Second Thoughts

Starax is Gone: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

When I was a child, the first movie I ever saw was "Fantasia," the Disney movie based on the fairy tale "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." Gosh, I was tiny and the movie screen was big and this was a really REALLY long time ago but the look and feel of that experience is a lot like Second Life, of course...

Starax's disappearance from Second Life -- most head-lines punned that he had waved his wand and vanished himself from the world or the Lindens had poofed him -- is a very simple or a very complicated story, or both.

Yes, Starax Statosky is gone from the People list, his store is gone from slboutique.com and he is not answering email. In fact, spending an hour flying around to all the places where I thought I might find his sculptures, like the sculpture garden in Taber, I couldn't find a single one, nor was he in any find list of places or classifieds (someone said a classifieds was placed 8/2, but it timed out). You can see some of them on some resident blogs and picture sites and there are some bloggers who recall the hours of fun they have had with his wand, and the internal game played with it.

Perhaps he was banned for a recent, typical forums-reg smutty jpeg, in this case, we're told, some very fat woman on top of a dinky man, which Torley removed, but since Governor Linden seized his land in Patagonia, it seems unlikely. Still, if you don't pay on your bills after 7 days, you disappear from the list and the Gov grabs your land -- so it's possible he just went on vacation or didn't pay his tier or something. But, unless he has more land somewhere, this was only a 512, which would come automatically with the $9.95 premium account (he'd probably have the oldbie 4096m2 freebie, wouldn't he?)

Others find the story more complex and emblematic of many of the tumultuous changes underway in SL.

The original Sourcer's Apprentice story is about an apprentice to a wizard who misued his powers and wrecked havoc.

But in our SL version of the story, it was just the opposite -- at least, I *think* it's about just the opposite. The magic wand that Starax created, an awesome, very expensive device that could conjure up whole world-within-worlds, was broken by the Lindens' latest software patches.

Starax very politely and briefly and wittily asked about this on the forums and was told that yes, his wizardry, which depended on temp-on-rez functions, was broken. Starax seemed to couch his curt query in the sardonic manner typical of the oldbies, saying his goldfish Bubbles would die without food if he couldn't sell his wand for Lindens to cash out dollars. But...you couldn't be sure if this wasn't a bit of bravado covering up a decidedly ambiguous feeling about the Platform and the way it eats its children.  There's GOMing...and then there's having your stuff wrecked and your business ruined just for the sake of the new edition -- without even a proper drama or wind-up.

Few people seem to have bothered to ask Lindens whether this was true and what they thought about it, so I did.

"You killed him," I said to one Linden. I find that you have to speak truth to power, and often only negotiate from a position of strength, which is of course ludicrous in a situation where they can "kick" you and ban you forever "for any reason or no reason". I feel the direct approach often works.

After we both climbed down from our huffs, this Linden told me matter-of-factly that he hadn't heard about Starax' departure, and found it odd, since in fact LL was working hard to repair just that very thing that made his wand go poof. Evidently Starax knew that? If true, it was sad that Starax was leaving, and unnecessary.

If the idea was to grandstand, and get the Lindens to realize that they must stop their ceaseless folly, cease this collision of one patch after another breaking the world in bits, just in order to make the web for companies to show off their 3-D media campaigns, and they must stop, look, and listen to their old residents who were hurting and literally having the magic sapped from them...then the campaign was a bust. They weren't noticing. And anyway, they were working on it. And anyway, isn't that new camera flashy thingy cool, though?

Earlier, another Linden had explained to me the bit about Starax's wand, when I contacted him about another issue involving how all the objects on a sim return in batches in order of ownership when some asswipe fire-prims your sim and overloads it, so that his new griefer prims get pride of place on a sim, and your builds are dumped into the ether (but I think they've fixed this now). I spoke with others about this as well. The issue of temp-on-rez is separate than that issue, they were at pains to explain, and I let them talk, because trying to let them know that I already got the point wasn't working. The problem of "where stuff goes" when you rez out too much of it, even temporarily, is of course, um, "at issue" in SL. In all kinds of ways. The bad stuff of fire-primming and grid-crashing with the self-replicating stuff is related to the wand stuff of making hippos and flags and monks appear in the air as Starax did.

A few weeks ago, I wrote to Starax, who was my neighbour in the northern atoll continent sim of Patagonia. in one line, something like, "Is it true that your wand was killed in order to make it possible for my tenants not to have all their builds returned when they're fire-primmed?"

He may not have found that funny -- or maybe he did. Or maybe his messages capped. In fact, maybe Prokofy Neva, that philistine realtor, killed Starax by seeming to revel in his tenants finally getting to save their builds at the expense of other people not being able to rez out shit all over the place (remember when Pete Fats was the subject of constant forums mongering on the land scanner temp-rezzing issues?) But...the issues are likely technically unrelated, or, if related, not a quid-pro-quo as I fancifully imagined, and anyway, I was speaking in a more metaphorical way:

Do the old ways have to make way for the new? Does the past have to die somehow, even in a world in which the Eternal is always a copy in your inventory? Is the Golden Age of Heroes over, and now we are in the Iron Age of Replication? Are small-beer sleazy real estate agents now going to be served, for their blingtard tenants' needs, and the fine talents and sensibilities of the Staraxes of the world to be trampled by the Almight Dollar and greed and lust? Or...is the age of sleazy realtors and blingtards going to be swept aside for the glory of big RL campaigns rolling out mass entertainment on 40-only sims? Well, um, yeah, maybe. But...I'm not the one who published the picture of the fat lady crushing the little man.

A curious -- but not so curious -- counterpoint to the Starax-is-Missing drama was provided by Shack Dougall, another post-FIC, post-Age-of-Heroes figure who has achieved much in his own right through sim design and innovative realtor work (he specializes in finding prizes and landscaping them and has also developed Liferain in Alviso and Bonny Doon and other sims). Whether feeling envy or irritation or both, Shack was prompted to gripe that "anyone could make these wands" or "these sculptures are possible for anyone". He seemd to have a convulsion of sorts, and a very public one, about the necessity of going on to keep glorifying these old early adapters. It led him to be shamed by others who were close to Starax, and let him to be compared unfavourably.

But he's right. The dog barks, the caravan moves on. Shit happens, people leave. I was going to blog even 6 months ago about some brilliant new sculptresses I've found around town, who have quietly gone around Starax by picking areas he didn't work in, and doing them really, really well, i.e. horses or angels. So, Starax may not have even survived as the dernier cri in the world of prim-rustling. Or maybe he decided it was better to leave gracefully, before it was really time. Looking in the list today, where once Starax was one of a only a few sculptors in SL, today there are a 100, with numerous gardens, galleries, tours -- and quite a few of good quality, possibly even exceeding his, though none had that Fantasia-like narrative power.

Starax is more about a sensibility, however, than anything else. Geek. Goofy geek. Arty geek. Geek who was here first. Geek who is friends with the Lindens and hangs out with them and pals around in the IRC channel. Geek who knows code out the wazoo. Geek who makes a Really Cool Thing that bonds with Lindens who love it to pieces. The era of geek is passing, however, in part, not because there are less geeks -- but because there are more. There are thousands of programmers and designers with RL credentials in SL now, and there will be millions. Most of them never heard of Starax and may never hear of him, any more than in their day, people all over the world might never have heard of Michaelangelo (that came later).

Starax, of course, was probably best noted for taking these rigid prims that have no malleability, (or didn't when he began sculpting years ago) and making sculptures, including of the human form. It's a little bit like trying to make Michaelangelo statues with popsicle sticks, but he pulled it off..most of the time, but my own first encounter with his works in the roiled waters of the Ravenglass/Carlisle border on the famous "They Don't Get It and I Sure Don't" thread was as kitsch, albeit noir kitsch: a man fishing being picked up by the neck by a vulture (was he the one who made THAT King Kong, too???). Most of the sculptures I saw of his had more elegance.

Still, Starax was one of those tastes of the core sims, an aquired taste. You have to like looking at the round/hollow eyes of sculptures and prim torture. Most 2004 and post avatars didn't buy Starax because he's primmy and they needed the space for their dinette sets. Even the really arty preferred less realistic stuff.As for the wand, it cost $15,000 on slboutique.com and while only $45 US, it's a lot to fork over. I personally got fun more quickly and cheaply from Jesrad Seraph's spell caster, which is built on the same principle, but of course, of more limited capacity.

Of course nothing could match a Starax wand. Cory Linden raved about it on the film for the Google people, and that's where you can see a bit of a demonstration of it. So it feels like the ultimate irony that the Lindens would then go about breaking it. The Google movie will stay on the Internet forever, showing Cory and Philip's dog-and-pony with SL, for the glories of the web, while Starax is gone from the world.

They break stuff like that because they have to make something different than our world. They have to make their platform. The platform cannot be sacrificed; the things on the platform have to be sacrificed. Platform is platform. Things are things. Get your priorities straight.  Maybe down the line they'll fix it up again.

There's a lot about Starax I don't know. That's for other people to write. My own take on him was that he was arrogant like all the FIC, even if he was probably actually quite warm and witty and fun and clearly beloved by those close to him.

Why? Because he didn't make his store public. Among other things, like his irreverent forums' posts, I could never for the life of me figure out why he kept a 512 square in Patagonia next to an ugly black box club on the next sim. Titled, "Patagonia 7, mature flat green," just the way Bob Bravo the Realtor had named it when he sold it aeons ago, it had nothing on it, not even a tree. Starax was impervious to IMs asking him if he wanted to sell when prims got tight on the sim.

There was no sign, no teleporter, no nothing. You just "had to know" that his store was there, with the wand, way up in the air. I didn't know, until I clicked on a SLURL or something on the forums and landed up in the air, then started falling as his store is gone now. nimrod Yaffle explained to me that the store was up there -- I'd never seen it. How would you know? It wasn't in classifieds that I ever saw, it wasn't in search, though probably in "picks". It was funny, to me, all the time, for months, staring at the square. Why did the famous Starax have this square on our sim, with nothing on it?

And that seemed to me in retrospective so typical of the FIC. Their friends knew -- you just "had to know" it was there because they'd never do anything "so tacky" as put a sign and a teleporter on the ground. Possibly he didn't need or want to sell a lot of those wands.

When I looked at the impromptu memorial site erected in Patagonia, I saw a jury-rigged mat put into place on the Gov Linden land, where normally you can't put stuff, saying "We Miss You, Come Back, Starax." Roses scattered. A kind of Mr. Potato Head expression made up of the kind of bits of prims Starax would have used was clumsily deployed with a frown and a tier. I rezzed a candlestick on my land nearby and levered it into place on the Linden land. The scripts were turned off on the land so I couldn't light it, an eloquent statement about magical things in our world which are so easily broken, and so easily forgotten, but not so easily replaced.

Harvitar and Groupitar

Note to Lindens and marketing gurus: MAKE THE INWORLD GROUPS AVAILABLE ANY TIME OUTSIDE OF SL AND ACCESSIBLE BY THOSE BOTH INWORLD AND OUTWORLD.

Here's why...but...

Is the coast clear yet? I think the buzz around the Harvard guy's article has died down now so that I can safely blog about it. You see, he contacted me by email right at publication and sent me the link, urging me fearlessly to do my worst (he apparently had picked up on the fact that I'm a sharp critic).

Knowing how these things worked, he figured any review, even a bad review, is part of the buzz you need to get established with an idea. Controversies bring more hits. When I had this Metaverse Grudge Match with Raph Koster, which seemed to spring out of nowhere, he said the next time he gathered his statistics that article was the one with the most hits, and that drove up his overall traffic, and that drove up his kachinging ads on that web page. "More Prokofy means more readers," he said. Really, I should be paid for this...and of course that's exactly what some would like to do, buy me, pay for me, and get paid themselves.

The Harvard guy, of course, was primarily interested in the intellectual discourse around his insights...um, I think. After all, if I had slammed it and started an uproar about it, that would have driven traffic to his site, that would have only given him traffic with no payouts, since the article was still for free. It was linked to the Lindens front page (and still is); Clickable Culture, Hammie, they all blogged it up and RL media also began commenting everywhere. So now, he can't expect to get any advantage from my blogging while cleverly waiting for the dust to have settled because now, all that can happen is that people will click on this link and learn they have to pay $16.25 just for the article!

Oh, wait! Curses, foiled again! Grrr. Of course a certain portion of my readers *will* now pay that ridiculous price for one Harvard-baked article, especially if they are in some ad agency's department or some big university with all kinds of slush funds for "server storage" which they use for "an island in Second Life". Yeesh. I am such a tard.

