Second Thoughts

The Essential Criminality of Open-Source Extremism

Open-source extremists say "all property is theft" but I say that all open-source labour and content copied comes at a price: the stealing of somebody's time, labour, or computer capacity.

I could write a VERY long post explaining what I mean about the essential criminality of the open-source extremists' movement attached to Second Life, but it's actually easier to just display a very typical post from this anarchists' movement (see below) that I noted linked to my blog today, even though the discussion is from 2006, and originated first on Raph Koster's blog, and then went to an interview with Raph.

People like Raph, who might support open source as a good geek, and make use of open source, and plan to open source some of their stuff, don't always realize how these terms are used by extremists in Second Life *including Lindens*. There is open source, and there is open source. We don't need little lectures about how "the Internet is based on open source software". We get all that. On the way to providing all that OS goodness on the Internet, however, our homes weren't blacked out, we weren't stalked or griefed or harassed. Our property was not stolen merely because we went on the Internet, unless of course a more sophisticated key-logging hack or data-base hack was used to access a credit card, which isn't the norm. *Our means of livlihood was not stolen*. On Second Life they are now; and in the Bright Future of Second Life, where we learn that DRM "slows things down" from the former CTO and his fans, it is likely to be welded into the software and the grid. Here's the message of copybotted Second Life: Just create more stuff faster, as it will be stolen; work for big companies that pay you regardless of the perms set on your props; create experience and environment rather than objects and textures. Otherwise you will be pwned.

The thuggery and crime of open-source socialism just isn't visible often to the well-meaning eye because it appears so good, altruistic, open, democratic, and even reasonable. The idea that everyone should get to access all knowledge and property sounds eminently positive, all about "learning" as the article I quoted from in the piece about Cory Linden the other day. Geeks want to "learn," and what better way to "learn" than to be able to open up a script. Why, if you didn't have boatloads of copyable and openable scripts in SL, you would have slowed down the development of SL.

And who could disagree with that? We all realize the benefits of having non-proprietary door, notecard-giver, vehicle, etc. scripts in SL you can open and adjust and improve. Ironically, it's scripters who have taken the greatest care to make sure perms work on their proprietary scripts, however, and whatever Copybot scandals that have happened in SL, and whatever texture and design thefts that have occured and object-copy heisting that took RL-lawsuits to address, you can be damn sure that the ability to keep perms on scripts is held sacrosanct -- the one time I remember scripts becoming copyable for about 12 hours, the Lindens got on it like a 5-alarm five, and the Linden responsible for it happening was fired. They never did that with Copybot, eh? Instead, the person who made Copybot was invited to the Lab to join an elite group, Architecture Working Group to discuss the open sourcing of the grid. Go know.

The Leninism of Linden

Some people hate it when I apply Sovietology to Second Life. When it fits, it fits, however, as it does for our beloved "Kremlindenlab" from time to time. The Tao of Linden is a perfect example. For me, it's merely Soviet political culture dressed up in cyber-clothing for the New Age, with the word "Tao" sprinkled on it like New Age Holy Water to give it that certain chic pinache. Arggh. The Lindens aren't just making revolutionary software, they are revolutionizing the workplace and the company. This nutty stuff is call "The Future of Work". Look out. It's going to get unstoppable with tekkies and academics behind it and liberal newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor, and we'll have to work extra hard to prove that it's a fraud -- at least in the way it is is being implemented here.

It would be one thing if this cult-like stuff were merely on the company blog, like all company blogs in the universe have stuff like this -- we all have it at our companies. And if the CEO spouted it as a kind of motivational talk that had certain touchpoints that meant certain things to the people in the office, but which wasn't taken really formally or literally. But...when you see the employees earnestly, from the youngest to top programmers at the apex like Andrew Linden, spouting it, you have to really worry. In fact, Andrew's posts in the past on my blog about whether LL is profitable are exemplary indications of just how deep the cult goes. Let's analyze it.

Year In Review: Mukkake-Rakers, Cory Linden, Copybot

I don't like year-enders, as I don't think it's very easy to sum up such fast-changing momentous history while we're living in it, but as there is already a lot of rewriting of history by the victors, it's important to keep sounding the note of dissent and keep setting the record out for posterity.

