Second Thoughts

Press Conference

The Lindens did something they've never done before Monday: they held a press conference *themselves* in world. Plenty of other companies, whether Sun Microsystems or CNET have held pressers in SL, but this was evidently a first for the Lab. If you want to get a perfectly serviceable wire-story type of account, go here to my colleague Xavier Mohr's story at SLReports.net.

But let me tell you the back story -- and also how it *felt*.

You wouldn't believe the static it caused in the little ponds of Second Life, with Nobody Fugazi's fanboyz letting it be known his street cred was now amped by him not being invited, and Jessica Holyoke fussing and fuming repeatedly in office hours about why she and other Herald reporters weren't invited and how they could get invited etc etc.

Robin Linden somewhat took the luster off any notion of in-grouping by noting first that the function was primarily directed not at "real-life press" but at "inworld press" (short bus stops outside at the dam, folks) and that "Prokofy had been on the list all the time." Of course, we remember it differently. (My God, just spent an hour searching through the old forums, what an eye-opener!). But aside from all this backing and filling about the genre and its participants, let's see first what they *said* and then whether it's a good format.

Regrettably, I got there about 25 minutes late because I first had trouble getting logged on normally then couldn't pull up the sim "Abundance" in the list (a Linden sim) -- turns out it was hidden -- and they get to keep stuff hidden, even though that system was ended for everyone else. Factlet one gleaned from the press conference! Then, the SLURL wouldn't work -- figured the sim filled up. Finally Melissa Linden TP'd me -- and then the usual wrestle with voice, and unfortunately becoming an annoyance to others who then heard double typing clatter from me -- from my inworld puppet typing (can't get turned off once again,) and from my RL self with the mike not muted. DUH!

But through it all were the calm, reasoned tones of James Linden, a fellow I had never met but had always admired for his normal, clear, helpful posts on the forums (remember the one about IP addresses that finally put an end to that idiotic forums debate about dynamic and static IPs?)

Vote Against the JIRA, and For a New Feature Votings System

I hope you will vote YES for a proposal to take the Feature Voting System out of the JIRA, simplify and reform it, and make it usable by ordinary people wishing to have a say in the governance of Second Life, instead of leaving it to a handful of coders who have seized control of the tools. This becomes even more awesomely important when you think that with these devices, we are laying the groundwork for the governance of the Metaverse, as this software will be open-sourced.

Lack of even the most basic democracy available even in authoritarian systems has been a hallmark of these Linden-controlled mechanisms. Indeed, with only five votes, the old Feature Voter was proposed for closure by dominant personality WarKirby Magojiro and executed by Torley Linden -- despite the fact that an April blog promised that the FVT would be "migrated" and ostensibly "improved" -- not destroyed. Earlier, as I warned in a blog titled "A Copu in Second Life," the FVT was gutted under the guise of "optimalizing it" by Angel Fluffy, who saw that it was the key to destroying even the rudimentary democracy we had in SL, and instituting the Security State he could control in favour of his capture-roleplay BDSM mindset.

Everyone who has heard of the JIRA knows that it is difficult to use, is obscure, and has an arcane culture of fanboy code-kiddies clustered around it who zealously go around closing, moving, and defeating proposals they find "off topic," or "inappropriate" or "not-doable" or "bad ideas" or "not what the Lindens want." Even if they are right 75 percent of the time, it's an awful thing for them to control even 10-25 percent arbitrarily and wilfully. And I'm not sure they *are* right so much of the time, now that I have studied them in action on the JIRA, read many important proposals, seen how they fare, and seen how they behave in office hours. If you aren't paying attention to this stuff because you think it's too complicated, you will lose your freedoms.

Troll at the Bridge: Ted Castronova in Second Life

The complete lecture can be accessed here

What's worse? Ted Castronova never coming into SL and never taking it seriously and sniping at it? Or coming in and trashing it from inside? Neither, really: what's most worse is Ted Castronova disseminating his oppressive ideas drawn from the rules of games into economic policies that should be instilled in virtual worlds.

When the Ludium this year (Ted's confab at University of Illinois of elite game scholars and designers) issued -- as a political game -- a Declaration of Virtual World Policy, I was getting ready to blast a post off denouncing this illegitimate Junta of the Metaverse and calling on people to critique it. It had the usual suspects, like Thomas Mallaby, writing thumb-suckers on it, and providing a wiki -- this wiki now turns up page errors and seems to have been taken down, I watched it for a few months and I swear I was the only person who submitted anything to it beyond the original conference organizers. The Declaration handily grants game-gods "freedom of expression" but never anticipates it for residents -- their freedoms are put off to the bright future when they can draft something some day after the economy is fixed -- kinda of the China perestroika-versus-glasnost approach. The Declaration says "A self-governance group of virtual world stakeholders should be formed" to which one can only say: "oh rilly? what do you mean "we," white man," etc. Who are these people in Illinois that get to do this? Of course Ted said at the time, well anyone could sign up. Of course, anyway who has plane fare and hotel costs and can "fit in" with this august bunch.

