue up now, and can take days to get answers, how much more so an appeal of a ban inclusion on the Linden list that prevents access to Linden water and roads and maybe even our own land? Hey, has anybody ever successfully appealed a Linden inworld ban decision of any kind and got it reversed? I've never heard of that. Have you?

Also evident in this session is the evasiveness of the SLBB, a group which has set out to blacklist SL businesses by virtue of reports from anonymous avatars, and whitelist itself.

What would a normal BBB look like? Well, one where the aggregated reports and the resposes of those targeted were accessible by the public, and one where not only businesses interested in white-washing themselves like Clowntown, with child avatar stuff for sale, participate, but eminent persons of good reputation without businesses or stakes, and more diversity across types of businesses. Contrast the mission statement of the RL BBB, "Since the founding of the first BBB in 1912, the BBB system has proven that the majority of marketplace problems can be solved fairly through the use of voluntary self-regulation and consumer education...It is dedicated to fostering fair and honest relationships between businesses and consumers, instilling consumer confidence and contributing to an ethical business environment" witj that of the SLBB: "Our Mission in the Second Life Business Bureau is to promote and encourage a very high ethical relationship between Second Life businesses and the SL Community through voluntary self-regulation, education, and excellence in service. Well, aren't they the same? No, while subtle, the concept of "environment" versus "relationship" is utterly different; one sets to promote the rule of law and the rule of ethics above companies, to which they bind themselves voluntarily; the other seeks to govern or constrain or in fact bless and fete "relationships" which are completely relative concepts, and also invokes the totally specious concept of "the Community".

"All Wild Speculation Aside, Let Me Govern Your Land..."

Avenging Security Angel

Here we go again with Chadrick "Judge Dread" Linden, trying to get the answers on Governance. If you are worried about various justice schemes being able to grab at your land in the name of justice, Chadrick is here to provide assurances that Linden Lab will never let another group administer its tools. Mark your calendars, screenshot that, save it, hold it, because it is one of the things likely to erode in the coming years. Why? Because other residents are so deadly intent on grabbing at your land in the name of higher goods that only they get to define; and they start that grab by first grabbing at Linden land the Lindens can't maintain.

And I don't mean things like people voluntarily agreeing to provide 32 m2 easements to make sailing tolerable. I don't mean a concerted effort to get rid of the scourge of sign griefing and extortion, or a *voluntary* sim association that would work toward basic rules like "let's keep spinning junk out of the sky". Those are demonstrably good things that people actually produce in some places. I mean schemes that take your land, or try to take over Linden Land for their own purposes. There is never any shortage of people who do this, and it takes my obnoxious, in-your-face question to get the Lindens on the record about this central issue of governance, because the opposite point of view -- prevailing on the Lindens to grant more controls over Linden and other people's land -- is constantly bombarding them. I described two such groups attempting to control the behaviour and content of other residents now, Metaverse Republic and SLBB, the first of which has a land collateral/justice scheme and the second of which has an investigations/banning scheme. In past office hours, Chadrick has only *welcomed* any such mediation and ban-sharing schemes, and simply hasn't commented on the issue of land collateral. When he constantly goes on and on (as all Lindens do) about "granting us the tools for local control," he refuses to engage on the larger issues of just what the Lindens will not cede and keep for themselves, and what the appeals are to other people's local control put on you merely because you share a sim with them.

Tag, You're It!

Not many people are paying attention to this -- only a relative handful of residents ever show up for Linden office hours which are usually during the workday hours for many -- but the Lindens have been tagging the world and are trying to get a handle on inworld business in SL. Tagging the world, of course, has its pluses and minuses -- it has the invasiveness of the Grid Shepherd; it has the wonkiness that LL stuff often has that is done undemocratically, and without taking into account and real field data, but just fit to the Tao of Linden. LL now has 6 new Lindens working on "data ware-housing" (whatever that is, and some geek will be along any minute to tell us), and Meta Linden is of course working on the economic statistics of the world. The statistics page, over time, has supplied more and more data, but become more and more exasperating as a result for those who want to get basic answers to basic questions like: just how much of our world is devoted to casinos? *was* devoted? How much to sex? The Lindens tend to give out evasive and even silly answers like "only 18 percent of lots are checked off mature, so that must mean there is only 18 percent of sex in the economy" (we haven't established a correlation between square meters and economic activity for one; for two, most people haven't bothered to check off that box and likely never will.

