Second Thoughts

They're All Bozos on That Bus

"The future is fun! ... The future is fair! ... You may already have won! ... You may already be there!"

Wow. That was really a horrible experience! I went on this geek dude's call-in Internet/social media TV show yesterday and I can't remember a worse experience since being strip-searched and interrogated by the KGB on the Soviet border. It really chilled me, to see the totalitarian face of social media up so close, and personal.

His name is Steve Gillmor -- I never heard of him before going on Twitter. Of course, he's, as they say in Russian, "widely famous in small circles". He's one of what I would call the Gang of Four (Some days that Gang is Scoble, Calacanis, Winer -- or on other days Arrington, Israel, Feldman or others -- it's a shifting Gang lol). They're in the Berkeley Cybersalon, or basically in the Silicon Valley tech set who are either making or power-using or taking over social media in a huge way. (A typical feature of this Social Media FIC is that they, too, constantly say there is no Social Media FIC).

At first I thought Gillmor's short and pithy twitters were thoughtful and funny, when he wasn't just geeking out on tech, and I thought his very spare and white looking news site, apparently relaunched lately, pretty interesting. But then I began to see him chiming in with Dave Winer and others who were filling up the blogosphere with this Wright-speak. Winer was telling everyone to go watch Bill Moyers interview with Wright, and read this speech of Wright's, and follow that justification of Wright, and the usual Hillary-pillory.

So when I saw the news on the wires that Obama had -- shockingly -- denounced his old pastor finally, and disassociated himself from his wacky rants, I thought, wow, I wonder what Dave Winer, who has been flogging Wright so hard will say now! What will they all say, those folks trying to whitewash Wright! So I just wrote a one-liner and a link to the news piece on Obama, and wrote @scobleizer, @davewiner and @stevegillmor as he had just had a news show devoted just to Wright *and because they are all Valley tech social media dudes trying to get into politics these days*.

I wrote a grand total of...four twitters. Here they are:

Prokofy @davewiner why aren't YOU as outraged as YOUR CANDIDATE about Wright? http://tinyurl.com/5f5wnw 03:03 PM April 29, 2008 from web in reply to davewiner

Prokofy @davewiner you guys really get nutty when you go so far as to try to right the Wrong Rev Wrong here. Stop it. Get over it. Move on. 03:04 PM April 29, 2008 from web in reply to davewiner

Prokofy Neva Prokofy ""What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for," Obama said." 03:05 PM April 29, 2008

Prokofy Now, could we get the same thing from @davewiner, @stevegillmor and all the other Obama flaks on here please?! 03:06 PM April 29, 2008 from web

That's it. Those four tweets. That's what this entire drama is about lol.

My Conversations With Hamlet

I understand Hamlet nee Linden Au (he came to prominence first as the in-house organist for Linden Lab) is having a fabulous penthouse book party in New York City. Wow! Well, as I twittered, what with all these invitations I've had to sift through lately -- the Pope for dinner, Ban Ki Moon for lunch, and that 0:Dark 30 breakfast with Hillary right before she swung down to PA -- well, I may have missed the little engraved cream-coloured invitation in my mailbox lol.

Of course, Hamlet loathes me probably even more than I dislike him -- he always treated me abominably because he didn't like my criticism of the FIC on the old LL forums. I think he really began to actively hate me when I joined others at Clickable Culture to confront him on why he thought he was a journalist, of all things, when he was a court scribe. There's nothing wrong with being a court scribe, but at least own it, admit it. It's part of the smarmy shillism (thanks, Amanda Chapel!) of the tech press that they can be utterly bought and paid for and still pretend they are somehow "reporters". His particularly nasty way of committing a sort of "avatar murder" is to insist on calling me by my RL-name whenever he sees me in RL, which is rude and inconsiderate and he knows it and b) saying that only if I use my RL name to post on his blog will I be allowed to post (I was pre-banned from his blog when he moved out of SL).

