By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
Come to my SL20B Exhibit! There are more than a dozen freebies, many of them historic artifacts!
Among the rules for exhibitors at the SL birthdays -- which have grown more strict in recent years -- aside from the ban on commerce, tip jars, your company logo (!), etc., there is this:
*10. You may not use or display hate-oriented content at your SL20B build. Political affiliations, statements or content of any kind are not appropriate for the Birthday. The Second Life Birthday event is a place to celebrate the anniversary of Second Life and display creative endeavors by Residents. If you are not sure if something falls into these categories, contact a Mole Coordinator. You may not display content that expresses a political opinion or would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups or Second Life. Any content that is deemed offensive, harassing, insulting or bullying will be removed, and the owner will be removed from the event. This will be determined by the staff of SL20B at their discretion. Their decisions are final.
As we know from the SL forums, the notion of "hate-oriented content" or content that "would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups" are tremendously overbroad concepts and certainly don't pass muster for US First Amendent jurisprudence, and for that matter, even Art. 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a private corporation, Linden Lab is not required to supply First-Amendment level free speech, so and here we all are.
I view this as merely an interesting, challenging writing assignment to see if you can apply "the View from Nowhere" -- so hated in particular by leftist media critics like Jay Rosen. I feel such a "nowhere view" is actually a good thing when it consists of layered perspectives so that the reader can form their own judgement. In the old days, the New York Times would typically have a "nut graph" or a graph early in the story providing, say, five perspectives of an event. There would be the perpetrators, the victims, the bystanders, the experts, the government officials and so on. Reporters have given up investigating these perspectives; worse, they delegitimize many of them.
I don't pretend to any full history of SL or even full (or especially unbiased) account of the events of protest in SL. But I was a witness of many of them and I think I can bring more information to the table.
Why do I write such long posts? Because I think out loud and write as I go. You're not required to read them and can skim. This essay is broken up into 18 vignettes in world -- several cover one event or topic in two notecards, so the "vignettes" are not so distinct. Due to health issues, I hardly had any time to do this build and notecards and nearly dropped out. But I did want to be present for the historic SL20B and get this topic passed and validated. If you go to Tapestry of Time, or read the official 20th anniversary commemoration booklet, you realize the Lindens tend to reify certain events in their own corporate history (the "Prim Tax Revolt" is always worshipped as much as the "Boston Tea Party" in RL American history and simulates it, right down to crates of tea thrown into the ocean). They also tend to focus not on social developments that drive their software revisions, but technical issues -- now we have sculpties; now we have mesh; oh, there's a shiny, PBR, oh now we can finally link prims 64 meters apart from each other (which means you can put walls on a sky platform that size and link them finally).
Protests about how software affects organic people manifesting as avatars? Not so much.
That is one "use case"; there is another "edge case"; there is a "bug" or a "feature". The software-driven life, not based on any kinds of laws of nature or natural law or organic values, which we have all lived thoroughly for 20 years has now invaded all of modern life in developed countries and will only become all-pervasive.
The recent fumblings by Meta (Facebook) and others with what purported to be "the dawn of the Metaverse" (which we know dawned in 2003 and had conferences and white papers by 2006!) and the reiteration of the wheel lets us know that we still don't have the necessary attention we deserve!
THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS: A HISTORY OF PROTEST IN SECOND LIFE IN FIVE ACTS
Welcome
Welcome to my exhibit for SL20B! I'm still a newbie at almost 19 years in SL now, but over the last two decades, I have done a lot of thinking about this glorious virtual Experiment in International Living which we have on these fair servers, and the lessons we can pass on to the new legless and blind Metaverse Engineers: leave in everything below the waist, keep the TVs off your nose and the boxes off your head, and zone, zone, zone.
Much of the stress and strife of virtual worlds and the cost in staff time and trouble in customer tickets can be boiled down to the Tragedy of the Commons. Read up on this concept if you haven't heard of it, but if you have been in SL for even 30 days, you've already lived it in the round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
The Second Life grid represented as the paddocked green pastures of the islands and homesteads; the gated communities of Bellisseria; and the wild mainland where large eyesore builds, grid-wide transportation games, enormous RP castles, etc. contest for the view, amid clumps of wildflowers and manicured lawns.
Few remember now how the Electric Sheep company, one of the "Big Six" resident developers or "solutions providers" for outside RL companies in SL, managed to tag every single item in SL and then organize a global search around it, which led to an uproar as people's casual sale items left to $0 for their friends or their adult furniture was suddenly thrust into the public eye. Eventually, this led to an object menu section where you can check off "show in search," an item that is generally irrelevant now (does Firestorm's Area Search even require it?)
Many of the protests that developed in SL over the years related to the ruination of the virtual experience of the many by the few, and the effort by the platform providers to provide the maximum freedom of creativity to grow the world, but not yield to forces bent on destroying it to fulfill the whims of the few.
Within a few years of its founding, Second Life was forced to abandon the dream of harmonious civic life on a contiguous mainland and offer private islands for people to get away from each other, represented by the sheep paddock here, and give in to strenuous customer demand for planned communities with more rules and predictable content, which began with Brown and Boardman and continued to Bellisseria and similar Linden Home communities.
As in RL, citizen protest emerges against rules and against other citizens' groups with the dominant theme that Second Life is "not a country" (although founder Philip Rosedale said he was making one -- and did, whether recognized or not). It doesn't have the features of real-life liberal democracies or for that matter rigid authoritarian regimes but is a private company with a Terms of Service. We already live in the Customer Service State predicted by games theory thinker Edward Castronova (Escape to the Virtual World - 2008).
Yet there can never be enough staff time to address all the complaints accruing in a place where hell is other people - in 3D, streaming, and where even the most attentive and dedicated customer servants could please everybody. And so the "game" that has emerged throughout the years is to get enough attention to one's recipe for happiness and have the TOS amended in this or that direction. Some redactions occurred internally; others were a result of external pressure, whether by small groups or fare more rarely, by mass movements (which are almost impossible to form in SL for lots of reasons).
I have made 18 vignettes somewhat arbitrarily that illustrates this process; some deal with specific events in time, and others deal with chronic themes over the years.
History is written by the victors. And Mainland rentals agents are not the victors in this game. So this is understandably a dissident history, and features moments you may never have heard of, such as this: did you know that in 2004, you could be voted off your group land which you purchased on the auction and paid tier on regularly, by tenants who paid no tier? Did you know one resident company asked for an obtained a box on objects "show in search" to be able to search the entire grid and harvest the search results for their use? This feature remains today on object menus, largely unused or not understood. Did you know there was once a volunteers' group with 8000 residents in it who met in an enormous Greco-Roman palace?
Naturally some events have been left out and if you think of any that you believe should be included, ,leave a notecard in the Complaint Rockets to the right in the Better Living Through Land Impact room.
Be sure to pick up all the interesting historical freebies or art works, vote early and often on all your alts, and leave your actual signed notecard in the mailbox to bring back the Pony in the Welcome Area -- or any other feature request!
We find the drinks we offer from Kittykat Ninetail's "THIS IS MINE" dragon are perfect for reflecting on everything related to the cry of many a resident down through the years: "I get to do WTF I want on my land" -- and the consequences for us all. And you should sample beverages offered at further stations to bolster your stamina in considering SL's rich history, only a slice of which I am able to give here. If you remember these events differently -- write your own history!
I am grateful to my dear friend Alazarin Mondrian/Alazarin Mobius for helping me with the build and providing signage and props. Also special recognition of Bump Squeegee and Silas Merlin for their art works displayed here.
Happy SL20B!
Prokofy Neva, Curator
Content and Discontent, Richness and Sadness
Prelude
Content/Discontent
The entire history of massive online role-play games, virtual worlds, social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence could be summed up in this phrase:
Content/Discontent
Game gods, virtual world devs, social media entrepreneurs, VR devs and our newflangled "prompt engineers" all face the same dilemma:
They make a thing.
Some people like it; some don't, they vote with their feet.
They let people make a thing; some people don't like it, they leave (and you can't have their stuff)
They make a thing -- some people "take it to real," as the kids say, in RL courtrooms.
They don't make a thing -- people complain.
They make a thing -- people burn through it and want more.
They make a thing -- users break it.
You get the idea.
Lindens make a gorgeous virtual, contiguous world with a sun that rises and sets, a moon, trees, grass, flowers, and like God on the 6th day, they made fugly but serviceable avatars, and then doubled back later and put in fish.
The didn't have to make animals because Sion Zaius entered our world and created the sion chicken, whose food inworld is now literally running out because Sion had to go back to college. Content/Discontent.
The content which the Lindens enabled with their inworld building tools and permission for outworld uploads of textures, sounds, and later mesh, is rich, ornate, as intricate as Maru Kado's Kasamawashi animesh cat here.
But people have poor graphic cards; they experience lag; stuff breaks; *they* break it -- and, as Wallace Stevens says in "Gubbinal":
"The world is ugly and the people are sad."
They sit in the Sad Chair, they talk to their Sad Little Friend the Cloud, they do Sad Things that make more sadness.
Their loudest complaint is:
"This isn't like RL."
Linden Lab refuses to get involved in inter-resident disputes and prohibits the naming of names on the forums.
But if anyone, Linden or resident, makes rules for compatible living, someone is sure to feel too constrained and bark:
"This is TOO MUCH like RL."
Linden Lab has rules based on RL jurisdictions, prohibiting the crimes of gambling, fraud, child pornography etc -- none of which is sanitized by being virtualized.
Everyone finds their way across the thin line between Content and Discontent, or they don't find the thin line between Sanity or Insanity.
***
Act 1, Scene 1
Prim Hoarders
Every virtual schoolchild knows the glorious history of the Prim Tax Revolt, spoken of in reverent tones and told and retold to a high polish.
The reality is, some of the instigators were Linden alts, so it was one set of Lindens against another set of Lindens on a policy issue, with some residents getting involved.
