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.

What Malaby does let us know, however, is something very important. That is, it's something we've all heard a million times from the Lindens ourselves, at the business end of this massive multi-player online experiment, at the Office Hours.

How many times have you sat, splayed in your uncomfortable modernistic furniture no human could sit on, or cross-legged on a flower leaf like a fairy, and heard the latest Linden intone somberly: "We are making the tools for you residents to govern your world." The tool idea is an interesting corporate myth, as we shall see, enabling the Lindens to plausibly control, but not appear to control.

Here's what he says (and do read the entire thing):

"Cory said to me once [...] that he didn't want to be "in the constraint business," and this was reflected in his spearheading of efforts to move toward open source for certain parts of Second Life (the client, and eventually the servers). His point of view, as I understand it, has always been very strongly characterized by a belief that as constraints on human action are removed, social goods (especially in creativity) are created."

Blink. I guess we have only to look at gambling, ageplay, prostitution, BDSM and other extreme slave cults, camping, and just general mass suburban sprawl, to understand that removal of constraints doesn't at all bring the social goods that Malaby indicates here. Quite the opposite. That isn't to say they should be monkeyed with; I'm not for monkeying with suburban sprawl or lifestyles if they aren't actually RL criminally liable, I'm for people who think they can do better shutting up and doing better (Nick Yee). But the balance that should be sought between constraint and freedom has not been found in Second Life and quite possibly never will be.

The Lindens are licentious hippies on some things (claiming to dislike commercialism and cheap commerce, but allowing massive devaluation of land by ad-farm invasions and sign griefing extortionism, for example), but control-freaks on other things that somehow grow out of their licentiousness (refusing to ever, ever budge on the mega prims issue by having a simple rule: don't put them on the mainland where they are used to grief people deliberately, or accidently; just allow them on islands).

Says Malaby:

"When we look at Second Life, however, we see this point of view applied alongside more "top-down" kinds of control, and these differing approaches have always been in tension. The easiest example from my time there was the telehubs. Attempting to apply lessons from Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the telehubs were constraints on user action that were imposed in an effort to contrive the kind of rich *accidental* constraints that made New York thrive (in Jacobs' opinion). In my opinion this kind of move always lay at odds with the more straight-ahead left-libertarian view that I tend to identify with Cory."

Malaby, like other social engineering types, really massively misunderstands what telehubs in fact *were* in Second Life, though he is absolutely right that the Lindens inserted -- and later removed them -- for left-libertarian ideological reasons.

Sure, the telehubs were put in to force people to socialize and build together. That's all the Lindens cared about, in their own social engineering, taking what Valleywag calls the Big Empty of Second Life and making people collaborate for their own good. So they made their travels actually force-port into hubs, from which they then had to fly out.

These areas soon became ugly, laggy messes, where you couldn't put out anything to build for long anyway because of autoreturn. And then the fact that about 10 of them were really ugly, laggy messes, completely obviated the fact that the Lindens reformed, and made them better in late 2004-2005 until their demise in late 2005 -- going on to build dozens of them with green grass, trees, large open spaces and park-like places that mitigated the mall lag and blight. That early and core experience of them enabled those who wanted to lobby against them to ignore the facts of the whole list of them and what it meant. I waged a battle for keeping them, even putting up "Hands Off Our Hubs!" on all the 42 telehubs minutes before the Lindens were scheduled to deleting them, and sending up pictures to the old picture-shower on the old version of their website. The Lindens defeated me, not only by pulling those engines of free enterprise, but by actually spending the time wonkily in Photo-Shop to then rez into the world a version of the telehub that made it appear as if it were blown up and in flames, and uploading *that* to the picture-show site. OK. You win.

Except...what they -- and Thomas Malaby, and many other liberals overlooked -- is that the telehub mall scene was an enormous engine of growth and creativity for Second Life -- and not in the way the Lindens intended. what happened is that because people were forced to travel there en route to other destinations, mall owners decided the land was valuable, bid it way up on the auctions, and cornered the market (Anshe Chung, Blue Burke, Moonshine Herbst, and a few others made their fortune in mall rentals and machines).

By VALUING places that had traffic -- real eyeballs, real people who actually did hang around and shop (because they aren't the politically-correct geeks that the Lindens imagined talking about media convergence theory and rezzing out scripted gizmos that improved the lives of people in the third world) -- the mall barons created a system that, ironically, was extremely democratic, accessible, and wealth-producing.

