Second Thoughts

The Evils of Wikipedia and the Hope of Second Life

I was trying to think today what "killer apps in social media" means, and it's hard to think of any for Second Life. I guess my own feeling is that it is a killer app all on its own, but one still getting developed and spread. Not everything follows the Gartner hype-cycle charts like lock-step. Why should it? Human affairs aren't "laws of nature" that you can always reliably analyze and chart like science.

One thing that is truly evil, unquestionably, is Wikipedia. It's evil in its reach and scope, and its danger to knowledge and wisdom. I was just reading George Orwell's 1984 again, and I realized that it's here already. Usually, when you read 1984, you think of the issue of "Big Brother Watching You," or you think of how these spies are posing as dissidents but then betray Winston, but you don't focus so much on his job. Sure, you remember the "memory hole" that he pushes factual news down every day as he rewrites it, but his act of constant revising and rewriting and lying used to feel like it was abstract and in the future.

Now it doesn't.

I realized this comparing my impressions from reading this book 35 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, and now. Winston's job -- rewriting history to fit with new Party directives spinning the facts and history as he know he personally witnessed it -- is a lot like the function of a blogger or Wikipedia or anyone on the Internet who can just rewrite a page and republish it, sometimes without showing that it was edited. Things get cut, erased, and don't even show up in Google anymore, and you have to look for them on the Way Back Machine.

But nowhere is knowledge pulled and tugged and manipulated more than on Wikipedia. It's like what some critics say of it: it's a cult, and back of it is one Big Lie that you are supposed to swallow as religious truth -- that it is "open to anybody" and "everybody corrects it" and mistakes and bias become opaque to thousands of citizens of good will. Baloney. Anyone who spends any time studying Wikipedia, if they are in good faith with the concerns of an open society, becoming slowly appalled, then chilled. The Byzantine system of editing orthodoxies and myriad bizarre rulings and conventions make the Catholic Church or the Kremlin look like school kids with an ABC book. It's awful. I stumbled on all those weird sets of pages describing all their editing orthodoxies and I just...boggled. Special terms. Sordid little wars. Executions at dawn...

A fascinating page shows the pictures and RL locations of some of the anonymous manipulators behind Wikipedia on one controversial subject. Largely male, largely geeky, largely in their 30s-40s. No doubt this guy's criticism page is biased, too -- I have no idea what all the politics are -- but just seeing all the *types* there I marvel at how much it's like the Second Life JIRA and the AWG.

I never knew until recently that there is a creepy function that certain Wikinistas up in the stratosphere of the Wiki FIC take on, called Checkusers. Checkusers, well, check users, they monitor their IP, their statements, they assess whether they are "sock puppets" or "trolls" blah blah blah. The more you read about all this, the more you think that Winston Smith's office should be renamed Wikipedia, not Ministry of Truth. That sub-committee of a sub-commission that he was dumped on towards the end working on Newspeak was the obvious result...

But the scary thought came when I tried to think what would happen if you made Wikipedia be the killer app to Second Life -- or visa versa.

FIC '09: M, Save Our Sims!

Wow, I never saw the Lindens make a FIC list before. It's something I've done, of course, based on their actions, but they've always denied it.

M Linden, of course, instantly grasped where he had to go with this, which was to embrace it. Well, I've always said, I'm not opposed to the FIC per se -- all of life has FIC, everywhere, since high school, you get the cool kids. Just make sure they're *good* FIC!

Are they?

Well, judge for yourself. Although he mentioned it near last, I'm glad M included Racer Gullwing's Snail Races. They are the longest running act in SL. Like clockwork on Saturdays, and so creative. I got such an innovative Christmas card from Racer. I've never seen the Lindens acknowledge him before, so that's good. Progress. I'm also glad Crap Mariner was recognized for all his hard work making the i-Tunes thing. Dusan Writer is mentioned as basically "best blogger of the year" -- and that's good, because he's not such a shill and a tool like Hamlet and other paid-for blogs, or the Herald, paid-for in a different direction, and is occasionally critical. Of course, I'm not happy he is recognized for that browser contest, which I thought was both a ridiculous waste of money on his part, and simply producing elitist browsers of little use to the public.

