To date, with nearly three years of existence, Second Life has no rule of law. It has a strong executive, federal power, with a loyalist clique, as the ruling class and oligarchs and FIC who benefit the most from this set-up. The rest of us have to scrape by as best we can, dodging arbitrary rulings, trying to bend unjust rulings to obtain fairness, engaging in all the strategies that people engage in when they live under injustices.
There is no court, no judges, no lawyers. That is, there are now actually lawyers, and that's a good thing, at least 2, Jake Reitveld and katykiwi Moonflower (and probably others I haven't heard of) who have begun to take up cases like "takedown notices" involving copyright. They've also taken up issues like the "bait-and-switch" problem of the telehubs' removal and p2p. It was katykiwi Moonflower's letter to LL that I believe played a crucial role in alerting LL to do the right thing with the telehub buyback offer.
Building the Supreme Court (and the United Nations for that matter) are hardly any part of any authentic rule of law in Second Life. They appeared out of the sky as just some guy on the Internet's dream to build a big building and put himself in charge of it. Justice Soothsayer, the ego behind that particular exercise, is a RL law professor, but by his own admission, has no ability or resources to take on any kind of 24/7 or even 4 hour a day
He's already raised some issues about his credibility, in my book, not only by claiming the Supreme Court of the United States "engages in dispute resolution" (when its chief purpose is to issue rulings on Constitutionality).
Perhaps such exercises feed the dreams of people who always envision themselves at the heart of any justice-dispending fantasy -- arranging resolutions of disputes in magnanimous fashion, with accompanying applause on the forums, media coverage, and beaming Lindens flying overhead.
The SCOTUS-among-us (as I call it) can't possibly bring justice to our world because it has no legitimacy. Um, we have no government. Many people don't want one! We don't have the necessary conditions for government -- we don't have first a clear winner of a war, or a clear claimer of territory with an army raised to protect its borders. That is, we do have that -- we have Linden Lab who own and operate (or at least lease and operate) the servers. That's as good as it gets, and many people would prefer the Server Farmers and Software Coders as the government since they figure their chief purpose is to keep the servers turned on and working, and the new code patches coming, and everything else they add on when they have too much spare time (which they obviously have too much of, which is why they do stuff like mimic and displace resident business).
If this Server Farmers and Software Coders, Inc. were to really settle down and become a real government, they'd first have to have separation of powers: executive, judicial, legislative.
That wouldn't mean taking one of these traditional branches and renaming it "Science" like they did in Neulatenberg, which is just a hilarious way of giving the executive branch another branch to run, in a coded world (ROFL with that one!). They have to go by the thousands of years of human history, for my money anyway, if they don't want to botch it.
Many international conferences have been held, especially since the one in 1950 in Bangalore or whatever, which established solemly that separation of powers is really a good thing. And it is! It's one of the things that keeps America free and prosperous and makes it an attraction to immigrants the world over from places that only have executives, and judiciaries totally in the pocket of the executive so that they become abusive.
The SL Supreme Court had a very short life. It was formed by two college kids on winter break or something, and as soon as they got back to the paper chase in law school, it fell apart. I think it did have a big building in Cecropia or something (that may have been unrelated) but after being told by LL to change their name so as to not appear to be "official," and changing it to the Metaverse Supreme Court, like all things with metaversal aspirations, it foundered on the rocks of real life. I have no idea where these people are now. I wrote to them a few times to suggest cases -- I had some great cases, ranging from just ordinary builders' fraud on a contract, to more complicated suits against Lindens for punishing under law they had not yet disseminated, etc. Anyway, so much for that.
Next, we go SL Mediators. I had a real problem with this group, not only because it was secret and its member secret. (They claimed this was due to "griefers" -- and of course that was a reference to just one "griefer" -- me -- who challenged some of their beliefs, practices, and members LOL.) SL Mediators grew out of the Thinkers milieu -- not a milieu strong on rule-of-law concepts and universality of human rights, to say the least (they favour the ideologies of the left, Neualtenberg, etc. as their rule-by-laws). It also was sustained primarily by the determination of Traxx Hathor to create either a blacklist or a whitelist -- on the forums, this took the form of a long and torturous debate about a Better Business Bureau (challenging business interests by advocating consumer rights and transparency). What some people really mean by that concept of "Better Business" was literally a list of groups *they* viewed as the "Better Businesses" by their own lights, without any rigourous, public criteria. Or they had in mind some vague municipal concepts more like a Chamber of Commerce (protecting business interests) where they get to pick the businesses they like and put them in a white list. Many have come and gone with this idea among the FIC and their hangers-on. It is unlikely to get any traction in SL. I formed a Consumer Advocates group with tenants, but they come and go when they have a case, and don't care to spend the time on the larger issues (as I don't). That is, when there's a broken TV and an irresponsible TV manufacturer, they gather in droves; when there is a stolen handbag design they show up for meetings to pressure that person out of malls; but then it all dies down LOL.