OK. So he got all the media/blog hits he wanted, SL and RL, and got the ultimate pay-off from Raph Koster, who called his article "exhaustively researched".

I gave it a zing then, saying there was nothing "well-researched" about merely quoting Philip Linden's canned speech, which he gave in March to Google, and has recycled about a dozen times all over the RL circuit, finally to give it one more tired flog to the netizens of Second Life in a town hall meeting, before giving it a final tired-horse beating for Podcast where it can be immortalized. In this flog, Philip tells us how people have made 10 million objects. Of course, we don't know if they made 10 million *good* objects. I'm not sure if this means every single prim cube, named "object," or whether only finished and named objects were included in Philip's typical gaga server statistics but we've all absorbed the lesson now: 25 percent of the people make stuff for the other 75 percent (and their own cohort) and they sell it for a gadzillion amount of real life dollars.

So Raph then countered that he meant the entire article, not the canned Linden stuff, was well-researched, which one can concede...except it was written in the usual button-downed, obvious, but let's-make-it-seem-more-scholarly style that you come to expect from a publication like that.

I mean, what is Harvard? Harvard is the grandest commodity of the American experiment. If you have "Harvard," you have everything -- influence, money, even looks (they can be backdated to fit the first 2 things). "Harvard" still means, despite everything surrounding the stories of scandal periodically surrounding it, like Jeffrey Sachs (give my Harvard institution a grant, you actually buy me, too, I then move to the other venue you'd rather have your grant at after a high-profile investment scandal in Russia); Cornell West (I can run political movements of various sorts, contribute to a rap CD, and just publish an article or book very rarely and still keep my credentials); or Lawrence Summers (I can say that women aren't really wired to be scientists and still be president...for awhile anyway). But I'm not really here to blog about real life, though Paul Hemp turning his attention to SL is like "Harvard Boys Do Russia".

The Harvard imprimature can affect everything. I've even started calling  the "backslash" that you are now absolutely supposed to use in every higher-toned SL venue to silence the idiotic din of the Linden-induced avatar drone typing the "Harvard backslash" since Berkman Island is really assiduous about policing it during meetings. (And live music venues are too).

I first began debating about the Paul Hemp's concept on Clickable Culture. Tony was skeptical that we could posit entities known as "avatars" that had any sort of mind/wallet of their own. Obviously, they require human agency.

I posited that no, the avatar, being a window into the soul, and an ensouled body of its own, has a separate life than the human typist. He might at times do things for which the typist will be sorry he has to pay, later.

The effect is something like that old Guys and Dolls song:

What's playing at the Roxy?
I'll tell you what's playing at the Roxy.
A picture about a Minnesota man falls in love with a Mississippi girl
That he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi.
That's what's playing at the Roxy.

What's in the daily news?
I'll tell you what's in the daily news.
Story about a man bought his wife a small ruby
With what otherwise would have been his union dues.
That's what's in the daily news.

What's happening all over?
I'll tell you what's happening all over.
Guy sitting home by a television set
That used to be something of a rover.

That's what's happening all over.

Love is the thing that has nipped them.
And it looks like Nathan's just another victim.

NICELY (spoken) Yes, sir!

When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky
You can bet that he's doing it for some doll.
When you spot a John waiting out in the rain
Chances are he's insane as only a John can be for a Jane.
When you meet a gent paying all kinds of rent
For a flat that could flatten the Taj Mahal.
Call it sad, call it funny.
But it's better than even money
That the guy's only doing it for some doll.
When you see a Joe saving have of his dough
You can bet there'll be mink in it for some doll.
When a bum buys wine like a bum can't afford
It's a cinch that the bum is under the thumb of some little broad.
When you meet a mug lately out of the jug
And he's still lifting platinum folderol
Call it hell, call it heaven
But it's probable twelve to seven
That the guy's only doing it for some doll.

(interlude)

When you see a sport and his cash has run short
Make a bet that he's banking it with some doll.
When a guy wears tails with the front gleaming white
Who the hell do you think he's tickling pink on Saturday night?
When a lazy slob takes a goody steady job,
And he smells from vitalis and barbasol.
Call it dumb, call it clever
Ah, but you can get odds forever
That the guy's only doing it for some doll
Some doll, some doll
The guy's only doing it for some doll!

The principle works the same in Second Life. The avatars' pocketbook has $1000 in it which seems like a LOT and makes him feel rich; in fact it's only $3.00 US. And the fact that it is game money, and also seemingly very little needs to be done to bring in "thousands" (sell your first land, sell an item you made, win at a casino, turn a trick), then you rapidly think that spending the thousands isn't such a big deal, either. Yumi didn't believe me when I said some people could spend $1000 US on their avatars in a year.  I think she just hasn't seen some of my tenants and all their gear. Even the conservative Linden estimate that people spend $1500 Lindens in each 4-hour log-in will give you $540 US a year -- and given the $5 MILLION US that is actually generated on this game *each month* (look at the running figures on the front page) people spend a lot more. (BTW, I don't believe those numbers, because I don't know whether they double count Lindex transactions, or whether they include or don't include tier or island sales, who the hell knows, they aren't talking. Back when they had it, I used to notice that the total daily for "objects sold in world" running as "last 10 things sold inworld" never remotely reached the "total US dollars spent today").

So whoever advertises and appeals to the avatar's wants and needs has us by our little pixelated balls. Many people don't seem to mind this. Others do, depending on their national, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The "don't need land to have fun" crowd are obviously the sort that don't understand the marketing and the spending that is going on here.

When I was permabanned a year ago, it was for taking on the top businesses of SL. Back then, I thought the zealous and selective -- and injust -- prosecution of me was related to the fragile egos of both Lindens, residents, and Lindesidents involved (residents-turned-Lindens). They were all terribly nervous about being noticed by the outside world from not among their fiercely loyal and tribal ranks, and terribly scared about RL big business coming in and blowing them away. Some of them still are, of course, but I've come to see that's not what it is about, entirely.

It's more about power just for its own sake, and unwillingness to share. Because in fact these "big businesses" of SL weren't blown away by the RL big businesses coming in. Nothing of the sort. At least, not most of them (there was of course fierce squabbling among some of them as they fought amongst each other for these leads). In fact, most of the people I criticized have only been able to flourish by hiring themselves out as Metaverse Consultants to big business and serving as sherpas guiding these big companies through the jungles and weeds of SL. A few of them don't seem to be successfully converting themselves in that way, like Cristiano Midnight, though he may be trying to fashion another career appearing as a whiny commentator on Second Cast and things like Harvard panels to position himself for the time when he can either charge for the snapshot baroning he does or sell the entire thing to some rich third-party entity, sort of the way FlipperPA sold SLBoutique.com to the Electric Sheep (while Cristiano's customers don't pay money, they pay in emotions, since pictures of all their special SL moments are hugely valuable to people, as some of the many photography studios in SL have learned catering to the desire of people to have really kick-ass SL screenshots on the walls of their McMansions.)

And of course, there's the main piece of all this which was related to my forums ban, and other actions taken against me (including the usual Linden social-engineering, which is the Shamu method of ignoring behaviour/statements they don't like to try to induce "positively-reinforced" behaviour that is positive by their lights.)

And that's the data scraping. Paul didn't fully grapple with this, but before I bore  everyone with trying to  struggle through my thinking on this, let me point to Collision Detection and someone else who has already blogged about this privacy/data issue  far better than I can, while I was waiting until the buzz died down so I could think about this in peace.

I'm fairly certain that the Collision Detection people do not wear tin hats. "In a virtual world, everything an avatar does -- literally everything -- is loggable and monitorable," they write. Then quote Harvard:

.. the amount of marketing and purchasing data that could be mined is staggering. An avatar's digital nature means that every one of its moves -- for example, perusing products in a store and discussing them with a friend -- can be tracked and logged in a database. This behavioral information, organized by individual avatar, aside from being priceless to marketers in the long term, could be processed immediately. An avatar clerk might appear from behind the counter and offer to answer an avatar customer's question -- questions the clerk would already know because they would have been gathered and recorded in the database.

Well, as I pointed out a year ago, and humdog pointed out even 3 years ago, it goes much further than that.

It's not only that the data scrapers can grab what Dow Jones on the Herald has called the "inventory of inventiveness, the projection of another, desire self" and the stuff of dreams. People's deepest wants. Some warehouse clerk dressed up as a girl buying Aimee's lacy underthings. Some stay-at-home mother buying a trollop's outfit or DJ equipment for a club. That's all been rehearsed.

More to the point, the relationships between people can also be charted, and I don't think the Harvard article or other far more superficial news accounts or magazine essays about virtual marketing have grasped this quite yet. Alts can be outed. People who aggregate can be tracked. Places they go can be tracked. And by following groups, even more important than individual avatars, especially if they form an Advertar or a Harvitar and start tracking the group IMs, are where the money is. Where the future is not only of marketing, but Life Itself. "Life itself will show us," as Mikhail Sergeyeich used to say.

The group IMs formed by making formal groups for $100 in Second Life, or forming a nonce "calling card" group out of all, or some of, your calling cards (you can keep batches of them in differently-named folders) are what sells stuff in SL: land, mall space, new products, gadgets, clothing, ideas like "we need p2p" or policies like "we hate these red ban lines".

Groups are where people talk all at once, and all the time. Many people are even asking for group chat to be muted so they can cut the droning, but nobody cuts it by *leaving* the group because they want to know what is going on. Whoever figures out a way through a script or something to save more of the group chat (now it has to be done through "select" and "cut and paste" more awkwardly, and often can't fit on a notecard and you have to go out of the game) will make a fortune -- people would love to be able to have all their groups save their chat, possibly with key words, when they are offline or busy, but read it later, like they do with their saving of TV programs so they can watch them later without commercials.

The Guardian columnist Alex Krotoski who is studying the social networks in Second Life also has only part of the story. She may track this or that person's calling cards with "friendship" status, as the one formal indicator she has of their connection, and ask them a static list of questions (the first edition of the questionnaire had non-SL related questions such as attitudes about spreading AIDS). But calling cards don't mean an awful lot; groups mean more. For now, cards confer the ability to map people, a function mainly used by jealous lovers and tenants worried their landlords won't get to all their requests in IMs. Real friends don't need to be mapped. You talk to them mainly in IMs, in fact. Some, you might only talk to in a group IM when you see them in a group. There are friendship cards you'd never cut just because of their status, even though you never use them to click and send inventory, etc.

Much more communication occurs in groups. I'm not sure I can claim that more of it occurs in group IMs or room chat of gathered avatars than it does in private IMs, but it's a close second anyway.

The reason SL is so sluggish is that people overuse the search functions. Rather than opening up their handy calling card folder, sorting alphabetically, finding their friend, and clicking, or going to the left-hand-lower-corner and clicking around to get the friends list and whose online up, people type their friend's name in to the people data base and see if they are online, or they get on a group -- and one of the reasons the Lindens were reluctant to make people have the option for more groups is that groups really make huge stresses on the data bases. Like the map, calling cards already in your inventory aren't really used. The one thing really used by everybody all the time always and overused is the search database. That's why it keeps breaking. People use it to type sim names into the list and teleport (they can't read maps, they went to American high schools). The use it to find even friends whose cards they have. They use it instead of clicking on landmarks also already saved neatly not only in their folders, but in their map list. When the Lindens can figure out that their user interface has too many steps for people to find their friends, places, and inventory and they use search all the time instead, they will understand the Zen of why their data base is broken all the time, and fix not the database, but their user interface. (I await explanation as to whether the pull on a dbase to get your friend by pressing on an existing calling card and the IM button takes more horsepower than the pull searching up his name, then pressing on his profile.)

The bad user interface, the lousy search engine, the general crashy laggy stuff everywhere is why group IMs are the heart of SL, so the Guardian gal and the Harvard guy need to study this more next time. Groups made by people themselves selecting topics and chat and membership and themes, not the rote routines of individual avatars making their journey from Ginko terminal to store to home.

When I need a product, I get on the groups and say, "Does anybody know where I can find a men's flannel shirt" or someone else will say, "Does anybody know if this house is sold in copies or not?" or "Is anybody else finding grey squares everywhere, is the whole game messed up or is it just me."

So people join groups to get around the game -- to navigate, to survive -- not only to socialize, and of course, to buy and sell. Each calling card list of a diva is an instant boutique where she can sell her Tupperwear subtly, through having parties or events, or directly, by describing the cool new thing she made.