How could that work, you ask, when mall rentals were very high per prim, and people were forced to pay 4 weeks in advance, with no ability to refund?) Easy. Because the alternative was not to get noticed at all, or worse, suck up to a diva, and get some spot in the back of her store, while you cultivated her, flattered her, chattered with her endlessly and tried to wait for the moment when you could save up the money or find the land to put up your own store. The medieval apprentice system in SL (SL tends to recapitulate all real-life economic stages) was brutal. Few made the cut. The forums, where the divas reigned, were brutally controlled and outsiders easily banned by having the divas gang-report to the Lindens in their secret-police informant system, so that the Lindens would have to say "The community desires Prokofy to be banned" or whatever. There was a rule that you couldn't start threads on individual people or individual businesses. But of course, this was violated egregiously with threads started about Anshe Chung or Prokofy Neva, and then punished severely even if legitimate criticism was raised about other businesses and their poor practices or monopolistic tendencies.

The Lindens feted the divas by letting them have scarce eyeball real-estate on the front page and other feature pages of their own website, and steered them to the media for feting there in their control of media relations (the Lindens discouraged sociologists and journalists from covering SL in the earlier days and cleared them through their own office). I was essentially banned from the SL forums for criticizing these practices.

So that meant that to get started in business, if you wanted to get around the huge obstacle created by the existing beta-era content monopolists and their boutique stores on core sims, and you wanted to bypass the Linden star-creation machine, you could at least PAY and freely, without fear or favour, get a berth in an Anshe mall. You could even make a deal with Anshe, if you were large enough, to put out your stores for you each time she managed to snag an auction win with a telehub in it. (The Lindens wouldn't tell you where the telehubs were going in, but wise auction watchers would dope it out and make an educated guess, sometimes being bitterly screwed when the Lindens pulled switcheroos.)

I was able to get my start in an Anshe mall advertising my own rentals, for example, on the same sim where she herself had a mall -- something you wouldn't think possible -- because Anshe didn't judge people or content in her rentals: you paid a box a huge price (by those days' standards), you joined the group, and unless you were late or put out some hugely laggy script, you never heard from her. Being able to PAY for entry in a faceless, free market that doesn't make you BARGAIN for entry with a diva is tremendously liberating -- it's what separates the Wester and Eastern marketplaces, historically (you setting your price that others must pay, and them shopping for lower prices, rather than the two of you sitting for hours haggling over tea). Oh, to be sure, you couldn't dare try to use her tenants' list to advertise your stuff, or she'd summarily expel you. But basically, the magic of Anshe, and how she made her million in Second Life, is that she valued commerce, unlike the ambivalent hippie Lindens, and made other people value it -- and it worked. They made a profit from sales; she made a profit.

The idea that all these malls were laggy avatar-trapping messes was completely false. As I said, about 10 of them were -- notoriously Fuji, which actually was an old core sim that oldbies had made avatar traps in, not Anshe. Anshe's malls were master-planned and laid out to get the most rentals and have flow of avatars -- permeability -- not trapping. If they were laggy, it's because they were popular. The act of forcing people to fly into the telehub itself was the lag; we discovered that when the Lindens took the physical telehub out and the flyers out, and we kept some of the malls "as is". Traffic continued to come; but guess what, the lag was gone, as all the other day-trippers bypassing the mall left it.

Malls are democratic, open, buyable public spaces. Boutiques on old land that oldbies got for cheap, far from hubs, are not democratic, are closed, and usually not buyable. Do the math for the economy. Even Philip was forced to concede that sales transactions were much higher on telehub sims. Duh!

The Lindens, in their social engineering idiocy, went to extremes, putting in p2p. They put p2p in for 3 reasons:

o they had this power themselves and felt guilty they had it and no one else did
o they were under heavy lobbying by the divas with boutiques that were not in the Anshe malls, but on sims far away from them, and they resented the democracy of the malls pulling away sales; their privileged pride of place in Lindenor was toppled, so they wanted to be able to press on their sim location and arrive instantly
o the Goreans flash-mobbed the old Feature Voting System because they wanted newbies to come into their arms and stay there, and ironically, the open flight p2p plan was great for that, so they could do less recruiting at welcome areas.