Then I'm glad M recognized the Kristallnacht exhibit, a hard thing to do when all the PC leftoid gang are behaving atrociously and inciting with the *wrong* "holocaust museum" run by the Friends of the Palestinian Suicide Bombers. And a first-class Japanese sim, with my most recent and favourite Japanese find, Giorno Brando, who I put in my International Bazaar list -- he has some of the greatest stuff. I'm glad he has another store, because the store I went to was hard to get to and figure out, up in the sky. I'm glad M also mentioned Coming of Age in Second Life. A serious book.

But, other than these few obviously merited picks, the rest is like the 3-D internactive NPR on steriods that the Lindens have always wanted Second Life to become - and that's boring, and won't attract users.Worse, he tops it off with Torley (blecth) and makes a completely tokenist and insulting "nod" to everyone else, like this, "The many, many great clothing, hair, skin and furniture merchants in Second Life".

Well, I'll Be Damned

Take a look-see at this. Incredible.

Another time I'm vindicated on the JIRA, after being harassed, brow-beaten, bullied, and resisted by the "regulars" there on that "science project" at the "Lab".

And resisted even by Lindens, who told me my bug was "expected behaviour"and who told me the bug should be "campaigned for in public triage" to be recognized as a feature. Sigh.

In a nutshell, what happened is that group roles and their powers stop being respected when this bug occurred. It's the sort of thing likely only a large rentals group or big community project trying to share things but keep them from being griefed might notice - private islands that are locked down like Leavenworth might not notice it as quickly. While the group roles enabled you to decide who in your group should be able to return a prim set to the group, and who couldn't, the system -- vital for rentals, clubs, group projects, etc. -- became overridden by the bug. Havoc ensued, as people who shouldn't have been allowed to return entire builds got to return them, and as people joined the open group and used the ill-gotten powers to grief. A crazy neighbour joined my open group and returned a house with just one piece accidently in "share" out of spite; newbies accidently got grief scripts because they didn't get the difference between "share" and "set" to group. That was all unnecessary.

I  just couldn't get the Lindens to grasp this, and of course, amidst the din of all the asshole regulars, like Harleen Gretzky and McCabe Maxsted, both of whom fisked and literalized and bullied me for 10 months, it was hard to get the case heard. It shouldn't have been; that it is, is a disgrace.

Joshua Nightshade Lies: Revisiting CopyBot

I've long had to battle the odious little creep Joshua Nightshade -- I have my basic set of rebuttals here. But for the public record, let me go over this latest piece of shit from the puny little asshole. Two years since the CopyBot disaster, the issue remains more live than ever; CopyBot in fact is still used inworld. 

"Lo inadvertently just found this for me, when I had been searching for it earlier.

Second Life Herald: Fleeced [CORRECTED]

In that SL Herald piece, Prok adamantly claimed that the Electric Sheep Company was responsible for the creation of Copybot on behalf of a RL client. Despite being corrected in the comments of that entry (you can read them), Prokofy still continued to assert it was true and the ESC were lying.

The ESC took the time to respond to it here:

The Daily Graze » Blog Archive » Software Theater

and eventually Urizenus edited Prok's article with the disclaimer you see at the top, leading to war. Prok still never retracted it herself, still maintains it was true, still maintains she wasn't wrong. Even in the ESC's blog entry Prokofy is unrepentant, insulting the ESC and calling them liars.

That's Prokofy. That's how she operates. Frankly I wish someone would sue her into oblivion, finally."

FALSE, all of it.

Urizenus did not edit this piece. I was the one who immediately responded on the Herald with a full explanation of how the story came about (read the comments), but I couldn't literally make the correction on this piece, because back at the time, my access was blocked. It was Walker Spaight who later added the phrase CORRECTED. And I was happy to correct a *factual error* on one narrow point, and did so immediately: the ESC in fact did not have any client, a garment company, that had commissioned such a thing as Copybot.  Far from being "unrepentant," I simply wrote the retraction and published it in the comments right away.

I had written the story originally this in good faith, not making it up, because I had sources telling me this. In fact, it turned out, I had *false information from a source who was paid to lie to me* and corroboration from another source who was going by hearsay, as it turned out. So no, the ESC did NOT have a client that commissioned Copybot; they merely had staff who knew about and played with CopyBot (they went to its debut on November 7). Someone did, however.

The Caravan Moves On

 
I think we're about done with the LCO drama, but just some round-up points.

