Second Thoughts

The New Feudalism: More Soggy Pancakes

Soggy Pancakes...the New Feudalism of OpenSpace Sims.

I'm getting a good laugh out of the hypocritical and nasty post Lillie Yifu has put up with the usual transhumanist malicious triumphalism (and BDSM manipulations thrown in to boot) claiming that the "feudal era of big land barons in SL has passed" and now that Lillie *herself* is a land baron flogging 90 OS sims, land-baroning is now no longer called baroning, because it isn't about anything so filthy and low-class as *renting* but it's now called "managing a revenue stream". Gotta love that burst of creative double think, eh lol? Mr. Yifu has got on the humper bunker band wagon and is renting out the low-prim sims, so suddenly, it's all about "content" and "managing revenue streams" is it, now. ROFLMAO!

Er, if somebody else, not to Yifu's liking, does anything so low-life as to rent or sell land, why, they are exploiting the People. But if she hawks the things, it's only about "content" or "management" -- especially because she instantly kicks off anyone who doesn't pay up tier on time and replaces them with someone who will, imaging that all her other land barons (because that is indeed what she is) merely raise prices to keep finding people willing to pay more. I guess she hasn't gotten out to look at the land market these days LOL.

Once again, she's banging away at the idea that people who bar megaprims are grubbing for cash out of forcing high prim use -- again, I have to wonder what possible landlord experience she could have, given that the problem with tenants is never that they don't use up enough prims, and you have to find ways to trick them into using more prims so you can charge them more lol. The problem is ALWAYs that they overprim, and you have to get them to stick to their allotments. Megaprims often grief others, and they really do slow down mainland sims. I've been casual about permitting them on the islands, because people tend to use them in skyboxes up out of the view. On the mainland, they often seem to get deployed as giant ugly walls and they have to be curbed. They're used a lot for griefing, too, put down over and entire sim and rooted somewhere you can't return from.

On the Revolutionary Train

Clay Shirky reminds me for all the world of Strelnikov, the stern revolutionary in Dr. Zhivago -- remember? Riding the train? It's not just the determined jaw or the glinting steel-rim glasses or the revolutionary stare -- it's the severe, cock-sure demeanor, sardonic sneer, and the sheer, well, Bolshevism of the ideas.

I'm still waiting for Here Comes Everybody to come down in price, but it's mentioned all over in tones ranging from giddy interest to worshipful awe. I know what that's like -- when I first heard of the concept of Clay Shirky in "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy," I was so interested I immediately asked the person to give a talk. I thought there was some insight in it. But it was very duplicitous. It took me about 3 readings and some debate before I began to see the flaw. See, at first, you're just so excited that someone is theorizing and conceptualizing about this thing called social media or new media or virtuality that you are in, that you don't realize some of the subtle awfulness in it.

Somebody enthusing about this videotaped lecture, which contains the prototypes of the ideas in Here Comes Everybody was in just that place, thrilled, but not quite really going deeper. Yeah, groups are cool, and the Internet is groovy. The problem with Shirky is rather like some Sovietologists I recall, who were so enthusiastic about studying and understanding Stalin or the Kremlin that they began to embrace what they studied and became impudently triumphalist about explaining or even predicting this or that feature of totalitarianism and forgot to realize that...it wasn't lovable. It should be stopped. It had to be debated.

Let me preface my analysis by saying that in real life, as it is lived practically outside his theories, Prof. Shirky is given a paycheck. His university has a contract with him and pays him on a schedule, possibly direct-depositing into his bank, after calculating the necessary taxes. When he arrives to teach, the lights are on and the students are in place. When he leaves work and goes shopping, the food is already in the store, waiting, and fresh. When he throws out his garbage at night, someone arrives to take it away in the morning. Clay Shirky does not surf the Internet looking for someone to hire him each week, or, once having hired him, outsource endlessly the computing and delivering of his check. He doesn't have to worry about which truck driver will agree to haul the lettuce from California on time before it works -- it's not a job for Craigslist. The garbage man isn't answering to a call on Mechanical Turk on amazon.com, he's a union man, paid to show up on time and haul the cans away. Yes, in real life, we live enmeshed in a series of organizations that require management, hierarchy, tasking, oversight, and -- wait for it! -- *payment* to make happen (Clay Shirky's job as a professor is one of those institutionalized functions).