None of these reasons are about removing constraints. They are about putting them in by feting or caving or guilting. In fact, the telehubs, while a constraint on travel, removed the constraint *on market entry*. This is the sort of thing I expect to be utterly opaque and foreign to Thomas Malaby. Not only because he has not spent very much time *in* Second Life, but because he tends to have the suspicion of corporations and commerce of most liberal academics -- he spends an awful lot of time trying to put you straight that this is NOT the case, of course.

Here's what Thomas Malaby got exactly right, however, from his Life Among the Lindens:

"So one of the core contradictions that I found during my time at Linden Lab was that between a deep suspicion of vertical authority and a desire to minimize or eliminate it, on one hand, and their own position vis-à-vis SL as indisputably in a position of tremendous (though not total) control, on the other. The Stewart Brandian rhetoric of "tools" was the primary work-around here -- a way of talking about what they were doing (providing users "tools") that suggested a deep neutrality of (and faith in) the technology they created and provided, and this allowed for a certain amount of ongoing denial of their authority."

Tools! My God, I should have realized long ago that they picked up this rhetoric from Steward Brand *slaps head* -- the old Whole Earth Catalogue had tools for living, as they called it, and we used to spend hours pouring over its pages, reading about old-fashioned ice picks that were actually the perfect thing to use on stubborn weeds in your garden -- or whatever. It was even more dorky than the LL Bean Catalogue. It was always about drying and grinding millet seeds and making millet loafs (whenever I think of that era of the 1960s and all that Whole Earth stuff, I think of millet loafs, and how goddamn hard they were to eat, with like 92 different grains and raw vegetables in them, and how we used to force them down anyway; in fact, what they did was make food taste like a tool...)

The tool thing is loosely based on that old idea of "give a man a fish, and you have fed him for one day; teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime". The problem with this facile adage of Western do-goodism is that people in civil war in Africa have a different problem. My God, they know how to fish, if they even have fish (a lot of them are in the desert). The problem is their kleptocratic governments steal their poles or poison the waters or chase them off their land with fratricidal wars. A man in Darfur needs a fish, not a pole, and somebody should attend to the larger problem of all the well-poisoning and cattle-slaughtering and compensate the villages for that destruction.

But the idea is very, very deep-seated in the liberals' nostalgia for pastoralism that they believe they can reach by modern technology (one of those weird inherent contradictions of the modern era).

In our case, the Lindens think all they have to do is create some sort of tool, usually involving the land or creation of goods, and all manner of thing will be well.

The problem is that we don't get to participate meaningfully in the decision making about the tools. So you will have these completely stupid and frustrating office hours, that go like this:

Resident: I can't get these griefers to stop blasting physics-enabled particle-spewing cubes all over my land.
Linden: We're making new governance tools that will enable you to take charge of your Second Life experience.
Resident: Do you think you could implement a function whereby accounts cannot make scripts for 30 days if they have no payment on file, to stop these day-old griefer attacks?
Linden: Our new governance tools will enable you to control who accesses your land in more granulated ways.
Resident: But on the mainland, I can even turn off "no information on file" entry already, but it does no good due to the no-show neighbours who don't have it on.
Linden: Our new abuse-report system will enable private island owners to receive all reports directly.
Resident: But I live on the mainland.
Prokofy: Could you tell us whether you are essentially GOM'ing Ban-Link in these new tools, putting whole swathes of SL into collaborative banning by a few top landlords, with no recourse or appeal? Could you let us know if you will go through with a rumoured plan to put ban lists even on Governor Linden land?
Linden: We can't talk about tools that are still in the development phase, but they will enable you to take charge of your Second Life experience.

And so on. The problem is simply that as a proprietary company, they believe they can't tell you -- and don't want to anyway -- just what they do plan with the "governance tools". You get straight to the point to try to find out whether they are going to essentially institutionalize bad resident devices that make life hell for a lot of newbies and others (Europeans) who have "no payment on file"). Just because FlipperPA Peregrine doesn 't like my criticism of him in my blog, he puts me on Ban-Link and utter strangers for miles who glom on Ban-Link (it doesn't work in the "trust" mode that everyone imagines) ban me from their land.)

Right now, the Lindens are going through one of these farces with the new abuse-report system. Although the lion's share of abuse reports come from the mainland, by their own admission, they will now start a new system that enables private island tenants to...send all abuse reports to their landlord.

