Second Thoughts

Socialist Media or Media for the Public?

I've been amazed to see how CCP, the maker of Eve Online, simply, without a lot of angst or fuss or forums wars (as far as we can tell, anyway), organized a player governance council.

Imagine, this world that only has to deal with imaginary starships and skill-grinding and mining minerals (the spacebux aren't supposed to be sold outside the game, but of course are) can have a governance council of players brought to company headquarters to discuss features and help make decisions.

But we in our "not-a-game" of Second Life, where the spacebux can be legally cashed out for real dollars in far greater quantities than are made from blackmarket activity by Eve Online, don't get to have any presence in the Linden councils except through horribly stratified and controled FIC institutions like SL Views and AWG which are appointed, not elected by the resident base.

Live Journal, a blogging service that was purchased from the owners of this blog site I'm typing on by a Russian company SUP, also created a council of bloggers and experts -- and rapidly became involved in deep politics of social media you find all over these days (leftwing idealists like Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig want to retain free accounts -- which make for more furies if not for more furries -- and the Russian company, after first promising to keep the community as is, moved to eliminate the freeloaders and force people to pay for subscriptions. Good!

Then I read how Fred Wilson, a VC backer of Twitter, is getting "tired". Like Susan Wu, another VC backing Twitter, he's starting to get bored and restless -- and conscience-stricken -- about the inanity and frivoloty of Twitter, that is so far, despite signing up "the masses" and their enlightened avante garde like Robert Scoble or Steve Gillmor, have failed to save the world or make it a better place (the affluent California student day-tripping in Egypt got sprung from jail after twittering, but not his hapless local translator).

Well, that prompted me to write quite the letter to Fred Wilson on his blog, which I will cross post here:

A-Voiding The Issue

A glut of new mainland continents, islands at slashed prices, and now $250 perfect cybersex units surrounded by the void...

Void sims, or "open space sims" as the Lindens have taken to calling them lately to sound like they are competing with Opensimulator and Central Grid and other opensource projects, could well kill off the internal Second Life land market, and send the inworld economy spiralling further. The Lindens and the e-lite creators and Metaversati, the scripters and code kiddies and outworld bizes and Metanomics chaterati won't care. But everyone else should care because unless you have many diverse levels of easy entry to the market and easy entry to creative expression from amateur to professional, you don't have a sustainable world. You can visit RenFaire; you cannot live there.

All of this is coming to a head now due to the Void Sims -- which are having consequences that it is hard to tell were intended or not, given the black box that is Linden Lab.

For a long time, void sims were merely totally empty patches of water parked between sims to bridge continents and hold a view -- hence the term "void". In the newer continents in recent years, the Lindens stop putting in void sims -- why not sell a server and get tier off it instead of creating yet another free Governor Linden Protected Land sim?

It was Adam Zaius who figured out that he could put these things in and make really nice landscaped areas for his continents, double prim up some sims nearby, and then put these voids in front to serve as the waterfront or park. We noticed that he started putting down batches of them on the map, and it was Anshe who began to ask, hey, what's up? Does he have an inside special deal? He did in fact, and she demanded that deal from the Lindens, too -- and soon, the Lindens enabled anyone to be able to buy batches of void sims in packs of 4 if you owned islands -- this was about 2 years ago. They only had 1875 prims on them, and didn't work very well, not bearing up under script loading -- they were class 4s.

Then, class 5s were put out, Havoc 4 began to be tested, and it wasn't long before Anshe was the first to offer them with double the former prims at no extra cost -- 3750 -- because the Lindens suddenly increased the number and didn't charge more. Odd, that.

Then, the Lindens crashed land prices in April, after suffering a terrible month of less sales and hours, offering mainland sims for $750 opening bid (formerly $1250, and before that $1000); and offering islands for only $1000 (they had been $1695, and $1250 before that -- follow that pricing history to see that first the Lindens drained land barons of as much cash as they could muster, especially Anshe, then crashed the prices so that their land wasn't worth what it was).