SL Mediators, despite its vaunted reputation, and its inclusion by Zarf Vantongerloo in his very important Nota Bene effort, turns out to have not really mediated a single case. That is, there is no track record. I had figured they had at least 10 if not 30 cases, the way they carried on about themselves and their need for secrecy -- and that they served large corporations like Nexcom or something, close to them. Turns out the secret is there is no secret! SL Mediators apparently never got a single case -- or had one it studied or got so far on, but didn't continue. So much for that! Of course, failure to act is never reason for an SL group to disband. It is a matter for consumers to look at, however, given the really urgent need for dispute resolution systems to appear and thrive in our wartorn, injust, just plain crappy world of SL on many sims where many suffer from things ranging from signs ruining their business to insane neighbours putting up huge pink rotating towers to grief people for mysterious reasons.
Nota Bene was and is a good institution to build -- the ability to take a notecarded conversation and put a hash mark on it so that "not even the Lindens" can change it. Most people think of this as useful for prepared agreements. It's also useful for capturing a chat history and getting several parties to affix their John Hancock to a statement claiming that the chat history is true -- so they can't later impugn it. Impugn it...where, I don't know, as we have no courts, but it's a start.
Nota Bene had two fatal flaws, however, crippling it as an institution that could help promote the rule of law in Second Life.
1) Nota Bene recommended as "mediation services" that could even be incorporated into an agreement between parties the "good offices" of the SL Mediators. This was wrong. For one, Zarf Vantongerloo himself was a member of SL Mediators. In some societies, where the barber has to also serve as the postmaster and the county sherriff and perform some routine surgery, this is "normal". I don't think we have to accept this double-hatting in the vast Internet where resources and people can be accessed more easily. It's a conflict of interest to both notarize and serve a notary system AND be the mediator for the agreements under it. Furthermore, SL Mediators are impugned in my book, by their secrecy and by the track record of behaviour of some of the participants, but more to the point for the public's concern, by their failure to do any mediating or have any cases. So they should just be taken off the agreements or just not promoted. Perhaps a kiosk with a variety of mediation services/lawyers/facilitators etc. could be posted on the same site as Nota Bene, but this should be reviewed.
2) Zarf Vantongerloo went and became a Linden. He says as much in his notecards. He is confirmed as now working for LL. Well, that's how it goes, LL always poaches, and sucks away from civil society, any sort of fledgling individual/institution that might help make it viable and independent. Zarf went willingly, and fails to understand these issues, as I've determined in hours-long debate with him. Neither he nor LL sees any issue whatsoever in claiming, on the one hand, "not even a Linden can tamper with this hash mark" and then BECOMING a Linden.
Now, duh, we realize that technically, not even a Linden probably can't tamper with a coded, machine-produced hashmark. It's like saying not even the makers of Crazy Glue can unglue the thing you stuck together with Crazy Glue -- there are certain laws of physics or laws of coding that even the coders can't override. But of course, like those manufacturers, the Lindens have their corrosive capacities as well. They can easily impugn the truth of a document, made client-side, if server-side, they essentially control the documentation. They can easily come up with a notecard copy or chat history of their own, that they may tamper with, and say "here's what we accept as true". Of course, you except the Lindens not to do stuff like that. But server-side, who's to know?
It's like when Lindens comes forward and says the bork in the "buy for group" the other day is "user error". Then when it was finally beaten into them that it wasn't a "user error" but a bug, they said "it will be fixed". Well, it was...but not quite on the timetable expected. And its appearance is the sign of a more distressing feature, not bug, etc. Lindens are not infallable, and they pursue their own agenda. See above re: separation of powers. There are no separation onf powers in Second Life. There is no independent judiciary, and when attempts begin to appear, they destroy them (tell them to change their name), co-opt them (Zarf) or ignore but tacitly fete them by showing up and cheering at Thinkers' Meetings (SL Mediators) or tacitly supporting them (Democracy Island). There's also no legislature. Of course, these could all be tortuously brought into being in this toy world -- but only by indigenous forces, not by plunking down some big-ass replica of SCOTUS and opening it up for business as a "resource" for the "community".
