A prim tornado set off by MC Fizgig, the alt of Prof. Edward Clift of Woodbury, from land he owned right next to mine in Furness, purchased deliberately to harass me and my tenants. This photo was one I took obviously, with my old blonde avatar in the foreground, but now it is on MindBlizzard.
By Prokofy Neva, Virtualator
I had plans for better things to do today but I'll have to put in a little time to debunk this outrageous "history" Chic Aeon has come out with. She's been building anticipation for weeks and other blogs have touted it -- they are such an echo chamber but even together, none of them make up the traffic that SL political blogs once had in their heyday, and of course approach nothing like the traffic of fashion blogs, which is pretty much all there is in the blogosphere these days.
I was born in September 2004 in SL, and so I know these events not by hearsay or by the scrubbed version one encounters in various famous books, such as by Shamlet Linden. I lived them; in fact, they directly affected me and I was at their epicenter in some cases. But you don't need me for this history, which ultimately isn't "about me". You can google the events and read about them in the tech press and blogs of the day which still have archives. The deterioration of this record is what is prompting me to write a book now, which will take awhile, even though some think I write a book daily on my blog. I actually have not blogged since 2016 on any regularly basis for many reasons due to RL jobs, family needs, travel, poor health, etc. I think when you work all day blogging the war in Ukraine as I did from 2013-2018, you really don't have much left over for any other kind of blogging. The news writing that is much like blogging these days which I did from 2018-2019, and the continued jobs I have today really don't leave much desire to blog. There also isn't the audience of like-minded or even educated persons around SL as there once was, but more on that another time.
History is written by the victors, but in this case, Chic Aeon, a talented but still mediocre figure on the SL landscape, prone to obsequiousness to Linden Lab like others of her cohort, isn't really so much a victor so much as someone who, for reasons that remain obscure to me, has given up her content creation and store (which had buildings that tended toward the concrete block school of architecture, but were still nice, and various other furnishings), but has decided to stay in the SL ambit by joining what she views as the "winning side". People have all kinds of valid reasons for exiting out of the SL economy, and it's not my business and they could be valid. But like Da5id Weatherwax, Phil the Furniture Guy and legions of other forums posters with time on their hands, their hatred of those who remain solvent or at least productive and still in business seems to drive their forums posts and blogging. They stream comment like this to help convince themselves their choices were valid more than anything else.
I'll do some short, basic takes now and fill in more later. The bold text is from Chic Aeon.
The Tax on Prims (2003)
I wasn't here then. SL was very new. But when I joined a few years later I remember reading about the uproar when The Lab decided that they would charge a weekly fee for EACH prim rezzed -- much like a tax. I remember seeing screenshots of protesters, meetings, outraged citizens -- you get the picture. This didn't last too long. Now and then The Lab backs down :D.
The operative thing to understand about the Prim Tax Revolt is that it is a Lab-approved and even iconic resistance that they cherish in their own corporate history as much as Americans do the Revolution of 1776. This Prime Tax Revolt even had crates of tea that it set afloat in the Linden Sea -- IM me if you somehow missed getting one at every freebie yard in the last 18 years. So it's not really an iconic movement of user resistance -- it's about some Linden alts and friends versus other Linden alts and friends, starting with "Fleatbyte" who was Linden.
Some Lindens and their alts (and that is well-documented and known by earlier residents and Lindens if not those today), took the side that this policy was misguided, when other Lindens applied it -- which is how it can become an approved iconic revolt -- otherwise, the truth about it would disappear into the mists of history. They still disappear here, because Chic doesn't explain the basic problem with this "prim tax" idea -- there are only so many prims per sim. What USED to happen is that one person would hog all the prims on their parcel -- often the free 4096 m2 parcels given to Charter Members or Founding Members as they are sometimes described. So people used to stockpile prims, rezzing and sinking huge numbers to be able to have them in a storehouse when they felt like building. Then they would disappear and play WoW, which started simultaneously with SL, and no one could build; hence the howling. THAT was more the problem then "paying the prim tax" -- which some wealth people with six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley could easily do. So what the Lab did was simply allocate prims per square meter, 3 per 16. Today, more has been added to those amounts, so now you get 512 with 175 prims, whereas in the old days it was 117. Some people objected to this collectivization approach apportion equal amounts to each meter, which was like their collectivization of script time later, but given the Tragedy of the Commons, it was a rational decision.
Once again d0 note that I am a registered Democrat in NYS, I voted for Obama and Biden, I loathe Ayn Rand and find her one of the creepiest anti-human authors out there, and I don't hold any "Randian" views or any kind of extreme capitalist notions like Schumpeter "creative destruction". I'm for regulated business in a liberal democracy in a rule of law. I'm not for socialism because most of the time, that involves committees of you and your friends taking over and deciding things without democratic participation, or substituting mass voting without any checks and balances on the system as some kind of plebiscite. I refuse to accept any idea that I don't understand what real socialism is, having observed it first hand for 50 years. I also don't "write about the Soviet Union" any more because it collapsed in 1991, and I'm not a historian. Now and then I will write about some historical moment to explain some present issue but many people mix me up with others with very similar names, so let's point out once again: I'm not a journalist in Minnesota; I have never been accused of plagiarism; I have never worked for the State Department, CIA or any other government agency; Radio Liberty, where I worked as a contractor for some years on weekly newsletters and features, is a Congressionally-funded independent agency which was removed from the CIA in the 1970s when I was in high school and you weren't born yet so you have no clue about the history; I don't work for Greenpeace; I am not an expert on terrorism; I have not written any histories of the Soviet Union anywhere; my sole book on Amazon which is self-published is about Edward Snowden; any other report I've taken part in, during my long career in NGOs and media, has been about contemporary issues in Eurasia with other authors. I do not live on welfare; I have two children whom I did not adopt and did not eat, either.
Copybot Scandal (2006)
I was here for this one. The lab had reportedly made the viewer code available to the masses and in that move opened the door to copybot theft. Creators as you might imagine were livid. A prominent protest campaign featured shots of famous folks in the nude (tastefully of course and honestly the bodies then were nothing to be proud of anyway). I tracked down a couple of the famous posters. (WARNING naked avatar picture here :D) They were everywhere back then. The thing that I found the most insulting (and I wasn't a creator back then) was that the Linden Lab's point of view was "well they can't get the scripts so it really doesn't matter". That is pretty much a direct quote. The idea that all the time people spent making skins and hair and such "didn't really count" was extremely insulting.
Cory Ondrejka, CTO of SL, made the viewer code (not the server code) available as open source, but the reason he was driven to do this was because a group made up largely of griefers who crashed sims among the many "experiments" they did, called libsl, who believed in "liberating" SL, had ALREADY reversed-engineered the viewer code, which was not that hard to do. Their reverse-engineering, illegal under the TOS, was ALREADY done for months on end before the Lindens moved to release the viewer code for third-party development. It was blessing a fait accompli, and Cory was blessing i in keeping with his copy-leftist techno-libertarian/communist ideology, although Cory served in the Navy, and also worked for the NSA (imagine that!) but as we know from Snowden, people with those profiles, who wear one earring and have a female avatar in SL although not gay, can have very sectarian views they develop on the Internet or in social circles that the government has little influence over. Cory ultimately had a falling out with Philip over this, and left the Lab; he believed in releasing the server code as well. Philip thought this would destroy their equity, and of course he was right about that.
I first experienced Copybot when a known griefer named Babu TP'd me to his known griefer sim and proceeded to copy my avatar head to toe, several times over, and put a chorus line of them on a beach, with their heads slumped the way bots always appear when they are not animated by real human beings. He bragged about the script/code to do this, so I began to investigate further within libsl and in the rumour mill around town. I discovered that Electric Sheep Co. (with its group Counting Sheep), a then-famous developer and one of the "Big 6" taking contracts with giant corporations like IBM within SL and making scads of money with the Lab's help, had one staff person who was in libsl and who had access to this code, whom I knew personally; he and another resident (who tragically later was killed in a car accident in RL) came to my discussion meetings or I met them at meet-ups. Electric Sheep in fact used it themselves on hidden islands in work for a client. Herald reporters went a viewed these "repeats" in action. They were making "shards" as if it were WoW to try to solve the problem of the concert with only 160 on 4 sims able to attend. So they were hoping to duplicate avatars across sims. This same company also instituted a searchable database of ALL the objects within SL which caused enormous alarm over privacy concerns. Their project never got off the ground, and their database was removed from SL -- how, is a mystery, as the Lindens never commented.
When I attempted to report on these doings, which were well established, with source interviews documented, I rapidly ran up against the kind of problem you run into working for Russian media, when an oligarch or government official decides you have stepped on his toes. This of course happens in the US as well. Electric Sheep funded the Alphaville Herald at the time when Urizenus Sklar, the original founder and editor had stepped down and handed it to Walker Spaight, who was more of a commercial kind of guy and who is now in the lawn furniture business in Michigan, I believe, or if I don't have that right, something pretty close to it. Walker had an interesting trajectory through SL -- becoming a Linden for a time, where the Lindens tried to use him as an enforcer to rein in the "Metaverse Engineers" and wild graphic artists and such under the guise of "helping" them "get the word out"; he then worked for the Sheep and other companies in this well-funded start up in California which was kept highly secret, but as far as I can tell, involved a kind of bro app where you could IM any person in the room and flirt with them or try to get a date with them. Since this also involved privacy issues it collapsed and was replaced by other apps and the various developers went their separate ways; Electric Sheep went out of business. Today, Counting Sheep is a group that is a good graveyard of developers -- the famous Metaverse Evangelist Roo Reynolds from IBM, known as Algernon Spackler inworld, has not logged on since 2008. The rash of Rip Van Winkle style recent log-ins from some of these old characters makes me wonder if the Lindens are hiring more contractors again, although they have the Moles already. Someone pointed out to me it could be Sansar-related.
