Second Thoughts

Liberating Free Culture -- 2 -- Tinie Causby

Continuing on my way critiquing the daily installment of Free Culture served to me by Daily Lit.

There's a reason I've come to conclude that Lessig is an asshole: he privileges technology over people. That in itself wouldn't necessary make him any more of an asshole than the next modern man, but there's more: he *ridicules and humiliates people* when he celebrates the privileging of technology over people. And that's morally wrong -- and it's even unnecessary for technology even to be acknowledged as "prevailing". You don't have to celebrate violent, destructive change that harms people; you don't *have* to be an asshole. There are balances, compromises -- and common sense that trumps that other "common sense" (i.e. brute force) being invoked with such malicious glee in this passage.

Here's the story. The Wright Brothers invent their planes; they get more popular; they are picked up inevitably by the military; and it isn't long before low-flying military aircraft are scaring the chickens of two farmers, making them fly into walls and die. These two farmers, outraged at this encroachment on their pastoral life (the kind of pastoral life that tekkie-wikinistas often inevitably celebrate when they buy ranches themselves with their Silicon Valley wealth), decided to protest. They turned to the courts. But an impatient and irritable justice ruled that "common sense" dictated that an old concept that people's private property extended endlessly up into the skies was outdated. The airplanes had to have the right of way in air space, or every transatlantic or cross-country flight would yield bunches of lawsuits. This would stand in the way of progress; it couldn't be allowed to happen. The farmers, one of whom was very appropriately named "Tinie Causby" (what a great name for an avatar or a blog!) had to resign themselves to their fate in the name of modernity.

But that's not enough for Lessig -- he had to gloat -- they always do:

"Or at least, this is how things happen when there's no one powerful on the other side of the change. The Causbys were just farmers. And though there were no doubt many like them who were upset by the growing traffic in the air (though one hopes not many chickens flew themselves into walls), the Causbys of the world would find it very hard to unite and stop the idea, and the technology, that the Wright brothers had birthed. The Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus in a chicken coop; farmers like the Causbys found themselves surrounded by "what seemed reasonable" given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these newfangled technologies all they wanted. They could call their representatives or even file a lawsuit. But in the end, the force of what seems "obvious" to everyone else-- the power of "common sense"--would prevail. Their "private interest" would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public gain."

Sorry, but that lame parenthetical hope for the chickens -- and not for people! -- doesn't cut it. It's typically stupid literalist gloating -- as if it has to be all or nothing. As if these poor chicken farmers have to cut a laughing stock image, shaking their fists, dead chickens in hand, helpless and technology -- military technology!!! the kind Lessig protests vigorously against if it is in the hands of Bush!!! -- gets to prevail uber alles.

There wasn't so much the force of "common sense" here as just...force. And the kind of force, that in fact, liberal democrats would definitely want to limit -- and even Lessig wants to limit if it is used in a place he doesn't like, oh, the Middle East, or something. And of course, there *isn't* any common sense in extending this eminent domain of technological progress indefinitely. Obviously, if both commercial and military planes had continued to fly low -- needlessly -- and continued to harm chickens and scare farmers, the need for *food* -- the need for farms and chickens, *too* -- would force a *balance*. See, that real common-sense balance is what is often missing from Lessig's extremist rages and gloats. We don't *have* to stand and ridicule the poor Tinie Causby; we can look for *mitigation*. And in fact, in real life, we do. It's no accident, comrade, that there is a page like this, where people in the UK can *protest against low-flying military aircraft*. The kind of protest that Larry would call "against common sense and progress".

Liberating Free Culture -- 1

I signed up for a service called Daily Lit that delivers an installment of a book into your email box every day. It's like we're regressing to the era of Charles Dickens, or my favourite early 20th century author, Kathleen Norris, getting books serialized.

Oh, I know I'm not qualified and educated enough to take on Lawrence Lessig --  not a fair fight. But, some tasks have to be taken on as a public service anyway. I find him a totally pernicious influence, not the least, on Second Life (where he was an early guru to the Lindens). I may not be able to keep up a critique once a day, but I'll try to weigh in as often as I can about these 108 installments filling my box.