Of course, the Lindens say in advance that they essentially will not respond to any reports against island scammers who sell the same property over and over again, confiscating it back unlawfully.

So what is the point? I don't need a special system. My tenants, if there is a griefer, or another tenant harassing them, already call me long before they call the Lindens, or complain in the group and sometimes get information or help that way. Why would you put a trouble ticket into Lindens when they won't respond?

So there is very little that wouldn't be ALREADY coming to the private island dealer, so it's not much of a "tool". The real tool people need is to be able to pursue deadbeat landlords who disappear, don't pay their tier, and lead to their tenants, who paid them hundreds of real dollars, being screwed. They don't need to be able to report that somebody's tree is waving into their cyber-palace.

What good is this new system going to do? None. But it will enable the Lindens to tell the media and their funders that they are "making tools for the residents to take charge of their Second Life experience."

Really taking charge would involve abuse reports that take into account groups, and action by the Lindens on groups -- as groups remain a badge of honour that day-old griefers keep joining when they organize griefing raids.

None of this is an easy task -- but it is solved not by having an elite group of coders in the Lab get together and decide something in secret, then foist on people, listen to where they howl the most, and make a few adjustments. It's about sharing the process and making it a fair one (with a JIRA with "no" votes possible, for example, and a meaningful feature voter removed from the insanity of the JIRA, intended for bug-hunting.)

Malaby speculates that the difference between Philip and Cory which led to Cory's departure was about control versus freedom, constraints versus openness. I had said it could well be an argument about the pace and form of open-sourcing. Malaby comments that "I got the impression that for him it was more the company itself that was the proper site for attempts to realize the ideals of governing collectively (the Wisdom of Crowds and all that; cf. the Love Machine, etc)."

That's an interesting juxtaposition -- Cory for giving so much freedom that he openly blesses reverse engineering and Copybot; Philip concentrating on making the Company under the Tao the place of experimental Future of Work stuff. Philip is committed to open source, too, however, so the question then becomes pace and format, as I indicated -- or perhaps it's about finding a better business model once there are enough grid-level customers, so that concerns about individual customers or groups making challenging communities on the grid don't threaten the Lindens' hegemony.

Dealing with the Lindens is like playing one of those miniature golf games where you are trying to knock the ball in between the windmill's blades. What *do* they pay attention to, and how *do* they make decisions? I would have though that Cory, if he were devoted to hippiedom and openness, wouldn't have seen the logic of my campaign to get LL to change their dope-smoking group tools. Yet I was told he was the one who cited my pizza guy blog in the Linden lunchroom to get them to reform the tools.

Philip couldn't understand what I meant about the tools for the longest time, and then he did. I think even he could see that they simply weren't safe and productive for business. If any officer of a land group can sell the group land out from any other officer, and if any officer can be frozen from functioning and voted out of the group by rank-and-file members, what you have isn't a device to prevent tyranny; what you have is a machine for producing the thuggery of Bolshevism. The group tools weren't used to depose despots; they were used to try to knock off legitimate developers from their land, and grief them to death. FINALLY the Lindens changed this so you had a CHOICE -- either make everyone an owner and put them in the commune to steal from each other if they so wish; or toggle rights and permissions off on each member to prevent theft and griefing, and yet full use of land.

Ultimately, I think Thomas Malaby has identified the cross-cutting issues for the Lindens, the crucifix of control and freedom upon which they are nailed, and which they have not been able to resurrect from because they are unable to concede the balance needed.

What he stops short of doing, however, is admitting that they are hobbled for ideological reasons, and tackling the ideology forthrightly.

Comments

[Thomas Malaby]

Interesting post, Prok. While I have indicated before that I was not hired by Linden Lab, let me reiterate that here. Doing research on-site at a company while not in their employ is not in any way a new trend in social science, and I was doing what is often called the "anthropology of organizations" -- studying organizations to understand how they work as communities of practice (and meaning). The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, so I was not beholden financially to Linden in any way. I am glad to hear that you agree with the core contradictions of Linden Lab that I marked, and I recommend Fred Turner's wonderful From Counterculture to Cyberculture for more historical background, if you haven't already read it (as you may have). Stay tuned for the book, Prok (it is now under contract, and should appear in about a year -- I know, the wheels of academic publishing grind exceedingly slowly).