(We could have a separate debate whether a resource of SCOTUS decisions in a library are really relevant to the very executive-run SL, that's another story.)
The picture does indeed seem bleak in SL. There isn't justice, and a whole range of issues nevertheless crying out for justice, and people urgently in need of justice, from billing problems that never get addressed, to failure to enforce the existing TOS against the Bush Guy, to allowing favouritism in enforcement on the forums, to very unclear laws about how Lindens can participate in resident groups (they appear to be currently using their "work-related groups" escape clause to let themselves take part in all kinds of groups, from the wild, like Suicide Girls, to the hip, like Digital Cultures and Free Culture, to the troublesome, like Bedazzled Studio --oh, well, it's their game, what can you do.)
Into this breach steps the Law Society of Second Life, founded by Frank Lardner, a fellow who describes himself on his profile as not only an afficionado of certain sex groups but a retired guy, evidently from a successful business, on the East Coast.
The Law Society of Second Life is a highly troublesome organization on many fronts. Start with the fact that it has only one officer, Frank Lardner. I've come to understand, over the months in SL, that organizations that have only one officer -- one person who can expel members, one person who can invite other officers, one person who can change the charter and perform other officer functions -- can become very unaccountable and authoritarian.
Of course, anybody can do anything they want in SL; that's its charm. But people taking on functions like promoting law in Second Life can expect a special public scrutiny and more demands than others for being accountable.
It's noteworthy that this group, which once had respected RL lawyers Jake Reitveld and katywiki Moonflowers, has lost those RL lawyer members. Other than Frank, who one assumes is or was a RL attorney, there is only one other law-related professional, Justice Soothsayer, a law professor.
I've objected to the choice of Frank -- supported by two very active members, Traxx Hathor and Ferren Xia -- to embark on "case studies" of only selected communities that help skew the very concept of law itself and which impugn the classic notion of "rule of law" by substitution of the "rule-by-law" socialist norm or the arbitrary rule of one or a group of authoritarian leaders such as the Gors.
I've long had a critique of Traxx Hathor, as many know, and for many reasons. My public critique, however, is mainly focused on something I view as symptomatic of virtual worlds, and a grave danger to the freedom of Second Life: the takeover of tools, groups, influential platforms, etc. by people who do not believe in the rule of law as something higher than themselves, who believe by dint of their own superior intellect or technological skill that they have an ordained right to rule others, and who have no inner moral compass of any sort to guide them by any universal standards, whether drawn from the world's greatest religions, drawn from real-life classic models, or drawn from any modern notion of a democratically and liberally drafted set of norms and laws accountable, impartial, and transparent in development and practice.
The first thing that people who wish to overthrow the rule of law higher than themselves do is to claim that such a "rule of law" is itself suspect, owned and operated only by the powerful, the evil, the greedy, the rich -- the suspect. The throw up hysterical cartoon-like images of "some guy on a sim lording it over everybody" or "authoritarian personalities running rampant over the sims" to get everybody salivating and knee-jerking, and then, of course, following their own suspect leadership.
Of course, that overlooks that whatever the abuses of the rule of law are by the powerful, that doesn't negate the value of a rule of law higher than all of us, a greater power to which we can be answerable.
One of the first thing such groups do is try to operate in secret -- secret groups not on the forums or listed in the groups list, access-only secret or hidden sims, secret societies, back channels, etc. -- they know the light of day would make many of the rats among them scuttle.
The concept of the "rule of law" in the world is weak in some societies, at some times. We can start with our own American society, where torture of foreign suspects in U.S. custody became sanctioned through a trampling of the rule of law and many other grave issues. Indeed, it is the concept of the rule of law that helps us fight our way out of this dark passage -- it was the City Bar of New York, and conscientious Attorneys General, who began to raise troubling questions, and leak the right critical reports, to begin to bring to light the entire mess of our responsibility for torture in Iraq. Lawyers are important to fight for the rule of law; but the rule of law cannot be replaced with "rule by lawyers" nor by "rule by laws". Many authoritarian societies make use of the "rule by laws" formula, substituting a plethora of regulations, often arbitary, for something higher than themselves.