But back in the Copybot era, Electric Sheep reigned supreme, with access to TV companies and others with deep pockets, numerous staff hired out of the SL resident base, and they were flush with VC and client cash, with all the scandals that can involve, a certain turnover of staff.
So Walker told me to remove my claims that Electric Sheep was involved in Copybot. There was a nuance here -- they may have privately used in for a client on a private sim, but they felt that they shouldn't be indicted for its leakage into the world by a few griefers -- even though their staff member was in the same griefer group, libsl which had indeed deliberately leaked it into the world for ideological reasons. The overlay among griefers/respectable scripters/Lindens is pretty porous and their groupthink and ideology pretty much sings in unison on the open source cult base.
I had no choice but to remove the text and sit by while Walker made an "apology" to his overlords, if I wanted to keep my "job" at the Herald -- a virtual job which didn't pay anything but which provided some visibility at the time as it was very popular. Then years later I confirmed again the story about the release of Copybot from a somewhat drug-addled staffer, and I think this isn't disputed -- and in any event, after doing two books on SL and the Metaverse, the Herald editors went on to pursue other interests and the Herald is only an archive now -- except for a creepy appearance to interview the atrocious weev, who once told me that he would like to take a chainsaw to my male avatar. That's how they are, you know.
So the Herald, the Lindens, their hangers-on, all took the position of scorn against creator concerns over Copybot, since they viewed anything you could see in your viewer as vulnerable to copying, and therefore due to the "analog hole," available to the unscrupulous to copy and benefit from without the original creator's involvement. It's theft, and theft more recognized as such today, but the copy-leftism of yesteryear that destroyed first the music business, then the media business is never recalled by the victors as destructive as it was, putting many many, journalists, newspapers, musicians, companies out of business. Today, the encryption that was in fact available to start https, a sacred belief system of techies question today, could have been used to secure music and content but techies would always claim you could never have perfect encryption. A longer story, but the ideological shifts on this over time, the failure for any mass cases of imprisonment of children and their parents for copying on Napster, which is now retired under a hail of lawsuits, can't be forgotten.
What happened inworld, outside the realm of wealthy tech developers and their griefer friends in libsl? (One of them was later hired away from his SL passtimes by Intel -- prompting the question for me, at least, whether Intel's experiments in virtual worlds at the time, since invisible, were so intensive for them that they were willing to sabotage LL).
The climate on the forums and blogs and forums was in many was just like the current gatchapocalypse, but with more resistance and more civil society.
The difference was that the "little dressmakers" as they were sneeringly called, much like gatcha makers are called "carnies" today or "losers" who can't make a sale without this avid "gambling" device, rebelled, big time. Along with major creators. They shuttered their stores, which were more important in an era without the Lab's Marketplace; there was only a resident SLexchange at the time which was cumbersome to use, involving the keeping of an SLexchange box on land inworld; it wasn't in the viewer with drag and drop. So they really could ban anyone from store entry. Big signs about Copybot went up all over. Hundreds of storekeepers were involved. I did not make content in those days other than textured prim boxes, but I had tenants who had been Copybotted or feared it, and I helped them put up signs and helped the boycott of sales as well until the Lindens would act. Some of my tenants went out of business and I lost rent, but more importantly, the era of lenience and even celebration of Copybot didn't last long because the Lindens finally acted.
Of course, the techies sneered at Copybot concerns, and of course found easy targets in the panic-stricken and ill-informed creators, who used devices and methods people evolved to address the threat, which of course didn't work -- these persist today in forms like the belief that an object not on "mod" is harder to copybot. Having seen how texture exploits work and the original Copybot, I can tell you it has nothing to do with mod or transfer; what is in the viewer and seeable can be copied by any device inworld or out. Yet people persisted with these "anti-copybot" devices, sold by the unscrupulous, which supposedly worked on the principle of disruption.
I remember one day distinctly, as I sat in Blue Linden's office hour, and he himself dismissed concerns about copying, claiming it wasn't widespread. I proceeded to copy his "labstah trap" as I sat there and put the textures on prims for all to see; even dummies like me could learn some of the basic exploits. I can't claim that my little demonstration helped turn the tide at all (although I will claim my famous "pizza guy" blog for changing Linden attitudes on "officer recall" in group tools). But it helped create the climate -- because many, many people pushed back against the few cynical assholes who did not care about little people making little things for a living.
All the protests did finally get the attention of the Lindens; we had multiple meetings with Robin Linden, then VP of Program/Community/whatever (anyone can find her and ask her about this, she may talk, her RL name is Robin Harper) who finally worked with techs to come up with TOS language to ban the use of Copybots and make it a punishable offense. Those hoping for copy-leftism to prevail by fiat were disappointed by these "corporate sellouts" at the Lab who yes, liked to get tier paid from customers making content and stay in business. It was an indication of the leverage the user base, particularly content creators have over the Lab, but which they seldom use, given the propensity of the Lab for retaliation against dissent -- unless it's preapproved like the "Prim Tax Revolt".
The Anshe Chung Griefer Attack (2006)
I don't remember this really but reading bout flying penises I can't say that it was anything very unusual back then. Griefing was much more prominent in those days. The sandboxes were notorious for all sorts of particle attacks, cages and the like -- certainly scary to new folks. That could still be going on but I haven't seen much in years. I believe sim owners have more control now than they did back then, but I can't say that for certain. I pretty much just exited the area when something I didn't like was happening. HOME is just a click away after all.
So much that Chic doesn't remember at all, yet feels she can opine on and become a celebrated "SL Historian" over! Griefing was more widespread, but for it to appear on an island as distinct from the Mainland, and an island controlled by one of the Big Six developers on behalf of a prominent media company -- no, that was special. This incident and similar ones was not AT ALL about sandboxes, and PS particle attacks happened all over, particularly against my rentals and those of other rental agents because griefers do not like people with RL simulation and want to kill it off, not only in the name of "creativity," but to control the world with their own nihilist, collectivist -- and as we have come to see, racist and misogynist -- ideologies.
I *do* remember, because I was there, and more to the point, the Woodbury/Patriotic Nigras griefer (yes, there was a group by that disgusting name) created an alt using a last name similar to mine, something like Griefer FitzHugh, and used my openly-named email address to create it. That's certainly easy to do and I doubt there are any fences against that behaviour today.
They could appear inworld with that name having established it as supposedly "from me" before I would have a chance to notice it and report it to the Lindens, which of course I did instantly. They know that I didn't create the account and the effort to link me to the attack and somehow ruin my reputation as a "griefer" failed, because the Lindens can see log-ons and IP addresses and they aren't stupid, even when anonymizers are used. So this Fitz-something swooped into a press conference that the whole world was watching. THAT part Ms. Aeon, who can flee home when she sees flying penises like any of us, failed to convey. Daniel Terdiman of CNET, who wrote frequently on SL, and who had put Anshe Chung on the cover of Business Week, and other journalists joined him for a press conference to discuss this world-famous cover about becoming a millionaire in SL. The ideology of griefers, as I have noted, involves a totalitarian movement to destroy anyone who wants to use the Internet or a virtual world in particular for what they cynically describe as "srs bizness". Yes, all these companies from Reuters to IBM in SL wanted to use the platform for serious business, and Anshe, while an inworld business, made amounts that put her in a RL business category.
So the griefers wanted to deface this with flying penises, which floated in front of all the TV cameras to speak, causing the organizers terrible dismay and basically sinking the event. Again: this is not just "kids"; this is not just "pranksters"; these are adults with concerted ideologies and methods that echo some of the world's totalitarian movements, which began as partisans.
How could this happen? A lot of scrutiny has been made of the island owners -- the Big Six development company -- who contracted to CNET for this, as well as it should, as I think they were problematic myself. The Big Six had common griefers in their midst; quality control was lax, and need for scripters and designers desperate.
They left autoreturn at 0. Why did they do this? Because they claimed that if an island is set to a group, and group members have to be invited before they can rez anything, that anyone attempting to rez a prim will see that prim bounce if they are not an invited group member. And that's correct, up to a point, until you factor in rogue viewers, which were reverse engineered and tinkered to have exploits of Copybot and the ability to rez anywhere, so that autoreturn should have been put on anyway. Those of us on Mainland sims who endured constant attacks had long since learned to have group roles AND autoreturn.
Plus, a security force should have immediately ejected the griefers; they didn't. They got to do a lot of damage before anyone moved.