In the Making of Second Life, Hamlet's new book, he has one page where he writes briefly about the FIC theory, crediting me with it, but trying to downplay it as merely the concoctions of a jealous person (I think he's jealous it became a household word lol). In the second edition of the official manual to SL, more hands got on the job, maybe even Philip's personally, or one of the cult leaders, and my name is now wiped from the theory. The FIC is mentioned, but the thrust of the commentary is "this was once a conspiracy theory about people being privileged but it's all untrue because actually they were all really talented". Anyone who has followed this issue, of course, knows it's not the case but what's more operative -- my name is stripped off the theory in the manual, and I'm relegated to a page describing me as a small-time rentals agent ROFL.

I had kept meaning to publish my conversational records from 2005 when Hamlet first pursued me. It was among the most bizarre encounters I had in SL, precisely because this dickwad kept hounding me to interview me, to "handle" me in some PR fashion that would help the Lab, I guess, but then kept implying that he had to seek permission from the Lab to interview me, and it wasn't forthcoming -- and if I didn't behave in some unspecified way, I might never get to be interviewed (!). In the end, most of the "interview" was in fact *what I wrote myself* in answer to his questions -- he didn't want to take responsibility for the text. Like I said, bizarre -- and one of the many, many unwritten chapters of SL. So here it is:

Lindens Feting Again

I heard this some weeks -- months? -- ago -- that the Lindens were going to pick out some of the newbie helper groups and fete them for presence in the Orientation Islands and Infohubs.

Sarah Nerd now has a blog up about Blue Linden discussing this -- there may be a glitch because the second page just doesn't show up.

Now, why could I possibly be so curmugeonly as to dislike the idea of a fine group like NCI (a tenant, BTW) being in the OIs with their help cards or links to their main islands?

Well, because that's not what it's about. There are two problems here. Actually three.

Number one, by opening the door to the possibility of vetting help groups, the Lindens will now find themselves under TREMENDOUS pressure to authorize all these awful vigilante play-police type groups. Ugh. They are just terrible. They are run either by 14 year old kids disguising their griefing as cop groups, or, surprisingly I find, even by RL cops playing cop the way they'd REALLY like to play it on SL, which is...abusively, and being a griefer. So the entire concept sucks. I don't want police, free or paid or volunteer. We already have such a huge problem with fake groups claiming Linden endorsement that this will now become UNMANAGEABLE.

What was able to stem the tide before was an iron-clad rule that said: the Lindens never endorse resident groups. Ever. In their lives. So you are lying (so you could tell some nit in the OI flying around with guns saying he was Blue Linden's friend). I remember once getting Coffee Linden (Steven Linden, who was actually Cubey Terra) to pay attention to this problem seriously. In fact, I marvelled that he even called me back to follow up when I reported some groups doing this -- claiming fake endorsement. Now, of course, I see what accounted for this some-time-Linden's enthusiasm: he himself, as a longtime resident in the newbie biz big-time, really resented these kinds of groups muscling in.

But now, without Cubey to care about this on staff (he left the job) and with Blue not possibly grasping what a Pandora's box he has opened (or not caring, or imagining he will sort it out) -- we will not be able to unstick ourselves from such resmods in the OIs for a long time to come!

Number two, another BIG problem of Linden endorsement or certification of groups is that it sets up more of the awful institutionalized feting we already have with Mentors, SL Views, Certified Devs blah blah blah. This is a corporativist construction of society -- and we all know where that leads -- fascism! Do you historical homework here. Arranging state-certified groupings, or estates, in society -- the engineers over here, the writers over there, the resmods over younger -- you set up a state where professionals suck up to power and where the executive authority abuses power by making it plausibly deniable and using these professional groups as stalking horses (the Oprichina).

The Economy -- Stupid

Most of the audience of the Metanomics meetings are not RL corporations or SL businesses. Oh, sure, there are some -- Jenzaa Misfit who has the thriving animations is one big fan; you can usually see a few IBM folks like Zha Ewry. But by and large, the people in the audience are that usual SL assortment of underemployed or even unemployed IT guys; social media consultants looking for work; small-time web space agents with overinflated notions of building a libertarian society; people playing store. That is, there's nothing wrong with that; I'm one of those little wannabees myself. But most there think of the next thing that SL can propel them to be someday, not what they are now (Prof. Bloomfield included, who has gained a remarkable immersive worldist catapault to WSJ fame and glory precisely because he got a *second* life where his *first* life couldn't deliver). And it's not surprising that they don't really talk about "the economy" in these sessions, but instead, do stuff like invite socialist game designers like Richard Bartle to speak.

