Second Thoughts

The REAL FIC

The Herald and other silly sites are still arguing endlessly who is the FIC, what is the FIC, claiming we are in a post-FIC post-Prok era, lol -- but let me tell you who the REAL FIC are!

Not the original oldbies and rulers of the roost on the old, now-closed official forums -- their glory is faded, though they occasionally still lash out.

Not the SIC, as I once called them, the more sophisticated, more proficient FIC with real-life credentials the original FIC only emulated in virtuality -- these metaversal myrmidons are getting eclipsed now, too.

Not real-life FIC, like the big corporations and movers and shakers who use Second Life sporadically, and idly wonder to themselves if they should buy Linden Lab.

No, the new, the real, the most powerful FIC are those whom the Lindens are chosing to partner with in the creation and management of Second Life internationally. Forums-FIC, roll over, you are dead. Neo-FIC-SIC, you wannabees, meh, you use Second Life, but Linden Lab uses *you* -- and never forget it! You are errand boys, sent to collect the bill!

No, the real FIC -- the FIC that pwns all other FICs! -- are these companies on the Second Life Grid, before which everything else we've ever talked about pales -- like the infamous last post I made before being banned from the official forums about monopolistic FIC companies.

No, the real FIC today is something completely different than what I could have ever imagined in 2005! Let's take a look at the one LL is using for its entree into China, for example.

Failure to Prosecute MySpace Suicide Case Incites Griefing

Anyone from Second Life who read the tragic story of the suicide of Megan Meier would instantly recognize the type of people who created a fake online account to harass and goad her and eventually drive the emotionally-distressed teen to suicide. They are like the typical bottom-dwellers of every Second Life forum, anonymous even in using nicknames -- not their already-anonymous Second Life names. They are the people who IM you in Second Life and say awful things to you, and harass and goad you in a million ways made more vivid by the extensive creative capacity of Second Life.

Yet -- in a boon for those concerned about Second Life freedom of creativity -- a prosecutor in the locality of this case could not find a legal hook to prosecute people who harassed this teen. A mother and minors who knew the deceased and were in some kind of quarrel with her were involved.

I'm sure I was like other Second Lifers who instantly recognized the type -- and who wondered whether the adult who bore responsibility for this account in fact was more involved than just with her name. An 18-year-old associated with the account is now apparently receiving psychiatric treatment, it's not certain if it is related to this case. All of the people associated with the account deny any guilt or even wrongdoing.

So the failure even to gain a perfunctory apology, let alone some kind of community accountability, much less any legal remedy all objectively conspires to give griefers (an online gamers' term to mean people who maliciously harass others to enjoy their pain) a pass. It's a very bad time for those who suffer this kind of harassment themselves. I know, I'm one of them. The kind of vituperative and unhinged attacks that are routinely launched against me due to both my outspoken positions on SL and my decision to have an avatar of the opposite gender mean and unending stream of abuse from a minority of people determined not only to ruin my particular Second Life, but disrupt it for all who would like it as a creative and tolerant space.

Benjamin Duranske At it Again!

Benjamin Duranske, shown here with caliphate promoter.

Oh dear, Benjamin Duranske is at it again! Recently Eric Reuters contacted me and angrily opined that I was being "unfair" to Benjamin and that my attacks were not justified. He just doesn't get it; he doesn't realize what is grimly at stake here: some people in the professions, with very sectarian agendas, trying to mute, ban, smear, and eradicate their critics on the Internet because they want to proceed with their very aggressive and ambitious agenda in building the Metaverse. They imagine that the dubious tools that make social media so accessible to the individual can also be used by the inflated ego to crush critics through defamatory posts. It's a real problem throughout Wikipedia and many other collectivized sites masquerading as "accessible" and "democratic".

Benjamin Duranske is a thin-skinned, insecure, yet bullying personality. The mildest of criticism sends him into a rage. He unleashed completely outrageous prosecutorial zeal on the Ginko's matter, deciding, without any discovery, evidence, real-life or Linden procedure, that these people who ran a bank in SL were guilty. They might well be guilty, but not in the simplistic way in which Duranske imagines in order to increase his popularity in a pathetic populistic bid.

Here's what someone like Eric doesn't understand, because he likely unconsciously tries to follow the old prescription of "the professions and their credentials" and feels at root that they should be insulated from public criticism in a status quo that used to work for even the profession of journalism, too. Social media and Web 2.0 disrupts more than old media, however; it makes it possible to disrupt the status quo that the old media supported, too. The other night a real-life, practicing attorney quietly contacted me. This person commented to me that quite independently, on their own, they had come to similar conclusions about Duranske and some of the others hijacking the SL Bar Association like Jessica Holyoke, another anonymous persona who claims to be a female law student and refuses to provide any RL credentials (that is her right, but given the outrageous positions she's advocated, it *is* troublesome in a bar association seeking RL credibility).

This person pointed to me to several other law or lawyers' groups that had quietly begun in Second Life that...surprise, surprise...had gotten started and flourished without Benjamin Duranske, Ashcroft Burnham, or Jessica Holyoke, controversial and unpleasant and controlling personas every one of them. Good! I'm confident this healthy process will continue, and that's a positive development -- ultimately, no one little grouplet of lawyers can set up something that is a Metaversal Bar Association with themselves in charge and hogging the act of credentialing and silencing the free press -- people will just push back. They surely don't need me to do that. Meanwhile, I'm the target of the smear campaign by this bunch of sectarians, so I'll have to publish some rebuttals.

Recently Duranske has updated his stock page to denounce me, which he pastes everywhere (rolls eyes).

The Two Cultures

The setting for the Sheep's CSI:NY crime lab.

Remember the Two Cultures of C.P. Snow? Sorry to give you a Wikipedia on that -- it comes up first all the time! You can try other versions of the story here (which unconsciously refers to Lysenkosim), or here. There's even a kind of subterfuge afoot to introduce a Third Culture which is merely the Second Culture (science) trying to prevail again.

Imagine, Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalogue guy, writing this sort of patent nonsense, a glass of Kool-Aid in hand:

"Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly."

Ugh.

Here's an interesting debate on the JIRA which is in a way about the Two Cultures, except I would submit that the extremist sect within the open-source movement isn't really the original Second Culture as understood some years ago, and would likely be repudiated possibly even by Snow. And BTW, even Wikipedia's article on Open Source lets you know that it is a school of thought -- nay, even a sect, or group of sects, or collection of sect-tending thinkers. You would never know from hanging around Second Life that even within the movement, Open Source has intense critics, like here or here or my favourite, Bezroukov, bog ego sokhrani, here.