I've come to see the environment of SL as one conducive to the "fuck-you hedonist," the person who not only seeks his own pleasures, but is happy to seek them at the expense of others, and tell them "fuck you" to boot. "I can do what-the-fuck-I-want on my land" is their clarion call. They have absolutely no sense of the rights of others, of the rights of all serving as a curb even on the *other* rights of all. This concept -- that no one right should be used to overthrow the other rights -- is engraved in Article 5 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Liberties or in similar wording in Article 30 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Article 5 notion applies to non-state actors as well as states. You cannot use your own pursuit and enjoyment of rights (say, freedom of religion) to injure the rights of others contained in the same covenant (say, the right of equality of women). Article 5 is fertile territory for a lot more promotion and work internationally in the real world; in SL, as exotic as the concept is, it could use some promotion as well.
Several slights of hand have been perpetrated by the Law Society. First, a conscious decision was made to have the group only communicate on group forums on the SL forums. That was a deliberate choice to ensure that I never posted with any criticism of the group or its choice of case studies -- case studies which drive readers away from any "rule of law" notion and drive them toward the "rule-by-laws" cases and the My Sim, My Rule sort of model in the name of "freedom" (freedom to control others with impunity and without accountability to anyone). Frank and others know full well that being permabanned, I won't be able to post, so they can look like their group is open by having me in it, but never have me post. I've repeatedly called on this group to meet inworld and discuss these issues openly and critically-- they refused, because they don't want the public challenge.
Frank Lardner, with the enthusiastic approval of just some of the awake and aware members of the group (others in it aren't following, or in fact left to make room for more groups), has selected as his case studies Neualtenberg and the Gorean communities. These reflected his own personal tastes and proclivities; that's his right, it's a game, it's a passtime, and nobody has to study anything they don't want to study. But it's of concern when these "case studies" are palmed off as a "work product" which is "peer reviewed" only by a few active -- and heavily biased -- members of the Society. It's of concern when through forums-posturing and huffing and puffing, such "case studies" are served up to the unfortunately all-to-fashion-following Lindens as "models" that they shoud use in their creation of the world.
I raised the issue of how the selection of the case studies were made. I view both of them as little better than cults, run by very strong authoritarian personalities, who, despite the trappings of elaborate rules and regulations and "democracy," do not at all represent a mainstream, "normal" model for the life of communities of peoples on sims in this world. Celebrating either of these communities in any way, by venerating them in "case studies" that are even going to be vaunted as "peer reviewed" simply seemed inappropriate -- even misleading.
As fascinating as it is for males to go study how strong males subjugate females sexually and psychologically, or how strong females subjugate males politically and philosophically, this is n't the norm of life in a world that is to have a million members. Such communities deserve tolerance in the sense that any community deserves tolerance, freedom to do as they wish in their private space, and unmolestation from those who don't think as they do, under the TOS.
They don't deserve a free ride from public criticism when they invade the public space, however, the public commons which must be kept free of sectarian ideologies of the left or right always seeking to hijack it. Then, they should be robustly criticised. So to take these groups and exult them as case studies is only fueling their claims to the public space -- illegitimate claims entirely.
Hearing no "objection!" to his one-officer-only group formation and rules, and his heavily-controlled group forums where there is only a few loyalists in an amen corner, Frank Lardner is putting up these "case studies" and merely taunting any critics that they should "make their own".
I personally don't have time for case studies; I live them in the grand experiment itself called Second Life and my demanding rentals business in it. Perhaps some day when I retire from this demanding work and my RL jobs I might consider it. I'd be eager to sustain others doing this work, but not do it myself.
Aside from all these philosophical differences with the organizational pattern and case study selection of the Society -- which I remain in only due to my own great devotion to see legal institutions, societies, and the rule of law upheld in Second Life -- there is another grave, misleading post that really deserves the most rapid of attention.
I quote it in full:
Forum Moderation Guidelines
Group Forum Moderator Guidelines
As moderators (for now), Traxx Hathor and Frank Lardner will responsible to maintain your forum. The following are the guidelines provided to us today by Linden Labs. We expect to follow them and will appreciate your cooperation.