Yet in the world of theory, Shirky not only *describes* a shifting of media or power or attention outside of *some* institutions, or the changing and adapting of institutions himself, he actively *wishes for* their destruction. From his own well-fed and paid and interesting life on the conference circuit which supports his theory with institutional rigour of every sort, he snips and even lays mines under all the other institutions that he believes are "failing" or are "already collapsed" -- basically, he means media and politics. Because communications costs have "fallen through the floor" (well, sort of, for some people) now -- in theory -- all kinds of things can be organized on the Internet spontaneously rather than waiting for official institutions to respond. This is "better".

Shirky starts this particular swaggering video lecture at TED explaining, there years ago, why Flickr was the cat's pajamas, and the long tail of the crowd source was all that. See, if you need a picture from the Mermaid Parade, if you didn't know to go to Rik's blog, you could type in the search terms and there'd be -- at that time -- 3100 photos with the tag "mermaid parade" or X number tagged "Iraq". So, there you have it, all brought to your doorstep without cost or photographers' fees, many of them licensed under Creative Commons for the taking.

From this simple task, Shirky extrapolates a whole theory not only why institutions, or at least media, is floundering. Instead of needing a librarian to sift through material, or a class of professional photographers sent out on assignment, we now have the masses on Flickr, and it becomes only a matter of social-networking one's way to the best.

Shedding institutional costs -- not needing to move people, but being able to bring problems like "where's the mermaid picture" to them right at their desktop -- means that institutions are reshaped or even collapsed as unnecessary, so Shirky imagines. In his manic enthusiasm, he thinks that the cell phone has even now replaced "planning". That people no longer "make dates" or "put in calendars" but simply keep calling each other endlessly until they hook up. Of course, my dentist and the person interviewing me for a job have different concepts, but...in Shirky's Twittering world, it's always streaming...and lifestreaming is an excuse and a substitute for meaningful dialogue.

Net Bias

I must be the only person on the entire Internet who remains unpersuaded by the socialist "net neutrality" propaganda -- I guess because it just looks to me like more of the Big Lie. Here Comcast is going to take a beating over this issue, and I don't see why individual consumption gets to trump prudent company management. FCC rules about access to provide for "reasonable network management" and sure seems "reasonable" to me to cap the bit-torrent kiddies.

I don't see how you can translate torrent-kiddies hogging the bandwidth downloading WoW patches and illegal copies of movies into "censorship". It's not about censorship of free expression, unless free expression now means "free consumption".

Bandwidth is a scarce commodity. It's limited, and you have to pay for it -- or you should. If somebody's gigantic movie download or Bible download (they've enlisted the born-agains on this to try to make it seem "bi-partisan") prevents me from merely sending email or accessing a news site for work, then why don't they pay more? Or be capped? For that matter, if my Second Life log-in is too heavy for the cyber-waves, well, make me pay more -- shouldn't I? I don't get why @Comcastcares is constantly rolling over on this on Twitter, and bucking this sort of question to a vague bright future where there will be "more bandwidth". There isn't. So it needs to be rationed. A good place to start is with illegal music and movies? I'm not getting this.

If I complain about being asked to sustain people's illegal and huge download habits (and perhaps I'm one of them!), then I am told that corporations get "corporate welfare" by getting tax cuts and this is "equivalent". Um, no it's not. Corporations that provide some big public service might very well deserve tax cuts or "corporate welfare". Let's see the issues and hear the numbers. Meanwhile, what are torrent-tards providing for the public? Clogged Internet. I'm not getting this.

Please Tell the Truth, M Linden

I could have put in the headline, "Don't Lie, M Linden" -- but let's be charitable as not even 90 days have passed, correct?

