Liberating Tech

I hear things are going to be awful at the new Linden forums -- they've got this company called Lithium (!) I'm not making it up, that they will have administer to get rid of the residents' bi-polar condition and "even it out".

It has some kind of "kudos" system that Amanda Linden has been explaining in office hours -- it will involve a reputation system where you will "get more powers" as you move up the food chain. I hope that doesn't mean you get to moderate other residents -- but it likely does. It sounds like the Love Machine. This will cause all that newbie helpers who love a good vanity parade to turn out in full force, plus all sorts of board hos and vamps and vipers  and junkyard dogs.

I've been checking out some of the other resident forums that have formed recently in anticipation of the Lindens forums' nerf, and they are disappointing and stupid. Actually, they are from hunger. One called gotvirtual.net (cool name, you have to give them that) and one called SL Offworld (also a cool name). Second Citizen has undergone some sort of...lobotomy or something. The awful Lektor Hannibal has stepped down, there's been some sort of drama or purge or something; some other people went to the other forums as refugees -- hard to follow the "lore".

Someone tweeted me a list of some more to check out -- but they all have that same feeling of being in the girls' locker-room in 7th grade -- uncomfortable stupid uniforms, stupid drills and exercises like squat-thrusts, the drill-sergeant dyke gym teacher, and sniggering about which girl got her period. Who wants to repeat all that stuff online when you're 55 years old ROFL?

It's because they all have the same mediocrities in them, and the same malignancies on hand (Mulch, Dale Innis Dale Chess, etc. -- although they haven't begun "acting out" yet. They're in hover mode, waiting until they have a big enough audience before they ratchet up to board-ho mode. Suspiria is reining supreme at one of them and issuing vile denunciations; somebody named Don Mill I never heard of is the Queen Bee at another. They are all petulant and posturing and pouting if you point out that they are insular numbingly stupid provincials, spending days posting cat pictures.

Why do you join our little village clambake, Prok, if you think it is so stupid and backward? Answer: I'm figuring the regular forums are going to shortly become awful and I hope to find alternatives where occasionally I can go see what the news is on something like Red Zone and find out what the issues are.

But you have to paw through so many pages of butthurt, smiles, hugely annoying forums software that forces you to quote the previous person like the Indian Talking Stick up your butt -- well, I don't have the stamina. My time for forums is a few minutes a day. I can't dredge them for hours.

I also don't want the following things from forums: hugsz, venting space, friendz, kisses, back massages, questions about how my day was, discussions about Charlie Sheen -- you know, that sort of thing. I go to real life for this and I just don't feel the need for smothering claustrophobic online communities filled with over-sharing strangers and weeping willies and vicious vamps.

Someone asked why I don't start my own forums, and the answer is: huge amount of work. I did a PHP forum on the police blotter/griefing/governance for awhile but it was too hard. Spam, people bitching, problems -- no thanks. I have my rentals for that sort of, um, online immersion : )

Recently, I also joined Stanford's liberationtech list, which you have to apply to join and be approved and is heavily moderated -- and it's just too oppressive. Honestly, I haven't seen so much theology and doctrine about what to permit to be posted and what not since I once studied at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies -- and those guys were a happy bunch of free thinking libertarians compared to the horrendously rigidly orthodox "progressive" sorts on libtech.

So I decided to name my list Liberating Tech just because, you know, I think we should liberate tech -- plus tech is liberating too. Works both ways. Has to work both ways.

I want to have a place to put links and stuff -- but who knows, it's likely at most 10 people will join and it will be too much work to build -- but that's ok. I like the blog comments. I just wish the comments were easier to access and read. They go into pages and become hard to sort through. You miss some that are made when they pile up. They are very long and narrow columns. Anyway, there it is.

You can go here to join the group Liberating Tech. You need: a real-life name OR a Second Life name OR a bloggers' name. I think Yahoo makes you get a Yahoo ID which you can either name as what your other IDs are or put a note of who you are if you have another Yahoo ID.

I looked at Google Groups but I try to avoid the Google scrape everywhere and I didn't see that Google Groups had dbases and polls attached to them as visibly easy.

One thing I like about listserve groups versus forums is that you can have the posts all digested into one mailing a day.