Or Cory Ondrejka, who has about as much interest in the internal SL economy as he would have in a Tupperware party in his RL suburbia, or a thrilling yard sale and BBQ chicken picnic run by the Rotary. Having Cory and Hamlet nee Linden Au speak yesterday at Monotonomics was part of Rob's plan for star---erm clustering his way to glory, and it has worked. I can't help thinking that if more of the real businesses of SL, inworld and out, would come to these things, some of the Bolshevism and wild-eyed libertarian sectarianism and tekkie wikie opensource stone-souping would, well, dissipate, as it would have to under the harsh glare of people who actually make bottom lines work, I guess, inworld or out.

I speak as someone who delivers some US $2500 in tier each month generated from my business, which covers my non-profit projects in SL, too, and leaves me a profit after tier and after subsidies of these projects. Now is that fucking remarkable, or what? Could we hear some applause here please lol? Does a single other person in the room do that? Other than possibly Jenzaa or even Intlibber, if he isn't getting his Pops to cover his low occupancy, the answer is: no. Very few people who think they know a lot about economies and business in SL actually do it, actually deliver it, and actually know something about it. I take a certain pride in this, but it also exasperates me that it is not appreciated -- oh, I don't mean me, I mean the hundreds of other people who do exactly the same thing -- or even 10 or 100 times more than I do in SL -- I'm on the middle or low middle of this spectrum, surely.

Unrecognized, however. Example: When I meet Catherine Linden at VW08, what does she say to me, beaming and looking at me vaguely. "Oh, don't you...run a neighbourhood...or something...in Second Life?" Here's a woman who I've always been friendly to, for whom I show up at office hours or press conferences. Who I even bought property next to in SL as it randomly happened, and have always chatted with amiably. But, as a Linden, she thinks I "run a neighbourhood". She doesn't grasp, possibly, what it means to have some 20 sims worth of land spread over 65 sims on the fucking *mainland* and yet, through sheer force of will and determination, I guess, is able to wrest $2500 in thousands of micropayments out of that hopeless scenario and keep paying tier. Of course, it's kind of a fool's errand, as we all know, but there it is -- something for the annals.

And yet, it's as if it were invisible, absent, non-consequential to these Lindens. And again, I speak not as me, but as the thousands of people I see all over, on the grid, not only my tenants, some of whom have made more than me off this game by being content makers, but everybody else's rentals, stores, widget making operations. I just marvel and wonder at the sheer awesomeness of what my fellow Second Lifers have pulled off, despite having the harshest conditions, the most uncaring stewards of their economy, and the most sectarian and ideological anti-economy freaks on the planet to deal with. It's a testimony to the sheer invincibility of the economic human spirit that even the most powerful form of communism thrown at it today in the form of the freetard opensource movement and all its works, they triumph.

I goggle. listening to Cory Ondrejka, and find proof once again of the sheer overpowering arrogance involved in "making an economy in 6 months" as a tekkie -- imagining that all you have to do to make such an economy is invite in Lawrence Lessig as an advisor (no wonder everything is copyable!!! lol). Cory is still dining out on two stories from his illustrious revolutionary past: 1) capitulating to the Prim Tax Revolt and 2)
listening to Lessig who told them "it would be stupid" (Cory paraphrases) to build this big world and not let people keep property rights. Of course, for the Lindens, as for Lessig, this was a sectarian leftist feint and thrust -- a temporary NEP, a selling of the rope, a way to stick it to the man (commercial game corporations) just as long as was needed to line up and instill all the memes, then everybody would be told to bend over, open source, embrace the inevitable, and, uh, make a new business model! Geez, we saw that one coming lol.