But sorry, I can't let this one go by. You've made a very misleading -- false, actually -- statement in your two months' blog, as follows:

"Finally, and this is the most interesting part of our model, the number of “profitable” inworld businesses continue to grow. By “profitable”, I mean that they had positive monthly Linden dollar flow primarily from their content creation activities in Second Life."

But...they don't continue to grow. Read your own statistics page. They tell a very worrisome story.

Not Really the Last Lecture

I'm probably the only person on the entire Internet that isn't impressed with the "Last Lecture" and who frankly could only feel a sense of relief that Prof. Randy Pausch died this week before he could be canonized in the secular transhumanist religion as defying death even when he was supposed to die. Now he's dead -- and still dead.

The "Last Lecture," as every geek and YouTuber knows, is an affirmation of life, is a be-all-you-can-be, be-here-now sort of advertorial for the secular transhumanist ideology. The power of positive thinking, living your dream, overcoming death, etc. Dr. Pausch not only was a geek, he even had something to do with virtual worlds, as you can see from watching the video, and he had a list of all the things he wanted to do before he die, including acting in an episode of Star Trek, and he even managed to do that.

The lecture, which is really more of a stand-up comic show for secularism, is supposed to inspire you to do more, be more -- and root that entire experience in the capacity of man, and expanding it. There is nothing outside of you, no God, not even any higher power of any sort, just you, and your capacity, and your Nietschean will to expand that limited capacity by trying really hard and struggling to the maximum.

This secularist manifesto, watched by more than a million people, has a different prescription -- one that in fact starts with maximizing man as the center of the universe (where I don't in fact believe he resides) but ends by making little of man (as all such human-centered philosophies always inevitably do).

If You Can See It, You Can Steal It

The other night I went to the Metaverse Meetup, a group of people interested in Second Life and other Virtual World technology to hear Zha Ewry (David Levine of IBM) and Adam Frisby (Adam Zaius of Azure Islands and OpenSim). Of course they were there to talk about interoperability and the wonders of open source and of course I was there to ask questions from the audience. And yes, approximately once every 47 seconds, we were told earnestly, flatly, aggressively, confidently, and exclusively that if you can see it, you can steal it, so don't bother trying to lock the barn door.

But first, a mis-en-scene. We're in one of those old Manhattan low-rises in the E. 20s converted into an office building, the air conditioning is waning, there's nothing to drink except the D'Agostino's overpriced Odwalla you thought to bring yourself (and most didn't), and here's 4 geeks, completely immersed in their laptops doing something for about 40 minutes while the rest of us sit there, uncomfortably unsticking one buttock and then the other from the plastic office chairs, and staring at our seat mates -- who don't look like any avatars we know. The ever-ebullient Eric Reuters is there up in front, and the nauseating Joshua Meadows (yes, I washed my hands after).

The lovely Zha Ewry made a fabulous entrance with a laptop, with a dress so diaphanous you could barely see it, legs up to here, and heels dyed to match equally invisible (the rumply jeans and polo projected were just something malfunctioning with my wearable). Adam was looking his usual cross between Dennis the Menace and Wally Cleaver, if you know what I mean. We were here to witness the dawn of the Metaverse -- or something. Of course Annie Ok was there, looking even more slender and vivacious than the last time she expertly conjured us together out of the ether, if that was somehow possible. Jerry Paffendorf was conspicuous by his absence, out in San Fran working on The Secret Project. So there, it's out. The Secret Project has to be metaversal, if Jerry is in SF. I asked if it was "like Loopt" and drew a curious stare from Otaku/Otape/Offtopic (please, don't make me go in the game and look up the spelling of his name). I get OT doesn't ever take a New York taxi cab or he'd have been bombarded with Loopt by now. I asked if it the Secret Project was bigger than a breadbox. As OT couldn't tell as OT was NDA, we fell to talking about, uh, Nova Scotia, and therefore we very rapidly ran out of things to say, or rather, I didn't say the things I did have to say about NS because now Zha was booming over the transom, and continued to do a marathon talk for about the next two solid hours, causing several would-be metaversals to sneak out in boredom.