This story went all around the world, and handily destroyed LL's reputation and saw many copycats for years to come. Ultimately neither Anshe or Daniel Terdiman were so much hurt by this as the Lab. Big business didn't keep streaming in, and died out in 2007. PS I think straight men are more disturbed than women at seeing flying penises; if there's any flying to be done with them, they want to do the flying.
Virtual Pedophilia Scandal (2007)
This definitely added to the less than stellar reputation that SL was gathering around itself. Nasty stuff. Even though the participants were supposedly adults it was a very uncomfortable business. It was around this time I think that age verification came into play -- not the "what year were you born" box on sign up but lots and lots of paperwork very similar to what you have to do to process credit now. Passports etc -- and a fairly steep charge.
I found this mention via Google which suggests my memory is working well.
I don't know HOW someone can style themselves as an "SL Historian" without any facts, any links, any actual substance to what they are writing -- and then mixing up different events to boot. All of this is findable. And no, the age-verification came in well AFTER the age-play scandals, and was more about the need to establish an adult continent for adult sex in general than about the specific issue of minors joining the world of SL and being preyed upon -- a smaller problem than that of adults engaging in child pornography.
The Lindens tolerated "ageplay" as it was euphemistically known (although it is a word banned on the SL forums), and some even said, enjoyed it, given the strange splash pages showing avatars that looked like they were 12 at the time, wearing jewelry that some conspiracy theorists said signaled to pederasts. I have no confirmation of that, other than to say yes, that splash page did have a child, just like the hentai children allowed for years on end in the search and event functions on the viewer. There is less of that now, so nobody remembers.
Many people were upset at child pornography in SL. They were of the type you find in the American Midwest who are religious and conservative. So they tackled this in ways that made them easy targets, as the bien pensant continued to insist on "free speech", and even after the tinkering of various US officials on this law (like John Ashcroft even from his sickbed) generally, in the US, the cartoon or fictional or graphics novel sort of depiction of children in this manner remained "protected speech".
So the Lindens did nothing. I recall one particularly horrible scene where someone summoned me as a witness, as a group of people who were either actual or RP Native Americans in SL held a picket across from a venue with very sick child pornography in it. I had only the vaguest sense of who all these people were -- I was asked to come because I was a blogger and reporter for the Herald. A Linden hovered in the sky nearby observing, but not kicking anybody. I cammed inside the building, and at first I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. That's because I had never seen a photograph of a child in RL, or at that time, in SL, in bondage-wear practicing BDSM. I couldn't compute it at first, seeing these tiny bodies in their pajamas patterned with animals or flowers. There were both RL and SL pictures, all horrendous. Before I could gather my wits about me and screenshot this, something I was reluctant to do because then it would be on my hard-drive and make me possibly liable (but which I thought might help the Lindens eliminate it), the owners deleted all the prims. They removed the entire house and disappeared.
One Linden, Adam (Chad) Linden to be precise, angered at the laxness on this topic, wrote up a card with warnings against ageplay, although it was not really firmly established in the TOS. He would hand it out, referencing other countries; German prosecutors had already signaled they were examining SL and in fact a group of German pedophiles who were arrested in RL turned out to have SL accounts and screenshots -- so we were told by media at the time although I do not believe there are any court records anyone can find to prove this -- but do try.
That's my recollection but like everything in history, has to be researched -- which Aeon did not do whatsoever. But we all know there were German prosecutors, and that set LL finally into motion. That Linden, the son of a policeman with a rather chequered career in SL, ended up being fired for, among other things, punching out a resident at the SLCC in Chicago, but that's another story.
Even as the Lindens began to develop and enforce a policy against ageplay, there was one rather prominent developer and builder in SL named csven Concord, who happened to have a sandbox in Patagonia near my rentals, who kept justifying this awful activity in the most creepy "libertarian" way possible. So a very long fight broke out on a blog of that era called Clickable Culture, edited by Tony Walsh, a crucial blog in the day run by Metaverse thinker outside the LL ambit and not as biased as an SL resident. He played a very important role in SL and while at first I could not find him, turns out he showed up when Dusan Writer (Doug Thomas) noted that he is now the CEO of a game development company called Phantom Compass.
He said he could not resurrent the archives now.
So this supreme asshole resident stormed and stormed on this topic. He tried to make much of the fact that every US state has a different drinking age. That the draft age is lower than the drinking age. And blah blah blah. All in the quest to justify this activity with minors, even as young as 2 or 7. I would mention what I saw as proof of how this was not about 17 year old twinks, and he would then claim my failure to call the FBI meant I myself was liable. It was extraordinary how he harassed and bullied me for weeks on end on this point, claiming that my "failure to act" over something I saw briefly in a virtual world and didn't document or get law enforcement on -- while a Linden hovered actionless nearby -- somehow implicated me -- a classic "turning the tables" technique used by every sectarian -- and griefer -- in the Universe and Metaverse.
Of course, you can't call the FBI when you don't have a screenshot, or even room chat, in a game, essentially, and make a claim. It was removed very fast as I said over and over again. This asshole would then claim that a swingset that some RP family had in my rentals meant that I myself tolerated ageplay, which is ridiculous, I ejected anyone who had child avatars with adult content in their rental, regardless of whether they were caught in the act. If someone has a child avatar and is playing "family," and has out a swingset, that's not proof they are "ageplayers". I'm more suspicious than most in this regard, and bar child avatars from my camping areas because this is a venue I have seen time and again in fact turn into adult behaviour -- and get removed by the Lindens. Why did the "playground" in Pompei get abandoned or seized and turn up on the auction last week? Let's literally not be children here.
I had never taken an interest in this topic as one to crusade on, which is valid but I think issues like torture, trafficking, etc. are more widespread where I could contribute at the time, given the huge number of groups on this topic already. I came to discover that those who engage in ageplay are an organized, proactive, vindictive, networked, determined bunch. I had had no idea. They have destroyed the careers of multiple journalists who have tried to take them on. Their capacity for retaliation is enormous, and they were all over SL and still exist today.
For this reason, and others having to do with the need for payment forms on file to start the adult grid of Zindra (more the point about age verification than the child pornography scandal) the Lindens introduced the age verification, which worked badly, which found people like me who submitted our driver's licenses and credit cards and who had histories in SL, unable to get to our own land in Zindra due to glitches. No matter, eventually they were resolved, but Zindra never became as popular as they had hoped to siphon off all adult activity from the main areas of the grid.
Ban on Gambling (2007)
It's hard to imagine how pervasive gambling was in Second Life. Small establishments and huge casinos covered the mainland. I am sure there were many on estates then, but there weren't nearly as many private regions as there are now. You would get paid to camp (sit to earn money) at the slot machines and play. There were money trees in many gambling establishments. And unfortunately plenty of people lost plenty of money giving in to their addictions. I was happy to see the casinos disappear but a LOT of people left when the change occured.
This is a total muddle, and leaves out the far more damaging High Net Investment Programs, which were basically ponzi schemes but not completely; the banks; the stock markets; the credit unions; the land loan operations, etc. etc.
There were many slot machines all over, including one originally made by Philip Linden himself with a fairy motif which was once in the Linden Library. His script was banned but not deprecated as it took money from people's accounts without their permission. The main problem of these machines is that they had no checks on your balance -- they could draw it down completely and leave it in the negative. So few people wanted them on their property. I got rid of them within a week from Coney Island -- and I had camping chairs for not much longer there, as they drained your account. Some people had large amounts of cash to pay for them; gambling itself gave them that float, which I personally did not wish to maintain in SL, though it was legal at the time.
I made a sort of parody game for awhile in the tower in Ross called "Barons" I think, where we would guess which land baron would win an auction, based on its various features and their histories, and have a kitty for the person who guessed correctly to win. It had some avid players for awhile but it fell fallow even before the Lindens removed the full sim land auctions.
Camping is not gambling, however. And that's why this is so stupid and misleading. Camping chairs merely required an avatar to sit for 1-5-10 minutes or longer, with a payout for X amount of time. They could see the payout and got the payout; no random factor whatsoever. It was not like a Lucky Chair that might have your letter, or a Sploder that randomly might reward you the kitty at a club; the chair were very straightforward. You sat, you were paid a small amount, and you thus generated traffic for that venue.
TEEN GRID DISILLUSIONMENT
I could point out that my young son at the time and his friends on the Teen Grid had their little hearts broken by the camping script, which Philip allowed into the teen grid, a very bad call, with Blue Linden's initiative -- they never met a script they didn't like. I had asked Philip permission to send an email to my son with a rental script, and he approved that and I couldn't see why he shouldn't. The camping script people didn't ask permission but didn't get banned, as I recall. So my son and his pals had a top mall with genuine organic traffic, where they sold armour and weapons and furniture, where they had something they called "Sewer Safari" which was a pipe under ground with quests and gifts. One of the boys scripted a basketball that actually bounced and could be thrown; Philip was amazed. There was nothing like that yet on the adult grid. They put a lot of work into the build, the customer service, and along the way would ask me for advice, but mainly they did it on their own. I was glad they were in Second Life for hours after school, and not someplace worse, and under my supervision from the next room as I worked from home at the time.