As somebody banned from Terra Nova on the whim of Dan Hunter for directly criticizing their stable of authors and challenging their received wisdom, and defending myself against malicious stalkers, and as someone banned from Metaversed Metanomics where Castronova spoke, naturally I'm going to point out those very salient factors as the first critique of this vaunted "self governing group". They will stop at nothing to ban, filter, censor people they don't like whose ideas they find challenging. It's pretty awful stuff. But I do hope that just as on TN this awful Declaration did get some pushback from some posters, so Ted's bad ideas he's about to spread around even further in the Metaverse will get some rollback, rather than everyone sitting around ga-ga merely because he's got the fifth most download paper on SSRN (a hilarious game-like statistic!)

Only Connect

Philip Linden has a blog out for Thanksgiving Day, Long Road Behind, Long Road Ahead..

Reading it, I was reminded of an office hour of Catherine Linden's which I forgot to post of 2 weeks ago or so, in which I pointed out that a) we hadn't heard from Philip in ages and I wondered if was locked in the electrical closet and b) Linden Lab didn't seem to have a mission statement that they put on the Second Life site -- even if there seemed to be something wonky and obscure on the corporate site.

Watching Philip's PowerPoint inworld last week, I noticed to my surprise that there *was* a clean, new crisp mission statement, of the type that you obtain from either public relations agencies or torturous staff retreats. “To connect everyone to an online world that improves the human condition.”

I was quite naturally perturbed, even thinking of E.M. Forster's Howard's End, the famous novel that ends with the words "Only Connect": it's not at all clear that when you speak of what major world faiths believe to be an unchangeable human condition that you in fact *can* better it -- that's instead a doctrine of secular humanism. And it's not clear that you can improve the entire human condition, instead of one person at a time.

A year or so ago, I sent this link to Philip which I found a profound commentary about connectivity of people through the Internet, and was surprised that he responded and said it was inspiring -- I recall being a bit worried he would find cloying something that appeared quite religious, but I hadn't realized at the time that he had his own religious education in a Baptist trailer school (described in the Rolling Stone interview - the interview that finally put Second Life on the cult map at Rick Ross's anti-cult site.). The blog at emergent-us by Kester Brewin talks about the need to challenge, not threaten people concerned about the effects of new technology and to give them a sense not merely of connection, but of *belonging*. It's truly an important piece, even if you do not share the religious beliefs.

Infohubs: Paying Cash, Leaving Today

The issue of public spaces in Second Life is something I know A LOT about -- I've maintained them on Ravenglass properties in every community, I've helped create and sustain the SL Public Land Preserve with some 50,000 m2 in about 25 locations, and I helped develop the infohub at Ross called "Memory Bazaar".

Recently, a group of people, evidently business owners from a few sims near infohubs, have been protesting vigorously, as they are affected by infohub griefing and loiterers demonstrably guilty of resource-hogging, They've been aggressively campaigning about removing these loiterers from infohubs. Lias Leandros is one who has been repeatedly nagging me with her version of the issues and trying to enlist me in her protest group and support of her website; another long-time resident, bladyblue Bommerang, has also been repeatedly raising these issues at Office Hours. Of course, people can campaign any way they wish freely, unless they violate the TOS and the Lindens boot them. There is an awful lot of latitude in SL for protesting, in fact. What I can't stand, however, is when you tell one of these door-to-door proseltyzers politely and firmly to go away, and they keep banging on you in an IM evangelizing their cause and arguing you. For that reason alone, you lose people for the cause.

What I can't stand for, either, is when the people pushing the cause so aggressively just aren't very bright, and keep ineffectually making the same redundant, retarded, and entirely unpersuasive arguments, as if by sheer force of repetition, you will knuckle. And what I really hate most of all is when a person attempts to globalize or universalize their local issue, and force you in under their tent, in the mistaken notion that the Lindens move better on globalized problems they can decide with one executive sweep, than on cases.