 

Her product might be on Slexchange.com where her friends might go

In fact, where SL will really take off, where the pedal will really hit the metal, is when the Lindens can stop screwing around with stuff like making tails floppy for furries and adding more options for viewing and making machinima or porn, but when they can MAKE THE INWORLD GROUPS AVAILABLE ANY TIME OUTSIDE OF SL AND ACCESSIBLE BY THOSE BOTH INWORLD AND OUTWORLD.

Most people trying to do anything significant in SL already use a hack for this called "Yahoo Messenger" or "Skype," but eventually, the Lindens will cotton to the idea that group chat and staying in touch with friends and groups is the one thing that will keep them in the black, and they'll get busy on it. Even EA.com figured out that if they made Yahoo Messenger a visible thingie that showed up on your user panel inside of TSO, you would stay logged into TSO longer, you woldn't log off TSO to do YM. That wierd third-party connection was the only thing of its kind in TSO, that I used to marvel at, somebody had a stroke of genius on that one.

The Lindens and their insider friends keep trying to make the game turn into the World Wide Web, a series of web pages you browse through by pressing on hyperlinks. I suppose if they want to do this sort of thing they should be busier trying to turn it into Yahoo Groups or AIM or these other messengers with buddy lists where people talk either one on one or in groups in live time or with forums.

The actual world, with its actual (really virtual? truly virtual?) avatars and things like stores are important. It's important to have them. It's important to know they exist. But what's even more important is that you can talk about them any time. Most people do most of their socializing in IMs, and the fixing up of IM interface should be way more of a priority than it is if they want PEOPLE as distinct from big companies managing other people, to come in this game. Oops, oh I get it now...

Still, they have to keep up appearances. That's why it has been vital to make the group tools work better, and why I hope the new reforms will in fact make that happen (there are some obvious improvements, like getting rid of the "vote hack" to be able to send a group message normally on a normal message interface).

So how does Harvitar, the marketing guru adept at interpreting virtual worlds through research rather than wishful thinking, who is good at making his way through the weeds of SL, sell to Groupitar? Erm, carefully. The obvious idea of seducing strong leaders who are in fact brittle, and capturing their followers, who are in fact weak, the Spanish method against the Incas, can carry you far enough, but this is a virtual world and people find ways of becoming really resilient, and one of them is to sic their group on you, or to use the eject button from the group or from their land.

A particular way that LL, the oldbies, and the Harvitars have tried to establish to help them sell to individual avitars and keep their hold on commerce is to have inventory sold not be transferable. When you have an account with literally hundreds of US dollars in stuff, you really don't want an alt, and you also are heavily dependent on the maker of the item to update it or fix it if it gets broken. Of course, you may get sick of some of that inventory, but how sick can you get of your kick-ass Morpheus vehicle or your retractable, extendable, and ejaculatable prim dick? So retention of accounts that can remain in marketers' databases with networks pointing reliably to establishment profit centers is one goal.

With all the alts proliferating (it really isn't *that* much suffering to make an alt and go buy a new $3.50 US prim dick after all), Harvitar might be at a loss, but in fact, with the Lindens' hash mark thingie now enabling them instantly, at a glance to determine if an alt goes with an existing, known, paid and verified account, there's only the thin membrane between the Lindens' holding private the hash mark stuff, and their high-end third-party-partners who want to get their hands on those hash marks that identify computers. They've already got avatar keys which they can match with purchases.

Although various tekkie wiktators (I am grateful to the permabanned Eep for this term) would love to have scripts that deliver to them the names of all groups associated with each avatar's profile, there aren't LSL calls for this (yet). But either they can get it done manually, or figure out how to scrape the groups' list.

I figure if some programmers were able to scrape the land-for-sale list, judging from various accounts, the same principles should hold to scrape the groups' list.

I asked Philip Linden if he could give a report on the groups. How many? What are the largest? Oldest? Which have the most people? What topics do they make? I'm not sure why he didn't answer, but I suppose it's either that he's busy or just wants to keep the cards close to this chest. I started my own laborious search by typing in ab, then abc, etc. to try to pull up more than the 100 you get from our dumb search engine. There are LOTS of groups. And some are BIG.  It would also be great to see how much they talk, how many group IMs or durations of group IM sessions they create.

So another nut of the W'u'arld that the world-to-webmeisters are going to want to crack in deconstructing our world to make their web is the groups. They are going to want to do this, some of them, due to Beth Noveck's article (especially as presidential articles come up in the U.S.). They'll also want to do this just to sell stuff.

Collision Detection goes on to theorize based on Harvitar insights about NPC clerks that morph to suit your appearance and likes. Like, if you're a furry, the clerk in the store becomes a furry. Anshe Chung knows this concept, donning a furry outfit like a cat with a tail when selling sims to Furs; letting people know she is "bi" and flirting when she is selling to GLBT, etc. But I find from dealing with customers that people don't really care what you look like if you sell real estate, which is what they are focusing on; what they are bothered by, however, is any change in your look. They wonder what it means, if their house is still there, etc.

I'm well aware of the creepy capacity of the Internet and the Internet, and the coming SLinternet (or should I call it Splinternet, since it will break up our world) to gather stuff about desires from chat. I was ushered into this private chat realm recently, some locked room not open to the general public on a forums. So we're gabbing away there on various days and I look over to the left, and I see the ads, the Google-type ads, are changing in their subject matter, depending on whatever key words it is picking out of our posts. So if I mention Free Tibet, my community, in a post, the next thing I know there are ads selling Tibetan rugs. Here you are in this so-called "private closed chat room," but the bot is picking topics out of your speech, which means of course he can scan your speech, which means of course somebody somewhere, if they want, can scan it too and pick meaning out of it rather than a chance to sell Tibetan rugs.

So...if somebody wanted to "sell to," let's say, the group Free Tibet, they might try to cajole or overthrow the group's leader, wittily called Dear Leader, or enter as an alt and start spamming about their Tibetan rugs, let's say, or use other more subtle techniques like join and lurk for awhile and listen to group chat, or come to group events, and actually see what it is people do want to buy, if anything (most just want to be left alone). Somebody might figure to put wind chimes in the marketplace which is open to be rented, or Tibetan dresses, but this takes manual field trips and work. (Of course, not only with Spin Martin'ss spinning, glitz creation of a p2p SLagat, but also more widely cast projects like slhandbook.com, the "explorers," who are really just "ad space buyers" or "media buyers" or "market share buyers" can hack away some of the weedy paths of SL.)

Naturally, the Lindens and their insider pals are adept at making mega-groups to accomplish their marketing purposes, like "Bub's Underwear Models" or "Awakening Avatars" or of course, branded, credentialed groups like the 1,600 strong Mentors/Greeters/Instructors with their internal comm system and extraordinary marketing and market-share distribution powers.

Have you ever been on one of those mailings lists in RL organized by Pepsi or the U.S. Government to either tell you about contests or about opportunities to protect our nation from terrorists by volunteering in your community? Periodically, you'll get some dorky flash thing from Pepsi or something boostery like "If You See Something Say Something" from being on these lists, and while you don't really pay attention, it enters your subconscious somewhere. You don't get off the list because getting off it sometimes involves going through a zillion menus where you suspect you are being tapped again, plus you don't want to go on record now sounding like you won't help your community when you once said you *would*. And there are those times when you go click through all the flash menus and games and win the Pepsi hat, and it makes it worth it. That's why you stay in some SL groups, well past the sell-by date, because they have some low residual of return for you now and then. A prominent FIC group recently booted my alt due to a reorganization, and my last link to spy on FIC messaging was cut. Sob.

Making mega-groups with overt advertising or covert advertising of the "hey kids come have fun and dance on our island" messaging might be one thing, especially if the mega groups can subsume some smaller more localized groups, but ultimately, to really reach the Bohos in Paradise, the Groupitars have to have real groups. That's going to force them to put on real events and do real stuff, and they haven't figured out that if anything, the world online isn't mass, and big, and viral like they thought, especially in SL, because of all the checkgates. If anything, they might come to the same conclusion of Raph Koster blogging about Cory Doctorow (which I don't completely agree with) that the new social technologies only lead us back to the same old parlour games and parlour conversations, the same old little group around the campfire. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to have gone through, when we could have just turned to the people we live with, or next door to, in real life, to achieve the same effect, but then, for all kinds of reasons, they aren't in touch with our souls, and Second Life is.

Happy Bastille Day! Resident Government

Friday Night Discussion Meeting at the Sutherland Dam on the economy.

Notice:

Yesterday Thinkers and Robin Linden met to discuss resident governance/government in Neualtenberg. Read threads here and transcript here: Last month, 8 selected SL residents met with LL staff in SF to discuss governance. And where were you? You thought no one would ever make a resident government, or at least not without you? You'd be wrong! So if you *don't* want resident government, you better get organizing. If you are concerned about what it means to leave it to a handful of elites, then be prepared to recognize that only creating alternatives can mitigate the inevitability: the Lindens wish to organize a coded system of governance, put it into the patch, and walk away -- but not by giving up any power or open-sourcing the client, but more like letting inworld resmonds take over. What is to be done? Let's discuss making a landowners' senate or assembly of community assocations from sims.

Desmond Shang: hi Prok!
You: Hi
You: Come inside
Desmond Shang: wah, this is the *first* time I've ever come to anything :)
You: well Desmond I would highly recommend reading the Thinkers' transcript
You: yes well spend 5 minutes on it at least
You: lol
You: I know you ahve a government already and run it
You: and guess what
Quinstar Gremlin: off
Clubside Granville: ooops, better do that myself
Desmond Shang: meh, I'm nobody :)
You: you will have a clickable ad on the website to say "press here to come to Desmond's humorously autocratic but

delightfully Steampunked Victorian Experience! Expect to be Enchanted!"
Desmond Shang: wah?
You: or you will get an ad space bought by some other group "TP to Tropika, 30 lashes of my whip for free, housing provided!"
You: Desmond
You: those are in the library dude
Desmond Shang: mmm?
You: are you new?
Desmond Shang: yeah, kinda
You: you bought my flamingos
Desmond Shang: *sheepish grin*
You: they are just a sort of protest
Desmond Shang: I did!
You: come in
Desmond Shang: lovely home :)
You: Yesterday at Thinkers Robin presented an idea as if new
You: of having social systems put ads or links on the SL website
You: well this is sort of like the idea they had to have websites outside of LL put up registration keys
You: you could rez newbies into your sim that way
You: and they will probably do that
You: they had a trial of that
You: but this is sort of more elaborate
Clubside Granville: a few people seem to be spamming SL Answers about resident police being recognized as well
You: they want people to make governments on sims so they have less work I guess
Falk Bergman: hehe
Falk Bergman: rez newbies ;)
You: yes well I love how people want resident police without any government first, with 3 branches, checks and balances, and

civilian control over said police
Desmond Shang: resident police?
You: well spawn?
You: I call it rezzing newbies
You: they sort of appear
Desmond Shang: gah! I have to log T_T
Clubside Granville: There are a few Desmond, search Groups... now some want recognition and Live Help type powers it seems
Falk Bergman: i like the term
Desmond Shang: that sounds awful
You: yes they want the power to return prims, even remove content from events list
You: of course it sounds awful
You: but it is popular
Desmond Shang: I really wanted to stay... forgive pls, must go T_T
You: the thing is whether what they are cooking up now is infact a resmod inworld system
You: kk
Sponge Morrison: ao off
You: Hi sponge
You: hi Pepper
Sponge Morrison: Hello Everyone
Pepper Plasma: hello
You: well before you get to the issue of police spanning sims
Pepper Plasma: this is my friend Sponge my main model :)
You: look at what they first actually discuss
You: which is sim owners having the power to do governance
You: which they do anyway
You: but then using new tools
You: to link up with others
You: so you have meta groups of owners spanning sims with rulesets
You: so if this were limited to things like "let's not have ugly spinning signs in the air shall we?"
You: it could work
You: but it could also be "let's ban all the people we hate from the forums, shall we?"
You: of course the Lindens want it to be that way
You: they want to sign off
Clubside Granville: Sorry, haven't finished reading... is any of this implied by the 1.12 covenant feature?
You: in part it is but that's only for private islands
You: most of the governance discussion yesterday was about mainland
You: and mainland doesn't have the covenant tool
You: the only covenant it could have is with Daniel Linden
You: but ultimately they want Group Tools 2.0
You: where you make up a set of rules, people buy into it or rent into it
Falk Bergman: i'm kinda suprised how hard they push the group tools
You: I keep raising the issues list that can't be affected by mainland covenants, like 16 m2 extortion
You: well they see it as a salvation of the mainland
Falk Bergman: they put a lot of stuff off just to get group tools out faster
You: Philip especially sees it that way
Clubside Granville: At least Selador has his typical short "no" response... one oldbie there!
You: well Falk you could also look at it another way
You: they stopped doing all these flexible tails and stuff tekkies and designers like
You: and listened to what other sectors wanted which they ahve asked for, for at least a year
You: if not 3
You: more control of land parcles and groups, and getting rid of the hippie communes in the group tools
You: nothing wrong with that, it's good
You: but they do want that to be the governance, and to confer upon it rather magic powers
Clubside Granville: The group tools sure are nice in the sense of "why weren't they there like this two years ago" nice like