Then they added the final blow: they flooded void sims into the market, now making them available for only $250 -- and now, you no longer had to have them in packs of 4, you could just buy one, as long as you were owner of an existing island. Enterprising land barons quickly bought huge bunches off their one island (you don't even have to place them right next to your island, but can put them anywhere), and flipped them, reselling them for complete estate controls to very eager buyers who didn't worry about the risk -- still not as great as people imagine -- that their island-owning friend would seize the land back, which of course he could at any moment.

Why eager? Because void sims are the perfect cybersex unit (uh, yes, I realize they are the perfect uh business prototyping tool as well). One prominent land baron calls them "humper bunkers". They have privacy -- wide open space all around. They can be totally surrounded with water, so that the rest of the land baron's continent isn't in your face, especially annoying if he allows security orbs or ban lines that bounce you around. The void sims now can handily compete with an 8192 or 16384 parcel, the old preferred cybersex unit (1875 and 3750 prims, respectively). That previous mid-to-high market for mainland and island rentals ensured land barons at least $16 profit, because you as a bulk owner paid tier to Linden of only about $25 on them, whereas Linden itself charged $40 to the individual user, so you could charge that much rent -- if not more -- in fact, you *could* charge more because people were saving on the monthly premium fee by renting from you.

At less than a cable bill or DSL line bill, the old $40 cybersex unit was very popular, but with huge increases in the price of prefabs, skins and even whores, the market could only welcome the fall of the cybersex unit price to $25 to enable content purchases.

The FIC 2.5

Well, it's that time of year again boys and girls -- the SL Birthday Season! -- when we have that very, very special announcement for you that I know you have all been waiting for so anxiously!

And yes, I've gotten an early leak of it and of course I'm *hastening* to share it all with you! I hate to rain on Mitch Kapor's parade, but it's better you hear it from me first!

And yes, it's the long-awaited update to the FIC 2.0 list of 2007, the FIC 2.5 list!

Ok, ok, I'm hearing some sighs of disappointment in the room that we're not at FIC 3.0 yet. Yes, I said, last year, "Dare to Dream!". And yes, after another fun-filled, but, uh, challenging year, we still have some bugs and some bugs-disguised-as-features that we haven't worked out yet. But I think you'll agree that we're better off than we were before. We're that much better off than we were last year, or last week, or a minute ago, when we were younger, stupider, laggier...and less closer to our goals of a Better World That Pays Us Online.

What is this FIC of which you speak, you may ask? For those of you playing the offline home version of SL, I realize the FIC, or the Bosses, may not matter to you deeply, or you may wonder why this term is always used, or find it "an interesting myth" as Robin Linden once called it. Google it. And read on...

FIC -- which rhymes with "bike" and not "Bic" -- stands for Feted Inner Core, which you can think of as "the kool kids" or "the jocks and cheerleaders" or "the inside dopes" or however you called it in your high-school or your office, where perhaps you rage and gnash your teeth at the fact that people who seem to do less work or have less talent or even less fabulousness than you still get ahead through connections, favour-banks, or sleeping their way to the top. Or even if they DO deserve their spot in the Hall of Fame, because they DO work their asses off and DO have talent, you feel, but wait...what about the people with no talent? What about justice? What about fairness? I work hard, too!

The wonderfully magic software of Second Life has shown itself to have astounding transformative powers. It can take a shy store clerk with barely a high-school education in Colorado and make him a famous virtual building contractor with tens of thousands of real-life dollars flowing in the door. But, you say, I'm a shy store clerk with barely a high-school degree in Colorado *too* and it's just not coming together for me! Well, your world/your imagination. With my handy lists here, you'll know to whom you have to suck up, or "fete", and whom you have to avoid as last year's spent nuclear rod.

"So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary World"

Acts of kindness and consideration are so rare in Second Life, nastiness so often abounds, that when it occurs, you have to really give a shout out. And this act of kindness is all the more highlighted by the act of malice which it sought to undo. The hero of the hour is Clubside Granville -- and not for the first time!

Some of you may remember how FlipperPA Peregrine, a long-time nemesis, became a nemesis on the premises by buying or getting somehow a plot of land on Ravenglass, my flagship mainland sim for which my rentals company was named. I'm not quite sure how this happened, but some old FICy friend of his who didn't like me or bore a grudge gave it to him, or he got ahold of it somehow -- Siggy Romulus was also involved in getting a 16 m nuisance plot (that is now owned by Weedy Herbst for her "private business" involving scraping data from other people's sims -- not sure what that's all about). These parcels were in the back of the sim towards the road, near the end of the public commons.