Yes, wasn't it terrible, like some horrid oligarchic Scrooge, to charge people by the prim??? Gosh, that sounds like some rental agents we know!
But before there was the Prim Tax and the Prim Tax Revolt, there was another thing that is instructive to know about in terms of our Tragedy of the Commons, and that is: Prim Hoarding.
So in the old days, people would get a parcel of land, and because the prims could be accessed like a vast well on that sim for all (as they can in grouped land on Mainland rentals! Imagine!), some people would build huge, complex, and not necessarily beautiful builds. Although there are some fabulous old builds like the Cathedral in Mocha not to mention the wondrous Linden builds like the Moth Temple.
And some people who weren't particularly talented but thought that some day, they might want to build something or hire a builder, would stash hoards of prims under the ground to use them up -- a kind of prim-soaker. Of the type we had to keep in some sims (the Estonian Embassy in SL's cornflower crown was good for this purpose) to that *griefers* wouldn't fill the sim with griefcubes which used to make people's prims return to their inventories.
So people just rezzed out a bunch of cubes or some high-prim item -- and in those days, there was no "Convex," no no no.
So quite reasonably to deter that behaviour, which good will and good neighbourliness couldn't stop, the Lindens decided to charge by the prim. Then people, especially prim hoarders, rebelled.
Then they charged by the *meter* and made the number of prims per meter standard.
Progress.
So while there were many Lessons Learned and imposed, such as "be clear on your protest goals" or "use humour" or "be willing to compromise," there was another darker, force at work, which we already explained was Content/Discontent, and that is the Law of Virtuality -- somebody is always making a thing, and somebody else doesn't like that thing, or wants to hog resources to themselves, and prevent others from having them.
In RL, there is "tort law" and laws about "attractive nuisances" and "zoning" but in SL, we have meters and standard number of prims -- or land impact as they are now known (virtually the same).
Be grateful.
***
Act 1, Scene 2
Magic Wand vs. Griefcube
After the Lindens rested on the 7th day, their residents got to work building out the world, in some ways worse -- much worse -- and some ways better, but that was the plan, and we all know that God loves us and has a plan for us, don't we?
So somewhere along here in the early days there was a wondrous magician named Starax who made an amazing wand. This wand, when clicked, could produce all kinds of things from detailed, anatomically correct Vertu Cows to goldfish and lions and horses (and we don't really know because we're newbies, and missed that early chapter but someone will catch us up.)
So these items would come out of the wand at a clip and replicate across a sim. They were on temp rez, so it didn't seem like such a big deal.
Meanwhile, less creative sorts who read the Something Awful forums, and later 4chan, thought it would be fun to go around and find items that people had rezzed out from the Linden Library, such as Philip's Party hat, which the Lindens had thoughtfully left on all perms to help people "share" and "create". (Now they've gone in the opposite direction and put things on no transfer which is a shame, but you'll see why in a minute.)
So not before long, sims would be regularly deluged with self-replicating cubes, often with horrendously ugly, vulgar, and illegal images on them, and typically with some nonsense being spouted and sometimes numbered prims announcing their births rapidly in chat. Often, this would crash a sim, if some other sim crashing device wasn't used.
And the beauty part? As they had originated from an individual resident's library, and then been seized because they were pre-checked on "share" and all perms, they could now look as if they were grief objects made by that prim creator, who was then vilified and AR'd as a griefer, instead of the victim of a griefer. That's why you always need to look at the prim *owner* or deployer in a grief attack.
These mass attacks would occur particularly during public events, like the goodbye party for Robin Linden, an early VP. Or during a town hall. Philip got so mad once he threatened to call the FBI. The entire grid would be shut down sometimes for days at a time -- essentially, this was a DDoS attack, with zero-day exploits.
Lindens scampered around trying to patch exploits and built what they called a "grey goo fence" which stopped self-replicating prims at least from crossing borders, or replicating as fast...or something -- get Andrew Linden to tell you if you can find him (he is no longer on staff).
But that nerfed Starax's Wand and a great outcry went up on the forums and in the land. Now, the forums are typically read in any game or world by less than 5% of the user population, but still, it Had an Effect, which is always the goal. It seemd Starax's Wand could still work, in a way, but by then, Starax had stomped out of the world. Of course, he was later to appear on an alt and work for one of the big RL developers but not everyone remembers that part. There was even a little Starax museum in Patagonia which we helped to keep free of weeds and Starax himself apparently came to it.
We can't represent all the forms of griefing here which are myriad and diverse and wondrous, even more than Starax's wand, or the Mysti-Tool, or Alazarin's 600-prim castles or anc's friedberry gatchas, my personal favourite. Because if we represented them, we'd be banned here. So take it on faith -- griefers wrecked havoc for at least 5 solid years before the worst of them either were finally banned or grew up in RL and got jobs at Intel and other virtual world competitors-- which maybe this was what it was all about all along.
Some people weren't affected by griefing and never thought it was a big deal; others experienced it daily and filed ARs that went nowhere for years on end. There was a strange drama of "allowing creativity" and "complying with TOS 2(c)" -- a now removed section of the TOS which we personally found useful which went something like this "interfering with the enjoyment of Second Life by other residents."
There is much that is overbroad in the TOS and some found that particular clause overbroad, but it fits. The Golden Rule still works pretty well as an organic norm often hard to enforce in code.
Griefing -- more than high cost, lag, curbs on lifestyles, etc. -- has likely caused more protest than any other thing in SL, but only the Lindens know how the ARs are trending as they no longer publish their partial Police Blotter which was helpful.
Enhancement of the land tools -- which we couldn't fit in to this exhibit -- helped control the experience more and more for residents -- they could turn off fly to prevent griefer swarms, although this also prevents much of the thrill of SL as the avian creatures we are. They can turn off scripts for "everyone" and only enable "group" to run them, which can be closed. And so on.
If working the land controls isn't enough, a newer sort of Linden now with names like Governance4 Linden tell you to file ARs accurately and in detail and they will have an effect.
Everyone knows ARs seldom work, but the workarounds that evolved to fill this gap -- various resident vigilante groups -- can be worse -- and again, space and time did not allow us to enlarge on that topic which in SL terms, is actually an interesting prequel to the Edward Snowden story.
Remember: if you are ever cage-bombed, the trick is just to sit on anything or be animated by any object.
***
Act 1, Scene 3
Griefer U
The visible or physical destruction of griefers is one topic, but there are myriad forms of other types of griefing -- ranging from briefly amusing chat to repetitive spam to annoying catcalls to actionable hate speech and more.
And there are all kinds of tricks and fakes and maneuvers especially making extensive use of the affordances of alts and the ability to fly (which is why "fly" is turned off in so many places.)
One might say that while SL is a place of enormous creativity where many have found friends and even soul mates for life, it is also a place offering incredible opportunities to inflict pain on other human beings.
There are certain extremist scholars who view offenses against RL social norms and corporate terms of service as merely "transgressive" or "ludic" or "neuro-atypical" and fascinating subjects of study to be encouraged and kept free of condemnation. But the people who live in virtual worlds tend to realize at some level that if there is something you are doing that you wouldn't do in your grandmother's living room, maybe you shouldn't be doing it, or at least not in public.
Is griefing a legitimate form of protest or merely another form of crime? We're going to go with Door No. 2. If you want to oppose The Man and knock over the twin towers as "satire," do it on your own sim at least. But you don't have a sim, do you? Or even a micro-parcel. So that's why you're griefing in a sandbox, eh?
Sometimes these behaviours are blessed as "emergent" by the platform providers who, after all, never forget that they are a Lab and we are all in an experiment.
Other times, they are allowed for a while -- sometimes years -- and then disallowed suddenly, and we don't always know why.
Extraordinary feats of kindness and self-sacrifice have been made on this grid along with extraordinary feats of cruelty -- but if you gave your log-on to someone else, that's on you. Protest as you will, LL doesn't get involved. And so on. The line is drawn clearly there.
Elsewhere, as a one-time VP at LL asked pointedly about the activity possible on a 16 m microparcel: "What are you doing on there, your knitting?"
Make a parade of alts to spy on or harass a lover who rejected you -- likely you'll be able to get away with it although in theory, this can be grounds for action. There isn't any limit on the number of basic or premium accounts any more "as long as they are not used for ill" as a top Linden explained -- but this has to be tested through the AR process by others.
One thing is certain, this Road to Hell is paved with the good intention of Encouraging Creativity.
The RL effigies of myself allowed to proliferate on my virtual lawns for years on end and the packs of Soviet palaces and Stalinist regalia were creative, I suppose -- prim sculpture really is a wonder and a lost art, at that, nowadays! But if the sacred pledge of virtual world makers to their denizens -- that if it is not on the profile inworld, it is not fair game -- is to retain its glory, then it has to stick for everybody, not just people you like.
Then on a separate but related topic, I personally wonder if art requiring virtual platforms and artificial intelligence can rightfully be called "art" in the full sense and I prefer to call it "artifacturing" when it comes to MidJourney although I concede that the creations of SL are far more like RL creations.
Trust me, I am unable to keep my hand and eye straight long enough to paint anything remotely like this Blue Owl on Porcelain Cup and I even manged to flunk art class in High School.
And I'm not so sure of the meaning of this Blue Owl which I personally didn't make at all but merely "prompted" to be scraped from the chaos of images on the Internet like the bits of chainsawed books in "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinges in a strange future library which were glued back together virtually!
In fact, somebody who can actually make a nice little Blue Owl like Dalriada Delwood of MOoH! is much the greater artist.
But even she may have gone on the Internet to get ideas because haven't we all?
Still, it's hard to imagine why even the mundane creativity of norms living in little houses on the hillside with picket fences and decorating with the top Coastal Grandma decorators of Happy Weekends had to die for Plastic Duck. You know?
Yet all of us had to have a little bit of them die in order that Plastic Duck live -- although have you noticed he hasn't been around for ages?
