Second Thoughts

Partitioning the Public Intellectual Space

This cabal at the JIRA just cannot leave well enough alone. The Linden moderating the JIRA (Rob) has basically said "leave this alone" -- and yet their internal, aggressive sense of "symmetry" and "the community" won't give them any peace.

Here comes Strife Onizuka -- no doubt after consultation on some IRC channel somewhere, to close off my proposal, VWR-382, which basically has a simple idea to counter the hammerlock that this cabal of elitist coders puts on the JIRA: requirement of the author's consent to make a final closure/resolution of a feature proposed or a bug prioritization request or notification.

It's extraordinary how fiercely aggressive this little bunch is on the JIRA -- they see to have 24/7 available to come on and constantly take little "janitorial" actions -- closing, editing, matching, resolving. But.."I prefer not to". No, I don't wish to close my proposal about...gaining some safety against closures.

A Simple Solution to End Ad Farms and Sign Extortion

Please come vote for my proposal on the JIRA, MISC-865, which I've been discussing, trying to refine.

A frequent argument against proposals to end ad-farming is that it is "too hard" for the Lindens to police because there are just too many cases, and the plethora of abuse reports would be overwhelming.

The trick to solving this is to borrow a page from those who try to fight "blood diamonds" not by banning all diamonds coming from conflict zones with abusive labour conditions, but by certifying as "non-conflict" those diamonds which do not come from such circumstances.

We need to stop posing this question as one whereby we attempt to think up new TOS language, or new mechanical devices on land (no parcel can be subdivided to 16 m2, or, as I've proposed earlier, no parcel can sell for anything but $0 if less than 512 m2, etc.).

We need instead to reward those who in fact do *not* cut up land into ad farms, and do not deploy signs such as to extort, or sell to ad-farmers, and vow to refrain from these unscrupulous practices. That way, we create a much, much smaller pool of people to watch.

Disrupting Media

"Hackers" -- part of an installation on Orange Island by SL artist Filthy Fluno.

"Disruptive technology," I find, is technology that one group of people think they will be using to disrupt another group of people, without disruption to themselves. It's not a very nice term, eh? Makes you think of toddlers with the Terrible Twos if you're a parent, trying to get work done. Of course, the tekkie sages describe it as something "changing the world," like cars. Seldom do these disruptions only *benefit*, however. For example, we get oil dependency, air pollution, along with liberation of travel. They also have all kinds of unintended consequences -- teenagers for the first time can go have sex away from the watchful eyes of parents; suburban sprawl is created not as a destination place but as a pass-through for easier consumption, and so on.

Is Second Life disruptive media? I'm not sure. For all I know, it might be a profoundly conservative backlash to that other disruptive media, the Internet, which made everything very impersonal, anonymous, facile, and even nasty. In fact, it could be a pastoral, idyllic throwback to a more intense interpersonal immersive experience -- i.e. back to the old real life of the pre-industrial age, where people sit around campfires or fireplaces and tell stories. Isn't that what it's about? It's just that you get to mix and match the people better than you do in real-life with Gramps and Auntie Ann and Bub and Sis.

Still, Second Life is ultimately disruptive of the entertainment industry and also business applications industry because it enables ordinary people to write, script, stage, and act in their own shows of any genre, or control their own commercial environments without so much dependency on specialists and talented people. Second Life in fact answers that famous forums' mournful question, "What about the people with no talent?" superbly -- as I can tell you, as a Person With No Talent (you wouldn't think it was possible to actually flunk Art in high school, but I did.)

So what about the role of journalists? Are they obsolete? The fact is, they are scurrying around to leverage this new technology as much as anybody, and people who are already elites in other areas aren't satisfied to be just professors of accounting, but want to be journalists, pundits, chroniclers of history-in-the-making, too. This is the context for understanding Prof. Robert Bloomfield's email to me, which I want you to walk through with me. And to participate, you have to realize that this is disruptive media, so, I'm going to disrupt. That's what we're here for : )

Life Among the Lindens

Zara Linden bravely faces the Star Wars bar multitudes alone, on Governance Team Island.