OK, then. I'm going to let Tish Armstrong/Ugotrade explain all the technical stuff because no doubt she will have taped the talk or had copious notes, and I'm going to focus on what concerned me, because what the hell else do you expect me to focus on.

No, It's Not Really About the User Interface

I took an instant and visceral dislike to the entries in Dusan Writer's contest to design a new user interface. Well, hey, what's a picnic without ants. It's not just that most of the people are people I just dislike as avatars in SL because I've had to counter them on forums (for example, the Nacon problem is much like the Wagner problem, even a work of genius from that slug will be forever tainted by his horrid, vicious little "dearie" persona on the Herald -- ugh!).

Truly, too much is at stake to let this sort of public discussion be yet another arty cliquey FIC thing where the Lindens are overthrown by a small grouplet lobbying for certain geek affectations. I want people to retain, and they can only retain if they don't encounter modern sleek geeky stuff -- seriously.

I truly would like to be at this party and be appreciating people's hard work and all that -- but I don't. It's art school. It's more of the same problem. It's designers and geeks being designery and geeky in their imagination that they are making Art for the People. The one possible exception is Roy Cassini, who at least had a cleaner, sharper interface along with a concept for tutorials which was incremental -- but I've been in games that tried that method, and even the OI tries that method with it's "quest" -- and no, you can't make people bat through screens.

For example, one of their ideas is that you should get rid of the task bar on the bottom, and put sidebars just like they claim the "mass" use of big-screen computers. Uh, wait a sec here. There aren't these masses with big screens -- even the new computers in the below-$1000 range just aren't that big, although they are flat screen LCDs now and not clunky terminals. But they have that envelope problem that occurs when viewing some movies. I find it hilarious that the same gang that would have a heart attack if you put back frames on websites, that being on-so-1990s and passe, would come up with a viewer that essentially puts frames back by running buttons and bars along the side and dragging your eye to the side. Uh, no thanks.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a task bar on the bottom. It's what we like to call the "normal way" to do things -- on a PC. Yes, we don't have Macs. No, we don't want something fanning out like Safari, ballooning up your last-used application at you like a surprise attack instead of becoming available through a normal cursor move. Most people have task bars on the bottom. It's fine. Of course, perhaps some things could be taken out of it ("build" would be my vote of a thing to bag completely and hide in some other experts' accessible menu for when people are ready for it).

I've always thought there are really only two tasks to fix the viewer, neither of which anyone wants to do (the Sheep in part did one of them). The first it to take the SEARCH button, down at the bottom, and move it up to the top. I'd even change it back to the word FIND to get away from Googlianisms -- it in fact used to be FIND. In a world, you want to find, not search. I'd make it bright and blue and in the center, but not a bigger balloon cartoon. One gets the feeling that some of these designs are like people shouting English at a foreigner in the belief they need it louder to understand. Nacon has a particularly bad idea taking up half the real estate of the viewer with long lists of friends AND below that long lists of groups. They're perfectly fine tabbed one under the other. It's not like you need to constantly access 25 groups and 100 friends such that you need to have a console spread out like you're an air traffic controller. And if you DO really have to access those people, taking up half the view you have to fly in isn't the solution.

Breaking the Ad Barrier in SL

Something revolutionary happened in Second Life this week, although the Lindens didn't blog about it (and may not) and they so hid it behind a door nobody might even notice.

For the first time, and a Linden infohub there are kiosks with ads for resident newbie-helping activities and content.

Yes, peer at this picture above closely, and you can see two things:

1) Yes, the Lindens fixed that old clunky resident ad-maker from the telehubs -- or rather, no, they didn't fix the clunky script but just put a new skin on it and made sure it did work (I think the old one had timing problems) -- so yes, you can now go to Violet Infohub and put in an ad and a texture to rotate for two weeks.

2) And there in the background is Carl Metropolitan's NCI, with information and landmarks to this newb helping empire. More are supposed to come. This is part of the system of "endorsed resident helping groups" which is now going to be called...something else. SL New Resident Experience? That's their buzz word. But this system apparently lets you retain independence and freedom from mentors.