At a certain point when the drive to allow creativity out of some socialist ideological fervour or technolibertarian fever dream crashes on the reality of user attrition and less sales of regions and more abandoned land, the Lindens do act. Protest works.
It just takes a long time.
And I think in the long, run, we'd all rather have our legs. PS our eyes free to look at RL along with SL at the same time.
***
Act 1, Scene 4
Ad Farmers
As long as there has been land enabled for sale in SL, there have been extortionists finding ways to get people to "buy back the view" -- or even buy passage out of their own property without ban lines.
Ad farmers buy up cheap parcels and cut them into small pieces and then put an outrageous price on it to encourage people near the land -- which may sprout spinning cubes, laggy cubes, large billboards that encroach elsewhere, etc. -- to "buy back the view."
Few remember how these micro-parcels first appeared, unless they were born during the early years when "First Land" was available -- and they clicked the wrong button on the land menu.
: (
If you clicked "abandon" by intention or mistake, your land would fall into 16 m2 parcels -- that means 32 individual 16m parcels which rapidly fell prey to swift or bot-deploying land barons who bought them for $16 meter before you could scarcely gather your wits. Well, you'll be sure not to do THAT again -- except you might, again, by mistake, on another account, or comfort a friend who fell prey to the same insanity. That is why among the reforms to the land tools were "scare screens" with "Do you really want to abandon your land?" -- and then this fall-into-pieces system was retired and the full lot would abandon intact.
The theory of the insta-chop-up was that your neighbours, all being people of good will, would only take what they needed for extra prims -- why there might be several cheerful souls right on your sim who would take the few prims each, leaving it for others to take as needed, like a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, right?
Except like a lot of things in SL, it didn't work that way until many years later, bots were banned for use in land purchases -- although the amazing speed at which certain barons show up at your elbow if you mistakingly click "anyone" when attempting to put land to sale to yourself or another person.
But to back up a bit, we spent many years -- from about 2004-2008 or four long years -- protesting the land extortion racket to the Lindens and trying to get them to adopt a policy about it.
This wasn't easy, because there were many legitimate uses of microparcels -- some people made maps, or surveyed the grid, or monitored which sims were sharing which server (contiguous land is not necessarily on the same server) or provided freebies for new residents or created various types of stations for RP games. The Lindens couldn't investigate every 16 m2 parcel and ARs were not always made in good faith as the AR system itself was always wielded in various internecine resident group wars.
Even so, it was pretty clear if you followed the money and followed the alts, which tended to have to be in the same groups and tended to win the same auctions -- which in the old days, helpfully showed the name of the avatar who won the auction.
Several groups sprang up to try to rescue abandoned land in tiny amounts and put trees or seating on it like mini-parks, or AR'd ad cutters and urged people not to buy the microplots and feed the madness.
Eventually after many meetings with Lindens, various townhalls, blogs, petitions and even a "Zoo of Ad Farmers" with the hope that "name and shame" might work (it seldom does in anonymous virtual worlds), the Lindens devised a policy where ad parcels had to be limited to one per sim, and the signs put on them could not be obtrusive or encroaching.
The problem is that some land barons bought up microparcels and re-rented or re-sold them and didn't always police their tenants; there are always those bold enough to park a giant billboard like the one shown here and root it on a 16 m2 to make it sit over Linden road shoulder. So it's an endless maintenance chore.
The ad farm situation is better than it used to be 10 or 15 years ago, but it is still a major maintenance and AR chore for both Lindens and land owners. There are ALWAYS edge-casers. There are even some who deploy the famous "Good Neighbour" kiosk with rules to live by many agree on to keep sims looking nice -- and use them to force people away from their land.
Island dealers could only gleefully follow the sufferings of Mainland dealers and deploy their own billboards, "Want to Get Away from Mainland Blight? Come to the Islands!" which only added to the problem.
Our own view is that only preventing land under 128 m2 from selling to anyone but its owner to change its group (or not at all) along with a managed, networked, tasteful Linden-owned ad system on roadsides and in infohubs and welcome areas (as there used to be) will fix this problem by replacing what drives it: the demand for advertising that can reach eyeballs, in a world where there always is too much bad advertising and not enough good advertising reaching people who can make use of it. Lindens shy away from billboard blight, but their own Mole billboards used as teleporter boards or other signage let us know they can make fun or even beautiful billboards and sell the ad space on them to residents.
Along the way might come a total ban on all resident roadside advertising, because Lindens prefer to use code-as-law rather than organic policy to solve problems because they can't eat up staff time. It really is a dilemma for the most well-intentioned.
Lindens also devised a policy some years ago that land under 96 m2 cannot show up in search. This prevented the use of microparcels to game traffic, by creating dozens of them at a venue and skewing search results.
Residents trying to maintain their properties are also vexed by giant air towers, spires, spinning orbs, and all kinds of junk deployed even on land not for sale -- for reasons that often escape passers-by. Lindens will sometimes act if there is a cluster of these nuisance towers, but given that their policy is about *advertising* or *sale* of land, just putting up a giant nuisance tower worthy of St. Simeon Stylites is not enough to get Governance Lindens to act.
Suffice it to say, the struggle over micro-parcel sales and ads, while abated some over the years with a series of Linden policies in response to resident protest, will continue until some greater intervention is devised.
See if you can guess why there is a box of donuts in the middle of these microparcels for sale, and those with correct answers will win a free prize.
***
Act 2, Scene 1
The Pizza Guy
Protests against prim taxes or Mainland griefing or Copybot are often the best known form of protests and viewed as the most successful in SL.
But in my view, the protest against the voting function in the original version of groups in SL, and removal of the feature of "officer recall" was among the greatest achievements in SL.
On January 14, 2006, I posted a blog titled
"Imagine if the Pizza Guy Stole LL"
The fanciful premise of this essay was to compare what the group tools enable/impose on SL businesses and non-profit groups with their equivalents in real life.
What if, in order merely to enable the pizza guy to make and then deliver a pizza and set it down in your office, you had to also enable the delivery man to take your office from you and be cut into all your profits?
Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) saw the post and discussed it with Philip Linden and they could see the point that I and other land owners had been making for many months to no avail. The original group tools were intended for collaborative projects of various types, whether communities of affinity or discussion groups, but not originally envisioned with land, which developed over time as a product available as "First Land" inworld to newbies or from auctions arranged by LL (mainly of entire sims when the world was growing by leaps and bounds).
Faced with the problem of how to have tenants join a group to set their vendors and wares out for sale, ,yet not be able to cause any damage or return any builds, Anshe Chung and other land barons used to switch out their entire malls to other groups every night manually, to make prims not set to the tenant's group disappear or to manage other aspects of a mall such as parceling, then put it back into the tenant's group again.
In SL, I found that I could create a land group and group my land as the system encouraged to get 10% more tier to apply for extra prims. The Lindens invented group land to facilitate communal activity -- which they idealized -- particularly group building -- an activity which has featured over the years more as a distant ideal than a typical reality.
Most builds are done by either a landowner herself, solo, or she hires someone else to build for her, or groups cooperating on builds do them either in serial fashion or with separate assignments -- a simultaneous group build with some people casually able to return the prims of others they don't like using the "share" feature is not the norm -- in fact, like blowing up land to terraform it, we could describe it as "declining" and not "emergent" behaviour.
But if I decided, for the convenient of my tenants, to have an open group anyone could join on the honour system to set prims on the parcel they were renting -- a behaviour seemingly consistent with the hippie-style commune nature of early group tools -- then any member of the group could trigger "officer recall" and vote me out of the group, and off land that I had purchased and paid the tier for.
In the early version of groups, all payments to the group, such as from a deeded vendor or a land sale, distributed exactly equally to all the group members -- there wasn't even a way (as there is now) to distribute according to the Soviet reformist maxim: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his work". And all group fees or "dwell" -- a form of incentive based on land traffic in the early days -- also distributed equally.
"Officer Recall" was clearly invented with the ideal of having civilian control over leaders manifested within the virtual world, as a way to prevent tyranny. But like other well-intentioned world-construction decisions made by the platform providers, it was not used by people of good will but used by bad actors, or sometimes triggered by mistake. The tyranny became the few over the many.
While the vote played out over 3 days, the officer with the group powers could not use them - he was prevented from thereby selling the group land to another group or expelling those who triggered the disruptive recall and continued to grief in other ways.
This in turn caused many businesses to fill their groups with multiple officer alts who, in the event of the recall of one officer by bad actors, they could keep their land and control their groups.
Then LL decided to crack down on the proliferation of premium accounts, which people would buy for their then-512 m,2 tier allocation and ability to buy "First Land" for $512, and misuse the function intended for a one-time help to make up an entire sim of $1/m land at a time when entire sims sold for thousands of US dollars on the auction. Residents were ordered to cut the number of their accounts to five, and cancel the rest.
When I cancelled my accounts, I wrote the reason for making the alt in the first instance -- to prevent the destructiveness of "officer recall". Philip then caught up with me at a RL meet-up -- the first SLCC in October 2005 in conjunction with the "State of Play" conference at NY Law School and asked me why I had done that.
Yes, people held conferences about the Metaverse in *2003*, although some think the Metaverse was invented by Meta in October 2023, 20 years later!
I sat down at a computer terminal and showed Philip how group land worked and the problem with "officer recall" -- it wasn't the first or the last time that an interesting discussion with him revealed that he was not familiar with every aspect of his creation and their ramifications!
I once complained to Philip that a book device released by a resident for the occasion of Cory Doctorow's appearance in SL and his giving away of his work "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" was not on "mod," and couldn't really be hailed as the "first printing press" as so many were saying.
(You can find a free copy at this station by clicking around.)
Of course, freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one, as the old saying goes, but Philip's response was one I never forgot:
"Someone will make everything."
He was absolutely confident that anything that was needed in the virtual world would be made; if one product or tool or script wasn't optimal, someone would make another and it would get better.
This has happened slowly and unevenly, and "someone comes to town" is overbalanced by "someone leaves town" constantly in SL.