But when the other malls introduced camping chairs, which my son and his friends didn't want to use because it was fake, not a real measure of content and attraction, they lost their place in search, they had less customers, and unless they played this game of camping -- for which they didn't have the large amounts of cash, as I and other parents had strictly limited what they spent there. I was proud they could pay for their sim with their own earnings but didn't want to pump anymore real money into it. But other rich parents with the children who got the best sims with Linden insider tips (they were not auctioned in the same way) did better. I was appalled at how the FIC system played out even more grotesquely on the teen grid.
I frankly can never forgive the Lindens for this particular chapter and I hold Blue Linden, put in charge of the Teen Grid, responsible for this bad call (and that is not even the reason I completely broke off all relations with him -- that was related to other bad acts on his part related to the Nebraska stores).
So I saw these boys of 13 and 14 who were in something like a latter day 4H club, something like an AV club which we used to have in high school, all rolled into one and even more so, who were learning how to run a business, who were having a great time, but who were suddenly walloped with this unfair competition which came essentially as a deception -- the traffic on those venues was not authentic, it was the result of paying people to stand around on your land. All the boys fell away from SL gradually after this, and never returned. It was really sad.
Meanwhile, on the adult grid, more havoc was done and also with breaking of young hearts of people who had worked hard to make interesting content and venues. So they went out of business. Eventually, the clamour of merchants once again got the Lindens to ban this. First, they tried tinkering with traffic, and still do, making it so fake methods couldn't affect it; but finally they just banned it completely, although I still camping in some places, and "Fishing" is really the same thing. People sitting in camp chairs had a temptation right in front of them -- slot machines and cheap merchandise, so they doled their camp earnings which were meager given the time spent into those other machines and then were worse off.
Camping did NOT create ready cash for the poor because of the limited amounts and temptations put before sitters -- Money Trees, which were gifts, and various freebie yards were must more helpful to newbies and the poor.
Woodbury University (2007 - 2010) and the Demise of Educational Support
I have no memories of Woodbury at all and reading Ryan's description doesn't bring anything back. I will say that sometime around 2007 Linden Lab stopped supporting teaching. In earlier years there were many schools that taught the ins and outs of Second Life to new residents. There were classes on building throughout the day at various schools. The Lab paid teachers per class and it was a fairly good wage in linden dollars. Some classes were spectacular and some to be painful sat through while IMing a friend and trying to make something amid the horrific instructions.
The system WAS faulty but the abandonment of learning left a large hole in the community for a long time.
This is the worst entry in this "SL History" -- appallingly bad, given how easily Google could correct this idiocy.
Woodbury University was a RL university, a commuter college in California where mainly white children with some minorities studied, children who couldn't get into better schools, and which had a Digital Arts program. The professor of that program, one Edward Cliff, is scrubbed pretty much from view now, but not before some of us tracked his reading of papers at the St. Petersburg Economic Forums, which provides at least one link explaining their fascination with Soviet memes.
The Woodbury students who originally rented from SL were the children of wealthy parents, not poor Blacks, nor minorities of any kind, although one prominent one who is now transgender, could be described as a minority, and a persecuted one at that. In that sense Prof. Clift was wildly tendentious and deceptive claiming that the Lab was harming "minorities" with the decision to put an end to this grief-a-thon.
The dean of the school didn't immediately fall into place supporting that sim as I recall, but then was lax in supervision and late in putting an end to the mayhem. I visited it early on and wrote about it for the Alphaville Herald and it was abundantly clear that this was an SL chapter of 4-chan, the griefer group that has spawned by now real-world terrorists. Some think these are some kind of progressive, edgy youth bravely fighting worthy causes, but they are in fact profoundly conservative and racist and -- need I point it out again -- don't want anyone to use the Internet for anything but a griefer's sandbox. It's a curious kind of dull Ludditism that never gets proper study, as the legion of griefer professors who laud them as "transgressive" don't want to acknowledge their fascistic and communist replays.
Edward Clift flew around in blackface, something that would get him fired today -- large Afros as in Habbo Hotel, where they first invaded as a movement, black skins, and particles with Bill Cosby selling jello. It was a shtick, a griefing caper, and not serious.
They were famous for word-salading, as Urizenus, a linguist by profession, described it -- babbling nonsense and pretending to be serious students or educators or researchers, even hinting at a government clandestine project (nonsense) so that collectively, they made a kind of hyper, electronic Eddie Haskell, if you remember that oligeanous character from "Leave it to Beatver". "Gee, Mrs. Cleaver, what a lovely dress you have on today," he would say, while giving Beaver a wedgie and plotting crime with Theodore, Beaver's older brother, before Ward, the dad, came into to stop it.
They always lied about their griefing and many believed their lies; they always styled themselves as victims, to the point that the PC Chronicle of Higher Events could post articles about the Lindens not promoting and helping education -- a falsehood Aeon echoes here. Nothing of the sort. The Lindens gave discounts to educators; they had droves of them; they had staff dedicated to them. But Woodbury was not about education. It was about perhaps "conceptual art" if you put a lib spin on it, but really more about the banality of evil. They crashed sims, including during Philip's town halls and the goodbye party for Robin Harper. They copybotted content, they harassed Christians with Bible studies, they heckled people they didn't like.
PSEUDO-TERRORISTS
And they griefed me mercilessly for a simple reason: I AR'd them, but I did more than that, contrary to the advice of the timid who say "don't feed the trolls". I reported on their antics. And I'm glad I did and will continue as sunlight is the best disinfectant and silence is surrender. The first time I came to the attention of a Quebecois friend of theirs (ostensibly), an avid 4-chan/PN regular, was when they created an "art show" of the 9/11 towers with big signs "I'm Falling for You" and love hearts, then set them on physics and watched them fall over and over again, as children do.
So the Lindens didn't remove this in the name of free expression, a value they have never displayed on their forums, and while I could acknowledge their "art appreciation," I said this was sickening and that we should morally condemn it so that these people were ostracized. The next thing I know, when I held a 4th of July party on Coney Island in Baileya, someone with a day-old alt with a name like "Muhamed," flew an airplane around and dive-bombed me and my tenants and guests. I didn't think this was high art, either, and AR'd it. Not long after, I saw a group of these same people littering Anshe's land for sale with obscenities. She would leave long autoreturn or no autoreturn so that prospective buyers could test houses. This led to griefing. I reported it. They saw me at the scene, and ever after, I was a target. They looked me up in RL, saw that Russian studies was my field, and harassed and bombarded me with the Soviet theme endlessly, and still do, although less so. Some say they actually dreamed up the Soviet theme just to harass me, but their Soviet grief objects appear to have pre-dated my ARs.
Meanwhile, the Lindens, who didn't care about me and my tenants, really, found other reasons to ban these people about 5 days repeatedly, each time a tender-hearted Linden, one of their own, letting them back, each time them renting an island, each time Edward Clift taking a star turn for the tech and edu press -- it was a marvel to behold. These people were banal, mediocre criminals. They produced no real scholarship. The few papers from one of their crew on Academia can reinforce that point. Their pseudo-scholarly articles in tech or professional press are hilariously bad, like parodies.
None of them count anywhere or have any following today. But at the time people thought this was sacred "education" and should stand. It was truly extraordinary. I could report a lot about this, but what was interesting is that their use of exploits and scripts to crash sims is what got them banned, not their harassment of me or people in Bible studies or stores. Over and over again. Each new edition of "island managers" would immediately become known from social media and you'd have to be blind not to notice their presence. Philip at an earlier point had banned about 100 somethingawful.com griefers and I would point out their enablers who didn't violate the TOS but stockpiled their griefer prims for them in groups and in sandboxes, available for the new alt to come back and collect. That's why I could see the same full perm object with different owners over and over. The techies wailed when Philip deleted all those asssholes, and he didn't do a very thorough job, but it's important to remember that Philip ran a business, even though he was a wild-eyed visionary. He did call in the FBI and the police. He did get his sims back under control. And here we all are.
The legitimate educators in SL, for the most part unrelated to Woodbury, had another problem: even with the non-profit discount, sims and their huge, unnecessary but popular builds cost a lot! Too much! Many folded after a year. They could never seem to understand how to do this smaller, although a few did; I commend that engineering department on the Mainland on a 4096. Then, for reasons unknown, the Lindens removed the educational discount -- long after the Woodbury saga -- when their business enterprise platform Nebraska failed as well. Gradually, they wooed them back, but they are a fraction of what they are now.
As for this bit about how "the Lab paid teachers," I'd ask for more on that. Perhaps they did. I think Chic is mixing this up with the dwell payments system, where a builder's class would generate traffic and dwell points, which then lead to real money payouts. But the Lindens had lots of giveaways in the early days, like the free $1000 sims, so this could very well be true. Most educators were paid by their RL institutions, however.
SL5B (2008)
I think his was the year that the birthday celebration committee removed the work from a very talented creator because the child in the multimedia depiction was a small girl and her nipples were showing. We are talking about a four of five year old with NO SEXUAL THEME at all -- and because it was a girl rather than a boy child? Some research found lots of mentions of censorship -- as well as some other instances of that censorship being based on gender. The exhibit in question was moved to the University of Western Australia which is where I viewed it. There was plenty of controversy at that time.