Like the Refrigerator of Ravenglass, another nasty piece of work put in to annoy me deliberately by Scout Detritus -- who, by the way, is now visible in the Woodbury group (no surprise there!) or even the punk store that became able to blight the largely residential waterfront (barring the Gorean medicine store refrigerator) -- again, because some old FIC type with a grudge sold or gave it to annoy -- this FlipperPAY parcel was deliberately provocative. I gritted my teeth and waited to see what they'd put up, as there were frequent threats on the forums that a washing machine was needed to match the refrigerator, etc.

I never really understood what content Flipper actually *makes* in SL, do you? I know he had this sim Indigo near the GNUbie store; he used to distributed Freeview, that awful cumbersome TV that drives everyone nuts (and still does!), and maybe he had widgets or animations, not sure. Of course his lovely wife, the lovely Jenny-fur, sells bikinis or thongs or silks or something -- at one point we learned why her store comes up so high in SL Boutique search -- Sheep were instructed to code the search so it worked that way lol -- did it work that way on the Sheep viewer, too?

At any rate, Flipper sort of knocked together a boxy, conventionally textured store, left it half-finished, and never put anything for sale in it. He pretended he had come to the area because it was a nice sales area. Of course, since it's largely residential and isn't a commercial sim with high traffic, that was totally fake, although a bit farther down the road, there is a nice stretch over 3 sims of stores along the lane that do pretty well and make a nice and pleasant shopping area precisely because it has no bots or camping or junk -- I don't allow it.

At any rate, finally FlipperPAY puts this land for sale at some outrageous price, during the height of all the land extortion -- it was like $300,000 if I recall correctly, or perhaps it was dropped at one point to $100,000, but that would of course be a ridiculous price even under the old land market for a 1536, whch at most, in an established sim with a "name" would likely be about $38,400 or $25/m -- so it was some 3 times what it really could sell for -- deliberately, so as to annoy. I recall at one point doing the math to see the US dollar price, and it would have cost me like $350 or $400 US to blow FlipperPAY out of the sim and remove the threat of Cytherea or worse buying the parcel, or simply getting it in a swap -- but there was no way I felt I had to enrich FlipperPA for that amount.

The Software Autocracy

I wrote about the Software Democracy -- which was a reference to a coder in SL claiming software engineering *isn't* a democracy, and my efforts (and others) to make it a democracy by resisting those sorts of controlling types. Is this a waste of time because "it's a game" or "not real" and "virtual"? Hardly. The setting of Second Life and its JIRA, the tools to report bugs and propose features, is a microcosm of what we all have to worry about in real life in the future, and that's why I bother.

I could be five years too early with this, or five months, but I feel strongly about trying to warn about these things. There are too many influential game gods like Richard Bartle or Edward Castronova who think real life should become like games. There are too many SL founders like Philip Rosedale or Cory Ondreija who believe that code is law and there should be no "no" vote. And there are now too many social-media gurus like Clay Shirky or Lawrence Lessig or Beth Noveck who think that "Here Comes Everybody" trumps individual expression, the group is all and we can all hive-mind our way to glory and ride the glory train to e-lectoral satori.

And they merely reflect the mindset of those they find around them in Silicon Valley, whether the literal geographic location or the global worldview, and with the money and power and influence of these people, and with them glomming on to the Obama campaign (globaming?), I really think you *do* have to worry. I think it's as bad a situation as any in history, and of course whenever you look back at the times when tyrants came to power, people always say later, but why didn't you strangle them in their cradle? Why didn't anybody do anything?

What are the features of this new-media world we have to worry about?

Cutting Through Obfuscation about Obfuscation

The comments on the post below about Obfuscation have gotten so long and detailed and varied that I'm starting a new post to continue this conversation. I'm glad this debate has finally gone beyond the silly round of Linden office hours, where Lindens and their pet devs, most of whom pay little or nothing for the costs of SL, harangue designers or business people with cynical, harsh abandon to the effect that "nothing" can be done about IP protection in SL.