I have to find a good logo/picture/

Comments

[nina]

well that is certainly harsh.
i thought gV was doing pretty good at avoiding the pitfalls of the other boards.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, sure, Nina, it's fine. It's not about you, as they say. It's a nice little forums with a cool name, I just don't need a forums. Forums culture isn't something I enjoy. I'm willing to tolerate it to a point to get information and refute people harassing me or putting out disinformation about me (that's usually what makes me go to a forums) but as a daily diet, it's too sugary. I'm sure I'll stop by now and then.

It's exactly that insular neuralgic self-pity you're exhibiting now that makes me find forums so awful.

[Toxic Menges]

The only place you are going to find totally suitable for you is a place you have created yourself. You fulfilled your own need, kudos for that.

[Prokofy Neva]

And you can't post about other games at WoW now formally because they've completely removed the Off Topic forums. Other games are considered "off topic". Mission accomplished.

[Lucifer Baphomet]

Prok, regarding setting up your own forum, its as easy as setting up a blog.....

There are a number of free forum providers out there mostly using PHPBB, I set the DoD up on one of those many moons ago, and from registering it to having it live literally took minutes.

I would however recommend if you follow that route to avoid freeforums.org, their customer service is on a par with LL, and their practices are even more uneven handed.

The DoD had gone quiet since SC2 started up, and it got purged with no warning along with many other smaller quieter boards, there was an uproar on their support forums, and they went about deleting all the threads complaining about it.

[Prokofy Neva]

You didn't listen to what I already said, Lucifer.

I already had my own forums some times ago, perhaps you remember, also PHP software. I tried two different versions, one free, one pay. Both were crappy. Both had spam that was hard to control even with the settings tweaked. I just got tired of it. Too much work.

I don't like forums. Blogs are ok, and I like lists. They're old-fashioned, but nice and clean and organized by contrasted with the many threads on forums.

[cube inada]

Speaking of moderation: - i read your post at dusans about the "teen" and techne stuff.. i "had" posted this last week,, but dusan dosent post my stuff...:)

its not a bang on "comment" since it was posted first.. but does IMO offer another POV as to "generations" within the virtual.

Thank you. Your comment is awaiting moderation.

i know all the vr stuff is shiny and great for book deals and meta..but i wonder if instead of “new” waiting times , if that a more clinical examnination of the last 40 years of virtuality shouldnt be of more interest.

that “American culture” was the TV. The box created an interface to shared “moments” since lets call it 1960, as we elected our first TV star leader, then watched him killed on the same medium.

As for avatars, we have actors,, as for multipuppeaered avatars we had Muppets on Sesammme street and animated cartoon characters TEACHING our children since the late 60s with more “face time” than mom/dad or teacher.

Its true “childhood” was a 18-19th century invention in many ways(marketing/machines/city living birthed), but as we segment more (marketing again-machine needs to quantify to monetize)in current times it seems that its not only children who get older… but adults who perpetually keep acting younger. — WE flatten, as we know network machines tend to do….
natural life forms curves when graphed…machine systems flatten lines with a spike here and there, that spike usually considered the anonomoly that must be debugged.

a world of 21 year olds living via a machine and being deleted by said machine as a system?
Logans Run… run runner run!..:)

food for human thought,

[Prokofy Neva]

Dusan doesn't let you post on his blog?! Geez... I guess it's because you call him out on his symbiotic relationship with the Lindens.

Even so, I think Dusan is basically the hero of SL. I don't like everything he does but he's decent and sincere, as far as I can tell. That counts a lot for me.

Since I remember TV before 1960, going back to 1958, well, I don't agree completely about Kennedy being a TV-made phenom. That is, I'm well aware of what Marshall McLuhan taught us in the media class I took at U of T. He said that because Nixon hadn't worn a blue shirt, instead of a white shirt, and because he wasn't extremely clean shaven, he looked like a dirty bum. That is, those who were already practiced and telegenic knew that in that era of TV, you had to wear a blue shirt, to make it come out looking white. If you wore a white shirt as you might normally do in a business situation, your shirt would come out looking yellow on TV -- i.e. crappy. Unless you were scrupulously shaven and even pancake-made-up, you would look like you had a 3-day-old beard. So you had to attend to those things.

Kennedy did, and he just looked better.

This was McLuhan's analysis at the time, anyway. But I think Kennedy would have won anyway.

As for "watch him be killed" -- that's just not true. There was no footage of him being assassinated on TV. There were newscasts, but that famous footage only came out and was shown later.

McLuhan used to call the television box "the great reducer". It would reduce a war into a box; it would reduce detergent into a box; it would reduce Mickey Mouse into a box; it was all in one box now, in your living room, all equal.