In an era where LL was trying to eradicate ageplay, it's more than fine for them to object to portrayals of children in this manner. It sure doesn't seem appropriate to me given the SL context, and I don't care how talented the artist was. The Lindens' censorship was uneven. They would swoop down and remove art works in the public domain from centuries ago if a nipple was showing in a store in my malls. They would leave the ageplay venue I described alone for days on end until residents literally picketed it. I remember I used to have a gay community, as a haven for LGBT who were at that time more persecuted than now although the persecution remains a factor everywhere. I had low cost rentals around the Grace sim area which was in General, but the fact is LGBT doesn't always want a sexualized venue with adult activity; they want friendship, art, socializing, etc. and that's why I hoped to at least support with rentals, although I wasn't going to be program director. So a few people moved in, mainly women, some men and it was largely ignored until one day, this huge furry rabbit, I think it was, swooped down with all these anti-gay slogans, particles and signs. They scattered it all over the lawns of my community. I was stunned and hurt. This was early in my sojourn, and I thought the climate was more friendly. I'm an ally of the LGBT community, not gay in RL, and that adds to the hatred I experience especially from certain gay men and m2f on the forums, who really don't like any manifestation of a male avatar that they don't control and isn't "real". It's a strange kind of patriarchalism which persists even among communities that should be "progressive".
Anyway, Daniel Linden, who may or may not have been gay, I don't recall, actually came running to the rescue, one of the very few times any Linden came to any rescue involving me. He swiftly banned the furry, globally removed the signs, and promised the Lab's response would be instant. And it was, usually. That community eventually fell apart simply because ultimately, PG or G becomes a problem, not because of your activity as such, but the presence of enemies ready to AR you if you so much as say "fuck" on a G sim -- which cynical artist griefers like Jauani Wu did to me repeatedly.
The birthday problem was deeper than ageplay, however. There was other kinds of art work that LL did not feel could be in a G kind of environment they wanted to control. And it's their game, and they get to do what they want. So they ended the resident involvement, which they had tolerated for a time. Then, they themselves completely got out of the Birthday business and let it be ONLY resident activity, which was weird. They then came back and took control of it again with a very sanitized and screened resident involvement. I have been in it perhaps 4-5 times, and by the time they got to this year's stricter rules, banning any use of your business logo, I was out. This actually made the exhibits very confusing. I could fly to an art gallery or some elaborate view and never see who made it, as the name might not have recognition, but the company would. I would searcg in the lag and slow rez for a notecard giver, which was still allowed, but not see them. Really stupid, all of it.
Openspace Price Change (2008)
The end result of the price change and downgrade of Openspace sims to Homestead sims gave way to a huge exodus and influx of SLers to Opensim -- namely Inworldz which opened in 2009. From $75 for a fill sim to $125 for the same sim but with limitations was viewed VERY negatively. Many just packed up and walked away.
I've written a lot about this on the forums and elsewhere, but once again, it has to be explained, that this was about abuse of the product by land barons, not about the Lab being mean and not letting people have homesteads without islands -- their current requirement.
Because land barons would buy up 100 homesteads, flip them into 16-piece rentals, usually flat sand pancakes, and rent them out, and using the tools, make the tenant "estate manager". Then they disappeared to play WoW or sell on Silk Road, which was more fun and/or paid more. The Lindens were left with miles of customer service tickets about performance. These sims were not meant to hold all those avatars and content. Also, the Lindens then did not get the value of them, as the barons could overcharge on them and no one else could buy them stand-alone. I don't think we will see this product from them as a standalone. There is a longer story here, go and Google it.
Banning "Banks" (2008)
This was kind of a "really who cares" for me. I mean the idea that someone would put money into a virtual bank in hopes of gaining better interest rates was downright Ludacris. It was definitely not a loss to see them go although there were some pretty impressively built "banks". The whole scenario did not raise the view of Second Life for the outside world.
I don't care about hair, for example, but I don't say that the evolution of hair is unimportant in SL and I find it "Ludacris" (ludicrous). Can we agree that Aeon is now simply incompetent?
The reason why people valued the banks and high-yield investment programs, so to speak, is because they are poor people from poor countries needing cash in a virtual world, where some make a living in RL.
This factor simply MUST MUST MUST be taken into account in studying all these issues. So often people perceive the players behind these seeming scams as computer programmers in California earning six figures and therefore worthy of contempt -- like Mr. Lee's Hongkong, who put ads all over on 16m which he charged $10,000 for, blighting the view and extorting it back. I once caught up with him in RL and asked him "Why"? He was a skilled programmer in fintech I believe it was. He could have sold scripted devices. He said he just found it interesting. Sure, to terrorize my rentals, to put spinning crap on prime waterfront, oh, how interesting.
The stock market emerged in fact for a very good cause: an effort by a group of land owners and merchants to try to break the hammerhold Anshe Chung had on the land market, which she (really he, a man with an Asian wife who was not the one using the avatar) could maintain over SL due to the investment from some wealth VC brothers in Germany where they were based. I was at the founding meeting.
Since the Lindens either couldn't or wouldn't curb the monopolist phenomenon, and still don't today, having no RICO or any other kind of notion in their TOS as such, Anshe bought up all the prime waterfront, islands and mainland, and no one else could get into the market. She controlled all the telehubs by winning every auction, and having a set of merchants' stores ready to drop on the land as soon as it fell into her control. I once through some miracle managed to win a piece of this telehub land which Anshe rapidly rented from me and put her client on it; that client then later rented from me for less on another sim, infuriating her, which is why she left a grief patch of land amidst all the "buyback" land at the Ross telehub.
But it's hard to imagine those days when today, the land market, while controlled by a few people, still has a lot of diversity and entry points. So this group thought that if we pooled our resources, money and staff, we could make our own cartel to challenge Anshe. This involved also a stock market to generate income. It was a failure at every point of its short-lived history mainly due to the problem of anonymous, unaccountable avatars, a feature baked into bitcoin which is why I will never trust that.
It had a run for awhile, and parallel to this, there were those HYIP, whereby you opened up a "savings account" by paying into a machine that recorded it and kept your money in a float, but to which you still had access. Most importantly, which Aeon can't absorb, they paid interest! On time, and in full, for years! So that spawned numerous alts opening up those bank accounts -- I had as a tenant the creator of these "ATMs" and I tested them. I had the founder of Ginko, as the company was known, as a tenant for $35/wk for an ATM like anyone else with $35 as I did not discriminate. I myself put only small amounts in these machines as I did not trust them. They were not like gatcha machines, as they had no reputational backup in any form, SL or RL. The person who made them was in Argentina (Nicholas Portocarro), and reclusive. He tried to bring me into his operation; I was uninterested. He had a good run, actually helping many people achieve some equity in SL. They could save $1000 or $10000 and buy land, then sell it, without having a credit card which their poor country didn't provide.
But like all things that looked to good to be true, and wasn't, it collapsed, and not because the owner had to attract new people to pay the old, as in a ponzi scheme. That's not how to understand it, and why crusading lawyers taking a star turn around this were so stupid. What it involved was simply philanthropy. People willing to use their many thousands of dollars to provide some cash to the poor through this interest system, as they gained a float out of it and reputational enhancement that helped them gain a purchase in the land business. Land was the best investment in this case to get a quick yield of profit, but even floating a loan to a store would work.
It was largely based on gambling, however. The owners of both the banks and stock market would gamble or own gambling establishments and have loads of cash on hand. That made it all workable. Then the Lindens banned gambling to comply with ACTUAL US Law that was ENFORCED, which we DO NOT HAVE with gatcha. I'm all for that; I did not support gambling after a few weeks once I saw how crooked the machines were, especially in terms of draining their owners' accounts, yielding a percentage to creators -- the way the few monopolist rental boxes worked in those days, namely one by Hank Ramos which he opensourced in some fit of pique with the Lab, and which I still use today, in adapted form.
Usurious rental machines making someone like Hank take a 25% out of your every sale (if you opted not to buy the $2500 landlord rental boxes, and that was a big outlay in those days) was never questioned by the Lab. They never met a script they didn't like. The Lindens feel code is law, and bad code that is bad law should only be deprecated in very rare instances.
On top of the gambling ban came the RL recession at that time in 2008, and also the collapse of the land market, and the snowball effect. Now they couldn't even borrow from Peter to pay Paul, they had to flee, leaving, in one case I know of personally, losses as high as US $8,000 to store owners and creators who used this system to expand.
It was heartbreaking to watch, and those people responsible, whom I reported, harassed me savagely for years to come, putting bloody effigies of my RL self on my lawn like RL gangsters.
Again, because my position is so often misrepresented, I feel that real life law enforcers should have been summoned from real countries. The FBI or prosecutors. Not crusading corporate lawyers who formed a Bar Association that went on to bar criticism of China and content about protests there, and feted the Al-Hambra sim, which re-enacted the low status of women and minorities and banned critics. That the SLBA today is a completely different normal association is in part due to my willingness to keep taking on Benjamin Noble/Benjamin Duranske, who now works at PayPal as one of those computer programmer/lawyer combos that I find so deadly in the Metaverse, exposing his lies, exposing his ill intent, and pointing out that this had to be done in such a way as to protect customers, and those in poor countries, and not make them take the rap for what really amounted to a few people, at least one a Trustifarian in the US with plenty of cash, who exploited others. As with Cuomo, trial by media and dropping of judicial procedures does not extend women's rights and the rule of law; it makes the bros and even some women more cynical about those who step forward with allegations.