While Linden Lab values freedom of expression and allows a great deal of latitude in the use of the Second Life Forums, there are certain kinds of discussions that are inappropriate in this venue and that diminish the community by their presence. The following types of threads and posts should be removed immediately when encountered in the Second Life Forums:
_ Personal attacks on the character or reputation of another Second Life Resident
_ Accusing a specific Resident or Residents of Second Life Community Standards and Terms of Service violations or real-world crimes
_ Inviting or encouraging other Residents to target a specific Resident or Residents in a manner objectionable to the targeted Resident
_ Inviting or encouraging other Residents to violate Second Life Community Standards and Terms of Service or real-world laws
_ Revealing personal or real-world information about a Resident beyond that contained in the Resident's First Life Profile
_ Using hateful or derogatory language to describe a specific Resident or Residents.
_ Linking to third-party content that violates the Second Life Community Standards and Terms of Service
If we see a problem we will endeavor to edit the forum. Should our forum consistently fail to meet Second Life's Community and Forums Standards, our group's forum may be closed.
Thank you for your cooperation with this experiment.
Frank Lardner
As I understand it, groups are allowed to moderate their own forums on their own. This seems like a reasonable concept, given that only groups read the group forums (and possibly only groups can post in them) but it seems like a slippery slope in itself unless that forums moderation can take place under the TOS and CS very explicitly -- especially given the horrid biased and tendentious nature of forums rules enforcement, all too readily visible now under the resmod system especially.
It would be one thing if Frank Lardner had put out guidelines that merely represented a re-telling, in simpler form of the TOS and CS of Linden Lab itself. It is surely not. What he has done has subtly rewritten the rules to serve his ends (and those of a minority of other members) in a very insidious way (one would like to hope it is unconscious, but given the direction it is going in, it can only be seen as deliberate).
Linden Lab has no rule or policy, in their TOS or CS, of banning the linking to third-party sites that could be deemed to violate their TOS or CS. They routinely permit the linking to third-party sites that indeed do routinely violate their TOS or CS. One can think of
www.sluniverse.com, for example that routinely publishes chat histories from SL without the consent of the parties involved, and which also allows another TOS violation, accusation of a resident of a RL crime (this happened to me on sluniverse.com, where I was maliciously accused, on the basis of mistaken identity, of a RL crime, that of plagiarism as a journalist, an offense of which I had never been accused, nor which I had ever committed (a person with a similar RL name had committed this offense).
The Herald routinely engages in writings that many would perceive as a "violation of the TOS and CS" -- indeed, this blog consciously violates the TOS as a public service on matters of public interest precisely because Linden Lab contains no clause in their TOS or CS that links to third-party sites cannot be contained. Indeed, the Herald, sluniverse.com, and I all routinely post links to our blogs in "fansites" and in other forums (I am still allowed to post in fansites).
Linden Lab has never exercised the overreach that other games exercise, i.e. World of Warcraft or the Sims on Online through Stratics, banning the linkage to sites that they view as "violating their TOS". Of course, a third-party site can't violate a TOS it hasn't signed! Of course that *is* overbroad and *is* overreach!"
So while Frank may wish to practice his own freelance sort of guidelines of what he thinks is correct on his own little group forum, he sure can't represent that as Linden policy; it is not.
Indeed, many long battles were fought by the Herald with Stratics over this issue. I remember I once was banned for 2 days off Stratics merely for having within a post about something else, some URL link to the Herald. The Herald, in turn, contained on its front page, a list of fan sites, one of which sold Sims currency (simoleons). So even unto the third generation of links, Stratics believed that they had a right to ban me for my link to the Herald, merely because the Herald had a link to another site, which in turn illegally sold the game currency.
Many civil libertarians and electronic frontier freedom-fighters work very hard to make sure these game companies don't take away freedoms outside their domain with this type of overreach. It's bad enough they take them away inside their games.
There are other troubling aspects of this "rewrite" of the TOS and COS; I invite lawyers anc close students of the Linden TOS and CS to study this. I"m going to investigate in particular this one: " Inviting or encouraging other Residents to target a specific Resident or Residents in a manner objectionable to the targeted Resident ."
This would seem to endorse some highly subjective and arbitrary notion of what anybody would find "objectionable". That means any resident gets to decide what "targeted" means and what "objectionable" means. That opens the door to numerous frivolous and specious cases. Of course, this could well be a flaw within the Lindens' own TOS writing. They have other clauses within their TOS and CS that are very subjective and discretionary in that way, which invite arbitrary abuses of power all too easily. If it's a Linden flaw, one would expect a lawyer not to replicate it in a re-write. I suspect it goes much farther though.