All Paths to Better Virtual Worlds Lead Through Real Life and Second Life is Not Special

The gumballs finally clicked and rolled down the chute for me the other day, trying to explain to Robin Linden in an office hour, or was it Michael Linden in an office hour, that Ginsu Linden had it all wrong (Ginsu even made the Saxo Bank guy cry!). Ginsu has been going around trying to get us to believe that Second Life is now only a "product" and that Linden Lab is only "a computer software company" and that while he understands that the "customers" get very "immersed" and imagine -- silly creatures! -- that LL is a "government" operating a "world," it's all fake, of course! Or, as a good friend also said to me the other day, "Why are we here? We're not getting anywhere with Second Life, it's all a fake world."

That's because none of these folks have figured out that Snowcrash is here! THE FUTURE IS NOW! just like the old Firesign Theater shtick foretold. Many wide-eyed fans of Snowcrash tend to remember only the Metaverse and its glittering virtual boardwalk and the cool Hiro Protagonist with his crossed katana swords, and not even be conscious of their smug appreciation of the exclusive and privileged coders of this world, or their sense of superiority over all those poor retards that have to log on at public terminals and be grey people, or their unconscious acceptance of the old lie that the Jews are to blame for evil in the world. But the overall "architecture" of this Snowcrash world, if you will, is a pretty simple inversion: governments are reduced to the role of at best, weak or sprawling corporations and corporations are elevated to to the level of governments. And that part Neal Stephenson got right, too.

So the Lindens need to stop role-playing that they are a mere software company in California making an interesting, yet -- at the end of the day -- self-limited "product," and the legion of their fanboyz emerging around them need to stop role-playing along with them that this is a mere "grid" with an "Architecture Working Group" to usher them and their friends into the Bright Future. Instead, they should sober up and realize they are a Government (and of course, the more sinister among them realized that, which is why they made sure they got early and front-row seats).

I seldom have agreed with the more cynical youngsters in SL who describe Robin Linden, whom I regard as a respected peer, as behaving like a "deer in the headlights." She does in this meeting -- but that's a good thing, because now we can get a better idea of the real problem we're dealing with: people not only actively shirking their historically-induced mandate of a new-style government, but who are in danger of losing it to far worse actors on the scene if they don't scramble quickly to assume the mantle of policy-making inherent in the software they are unleashing on the world soon. For the first time, Robin appears to contemplate the open-sourced software being used by people *not to connect to the grid of Second Life through Linden Lab* to do things *not Second Lifey as we know it*.

Try Before You Buy?

I had a question for Philip Linden when he was inworld the other day that didn't get up the queue and got ignored by him and the mods but it went something like this: "Can avatarization in virtuality stay competitive with increasingly accessible and good- quality video, such as on cell phones?"

I've long been asking this question to myself, because the few times I've gone to these Virtual Worlds conferences organized by Chris Sherman, as well as State of Play, I've found a significant portion of the execs there to be highly skeptical of avatarization in general, and to be convinced that video -- as in video-conferencing, vlogging, video on i-Phones, etc. -- to be more important and just better.

Some people just don't avatarize well. It's like hypnotism. Either you hypnotize, or you don't. If you do hypnotize well, you think it's a great thing, say, to stop smoking. If you don't, you think it's stupid. Some day they will be able to explain why some brains work this way, some don't. It will be likely a genetic thing, like whether you can curl your tongue -- or not. I mean, you do, or you don't.

People are that way about avatars. They either invest their consciousness in a toy, as Will Wright so perfectly put it back years ago, or they treat it blandly and even cynically as an email attachment, like Benjamin Duranske Sycophanske. People can even get emotionally very zealous on behalf of avatarized virtuality, or very hateful and malicious -- avatarization or video transfer -- these are about power and loss of control.

One of the ways in which people have been saying avatarization in virtuality would be useful and be a great business model is "try before you buy". Boy, that's been a flop. Or at least...not quite tried yet. I think somebody thought American Apparel or Armani could be these things, but the clothing was either not available, too dull by contrast with your avatar's wardrobe in this fantastic world -- or not something you could really see so clearly. I mean, the obvious problem with the try-before-you-buy stuff is that in many cases, you'd have to make your fat and lumpy RL self -- or at least your less-than-perfect RL self -- and put them in a virtual world for everybody to see "as is" -- to really get that "try" thing going. And who is going to do that?! I mean, you have a chance to have a *second* life, and you will make your RL replica? Why?

The Battle for the Soul of Second Life

A battle for Second Life is being waged, but it's not out in the open, and most people don't know about it. Many people stumble across its effects, but don't understand them.

Basically, it comes down to whether Second Life is to be Googlized or not. And frankly, in real life, so to speak, on the rest of the Internet, there's a battle against Google. Facebook has arisen as a power to challenge Google, and you can opt out of Googlization on Facebook. What that means is that you can create networks, relationships, news feeds, little games, etc. that can sell stuff without Google being involved in scraping you or your intentions or you attentions. That is, perhaps with various events going on now with Google creating APIs and Facebook getting invaded by Google doing that, our short window of independence and privacy from the Google scrape is gone. I think we can still give it a good fight, however.