The very first installment contains three of the common fallacies most often memed around by Lessig, and you can see what a sleight of hand is performed -- follow along yourself here:

1) that Lessig is not of the left or right, but a forthright supporter of private property

2) that he is only concerned with a moderate's concern about ensuring free conditions for creativity and access to works of culture

3) that there is a crisis of control of culture and deadening copyright laws hobbling culture

Lessig begins by referencing The New York Times's tekkie columnist, David Pogue, who critiqued Lessig's earlier book back in the year 2000. Lessig, in Free Culture, doesn't mention that his thesis of that era -- that the Internet was going to get horribly regulated -- didn't come to pass. In the typical overstatement for which he is never called out, back in that era, Lessig claims that over-protection of copyright is going to be some huge problem. Of course...the opposite happened, and in part due to his handiwork.

Rental Dementia

Sorry to interrupt the regularly-scheduled programming with more Rental Dementia, but it has to be done. I have another one of those idiots threatening to get "everyone in Second Life" to boycott my business and to "report me to the Lindens". Sigh.

Below the fold is the chat with one of these aggressively stupid people you find all too often in SL. I have all the time in the world for newbies and non-English speakers -- I help them, I explain, I send them the link to translate stuff, I speak two foreign languages so I try to grasp cognates, etc. But, I often find more and more that there is a learned helplessness -- and passive/aggressive exploiting going on. Someone pleads "Oh, I'm a poor foreigner without English be nice to me and give me stuff" -- although their English is perfectly fine. They claim they can't understand you, they insist YOU get a translator, even though they turn up seconds later, when you refuse to cave to them, with a HUD -- into which they speak English, which repeats as English. ROFL! I've seen that happen so many times lately.

Another thing that I find curious is people's expectation that something instant and magic should happen. There aren't rentals that enable you both to join a group automatically, with, say, a bot logged on, AND enable all the prims from another expired tenant to be wiped away. That's because if you had a bot that automatically enabled you to join a group, you'd just move in without paying.

Even *with* paying, I don't see that anyone has developed a bot that senses a payment event in another object, and generates an invite only to those who paid. There are doors that open if you pay, but that's different, and still not a group. It's a problem for all rentals that they can't solve the need to a) pay and b) set prims without making people join groups, either self-join, or through prim divas issuing invitations on a discretionary and manual basis (that's why I just leave my groups open for the initial prim-setting, but add in the powers to use media and ban after I see a payment was made).

The furious rage people experience when having a cancellation fee taken out when they refund is understandable, but misplaced. What did you expect? Good lord, most rentals have NO REFUNDS period. They often, in malls, make you pay 4 weeks in advance with no ability to bail, even for a cancellation fee. The cancellation fee is necessary, of course, because otherwise, people would just day-trip from rental to rental, living for a day, and then refunding and going to the next place to rip off.

As you can see from the transcript, this idiot got a full and fair explanation immediately that answered all his questions and solved his problems, but he simply refused to read it. It was repeated. He still refused. I'm well aware that in scrollling convos in SL with one-line windows of text, people never read what you write, and they just want to say their piece and not listen. That's why I repeat it several times. But about round 3 or 4, I start telling them to stop being asses : )

Commerce Before Community or Prim Perfectability

I'm going to argue just the opposite to this post, a guest post by, not surprisingly, high-profile massively.com technocommunist Tateru Nino.

Oh, I realize that leftoids will then imagine that I'm a greedy, grasping capitalist, ready to put profit before people, but, um, let's see if that's actually the case -- and whether those arguing "Community Before Commerce" aren't in fact doing the greater damage to humanity -- by actually spelling death ultimately to "communities" that really have no cohesion because they can't pay for themselves, or get themselves paid.

The thesis of Community Before Commerce runs like this:

1. First, a fallacious proposition served up as "fact" when it is in fact "religion": "Commerce cannot exist without communities". Of course it can, and I'll explain why -- and why it's desirable in a free world as well.

2. Second, that flogging of another fallacious propostion common to Internet-residing technocommies -- that people are "forced" into proximity by evil meat-world geography and "hate this". They are in a supposed "captive audience" in thrall.