***
I'm not doing so well in this poll, as it seems 430 people want to permaban me, but I also discovered this old script doesn't work any more to stop more than one vote on one avatar. So somebody may have had the patience to click this 430 times, who knows.
Act 2, Scene 2
Group Tools Reform
The reform of the Group Tools in 2005-2006 is one of the most fascinating -- and overlooked -- chapters of Second Life history.
It's hard to remember now, but long before Twitter, long before Facebook, even Second Life groups had real-time chat with numerous people, and the ability to hold talks in world with the ability to save transcripts. The first person to make an RT on Twitter was actually a Second Life resident -- because they were already familiar with that gesture from a very good early form of social media inside this virtual world: group chat.
The flaws of the current iteration of Groups tends to overshadow how truly clunky the tools were in the early years and fails to recognize that the cure for the key beef nowadays about Groups -- chat lags or doesn't work at all -- is simple:
Discord.
And really most games and worlds have always cultivated outworld solutions for inworld communications that either were too clunky or too heavily moderated: TeamSpeak, Gchat, Skype, Twitter, etc. There are actually SLers still on Plurk, which you never heard of. So we can't take the knock on Group chat seriously when there is such an easy workaround -- Discord, used by numerous merchants and affinity groups.
Next. We saw how in "The Pizza Guy," there were terrible flaws in the group originally created by that unique amalgam of technolibertarianism and technocommunism that makes up the ideology of our beloved Lab. Never change, LL!
But Lindens could see the problem themselves in their own groups they needed to accomplish inworld tasks from land management and customer service to staff meetings.
So they launched on a total reform of the groups and began by convening a series of inworld workshops with interested residents. Up until that time, the top Lindens would hold town halls on four-sim corners to maximize the number of participants "in person," then make available relays (they looked like old-fashioned radios) for any resident to hold a listening party on their own sim. They also began holding office hours and in the early years, they would even do walkabouts on the telehubs and welcome areas and talk to residents.
But to my recollection, the Group Tools conferences were the first of their type where people were in smaller working groups with Lindens, asking questions and proposing alternatives and getting feedback. It's one thing to protest, including with your feet, but it's another thing to try to work out alternatives and solutions.
The different-sized Laminak tables here with mismatched chairs represent the results -- more granulated tools, more flexibility, more possibilities for everyone, but not a perfect fit. Along the way, the Lindens faced demands such as a desire to have all owners to join simultaneously so that no one owner would be controlling the admission of another, but that was not technically possible.
Some Lindens kept failing to understand that "officer recall" might be a boon in a hippie commune where everyone put in 512, but one person was hogging the prims on group land that was collectivized, but in a rentals operation, where prims had to be managed fairly and apportioned, it was a bane. When I explained how "officer recall" could be used perniciously, a Linden told me that I would just have to lobby the other group members and prove to them that I was a good manager.
Except...I had paid for the land, and continued to pay the tier every month, and collect the rent to pay that tier. If someone felt that arrangement was tyrannical, they should refund or not rent in the first place -- the premise is different.
So land could be stolen by one rogue officer, taken away from the owners who paid for it and worked it, under the guise of "democracy".
When they finally grasped this, the Lindens went overboard and removed voting completely from the group tools. I remember one of the last (the last?) votes in a group of 8,000 people called "Concierge" at the time (which has now been revised as "MonCierge") and a proposition was mounted to protest changes to the TOS regarding copyright and LL's use of resident content, which many were unhappy with.
It may have been that the lag induced by having to check group membership and handle poll questions was too great, but like other early democratic features of SL, it was deprecated for the greater good.
While there was a certain amount of Sturm und Drang in the group tools process, and the Lindens never returned to quite this "workshop" format (the select "focus groups" with special friends was not as open and democratic and under NDA) -- it did bring about one of the greatest achievements of Second Life: tools to enable the kind of differentiated roles and granulation of function needed for every kind of group on group land or private land, whether a small group of friends, an RP sim, a store, a rentals agency, a university, NASA, or really anything you could think of with more than one person -- and some people took a group of alts to group their land and gain the tier bonus and ease of management.
The beauty of the group tools comes in the Roles, which can be calibrated or granulated to give people greater or lesser amounts of control of land, suited to their role -- as a partner in an RP community, as a romantic partner, as a tenant in a rental, as a shopper in a store, as an employee in a non-profit. So once the roles were set up properly there were the issues of cash and property -- deciding whether people could remove group-set prims, or equally receive all proceeds from a land or objects sale -- now there was no forced collectivization.
There are still some annoyances with groups -- search does not work with a pasted in name but only the first few letters can be typed to find it manually; after about 350 members, the land groups don't load so well; at 500 members the Lindens decided to make a bug a feature -- the group members cannot see the others in the group. This is not an option to select, so that say, shoppers are not "outed" to each other, but evidently a default. The groups can be hidden from one's profile.
The groups can still be griefed, especially if open -- people still invade them begging for cash, or spamming ads for their store, or spouting trash about other residents, sometimes pretending to be "bots," and we find all too often, group members believe an anonymous day-old alt ranting in their group, instead of someone in business for years in SL. But these problems are fixable by moderators with the ability first to select who can speak and second, who must be kicked from the group to maintain decorum. After all, if anyone is unhappy with a group's rules and management style, they can form their own group for 100L.
The fact that a key feature of the new Premium Plus account is 140 groups lets us know just how important groups are to Second Life. We never thought we'd use them all up, but we did and have to constantly leave some to make room for others.
***
Act 2, Scene 3
Mentors
There's a lot I could say about the Mentor.
Or maybe just a little, because this new version of them coming up may not last, like past iterations.
Mentors are older residents deployed to welcome areas, infohubs, etc. to help new members of SL.
They exist both as the result of protest about lack of care of newbies and retention -- which is bad in general for business and socializing. And themselves become the subject of protest when they inevitably fail to produce results that fit everyone's ideal society.
Remember your high school government? OK, everyone wants an ideal society, but no one wants to put in the work and those that do become martyrs or villains.
So people protest the various forms that Mentors have taken over the years as examples of favouritism or ineffective onboarding; but people also protest the lack of any kind of systematic efforts to retain new people when business begins to lag and concurrency falters. Periodically a forums or blog post or a RL news story refreshes the sense of futility and despair.
So let us just contemplate in general the Bonfire of Bad Ideas, which included things in the long-ago past when group tools were being reformed, such as "let's have islands where the residents can only file an AR with the island owner". This would be great for certain types of RP, said a Linden no longer on staff. This will be great for Retention because people will be Free.
We felt that if, for example, subs in highly authoritarian forms of RP were forced to give their passwords to abusive doms under threat of ban or worse, or forced to do things against the TOS, they should have the right to make a private AR to the Lab, where the name would not be publicized, and some person in authority could in theory respond to the situation if it was not a mere resident-to-resident dispute. Fortunately, that's more or less the regimen we have today, with no "home rule" for islands as much as it might be desirable in some aspects.
Another really hard-and-fast rule has been that only Lindens can ban from Linden land. This always seemed like a really, really good idea to us for any Mentors or related volunteer program, even though as we run a resident infohub on Governor Linden land (an old program following the demise of the Telehubs and the collapse of the first rendition of the Infohubs -- there are 10 of them) -- we have often wished we could ban the people who specifically came to grief us, and put out large pictures of our RL selves on the land using rogue viewers.
In our view, only paid, full-time, benefited staff can help entry and retention in RL as in SL. But it's a luxury for the Customer Service State so there is always the temptation to reach for Ladies' Auxilaries or druzhenniki (auxilary police).
The interesting feature of the newest rendition of Mentors is that prospective Helpful Hals and Helpful Hannahs must agree to work two-hour shifts for free, and promote the SL viewer unless asked about alternatives. Inevitably the cry went up to provide some perks or gifts for such shift-working Mentors. (Hey, I know, let's have them put their stores right at the first landing, as was done in the past.) Having worked far longer shifts for less than minimum wage in RL and SL, I think I'll pass.
Still, I'd invite you to look into the face of this sad and tired boy in Silas Merlin's sculpture. His feet are blistered from running as a First Person Shooter without even a voice, as in Zelda, and he has run many, many a mile across games and worlds and now arrived in SL. He stares listlessly into the distance, idly wondering whether SL is a game, or what the heck it is. A kind bird, but a bird spouting incoherent nonsense nonetheless, tells him that F1 is in the Viewer now.
He doesn't know what F1 is, or what a Viewer is, but ok....
Can't anyone HELP??!
I could go on, but I can only say Sic Transit, Gloria Mundi.
I have one name for you -- "Lucy Linden".
And I have one region for you -- "Tenera".
Look it up.
***
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
***
Act 3, Scene 1
Telehubs>>p2p
The Lindens always said they felt guilty as game gods with god modes that we mortals did not have, so they were keen to add point-to-point teleportation (p2p) as quickly as possible.
The anti-telehub lobby on the forums was strong, in part for justified reasons as some telehubs had become avatar traps and lag monsters when surrounded by heavily trafficked malls -- which were there because the way people used to get around in SL was by first going to a central telehub in a region, then flying on their own steam (or taking a jetpack or plane or boat) to their final destination.
I remember Waterhead Telehub, which I used to call "Headbangers' Ball," because each time you landed there, you banged your avatar's head on the ceiling inside the building -- the landing wasn't put outside for the longest time.
Then I would have to fly 1,000 solid meters, often in strong headwinds with tough sim crossings, to my first auction-won sim of Ravenglass. It hadn't occured to me when I got it that getting to it would be such a problem (and I actually won an auction once in Portage where I quite simply could not get to the sim due to the lack of void sims at the time and difficult sim crossings).
Unless I stayed put on that sim and never went anywhere -- and that's actually how a lot of early pioneers lived, not usually traveling that much because it was a chore.
And those with businesses now located 1000 or 2000 or more meters or many sims away from a centralized telehub sprouting a giant mall felt shafted, and left behind by "Progress".