As you can see, some weeks ago, Meta's concept of a 'business tool" for an inworld business was a casino, it was something to be tagged. The board was still up yesterday even though casinos are now illegal; she'll have to re-do it. I asked whether she could tell us the percentage of casino activity; she wouldn't. She said they may be able to in the future based on saved data. Well, read the transcript. Tagging the world is probably beneficial, but like all things Linden, it isn't in our hands, we can't know what they're doing in full, they only tell some people, they hold it tight to their chests, and as a result, we can't really understand or use it. Of course, their capacity server-side to scrape data is enormous, yet, maddeningly, they don't show it to us because the picture, as it is now, might harm their business and their goals for expansion and development.

I find it utterly exasperating that Lindens expect that a concept mooted in an office hour, and put on a JIRA to vote on (arghhh) and even blogged about is considered something that people "want" or "don't want" if no one responds to this clunky machinery for expressing views.

Tragedy of the Commons

Historial Linden-sponsored Atlas Casino of 2003, picture by Betsy Book from Traveling Through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds.

I'm back doing another episode of my podcast, "The History of Second Life Sims," and today I have Eggy Lippman, one of SL's oldest residents, builders, and scripters, to reminisce what it was like in the Lindenor of yore, when there was endless public land available -- but a prim tax -- and when the Lindens -- the Lindens! -- *sponsored* a casino, instead of closing them. And learn about how ultimately, the Tragedy of the Commons played out, first in one form, then another...Fascinating stories and analysis, tune in here for an amazing 90-minute conversation with Eggy "I Did it All in Beta" Lippman, pack this one on your long RL commute or flight.

Then check out a new podcast I was asked to do weekly with Nick Wilson/57 Miles, called Second Rant, at Metaversed, on the new crackdown on casinos and what's in store for SL.

Let's meet tonight at 9 pm SLT at the Sutherland Dam for more discussion about the casino close-downs and inevitable cashouts and how this will effect the economy.

What is Second Life *For*?

Now that the Jesuits are coming to Second Life (and not a moment too soon!), I really must get this down on paper -- I've been pondering it so long. I actually spend a great deal of time contemplating the varieties of religious experience in Second Life, and thinking also about how the Lindens' hired PR flaks, some time ago, decided to pitch the "religion in SL" theme everywhere as a kind of counterspin to all the ageplay/furry/casino/corporations undertow pulling SL down from the lofty heights of Better Worldism envisioned by its founding fathers. Religion, of course, merely means realignment, like tires on a car. In one century the dynamic might go to the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, but in another, the same dynamic is considered a really edgy corporate interviewing technique.

Philip Linden has this funny idea that people max out on sex and shopping in SL, and then are ready for Zen. I think somebody told him this idea out of their own experience, and he extrapolated it to be the experience of the many. I know nothing of the kind; people follow the contemplative track or the hedonistic track almost from day one, and don't tend to drop it, but deepen it, although they might take respites on alts. I often get the distinct feeling that Philip doesn't *use* SL like we all do, that it's an artifact that they have at work, that he drives in to work on every morning -- but maybe it's just that he maxed out on using it back in the beta era and now merely retouches it. What we want to get at, of course, is not just SL used for sex, or drugs, or rock 'n roll -- cybering, entertainment distractions of various kinds, live music -- but what you can *really* use it for in a new, innovative, revolutionary way that transforms mankind. And you don't even need any wacky belief system of any kind, that's the beauty part, see, that's what SL is *for*.

The Voice of Pixeleen Mistral

Here is the voice of Pixeleen Mistral, editrix of the Second Life Herald -- and you'll see what I mean in a minute:

"Ethan, the problem was that her articles were lies and attacks followed by responses of other attacks and some challenging of her disinformation. This was then followed by all types of accusations and judgement from Prok. When that was countered and Prok didn't have a leg to stand on she resorted to profanity and insults. Not to mention how many she seemed to be allowed to put on the site compared to other people's articles. That's not debate. Thats a flame war and slander. She surely would have been sued if this were a real news service that anyone in RL cared about. Hell even the Enquirer doesn't go that far!! She definitely WAS entertaining, but in the same way one could be entertained by taunting an old, blind pit bull with meat. We just got her barking enough that her owners decided to let her run away. Works for me! --DaveOner"

"Good riddance!!! ...I mean to Prok. :p She's a fucking asshole, horrible writer, conspiracy theorist, who thinks everyone is out to get her. Maybe getting away from this place will help her re-adjust to normal society. --Psych."

"Prok (or Pork) has become what she has professed to hate... A whiney, snivelly griefer. Nothing better to do than hate and whine. Time to make a new alt, and toss this hatefilled bag of puss aside, prokofy. Cheers to Second Life Safari, for ribbing her good.--duh hick".