[Ann Otoole]

One thing is a constant: education tends to work wonders. if more people are educated as to the existence of what would be illegal trusts in the USA then more people would not go running to them to blindly pay them money. eventually the illegal trusts would work themselves out of existence and we would read sob stories on many a blog about how cruel that damned prok and all those others are for ruining their lives.

maybe 2008 will be the year of change for the better. as far as what we can have some influence over. we have no way to predict what LL will do next or if LL will respond to blazing fires such as the jira entries related to IP theft and the 25 group limit. both of which are being ignored, the IP theft issues generally ignored and the 25 group limit issue being totally ignored. only consistent and intelligent writing that is published will make a difference in the long run.

[Prokofy Neva]

Thomas, I find it reassuring to hear that you were not hired to perform this study, which might have opened up questions of academic credibility, and I'm interested to hear that a book is coming out, and I'll watch for it.

I'm not convinced that there is an already-existing well-established trend of corporations being studied by anthropoligists. I've heard of the book on the hippies and the dot.com tekkies, I'll have to get it and read it some time.

As for the 25-group limit, this is one of those things that is getting flash-mobbed in the blogosphere. It's clubs, DJs, land barons driving the call for it.

I can't get behind that call because I think Lindens should fix the group bugs and wonkiness they have now, before they add more capacity. Get an alt, put another 25 on. How may groups can you realistically follow?!

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, Malaby, you're not off the hook for being FIC. The Lindens didn't just let *anybody* come in and study them and get a book out of it. Some anthropologists had to slog it out inworld for years.

[Cocoanut Koala]

A few assorted comments:

You remember, Uri used to say that SL was good for turning griefers into productive citizens, by appealing to their creativity. (And indeed, under his tutelage, several did reform.)

Most people, griefers and non-griefers alike, though, need something to do that is less open-ended than what SL offers.

Another observation: Educators have been stressing collaboration and group stuff for several decades now, at the expense of individual achievement, and I think this shows up in video games.

In TSO, for instance, it was designed so that you would be much better off to group with several people to have a full-size plot, as it would take you lots longer to get it on your own.

Which, of course, made me more determined to get it on my own.

In schools, what happens is there are usually one or two kids who do the most or the best work, and the others glom onto him to get their grade. Sometimes that kid resents it. I have kids of each type - one who resents it and always did all the work, and the other who can scarcely EVER work or study by herself! lol

This notion that group collaboration is the best thing for everything is to me as faulty as the notion that there should be no top-down delegation of authority.

Group collaboration is great for those who like it, and for those who have good partnerships and groups. But it should never be elevated as preferable to individual work, imo.

The Lindens err in becoming wedded to their ideologies, I think, and are slow to actually alter their notions to fit realities.

In other words, they start with these concepts (such as no authority; group tools; etc.), and are not really EXPERIMENTING to see if they CAN work.

Rather, it is like they started off their experiment determined that their ideas ARE right, and the end result WILL be a certain way.

And this hobbles them, as they continue to parrot the notions they started out with, but which don't work as smoothly in practice. The theory should bend more to what really works, I think.

I agree with your last two paragraphs.

coco

[Ciaran Laval]

I remember raising the point about estate owners receiving AR's and you suggested it's always the case, which left me to assume that none of my residents had ever filed an abuse report. Indeed they do come to me first. Fortunately I don't suffer as much griefing as you do, largely because I'm a lot smaller.

My only objection to such a process is that it's not possible for me to be on 24/7 and therefore as I pay more for my island than I do for my mainland I believe LL should support my estate tenants too.

I may have to attend one of these awful governance meetings, I cannot stand this microphone policy they have, I feel like I'm back at school, that's not open discussion.

I enjoyed this article Prok, although I've only touched on one issue (that relates more to my line of business) it was an enjoyable read and very well presented.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, yes, Coco you have so hit upon it. It's not like a real lab, with experiments, with an open mind. It's like -- they get a meme, an ideological doctrine, and they just it, and run it into the ground, and grind it as if it should work, and are belated in not admitting it doesn't. See "tao of Linden".

I know what you mean about this school collaboration stuff. It's almost like it's just a modern management tool to deal with a big class if 35 or even 50 kids, put them all in groups, and let them fend for themselves.