3. Third, based on these flawed propositions, a "rule" (blecth, coders always come up with this shit) which is "you need a community before you can attempt to sell" -- ludicrous claptrap as anyone knows, and just one of those technocommie religious beliefs they'd like to get people to believe in. Second Life -- hey, Real Life -- puts paid to these fallacies, as you don't need any sort of community whatsoever to sell stuff.

4. Fourth, another fake rule with hortatory and pompous fake guru-hood: "you need to be providing something that the community wants before they will buy". Huh? Tateru has never heard of yard sale -- they run against her socialist constitution, of course. And impulse buys. And buying alone, online, or even on Second Life, following a list, not of friendships, but what you need for your house.

5. Now comes the Fifth fallacy,the collective farm bit, that has to be built to sustain the technocommunism. "You have to move into an established community or you have to build one". Well, nothing of the sort. Because you don't need a community. And it doesn't work that way, either in RL or SL as any cursory and non-ideological monitoring will illustrate.

The Fat Lady Sings

It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings.

I was getting my usual round of Holiday Hate -- holidays where people get depressed seem to bring out their need to send vicious hate mail to others and inworld grief-grams -- noting the usual themes of "get a life" and "you are worse than a child-murderer" and "go play with your grandchildren" (hey, can I go into the future and see my grandchildren who don't exist yet lol?) Anyway, I noticed one of these hating assholes was posting on vintfalken.com to that garden perennial, the "Benjamin Duranske v. Catherine Fitzpatrick" post by Vint, who I think frankly is a man in RL (I find these are the only people who persist in harassing me, the manginas). As I point out in this thread where I am literally 'airbrushed out of history" (her technique for controlling "trolls'), the link doesn't work anymore, as Benjie took it down when he got "a real job" and realized it would look pretty stupid up there to his future employers and clients.

 Meanwhile, this freak on Twitter named Pareidoliac is posting Twitter hate grams with hysterical frenzies about me being a "banned troll" *gasp* and linking to his site where he has posted my RL picture, a rant about me being mentally ill with borderline personality disorder -- the usual Internet griefing hysteria. Here's the story about this anonymous and cowardly "Pareidoliac" who naturally doesn't post his own picture or RL name ROFL. I'm not sure how he ended up in my follow queue, but I noticed there was this jerk with a Twitter avatar which was a picture of a woman's manicured long-nailed fingers clasping a mouse, suggestively photographed such as to look like a vagina (go see Twitter and you'll get what I'm talking about). Um, Georgia O'Keefe it's not, if you know what I mean -- it's exploitative and infantile and stupid. It's one of those things empty-headed misogynist males do on the Internet to be abusive, and they imagine it is "funny".

Linden Lab Does Top to Bottom Strategic Review

Hmm, well, that's all I got, sorry. Just that headline. No more. Well, I have Zero's post to the Open Grid list (below the fold), but no more than that. Tateru hasn't been leaked this story yet, I guess, so she doesn't have anything.

Naturally, I, and possibly a few others, are wondering, "What is this strategic plan of which you speak? How did it change? Can we get even a sanitized copy?"

I find the implication fascinating here that the OpenGridniks at the Lab were paralyzed for four months while they -- and everybody, ostensibly -- were being reviewed. That doesn't exactly sound like the truth, as obviously some programs and projects, like Operation Jack Up OS Prices and USS Sea of FIC got to charge full steam ahead, and others seemed to be completed, and even have their Linden leave (Havoc 4 and Mono?). So that needs probing (although Zero appeared to stop giving office hours then), but basically, the question to contemplate is: what is the strategic plan *now*? And why was it changed? And what is the REAL attitude of management to this opensource nonsense? Was there an actual assessment of the opensource madness, and its failure to lead to real improvements and retention? It seems mainly a sop to a noisy but very tiny minority of coders active both within LL and within the elite SL JIRA-going population -- plus IBM. Are we done accommodating them yet? Guess not?  But when I get to post the chat in awhile, see what this group is up to lately -- and hold on to your prims, their permissions are more vulnerable than ever. They want to install a "Creative Commons Server" (yuck) that will merely give you CC rights on your objects and not protect IP *for commerce*. That means a card or interface that says "CC licenses [sic] apply! You can copy this but you have to give me credit and you can't resell it!" But...NOT a license for "you can copy this if you buy it! Or you can buy it, but not copy it!"