What we've found, not surprisingly, is two persistent memes, mainly perpetrated by the old FIC gang of the old official forums, and the ill-named Second Citizen, preserved to this day at Sluniverse.com namely:

1. "Prok always publishes lies, slander, inuendo, gossip, falsehoods, incendiary blah blah blah"
2. "Prok is a girl and doesn't get to be referred to as 'he' because...we say so and we determine who gets their rights by our say-so."

So, Second Life never changes, and it's important to point out once again, as wearisome as it may sound:

1. I haven't published any lies, libel, gossip, etc. No one has successfully challenged anything I've reported here.It's true as far as I know -- I don't see there's any other version of this story that's credible.

A. LaLa herself has not come forward and claimed there was no deal or understanding with Simone; she has no chatlogs proving this, but merely her dunning bill and Simone's initial attempt to deal with her by arranging payment; instead, LaLa has let her minions do all their yaking and shouting and swearing to distract.
B. I haven't said LaLa "stole" any content anywhere; I've said the content creator is locked out, can't get her content, and her wish to have it removed was ignored. So she's following up. And you need to listen to LaLa's own words, in which she says she is DMCA proof.

Me saying this doesn't make it less true; me saying this based on my own investigations of this world LCO and my interview of Simone doesn't make it less true; LaLa's chat logs don't make it any less true; Chip Midnight pompously declaring that he "agrees with me 100 percent" because he saw the creator-fascism agenda cranking up to his advantage, and then his backing away as soon as he saw some "other version" ("overdue tier") doesn't make it any less true. The Herald, with paid LCO ads, saying this is a routine customer service problem gone wrong (ignoring the larger issues) or that a false claim of theft was made (it wasn't) doesn't make it any less true; Cristiano, spouting his usual nonsense, as he collects pay for LCO ads on his website doesn't make it any less true; all kinds of people spouting on forums, including the official Linden ones, doesn't make it any less true.

I won't have to keep arguing any of this much longer, as I think we'll see a pretty rapid denouement by early next year.

Voice of Consent

The introduction of Voice provided by Vivox in Second Life has somewhat changed the landscape for the blogosphere and for the rough frontier justice of the virtual world -- but not entirely. Chatlogs are a staple of SL. They are the heart and soul of its democracy -- such as it is. They enable public accountability; they also provide practical things like help for newbies who can't follow IMs or a group or a meeting and need to read it back later.

Here's the rule to follow about chatlogs from SL: you can publish them outside of SL, unless you have a takedown order from a court of law.

Many people don't seem to grasp that; they play Internet lawyer; they play Virtual Prosecutor; but I've never seen a successful prosecution -- and judicial decision rendered -- regarding the impermissibility of an SL chatlog *outside the SL domain*. The Linden TOS makes it an offense to publish chatlogs inworld, on the SL forums, on the SL blog -- in other words, on their servers. They cannot stretch their even lengthening arms out to your third-party blog. Other games and worlds have done that, making it an inworld TOS offense, say, to reference or link to another game, or to criticize groups or individuals in any fashion. But not this one. Sorry, fail. And the worst that can happen to you is loss of your account on that game with that kind of rule; certainly not RL judicial action.

What about voice? Here, people concoct all kinds of fantasies as well. Voice is even more elusive, which is why increasingly, Lindens, important people, divas, etc. use Voice, so there is no chat log. They figure it's just too hard and cumbersome to tape individual Vivox convos in SL -- and it is. That is, you can rig up various things but who has the time unless you're like a Metanomics groupie?

But because Voice in SL is like the telephone in feel and flavour, people assume -- wrongly -- that it is some kind of federal offense to tape a voice convo. It's not. In these United States, boys and girls, get the facts:

"Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia permit individuals to record conversations to which they are a party without informing the other parties that they are doing so. These laws are referred to as “one-party consent” statutes, and as long as you are a party to the conversation, it is legal for you to record it."

California has a 'two party consent" law -- that's where *some* of the servers are located. Texas has a "one party consent law". So, pick your servers, and tape away -- or see your bitchy diva in court. Let her figure out which server; which domain; which jurisdiction; which state; what occurred. It isn't a privileged two telephone conversation when you stand on a sim with 15 people plugged in; it's a public meeting. Running a giant group in SL of 3,000 people -- a group where voice is enabled? Welcome to your life as a public figure, which simply enjoys less protection from libel/slander laws (in a liberal democracy) and welcome to the ambiguity you will face in trying to prosecute somebody who held you to account by taping your ass when you had a meltdown.'