THAT drove a lot of animosity to the telehubs, which Philip Linden had invented under the influence of the theories of urban planner Jane Jacobs.
Jacobs envisioned hubs in New York City which often came into being, where a subway stop or a stop below the El would engender stores, services, large apartment buildings, parks where people would congregate when they came home from work -- or conversely, in the areas where they went to work.
Philip reasoned that the virtual world could operate the same way -- and he was right. The problem is that not every one shared his embrace of commerce and some people thought virtual worlds would be better off without malls.
Or at least...there could be the highly specialized boutiques of some early designers, where new designers could sometimes get a corner if they essentially elected to serve as apprentices or unpaid clerical and PR staff. But these were located far from telehubs, and wasn't it terrible that now these newbies competed with them!
Anshe Chung may have commandeered most of the telehub-adjacent land through market capture, but she was democratic about her rental tenants -- anyone who was willing to pay the somewhat higher rent -- even another land agent -- could get a space. That's how I got my first office at a mall in Clunn -- that has remained abandoned land now for many years.
I once asked Philip Linden which sims had the most sales on them and he said quite frankly, "The telehubs." Telehub land would command double and triple and more the average land price -- and new ones continued to be rolled out despite some residents' and Lindens' protests -- and often in bucolic surroundings with plenty of space around their squat, concrete Chicago urban style to make them less "avatar traps" with the inevitable malls that appeared around them. The Moth Temple in Iris didn't start as a hub -- but ended as one with the most beautiful build of all of them.
Then Anshe Chung and a few others noticed something that wasn't readily apparent to non-tech types -- the Lindens were tinkering with the world map. They were preparing it for the day when anyone could click on one point on the map -- and directly travel to it from any other point, hopefully not landing in deep water or the side of a wall (which oddly didn't work for telehub sims where the landing was forcibly set -- and never changed, which is why you land in the water in Ross, for example.)
Suddenly, Anshe stopped renting out the telehub land she won at auction -- she used to keep the stores of her regular clients and put them out herself for their convenience to set up right away. Instead, she put the land to sale.
A new generation of would-be land barons snapped them up, and were thrilled at the opportunity. One built a Wild West sort of mall around Midge. Lindens publicly expressed their skepticism about the usefulness of telehubs, and one day I took Robin Linden on a tour of telehubs, so that she could see with her eyes that they were not all like Fuji -- the notorious avatar trap that was the reason for so much animosity. By that time Brownlee had been deployed -- although not yet with the Mole's juice bar. As we stopped at each telehub, we would see friends or various people who recognized her and we would chat and look into some stores. The telehubs functioned in fact as envisioned and weren't the lag mess claimed.
But the Lindens were determined to go ahead with their plan to abolish the telehubs as forced landings, install p2p, and convert the old telehubs merely to company inifohubs with their own kiosks with information about orientation and buying Lindens, etc.
Your faithful servant snapped the last picture of a telehub, carrying a poster "Save Our Hubs!" before Lindens gleefully deleted it, which at that time was posted on the Snapzilla-run device for anyone to put pictures on the Linden front page (that didn't last for long, obviously).
Then there was ANOTHER kind of telehub protest -- one that wasn't covered by the media or the forums in particular, but was also one of the most important protests of SL history:
http://alphavilleherald.com/2005/12/extra_extra_bar.html
The newbie land barons, seeing now the writing on the wall, felt they'd been sold a pig in a poke. Even Anshe began to realize the full extent of the damage -- the new infohubs would not be a draw and the malls around them would get overgrown with grass -- much like the malls of RL America with the appearance of the Internet, then later COVID. The Lindens tried to desperately drum up interest in the infohubs by sponsoring a hippo contest -- anyone could take a basic hippo model (the Lindens had adopted the hippo as their mascot due to some arcane coding term) and embellish it into a character. You can see ours in a tree at Memory Bazaar in Ross.
But before p2p was installed, another stage in this drama unfurled, which was the launching of the Heterocera continent withhout any telehubs at all. Everyone had to fly over rough seas to get there -- and a few enterprising souls started ferries and planes to haul people to the new paradise.
Forums regs rhapsodized about land unspoiled by urban and commercial blight -- the Lindens also staged a short-lived experiment in leaving Linden trees and grass on parcels, rooted elsewhere, so that they could not be removed. This forced pastoral idyll didn't go over well with people who bought land on the auctions -- unlike those on the forums who lived back at the ranch on the Colour Sims of the first days of SL.
Somewhere along this road I learned from Xenon Linden, the builder of the Moth Temple, that a telehub didn't have to be a squat, ugly, bug -- like the ones you see here (take a free one home, they're sort of cute when shrunk!) -- but could be anything, with an invisible telehub landing disc inside the build (as in Iris).
As it became clear that telehubs were going away for good, there were now dozens of very angry customers, who began to mutter legal phrases like "bait and switch," and demanded a meeting with Philip and other Lindens.
They threatened to "cash out" and stop buying on the auction unless their now worthless telehub land was bought back. Philip made an offer to buy back telehub land at the rate of $7.5/meter (not the $10 or $20 or $30 once enjoyed), and many took him up on his offer. The Lindens said that if anyone opted to keep their telehub and not take a buy-back, they could submit a proposal in a competition to have their group run an infohub on Governor Linden's old land, set to their group.
After they shelled out a fortune in buy-backs, which they had once taken in on the auction, the Lindens still prevailed. They rolled out some beautiful new sandy and pine-tree covered sims that looked like private islands, with new textures, but which were actually still mainland -- the sims are named for artists and scientists. In order to keep their market share, Anshe and others had to buy those new sims -- using their telehub buyback funds and more.
This was one of the turning points for some land barons in departing the Mainland forever and working exclusively with islands and homesteads.
***
Act 3, Scene 2
Copybot
The story of the pernicious script known as "Copybot" unleashed in Second Life is well known and covered in all major studies and articles about SL, Google is your friend.
But I'd like to recount some aspects of the story not covered as much as the main outlines of the crisis, which involved hundreds of angry and frightened virtual merchants -- some fearful of their RL livelihoods -- shuttering their stores, blocking their vendors or asking mall agents like me to put up ban lines -- and refusing to sell until the Lindens "did something".
Cynics ridiculed their scandal as "little dressmakers' holocaust" but perhaps didn't realize the scale and numbers of "little dressmakers" who at least offset the considerable costs of SL (especially for second- and third-world nations) or actually covered RL bills with their virtual wares.
Many on the Internet and most in Second Life are aware of an essential truism known technically as "the analog hole" -- if you can see something on your screen, if it has been streamed or displayed to you through your browser, you can copy it in a variety of ways, even if some deterrents are deployed.
The greatest wonder of Second Life is the permissions systems enabling a choice among modify/copy/transfer because it enables manufacturing and shopping -- "a willing buyer meets a willing seller over a price" -- the most prevalent activity of SL, dwarfing even socializing, sex, games, or music. And the miracle is that these permissions hold, and not as mere markers for a social norm easily overridden. While rogue viewers and techniques have abounded, generally their deployers are caught and barred from SL, with notable exceptions especially in gacha rares.
The cynics said that everyone should simply "Get Real" and live with the fact that everything online is copyable and they should just allow copying and distribute freebies and make their living on, oh, volumes of sales, or custom work, or -- like the authors who claim they sell books by giving away books, make money on the Ted Talk circuit, if they can break into it.
But people who had benefitted from the genius of C/M/T and the regime that seemed to hold, felt Something Should be Done. They didn't feel they should be driven into the chore of RL DMCA takedown notices, or registering their mark, or engaging in any RL business necessities if the whole point of a virtual world was to make more possibility and enable more people to benefit from the Internet instead of seeing it destroy their livelihoods.
I personally was summoned to a sim and had a gleefully malicious griefer boy copy my avatar and array out a dozen of him as he roared with laughter. Not being much of a clothes horse, I didn't immediately see the disaster involved in this prank, which I thought would just lead to a lot of mistaken identity and griefing episodes. Years later, I went to a Metaverse conference in 2007 (yes we had those! Before 2023! Let Grandpa put in his teeth and tell you the story!). A group of us went to a bar and I fell into a long and interesting conversation with Raph Koster, the famous game designer (Star Wars Galaxy etc). He had invented at that time a prototype open sourced open-ended sandbox sort of world-not-game which he used to flesh out ideas for how to make these worlds work, and which some of us had joined. As he spoke and I asked a lot of probing questions (about copyright issues, for one), I noticed a very young boy, too young to be served in the bar and whose mother may not have liked that he was out this late), edging closer and closer to the conversation, but not speaking out of shyness.
Finally, people began to head off to bed and just the boy remained. I asked him what his name was in SL -- and it turned out he was a notorious griefer, and the copybot deployer. He said he lived in his mom's basement -- "But I pay her some rent," he added defensively. "Where's Dad" is a question I had long learned not to ask any more.
"Why????" I finally asked in despair. Why the griefing, the ban evasions, the theft.
"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said in all seriousness.
The story of Copybot actually begins much earlier, when a group which I'll dub "Perverse Engineers" reverse-engineered the viewer -- an action that was in violation of the TOS of that era. These fellows set about god-moding and stalking and harassing and griefing people around the grid and of course contrived to copy especially textures, which anyone could do with a series of steps right within even the legal viewer at the time. Some of us AR'd what we felt was an obvious TOS violation but apparently they had some encouragement from some Lindens -- because the Lindens were about to open-source their viewer *anyways*.
When the time came to ask questions on the forums for the Town Hall -- as we still do today -- I asked pointedly why this group was allowed to reverse engineer the viewer and grief people. For this I was banned from the forums, but still remained to attend the town hall. Somehow the question had still reached Cory Linden, and he read it aloud and began to answer it. Just then an avatar of a few days with a name created to look like mine began swooping around and heckling people -- and to no one's surprise, *I* was soon looking at the ominous "administrative time-out" screen and cooling my heels back in RL. When I emerged an hour later, I found a bunch of the particularly tough looking Perverse Engineers flanked around Philip as if holding him in protective custody.