It would have been nice if the Lindens had the resources, cash, staff time, lawyer contingent, and media savvy to try an experiment with banks in a virtual world, where they could have easily kept it inworld and not allowed cashouts by the principle players. This would cause inflation, of course, as their dwell and high stipends did in their day. The Lindens did not want to become a bank with all the regulatory hassle that required, or even a credit union, which might have been more doable. A microcredit scheme as in Bangladesh, perhaps? Even these programs beloved by the UN often end in tears with scoundrels making off with the cash.
Meanwhile, all kinds of loan companies and banks and investment programs sprang up in Upland, for example.
Zindra - New Adult Continent (2009)
Making an adult continent seemed like a good idea, but the problem was that The Lab FORCED all adult oriented businesses off the regular mainland. No choice -- you just moved or perhaps they moved you; not sure on that. One big problem however (and only one) was that not everyone exited the mainland. I had a neighbor who was selling adult oriented "gear" and while I did report the shop, it was never moved. So much for "cleaning up the mainland". A dozen years later the "continent" is still waiting to be finished and is filled with for sale signs.
You were not "forced" off the main grid. You were given an opportunity to have your openly adult venue moved to a location you could actually choose inworld, which was unprecedented, since the First Land program which also involved choice, unlike Bellisseria today. If you did not take this offer, you might be punished later, but it was a gray area, and would largely depend, in this sprawling world across many servers, on abuse reports by your fellow residents.
I decided to take this hotel once located in Juanita, that I had bought from a woman who had run it as an adult venue, but ceased when some of her scripts went haywire, and experiment with what would happen to it when it got to Zindra. So I dutifully applied for the program and moved the hotel. There were some bumps along the road, it wasn't instant, and speaking of roads, I really hated the roads in Zindra. They were too glaring and cartoonish, and I hate that they put one like that in Palomarian.
First, there was a scandal about child avatars, who insisted on their "rights" to come to Zindra. I found this profoundly fucked up, and totally undermining their case, but they thought they should have entry, and go in bars but as long as they didn't "ageplay", fly under the wire. Some now respected child avatars took this position which really undermines their credibility. It was an endless forums and inworld drama never really resolved.
There was a lot of competition in Zindra, so I closed my motel, then made a mall. I moved one tenant who sold adult items like vibrators openly on the shelves to Zindra, as I felt this would be bannable. I didn't want adult content constantly leaving me vulnerable to ARs fueled by haters on the forums, not real concern about the wrong content in the wrong place. So I moved a few of those stores into the mall, a mere 4096. They did ok for some years, but then lost interest.
I think what the Lindens and most older residents know about all this is that most people are NOT repeat NOT interested in PUBLIC adult activity -- strip shows, various blatant acts, organized orgies, fake Black people enacting scenes with lily white virgins, etc. etc. Most people want to do, not watch. And do in private, not public. There is actually a limited market for clubs featuring "older men with younger women" or "women with men whose wallets they control" or whatever their kink is. They are a decided minority for -- again -- public activities. Therefore clubs do not do well. Stores maybe a bit better, but they are very far from where people live because...once the Linden swap program was over, prices shot up, and today most land is owned by LIFE and sold at high prices, a reprise of the Anshe phenomenon earlier in SL histories, but now, with no determined group of furries who want to break the cartel with a stock program -- which is illegal.
I can see that the generally miserable state of affairs all over in the land business may sometime lead to that "marvelous" idea of Phil's (he hated arbitrage) of making all land cost $5/m the end, regardless of rating or location. That is, hard coded into the viewer so that it could only sell for that.
Some people put their art or other activities in Adult just to avoid problems, in case somebody somewhere objected to something -- which mainly never appeared in their work or store, but they wanted to avoid trouble.
The very design of Zindra, like Horizon, is awful. They wanted to get away from the Mainland dirt, which became toxic chemicals in places on Heterocetera, and went too far in the other direction. Will Zindra be killed off before the old Mainland? Can't say. Zindra can be a showcase to investors or media as the place "where the adult goes" but that's hugely misleading.
The overwhelming majority of adult activities are in M, and even G, which is cheaper, and where people engage in simulated sex in private, in the sky. I think that's a good solution, but I realize it's one that may not hold for LL.
At some point, the new owners may drop down a policy, as they did with gatcha, that says "all adult activity, private or public, involving scripted adult furniture and props, must move to Zindra." It is for that day that LIFE has quietly held their land unsold for years. Many of us will fold then, and we won't be missed.
No history of Zindra would be complete without the story of "bondage Linden" Blondin, who was assigned to caretake the rowdy Zindra denizens. Like all resident things (this will happen to Bellisseria soon enough, and was the case in Nautilus in the early days), there were competing groups, loudmouths who tried to throw the Lindens, etc. etc. Blondin made a hasty exit from LL finally, prompting much speculation. Years later, Blondin's typist told me that the reasons he left had nothing to do with Zindra, and when the story is told someday, he said, people would be surprised.
The Big Layoff (2010)
Mid June arrived and 30 percent of the Lindens vanished. What I remember most is the memorial someone made for those departed -- and indoor watery "graveyard" of sorts with the names of individual past employees etched into stones. This was of course the first of the "big layoffs" with another coming in 2020.
I believe this was made around the Sea of Omidyar -- there was the big cull of griefers numbering some 30 some time before this, and a graveyard for those miscreants, then the Lindens. For weeks on end, the Herald refreshed the People list, spotting missing Lindens, until LL figured out to leave the Dead Souls in place so the size of the cull would not be visible. A lot of these people were once residents. I don't know if they made a policy -- a good one, in my view, if they had it, and they don't, really: see Patch -- was to remove Lindens who were prominent residents, with conflicting loyalties. Some of those people were nothing but trouble, as they kept their commerce and social circles intact, creating the FIC system whereby they benefited with the Lindens against others without those insider contacts. Some of them were abusive or even corrupt. It's good they are gone. But some were decent and contributed a lot, and their firing was a mystery. Some tended to be the more extreme open source cult, that LL in fact really didn't fully subscribe to. Some day someone will study all those cases and come to a more educated understanding.
The Last Name Debacle (2010)
Any of you WITH a legacy last name remembers this time. The Lab once again thought they new best, even though the populous was loudly (oh so loudly) telling them they did not. The point it seems was to make it easy to integrate SL with Facebook. That seems odd now since Facebook also cleaned up its "avatar" files in favor of real people. We were given "FACEBOOK" tabs in the viewer for easy access. Those of course disappeared over time -- and a decade later last names were returned. Wait for it -- for a hefty price.
The populace would have told them this, yes. The Lindens were fascinated with Facebook and Twitter, thinking this would grow their platform. It didn't, because people wanted pseudonymity, tied to a real identity but privately and supposedly securely, or even total anonymity, which I think should be eliminated as it is a vector of crime and griefing. Oldbies really rejected the "Resident" stuff. You have to realize that each last name represented an era in SL; a community in some cases as they clustered together; even an industry, as some people opted for certain names with certain content. It really was a great thing. I chose "Neva," the banks of the Russian river where I lived as a student in St. Petersburg. "Resident" really seemed like 1984 revisited. But people coming in didn't care, and the last name "Resident" itself began to disappear.
The Emerald Viewer (2010)
This wouldn't have made "MY" 20 historical controversies list. Bad person (also young but that isn't an excuse) used the viewer and the folks USING the viewer (Chic waves hands) in a Denial of Service attack. The viewer was blocked from use and eventually the "good" folks working on the Emerald viewer picked up the ashes and the Phoenix viewer was born. Now we have Firestorm. I doubt that there was much controversy over the blocking. It was the right thing to do -- in my mind anyway.
Here's another historical landmark where Chic has taken a myopic, self-serving, ignorant and arrogant approach in line with whomever she is trying to suck up to in the "establishment" who holds these views.
The Emerald Viewer was a griefer art house. It had Copybot and god-mode stolen from the Lindens. They used it to harass people like me who reported on their antics widely and AR'd them, but also many other people no one has heard of. I became a laughing stock because they came and killed my sionchickens at the time, which they could do merely by stepping on and breaking their eggs, or kicking them off world.
Sion, the maker of the chickens, who has since disappeared, put a script in the eggs which reported to you who crushed them. So that is how I could establish a list of all the Emerald/Phoenix/Firestorm operatives, some of whom were very bad eggs permanently banned for crimes far worse than my chickens. My chickens were just the visible tip of the sim-crashing, copybotting, harassment mob.
It was not at all only about one notorious incident when Fractured Crystal (sigh, these names) tied the DoS attack to users as they can do through exploiting the web traffic and such. The Lindens put their foot down over that but not ONLY that. It's not true that the "bad people" in Emerald went away; they emerged again in Phoenix, which then became Firestorm. The DNA is all there; the viewer once "phoned home". If it doesn't "phone home" today, that's due to LL intervention.