Of course, as for the resident ad, there's no need for it to be clunky, and to have that awful looming hand and too-fast timer. There are other resident scripts out there that simply do more -- they enable you also, once you've paid, to get information about who clicks on your sign (name and place) -- that's the norm everywhere now. The Lindens could easily adapt one of those sorts of scripts and have people pay $0 to have those options which would be tremendously helpful.

Not a Virtual World, a Platform, Dammit!

You may have noticed some witty and talented new paintings illustrating my blog posts lately. This is the work of Nikolai Sapunov, a Russian artist who I am sponsering. Sapunov first contributed a work to me that he dedicated to Zha Ewry after reading my blog by candlelight in his communal apartment tabbing back and before between lingva.yandex.ru. He is intuitively a kindred soul and I am so happy to have found him.

Kolya explained that he lives with his babushka in one of those ghastly novostroikas out beyond the end of the Yugozapnaya line. They survive on her sale of wilting cucumbers in the metro passageways underground to busy commuters. Weekends, they tend the plot at a dilapidated dacha of a friend who is in rehab or dead, they're not sure which.

Originally active in an underground gay artists' commune named Blue Rose, Kolya had a brush with Suprematism but never really understood Malevich -- he is still contemplating non-objectivism in its many black square forms. Kola then drowned in a lake in Finland in 1912, possibly having had help from some early Bolsheviks but more likely because he didn't listen to his babushka and went swimming after a heavy luncheon.

He has now resurfaced in Second Life, he tells me, as his bad connection flickers and his silences grow longer. I set him up in the Grace plaza where you can find some remarkably ingenius works, including one that I always laugh when I see it featuring a little hippo. Supporting Kolya is supporting Russia's soul and supporting this blog because I'm paying him now per post and I need to get him off the dime.

Meanwhile, this just in: Adam admits OpenSim is not a virtual world. Gasp!

The World of SL and the W'ural'd of SL

What is the World of SL? Or the W'ura'ld for that matter? (Khamon, could you please spell that for me again and explain its provenance exactly, thanks). Well, for starters, you can read World of SL as a feeder, and see what you see. One of the reasons I can ask, "Hey, where are the student blogs about SL?" is because they aren't on there...and there are just occasional or annoying bloghuds that show kids sitting in pastel-coloured loungers saying "hi" from their edu sim with no other thought.

Of course, Tao may be too lazy or busy to go out and get all the other new blogs out there, and I suspect there are bunches.

Still, what do people do in SL? Well, read on World of SL -- they are doing stuff like making the Relay for Life on separate sims this year, away from the Lindens. I'm a big critic of RLF precisely because they don't integrate with the community and have residents run the relays as part of their businesses --they merely tag them to put out kiosks. The event branding is confusing because people do have their own events but they are stagged over so much time the message isn't clear. It's a good start to get away from the Linden vehicle sims, though these were still laggy. Timeless Prototype came up with an idea to drop down teleport portals like out of Star Wars to come up when sims crashed. There's something clever -- yet painful about that, adapting to sad realities.

Remember the Avatard? Well, they finally had the good sense to go on the web and not just in PDF, which may get them more mindshare. The content is just as lame, but perhaps it does appeal to a certain readership, and they are more professional and varied for what they are -- a real tabloid -- than the fake tabloid of the Herald, which is stuck on Woodbury and War in Jesse Upon Us and Furry Diaper Baby Porn etc in an unending never-varied diet (they recently tried to be funny with some Linden blog parodies in the Onion mode which only served as a painful reminder of how bad they are most of the rest of the time.

or -- remember that site CNN started? It's still kicking. There's a lead story today about economic pressures closing the surfing sims -- very good coverage of an issue many may not follow, the attempt to actually create a surfing community and monetarize it like the attempt to make a sailing community, and the realization -- that Rezzable of course is so resistant to! -- that only rentals and stores with content - and did I say rentals? -- work as viable models in SL due to Mainland Mystery Math which...affects the Private Islands too, only less so as in the past their purchase prices were less and their occupancy was higher and their revenue higher. Watch this space: I predict Rezzable will go into some high-end townhouse arty rentals community before they go bust.