The three main stories for the last year are: a) the departure of Cory Ondreijka from Linden Lab; b) the decline of the Second Life Herald into what I call a mukkake-raking rag; c) Copybot (yes, still). All three topics are related and really all about Copybot, who you might have thought was last year's story, but is actually really just as much this year's story in many ways, because it's all about, what Dean Moriarity once famous called, "The Big Grab from Washington to Moscow" -- property, its valuation, who gets to own it or take it, and who manages it.

Someone else might say the really big story of 2007 was the entrance -- and exit -- of a lot of big companies to Second Life. They can write that history. This phenomenon was responsible, in inworld terms, mainly for the rapid aggrandizement of a lot of content-makers and programmers who perhaps didn't keep their modesty as intact as their NDAs. It's historically important but I will leave someone like Forseti to fawn over it.

I've already written about Cory Linden since the story was broken by our familiar FIC at massively.com -- but it will long haunt as a topic, as if a close family member had left home or died. His departure was one of those laser burns that the virtual world unleashes now and then making you somehow feel it "in real" too. While everyone seems to acknowledge that he made a graceful and even noble exit, the public really does have a right to know what the "creative difference" or "engineering dispute" was all about. A very old Second Lifer told me frankly they thought it was a business dispute, not an engineering difference. And as engineering *is* business in SL as in a lot of Internet and platform technologies, that is very astute.

Suddenly, I recalled a moment in SLCC 1 outside the Korean bar where a group of us had gone to hang out, and wound up hearing Philip Rosedale do a karaoke of Jeremy's Spoken, a song I felt he obviously identified with. As we left the bar, Cory Ondrejka wandered off and returned from a Korean deli, impishly holding up one of those ubiquitous gourds (does anybody ever buy them?!), which he cradled like a ventriloquist, and mimicked the words in a high, squeaky voice, "I am the CEO of the Metaverse!". We were convulsed -- it was a fitting coda to days of back-to-back SOP and SLCC. I glanced over at Philip -- he wasn't seeming to find it as funny as everybody else. There you have it. Cory's irreverence and geeky sense of humour. Philip's ardent belief.

Cory Linden Leaves the Lab

Dedric Mauriac knocks over Cory Linden's dominoes on New York island, an unwitting omen of his departure.

moo Money over at massively.com has the scoop of the year in the SLogosphere: Cory Linden quits or is fired from Linden Lab.

Your faithful correspondent predicted exactly a year ago that "one senior Linden of some sort, not like a David Fleck but more basic to the tribe, will flame out and maybe even Tell All in a magazine article or forthcoming book. They will be hired away by some huge competitor". I contacted moo for details about how she got the story, and she said it wasn't really an investigation but the selection of her by a Linden. "The sources for the story are keeping themselves anonymous and have opted to use multiple bloggers from Massively to tell the full story". I'll bet! The Herald is asleep, and it's been 3 lonely years since Cory and Uri gulped gold-fish together and downed shots.

Later, Tateru blogged Philip's confirmation, putting paid to the idea that any outlet but the Blingslider is the state news agency

Metaversals Picking up Stakes from SL?

Pontiac reportedly shuttering its Second Life island. Will the automobile manufacturer ride out of Second Life to other worlds?

I guess the buzz has been around in the blogosphere for quite some time, really, if you have been paying attention and linking up the dots, but now you can feel it more palpably inworld. Those empty corporate canyons that everybody poked fun at, with their rolling tumbleweeds and cricket sounds among the gigantic, expensive builds, are more and more disappearing into the Linden seas like Atlantis.

More to the point, the Metaversal development agencies who served as the sherpas of the gentlemen explorers in SL are themselves heading for other shores.

" I can tell you that right now most all of our work in the sales pipeline is in other worlds," one top SL developer told me, who contracts to do virtual world campaigns for real-life companies.

Of course, all the Metaversal Myrmidons will have pocketed their copies of builds into their inventory, where they also keep their highly-transferable 3-D design and programming skills, but linking up stuff like that, or getting it to rez its coordinates all out with scripted thingies on notecards -- well, that's a chore, and may not preserve the likeness perfectly as it once stood. One thing is certain: the builds will never, ever look as good as they did in Second Life in these other worlds...