I was waiting forever for Terra Antiqua, home of the old gamesters and conference-circuiters to pronounce on "their own" Cory Ondrejka. When I saw a headline about "an 800-lb gorilla" -- I thought that was what was definitely in the room (it was an article about something else). They were silent way past the sell-by date.

FINALLY Thomas Malaby, who one served as a kind of latter-day court scribe for Linden Lab, Pronounced: The FSM Has Left the Building. The FSM is -- for those of you non-believers -- is the "Flying Spaghetti Monster," which is the avatar Cory adopted to thumb his nose at thousands of years of tradition among the great religions, and adopt the irreverent secular humanists' religion of Pastafarianism, which made a spoof deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who I have chosen to call rather a metaphor for Second Life's code and governance, since I personally believe in -- as one young man once described him in the Sims -- "the real-life God".

"Has left the building" -- for those of you who, like me, didn't pick up that popular tag, is a reference to "Elvis has left the building," the phrase apparently said over public address systems to get fans to leave concerts, if they were still lingering in hopes of getting an autograph. I have to say in some of the places I've worked at, "Has entered the building" and "has left the building" is a quick e-mail tag that goes around when the Principles enter or exit, mainly letting you know whether you might face a surprise inspection or have an opportunity to get that all-important face-time -- or not.

However, Malaby doesn't say much, and it takes the Grandfather of Game Mastery, Richard Bartle, to bell the cat: "You spent some months doing fieldwork at Linden Labs: is this something you saw coming, or has it arisen because of developments that occurred after you stopped?" he asks, as blunt as Prokofy. Some background: Apparently in 2005, Malaby was hired (I think that was how it worked -- or maybe he was merely allowed to do a study) to be a corporate ethnographer for the Lindens. This is something that is rather opaque to me as a Silicon Valley/enterprise sort of cultural concept. Apparently some corporations, when they are wealthy enough, or vain enough, hire -- or encourage -- anthropologists or sociologists (people with RL academic degrees) to come in and study them and write something about them for posterity, or for their own internal development use. I take it Malaby's work isn't public, he's not indicated that it is. Of course, I've repeatedly questioned whether this is a good thing for academics to do, be hired (or encouraged) by corporations to produce private documents. I suppose the academics who teach people to become like them have to provide more jobs for them then just becoming other academics, so for all I know, this could be a growth niche.

I do think it causes havoc to the idea of the university as an independent realm studying society, including corporations and their influence. Of course, there's a lot of government and corporate buying of brains, for the military, for foreign policy, for all kinds of things. This is just one more sector. I think it needs a critique.

Still, no doubt Malaby got a lot of interesting material, even if he isn't telling us any of it -- just a hint. After a lot of throat-clearing, Malaby then tells us about his Life Among the Lindens.

The Brain-Uploaders

The Future is Here! The Future is NOOOOWWWWW.

Imagine if you were told that Philips, a major electronics company, and the American Bar Association, a bastion of sorts of the American establishment, were related to something promoting a futuristic device that would be implanted in your skin, and turn colours, according to how people online rated your reputation -- including anonymous griefers in Second Life. You'd say I was completely insane, or at the very least, tinfoiling it, eh? Well, let me show you how something like this gets started...many layers below the surface of life...

First, browse on over to Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon, part of the growing Extropia Core cult in Second Life that is digging in to spread the ideology of Extropianism, a particularly aggressive sect coming out of the trans-humanist movement. I call them the Brain-Uploaders because many of them actually think that they will someday upload their consciousness/brain/knowledge to the Internet or something like it, and therefore survive death.

For those who have been been in SL for awhile, the saga around the unhinged Csven Concord is well known. Csven Concord shouldn't be received in polite company. Yet he's the type of figure that gets rehabilitated now and then as he is able to continue to dine out on some old futuristic design work. At Saphrosyne's, a fellow named Yel Oh (groan) demonstrated a new tatoo concept from Philip's Design, which does the design work for Philip's Electronics. It's very hard to paw through the thicket of idiot chatter in the transcript, including inanimate chatter from objects, but basically he was presenting something called "design probes" that has to do with researching the future of design and people's emotional responses, and building these kinds of sensors into clothing. They were featured among Time's noteworthy inventions.