Just as I could not prove I was not a camel, I could not prove I had not done any swooping, although server records would show it. Or maybe not.
The viewer was open sourced, and Cory Linden then left the Lab, some said over a dispute with Philip over whether the server code should be open sourced as well.
It so happened that I was in touch with some of the Peverse Engineers who came to the old Sutherland Dam discussions on Friday nights which I hosted, one of whom sadly died in a car accident in RL at a very young age. I was tipped off that one of the big developer firms working with RL companies had ordered "Copybot" to be coded (or a version of it) to make instances for live music concerts -- shards, as in a game, where the band would be mirrored many times over to enable thousands of people to see those avatars. This seemed like a super-structure in search of a base, if not an accident going somewhere to happen -- and sure enough it did.
Copybot had a thousands midwives and no paternity, however and while I had sources for this story they needed to hold on to their jobs and their sponsorships so we had to issue a retraction at the SL Herald, the notorious muck-raking tabloid of the early years of SL edited by Urizenus Sklar and Pixeleen Mistral.
While not everyone wants to connect up the dots, the Copybot scandal led to Linden policies about Third-Party viewers, and various showdowns and knockdowns and revisions along these lines -- and lots of dead sion chickens kicked offworld, let us just put it that way for now.
We now live under a regime where "Copybot can't be stopped" because "you can't stop Copybot" and inworld groups devoted to copybotting and a Github page with the Copybot script persist "because it can," but Lindens still insisting that certain groups have their leaders step down to spend more time with their families and revise their inworld activities.
While once "unlawful copying" was an offense contained in the Abuse Report template that could be submitted and sometimes get action even without an additional DMCA, today, that category is gone from the AR form.
Copybot compelled the Lindens to change wording in their TOS and attempt to remedy the complaints of masses of merchants -- and this wording was to be redacting and changed and dropped over time leading to more protests and walk-outs.
Merchants then tried their own remedies, which included the completely ineffectual script you see here that would supposedly spam a copybotting viewer or script and get it to stop.
Today, the mechanism for copybotting is different than those used in earlier days and some people feel it is "less of a problem" while others weep constantly on social media about how they've been targeted. The breedables industry has been particularly hit with mutual recriminations and even RL lawsuits.
There's one category of creator who ostensibly never has to worry about Copybot, as their creations execute server side and not client side: the scripter. The one recorded instance of the copybotting of closed scripts is disputed.
It is no surprise that those whose work is most protected against copyright are more cynical about the complaints about those who are most vulnerable to theft -- even to denouncing certain anti-rez scripts that work well enough, if not perfectly, particularly for those compelled to comply with full-perm mesh makers' TOS.
Merchants have responded to the challenge either by giving away more freebies; building up loyal client lists and doing custom work; putting their items in bags or HUDs or other types of packages that ostensibly deter theft; banning people and their alts with illegal IP detection systems; not putting their products on "mod" -- although this has zero deterrence value.
Surprisingly, in the food sector, some major creators simply put the takeaway food on all perms -- because when you get down to it, who is going to bother to re-sell a fork with a bit of chicken on it at an odd angle, or a tilted wine glass? It doesn't matter.
And some full perm creators have in fact specified in their TOS that for props such as food givers, they suspend their usual mandate to bar "transfer" -- but then they specify that "no mod" must be used. Well, at least a script is safe that way, although of course the whole lot can be bundled into a separate box. Of course, most people -- again -- buy platters of food for their beauty on the table, not in the hand, and the market for plywood boxes with famous creator's food bits in it is strangely....empty.
As with a lot of situations in Second Life, the hysterical hypothetical need not apply, and the edge case need not drive policy.
Even so, for many sectors of the virtual market -- bodies, beasts, buildings -- copying remains a serious threat and causes people to give up, to go to other third-party model sites and reduce their contribution to SL. And who can blame them, those "little dressmakers" in war-torn Ukraine or refugee overflowing and earthquake stricken Turkey or crisis-ridden Brazil? Or even a COVID-ravaged city in affluent America.
The dream of anonymously marketing your virtual wares on the strength of your talent and your constructed persona, free of taxation of bricks-and-mortar costs or real-world authorities with their hands out, dies hard, but the hill it dies first on is Copybot.
***
Act 3, Scene 3
Welcome Areas
If you TP into the original welcome areas of Violet or Ahern or Ambat these days, chances are you will find they are pretty quiet. There might be a newbie or two struggling, spread-eagled, with appearance or standing in bewilderment or AFK. A lone, sad older resident might also be AFK with a sign over her head: RENT ME.
One reason is a curious recent development: the Lindens have removed the term "infohub" from map search. While the infohub symbol remains on the map, and browsing the map can turn up such spaces, they are no longer in search at all.
Instead, we have a brand new set of Welcome Hubs with shopping, ersatz gambling, a sandbox, and tutorials, and new mentors. *Some* old infohubs still retain the ability to set home (this function has been removed from many of them despite the confusing message that you can set home on Mainland hubs).
As the great baseball legend Yogi Berra might have put it, The Welcome Areas (infohubs, orientation islands, hangouts and other Linden-owned areas) are so crowded nobody goes there anymore.
But if you know to hunt for "Social Island" and some of the newer entry points (Firestorm Island, Belli Hub) you might find 40 avatars filling the sim, or at least 6, with much the same mixture of useful help and trash talk as the old days. Yet no pickets
At one time, every ongoing protest in SL would play out in the Welcome Areas, whether against VAT tax, or ad farming, or putting Voice into SL (denounced as a ruiner of magic and outer of genders by quite a few, and today -- as I can attest from looking at many, many parcels -- Voice is often turned OFF or sometimes fails to work in public events).
Early throngs of hardy residents would go to Governor Linden's mansion in Clementina to protest, but that was before they learned she was never, ever, there. Yes, she. We have seen her twice in our 19 years!
There are still public spaces where newbies are heckled as I can attest from rolling a new alt the other day but generally, this type of behaviour was thoroughly discouraged. Even so, there are patches of "wall sitters" as they were dubbed -- groups of bored, restless youth (or senior delinquents who should know better) who voiced inappropriately for the rating and confused or ridiculed the new arrivals. Other bands of residents would fight them -- and then the welcome areas as such would become the theme of protest.
I suppose the earlier renditions of them could be called sort of Hyde Parks, especially when the famous Jeska Linden would tell people sparring on the forums to "take it inworld," in the theory that if you could see your antagonizer in person, you might be nicer to them. We're here to tell you that doesn't work, just like a demand for RL names, age, location, occupation don't help social media to become more tolerant, either.
Recently I came across a resident who had returned after many years, and wrote this in her profile:
"In 2006, Second Life was wild and unpredictable and amazing. Mass user protests, mafia gangs, and land barons. Ready, Player One! Snowcrash coming!
Second Life is prettier now, but something is missing. It seems reserved, careful, and a bit cold. The unpredictability is gone. Maybe everyone just grew up. The unknown is known. Limits set. Expectations in place."
Experiments in what might be called "managed democracy" haven't exactly proliferated in SL but there have been some:
o the original Linden walkabouts -- it's hard to believe now that Jack Linden, a computer professional with considerable RL experience, who began as a modest liaison in SL and worked his way up to VP, would actually stand in the WAs for hours on end, and hold office hours frequently to wrestle all the most urgent questions of the day, such as ad farm destruction of the Mainland.
o town halls (which were more interactive with spontaneous questions rather than lists submitted and curated by talk show hosts)
o workshops on specific issues such as reform of the Group Tools
o focus groups (yes, LL used to select some of their special friends to come all expense paid to California and give feedback, all placed under NDA)
o RL meetups -- a series of SL community conferences under various auspices with varying degrees of disaster were held over the years 2004 to 2012 before they broke down and devolved into inworld Open Sim conferences or select groups such as Educators, to which Lindens were invited to speak
o the Features Voting Tool -- this was actually a really great page in which anyone could submit a proposal and collect votes for it. It should simply have been left alone. It wasn't. A "helpful" resident who actually seemed bent on destroying it offered to help "clean it up" and went to the Lindens first with a list of duplicates, in his view, then with a list of "undoables" or "poorly worded" proposals -- and busy Lindens were grateful for his input. As the FVT, which had grown thick and dense vines around a weak trunk, began to be pruned, authors of proposals began to howl, since they didn't think they were "undoable" -- and the Lindens should decide this, rather than residents with agendas. One day we woked up and the FVT had been deleted entirely by a Linden.
o the old JIRA voting system -- at one time, it was possible to make a JIRA proposal specifically about bugs but also about features, more broadly understood, which would then also be about policies, and also collect votes. Today, since the reconfiguration of the JIRA under Oz Linden, the system is very different.
At one time, your faithful correspondent introduced a proposal that was revolutionary -- that anyone could continue to collect votes for a bug report/feature request and JIRAs could only be closed by Lindens who made a judgement of "can't do". The volunteer helpers who pruned the JIRA and similar systems would not be allowed to close anyone else's JIRA. This essentially opened up a way to create a "no" vote to the hall monitors who inevitably appear to clean up in any group, sometimes with the tacit approval of the company. Amazingly, this proposal was passed, and implemented -- but then removed some years later.
We could note the chief flaw of these voting systems is that you couldn't vote "no". Voting "no" is vital to any democracy and a part of any robust proposition system on local ballots. But in the ideologies of Silicon Valley, voting "no" is viewed as "negative," or an anomaly in the system. Some people think it is "not possible" to vote "no" on the JIRA as configured for use by Linden Lab.
But I caught up with the makers of JIRA at TechCrunch one year and quizzed them on this. They confirmed that any client of the JIRA could configure it to vote "no," but also had trouble understanding why it is necessary. There is a tendency to think that "upvoting" or "getting to yes" or "taking a straw poll" or "direct voting" is going to "fix" democracy. It never has.