But this is all fake, of course. The reason why there could even be such a revolt that the Lindens still fawn over, and that they could capitulate, is that they agreed with it themselves from the start -- but were just fooling around.

Prokofy Linden

We were going to wait until Friday to announce this at Virtual Worlds 08 in New York at the Javitts Center, especially given today's date, but now that it is starting to seep out on Twitter it's probably better you hear it from me directly.

Public opinion began to be prepared yesterday with the announcement of a general amnesty in the works, and a review of all permabans in a Forums Facelift, including even He Who Must Not Be Named.

So, yes, it's true, no fooling: I'll be joining the staff of Linden Lab next week, heading up an exiting new project called Lindenor, a wonderful place where inworld businesses will be able to get special tier rates to run sims with homes and shops for the community as we make a really exciting transition to the SL Grid, a place where we will all be connected to a virtual world that will give us a Better World.

Sharp eyes may have seen a hint of this amazing concept here on the Linden blog, where an important distinction is going to be made starting on May 1st, World Labour Day, when Workers of the World Unite. Sidewinder talked about how Havoc 4 is being deployed:

Monday, Monday March 31

* All Early Adopters
* All Welcome Areas
* All Orientation Islands
* 1200 specially selected Second Life regions

Thursday, May 1

* The rest of Second Life

Lindenor will at last be a place where everybody who has gotten with the program -- Early Adopters and Mentors as well as Clueless Newbs and special people who "get it" on just 1,200 specially-select sims will be able to be rewarded for their long-suffering endurance on the grid and given a special leg up to weather the Liquidity Event -- when all private islands will be asked to host their own servers or die, and when the mainland will be closed except for Lindenor.

The "rest of Second Life" can go fish.

Is this FIC? you ask? Has Prokofy, in becoming a Linden staff member heading up what sounds like an exclusive new land baron program the ultimate in FICification?

SL Rid

Are the Lindens trying to get rid of us?

Does this new SL Grid thing they have going really amount to a Darwinian next stage meant to make us obsolete or extinct? ("Us" meaning the people who live and work here now...)

Will this use of the trademark be considered "disparagement" in 88 days, unlike the heady days when this one wasn't, and even got an upbeat Linden letter?

Well, youth wants to know! And I do discuss this avidly in the councils of the elders, and of course no one likes me for this, but I do have to ask the question, posed by Alex here, which is whether big corporations are using open-sourcing to basically steal SL's customers and content -- and doing this by getting the open-source movement itself to help out and not even notice the possibly smothering embrace of big corps.

Ever since I first noticed that SL Grid thing innocently looking up from the page of a seemingly innocuous Brazilian localization company for SL, I had to wonder what the plan was for the new business model post "the Liquidation Liquidity Event" and post open-source. I especially wondered about open-source as did others when I saw the SL Wiki for the Architectural Working Group not putting in "Second Life as we know it with a user economy and contiguous geographical space and a land market" in the use cases lol (so I added it). That would be a tip off! Of course, I couldn't even get the Lindens to admit they wrote this, and this particular wiki roadmap isn't signed.

Lindens Hire Woodbury Goon?

Hmm, I wonder what's up with this? You'd think the Herald would have this by now. Oh, except, they're in on it.

Fact: I go on Facebook and I see that Chadrick Baker, formerly Chadrick Linden, my FB Friend, has joined a group called "Feted Inner Core." Wondering mildly if I've been given credit for inventing the term, I click on the group. It is founded by:

Fact: Jordan Bellino, graduate of Woodbury University and...member of the Linden Lab network.

AFAIK, the way the FB tools and networks operate, you cannot become a member of a network unless you... have an email on the system of that workplace.

Hypothesis: The Lindens have hired a Woodbury...goon? Would they do that?!

Busting the Backchat

Backchatters unite and fight for your rights! lol But those rights don't extend into disrupting the discussion itself. Who gets to determine the limits? The blogsophere solved this problem by witch-hunting Sarah Lacy; Scoble solves it by having a separate discussion "just for geeks" so they can ask "their questions". Paging Eric Rice: are we now going to have to have separate drinking fountains?