"Shoot, if Prok is gone I'm back in.--Heartun Breaker"

"I've been PRAYING for the day Prokofy leaves, though. If I wanted that much ignorant hate, I'd watch Bill O'Reilly. At least wehen BOR calls someone a socialist, he knows what it means.--Kahni Poitier."

"I'm glad to see the winds changing at the Herald. The format here has a lot of potential if only the reporting was more focused. Also seeing positive articles that aren't about avatar models and other silly shit would be nice! I'm positive that SOMETHING good happens in SL once in a while...not around Prok, though!--DaveOner"

IIIs and Squeegee Squeezed Out

Newfangled has the oldfangled chicken-scratch core sim dirt and those ugly Cypress trees.

Do the Lindens hate us? "Intermittent Inworld Issues". Is this the name for a new American soap opera, or a candidate for Euphemism of the Year? I can't help wondering if the Lindens posting about III's (like...there are outworld issues they post about ever?) are laughing up their sleeves. Erm, bare arms with their tats. Or what *could* they be thinking with some of the names of these new sims they are putting out to fill up their bottom line and utterly crash the land market? Jokung, Gunfunk, Newfangled, Moodle, Fungbulf. Duzzclown, Socksamillion, Hubunny. Um, I think they're just not caring anymore...

Well, or maybe they're on to a great marketing device:

Rolypoly (128,128) Mature 65536m US$2751.00 Jul-22-07
Dingercat (128,128) Mature 62464m US$2551.00 Jul-22-07
Dooknock (128,128) PG 61440m US$2411.00 Jul-22-07
Salliohsis (128,128) Mature 65536m US$2811.00 Jul-22-07
Argybargy (128,128) Mature 62464m US$2551.00 Jul-22-07
Dex (128,128) Mature 65536m US$2751.00 Jul-22-07
Acknefar (128,128) PG 65536m US$2741.00 Jul-22-07
Glookbone (128,128) PG 59504m US$2345.00 Jul-22-07
Nerani (128,128) Mature 65536m US$2741.00 Jul-22-07
Wicktro (128,128) Mature 61440m US$2606.00 Jul-22-07
Thalipolli (128,128) Mature 65296m US$2751.00 Jul-22-07
Phenywheny (128,128) Mature 65536m US$2656.00 Jul-22-07
Hunbglump (128,128) PG 65328m US$2606.00 Jul-22-07
Tordangle (128,128) Mature 65296m US$2701.00 Jul-22-07
Divirian (128,128) Mature 62256m US$3056.00 Jul-22-07
Grumphmunch (128,128) PG 65536m US$2651.00 Jul-22-07

I've always wanted a sim named Hunbglump for $2606 US, haven't you? Or one named Grumphmunch for $2651? Damn, I was shy of the one dollar! That PG can fetch that kind of moolah for one lucky resident, Roderick Gustafson -- my God, what a world! Prices aren't falling...or are they?

Five Fallacies About the Myths of Second Life or Find the Happi Coat!

Hamlet nee Linden Au has pontificated again to set all the corps right that are supposedly stampeding out of SL. Of course, we all know this is hokum. There are like...three. Aloft, which never figured out that avatars actually *can* live and spend time in hotels and need them for erm showers and stuff; American Apparel, that never figured out how to make just plain better looking and *more fun* t-shirts at their store; and uh...what was the other one? Somebody who blasphemously said SL was like Baghdad. Puleeze.

So Hammie gets all worked up and comes up with five myths about SL that will keep the corporate buy-into SL flowing. I mean, first of all, even before we get to Hamlet, we have to admit that the world doesn't revolve around *American* corporations. Or did we think it did? We did. But we should have been turning Japanese. Because a company called Mitsukoshi Ltd is rolling out in SL and I'm actually excited because I never heard of it, and it just sounds so *different* sounding because instead of trying to peddle ugly clothes that are ugly in RL for money, or ugly SL hotel rooms that can't work for my avatar to um...rest...in, these people have figured out what my avatar *needs*: "No items are sold in the virtual store, but traditional Japanese costumes such as happi coats, hats made from bamboo and paper fans are distributed for free to players. Mitsukoshi hopes for 120,000 visitors in the first year."

I don't know what a happi coat is; I know that Prokofy Neva must, must, must have one. I'm going there now, be right back. As for Hamlet, well, even in debunking the myths we know in part are myth, he introduces *new* errors that are completely, well, wrong. So let's parse it.