First, the comments by Jimmy Dell, obviously a grown-up from a real-life company, are a hugely appreciated intervention, and I'm going to reprint them here in full (they were successive responses to other responses) in order to focus people's minds through the back-chat:

"Prok, thank you for taking up this issue. For the record, I've been programming for over 20 years and I often read SLDev and find myself either laughing or tearing my hair out when I see people I know have at most a couple of years of work experience attempting to dictate their views. This mathematical proof simply talks about the fact that any protection is defeatable, but what these kids fail to realize is that, in the real world, less than perfect protection still reduces theft. The reason why this is even a cause of debate in this situation, yet we don't complain that all locks are pickable and shouldn't exist, and all cars are hotwireable and shouldn't have keys, and so on is that there is an underlying philosophical and not technical motivation. Working engineers in the real world look at the business requirements, point out that nothing they do will stop a determined thief, implement a simple obfuscation that prevents the file from being copied by a casual user, and move on. Anything other than that is not engineering, it's proselytizing."

"Every project I've ever worked on for an employer, and frankly even the well-organized open source projects, have had a well-defined set of business requirements. Prok is just as qualified, if not more so, than any person outside of LL to discuss business requirements. Some of the people in these comments are resorting to technical slight-of-hand, where they're in-effect saying that because any lock can be picked, that no locks should be used. Because Prok isn't trained in software project management, he may have fallen for this neophyte insubordinate engineering trick, but it's still B.S., and in most companies, trying to sandbag the software requirement definition process with false technical arguments will quickly get you shown the door. This isn't about mathematical proofs, it's about whether textures should be easy or difficult for the non-technical user to copy."

"I probably did read too much into John's position, which I think is closer to mine than I gave him credit for. Frankly, I usually avoid these types of arguments, because they get very emotionally charged. I jumped in this time because Prok was making a very good point, but she's the first to admit she's not a technologist, and I was seeing this was somehow being turned into one of those "you can argue with me, but you can't argue with the laws of physics" type arguments, when the original point that was being made by Prok, and incidentally, many other respected developers on the SLDev list, that cache obfuscation was a desirable feature at best and fairly harmless at worse and which shouldn't have an adverse effect on performance. I don't disagree with Johns other points, in particular his assessment that LL is the only party that could do a serious job at a better solution, my motivation in getting involved in this was simply to prevent some of the people who posted before you from misusing technical arguments to promote a non-technical agenda. It's all too easy for technologists to be dismissive of requests from the end-user, but in most situations I've been involved in, there's someone involved who's supposed to be the user's advocate in the planning process, usually a product manager of some sort. For reasons that I don't fully understand, that's been very lacking in the SLDev community and the LL representatives involved in it. If someone from LL were to meet with the business users of SL, which should include content creators and land-owners, for the purpose of generating a real requirements document for SL, as opposed to the current office-hours process which doesn't do that, I think it would go a log way towards getting their buy-in."

Lordfly Loses His Stripes

Remember how I blogged very skeptically about Clever Zebra back in January? Horse in Striped Pajamas. I had valid personal reasons, but I wasn't the only one in the Slogosphere to question whether this model, that seemed to involve shaking down everybody's free content and business cards and reselling it for a profit to outside companies was viable, let alone, well, ethical.

Now here comes Lordfly, to tell us late at night on Sluniverse.com that he has left the Clever Zebra, and apologizes to everybody for making them work for free and give content for free, given that, well...they didn't get anything out of it, really. The theory is that you get, in addition to a credit line on the object, which happens automatically with builds, objects, scripts, and textures in SL (although not with skins), a sort of job lead. Or, just "networking" which is always supposed to be beneficial.

My estimation for Lordfly can only go up for a) his having left CZ and b) truthfully describing what happened. I think most people won't hold it against him. But there's a much larger message here, that I'm not sure Lordfly concedes, and that is the non-viability of this freetard business model.