The "no" vote -- especially with the added functionality of undisclosed vote -- is absolutely essential and would rid both Lindens and residents of a lot of their illusions if incorporated, and redistribute the balance of power. Even if the "no" vote became only symbolic, it would have a cumulative effect.
We felt so strongly about this that at one point, we created a "JIRA Mirror" where people could collect mirror votes on JIRAs they had posted, and of course the results were fascinating. There is more on this subject in other venues, but one thing Governor Linden might consider doing in honour of the 20th Birthday is to pardon those banned from the JIRA.
Today, certain factions hijack the forums occasionally with impunity; Moles, who were once associated only with creative endeavours are now diverted to loathsome moderation duties; and various groups associated with large continents or large stores or RP groups tend to hold sway.
There isn't any form of democracy today within Second Life across the grid, and the efforts to create the institutions of democracy outside of it (such as the Herald online tabloid or various professor and game developer blogs) have all fallen into disrepair. If the Customer Service State gives people more or less what they want -- if there is a product and they themselves aren't made the product -- they are content and don't see the need for dissent.
For a brief moment in time, relatively, on the old forums, we had the Features Voting System and even large group voting tools even in Concierge; we had live interactive townhalls and a far more free-wheeling forums -- go and look:
Don't be afraid of scary warnings -- the Lindens didn't update their certificate but it's a perfectly safe site. Try it on Edge if Chrome doesn't work.
If there is "socialism in one sim," it doesn't count, because such RP expeditions don't influence policy for the grid; it is Solzhenitsyn's idea of democracy but not Sakharov's.
People who regularly talk to their Mole and Linden friends, who bid in charity auctions to have sims named after them, who have their weddings in new community centers, they don't see what the problem is here!
"Lindens are a scarce resource," a Linden once commented in an office hour with many residents clamouring for this or that change. And indeed they are, and that's why virtual world construction can't rely on them.
Lindens have put up with so many protests about lag over the years (even Linden Lags parody t-shirts) that they have now put a button right in the viewer under WORLD called IMPROVE GRAPHICS SPEED.
Our advice is to never touch that button.
[Linden Lags Tshirt]
***
Act 3, Scene 4
FIX SEARCH
There's a lot I could tell you about this subject -- I've written reams and reams.
One way to sum it up is this: In the beginning of our world, the button on the viewer to get your virtual world started was titled:
FIND
And you did.
Now it's called SEARCH. So you keep SEARCHING.
In 2012, the Lindens decided to move from Viewer 1.23 to Viewer 2.0 by decision of then-CTO Oz Linden, immortalized here with the "mirrors" he promised would come some day (and so they have in PBR, we're told).
The Search in 2.0 had a terrible interface, the Lindens used Google Search Appliance instead of the interface and code they had before, and it simply stopped working. There were many layers to this decline but the Lindens then -- as now -- insisted they were working out the bugs and improving it.
Meanwhile, Firestorm "forked" so to speak, and KEPT the version of search from 1.23 which the Lindens then RETIRED.
We have Cinders Roxley to thank for this decision and this effort, which is why we have a statue in her honour at the Lost Gardens of Slosser.
The decision to keep a normal search that returns clean lines on an exact word search of a person or business or venue meant -- was, among other reasons, but in my view the KEY reason -- that Firestorm began to be used by likely 80% or more of the user population, by the Lindens' own admission. They say they can't give precise numbers because the same people use different viewers but we have our sampling of tenants which have convinced us there are only four of us: -- me, another oldbie like me with failing eyesight, a newbie who just landed and hasn't gotten the memo, and some guy testing his furry avatars on different viewers. The end.
What has kept our world thriving all this time is the ability of people to SHOP, and GO TO THE PLACES, and BUY and then FIND A HOME and live happily ever after. You know?
All you have to do is search for a business or location -- "Linden Lab" is one good one to test -- on both viewers, and I won't have to keep explaining this. I use Alchemy personally to see my own Search/Places ads.
I've learned this will never change; this is cast in stone; this is a religion. So I step away quietly and go on Alchemy as needed and muddle along.
What keeps me occasionally returning to this topic is I remember a night in...2018? Before the pandemic, anyway. When I saw search was broken and not returning as it did -- which at that juncture wasn't great, but still had some use. And various Lindens hurried to fix it, and within 48 hours, it was back to status quo ante. Then on another night in 2019? (before the pandemic) it broke again.
And stayed that way. And got worse. And some obvious problems were fixed but basically, the interface today -- well go look.
The Lindens need to fiix search. Then they'll have a growing world. They don't want to, possibly because they actually need to throttle growth given insufficient resources, so they don't.
***
Act 4, Scene 1
Price Drop/Fee/Tax Hike
Surely after years -- decades -- of protests, SL's protesters would be ready to retire?
After all, they now have Linden Assisted Living -- Bellisseria, Fantasseria, Sakurasseria and the soon-to-come Ponderosaserria with enormous 2048 m2 ranch spreads.
These zoned and better-managed regions with new mesh customizable houses are an answer to the chronic protest of people on the Mainland facing blight, or lonely islanders in silos left with no-show landlords. Bellisseria is the best product that Linden ever made, although the bien pensant falsely believe it to be "like" the Stepford Wives.
It's actually more like Trumansville, if you pay attention.
Bellisseria only bred the desire for more and better and different and more prims and more meters -- remember the Prelude, Content/Discontent?
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have enough prims -- but we'll let you in on a secret: most tenants do not use all their prims, far from it. And another secret: mesh items aren't necessarily a lot less land impact.
So now that the wolf at the door is merely a lawn ornament; Honey West whom you were too little to watch is a hipster collage and you even have a plaster elephant -- 10 prims! -- on your lawn, just like the neighbour's! ----
Why are you still protesting? You got homesteads without having to first buy an island. They're unattached and proliferating now and filling up with big ugly black boxes just like the Mainland -- but now there will be 2028 ranchettes!
WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING?
If you have a comment, you can rocket right out of here!
LOL
Although first, leave a notecard.
But we'll tell you what people still find to protest:
o the fee increases for purchase of Lindens and cashouts which came soon enough after the lowering of the cost of tier and the increase of prims per square meter;
o application of US state taxes -- ouch, ouch, ouch (unless you're in like Montana);
o more fee hikes for conversion of Lindens to dollars and process of credits;
o lack of void sims laid out in a row from their Mainland properties with money-making venues and the newest Bellissseria content;
o the strangulation of the Mainland in various ways;
The Russians have an idiom: "frenzied from fat".
One thing we've noticed: if you complain about lack of managed land in SL, you will get what you wished. So be careful what you wish for.
***
Act 4, Scene 2
GachaPWND
The ban in August 2021 on gachas, a form of commerce involving selling sets of items via random pulls, sparked massive protests on the forums and social media on both sides of the issue. I believe it was the biggest blow to the virtual economy in 20 years, and we are still feeling the dead cat bounce two years later.
As usual, those backing the company policy (especially those who benefited) were eager to leverage their loyal positions to harass and silence opponents. Threads were closed, forums bans were handed out, and some lawyers got bully pulpits that others didn't, but there was no recourse: the ban hammer went down, merchants had 30 days to get rid of the machines or face disciplinary actions.
The word "gacha" comes from the Japanese term "gachapon" the term for machines containing small prizes for a few coins -- they were originally modeled after the American gumball machines found outside supermarkets.
The SL edition also began at a low price of 25L for a few decor items and evolved into mechanisms to sell sets of fancy hair for 100L. While there was also a vocal chorus preaching against the Las Vegas/Lost Wages aspect of the gacha, they were massively popular. If you asked the critics claiming they were "shocked that gambling was permitted in the house" and told them to turn out their inventories, you might find a croupier would appear and say, as to Capt. Renault, "Your winnings, sir."
While the opponents of gachas tended to focus on the random nature and the enormous amounts people would pour into them to get the "rares," they key feature of the gacha phenomenon, which ran for more than a decade, was that it was a way for people to enter the economy if they had no skills in design or coding and insufficient capital to start a land-related business. People hoping to offset the cost of SL, which can be considerable even just to buy a socially acceptable outfit and body) are able to buy low and sell high or sell in high volume, as they can with breedables.
Gacha machines have also been a way for creators to make sales at themed mass shopping events in an environment where they are increasingly competing for attention in search among a proliferation of weekend and weekday sales.
While many people have the impression that some law was passed in the States or some prosecutor overseas sent a warning from another country such as Germany or Japan, in fact there is no such law or warning, at least known to the public.
There is a US law on online gambling such as poker which prompted Linden Lab to ban slot machines, poker, roulette etc years ago. But recent court cases have found in fact that judges sided with the big platforms Google and Apple regarding lootboxes -- which strictly speaking, is a different animal than a gacha as gachas in SL are not required to advance gameplay as it is not a game as such. And in theory, minors under the age of 18 should not be on the plaform (although 16-18 years are permitted in G areas). The main driver of the lootbox lawsuits were parents angered at children running up credit card bills to play an online game.
The US is a country of common law where judicial interpretation and legal precedents establish the law of the land and where international law or law from other countries is not self-executing. Again, there was no judicial ruling to prompt this policy.
But since Linden Lab is a private company it can make any policy it deems necessary, and in this case took preemptive action to limit liability for litigation, a standard business case.
The irony is that while the old form of gachas were banned, a new form emerged called Miepon or other names that still involved machines with sets of desirable decor or outfits, but you could see which one you would be purchasing in a chute -- removing the mystery of the blind pull. To be sure, you can't be sure when the coveted rare will come which means the aftermarket and the Lost Wages are still relevant,
Even so, there is no question that the overall level of gacha frenzy is considerably reduced. The shock to the economy was considerable and some merchants ended up out of business. The critics who sneered at them that they couldn't drive traffic to their stores are forgetting that this is an attention economy -- search functions poorly, there is both too little advertising of the right kind and too much spam, and mass events by large companies (viewed by some as cartels) heavily influence the market against "a nation of shop-keepers".