It's hard to say who overthrew whom in these meetings. Obviously Emerald/Firestorm had a lot of clout, with eventually the majority of users. But so did Linden, knowing exactly how many TOS violators remained in their midst, and not fooled by their anonymizer log-ons. There was a lot of leakage of chat, videos, drama at the time and it's easy to discover that the Emerald debacle was NOT repeat NOT only about the one-time DoS attack. At one point, there was a goodbye party for Fractured because they were tipped out he was about to be permabanned. So they put out
a huge effigy of my RL head, something that they used to do like some ancient pagan mystical ritual, uber creepy because I...reported on them truthfully, unlike others, including Chic, who think they were just some Tragically Misunderstood Artists. They danced around to the tune of a then-popular EBM type song, and their video gained many views over the years, but now it is removed by YouTube. At the time, I pointed it out to Joe Linden, one of the few grown-ups at the Lab, and older man who has sadly since died in RL. It was easy to see all the alts of the mains and the name tags of people who claim they never grief, as they stomped on my virtual head. Again, it's not about me, or even about that one DoS attack, but things like "phoning home" and the crashing of sims. The one thing the Lindens really don't like, although they will put up with a shitload of other stuff they shouldn't, is the crashing of their sims. It makes work for their engineers. So you lose your island when you do that. And they did, again and again, those intertwined with Firestorm, even to this day.
That's why I will never, ever use Firestorm, while of course my tenants all do, and why I banned the promotion of their group on my land, by recruitment, signs etc although I could hardly ban the viewer itself. Even the Lindens likely use it, and I wonder why they don't buy it out, shake lose the remaining dubious characters, and be done with it. Why? Is this because their own viewer "phones home"? I actually don't think so. I don't think the Lindens scrape data. Or at least, not for abusive purposes. We've never seen them do that or seen evidence that they have exploited it in some way. We've never seen a RL blackmail case based on chat inworld that would only be obtained -- and more importantly verified -- by Lindens, for example. I never got an answer from Oz to my questions about this, and never will. Like the early reverse-engineering of libsl, which Cory looked at through his fingers, so to speak, and didn't ban under the TOS but allowed to thrive, until Philip authorized its certification.
BTW, I put this question about the "perverse engineers" reverse-engineering the client on a forums thread gathering questions for a town hall. Torley saw it, and banned me permanently (i.e. for a time until a smarter Linden came along) merely for that question, which was seen as "provocative".
The hilarious thing is that Cory answered it during the Town Hall, although not completely. He admitted that the cart had come before the horse. I was standing next to Philip inworld in the town hall, with some huge goon of a scripter/griefer towering over him (the screenshot is on some old blog), summarizing what I saw as the situation here -- the Lindens got thrown.
Then suddenly, I was kicked by Torley from the world. I had no idea why, as I had not opened my mouth; Cory himself picked my question and answered it. Answer, discovered hours later: someone made an avatar with a name very similar to mine to ensure confusion, and began flying around and prim littering up by the speaker's stand. Funny how I got banned, and that character unrelated to me persisted. That is SL. That. That's how it works. Unfairly. Stupidly. Rewarding criminals again and again, and punishing whistleblowers.
The Red Zone (2010 - 2011)
Again, not something that would have made my list. A script that used an exploit in media delivery to identify people's IP addresses. Eventually banned. Messy for some but not really up there in terms of who it affected.
The main people who howled about Red Zone were congregated on Sluniverse (now Virtual Verse or some other name like that) who were males in real life with female avatars in SL, many top designers, merchants, scripters, etc. There are a lot of them in SL; some very successful in SL terms, and they were terrified of being outed, as they thought it would hurt their business, destroy their RL privacy and cause them RL misery. Not to mention that it outed alts. And they certainly have a case here, however nasty some of these manginas have been to me personally because: see above re: gay men and m2f who loathe f2m especially if they are publicly critical and don't "know their place".
The Red Zone guy, a Russian, was actually quite creative, as such mega griefers sometimes are, although usually they are mediocre banalities. He made a walking Baba Yaga house which was really cool, and other buildings. I had one, but it seems all his content got removed from the world. I didn't use his script, which I viewed as causing complete havoc, by outing alts and people's RL locations. I know from RL work in journalism doing geolocating that you are limited in your ability to pin-prick a location using only an IP. But using triangulation and various methods comparing other lists and data bases, sometimes you can locate a very building, like, say, the GRU's radio technology department, so that you know that it's not just kids bringing down a bank, but grownups employed by the state.
I actually think you'd be hard put to use an IP address to find someone's real gender and RL name, but it might be done, given the prevalence of blogs and media fora online where IP addresses are captured. As they were for Pixeleen Mistral at the Herald, who was outed as a Duke University computer program department head famous for having invented the Gopher system of the early Internet
The thing about the RedZone guy is that he went to RL jail, and not over Red Zone and SL, but because he was involved in some sort of hacker activity and had even kept wild animals in his home and abused them.
Merging of Teen and Main Grid (2010 - 2011)
Again, not a biggie in my mind. Teens were already on the main grid. Easy enough to lie, but it didn't help with the perception of Second Life as a sexual conduit for "kids".
It's easy to forget that SL was not that big a world to start with, and was never the "millions" claimed, and I personally saw very few actual minors in SL. Kids that age played WoW. I saw way more young children in The Sims Online.
I'll never forget the time I hired a scripter to make my Tier Garden, a device which helps you know instantly how many prims you will have in a particular size of land, and what tier (I still have it if you want one, and it's updated with new amounts).
His name was Meatwad Extraordinaire. He was kind of dilatory about the whole thing, although it only involved adding some parts to Catherine Omega's famous open source prim counter. He was sometimes late to meetings or unavailable. I asked him one day what's up, and he said "I'm waiting for my mom to pick me up from school."
So sure, after he got home and had his milk and cookies and finished his homework, he could work on my job.
He was only 15 years old, and not supposed to be there. Yes, he could script, and there are many miracle tales told of wonder children, and I have told them, too, above, but in the end, Meatwad bailed, and Adam Zaius, of all people, answered my call to fix up the script. He was paid, and no, it is not open source. Not that hard a script for anyone to make, but again, I paid another scripter to update it with the latest stuff, so I sell it for a modest price on the MP. As well I should given what I have paid scripters, and not only for that reason.
Daniel Voyager was the most famous of the Teen Grid graduates. They used to have a special building and a little ceremony as each one arrived on the adult grid. So Daniel turned 18, and became the supreme fanboy, dutifully reporting in his blog every twist and turn of LL policy and never, ever questioning it. It's a marvel!
Canceling Educational and Non-profit Discounts (2011-2014)
This was sad to see, but for me -- not as sad as the end of support for SL teaching. A few years after this new rule went into affect I found out from several reputable sources that the discounts never really went away for "some" folks. Not sure if that is better to know or not know.
No, they never do, that's life in the big city.
I'm dim on this "support of SL teaching" stuff. I thought Builder's Brew existed on tips and content sales. I'll sak.
The DMCA Process (2011 -)
It's not good or fair or even working but in truth it is not totally The Lab's fault. Are we better off WITH it or without? Hard for me to say.
What an outrageously ignorant and short-sighted comment from of the few content creators with some fame who bothers to post on the forums. Most don't. And I fear given the level of ignorance seen hitherto from Aeon, she may not realize that the DMCA process is related to US law, not Linden Lab. Oh, well.
The DMCA process works; I have helped builders file them when our cities or buildings were ripped, or even just a picnic table by that griefer with the grisly bloody versions of my in RL with chickens, which were also ripped off from Sion.
It works if you put a RL name and business name and account, etc. which many are reluctant to do. That's all it's about. Many want anonymity without accountability yet they want the Lab to go chase copybotters for them. I'm sorry, that's just not on. We all get how hard it is to register a business. In the US, you are lucky to be able to file as an Unincorporated Business and pay the local NYC tax, or easily make a corporation in Delaware for mere dollars, which many do, and of course write off business expenses on your income tax. In Europe, yes, it's hard, but once you do it you can write off VAT -- making the VAT howling something that has to be seen in context. It's about amateur versus professional.
Do the Lindens entertain ARs on ripping shy of the DMCA? Indeed they do, I have seen them, but not enough to people's satisfaction.
Could they do more? Yes, by licensing creators and licensing the sale via the MP or event inworld.
OK, could you shut up now please? Thank you.
TOS Changes August 2013
This was a biggie. The new TOS basically said that Linden Lab had right to do anything and everything with ANY work you did. This included articles written on notecards later to be publish in real world magazines, mesh made that could be used on other grids. items made as "work for hire" in Second Life that were supposed to be proprietary -- the list goes on.
We lost so very many creators because of the changes. I only uploaded one 10 linden sign texture in the year following. From an outsider's perspective it seems like The Lab has repeatedly (or continuously, I don't know) employed overzealous attorneys. A later TOS actually used the terms "in the known and unknown universe". Honestly? Isn't that a bit over the top?
We lived through it but that was pretty much the beginning of the demise. Later and in retrospect it seemed like many of the changes had to do with plans for Sansar, plans that didn't work out or "pivoted" along the way.
I found this pretty much a tempest in the teapot, that was more whining than actuality. All platforms have to have free use of your content to stream the view of your content; they need that "one copy" to do with as they wish. That's built in. Many don't grasp that. More to the point, they are platforms, private companies, that need to advertise their business. I remember coming up to -- again, Joe Linden -- standing in front of a giant board at a RL conference with my tenant's mermaid avatar on the screen as an example of creativity. I said her name is not even in small type. She's not listed in the program as she would be in an illustrated magazine. What's up with this tech bro conference hijacking of content?! Yes, I get it that you "can" and it's given up as right in the TOS. But you can't put her name on the silk screen? Really, guys? More people should have protested to have gotten at least a soft norm on this one, as I did, without being a content creator at all at the time, but only a landlord and ally.