The formula worked like this: first, Nick Wilson (57 Miles) came to SL and started a website, Metaversed.com, which tried to draw more serious business and technical discussions away from all the hysterical blogs and forums. He then started an inworld Things to Do group and began having events with well-known speakers on technical and business issues. He then invited me to do a weekly podcast and write on the blog, and Caleb Booker to write on the blog and do podcasts, and that drove traffic to the site. He then, having now a ready made bundle of content, activities, and contacts, offered it up for sponsors. He got various sponsors like Cisco, Kelly Services, Otherland, etc.

Next, he systematically dumped my podcast, due to a complaint about criticism of ESC and pressure from sponsors on the pretext of an inworld incident; had neither of those things happened it would have closed anyway as Nick's plan then was to dump the news business and website and podcasting, and move to a consulting business. For a time, he was the host of the website and meetings of Metanomics, but then they broke away. Nick made Clever Zebra on the model that I call "your information wants to be free, mine is available for a consulting fee, however."

Happy 5th Birthday, Second Life!

Philip at the opening ceremony of SL's two-week birthday celebration.

"What we're doing here together is outside the bounds of possibility. There is more going on, and there's more meaning, and more of the future, and more imagination here than I think there has ever been in many ways anywhere on earth". Philip Linden, SLB5

And you know, he's not kidding, and he's right. Can you think of any other project in human history that concentrated as much creativity and imagination in one place, and involved so many people? Oh, I know, celebrating anything worldy goes against Khamon's scorn of the W'ua'rld but, hey, it's pretty nifty, you know? A million people, doing something. Most of them, not even thinking about the whole picture or even able to describe a fraction of what's going on now, but still, all pulling together, somehow. Not yet consciously, perhaps some day to be so.

Like the real-life earth, Second Life now is so big and so complex that you cannot describe it or even see it in one go -- perhaps some day teams of people, or more likely bots -- will have some system to monitor facts about it that may escape perception now -- but they would have to be spimes...and you know my feeling about spimes!

Philip once talked somewhere about how people would not come on Second Life, and spend time there, and put in effort, unless it was "intellectually compelling". Those were the words he used, and he meant not just as an engineering or coding project, as I saw it, but all its aspects. And I think I will pay SL the greatest compliment I could today, on its 5th birthday -- it's still intellectually compelling. Perhaps some aspects of it have become less intellectually compelling, even threadbare and utterly predictable (cache politics), but new horizons open up as others close.

Cory Still Drinking the Kool-Aid

See more from Dan Goodsell's Kool-Aid collection.

Another wild interview with Cory Linden Ondrejka, who is now at EMI, with all kinds of wild claims. Honestly, do they go to special secret boot camps over the summer to come up with these wacky ideological precepts?!

The headline about a conference in Orlando says breathlessly that Cory is claiming Virtual Worlds bring "real world results". Ok, what are they? Um, innovation and education. Learning! Yes, and where is that again? I posed those hard questions to Mixed Realities, and to his credit, they continue to be asked.

Now comes one of those fake Internet memes, or memes handed out at these weekend geek boot camps -- I don't know WHERE they come from!

"Second Life was alternatively viewed as either expanding "Internet addiction" or as a savior of the social fabric in its ability to connect people. Both expectations went to far, Ondrejka maintained.

"The situation is similar to when the telephone was invented, back when there were all sorts of rumors that the telephone would destroy society," said Ondrejka."

I don't know that that's even a fair statement about Second Life, frankly. The mass coverage in mainstream mass media and big companies and such became interested in SL because they saw it as a money-maker, not because they were concerned about the social fabric. They thought lots of people would flock there from dying dead-tree media and one-way dead electron media, and that would be a new venue for their product demos, advertising, and training. They were only partly right about this -- and too early.

As for addiction, never was more proof found of the inability of the Internet to become addictive -- even when delivered in 3-D streaming packages with immersive delights including everything ranging from cybersex to seeing the inside of waves or space with NASA or dancing on Moscow's Red Square. People in fact did NOT get addicted, but left in alarming droves. Out of 13 million sign-ups, only a million remain to log on -- and not even, their numbers are dwindling. 350,000 spent more than a Linden dollar last month. If ever there was proof of NON addiction, that would be it!