It's no accident that Traxx Hathor and some others in this group tout the book "Order Without Law". It's been said by at least one lawyer I know that this book is highly flawed by forgetting the previous 150 years of history that went into the establishment of such "order without law" practices as grazing of cattle. That 150 years including a lot of hangings, shootings, and cattle-rustling! Sure, it's easy to put in nice little neighbourhoody Mr. Rogers kind of practices of "order without law" AFTER justice or the strong or both have prevailed over the management of scarce resources!
I find that tekkies, socialists, hedonists, and other modern Internet lords and masters love to grab on the "order without law" concept because they figure they'll get to be the ones who establish the order, and they sure as hell don't want any law that they will view as in any way curbing their freedom.
But it's a lot of bullshit, covering up the same-old, same-old, of a few authoritarian personalities wishing to use Bolshevik-like methods of duplicity, revolutionary justice, displacement and distraction techniques, and all the old well-worn tactics of taking control of others, that start and end with the very notion of "the end justifies the means".
The "end" that is always justified by the hardline socialists, utopian tekkies, etc. is always "My Kewl Space" or "My Superior Architecture" or "My Secret Sim" that is unaccountable to any rule of law by man or machine.
In fact, the people coding the machines want to make sure that always and anywhere, they get to do what they want by their own lights, brooking no dissent. That's how you could get a handy thing like the Linden voting mechanism that does not let you vote "no". For that, I personally hold Cory Ondrejka responsible.
Not being able to vote "no" is what enables a posse like "Rock the SL Vote" -- another group with only one officer, Lasivian Leandros, who routinely comes to harangue me and drove me off at least one listserve. This group contains many of our usual suspects, ranging from Maxx Monde on down -- it is filled with tekkies who figured out what many people are asleep to (except the Goreans) that if you work up a posse of your like-minded tribe, you can go and "throw" just about any of the propositions on the "ballot" now. Of course, that's their right. Of course, in a democracy, any PACs, or interest groups, or lobbying groups, get to form and act! Hooray! But when a group is unaccountable, with only one officer, when others can't join it by any publicly-scrutinizable criteria, it's right to ask questions. If a group of residents puts up a proposal to either remove the functions of the bounce script (the aggressive security script), the posse will go and create another proposal (they can't vote no in any accountable way) and get that passed with more votes. GIven their use of the notorious back-channel the SL IRC Channel, given their technological superiority, they're likely to "rock" a lot of votes their way. Too bad for you, non-tekkie! You're fucked!
(Of course, we see a lot of the tekkie lobby also going into big business, like Electric Sheep Company and GIGAS, and that helps us know that this isn't just about superior-minded folks who Care About the Community, they mainly care to make money for themselves and their friends but even more importantly, gain the reputational enhancement and Linden attention that goes with technological superiority.)
This is supposed to be the "Internet norm" now -- but it's a system that will, in its own way, be just as evil and accountable as the meat-world system it purports to overthrow -- representative government in democracies, where (so the theory goes) there are all these politicians and PACs bought out by big business. That is, half or more of the people in these "tribes" can just obediently follow the bidding of a few just for the sake of a sense of group membership and cohesion. They can decide they like this or that feature of a sub-culture, join it, and never have to think for themselves.
The answer, I suppose, is to try to strengthen the voices of individual dissenters (that's where I come in, willing to take any amount of harassment and abuse to try to keep speaking up against the group-think) and to try to ensure that groups with a variety of opinions are created and sound off on the voting page with their own organized propositions and their own posses to "rock the vote".
I'm also confident that as more and more people come into the world -- we can already see from all the increasingly brave posts on the forums -- there will be people who are normal businessmen, here to make money in an engaging and fun way, lots of householders and romance-seekers, and creative people not tied up to the existing SL diva machine. These people, collectively, will exert a force of moderation on the forces we see now at the extreme right (creator-fascism in the Platform Party) or left (the tekkie wikinistas and utopians, who are often so left they're right). These extremists want to overthrow the Rule of Law, whether in the forum of TOS/CS or any kind of universal, grid-wide or metaverse Law, by constantly impugning universality itself, so that they can get away with an "end justifies the means" sort of approach.
In the name of "host my own server" and "do my own thing" and "anything goes", they will seek power over others, especially those they've gotten to most enthusiastically sign up for the "anything goes" philosophy.
In the new post-covenant configuration, if Daniel Linden and others have their way, any community will be able to override the Community Standards and set as yet unspecified "local standards". The Lindens were extremely vague about what this meant in terms of violations of their CS.