This isn't just a matter of privacy. You can't have privacy in a basic sense on the Internet because everything you type is copied somewhere and available to someone. You'd have to keep your thoughts to yourself to avoid that sort of invasion. It's more about the ability to use what is scraped in ways that start to harm you and the broader public interest. It's about the constant push of ads and the push of tampered, manipulated, fabricated information that is Wikified and mindmapped and memed and dumbed down. Facebook helps mitigate that by establishing experts and groups that you come to trust and interact with on your own, at your own pace, with your own criteria, i.e. "my relatives, friends, classmates, work colleagues from RL" -- or people you find with various affinities that you don't need to be in those RL categories, because they establish their own reliability through constant, open, authoritative and knowledgeable statements (like a Robert Scoble, for example).

And Second Life is -- was -- like this, too. It was designed as a social media first and foremost, and originally even had a ratings system with financial incentive, which then became a currency sink but still a reputation factor especially for building. Lots happened along the way -- and here we all are now. Some people brag that Second Life is Googlized. Some people don't realize it's happening yet. Others are fighting it.

Ted Castronova Ageplays Second Life?

Buy this dwarf as a memento of Ted's visit to SL.

Edward Castronova, the soi-disant expert on virtual world economies, is coming to speak in Second Life today at Metronome-ics-- and has asked for residents to make him a female dwarf avatar for his appearance.

My headline should have been a Herald headline, but they're both too busy chasing bots and bukkake, and Uri is in RL somewhere and might not be critical of his fellow Luddologist Luddite anyway.

Why ageplay? Well I suspect that Ted has read enough headlines lately about the Lindens cracking down on the lewd depiction of children that he's decided to push the envelope a bit to see if he can tweak the Lindens with something that he can say "BZZZT! NO! It's a female dwarf, not a child, nyah nyah". And even if he hasn't read the headlines, and you'd have to be living under a rock to not have at least heard of them, he sneeringly sneeringly finds SL a hoot, a place where he imagines you have to be a diapered furry vampire BDSM Star Wars geek or you just haven't virtualized. (Caleb in fact ditched his antelope thing for a business suit). So making a female dwarf is Ted's contribution to the weird Star Wars bars of SL as he sees it through the Web 1.0 geek keyhole -- and an extra in-your-face way of telling us that he really, really doesn't care about Second Life. As Uri explained, he just prefers those tighter magic circles...

In fact, Castronova hates Second Life, saying its subscriptions and log-ons are "dwarfed" (what is it with this dwarf fetish?!) by the large games like World of Warcraft -- as if they are anything alike. Yes, we know everything about the hype numbers, as we SL bloggers are the first to debunk them. So? SL's intellectual and social importance are far beyond these closed-world games, but that's too challenging for Ted.

The reason is because Second Life has a real economy -- although it has its troubles that persist even since I wrote this critique of it as a game. Real economies scare Ted. He likes to be in control -- even tyrannical as I've explained. He looooves synthetic economies that he gets to control. RMT is fascinating...but not a RM *economy* that is robust like Second Life -- that might expose him as a game-god wannabee who failed.

The Angel Fluffy Security State

Countless people are pushing a notecard on me today warning of a very typical Patriotic Nigra griefing attack -- of the kind we've suffered gadzillion times over the last two years. There's nothing special about this one -- except the person distributing this warning -- Angel Fluffy -- is using it as another bid for power. I figured something like this was up, and then Wayne Porter inadvertently confirmed it -- I've posted a comment to his blog waiting in the moderation queue, so I'll post here instead.

Not surprisingly, "experts" like Wayne Porter are trying are pumping this warning to position themselves as "in the know" consultants to get paid for the lucrative trade of security advising. This is a classic case of why you should not publicize griefer notices verbatim, or merely follow the advice of anti-griefer groups (which can be even worse). I’m all for publicizing griefing attacks and the public’s right to know (some people believe falsely if you never publicize griefer attacks they will lessen), but this merely plays into the hands of the griefers.

First, it’s a distraction — the attacks in fact are always going on, there was one just like this last weekend and it requires no special ‘intelligence’ to figure out that they happen frequently and there's no special "intel" gathered by suggesting they might happen again. They also happen at places not only on this list, with griefing objects different than what is indicated. LL has even turned off scripts everywhere it seems which has completely paralyzed the grid, rather than leaving it to the discretion of landowners to do (which does little good on the mainland anyway if you have no-show neighbours or Linden land where this has not been done).