Yel Oh natters on about touchy-feely stuff like "what is the one thing you would take from your burning home?", and then later telling us how Philips is interested generally in expression, and hints at some "negatives" that we shouldn't have to worry, as this isn't going to happen until 2020.

Con Phil

In New York City, we have a public utility for electricity we call "Con Ed," I guess it's short for "Consolidated Edison". People often curse Con Ed for various things, like those steaming man-hole covers, which explode sometimes, or for these ridiculously high bills in some apartment buildings where they have some kind of unit fee that they insist has to be paid just to heat the hallways -- not your apartment -- or your apartment would freeze. Still, Con Ed is just...there. When it explodes itself, you worry about terrorism. Most of the time, it works. You don't think about it, it's...a utility. It doesn't become involved in the content of your life; it's the substrate of your life. Electricity provided by Con Ed keeps you warm and gives you light and helps you do your job, homework, and even play Second Life.

If you looked in your Google news for SL today, you'll discover that Philip Rosedale now says that Second Life is "a kind of public utility". Con Phil! Or Phil con. Right on schedule (I had just mentioned the other day that he hadn't been around to analyze the economy lately) David Kirkpatrick of Fortune, who has been a very special friend of the Lindens (he was the journalist who got the embargoed story about open-sourcing the viewer and was able to post his article about 15 minutes before the Blob formed us, if I recall correctly) has done a very positive story about Second Life and Philip. Say, I've turned in a positive story (see next post below) about the economy myself, flying in the face of a lot more negative, some from very seasoned and astute quarters.

Even so, I had to goggle at this one. A utility? A thing you utilize? I was just telling Shaun Altman about this, and he was quipping that we were "utilizing the utility" when...suddenly I was pitched off world, and then my avatar got tinier in the deep murk of offworldness, just as an avatar with the perfect-for-this-moment name of Incredible Tomorrow came online (having crashed himself minutes ago) and then...I crashed. The system logged me out. It couldn't log me in again, it said. Then it told me it couldn't connect me to this version of Second Life. Or...any version. Ok. We'll wait : )

A utility?! Well, if this is a utility, then...unban me from the forums, please, because utilities don't ban people, they don't get involved in content. And stop monkeying with governance tools, we can make our own...

Hmmm. Actually, do public utilities have forums?

The Economy, Stupid

A pass-time even greater than year-end forecasting these days is dumping on the SL economy. With so many wrong-headed reports out there -- like the Herald, where Jessica Holyoke is wildly messing up and claiming the SL economy "isn't predictable"; with the Rezzable guy making a few sharp comments but having way too many errors (um, mainland isn't just 15 percent of the land supply, even with more islands than mainland -- look at the map); and even the reliable Mitch Wagner getting a few things wrong. Well, what can you do? Consult Prokofy, of course, who, like a broken clock, is right at least twice a day, and a Linden even said the other day, "for once, you are wrong". Once? Hehe!

So let's take a look! Please pay attention, I have some good insights here!

Fallacies that need sweeping away, first:

1. There are more foreigners than Americans.

Well, sure. It's not too hard to add up the other 190-odd countries in the world, and come up with more people "overseas" (whatever that means in a virtual world) than in the U.S. Duh. But that would lead you to making a lot of further fallacious assumptions. Yes, there are now more non-Americans, and that's interesting for a "start-up" as Bill Geller calls this 7-year-old aging toddler. But...A more accurate picture would be to compare, say, Asians or Westerners (or WEOG), or Latin Americans and North Americans. The fact is, even if you add up all the EU countries together, you do not get more user hours -- or even more users -- than the EU countries taken by themselves. Americans in the U.S. of A. still count for the lion's share of sheer time on line. That can be accounted for by a number of things -- a) older residents b) better working connections to SL by being in the US near the servers; c) wealthier or at least willing to put disposable income on virtuality d) more media coverage.