I agree that Sesame Street is a great evil. I would only sparingly let my kids watch it because it was constantly pushing a leftist political line and constantly pushing the multi-culti bullshit. I would watch it and point things out to them. I would watch and point out the ghetto stoop and the ghetto garbage cans and say, "No, you don't HAVE to live like that, no, that's NOT to be celebrated."

Sesame Street glorified the ghetto and made it seem like the ghetto was the center or even goal of our culture when it was not. They did that as a way of "reaching black children in the inner-city" -- but I'm not sure that those self-same black children didn't realize at some level they were being "handled."

I directly blame Sesame Street for that glorification of the ghetto in the evocation of the Hip Hop culture which is very cynical about violence.

One of the things I really hated about the manipulations of Sesame Street was that if you criticized anything about it culturally, the developers and their "progressive" supporters would ridicule you for "reading something into" what was "merely a puppet". They played the puppet card on you constantly.

One day I remember that this perfectly attuned PC show that was constantly trying to create this fictitious rainbow coalition image messed up and let through a stereotype -- against Poles. They had some sort of Polish characters on; one was named typically Wanda; they said "Let's go bowling," as if that's all Polish people do, etc. I pointed this out to my half-Russian children so they could start to break through the Sesame shill.

There was one of those moments of my son's childhood I will never forget. I usually didn't buy all those Disnified and commercialized toys for my children. They were expensive, and sort of ruined their imagination. Sometimes I'd have to break down and buy a Barney or something, but they had a wide variety of toys and a vivid imaginary play life with them, as my brother and I did when we were little.

One day we were outside walking to the park, and a mother and her kid in a stroller were ahead of us on the crosswalk. The toddler capriciously threw his Elmo doll out of the stroller. A car came and ran over it, dragging it along and crushing it.

The mom and toddler looked back -- he didn't care, she didn't care, she'd buy him another, she just left it. My son ran over and dusted the Elmo off. We looked at it eacher. We realized: this is how we like Elmo lol -- missing an eye, with his foot crushed, he is no longer perfect and now more likeable. This became one of my son's most precious toys lol.

And BTW, the guy who works with Dusan now used to write for them (or some children's TV program, I forget the specifics) and I really find that evil and I don't like his lefty politics and argue with him constantly (he's the one who did that sappy AIDS story thing on SL). But Dusan is sort of more magnanimous about these things and just appreciates his skils, I guess.

[cube inada]

see. i didnt mind the message of Sesamme Street... What I argue now was the methods.

a few of us, finally learned to deconstuct the medium, but most, only FEEL it...the hum of the static... or the need for the soundtrack in their lives...:)

I am all for multicutural stuff as the "visuals" for kiddies... in fact that WAS the real Good that came out of Seseame street....

what was the BAD was the "flattened" depth of knowlege as "factoids" and the "faux IQ of repeating rythms and hyms...

it was the "testing" methods just visualized by repetition...

as for JFK killed-- its the cumalitve 40 years i speak of,, and "back and to the left" as Oliver stone (master of media) gave us...and polls indicate his JFK movie is the new history for the under 30 set.

great reducer -- Tv set. i agree- but it wasnt the box. it was the "network".... not the tool - but what "medium" WE made of it... and again mcluhan only really got to see the EAR EYE media reduction from one way elecric broadcasts....

the PC. GUI. post 1980 brought us.. HAND EYE media reduction/flattening....get it.. LL logo?.. no accident:) INTERACTION...and NOW IMMERSION..we dont augemnt ourslves with machines... machines augemnt themsleves with US....:)

HAND EYE is pre language tribal... it virtualization and link to networked machines...the REAL ISSUES that all the "story" stuff or "whatever meta" pundist cant see.. their too literate..

look at all the fool writers who missed web2.0 bis models and gave huffinton 300m on their free work...

one can "forgive" housewives making shoes for phillip due to "shiny ignorance" of sillicon valley scams...2.0 style...

but when we have a generation of seseame street jounalists..cough cogh... NOT getting the scam... and being the victims of it...

well.. were fcked.

[cube inada]

puppets....
henson... and SStreet...

thats a whole other conversation...

but its one about AVATARS, and the CARTOON culture....and IP.:) and MONEY.

and of course you do realize that today.. 40 years later... seseame street isnt the "owner" of the puppets--HENSONs works

but DISNEY is.