"Until the Grownups Come to Fetch Us..."

One of my favourite classy magazines, for which I've done a great deal of uncompensated consulting lately lol has an article up about Princeton pulling out of Second Life.

Ouch. Do the Lindens -- does Pathfinder or whoever is responsible for keeping educators happy on the grid -- get that this is *the* most prestigious university on the East Coast? More important than Harvard? Maybe the most prestigious in America? Like losing the most wealthy and influential wire service, Reuters, somebody isn't paying attention -- or doesn't care.

Of course, part of the problem is this philosophy that the Lindens used to purvey endlessly from 2003-2007, before M Linden arrived, that Linden Lab was just the caretakers of a platform, a blank space in which other people were to write, where they wouldn't help them write. They have a lot of trouble undoing that now -- it's like jumping over their own knees. "Blowback," you might call it.

M seems to have modified or junked that old technocommie Darwinism, and realized that people need help writing on their space -- which is of course, a delicate balance of not promoting learned helplessness and dependency versus not intruding on creativity and autonomy. For example, I don't need M to help me write on my space; I need him to get off my e-lawn and do one thing: keep griefers from crashing my sim. That's all. But others need a lot of prepping and hand-holding for the long term project of building a Better World (as Real Life becomes a worse and worse place to be, with collapsing economies and wars, it shouldn't be THAT hard to make a Better World online. Any would do.)

I'm not getting the Princeton exit, and likely there's a story behind the story -- I just don't know the people. I went there and took a screenshot of myself in collegiate wear (as it happens, by Simone! lol) earlier this fall, when I was in Connectivist College (from which I flunked out midterm due to taking another real job lol). That won't stop me from engaging in some useful public guesstimation, however : )

NDA'd Security Group: What Rob Erases

So many other dramas like USS Nautilus and open space sims, Legend City, and rental dementia might drown out another ongoing FIC-a-zoid story, so let's not forget to keep up on this one.

Back at the SL Dev list (not to be confused with the uber-elite insider big business and "solutions provider" dev list, but the scrappier coders' dev list), there's a debate raging through the scrim of Rob's moderation about whether or not Linden Lab should create a separate and privileged group of residents who get to sign an NDA with the Lab, and get inside information that will help their businesses and their reputation-enhancement and research projects -- which are all part of business, too. And what that NDA would be about is a heads up from LL whenever there is a security exploit emergency.

Now, in the ordinary real world, the world of Madoff and banking scandals and such, you might think, "No fucking way! Gosh, you don't privilege one set of people over another and give them an unfair advantage like that. Shouldn't we spread the wealth around? Aren't we all in this together?" etc.

But in Linden Land, this is how it rolls -- they've *already* picked select groups of residents and privileged them over others. They have a long history of doing this. For example, Cristiano Midnight and his pals revealed that back in 2003, Linden Lab summoned the elite content creators and forums regs with street cred to a special conference call, asked them to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements which gives privileged information on pain of reprisal if you release it), and proceeded to tell them they were moving to an auction land and tier model and that lifers could get 4096 m2 tier-free for life if they bought in with a one-time fee of $225 (a lot to be paying for an untested world of this nature at that time, but...not really all that much if you were already a content maker coining anywhere from $25,000-$50,000 a year off this game).

Later, NDAs like that were signed with the Electric Sheep Company, for example, to help develop the viewer and other features -- way before the big business onslaught in 2007. Others got the NDA special treatment -- those who agreed to attend the all-expense-paid high-flying focus group held in San Francisco called SL Views (they seemed to have suspended this, but it had a long run feting the FIC for more than a year). So NDAS have a long and unattractive history *already* in SL, privileging people who have no demonstrable need or merit to be privileged *already* and giving them tremendous business and reputational advantage.

Shaun Altman, for example, former SL Mentor, is one land baron and scripter who comes to mind who benefitted enormously from the Linden trust and imprimatur that went into them first taking his content for their Linden Village, then inviting him to SL Views. That credit of trust had lustre long, long after many questions began to be asked, some by those who lost large sums of money, about his purchase of Ginko Perpetual Bonds...about which we all continue to pray to Our Lady of Perpetual Help to cash out...