All I've said about Richard Bartle is that his concepts for games are socialist -- enforced egalitarianism. You would think I had disrobed the Pope! But I had to say that...Because they are. Just listen to what he says. He wants games not to have RMT, and he wants everyone who enters their spaces to be "on a level playing field" -- not just to have equal opportunities, however, but to have equal outcome. How so, equal outcome? Because he doesn't want anyone to put cash in (evil riches from evil real life!), or to cash out (evil profit!). He's willing to invoke moral persuasion or even threat of expulsion if you don't believe as he does.

If a designer and a group of his fans wish to make a closed game where they can enjoy the socialism they could never establish in real life, who's to stop them? In the name of freedom of expression, they get to do that, if they can find the $130 million or more needed to design and publish a game, as Richard himself explains, and can make do with the some $15 million in profit they can make after that. It's their right to keep their game closed, surely, under a TOS, just as anybody has the right of free assembly to make any club they like and keep others out under rules that don't violate real-life law (i.e. discrimination against minorities).

That's never enough for game gods these days, however. We live in a world where game makers tell us that reality is broken, and *they* can fix it. That Bartle's fellow Terra Novan, Edward Castronova, can publish books in which he actually calls for making the real world like these games. "Learning from their lessons" in "serious games" and such. So, I'm sorry, but when you reach that point, it's more than just to begin to examine the motives, ideologies, capacities of people calling to control your game -- and maybe your life, too.

The furious frenzy that is kicked up among the thin-skinned, arrogant, and neuralgic (oversensitive to sharp criticism) tech set is astounding. You would they didn't work for big IT companies that run on the capitalist profit motive and pay them on that basis, or something lol. I don't know the root of their fury, but part of it is simply *not being in control*. Far from the marginalized social misfits that people still imagine them to be from the *last century* -- and I mean like *the first part of the last century*, they have gotten their hands on the controls of most of your life already. Everything from school attendance records to employment histories to health background to criminal records to romantic affiliations to banking records are online, or digitalized, and in the control of these technicians, these gamers, who would like to put more game elements into your life. It's more than right and just to ask: but what's their plan for all this control? Control they insist on having?

Bartle the Scrivener

Richard Bartle, the Zeus of Game Gods, is such a textnik, that when He comes to Second Life, he says he expands the chat window out THIS BIG so that it takes up the entire screen and hides the view of the streaming 3-D world, because, he says, "I don't care about the pictures behind it."

Ok, fair enough. Of course, you'll get the machinima, the audio, the backchat in the room, the backchat in the group (actually, they have Group Backchat but maybe not Room Backchat, that's for refined collectors) at www.metanomics.net which is now it's own website free of the old Metaversed.com dynasty of Nick Wilson. So this blog is just a sort of laggy pastiche of impressions.

I have to say I couldn't really find any direct connection between MUDs and Richard Bartle and the nouveau groovy topic of Metanomics, back when it was first posted (and that's why I accused the organizer of being just a name-dropper or worse, a star, erm, embracer).

How *could* Richard Bartle and his MUDs and whatnot have anything to do with Metanomics when Richard Bartle, as a good British socialist and intrinsic Marxist (although he'd deny everything but the British part likely) is opposed to virtual economies. He really really hates RMT, and he wants to set up a giant commission in the sky to scold REALLY hard all those nasty smug little Chinese boys that go around gold-farming and interrupting everybody's game! For shame! Shame, shame, little Chinese boys (and Western round-eyes who do the same thing, essentially, in Second Life or some place). Shame! Maybe if we all hold hands and chant STOP THE GOLD FARMING, KILL THE RMT really really hard, we can make Tinkerbell wake up and prevent money from leaking into and out of games! Evil money! Evil capitalism!

I did have a very important insight about Richard Bartle I hadn't gained before, however, by his appearance among us mortals in Philip-Rosedale-look-alike-noob attire, right down to the metal tire-tread sandals (you *do* realize, don't you that all newbie males are made to look like Philip Rosedale going in t-shirt and jeans to Burning Man the first time in RL and buying some...tire-tread sandals out of somebody who was like, recycling and Saving the Earth, right? Of course you did.)