And...I'd love to see some citations about this supposed history of the telephone in which there were these supposed "all sorts of rumours" about the telephone destroying society. Huh? I mean, that ranks right up there with Clay Shirkey's facile and silly and Twittery meme that the only way to get people to adapt in the industrial society was to roll carts with gin to them constantly in the streets.

Obfuscation

SLDEV churns on over the texture-copying issue, and I've replied to Soft's attempt to shut people up (I notice she didn't do any smackdown of those people all speaking so crudely to me, but that's part for the course) and overall tried to frame the issues (see below).

Crucial to the entire discussion is the concept of "obfuscation". The Lindens have a deep-seated, visceral, overwhelming, autonomous-nervous system, animal loathing of obfuscation. I've found this again and again over the years in dealing with Brent Linden and others -- they simply accept the Kool-Aid Koncept that obfuscation can't work, and they will never try. Some of their code-kiddie friends are also deeply, deeply brainwashed on this subject, and simply refuse to ever think otherwise. For these often young male coders, the idea of trying to fight their peers -- other code kiddies who hack -- almost seems like a kind of cannibalism. They can't bear the thought of trying. They think it's "impossible". They see the holes -- and they don't want to bother to plug them because they think there will 100 crack pages coming tomorrow every time you do the slightest thing even to dampen the problem of texture theft. This sentiment is so emotional and visceral, they refuse ever to question it because it's a kind of question of male pride and honour and machismo for them -- I've seen it over, and over again. And I'm tired of it, because as a non-specialist, I can readily tell that ANYTHING generating THAT MUCH emotionality, machismo, and hatred around it *is not scientific, and can't defend itself on the merits* but is ideological.

Get a little away from this Magic Circle however, and talk to not-so-young more experienced coders, whose only job hasn't been at LL, which often seems to function by powerful tribalist incantation rather than scientific theory, and you see it differently. Hear what other people -- programmers in big or small IT companies, people with more "real life" so to speak have to say. And they don't have the religious problem with obfuscation that these Lindens and their hangers-on do. They will write matter-of-factly that you could try it this way, or that way. They don't mind *trying*. They think it is *worth trying*. They do, because *their own companies do that with their own software*. Duh.

One of the reasons that these young males around the SL project are so deeply vested in anti-obfuscation is that it gives them a chance to be enormously superior, and often shore up sagging self-esteem and insecurity about other aspects of their lives (they're geeks) and deliver brutal, withering, social Darwinistic smackdowns to other people. Coding, after all, like a lot of other such human activity, is basically just a kind of signalling of male dominance on territory. They love to be able to chime in on a list or forums and tell with smug, superior, all-knowing malicious glee that you "can't" obfuscate. That users are "misled" into thinking permissions "do anything," that it's foolish to try. They LOOOVEEEE delivering these smackdowns, and any actual scientific and thoughtful consideration of obfuscation would deprive them of that glee they have experienced time and again putting creators in their place on this score, and that would be to remove the supply for their addiction, and they would go ballistic.

Once you are open-minded enough to discuss obfuscation, without all the hysteria, religiosity, testosterone interference, and maximalism that always comes from that hysterical "all or nothing" geek-religious belief system, you are free to then push it further. What is the cost in having to do this constantly? Does it affect performance? If so, how can we compensate? Would it be worth it anyway? It's nearly impossible to have THIS kind of adult, measured, thoughtful philosophical discussion on SLDEV or any venue precisely because of these tiny animal minds that shut like a trap if you try to put FIRST the goal of protecting IP, THEN finding the technology that serves that goal, instead of visa versa.

In short, what I feel is obfuscated here more than anything is the ideological, zealous approach to the topic that these supposed technicians, who should be free of politics, are bringing to the task. One could believe their technical claims if we didn't know them already to be ardent fans of copyleftism and even a Stallmanite view that everything should be made free in a grand hippie commune like Burning Life. Even Wikipedia's article on the subject doesn't contain some long-winded homily about how it is "impossible" and "always cracked". And I see Ann O'Toole attempted a JIRA on the script obfuscation issue, and got a Linden answer that to me looks to suffer from the same religious problem -- a narrow-minded focus on "what will break right now" and not a larger, more open-minded look at what such architecture might do in the future.