I find it hard that you would punish the Lab over language that still, at the end of the day, did not remove or never acknowledge your rights, like Instagram doesn't. Not upload for a year? You can't be serious. Fortunately most top designers and builders just kept going, making money, with their IP generally intact. We saw a rash of lawsuits around breedables which was quite a spectacle -- Ms. Historian doesn't mention that, or the land lawsuits, which I would mention and will when I have time. To be sure, "known and unknown universe" is a term meant in science fiction more than in legal documents but maybe they got creative.
If you want rights, you have to wrest them from the Lab, which does not default to them. You have to fight for them. I would put in my history the Lindens debacle with the telehubs; where ultimately they had to back down with land barons; the VAT tax; the open sims; the sale of grandfathered sims only to outsiders, which I exposed and made it possible for ALL OF US to have $195 sims instead of only the list of Sheep held close by the Lab -- something which they never forgave me for.
Like the exposure of Pathfinder Linden in the IRC channel with some of the leading lights of the FIC, including Adam Zaius, plotting to get me banned on the forums by setting me up with provocations, hoping I would then over-react to and get banned. This is all documented, including the apologies to me from Pathfinder, his reassignment from the forums to another job (educators) after a vacation, etc. etc. That's all going in MY history, so watch this space.
Eliminating Outside Money Exchanges (2013 -2015)
This raised the cost of money exchanges for many to most people. It was also around the time that The Lab bought Tilia AND the beginning of Sansar. It all comes together or it doesn't. It made good business sense for The Lab, but hurt the people. Not a new scenario, but it IS their platform, their product.
This is all out of sequence and began back as early as 2004, not 2013.
First, LL cracked down on Gaming Open Market, the most popular 3rd party exchange that gave a whopping $4.25 value to the Linden 1000L at the time, something never seen in SL itself. Because it was valued. By many, inside and out, as the first green shoots of the Metaverse.
The Lab entered into seemingly friendly talks with the GOM with some portrayal of a plan of partnership, or maybe a buyout. It ended with a rejection, hence the term "to be GOM'd" used by many other situations of "partnership" with the Lab that ended in tears then and now, although I think the term is now forgotten.
AFTER that killing of the GOM in around 2005 -- before there was a LindEx!!! -- then the Lindens literally over the weekend -- as Lawrence Linden himself testified, like Cory writing LSL over a weekend -- created the LindEx, to drive out the third parties by adding security -- some of them would steal your money. They didn't ban 3rd parties at all, however, allowing VIROX terminals all over the place. Anshe ran a prompt, efficient exchange right to PayPal which had good rates. All of this was banned later, and you cannot blame the Lindens because while the US Treasury Department did not come calling to our knowledge any more than the US gambling authorities did over gatcha AFAIK, they might eventually -- and frankly on this point, rather than gatchas, really.
My additions to the list:
SANSAR (2013? -2020)
It could have been great, it could have been the right move. Either way the siphoning of funs from SL to Sansar definitely hurt the older grid. Staff increased then decreased. The folks left behind in SL (some apparently by choice) worked hard with the smaller teams to keep us going and kudos to them. But resources divided are just that.
I have little to add here from personal knowledge as I only made a few venues in Sansar, which was frustrating as you couldn't even sit down and there was no grouping of land or anything, and I left. The sound modules spaced around the sim were better than SL, however. I later went to concerts a few times, and just didn't find it very compelling. I think it has a use case.
I have to say that I think it's unfortunate certain Lindens weren't fired and were deployed back here on the main grid to get in our hair here, with old grudges, but I can't say new ones would be any better.
TILIA (2020 - )
Many content creators left Second Life (and Sansar) when the new rules for Tilia came into effect. Whether actually needed by law or not, this was the end result. Many people couldn't jump through the hoops needed; some simply chose not too. Our creative pool and general residency both suffered.
Indeed. Once you got rid of banks which provided some income for poor people and investment funds for entrepreneurs; once you got rid of third-party exchanges that could function outside the US and provide equity for non-Americans, especially in countries which make it very hard to get a personal credit card or any kind of credit; once you had VAT; once you had the transition from prims and sculpties to mesh (something that Chic Aeon doesn't even mention as she is simply too much of a snob -- and one of those insecure provincial types of snobs of which there are no shortage in SL, making it often unbearable) -- why, you lost some of the very best creators of SL. And they never came back. Some went to other worlds; most got out of the virtual world business. Someone in America with debit cards even (I went for many years without credit cards which only put you in debt; I found I couldn't apply for new apartments without a credit card to give me some score in some agency, so I got a few low level ones), who has a driver's license or passport and the American system to back them up finds Tilia only a slight nuisance. It's a hurdle, and also annoying to have to go over and over on each alt and give them each a form of payment and step through the Tilia forms. But it's not that big a deal. I don't see that the cashout works any faster out of SL into PayPal, however. I think it's actually slower now. Something we must simply accept as the cost of doing business in SL.
Did "many" leave? No. Not at all. That's where Aeon gets it wrong, as she does on many other things.
BTW, it's fascinating to me that Uplands is allowing loans, banks, based on the buildings as collateral, based on collections, etc. -- although real money is involved there, via bitcoin. I don't know how long it is lasting. It is the chief draw to their game now as far as I can see. I got a building randomly in Brooklyn which I think holds a bodega and a laundromat with the Upland free simoleons they give you to start. BUT there's a catch. Unless you get an Uplands "visa," i.e. join and pay more fees, you can't keep your building. So there goes the bodega. I also wonder about the real owners of these properties and why they can't have a say in all this but whatever. There's also no virtual world even of the 2D type to walk around in there although I think it's coming. It's just a map now AFAIK.
Gacha Ban (2021)
Because of world laws and upcoming restrictions Linden Lab decided to take action and ban gacha gaming. This would no doubt have happened eventually even if it was by court order. We will obviously lose some creator over this change. We may if the stars are shining on us remember how to make products that push our creative abilities and reclaim a bit of our lost spirit from the early days. It isn't really ALL about the money -- or at least I hope it isn't :D. Time will tell as it has with many other events listed here.
Let's point out for the LEGIONS of the ignorant on the forums and in widely read blogs like Chic's. There is no law. Because the law is not APPLIED to gatchas in any lawsuit, in the US, or anywhere in the world. So ALL of this speculation that it "might" apply has no foundation other than hysterical tech news and forums hysteria.
Let's also not to pretend that there are all these zombified creators lurching around who "didn't remember" how to push their "creative abilities". There are plenty. Quite a few dropped gacha years ago. Some may want to "reclaim lost spirit" -- others may want to do something new. It ALREADY "isn't about money" for many, many MANY people who do not make a profit or RL living in SL with their creativity. So could we please knock off the bullshit here?!
Perhaps Chic Aeon will come back with her buildings if she doesn't have gatchas competing against her. Is that the point here?
That's what all the forums ranting is about, competition, the desire to control others, the glee at other's misfortunes that drives the drama of the world. As it was with telehubs -- whose removal in favour of p2p Ms. Aeon also strangely leaves out, although it also cost many businesses their lives and they are gone now. The world did not grow pure and sweet by deleting telehubs which oldbies thought were the devil's handiwork. In fact, it grew worse, as people grew more atomized, there was no places for free, non-sexual socializing with a draw like shopping or games to stick; there was no way for ordinary poor people to enter the market, as I did, renting from Anshe to make my start even before I had my own office.
Chic Aeon does not understand fuck-all about this world. She never lived in it. I did. There is a lot more to tell from the perspective of those who aren't the "winners" of SL -- she left out not just the turn from sculpty to mesh but the nasty campaign LL launched with Draxtor's help in bullying and ridiculing those who objected HOW it was implemented, the same way with telehubs (the Lindens are such stern ideologues that they never conceive of anything as co-existing). There was the four-year long campaign against ad farms directed at Jack Linden, who finally, before his departure, created an ad farm policy and enforced it -- for a time. There was the reform of the group tools -- very important, as it made business possible!!! There's the Impeach Bush extortionist and the failure of the Lindens to cope, as they don't today with his descendants; there's the purchase of the resident-owned SLExchange and move to Marketplace, then its taxation (how could you be in business and not mentino that?).
Can it all be chronicled before some of us midbies and oldbies die in RL or are banned? I don't think so. I've always thought that while you can't change history's brutal flow in the electronic Metaverse especially, you can keep a record. That's what I've always tried to do, voluminously, because you have to, because rebutting lies and eliminating misconceptions always takes longer than to tell them in the first place. But history is indeed written by the victors.
I can't take time now to fix typos and put links. Ample information is out there; I was just reading
Tech Crunch on the short-lived Metanomics run by Beyers Sellers, a RL professor at Cornell who has disappeared from SL, like all these "Big Six" developers and IBM "Metaversal Engineers" who literally logged in last in 2008 as I confirmed last night. I'm still here.
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