2. SL still is seen as a weird place, with sex and bad shopping malls as Rezzable put it, merely pumping their own "rich content" sims. People who engage in cybersex and go shopping a lot don't find this the problem that the prudish Rezzable does; however, it's actually not the case that SL is filled with only sex in a box and business in a box. If you watch the CNN blog, which does of course tend to have "positive happy" stories, you will actually be surprised to see the amazing amount of stuff going on in SL -- live music, medical training, weather simulation study, fund-raising for charity, talks on religion, a movie-tie-in game, home-made resident RP games, etc. I've actually seen a reduction in the extremist BDSM type of tenant in my own rentals, and more and more what I would call more-vanilla-M, PG, business, creator sort of rentals.

3. SL is the big empty -- as Valleywag puts it. This is one of those things I always have to chuckle at. If you look at the figures for "foreigners," which are impressive, you'll have to realize that when you cynical 30-something geek nihilists are awake and willing to log in to SL, much of the rest of the world is alseep and their sims are empty. Of course, some sims *are* empty even whe you are on the same time zone, and that's Second Life. It doesn't matter. People fill them. Russia, Canada, the United States were all sparsely-populated once too. What matters is that people do use them, and keep paying their tier bills.

Black Not Like Me

At the new recruit station in I Am Legend--SL.

One of the most bogus stereotypes among the "progressives" about Second Life is that this virtual world -- where you can be anyone you imagine -- is racist, or reinforces stereotypes, or doesn't even have skins that can be used for blacks, Latinos, and Asians!

Of course, you can pick up a free black skin -- or white skin, or dog avatar -- at the I Am Legend orientation island built by the Electric Sheep as part of a game related to the new movie -- but I guess that's too politically-incorrect, too, oh, low-brow, American, mass taste?

There is no dearer meme held among the do-gooding Twittering chattering class than this idea that even virtual worlds, which were supposed to free us from prejudice, perpetrate the age-old stereotypes.

Sorry, I don't buy it, and while I'm sure I'm going to step on certain toes by sticking to this perception, I have to tell the truth about my own direct experience of SL, which has involved a lot of customer contact and attendance at all kinds of public events -- as well as RL meet-ups.

I recall in October of this year, on the exhibit hall floor of Virtual Worlds 07, I got into an unpleasant argument (the only of that sort that I had at this important Metaverse meet-up), and pissed off this fellow Peter Marx, who is famous and important. Somehow, we got talking about the Interdependence Day debate and race in Second Life, and Marx was waxing indignant. He insisted that it was not even possible to make good non-white skins in SL. I totally begged to differ. As it happened, at that moment I was chatting with Beth Coleman, the MIT professor who happens to be African-American, who had come up to me to query why I had disagreed with her on the Clay Shirkey debate, when it seemed we should have disagreed. She didn't appear to chime in with Peter Marx about the inability to make black avatars in SL, but she should be left to comment herself.

I asked Marx if in fact he had spent any significant time in SL and worked with the appearance mode. Marx, winding himself up to one of those "don't you know who I *am* pitches, insisted that as an expert 3-D artist, he was absolutely right, and there simply weren't any range of options. I completely begged to differ: one of the first things I did in Second Life in September 2004 when I joined an made Prokofy and another alt was create a black female and black male look -- the Herald even reported on it (the story was filled with fake and false statements BTW). Of course you can make a black or brown or purple avatar! You just move the slider, duh.

The Second Coming of Dyerbrook

Predictions for 2008: Linden Lab Won't Open Source

Given how several of my predictions for 2007 came true (a major Linden, core to the tribe, would leave), how could I do worse in 2008? I'm not even going to look yet at the tantalizing Virtual Worlds industry forecast you can get here -- that would spoil it!