Predictions for 2009

Time for the annual predictions again. You know, I do have the power of clairvoyancy, and I have to say, it's annoying, because people never believe me. I don't have a very *good* version of this power/gene, because I can't see much, or that far, but, what I get, I get. I find that in fact, seeing into the future isn't really seeing into the future, because, um, it didn't happen yet, but...it's more about paying *really good attention to the the present*. You know, like the Wizard of Oz reaching into Dorothy's basket and finding the picture of Auntie Em...

I did pretty well with my 2008 predictions. I said Linden Lab wouldn't open source it's server code -- and it didn't, and it won't, so I don't even really  have to include that as this year's prediction, either. I was right that "shedloads" of VWs *did not* come to "unseat" Second Life, either. Google was Deadly, Twinity never got working for a lot of people, VastPark eternally stayed in Beta, Multiverse remained inscrutable, Sony's Home was a flop, and all those open sim SL clones were filled with badly-working code and dull drama (what a combo!)  I said LL would announce "interoperability with some aspect of the avatars with another world" -- and that kinda sorta happened with that first hop by Zha Ewry, but...hmmm...

I think when I said LL would open up a second grid where some select few would get to advance their businesses, the fulfillment of that prediction was when Rivers Run Red got an exclusive contract to do a suite of office services with LL. I'm not sure that physically takes place on some stand-alone separate logged in grid, but...it's like a second grid, and may in time become one, so as to break free from the blinged central asset server. Like the Central Committee of the CPSU, I've always wondered why you can't just...have two of them. You know, *another* "central asset server* lol. Like, in...Tatarstan lol.

When I talked about a "blackout" in real life restoring the sense of fragility of virtual worlds, I should have crossed out that word and put "recession". Oh, well, too late now...I was sure right about mobile phones being more important, however.

But...like I said, the population kept growing and growing...As for the "suit for fraud" over banks, well, hmmm, that didn't happen, unless you call Intblubs absurd IPO to raise a war chest to sue LL over the openspaces, but...naah, I won't give myself a gimme on that one. No lawsuit on libel, either. Naaah, it's just too hard to do that. I was right that the lawsuits would ebb, though, and they have. No there there.

I thought something was going to happen with China. Hmm, boy, I was wrong about that. And...nope, still not getting anything on that for this year.

It was a no-brainer to say that big corporations would not be using SL as much.

I don't know what I was smoking when I said the more mainstream blogs would start integrating more with virtual worlds. That's simply not happening. Even with Daily Kos kinda sorta having some SL presence for their annual wingding. No, I guess I don't have clairvoyancy, duh.

Wrong also about age verification -- it went nowhere -- and Red Light District, which  never caught on. I don't know why. I have met like one actual person who went there -- and then came back to SL.

The Path to NUX is Littered With Obstacles

Ok, I just happened to get this new website when I went to log on, not sure why, whether everyone's seeing it now, or whether I just happened to clear cookies and get it.

The black absolutely doesn't matter, it's fine. It looks more dense on the screenshots; in the actual browser, it doesn't call attention to itself.

Each window has a machinima in it. What I found confusing about this is that I didn't know that was coming, even being in SL for four years and even understanding what machinima *is*. I didn't expect that the windows would "do anything" other than pop up larger. In fact, they *didn't* do anything because I was on my crappy computer, and not only did they not load, they didn't tell me they *needed* loading.

It was only accidently that I finally saw one of them start moving and pan around a scene. It was the quintessentially politically-correct interracial scene that the Lindens feel they MUST impose on people which I find terribly off-putting. Not the mixing of races -- duh -- but the PUSHING of it in this intrusive way. It's not natural to impose political agendas on to people's love-lives; it's unnecessary in order to achieve racial harmony, anyway, and you aren't racist if you *don't* push it. It would be one thing if you showed *tolerance* by covering the fact that you have all kinds of people in SL, and yes, interracial dating, too, as a simple, normal phenomenon. It's another thing when you PUSH IT as a PC AGENDA forcefully on a sign-up page. Stop that, Lindens, it's annoying.