We know what the Goreans want. Magnum Serpentine made it abundantly clear. They want to rule over other people, spouting the "voluntary, with their own will" cover-all clause constantly, even in face of any actual facts of abuse (and the mere presence of so many self-help sub groups to address abuse in the BDSM community lets us know that the "voluntary" stuff just doesn't fly in significant numbers of cases.)
Magum wants to have all abuse reports coming out of lands under his domain going to the Lindens to come back to him, unopened. That is, the Lindens will let him serve as judge and jury of all his own abuse cases. A legitimate cry for help could come of someone severely griefed, and the Lindens will boomerang it back to the person in charge of the abusers, if not implicated. Sounds like Russia or worse to me! Very bad system! The Lindens blandly look on, when urgent queries are raised about this severe flaw in their concept. They want people to host their own servers and get out of their hair, full stop. They aren't thinking of their responsibility as world-creators in the slightest.
But then, these are the people who sit around like deer in the headlights and tell you in start surprise that they had *no idea* that people were going to use the idiotic circle-jerk hippie tools they made for groups *for actual businesses*. Gosh, and look, they did?
I've seen many RL situations, some of the most stark nature, where the rule of law can begin to take root by groups of people behaving "as if" there really were a rule of law. That is, if they make model constitutions, or magna charters or what-have-you, but more importantly, if they document and publicize abuses of what everyone can recognize as injustice; if they create weak rhetorical precedents at least by making courts that issue rulings even when the powers-that-be have no intention of enforcing them. That's why the original SL Superior Court was a great idea -- let them issue rulings that the community comes to see have merit and trust, and the powers-that-be will sooner or later have to take note.
We need the rule of law in Second Life. For that we need a whole complex set of factors -- lawyers, bar associations, consumer advocate groups, mediators, dispute resolution services, courts, judges, legal drafting committees -- parliaments! The rule of law usually can't happen without a government. Yet in many countries of the world, where the government is hopelessly resistant to change, and has no intention of letting citizens really rule themselves in a just manner, they can make changes and prepare for the time when they will be free to have an independent judiciary. That's why the formation of various lobbying groups, interest groups, political parties, movements, etc. are an important step toward the Rule of Law in Second Life.
There's a significant -- though small-in-number -- group of influential forums posters and tekkies and socialists with the Lindens' ear and likeminded chumminesss that believe that we don't need a Rule of Law in SL, we need My Rule on My Sim. They think to fight against the meatworld's injustices of the Tropica's "I Rule" type of problem ("You Rule" is the slogan of Tropica), they need to overthrow law in general, universality, and create a host of particularized and subjectivized laws.
But their notions of socialist justice (which is to music as martial music is to music) and revolutionary justice and so forth are not sufficient or beneficial to the virtual world, whatever their short-term gains. More and more, people will come to see the need for larger forms of community recognition of the rule of law, and community dispute resolutions.
It's wrong for a group of Lindens and regulars on the forum to band together fiercely and declare that "selling freebies is not cool and is wrong". That's an example where they are trying to put over on us a feature of their self-interest -- the desire to distribute freebies and gain reputational enhancement and loss leders -- over the free market's interest -- the desire of newbies to find useful things "just-in-time" -- that mainly other newbies will sell to them. Tekkis, IRC back-channelers think they can come up with a social norm -- an "order without law" like "selling freebies is not cool" and put it over normal, common-sense thinkers operating with a different sense of more universal law based on the actual appearances of that law in RL where there are free markets -- selling stuff is ok.
I get a reviewer's copy of a book for free; after I write the review, I sell that free book at the Strand. Neither author nor book publisher can do a thing about it, nor would they want to. They send me free books knowing that I'll review a good portion of them and they'll get their "page hits" or sales. It's a loss-leader, part of promotion. None of my neighbours hiss at me as I walk to the Strand with my bag of free books. They happily go to the Strand and buy the Strand's marked-up resold copies of my once-free book that I got payment for. Hey, that's life in the big city. It's a very good example of how freebies in RL are given out and sold freely. The publishing company doesn't scream on forums that their business on amazon.com or at the bricks-and-mortar Barnes and Nobels have been irreparably harmed by the sale of freebies. People who scour the Reviews' Copies bins -- myself included -- for just-in-time bargains are going to buy those versions. Those who want a more pleasant shopping experience at home on the Internet or in the fancier store will pay more money. That's life.
Honestly, I can't wait til the world grows! It's already growing! It's great!