Judging from some wistful and thinky goodbye blogs, it seems Pontiac is rumoured to be rolling up the 7 Motorati islands, proving the axiomatic thesis that no matter how pretty you make the builds and no matter how many enthusiastic car designers you put on the task, you just can't get the vehicles to go over the sim seams. I went out for my last test drive of the Solstice GXP, and idly wondered if they ever experienced the blowback that Intel and McDonald's got out of the Sims Online, where the breakage and poor pointage of the virtual products in world began to drag down the real-life brand identity lol (remember those broken burger stands that left you so hungry in the Sims lol?)

Pontiac was supposed to be the Poster Boy for enlisting The Community (read: a fraction out of the 10 percent geek content creators) in making corporate builds "sticky", i.e. of use to advertisers. I'll return to this inquiry when I get all my pictures developed (gah, I can't wait for SL to generate jpegs; even better if they pipe them to typepad.com). I gather that even giving away free land to content geeks who used it to make stores to sell their own products (some only vaguely related to "car culture") didn't translate into sales of real-life Pontiacs. It was likely that Pontiac's regular customers didn't use the website to discover Second Life, although apparently the already-existing brand Ask Patty, the women's car talk site, did cross over -- but then more to the point, the geeks of Second Life -- and their audiences -- who sit all day in front of their computers linking tiny fiddly prims and texturing them "just so" weren't the folks who happened to spend big and buy big old Pontiac cars. At the end of the day, you gotta sell the cars, no? You can't keep having "virtual-world virtual rounding-error budgets" for ever...can you?

Valuing Virtual Worlds

Library of Congress

As I contemplate the year of 2007, and especially some recent debates out there, on Terra Nova about "taking out the intellectual trash of Second Life" and on Resident Answers on the official forums, I have to come to the conclusion that people don't sufficiently value virtual worlds. And that's one of the main reasons they flounder.

The people making them have been too idealistic, utopianist, and socialistic (while being too mercenary in other respects) and haven't charged what they are worth even to cover their considerable costs. So people don't understand what they cost, and therefore are ignorant of the costs, or even deny or disparage them. This is in part due to real altruism, and part due to fake altruism on the part of the people making these worlds.

I've heard someone like Philip Rosedale talk about how he wants "Second Life to be for everybody" and how his company has a mission "to connect everybody," and a lot of their reasoning giving for things like mangling the Search or keeping the LindEx synthetically controlled like a socialist system is because of the poor newbies they imagine needing this subsidy. Or the maker of Gaia at VW07 talked about how unlike real life, virtual life enables everybody to come in on a level playing field, and by not having real-money trade (cashout), then you can ensure that people get rich "on the merits" and presumably don't "exploit" others. (That he imagines that people in real life don't get rich "on the merits" is one of the peskier things about trying to reason with these folks.)

That socialistic and idealistic game makers don't value their worlds or have some utopian notion about making them "for everybody" is understandable, but then what happens is their less idealistic (or more idealistic, depending on how you look at it) cohorts don't value their worlds. They take them at their word!

If Virtual Worlds were as expensive as a computer or even an I-Phone or a Blackberry, they'd get a lot more respect. Instead, they are priced even less than games: SL is $9.95 a month for a premium account, and World of Warcraft, played by 8 million people, is $15.95. There you go.

His Dark Arts: The Golden Compass

The Golden Compass opened December 7 in the U.S..

It's funny to watch the growing controversy around The Golden Compass. It's a great story -- I read it right through a few summers ago and thoroughly enjoyed it -- until towards the end it got sort of confusing and didactic. It's a slow start, too, and you wonder if it's going to be a kid's book, so you have to stick with it. It's no Harry Potter -- but I think it's much better -- and frankly, I'm the last person in the America who has *not* read a single Harry Potter book and never will.

Oh, I know the secularists and geekie leftoids are out there gloating that the Golden Compass is all about hatred of Christianity and a big dis of the Catholic Church and triumph of the Uploadable Brain and the Singularity and the Sextremist Tao...or something.

But...you might just as well take the Magesterium for, oh, the Lindens and the elitist coding class of Second Life..or something. It could be about any government or big power in whatever setting. And you could say that the shape-shifting daemons attached to the children which are said to be their souls and finally morph into one continual animal spirit are in fact a metaphor for their consciences, which science wants to cut out of human beings -- not merely a sign of the sexual urge which the Church ostensibly wishes to suppress. After all, good and evil are only supposed to be chemical states of the brain, so why not excise whatever organ infuses with a crazy notion of something being "right or wrong"? It's all good, eh?