on other systems
You: totally, I'm glad there are no officers to sell out my land now, and tenants can now deed TVS in theory
You: all to the good, if they will un buggy
Clubside Granville: The Merczateers group was destroyed by the very scenario you described... one officer abandoned their HQ
You: I haven't been very enthusiastic about that group frankly.
Clubside Granville: just an example, sorry... one reason I don't group my land
You: but that doesn't mean their group should be destroyed in that method
You: with that flaw
You: of course we're in for some fun with the problem I mentioned too about the dead or absentee or deleted owners/founders

of groups when the new tools kick in
You: only the owner/founder can confer powers
You: I'm waiting to check that out more
You: did you follow that Clubside?
Clubside Granville: yes... as one person noted to me when I reported a 16m2 plot was owned by a seemingly dead av because
Clubside Granville: they were no longer in their listed groups
You: that was a decidedly wierd thing going on with Schwanson and there is more than meets the eye in that story
You: he is back in all those groups
You: but there are many long-gone owners
Clubside Granville: I saw... though I was more suprised to see a whole sim connected to the mainland with his name... sorry,

don't mean to derail
You: Falk, what do you think about a landowners' senate? Because it strikes me that is what governance in fact will be, if

based on sim owners.
Sponge Morrison: was this land in "Bombyx"
Clubside Granville: seems not too mny people showed up from that transcript
You: well some people get to have whole sims connected to the mainland, what can I tell you there are some
You: perhaps 30 who can fit, some didn't talk
You: not even
Falk Bergman: hmmmm
Falk Bergman: a senate
You: well they don't think of the act of harmonizing rule sets with other groups as a senate
Falk Bergman: I would think it would be hard to actually get everybody together at the same time
You: they think people will fly over the voids and meet and click on tools and go back to their pose balls
Falk Bergman: maybe a landowners forum
You: but in fact, it's a senate
Clubside Granville: doesn't seem like anything in there was too enthusiastically received
You: well it doesn't have to be in real time
You: it can be a forums or a group IM or all kinds of things
You: but those that have already worked this and created bodies with rules like Neualtenberg will be fastest out of the

starting gate
Falk Bergman: a forum would be best - IMs are still lossy
Falk Bergman: I agree with that
You: every time a discussion about governance happens, everyone says, why, they've already done that, they are a model
Sponge Morrison: Hey guys sorry to be disrespectful but me and Pepper have some stuff going on that needs finishing is it ok

if we leave?
You: I can tell you that there is a group governed by the 500 people on the group IM every day, all day
You: can you guess which one?
You: of course
You: come any time
You: lol
Sponge Morrison: heh
You: not disrespectful, this is SL
You: you just fly around and perch
You: we're birds
Sponge Morrison: its been a pleasure listening
Clubside Granville: Which group is this Prok?
You: Group?
You: well it's just a regular discussion club on the afternoons
You: I have 2 events every week, one on the economy, one on politics
You: and all the groups are invited
Falk Bergman: ah
Clubside Granville: no, the one you asked us to guess...lol
You: Mainlanders is one group, another is Doers
Falk Bergman: American economy i take it
You: ohhhh
You: ok guess!
Clubside Granville: I never see that sort of membership volume so I really have no point of reference
You: Ok well I'll tell you
You: It's not Ravenglass though it could be
You: mainly beacuse I try to spare people group spam
You: they hate that
You: it's Dreamland
You: Anshe chung's list
You: and every day all day
You: people decide things like "should we allow security orbs? should we have red ban lines?"
Clubside Granville: oh, thankfully as a full sim renter I'm not in that one... or I guess I should be thankful
You: "Should we all ban our friends' rival from the store areas>?"
Clubside Granville: related to her thems and covenants I guess
You: well you think Neualtenberg governs because they're the socialists
You: Anshe Chung has more public democracy and participation that Nberg
You: huge numbers of people
You: She comes on herself sometimes
You: mainly her overlords run it
Falk Bergman: Prokofy: i think a group with that many members would carry itself even in a lossy enviroment - however groups

with fewer members might have a greater signaloss
You: a lot of thigns are decided by the tenants tho
Clubside Granville: I never followed the foundation of Neualtenberg, and thought I read that it had "failed" but I certainly

could just be hoping I read that
You: there's nothing lossy Falk
You: because without any tools it self-limits
You: it picks its 5 issues:
You: 1) lag
You: 2) prims
You: 3) views
You: 4) griefing/bannings
You: 5) dogs on the beach
You: that's it
You: nothing else
You: limited government
Falk Bergman: 5) --- Profit!
Falk Bergman: Profit ;)
You: ok I made that one up
You: but 5 is fill in the blanks
You: Caledon is a little bit like that
You: but Desmond doesn't spam up chat as much
You: but it's all decided in secret cabals in the map room
You: too bad he isn't here to describe it
You: he has a steward system that rotates
You: they make ban/lag/reset/grief etc decisions
Falk Bergman: hmmm
You: So this is all good
Clubside Granville: Is part of this discussion of a NEED for democracy, mainland or otherwise? I guess I certainly wouldn't

look for that unless pricing structures changed... to next to nothing
You: but what SL also needs is another set of issues of governance: 1) theft of IP 2) injustice of LL 3) business libel; 4)

property destruction; 5) dogs on the beach
You: and it's those 5 that LL doesn't want anyone to govern
You: but they let something else govern those 5 things then:
Clubside Granville: property destruction? how would you define tht in SL terms?
You: a) ugly forums; b) abusive police c) boycotts; d) destruction of property; e) mafias
You: Destruction of property through prim bomb attacks displacing and delinking objects and houses
You: devaluation of property
You: changing of borders or things like the telehub take-out
Falk Bergman: 1) theft - agree 2) injustice - a appelate court system? 3) ya fraud should be punished
You: all that is property destruction
Clubside Granville: the only example I was thinking of was invisiprim coating... do bombs actually ever de-link sets?
You: yes they do in a group
You: it's a hugely annoying problem
You: I fight it several times a week
Clubside Granville: hmmm... physics have to be on the objects affected?
Falk Bergman: 4) kinda hard to define - prim bombs should be fixable with simply returning stuff to their owner
You: it has nothing to do with physics
Tom Bukowski: Hello all!
Clubside Granville: Howdy Tom
You: in a group, when the sim is overloaded with prims from fire prims, they first things to return to inventory are the

owners' objects, then the group set objects, etc
You: so they all start flying back to inventory, delinking, being ruined
Falk Bergman: ah
Tom Bukowski notes this is a *stunning* build
Falk Bergman: that sounds more like a technical problem
You: there doesn't seem to be a routing in the program that says "destroy invader prim first and return that before you

return these paying tenants dammit"
You: Falk, it's one that is political because no one cares about it
Falk Bergman: the build is quite nice ;)
Clubside Granville: oh, I was thinking it from direct object-to-object reaction... I understand
You: If I lose 10 tenants and a build of $100 US they don't care
You: you call it a technical problem, I call it a property destruction problem
You: this sort of thing makes people leave SL
You: the loss of builds on sims is a common enough problem that it has cause people to leave
You: or sell or tier down
You: what you have never heard of this problem?
You: It's now hit me 6 times in the last year
Clubside Granville: Does anyone find the "mafias" of (5) more or less involved in all the griefer hysteria of late?
You: it's devastating to lose an entire sim of builds, tenants, structures, prims
You: all returned, all delinked, all MISSING
You: I had one that was missing for weeks
You: then came back one by one for weeks later
Falk Bergman: not really - I live quietly just visiting a few events and build books the rest of the time
You: Ok well talk to any major land owner or club or business
Falk Bergman: working with ll on a nice info billboard system
You: they all have this awful fate happen to them
You: is this in competition with Infonet?
Clubside Granville: I've seen the mafias less and less perosnally is why I asked
You: No they are as active as eveer
Falk Bergman: so the only fix is totally blocking all prim rezzes?
You: The fix is rolling back mainland sims which they refuse to do.
Tom Bukowski: I was just talking to someone about mafias today, asking if they are less common here than in TSO or not...
You: The fix is some routine that doesn't let non-group-set invaders displace group-set
You: no they are more common
You: they have more reality to work with, with money, porn, call girls, etc
You: because LL has no justice system, mafias take care of the problem of libel and theft and disputes
Clubside Granville: back to the list from the top... with (1) theft, are we breaking it into the parts (copying moddable

builds), texture stealing, etc. or dealing with it as a whole?
You: Falk what sort of billboard? I'm curious because I always have these debates with people who hate billboards and want to

kill them.
You: theft as a whole
Falk Bergman: ah its xytext based
Gonta Maltz: how are they different from any other griefing group?
Falk Bergman: not an ad billboard
You: Organized
Clubside Granville: 16m sq billboards? like the chinese 3-prim dude?
Tom Bukowski: whew, lol
Gonta Maltz: But that's not to say they can't be ar'ed
You: they are families, networks, they have their own detectives, they have back-up firepower, they have methods of coercion
You: not just random flying kids
Falk Bergman: its basically planned to be used in places where html on prim sn't needed
You: OK, you work on AR'ing them.
You: Meanwhile I have to work on preventing destruction of property.
Falk Bergman: or not efficent enought
You: I refuse to accept their protection offers.
Falk Bergman: it costs mem and fps
You: yes yes
You: I wondered if xytext cuold handle that
You: everyone said well web on a prim will make this unnecessary
You: but why?
Falk Bergman: the new version can
You: don't we need whiteboarding?
Falk Bergman: Prof: html on prim incurs a performance hit
You: well quite a bit of time yesterday was spent on discussing justice systems
You: should LL appoint judges? should residents?
Clubside Granville: we need whiteboarding an in-system voice... two things that SL is years behind the curve in terms of

collaboration
You: yes Falk html on a prim scares me
Falk Bergman: it might end up like QT where people need to click to activate a browser
Falk Bergman: so html links are not called automagically when you enter a region
Falk Bergman: anyway
You: oh hell no don't do that
You: yikes
Clubside Granville: I don't know Falk, I always assumed like hovertext a mozilla-on-a-prim page would stay rexxed in its

current view for all
You: then you'll have to turn them off to fly like you do with streaming video some days
Falk Bergman: parcel is full
Falk Bergman: ;)
You: who here ever uses the voting page?
Falk Bergman: otherwise i would rez on
You: is that a viable form of governance?
You: could you make disputes on a web page?
You: some advocated that
Quinstar Gremlin: Feature Voting? I do
You: once you have html on a prim perhaps people will do this
Tom Bukowski: Argh - I gotta shift rl locations, I'll log back on in about 15 mins - if someone can save the chat for me that

would be great. cya in a bit!
Tom Bukowski is offline
You: kk
Gonta Maltz: I'll save log
Gonta Maltz: or well, copy paste I guess
Clubside Granville: not as its designed, and I'm afraid SL is lacking in so many areas that you can't build a consensus on

root/core tech issues with end-user needs in the way
Falk Bergman: ok i will attach one to my head
Falk Bergman: don't laught
Gonta Maltz: there's always going to be infinite room for improvement
ANGELA Evans is online
June Cela is online
Billboard (4 lines, 30 chars): Please tell me what Line 2 should contain?
Falk Bergman: This line says Hello!
You: Hell no we won't go
You: hehe
You: hey I need this!
Falk Bergman: haha
You: : )
Falk Bergman: old version
Clubside Granville: You're right Gonta, but thingslike Havok 4 and a decent scripting core roll up while most voting