[cube inada]

odd. i think the blog here ate my first response.. i had a longer post before the "puppets" one...

oh well.

maybe itll show up... blame the machine...lol

[Prokofy Neva]

It went in the spam filter for some reason, I posted it.

[c3]

ah. ok thanks.
i just logged in at my studio machine, and i see it.

HAND EYE... "to understand by doing" -- "but in virtuality all actions are mediated by man and his technologies limits"

that reality is what we must teach all to comprehend.

Sesame Street should have been "about the cameras and edit bays" not reading and writing.

that IMO has been the problem.;)

All those who try to tell "stories" ( as they were) in immersive media will also fail the generation after them.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, again, to me, it's about the *politicizing" of the story-telling and embedding the politics into the tech and using the tech to disseminate politics.

A good example of what I mean is by Dusan's partner in Startled Cat, who had the Story Quest project in SL.

Here's the Metanomics show transcript.

They see themselves as a *progressive* organization that helps inculcate that political perspective into culture.

http://www.slideshare.net/WeAreRemedy/metanomics-transcript-dec-9-2690477

So you get this:

"JENA BALL: I'm the coordinator of Karuna, which is the National Library of Medicine funded Sim for HIV/AIDS. And one of our mandates is to educate and tell people stories of those who are dealing with HIV/AIDS. One of the biggest problems we've had is the stigma attached to HIV. People don't want to get help. They don't want to be educated. They don't want to even be seen going into clinics to get information about prevention. And, of course, there's a lot of assumptions and stereotypes about people who have HIV/AIDS. So I got to thinking, "How could we debunk some of those stereotypes and help people understand that this is very real and human condition that we can empathize with?" And I thought, "Well, I'll tell a story of someone who had HIV/AIDS." So I came up with this character, Uncle D. I built out his life. And his life includes everything from his cat to his phone messages to his journals to his house to his garden which you can wander around. And, through learning about his story and imagining yourself in his story, you're educated, but you're also learn to empathize with someone with HIV/AIDS."

And we never, ever hear that Uncle D promiscuously fucked probably hundreds of men, treating them like tissue, to get this disease. That there's an essential *problem* with this cultural value called "promiscuity" and that is not only in that it demeans other human beings; it also is risky behaviour that causes this disease.

So there's no stigma on behaviour that is objectionable. Instead, we are to treat people with AIDS in this warm-bath multi-culti PC cultural fest as people who have something like, oh, diabetes or Parkinson's disease.

That's the sort of lying I hate. I think you can promote the values of tolerance and values of compassion without lying about negative features of the culture you are trying to get everybody to "assimilate".

[Prokofy Neva]

Also note their collectivist ideology at work (they are part of that "communities of practice" cult), one that degrades capitalist competition (except by small consulting companies who do SL development ROLF).

And note how gamification, collectivization -- they alway come together, these leftist ideologies that always start out saying they are just here to "help" and "educate" and always wind up being part of what controls people in authoritarian ways:

JENA BALL: I'd like to add to that because Brent has, without any compunction whatsoever, continued to push Marty and I to grow as well. We've had some pretty long discussions. But I love that. I love that about him. I love that about our partners. If I had one thing to say is that Second Life is part of a new shift I think, in thinking, in terms of education, in terms of how we see one another. But I love that we can come here to collaborate and think in terms of not competition--we're shifting away from that competitive model and moving towards a collaborative global model. And Second Life to me, particularly the stories, are indicative of that and a perfect way to build empathy, learn how to collaborate and support one another. Yes, I agree with you, Brent. CHRISTINA GALANIS: Well, of course, I agree with both of them. I think the only thing that I would add is that I'm really intrigued lately with building in more and more of an adventure or game into stories and into the information we're trying to give out. I'm a big fan of treasure hunts in Second Life. I'll freely admit it to being a shoe junky. And what I've noticed is that people get really engaged with trying to win, even if they don't need it. But building in the game, the reward system, I think, is something I really want to dig deeper into and how that ties in to the stories.

[c3]

right.. i agree. its all kinda "yadda yadda" to me...

remember--- racism to me was shown as "STUPID" at 10 years old.. cause the Black white guy and the white black guy-- both had no planet anymore...;)

lots of runnings, lots of yelling, lots of cool forcefields. frank gorshen,, AND --oh yeah.. a moral "hidden" in the story...

but immersive media is not about these types of stories..and all those with specific agendas of story will fail...

Lucas failed...and all the cool cats and dogs of this media will figure that out again... soon.

wrong medium for their message.