Help Yourself While Helping Others

Drop in at Ahern/Dore and find nudes, griefers, idiots impacting the newbie experience.

I guess I'm not surprised to see the SL Volunteers building out their empire -- that's always been their goal. You always hope the Lindens will get wise and outsource all this newbie handholding stuff like any normal company would, if they aren't willing to put paid customer service staff on it -- but to assume that means you don't get what the Lindens' aspirations are. They wish to rule the world. They want to be the ones to connect everybody. Their way. Through them. Even if it's all open source, they will find a way to keep their finger in every pie. And one of the ways they are doing that is to prepare droves of cadres to march through the Metaverse spreading their Gospel, absolutely loyal to them through a combination of gaining reputational enhancement points and getting special visibility that helps sell their products or projects.

In the old days, the Mentors would stand in the welcome areas slinging folders of their landmarks or their friends' store landmarks and Shanghai newbies into their commerce circles. How do I know this? Well, it was done to me; on many test alts; and I would find even tenants who would become Mentors somehow expecting that "the way the world works" is that they should rope unsuspecting newbies into my rentals just because that's what they were familiar with.

I've had numerous encounters with people wearing the Mentor tag in SL behaving badly and have written extensively -- I once posted a thread on the old forums called Live Help or Dead Disservice? about a really aggressive git that flew up to me with the LIVE HELP volunteer tag and told me my land for sale was "overpriced" and I was an evil land baron. A neighbour who bragged to me that he could summon Lindens at the snap of a finger to do his bidding sported the Mentor membership tag. A Mentor threatened me with griefing if I didn't do what her friend, a tenant wanted, which was against my rules. Etc. People who seek honorifics like this range from the stupid to the cunning; they are all about trying to get reputational points in a world that seems to require them for business or non-profit work.

At one point, Robin and Jeska were trying to reform the system and asked for input on their mission statement. I gave it. Now I see they have something 100 times more dreadful called the Tao of Volunteers.

It's a Wonderful Life

The term the kids all use about making a profit in Second Life -- is "making bank". It helps them swagger around and feel like something bigger than the losers in their moms' basements. A reporter contacts me all indignant about "the Ponzi schemes in Second Life" and can't get past his own emotionality and has no feel for this. The math spells fraud. Therefore, the math is right, and there are no extenuating circumstances. I maintain that they are more like corrupt football pools or something -- and not always deliberately corrupt, something more stupid and inane.

I have seen that some of the same people involved in creating these banks and exchanges are prone to such shady activity in real-life sometimes out of desperation, or gullibility, or naivity. They are non-wealthy, minorities, disabled, women. After all, if you were a highly-paid programmer or prominent journalist with a secure career, why would you bother to play penny ante stocks in SL with the fees, the risks, the long payout?

But if you aren't wealthy and important in RL, there's nothing that makes you feel like a million bucks than to call yourself a "CEO" and then "IPO" your little SL company, even if all you do in RL is work at a call center in Atlanta, and all you do in Second Life is put together a box of textures swiped from the Internet to sell. SL is an enormously powerful tool for the imagination -- with real play money! So it's a great temptation to play store and bank -- and people do. And there's also the objective situation of this pioneering Wild-West like world -- it needs capital. The Lindens pulled all their subsidies in 2005 pretty much, so today, it's this helter-skelter network of exchanges and loan companies and banks and whatnot that launch businesses.
They made the world that the Lindens didn't want to bother to make.

Ted Castranova claimed that my question at VW07 about banks on every corner like Russia could be a disservice to Russia, but anybody who remembers Russia in the 1990s and even today knows exactly the story -- banks on every corner. It's a natural phenomenon for a country in transition -- which is what SL is. It is transiting from the game-gods feudal MMORPG medieval system to something like state communism, and then perhaps some day, to parliamentary democracy with a mixed economy!

8 Things You'll Never Know About Me

I wondered what all these links to my blog coming in from something called "Fashion Victim" were all about -- and it turns out someone tagged me with that "8 Things You Don't Know About Me" meme.

I remember there was one of these more than a year ago on Clickable Culture, when the meme was not so shop-worn, and I was tagged by Tony Walsh and answered.

I don't like this game; I hate memes; I hate social media experiments that are manipulative and stupid, so I won't play.

So those 8 things...16 things...444 things you don't know about me will remain unknown, unless you are a real friend and over time, you find out this things naturally in the course of things.