proposals roll down
You: can I buy one?
You: lol
You: I have the old one but it didn't work as fast
You: unless my new computer is faster
Falk Bergman: nono
You: I need one that has the pictures AND the text AND the landmark
Falk Bergman: this is based on xytext 1.2
Falk Bergman: it uses only 1 texture
Can't create object because
the parcel is full.
Falk Bergman: anyway the real trick is that I made a spiffy php based webinterface to update several billboards at once
Falk Bergman: so announcements can easily be added
You: cool
Falk Bergman: anyway back to the regular scheduled programm
You: well this is all part of governance
Clubside Granville: There are a bunch of neat XML RPC things out there... the public StarGate system comes to mind
Falk Bergman: i can give you a copy of one of the open ones
You: you can't govern if you can't have laws and rules in texts people can edit
You: this notecard stuff is for the birds
Falk Bergman: ya
You: for example, a simple thing
Falk Bergman: i agree
You: I'd like to have the feed of the police blotter in world
You: by topic
You: by tag
Falk Bergman: notecards suck
You: and with memory
You: and with alternative resident police blottering
Falk Bergman: Profky: i can do that
You: because clearly the Lindens don't post all the incidents
You: well please do
Falk Bergman: I have all sorts of feeds piped to the billboards
You: it's a meaningless device until it has memory
Clubside Granville: storing HTML in-world as well as outside would be the easy and ideal replacement for notecards
You: until I can go in a sim and see does this have a crime rate?
You: think of making a Chicago crime hot spots map
You: with the map API
You: showing the police blotter
You: think if you could get the police blotter from sims before buying
You: but most of all
Falk Bergman: That would be cool
You: see where your dam AR's go
Clubside Granville: If we could get a police blotter with less forum issues and more in-world ones
You: we know they go mainly nowhere
You: well forums issues are just jags they have every 5 weeks
You: there is a wierd cycle to it
You: it's very very uneven
You: one week it's all indecency
You: the next it's all 'parcel encroachment"
You: they waste space on it by having a group of griefers each individually described
You: I had invisiprim theft happen to me
You: and the guy is now gone from the list
You: but no police blotter
You: why?
You: he stole rent from me and tenants
Falk Bergman: hmmm
You: on a dozen boxes using an invisiprim
You: I got a notice "your AR is resolved"
You: no blotter, but the guy gone from the list
Falk Bergman: it might me that the police blotter system isn't really integrated
You: well one of them in duo, the other is at large
Clubside Granville: so based on Gwyneth Llewelyn part of the transcript (and its long making it hard to sift) much of the

discussion was making super-group powers that mimiced government rather than a global mainland government?
You: Falk it isn't a FULL list
You: which is why we need to follow up on that guy's forum concept of alternative blotters
Falk Bergman: so you can ban somebody without entering stuff in the blotter
You: recording the AR's people file
You: now watch what will happen with that
You: Lindens will declare it "disclosure"
You: but we should try it
Falk Bergman: erm
You: for that we need a feed
Falk Bergman: simply do it anonymously - I mean do it in a way that cannot be tied to a SL av
Clubside Granville: until they cave on releasing names... why would they even pursure gov't when they won't do that?
You: Club they won't allow naming names on forums
You: in world they are divided in their policing of that
You: sometimes they do
Clubside Granville: I mean on Police Blotter
You: oh that they are held hostage by one view
You: they say they have to have privacy
You: of course, it gives no privacy
Clubside Granville: So how can they have a proper government?
You: everyone knows that if one forums event happens, and one person isn't posting, who it is
You: well they can't
You: but who says they want a proper government?
Clubside Granville: lol
You: read the Thinkers meeting
Falk Bergman: who says they can really enforce one
You: Robin said to me very clearly: Prokofy, you ideas that we can have a government can't be implemented because this is a

company"
You: they drop all that world stuff when they have to
Falk Bergman: ya
Clubside Granville: I'm trying... Gwyneth Llewelyn started it down one track then it, as always, whent everywhere, making it

hard to follow
You: well it always does
Falk Bergman: but what do you supposed they do? they are a company after all - its the same crap the Internet is in
You: because they just have everyone speak out and don't use the soapbox they invented
You: they don't do Roberts' Rules
Falk Bergman: do you remember ICANN Members at large?
You: wel Falk
Sonofa Fritch: boo hoo
Sonofa Fritch: poor me
You: We are partners to this company.
You: We provide some of the income.
Falk Bergman: ya very nice sonofa fitch
You: We are not chopped liver here.
Gonta Maltz: we're customers, there's a difference
You: Sonofa I have 0 tolerance of event griefing
Avatar ejected.
Falk Bergman: we are customers and in a way resource and in another way even employees
You: well you are Falk
Clubside Granville: that's why I commented earlier than any pursual of government would need to be coupled with drastic price

reductions unless it's voluntary and thus worthless
You: I'm a serf and quit-renter
Falk Bergman: its all tangled up
You: you are an employee, yes
You: well why drastic?
Falk Bergman: well my pay is crappy ;)
You: Kenny Linden explains it all: there is ALWAYS another guy to buy the island.
You: ALWAYS
You: I'll bet your pay is better than mine, Falk.
You: Well we are something like serfs or employees
You: so we should have more say really
You: I would think of it more like partners
Falk Bergman: well I make enough to pay my ISP bill (wich i could not pay otherwise)
Crystal Lameth is online
You: some of these big entities like Anshe or Azure should have that status
Falk Bergman: so I'm glad for that
Falk Bergman: but the billboard thing really is more a subproject for the community team
Falk Bergman: no real funding
You: well I paid my ISP bill and went out to a fancy restaurant for a friend's birthday with my SL winnings...erm I mean

earnings.
Falk Bergman: I make my money mostly with non-linden stuff
You: It's kind like a lottery or a casino.
Falk Bergman: ya
Falk Bergman: here
Falk Bergman: thats the latest book i converted
You: well Falk if you are getting a contract from LL, and will be involved in world-making
Falk Bergman: thats what i get payed for mostly
You: why can't you have a say in the police blotter?
You: or features?
You: or anything?
You: why?
You: why can't any of us?'
You: even a 512 owner
You: even companies have things like sub-committees for disputes
Gonta Maltz: esablished companies
You: Falk what do you think of Sl Views?
Clubside Granville: So much would be easier to make head or tails from if their "vision" didn't shift from what I saw at

sign-up and what I see in the upgrade/bug-fic path
You: They didn't pick you.
You: But they might!
You: what is the upgrade/bug-fic path?
Falk Bergman: sl views?
You: the 8 people going to SF for a day of talks?
Clubside Granville: when we see the list of updates and bug-fixes they are all over the map
Falk Bergman: ahhh
Clubside Granville: no obvious path of where they are going feature-wise
Falk Bergman: I didn't follow that
Falk Bergman: been busy
You: well is that because they have distributive decision making and the BLOTDD approach?
You: they don't have a top-down master plan?
You: something gets done, they throw it up
Falk Bergman: ya
Falk Bergman: thats how it happens ;)
You: hmm
Clubside Granville: I guess it's hard to fathom any company getting VC money with no top-down plan these days
You: well that's because they have people to fund it like that
Falk Bergman: as a developer i know thats how it usually work ;)
You: if they didn't have people to fund it like that, they couldn't go on doing that : )
You: I know if I do it that way, I don't get funding : )
Falk Bergman: the problem with predetermined top down plans are that they don't allow for much flexibility and you need to

actually know what your goals are
You: well who says they have to lurch to extremes?
You: they can have participatory management
Falk Bergman: by goals i don't mean "make profit"
You: most modern places have lots of feedback and input
You: teams working with independence but with a set of goals from management
You: it is not a company from the 1930s
Falk Bergman: Prokofy: i think they have - its just not formalized
Clubside Granville: from the transcript were you saying that Azure Islands has certain powers/features that Anshe doesn't?
You: The question to ask about their love-pat system is whether it works, if it works, it justifies itself.
You: how do you mean?
Falk Bergman: its trickeling down into LL
You: they have the same powers on islands
You: they decide more or less rights for tenants, so terms may differ
Clubside Granville: [16:26] Prokofy Neva: some like Azure Islands get to have this and advertise they have this; others like

Anshe Chung don't have it and don't get answers about getting to have it
You: but of course Azure has had some favouritism
You: yes well Azure gets the void sims 4 pack first
You: they just get it
You: then Anshe gets wind of it and demands it
You: doesn't get it
You: then they make it a "feature"
You: Azure has Ben Linden work for $50/hour for 20 hours to build 4 shopping sims.
You: Well, Anshe didn't think to hire Ben I guess LOL.
Clubside Granville: Thanks, that's what I wanted to know related to how they pic "favorites"
You: Clubside, if I knew how they picked favourites, I might BE a favourite.
You: lol
Clubside Granville: lol
You: But I don't wish to be.
You: I think we should have equal opportunities
You: Did you notice that group tools is in 1.12
You: and the current patch is 1.11 something
Falk Bergman: no
You: and the next patch isn't 1.12
You: but 1.11.6
Falk Bergman: 11 got pushed back
You: so we could have 1.11.7
Clubside Granville: Yes, and I hope that by putting up options/designs/user-interfce screenshots that they can see many good

suggestions
You: or endlessly get to 1.12 by Xenon's paradox
Clubside Granville: rather than blindly guessing from the voring system or forum rants
You: well a patch went in yesterday
You: it's all grey squares still
You: the voting system is funny, they pay a lot of attention to it sometimes
Falk Bergman: prokofy, i think they run 2 preview grids to be able to get those features in here faster
You: then they ignore other things
You: well it's good they are running them
You: all good
Falk Bergman: the group tools are important so they want to extra test them
You: I'm just laughing at how they may not get to it tho
You: hell yeah
You: I'm very scared about them actually
Clubside Granville: yes, Falk, I was told because of how they merge code 1.11 and 1.12 had to sit on different grids
You: I've seen some aspects of the buggyness
You: all it takes is one glitch where one person I've made officer thinking he can't sell land
You: then it's a disaster
You: I do not want to wake up to that
You: in fact I dread making this transition that I lobbied for, for a year
Falk Bergman: well then do something about it - go out there to the .12 preview and help out with testing
You: it's a huge management nightmare
You: I am doing that Falk.
You: I AM testing it.
Falk Bergman: ;)
You: I AM filing bugs
You: but that's not giong to cut it
You: I don't have power over bugs or programming
Clubside Granville: That's one of the reasons I was curious about the default powers granted to the three exitsting roles

(Founder/Officer/Member) when groups get "upgraded"
Falk Bergman: lets hope it will be enough
You: no matter how perfect it is, it's a huge management transition disaster
You: it will cost weeks
You: I was expecting something simpler frankly.
You: It is very very complex, all the multiple menus, toggles, rights
You: they had to do that to satisfy everybody and that's good
You: let's hope it works
You: wb Tom
Tom Bukowski apologizes for his absence...
Tom Bukowski: ty
Falk Bergman: well is there an alternative? do you think it will be possible to do huge fundamental changes in the way one

part of SL works with smal incremental changes?
Clubside Granville: It's actually only about 60% of the group features I have for console games, Prok... mostly the interface

needs a redesign
You: yes interface is sucky
You: interface is not their strong suit
You: but that's ok
You: they can fix that later
You: what worries me
You: is that before, anyone could click, join my gruop
You: put out prims, rent, build, do their thing
You: now, I have a problem
You: do I make them tenant with full deeding tv rights?
You: do I confer to them prim removal rights?
You: what if they are assholes who remove OTHER people's prims?
You: etc
Falk Bergman: ya
You: each person now needs a custom job
Clubside Granville: I haven't checked some things... like I would think you set "join for free" assigns them to this role,

even "join for L$ to get a different role"
You: and that's good for all these utopian furry things like Lusk or the socialists
Falk Bergman: scripting logic might help here
You: they love endlessly figuring out configurations for the 40 people in their group
You: it's so much fun playing government
You: but I have 600 people
You: other big owners have 1000s
Falk Bergman: somebody with a CC info on file might get more rights than a total freebie
You: I don't care about the CC on file
You: Lindens are on file with me
You: that's good enough
You: Lindens don't stink
You: lol
You: but the problem is, will they push all the prims? some?
You: will they make a ban list that can ban me?
You: see I tried to make it so I had owner/tenants
You: tenants were given powers to ban
You: that's vital
You: so they don't drive me nuts
Clubside Granville: Scripting may be the answer as in they click your rental sign in adds them to the group at a certain role
You: all night long I run around fixing lists
Falk Bergman: have you ever met harry linden? he is a pig!
You: but what if they ban their next door neighbours' from their own land because they hate them?
Falk Bergman: :D
You: yes
You: he's a hedgehog
You: not a pig
Falk Bergman: ah
You: big diference!
Falk Bergman: my bad ;)
Clubside Granville: lol
You: ezhik
You: in Russia, a beloved animal
You: anyway I started rethinking my grandiose concept
You: of making all tenants officers
Falk Bergman: in german they are called spiked pig
You: first I thought, I'll make new employees officers
You: then I wanted to push the ools
You: see the problem with people in games
You: they burn through content
You: you give them new stuff, they just want to push them and break them
You: I want to push those new tools to see can I give everyone all the rights but sales
You: and it's not parcel-based
Clubside Granville: That's what us being live beta-testers paying for the privilege is all about lol
You: perhaps I will come aruond to agreeing wit Tiger Crossing if in fact that's what she wanted
You: well I'm thinking surely tv deeding can't hurt
You: but
You: what if they UNDEED group deeding money-taking objects and steal them?
Clubside Granville: I still want parcel-media only gone...
Falk Bergman: I want per object media!
Clubside Granville: need universal media player that can tune into local playlist, parcel playlist, and global playlist
Keely Lawson is online
You: I am so tired of media.
You: I want them to watch media in RL.
You: LOL.
Clubside Granville: I'm listening to the Predator commentary track as it is
You: yes somebody else wanted all parcels to have all lists
You: You know, they are also showing a great predilection for muting and whiting out people.
Clubside Granville: just the ability to stay "immersive", an avatar player that could maintain the media stream without using