And that is: what Richard Bartle plays aren't games as such, but the meta game of being the game designer. So his fun, as he'll be the first to tell you (and did at Metanomics) is enjoying the game-god fun of the game drive, playing with, toying with, thinking about, the design, which is at the meta-level. So he doesn't look at the game as, oh, those hordes of ordinary consumers who are just having ordinary fun for whom he has, well, a certain British upper-class fastidiousness.

So naturally, what I thought was missing here in his metaverse was a realization that *other people* would enjoy playing at the meta-level of game design *too*. Maybe not *lots*. But *enough to make the problem of political participation in games and worlds and power-sharing with devs an urgent one*. That's not something he's likely to take on board soon, because he is absolutely convinced that there is only one tribe that gets to play the meta-level, and that's the game god. So it's circular reasoning.

A-Void-Ance

I see from looking at the Linden Blob that there's to be an Ides of March Concierge Party and also a new feature where you can buy void sims for $415 and $75 tier which will have double the old 1875 prim limit.

Now, that should cheer the average disgruntled Concierge customer who is tired of sims not working, crashing, HTML on a prim, which was so exciting at first, causing crashes, etc. But it doesn't cheer me. And it's not only because I'm Done With the Lindens, but there's more:

o I will never go to another Concierge party because the Lindens conspire and collaborate with griefers. I'm sorry to have to say that, because it sounds like absolutely tinfoil hate nuttiness and crazy batshit looniness, but the fact is, the last time I went to a Concierge party, with the best of will and a song in my heart and a thanks to Jack for his lovely builds and service, I had to endure total unadulterated bullshit from griefers, right in front of two Lindens, Jack Linden and Spike Linden, who only laughed. Maldavius Figtree, who I guess is a concierge customer by dint of having one sim or something (or he got TP'd in by Intlibber as a date), kept flying up and standing on my head, over and over, which is the favourite "look at me, Lindens, I'm under the radar, doing a griefy thing but you can't ban me for it" sort of thing. To add insult to injury, Alyx Stoklitsky, who I rather doubt is a concierge customer, but may in turn have someone come in as somebody else's "date," was then on hand to stalk me around, stand on my head, sit down on me wherever I sat down, etc. etc. Spike Linden looked on in glee. What normal people would do if they were hosts of a party, even if they didn't like you, would flick children like that off the server, instantly. It wouldn't even be a warning. It would be a flick. You don't act like that, period. Pixeleen Mistral indulged in that kind of gleefully malicious behaviour at some book party Uri dragged me to months ago, too. When people do that, and the hosts can't stop it, I don't go back to their homes -- ever.

Besides, I could never reach the high of my very first Concierge Party, where I got to dance with Lee Linden, it makes me gerrlish heart flutter ta remember it even now, alackaday.

o I've figured out my demands now for reinstating my helpful, constructive communication with the Lindens (seriously): a) unban me from the forums b) process my abuse reports on the grieftard ad extortionists who put up big-ass signs on the former extortionist-cut-up ad land...and took it off for sale. Even a good-faith gesture in either of these directions would be acceptable, i.e. processing of *one* of the complaints in one obvious area (Baileya or Alice) where it's deliberate stalking or even restoration of my posting privileges to Resident Websites (my original Terms of Restraint had me enabled to post in the classifieds and on the resident website, but Torley removed this when I questioned the heavy advertising of obscene w-hat builds with huge obscene penis pictures on Resident Answers. Torley never likes anyone to push back against libsl, w-hat etc because she feels instinctively that not only is the Motherland in Danger, the Tribal Lodge is Burning. Run for your liiiiveeees!

o I thought about the new void sims (we must think of a more attractive name for them -- the Lindens cleverly har har started calling them agagin "open sims" to compete with...opensim lol laff riot). But seriously, folks, does it make sense to put even US $415 into a void sim? Because the Lindens are going to opensource and...it's not clear what happens next. We could be left holding very big bags if we don't have $20,000 to spend on new T-1 high speed lines and a set of servers of our own to host our sim thingies on.