Cristiano Lies

Cristiano of slunvierse.com has decided to take LaLa Xevious' side in this dispute, but it's important to keep pounding away on his misrepresentation of the facts, along with his beloved Joshua Nightshade:

"Most people don't always handle themselves perfectly in the crosshairs of Prokofy's accusation as fact diatribes. As far as LaLa's ethics, she was stiffed for tier - money is owed to her. She has every right to hold onto something of value until the situation is resolved. You are speaking of oh poor content creator -yet this is a dispute over unpaid service."

No, nothing was owed her. There was no automatic tier bill. Because there was sim purchase, such as to "owe tier". You can't "owe tier" when you don't buy a sim, duh. The sims were given for free, they were understood to be available for free in exchange for giving of free content for newbies -- and that's it.

No payment information was set up on file! No billing system kicked in. Instead, LaLa manually billed her to get her to come on the site and set up an account and start paying out.

You know, a lot of people in the general public who don't normally pay any attention to me or the sluniverse.com jackals will tune in to this. They will not find fault with me because I'm extraneous to the story -- I merely brought it out in the open for reporting and discussion. They will not find fault with Simone, who logged on voluntarily and took  up a discussion about a bill that was not expected. They will find fault with Cristiano and Joshua double-timing and two-stepping to apologize for LaLa and fit the store into her favour; they will find fault with LaLa for her atrocious behaviour, her publicizing of chat logs, her siccing of her Queens on people, etc.

SL Legend Simone Locked Out of Legend City Online

Like a lot of SL merchants and landlords shocked by Linden Lab's openspaces price hike and PR fumble into having to abandon their sims, and watching the effect on the world, I began to cast a wandering eye on to those other "open sim" projects out there that were reverse-engineered clones of SL, some of which had already gotten a reputation for being Not Ready for Prime Time because of their technocommunism and hatred of commerce and intellectual property, and some of which just seemed to be steeped in drama and filling up with the pyramid-schemers, ageplayers, and gamblers who were flushed out of SL when Linden Lab began to apply the normal real-life rule of law to the virtual world.

So I looked around and I was told of Legend City Online. Reading up on it, it seemed so much more put together than these crappy tekkie sandboxes. It seemed that more mature women in business in SL were running it more expertly than the snivelling and snarky opensource geek males were running the other worlds. The prominent clothing designer Simone Stern talked it up on her friendship card list, and told me to check it out and sent a link. I couldn't get logged on it was so overcrowded - Simone told me that due to her advertising, and the word-of-mouth of other SL merchants who arrived as pioneers like Asri Falcone, LilyBeth Firth of Textures 'R Us, and others, the world burgeoned, and it's manager, Lala Xevious, sold something like 5,000 simulators in a matter of weeks.

Finally, a few weeks after finally getting a better computer, I got logged and was impressed with what I saw. None of this awful opensourced frustration like Adam's world. Clear signage, help for newbies, a very nicely laid-out store with outfits and gadgets easily obtained -- and Simone's signature logo, with some nice free and attractive newbie outfits. Instead of struggling to make a home-made sack for myself in non-working tools as in the other scrubby worlds, I had a nice jeans, shirt and jacket to instantly put on, with skin and hair. A sign told me a "government" was coming soon in a "town  hall' and the TOS contained nice, simple, no-nonsense non-politically-correct restrictions against something the majority of the public wishes to in fact restrict, which is simulated child pornography, and something which the majority of the public wishes to promote: namely copyright protection, respect for IP, and a ban on copybot type of activity (which OpenSim, OpenLife etc actually encourage).

Still, reading a bit of drama on the forums about someone having their build wiped and hearing that snotty tone of the overzealous pioneer and their sychophants so horribly familiar to me from Second Life, despite the nice aspects of this world, I paused. I decided to let it "age". Meanwhile, Simone kept telling me to get on over on to the ground floor of this wonderful place -- enthusiastically, she filled the world with free content, and cheap $50 content, taking on two sims and a welcome area store. The arrangement was like a lot of enthusiastic pioneer arrangements on the open frontier -- a virtual handshake. I listened to this -- and a little warning bell went off in the back of my mind, but I pushed it away. In exchange for Simone giving her Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to this scrappy new world -- which was hugely important to convince people like me to go there -- and in exchange for providing free newbie entrance content and deeply discounted wares inworld, Simone was supposed to get the free use of two sims. Given how much lower the cost of these sims are (it's not $2000/$295, but $100 down and $100 a month for a full-prim sim), it seemed eminently reasonable. Simone was willing to give -- but not take on a recurring expense on top of her existing obligations in SL.