an external player
You: I find that really an awful concept.
You: but you have that now Club
You: you just play an SL radio or URl changer
Clubside Granville: yes, on an external player
Clubside Granville: not if I want to explore and keep the in-game player
Falk Bergman: with per object streams easy Voice to voice communication could be realized
Clubside Granville: again, that's just immersion
Clubside Granville: voice can be done real easy Falk, they have to get past the anonynimity hurdle that Philip mentioned
Falk Bergman: ya
Clubside Granville: as long as they are hung up on that we lose out
Falk Bergman: tho communication on the internet is really not anonymous
Clubside Granville: I come from the Xbox Live world, we could be having this same discussion there in a lobby by voice right

now
Falk Bergman: I'm not sure if discussions are better handled by voice
Falk Bergman: its faster true
Falk Bergman: but anyway its 2am here
Falk Bergman: I need to sleep
You: ok
You: thanks for coming Falk
You: is that board on sale?
Tom Bukowski: cu later falk
You: I can't rez the one I have the parcel's full
Falk Bergman: prok: can you call me up if you still want a billboard?
You: yes I do
Falk Bergman: they take up quite a few prims
Clubside Granville: Well, Prok has mentioned huge groups, I was a co-founder of a 1200 person clan and the leaders would meet

in a lobby to deiscuss issues and it was much easier I cn tell you
You: I need to type HELL NO I WON"T GO in the sky regularly
You: : )
Falk Bergman: 5 lines are 65 chars take 36 prims
You: what made it easier Club?
You: ok
You: see, limits on dictators
Clubside Granville: just like talking to friends in real life
Falk Bergman: i cvan make any combination
You: they are 36-prim dictators
Falk Bergman: ;)
You: they can say 5 lines
Falk Bergman: ya
Falk Bergman: i could add scroll arrows
Quinstar Gremlin: have to go elsewhere. thanks for holding the discussion group, Prof
Clubside Granville: It's easier because you don't backspace over yourself, you can hear tone and inflection
You: well I need stuff about rentals more than anything
Falk Bergman: or add more lines its modular
You: kk
You: I will IM you soon then
Falk Bergman: ;)
Michael Hatfield is online
You: oh
You: do you mind if this transcript is published on my blog?
Falk Bergman: just tell me your specs the LL build boards are kinda specilized for web-control
Falk Bergman: not at all
You: becdause Desmond and others asked for it
You: anyone else here?
You: mind?
Clubside Granville: well, we're wa off th government track... anything in particular you could point to from that transcript

that's worth exploring?
Tom Bukowski: I didn't say much so fine with me lol
Tom Bukowski: sorry about that
Falk Bergman: bye
You: club what made the 1,200 guild different?
Clubside Granville: It was so large and since there was a cap of 100 users per "clan"
Clubside Granville: we had to have leaders spread out with the equivilent of "alts" or else trust each other and talk out

issues
Clubside Granville: plan matches, update websites
You: well was there a limited set of issues tho?
You: in a game it can be limited
You: like quests and powers and such
You: here it is more complex
Clubside Granville: we had to deal with griefers, cheaters, people not showing up to matches, it was surely less but there

was an easy way to work it out
You: wel texture theft?
You: business libel?
Clubside Granville: check things while going, and for conversation to flow
You: Lindens' injustice?
Bub Linden is offline
Clubside Granville: same with something like Halo 2... a patch chaged the way weapons were balanced...discuss

Resist Immersion Subversion!

Their world, their imagination...

I had just completed a blog preparation this afternoon after a delightful little side trip in Second Life, and was trying to think of a title when I clicked on Hamlet's blog, then went to see what the cunning Ms. Wu had to say in Wu-Had.

I had visited Chip Poutin's blog the other day and pondered how to frame a critique of two of his somewhat fawning pieces there. I'll work on that, but meanwhile, let me say what's wrong with a lot of all this stuff: it's like book-jacket blurbs, all these blogs feting each other.

Wu-had World...

When he was newer, and possibly with less of a social circle, Chip's criticism seemed more impartial. Now it has the feel  -- like Hamlet's blogs do -- of being the society pages. "I'll praise your build just because you've got a new one out and need coverage." Chip always has something thoughtful to say...but it's just not as critical as it was.

And criticism, especially informed criticism, is just what is sorely needed in SL.

Hamlet stacked a blog on Wu into his blog-o-matic that spits out pieces while he's on vacation, giving new meaning to a-synchronicity, I guess (simulated real-time feting!) -- and away they went. By mornig, Mark Wallace will be touting it and somebody at Terra Nova will egg it up.

Hurry home...

I spent a lot of time going up and down Wu's build back when it first appeared on the map and I had this really gut pronunciation to make: this is all wrong as a newbie orientation station, though it's ok as a build.

I guess it's almost a Biblical precept that you should never introduce "usability" into any architectural discussion around SL, and of course, another precept that all builds made by Lindens and friends have to be Good Builds and if you don't like, you must "need help" and "not have a life" and probably have ugly RL pictures, too.

But...newbies rezzing into the world -- even if they are sophisticated, uber-cool German newbies aware and hip and into architecture -- need to have some flat land and some wingspan room. They need to have a plain surroundings at first to spread-eagle into appearance mode and figure out how to straighten up and fly right.

Rebellious splash of colour by para-jumper points the way out of Wu...

At the big Ulricha castle (which can't help but bring very unwanted associations with the odious Ulricha Zugzwang and Neualtenberg), you fall down the stairs. Boom. On your ass. And struggle to climb them again. While I agree it makes for a more interesting build to have castle ruins and steep stairs and winding passages, I think it's not kind to newbs. I also have a strange feeling looking at the textures -- backing up, they don't quite hang right for me with a kind of stoney coldness, and I feel that more prims and less textured-ness, given all that gadzillion meters that were turned over for this effort by the Lindens, would be in order to warm it up.

Whoopsies...fall down stairs trying to zoom around the eye chart.

So I'm not surprised in reading Wu''s manifesto on his Wu-had, that is has all the elements and substance of Creator-Fascism.

Here are his two main precepts:

1. immersion requires seamlessness and attention to detail. architecture in secondlife, like the surface of the av, should be scrutinized down to the very last pixel. the best fashion designers wrap their avs with textures with acute attention to details. some of the details may go unnoticed to our concious eye, but the subconcious eye is much more discerning. any discrepency will break immersion. so it is true for architecture.

2. it's not sufficient for one enclosed space to be finely constructed. it requires that the next space be so as well. and the space after that. immersion works better when the surface of one space frames the next. it reinforces the notion of world.

"Should"?

"Acute"?

"Not sufficient?"

Oh?

And here's what's wrong -- even fascistic about Wu's Builder's Manifesto concept, and why it's no accident, comrade, that the Goreans fulfill his precepts handily (and proof yet again why we need a culture war and a clash of civilizations in SL, the only place you could justifiably have it because you can't really kill or torture or starve anybody).

These precepts in Wu's latest Wu-had require absolute control. They require either a hugely egotistical tekkie architecterati type with absolutely immense ego and staying power and coercive ability to get a job done or they require a group with slavish conformity, usually around a very strong leader. Texture, texture, texture. Built by the numbers. Never a flutter. Every line in place. Prim edges blindingly cut into a million facets that hurt the eye.

The desire to reach around and control the next sim, the next, the next, is seemingly unquenchable in some people.

I recognize the inner need when you see a sim is "not right" because one asswipe has a red texture on his building that is "all wrong" next to my build or 3 other builds. But the inability to appreciate the organic give and take, the sheer possibilities and openness and experimentation that comes *by necessity* with tolerance of amateurish and even kitsch, is at the heart of what's wrong with art in Second Life. It's why this world of the old SL architects is so stale, static, stolid, and then frankly mediocre in its own right. It's why some hope is present with newer architects who shrug off those vocabularies of heavy Goth and heavy control.

Blinding brilliance of architectural work in Tusk in Jubata.

Often, what passes for immersiveness and the requisite attention to detail is just slavish period -- copying Myst or some Gorean novel art or something out of the Lord of the Rings or similar medieval book, movie, or game. Sure, I can be terribly immersed in Tusk, which is one of my favourite builds, that has a wonderful conversation with Xenon Linden's build in Jubata there with the great wall and the strange legendary Minotaur thing on the top of the great wall. But...while I'm wandering around Tusk, I do have a sense in the back of my mind that I'm in somebody's graphic novel  off Lord of the Rings or other medieval/Celtic/fantasy/indigenous game world graphics kind of style. It's great, it's grand, but I can't wait to get home to Derwent and feed the peacocks and turkeys ambling around the gazebo.

Architectural conversation with Xenon Linden on the Great Wall in Jubata...

(I'm quite prepared to concede that for someone who wanted the Tusk castle as their roleplay in BDSM, it would have the rich tapestry of immersion that my peacocks would have for me in Gilded Discussion Club in Derwent...)

Few places more immersive than Tusk in Jubata...

Of course, Wu features his own friends and circle as the perfect immersive builds ("Immersion is my friends and their builds I like.". Other people, of course, *should* be free to find immersiveness where they find it -- why they could find immersiveness in a prefab in Ravenglass Rentals, of all places. I marvel at the "picks" people make sometimes snapping screens in my rentals, with all their heartfelt kitsch, their first kiss, their first collaring, or wedding, or business, or a memorable evening with friends, and the tagline below in the picks pic with the Ravenglass name -- and the building is merely what they made, either they built something even amateur and clumsy, or put out something that is in fact beautiful and has just the attention to detail the fussy Wu wishes to have -- but only on 1536 m2.

Perfectly Immersed...but in a cold bath of mathematical abstraction in Traxx's build in RFrye...

So...number one, in my theses nailed on the wall of Jauani's Grotesque Goth castle, I absolutely REFUSE to allow Jauani Wu to dictate that immersiveness=aesthetic architecture. Or that immersiveness=his aestheticism. Absolutely REJECT this concept.

Indeed, the pull of Second Life, whatever the repulsion for Wu, is that you can always be surrounded by a mini-immersion around any corner. You can be in the midst of utter predictability, lag, grief-build, ugly and find the greatest of gems. These experiences are really overwhelming. They couldn't be without the backdrop of the normal.

The entire Second Life when you log on is the immersion, and we must embrace that immersion as everybody's immersion, like it or not. It's a mosaic or a Chinese menu or a hodge-podge or a mess, but if you want to have the freedom of private property, ir you want to have a world, you have to have the freedom of one man's kitsch being another person's immersion and attention to detail in architectural niceties.

Start with Smile...at Frucee in Cincta...

There I was, pushing prims in a standard apartment, stacked up, no privacy, for newbs, but the kind of initial experience people want -- a place to put out stuff, learn how to work prims, have a little home, invite over friends, feel like you're Marlo Thomas in New York City or in an episode of Seinfeld.

A person has moved out, I wonder why, and they have left something behind. It is a swinging tail on a flexi prim...no it is some kind of flag...no, a kind of Japanese sash or something, affixed to a wind chime, but not a typical one of the Chinese variety that we are used to, more elaborate, with some kind of little ball inside. I zoom in, and it is my world suddenly, exquisitite, immersive, drawing me, regardless of my apartment surroundings of SL or RL.

Prims left behind...

It being Second Life, I click on the object, and get the creator's name...I pull up his profile and read about him and head for his "Picks". There, I get an ad for a store with a strange name and I tp there, the object menu still open, like a rubber band stretching out.