Of course, we're all up against the blogger-style 20-issues meme on Tech Digest that has just about everybody convinced, and few disagreeing. Except for me. I don't believe there will be "shedloads"of Virtual Worlds appearing to unseat Second Life's pride of place...because I don't think Scenecaster on Facebook is a virtual world, and even the virtual worlds that will be interesting will have nothing near the capacity for user creativity, serendipity, collaboration, and community.

1. Linden Lab will not open-source Second Life in 2008.

Now, as it happens, this isn't just a prediction, it's a report of what Robin Harper, VP of Marketing, said today at her office hour in response to my direct query about the timing of when LL will open-source the server code. Now, she hastened to say a number of things (in voice, sorry, no transcript) to qualify that statement: a) SL is evolutionary, and so it changes and is subject to change (we had just debated about whether SL is evolutionary, revolutionary, created, or um...the result of intelligent design har har); b) it can't happen in the next 3-5 months -- not in the plan. Not likely in 2008 but....

2. Linden Lab will announce interoperability of some aspect of the avatars with some other world or platform. And this is also not a prediction so much as a report out of the same office hour -- that is, a statement from Robin that such cross-pollination was likely to occur before open source, that there would be the ability to port some aspect of SL elsewhere. Now, mind you! This might be as rinky-dink as having a deal with Facebook to put your avatar's profile on Facebook in some more widgety way than the existing SL/FB widget made by a resident, but...I'm betting that SL will figure out how to GOM one of the smaller very easy-to-use portable virtual worldlet browsers and integrate it with SL to Show the Way that cooperation, not competition is the Way and the Tao and the Life.

3. The new open-ended worlds (i.e. not-a-games) with some controlled user content like Kaneva, Twinity, V-Side will not gain any significant influx of users, from Second Life or otherwise, because people will be too interested in their mobile phones.

4. Linden Lab will open up internally a second grid, on which better more stable code made by more grown-ups will be deployed, and a select group of their special friends will get to "test" it, i.e. use it to advance their businesses. If they can offer Havoc 4 to only some people; if they can give them a heads up on how search will work at SL Views, they can do this -- they may have already done it! And this is technically possible -- it's just not ideologically possible due to the "founder's vision" as a high-ranking Linden once put it to me.

Coldwell Banker Getting Cold Feet in SL?

Did I miss the memo on this? I wonder if Coldwell Banker, the much ballyhooed "real-life realtor" in Second Life, is the next to go -- or has already left. Their presence in SL seems to be markedly diminished.

I see signs that the vast empire of Ancient Shriner and Chrischun Fassbinder -- the CB reps in SL -- is crumbling. You may remember Mr. Lee's Hong Kong, whose ugly, stupid signs blighted the mainland for hundreds of miles in all directions for the last 2 years, with 16 m2 parcels anywhere -- pristine waterfront, beautiful mountainside, flat plateau, anywhere but by a road.

Worse, Mr. Lee's signs were set to sale for $9935 to help prod you into "buying back the view". Shriner prided himself on not being an extortionist (and was silent about his partner in crime) because he didn't put his parcels for sale, but instead just put up huge, tall towers with his ugly logo visible for miles. It's hard to believe these blight-monsters ever got any clicks, especially in cut-up ad farms on destroyed sims that nobody ever visited. Then, we all watched in horror as these two sign griefers and extortionists in Second Life got a huge pump up for a year from Coldwell Banker, a real-life company that chose them as their representatives in SL, and then proceeded to use their ill-conceived sign-network to advertise real-life houses. Ugh.

The concept never seemed to take off. By his own admission, Shriner had something like only 20-40 percent occupancy in the CB houses, because evidently they required deposits and an age check? I'm not sure why their neat, boring suburban tracts didn't sell, given the received wisdom that what most people in SL want is a neat, boring, suburban tract.

Something's up, because Chrischun Fassbinder IM'd me the other day, notifying me that he had now removed the prices from his extortionist 16ms (!), which have been in place for more than two years, and was now offering a "land swap". He gave me a link to what turned out to be an inactive forum with only himself as member and no takers. Meanwhile, he informed me that he'd be abuse-reporting me unless I removed a tree that was waving on to his micro-baron property. *Shrugs*.