I realize that all FIC systems are exploited to push Jenzaa's business, starting with Metanomics and ending with the Lindens' splash pages, but I really think they all should be wary of pushing stuff that in fact is not easy to find and use, especially not at all for free.

I was originally supportive of, and still basically am, although I'm tired of having it shoved down my throat. What's terribly misleading about her system is that it is not a poseball system, that you buy, place on an object like a bench, and achieve when two avatars come on a scene, meet each other, and then decide to hold hands (I didn't realize that at first until frustrated, I went to her store, and frustrated, I left, realizing I could not develop a sim with scenes with this function in it, but only by essentially a vehicle with a HUD). So I can't buy her object, put it on a public bench, and emerge with the result where two avatars will each click and wind up holding hands and walking together. They'd be able to fuck each other three ways from Sunday before they could accomplish the technically very difficult but more initially friendly and PG result of just holding hands. That's simply because it's hard to get two avatars of different heights and seizes matched up correctly in this fashion, and have them move.

Podcasts: Around the World with Prokofy Neva

 
A short-lived Chinese parcel called China Pig Cage Dorm -- a gem that disappeared perhaps when the guy couldn't pay his rent...

Yay! Podcasts are back now that I have a computer working.

Start here, with episode 17, and then continue to episode 18 of Prok's Traffic Report on Talkshoe.

This is about my new International Bazaar, part of Memory Bazaar at Ross Infohub.

The go here to the Council on Virtual Relations if you want to buy the set of all the country sims I've found, $30 for the editable compass where you can add your own, have visitors add their own, and keep it updated.

Redesign

Kazimir Malevich, 1913, Black Square

I suppose the Suprematists knew what they were doing, when they substituted their flat solid-coloured geometrical shapes for those queasy multicoloured politically-incorrect Impressionist blurs and figurative fantasies. In his lifetime, Malevich had trouble staying in the good graces of the art Commissars and barely kept body and soul together with Party rations, while he laboured on his idea of "non-objectivity," a pure, ideal world beyond the messy meat-world (Malevich was one of the early Internet users of the 1930s) where the notions of Catholicism seem to prevail more than thoes of Bolshevism. After his death, suitably, Malevich's simple, proletarian but spiritual shapes, which were painted with allocated oils on Communist-issued canvases, were kept rolled up on balconies but nowadays sell for fantastic sums in the millions.

The Lindens are now working on getting rid of their stupid and useless old website and redesigning it with some high-priced help from M Linden's old shop. And the first thing that happened to get all the geeks mad is that a) they are using flash and b) they are making the site black. The shrieking from the FIC aesthetes has been ear-splitting. I guess they haven't studied Malevich.

Geeks are very, very big on giant white spaces -- blindingly white. It's the blinding white of objectivity, i.e. cynicism and hatred, and not the lofy black of Malevich's living Cosmos. As any synesthesiac knows (I'm one of them), the Internet is not only a white-coloured word; it's a white-coloured thing, too, and concept, three. I first began noticing white everywhere on the Internet about 3 years ago and even bought a glare screen for my computer, but still continue to suffer retinal damage. All the most "bleeding edge" and cynical tekkie sites are all in white -- Techcrunch, Valley Wag, etc. A sea of white, with the print often in tiny black, and with graphics bars usually in Islamic green, perhaps to set off the flashing ads you're supposed to click on better, but also because this narrow demographic just thinks white and green are the most aesthetic and perfect colours now, and have been for awhile.

Designers who are trying to attract more than the 200,000 power uses of Twitter in Silicon Valley, however, know that mass media requires black. There are three places where consumers, in their masses, have been bred to expect black for the last 50 or 15 years:

o darkened movie theaters, where you wait in anticipation for the film to roll
o your TV set, which is black until you turn it on, and remains a black box as a frame
o your computer screen, which is also a black screen in a usually dark box.

So black equals expectation, anticipation of media, and media frame -- and it also doesn't hurt your eyes. Youtube is all white, you say? Ok, but could you explain again how they will...make money from this massive pirate site contributing vastly to Net Contestion?

So the Lindens are all good with the black, but what about the flash?