I arrive in a place and the first thing before even the textures rez, I hear the sound of the chimes. Then the sea crashing on the shore. It is an exquisite sort of SL moment. I'm on just an ordinary sim, Shaka, in the old core, a sim that, were I to zoom out at that moment (I do much later), would be just a Linden road, somebody's ugly spinning sign, one of Shack Dougall's rock islands that some people like, some don't, somebody's red ban lines offending the whole neighbourhood, somebody's stupid purple textures.

p2p

But none of that matters, because I'm in a Japanese design store -- the Japanese are making SL liveable!

It's a little sort of plaza with stores and a cafe, all fitting on no more than 8192 m2, less, straddling the parcel sandwiched between Linden road and other builds. I wander around marveling. A cat seemingly pulling itself up to look at me with curiosity. New engineer's shoes I buy promptly, absolutely essential for my look, perfect! I keep hearing the chimes...but I can't see them. I wander, wander, finally finding them. Zooming in and out, I see beautiful texture, craftsmenship, colour, design, and some things that are Japanese and merely incomprehensible.

My new shoes!

If it were up to Wu, these people would try to take over the next 16 sims, (he'd edit out some of the stuff like the cat or the bublegum cards) or they'd move to a private island and dominate it utterly. But their entire charm comes precisely in the way they blend but don't blend into the rest of the world, and the prize of finding yet one more good thing in SL that is always around the corner.

Kitty.

...Last night at another apartment building, I suddenly pull up, come to the top of the hill, and it's pretty! It went from being some ugly texture barn or stupid pose ball store to being someone's house. Nice terraforming instead of the usual pancaking. Great!

But am I to be only happy with these pockets? Am I to look for something more cohesive than pockets?

Kru's chill spot...

Flying above Grace these days, I always become totally knotted up with the IMMERSION AVERSION problem presented there. There are at least 6 competing styles, at least 4 or so of them my tenants and an architect I supported. There's St. Paul's Cathedral and something called the Embassy of the Aristidians, a lesbian RL outfit, and then there's a normal prefab of the kind you see everywhere but crested with a surreal giant flower, then Barnes' lodge now everyone in newbie theaters near you, where somebody put out deck chairs with the tie-dye texture..then a glass-and-steel modern build and then...ok, brace yourself! a spaceport and an airport. We wouldn't have planned that we should have BOTH a space port AND an airport in Grace, with all the accompanying aesthetic issues, but...there it is. And then -- like 12 stupid 16m2 ad signs.

How to cope? How to get the other 2 parcels rented in this madness? How to deal? I fly and fly around. I replace one house on one lot. I fuss. And then I shrug. Becaue no one is complaining. My immersion aversion is just that -- everybody else is immersed in their pockets, it seems like pockets merely because it's...other people! But...Everyone's getting along, by not even dealing with each other or being on different time zones or just being indoors with their loved ones or gasp, even coming out on the commons I made for them and talking to each other at least about things like how to get rid of the damn 16m signs! Why rock the boat? It's ok. It's Second Life. I wouldn't want to change a thing! God, I love you! To come after these people now who are happy in their eclectic hood would be a form of violence. Leave it alone.

Fortunately, someone else has rebutted Wu on different grounds.  Kris says that merely looking at the 3-D world that might be perfected with craftsmanship in the way Wu (or mathematical-perfection builders like Traxx or Lordfly wish it to be) is not going to be enough. He cites the realities of building the simulation of flight, for example, that puts realistic graphics last.

Immersion won't come from the pretty pictures, he says. "It will come from a computer screen the size of a wall, from easy voice interaction with other residents and from an interface that provides natural interaction with the world."

Oh, I don't require any of this; Richard Bartle required even less than me when he started out and developed his MUDs. Immersion is all in the mind's eye, and that subtle organ cannot be controlled or coerced.

Even when you fume about ugly builds, you are immersed. You are immersed! You don't need aesthetics to be immersed! You are engaged. You decide what feels wrong. You wish it to be otherwise. You are not detached.

The only possible criticism of the perfect world of Caledon is...it is TOO perfect...

What sims are immersive? Sure, you need more than one. So Caledon which has 5 now, is just that more immersive than somebody's one-sim wonderland. You wander around totally bewitched in Caledon, with the top hats, the horse-rides, the Victorian airs, the swishing of petticoats, the strange establishment's like Aldo Stern's Falling Anvil bar, the Lochness monster, the curious gadgets and whirling thingies. All good. The air falls like an Impressionist painting. You walk and walk. You are in a world. But...something is stiff, affected, you don't get the comfort level, even in your own house (I find). maybe it's the pressure to RP, to chat, there are always numerous social events of truly delightful proportions like icing cakes or croquet or turkey chases.

Haunting perfection...

But...then I want to get back to some familiar haunts. Like Aztecha in Columbia. I never got the trees put out there on that flat sand with the Aztechan build by Foolish Frost. One tenant told me happily that he loved the place because it reminded him of empty used car lots in Mo-town. Somebody else thinks it looks like Death Valley with the plane crash (Magellan landed there and miraculously survived with his crew, remember?)

I put an ad up and say "experimental builders welcome" and make the rent dirt-cheap, and I get both the familiar Victorian look (it strives to appear everywhere, even outside Caledon) or the skybox out of sight or the strange new look of a house that seems to have drawn its inspiration from the woman who had too many children and didn't know what to do!

Or I go to Botany's Grove, another Frost build, that is cluttered up with a Jai Nomad newbie's prefab who is camping there, and somebody's tent. A donor said mournfully that he had come expecting Yosemite (actually, somebody's building that now in SL!) but found a Texas fishing camp. Well if we can *do* Texas fishing camp, let's! This is Texas by way of County Mayo, of course, since it has Celtic radio and fairies and Middle Earth textures, like Ravenglass Hall across the water.

I really want to fight fiercely for this world, which is the mainland's world of freedom, and freedom of both the geographical sense of place, created from the Lindens' original landscaping, and the freedom of the fantastic overly of styles over that freedom. I find 4 sims -- even 3 -- is usually enough to get that sense, and you can have all the world on a 512 and hold eternity in the palm of your hand if you are with a loved one, of course.

At home in Obscure...

I feel we really do need to fight fiercely, and not only to the Lindens, who usurp the concept of freedom we want and need and replace it with lazy licentiousness as they did with the Impeach Bush Guy. Hell, we aren't allowed under the TOS to spam people with ads, I don't see how we can tolerate spamming of signs across hundreds of 16ms, it's disturbance of the peace, spamming, and destruction of the enjoyment of SL for another.

And we need to wage this fierce fight precisely against Wu and the Wu-hadists who want to impose Professional Architecture on us -- by their own lights.

They cannot be allowed to remake this world. And our chief argument -- and the most persuasive one -- to them is this: they will collapse in on themselves and die as a caste if there is no freedom for new experimentation outside their rigid Academic caste and canon. That means a tolerance of the amateur as well as the professional, a matrix out of which excellence is proven to come in an open society.

Of course, there is quite the drive to establish a registered, certified overclass in SL of content creators. If it were left up to some of them, we'd all have CREATOR or CONSUMER stamped on our foreheads at birth, and those who dared to upload textuer in the CONSUMER class would pay a premium fee. There are always calls on the forums to "certify developers" (bleh) but what's alarming now is that Lindens also are mulling over the idea of certifying instructors...then resulting in certified students who complete instruction in things like building skills in SL...who then grab at market share with their Linden certification as the consumer is taught to fear fraud and shoddiness by anything "unverified" and "uncertified".

I do hope the laws of Nature and the force of the organic and the amateur in fact make short work of all this Creator Fascism. That will happen with just a lot more people coming, some of whom are RL architects with RL licenses and RL clients who pay more than Ben Linden pays Jauani Wu.

Resist Immersion Subversion! Resist the Bolshevik Plot of Jauani Wu!

Style Wars break out in atoll sims like Tuliptree...

"Till We Have Faces"

"How can we meet the gods face to face till we have faces?" -- C.S. Lewis

This is a big subject. I should really do a book on this subject or at the very least, a long magazine article...except that SL *itself* is always that book....

Did anybody notice this squib on Robin Linden's blog, tucked in between the posts with all the furor around the SL Views:

"Physical Avatar -- Ventrella Linden:

"Physical Avatar" is the name of a new technology being developed at Linden Lab which allows the avatar to be more intimately connected to other avatars, things in the world, and realtime user manipulation. Ventrella believes that in general, avatars in virtual worlds are still stuck in their own local coordinate systems (referred to as the "lonely coordinate system"). Physical Avatar uses 3D physics and a special 3D transformation scheme to make avatars pliable, manipulable, and interactive, in many ways."

This fellow is that Ventrella who used to be in There. I never got much out of There, being turned off by the cliquishness which seemed worse than TSO or SL, if that can be imagined, and it seemed expensive. One thing I liked about There, which was meta to the game, so to speak, is that they figured out that the female demographics is really what they had to play to. And they also figured out that people just didn't have the graphics card power to play this game. So they basically said, let's send out free graphics cards to all the females that write in and ask for one. Nifty, eh?

The lonely coordinate system is exactly what has distressed me about Second Life every since I came there the first time in about May of 2003 was it? Then came for the duration in September 2004. It's just impossible to dance with, hug, kiss, shake hands with, another avatar, in any kind of really lockable groove. I don't know if that's what Ventrella means about the lonely coordinate system, but this jig-jag way you have to mesh the different sizes of avatars and get them to do stuff is hugely annoying in SL and makes you just keep to yourself.

We were just friendlier and nicer in TSO because we could shake hands, dance the jitterbug, do back rubs, pat someone's shoulder in sympathy, and so on, not to mention kiss romantically with cheesy Hollywood music surging in the background. Now, maybe the avatars slid on the same kind of jig-jag -- we all know how we start walking in squares to take out the garbage after playing these games too long -- but something about them just *fit*. That's because they were all the same size and proportions, there were no sliders making some bigger or smaller, or some dragons or furries and some norms.

If the avatar could move in the round more organically, in serrated edges, with roundness of motion, with less predictable jig-jags, sure, that's a good thing. Of course, we all know that we can set up gestures with that balky thingy in the UI (I never did learn how to use it, and I am stuck with the same 9 set of gestures Ingrid walked me through and helped me put in back in the day, and have never added on to them). We can buy those ridiculous A/Os, that chat and make avatars constantly assume these pouting poses like they are models on the runway all the time (that's the idea). Of course, the sex pose industry is highly developed and not only can you hump another avatar frontwise and sidewise, you can match up 3 or 4 or more on some of the furniture. You wish there was the motivation to put this much care and precision into the handshake, the holding of hands, the shoulder pat.

The other thing is of course the facial expressions. We all saw how those worked with something special rigged up not yet in the regular software that Eric Linden used in Bells and Spurs. I actually feel that weakens machinima, and makes it look too much like a caricature, the way that this funny parody of a children's shows operates on one of those granier and higher-numbered cable channels where the fingers are dressed up as people and talk.

There is a concept that Rudolf Steiner, the educator (and mystical philosopher) who created the Waldorf Schools had about how children play, and what's good for children. If you've ever had your kid in a Montessori or other type of progressive school with one of these theories, you may have encountered it.

Their idea is that it is better to have dolls with very plain or even no faces, and just the plainest blocks of all. Rather than having the elaborately painted and artificial and too-adult faces of a Barbie, or have the coloured Lincoln logs or Tinker toys, you go for plain, because not only are you attempting to appear wholesome and connected up to the world of simple Platonic ideals, you are trying to leave room for a child's imagination. The theory is that they can imagine the many ranges of emotions that Raggedy Ann can have on her own, with her plain sewn face, or a similar doll with no face even, than they can if the face is already pre-printed with that combination of vapidness and laciviousness that you find in the Barbie or the G.I. Joe.

The same for the blocks -- simple, wooden shapes will be easier to combine and recombine in a million imaginative ways. That's why I often think that sometimes, it was easier for me to create and I was more inventive in TSO, where I had the standard stock of inventory that everybody else had, than in SL, where there are a million prefabs.

An avatar who can move and groove quite a bit more than the already pretty groovin' SL avatars might lead to more immersiveness -- or it might lead to people burning through content faster, and becoming jaded faster -- what can they imagine? What can they add? Burning through content is of course the problem all game gods have to face with their mortal customers, the Lindens being no different, even though they have the strategy of promoting the content of a few demi-gods in order to keep the burn-rate down.