The inimitable Daveosaurus of Crocodoggle, beloved in SL as both a developer and DJ, created a parody item called "GachaPWND" with a play on the term "gachapon" and the kids' term of art for being beaten in a game -- "pawned". Merchants who had drained the pockets of their fans in search of "rares" now got their comeuppance. But since clever designers and scripters ultimately succeeded in keeping the broad outlines of the gacha experience and some of the re-sale economy intact, who was really PWND?
The constant proliferation of new weekend or weekday or really 24/7/ sales which were weakening the economy for creators before the ban has not compensated for the role played by gachas in the economy -- hence even more appearing every week. Every inventory is bursting and every home is flooded, and no one could possibly wear all the outfits they have purchased even if they changed their clothes 10 times a day. This is a feature of virtuality that hasn't been sufficiently studied -- with the ability to replicate without expending RL materials (except server space) and when goods don't wear out, economies seem magical.
But when inventories are so large they can't even be searched anymore, and every weekend sale living room set looks like the other one, have we discovered why virtual economies always tend toward entropy and failure? Or maybe not?
Now we've also deployed Daveosaurus broken gacha machine to symbolize a "gated community" of sorts -- Linden Homes, the answer to the Second Life Tragedy of the Commons for tens of thousands of people who now don't have to wake up and find anything unpredictable in their view.
Critics of Linden Homes have likened them to the movie Stepford Wives, but it wasn't the homes that looked the same in that movie, but the wives who began behaving like identical ideal subserviant drones after their husbands turned them into robot replicas. Perhaps the song popularized by Pete Seeger, "Little Boxes on the Hillside" is a good descriptor?
But there are a wide variety of Linden homes and they are customizable up to a point. Perhaps Trumansville is the better trope with the same scenery repeating and the controlled life, but the Moles may have a lot of repetitive tasks, they aren't actors, but contractors meeting customer requirements, a feature of proprietary software companies often absent from open source experiments.
With the Commons expertly managed by Lindens and Moles, there is relief to the eyes as to texture, land impact, and covenants specifying the removal of Christmas trees after holidays, a limit on cats, and even prohibition on the ban systems that hark back to MMORPGs in the way they return you home, to your spawn point.
To be sure, people run through 351 prims, even if the house doesn't count, pretty fast -- which is why we are about to get 2048 ranchettes! Can Bellisseria homesteads be far behind?
Freed of the stresses of the Commons Tragedy that pits neighbours against each other (remember the neighbours' gigantic submarine that brought all other scripts to a standstill or the club on 4096 of land that filled all available avatar slots for that region every night, so no one could go home not to mention infestations of glowing towers?), the Linden Homes areas are said to create better communities with richer and more rewarding events, including DJ parties, the stamp finding game, and art shows.
Yet no lot can be put in search, no commerce is allowed, even a yard sale or charity flea market, and all social life is driven to groups -- groups inevitably heavily controlled by their founders, often spawning anti-groups.
We didn't find Juneteenth on the calendar or anything like the elaborate sculptures and installations of ArtKorner's weekly HUD, but there's the Legacy Mainland for that, right? After you're done with a round of the GTFO transportation game.
For how long?
***
Act 4, Scene 3
Privacy for Me/
Bounce for Thee
This vignette doesn't need much explication.
The yellow ban lines, blocking your view.
The inadequate ban lists that are numerically limited, or overcome by some rogue viewers, or which don't work above a certain height.
The candles and crystals and wishful thinking -- door locks? Sit hack anyone?
We did have quite an ominous looking animesh bouncer guy out here but he was 17 li so we took him down.
Both the desire for privacy -- and not always for the reasons you think -- and the desire for travel and exploration are always in conflict and always spawn protest.
It's hard to believe there was a time when Philip actually said for a moment in time that he would deprecate the "teleport home" or "bounce" scripts that so aggravated life on the Mainland. Then a caucus of Lindens and old residents squawked that the 3 1/2 elevators then operating in SL very slowly and clunkily would no longer work, so the script had to stay.
Certain merchants and influencers got their way on this, especially those who sold security orbs.
The Lindens had a brainstorm a few years ago -- truly genius. They added the function "Avatars Can See Me" to the land menu which can be switched "on" or "off".
Nothing like being totally invisible from outside the lot for privacy!
Of course, by definition in a virtual world, you are in public and it is hard to take yourself out of the public eye but of course it is constantly done with a huge variety of skyboxes, security systems, and then the continent Zindra, which isn't so much the "adult content" continent as it is "the zone where your enemies can't AR you" for swearing (as they can in PG) or classical paintings with partial nudes (as they can in G) or flying around with your bits outside (as they can in M) -- which they do merely as a form of retaliation usually over other beefs.
That's all that's about.
"Privacy" encompasses not just the view of any activity or furniture or scantily clad persons, but the right to be free of encroaching trees or builds, other people's prims on your land, rooted on theirs, and even an ugly view.
So the Lindens responded to the constant flood of complaints about how ruined the view got from signs, ad farms, tall buildings, and just plain fugly beach houses and spinning neon signs by allowing the third-party viewer Firestorm to put "derender" into the viewer.
The Lindens themselves have always steadfastly held to a Shared Vision of a Shared Vision and I'm with them there -- I think you should have rules people abide by -- soft norms or hard code laws -- to make views and lives tolerable and not rely on making the world a fractured fairy tale where no one sees the same thing.
I don't know how long that notion will last with the Lindens but they've had it for 20 years, and enabled a wide variety of options to ensure users the level of privacy or interaction they wish, by choice.
Every student of the Internet's history knows the story of "A Rape in Cyberspace" -- and everyone knows that when Meta began to claim the first Metaverse, they failed to learn not only from The Well but Second Life, which made a lot of progress on enabling freedom from the company but freedom from other users, as well. Soon the headlines were filling up with the rediscovered invention of the wheel.
A movie was once made for TV, a detective thriller taking place in Second Life, in which a character shouts "Log off! Log off!" to another character to get them away from an evil influence.
Until AI has a map of your house in its mind's eye and you in it, unless you're in a place like Iran or Russia, you're safe from prying eyes in RL for now. And in SL, you have many options to protect your privacy -- so many, that the frequent lament of newbies and returnees -- it's impossible to find a friend and things to do -- may have been the result. The privacy the individual seeks soon attaches to groups of like-minded with clubs whose main purpose is to keep others out.
***
Act 5, Scene 1
The Future is NOW
Dr. Harry "Happy" Cox, who you may remember from Firesign Theater, says "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG'. And as we know from a Firesign skit, "The future is HERE, the future is NOW".
The future isn't turning out like we thought and here we all are now soaking in it.
What will YOUR future be like in SL? If you like, go to our ancient Magic Compass at the geographic and magnetic center of SL in Ross (yes, really!) and take a reading (click on the fortune cards for the LM).
Harry has a question for the big Linden town hall for the 20th birthday:
"Will chatGPT take YOUR jobs?" Some of the work of Moles and Lindens may be further automated.
And more importantly, this:
"Is all of SL a giant LLM for you to use to train AI on? Are you sitting on a gold mine?"
As I noted before, unlike the giants who inhabit Silicon Valley, LL hasn't slurped up customer data to pitch ads to customers or sell to outside ad agencies.
But could it use the petabytes of chat and content and signage and labelling as an LLM to train robots?
Would it want to? If so, what constraints would be put on it?
I predict that the next iteration of the Tao of Linden (click on the rations to get it) will have to say something about artificial versus organic intelligence and comment whether it uses customer data for anything, whether pitching ads or for "world experience" or "improving the platform" or however it may be phrases. The role of bots will have to be better defined not just in the TOS but will have to start in the mission/values statement of the Tao.
We all have a big advantage because we've all been living up in the future for 20 years and other people are just going to come and know it.
We know what it means to be banned globally from the main outposts of society. Could that pan out in RL? We know what it means when merchants ban us from their vendors on the MP and inworld for all kinds of reasons, good or bad -- maybe they believe we have Copybot; maybe they don't like our blog. What about a future when you can't buy bread because you criticized the president?
We know what it is to have houses that are networked and public and visible and cammable by everyone. Will RL get that way?
Will the best parts of SL prevail in a RL all-encompassing Metaverse, like "getting to know someone from the inside out," as a figure in one of Draxtor Dupres' videos about romance in SL so beautifully described it?
All kinds of people from all kinds of places and stations in life and perspectives sometimes come together to cooperate in SL on all kinds of things, from live music to art to breeding smart cats and keeping the view nice and sailing into the sunset. Is that extendable to RL?
The "weak ties" once celebrated as a boon of social media are never discussed any more because they too often turn so vicious. Do virtual world "weak ties" work better to create viable communities?
I find it shocking that some tech on Twitter says the Metaverse started in 2022 and points to some industry working group -- and says if some company isn't in it, they must not be relevant. They have a very cramped notion of "Metaverse" that largely revolves around interoperability for a few big platforms.
Of course there is a lot more that goes into world-making, from security, privacy, regulating commerce, ensuring creators' rights to enable a viable market, and deterring crime effectively.
Linden Lab was convening Metaverse conferences in 2003. I went to the first one in 2004 ("State of Play" conference at NYU Law School, followed by the first SLCC meet-up).
I'm old enough to remember the first white paper on the Metaverse in 2007 with Jerry Paffendorf (SnoopyBrown Zamboni in SL)
Wire magazine has an article on the Metaverse this week acknowledging the role of Second Life in shaping Roblox and VRChat. Philip Rosedale is chided for anticipating SL becoming far bigger than it has, but if it influenced other worlds -- it has indeed grown bigger. Who had adult content in Roblox on their bingo card?
Wired speaks lamely of the need to organize easy AR reports as in SL -- but we know that's not enough, not without external blogs, social media, internal forums, and resident community groups where you can discuss issues and where you can address grievances and bring about meaningful change.
As the old END anti-nuclear slogan said:
PROTEST AND SURVIVE!
If the world are to live and be places where we move and have our being, we have to care enough to protest, offer alternatives, and being willing to compromise, just as in real life.
I always have.
END
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