And nobody seems to have noticed much the work of some of the more innovative tekkies like Kitten Lulu, who is actually trying to wire up her facial expressions in RL to SL -- or rather -- mapping it out and figuring someone else will do the heavy lifting because she went on a long vacation LOL.

Of course Yadni has his emoticon thing and she references that -- but that's just it, for those of us who were in TSO with the really easy and intuitive controls for our dances and interactions and emotions (remember how they could cry? real tears??), it's hard to beat. I'd have to say that the most moving times I've ever had in virtual worlds involved my avatar's ability to cry, and another avatar's ability to pat me on the shoulder or give me a hug.

So, you know, I get as excited as the next person about this stuff until...I get like I do with my customers sometimes struggling with their poorly-made videos -- I tell them that if they log off and go turn on their TV, or go to Blockbusters or Loew's, it will be so much easier than trying to watch a movie in laggy and crashy SL -- and it will actually cost them not a whole lot more money LOL.

Aside from the puppetry and complexity that will be involved in queuing up or toggling or mouse-clicking various menus or HUDS or panels with emotions and movements and interactivity, there's the other way to go, which is I guess a kind of macro.

Remember when they did Bells & Spurs, in fact that's how it was done. People didn't act with their avatars as puppets, trying to move them around on stage and gesture (as the heroic SimArts people did in TSO when they once staged "Waiting for Godot" with sims (!)) -- instead, they just created animations, like Disney would do for a movie, making a kind of harness that you'd click on, and then it was just a question of keeping online, watching your avatar go through his paces, and making sure to unclick him or stage him correctly.

I find this very unsettling. But I'll bet it's the wave of the future.

Under the guise of more freedom of expression, more emotionality, more intuitiveness and right-brain and immediate-brain connectivity we'll get...more rote, autonomaton thinking.

I have to say that after being in SL for so long, going into WoW, I can't tell who are the NPCs and who are the real people. Some of the NPCs even talk and I still haven't sorted them all out yet. My kids laugh at me because of course they've already mastered all the instinctive visual cues you need to tell an NPC apart from a real human-managed avatar. But I'm going to persist in studying this because many of the new people flooding into SL now come up to me in the infohub in Ross and think I"m an NPC. If I'm in build-mode or trying to write a notecard and don't talk or greet them, some of them come up and click on me, thinking I'm going to say the same thing. In fact, because I *did* say the same thing in a row to a few newbies arriving, I think this fellow got the idea that I was an NPC and did a double-take when I said something "out of character" and asked him something about his interests and groups he picked on his profile. ROFL!

Maybe I missed my calling, I could have been a contender, I could have been an NPC!

I imagine I'm not so different than other people in SL, that aside from the creepiness of having to go through Eric Linden's paces on that movie, I like some of the things that are little set, contained animations.

For example, Jim Lumiere has a variety of objects he creates for his store Gestalt This 'N That that you click on and that have you do things like knead bread, dip a pen into ink and write, even wash a floor. Somehow, putting those around in a lodge I have is just deeply satisfying. People like to come and click on them and do the things, even though of course there's no skilling, no payout, no nothing. And it's not for everybody. Some people completely give them a pass. It could be gender, age, or culture related, one would have to check.

I see people come into this lodge and they'll either go in the hot tub, or they'll go for the freebies, or they'll go and do the kneading or scrubbing stuff or the chess -- or none of the above. Because...unless there is another avatar there to do these things with and enjoy them, it's no fun.

Of course, in SL there is a sizeable number of tekkies who absolutely hate and scorn anything like There or the Sims that involves having avatars do anything like having houses with kitchens and faucets where they really wash their hands, bathtrubs where they wash themselves, and beds with sex poses. They want everything to be extreme and unlike real life, and in fact I think that impulse is what drives both the furry and BDSM movements because they can make things fantastically unlike RL and feel something -- feel something they couldn't in RL, feel something they couldn't feel in SL if it is too much like RL.

What does it mean to feel something in a game? Is this a good thing? It's an article of faith among the tekkies that Everything Bad is Good for You.

Several times on the forums, newbies, who have either been ignored or ridiculed, have asked this question. Is is a dangerous thing to feel something for a stranger induced by the "Garden of Paradise" surroundings and the "Adam and Eve" animations? If they are on SL too much, do they experience headaches, confusion, withdrawal, like a drug, or like some other kind of terribly distracting experience?

St. Augustine was one of the early thinkers to grapple with this issue.

I see many really facile and stupid summaries of The Confessions on Yahoo or in the Cliff Notes type of pages that basically castigate St. Augustine with that horrid moral prudishness that only the licentious are truly good at -- imagine, Calvinist moralizing against the moralizer lol.  They read, "To Carthage then I came where I was surrounded about by an unholy cauldron of lusts," and stop all thought.

What's important about August is that he tried to parse and think about the internal machinery of the human being, the mind and the emotions, in ways not unlike what game gods do today.

Back in the 4th century, in Book III when he analyzes the spectacula, or theater of his day, Augustine of Hippo asks whether it is a good thing that a fiction can move you to emotions that in fact are not real:

"Stage plays also captivated me, with their sights full of the images of my own miseries: fuel for my own fire. Now, why does a man like to be made sad by viewing doleful and tragic scenes, which he himself could not by any means endure? Yet, as a spectator, he wishes to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very sense of grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched madness? For a man is more affected by these actions the more he is spuriously involved in these affections. Now, if he should suffer them in his own person, it is the custom to call this "misery." But when he suffers with another, then it is called "compassion." But what kind of compassion is it that arises from viewing fictitious and unreal sufferings?"

This is the oldest surviving image of Augustine, from the 6th century AD at the Lateran in Rome

The kind of emotion that is responsible for the grip of the forums and of SL and other virtual worlds is analyzed:

"But at that time, in my wretchedness, I loved to grieve; and I sought for things to grieve about. In another man's misery, even though it was feigned and impersonated on the stage, that performance of the actor pleased me best and attracted me most powerfully which moved me to tears."

He goes further, of course:

" This is the reason for my love of griefs: that they would not probe into me too deeply (for I did not love to suffer in myself such things as I loved to look at), and they were the sort of grief which came from hearing those fictions, which affected only the surface of my emotion. Still, just as if they had been poisoned fingernails, their scratching was followed by inflammation, swelling, putrefaction, and corruption. Such was my life! But was it life, O my God?"

That is, the manipulated emotionality of the theater (the video game) was enjoyed precisely because it didn't go very deep, it was controllable, enjoyable, not overwhelming.

Augustine believed that the subjecting of the soul and the fine inner workings of the emotions to such superficial and false agitation was detrimental, causing even "an inflammation" and "putrefaction".

Nobody in the modern world believes such things, which is why the yahoos at Yahoo can write dismissively of such insights but...what if it does have an effect. What if night after night, killing lots of monsters or watching lots of people cheat on their spouses with beautiful avatars or trying aggressively to beat out business competition or whatever action or emotion you chose in SL *does* have consequences, and consequences whose relentless, if invisible eroding action is destroying something innately good and fine about our souls? Nobody really wants to ask themselves that question, but by not asking it, they are letting some Congressional commitee ask it in a way that is a hundred times more coarse and blunt. The issue of games and distraction is often turned into an issue of addiction; what if it is also about spiritual distress?

"This is the reason for my love of griefs: that they would not probe into me too deeply (for I did not love to suffer in myself such things as I loved to look at), and they were the sort of grief which came from hearing those fictions, which affected only the surface of my emotion. Still, just as if they had been poisoned fingernails, their scratching was followed by inflammation, swelling, putrefaction, and corruption. Such was my life! But was it life, O my God?"

What I observe is that there can be a wonderful inner satisfaction to a completed round of some fake avatar activity. Example: a desk at which you can draw a watercolour, such as can delightfully be found at Deborah Doowangle's studio in Barton. You can take a picture of yourself, and even imagine that it is you who has drawn that painting, although, of course you haven't LOL. You could tell yourself this might inspire you to go draw in RL, this little interaction -- perhaps it might inspire you to your own creativity in SL itself, if nothing else, to make your home more beautiful by buying this artist's content in SL. But...you won't be going to go draw in RL because you suck at drawing in RL, which is why...you are in a virtual world in the first place enjoying somebody *else's* art.

Or perhaps a salsa dance, in a wonderful primmy salsa gown, of course unlike anything you own or do in RL. You might be inspired to go hunt for salsa in RL, but you'll never look as good in your salsa gown as you do in Second Life!

So...what is that inner satisfaction  that SL or any virtual world can deliver *for*? Clearly, studying it is key to understanding how games and addictive behaviour and substances all work.

Cocaine is said to give people the illusion that they have all their work done and that everything is fine. I remember I used to have a friend who was on cocaine and not happy with it who would describe the feeling of being really superior and bright and not having to do anything because that sense that it was all done and you were very smart was all satisfied. That is, in RL, the sense that draws you forward is that sense that you've got a to-do list, something to get done, to get to work, or wash the dishes or put the kids to bed. That draw moves you allow the draw of life -- it has been called "being-partk-dolg-duty" and I imagine the "to-do" list only scratches the surface of such a concept ("the greatest thing is to be able to do").

Now, what if it wasn't a sin, or concupiscence of the wrong sort, but a useful exercise to have an avatar engage in leveling up, or selling a house, or making a piece of avatar clothing and seeing someone else delight in it. What if it was simply modern life? (Cory Linden was trying to float that boat by claiming that gaming had taught him to be a good father to his toddler who behaved something like an NPC...).

"Even in  troubled times, how could you want to work on anything else when what  you are working on is the future of everything?" -- Philip Linden in Ahern.

What if it is the future of everything???

Well, come now, it won't be EVERYTHING, of course, because, like that guy wrote in Wired or was it that other gamers' mag, I'm forgetting the name, that his girlfriend in SL was just never as compelling as his RL girlfriend with her crooked smile *just for him* with the gap in her teeth *just so*.

But how to understand that feeling that something important has happened if you avatar has done something, leveled up, gotten some loot, or sold some actual creation for RL-cashable money -- which is the hook SL has, of course. What if it is no worse -- maybe even better than -- the illusions of RL, that the 90-day impact study you completed for some obscure commission actually has some effect on the world, or the widget you sold, or law you drafted and helped to pass, or even patient you healed. What if the illusoriness of these RL things which fall away as ashes unto ashes when we die is *no better* at imprinting on the soul, *no better* at engineering the soul, so that we turn to the virtual version because it's faster? or deeper? or...something?

But...It's the irregularities of the organic, the chaotic, that the game -- the lonely axis, the code-as-law, the scripted experiences, the clickable pose balls -- simply can never reproduce.

In fact, one of the reasons the Lindens allow the licentiousness they do is because they can't think of any other way to create the sensation of the unexpected.

People are hoping that by having avatar actions, whether enacted or scripted or achieved through more elaborate puppetry, they will heal human beings or at least make them salve the itch of desire.

Already, there's at least two licensed clinical pschologists in SL, one of whom, Craig Kamenev, has specifically developed "avatar therapy" the way you would develop "play therapy" for children, or role-playing for adults.

And...healing is one thing. But what if it is just the normal course of things to come?

Web or World?

I began thinking about this issue more seriously (concluding immediately it shouldn't be "all or nothing" on either score) a few weeks ago and then this last week, watching my son close up his games for the summer and tier down his SL account. <CLICK> and characters on WoW that seemed boring or were on an RP server that proved too fake were deleted. <CLICK> and Runescape, skilled out the max with all kinds of swords and helms, is sold to a younger player still thrilled with grinding. <CLICK> and a mall and game-within-game and tons of fascinating content in SL is deleted, sold, forgotten except for a screenshot. I had all I could do to convince him that he should keep his "brand" and leave out a store on a 512 to keep selling content. When he was able to make $53 U.S. in just a week or two, he decided to keep his little store -- but not log on. Well, for one, he's going fishing and boating and that's a good thing!

But...he was curiously "untethered" to his av -- to use an expression I heard Sherry Turkle apply to discussions of virtual worlds at a talk she gave in SL once. That is, his avatar was just a kind of glorified browser. Oh, to be sure, his name was cool and even his look with his amazing armour and fierce fire particles. But...my son could never understand why anyone would want to get married in Second Life. The avatar is just a mule, a closet, a place to keep your inventory. He's a hand-tool for building, in the shape of a person to give you an idea how it will feel to walk around a house. But...he's not a person.

Why marry a hammer, or a closet?

If anything, I'm the opposite, deepening each avatar, adding to his character, legend, possession, experience, associations, friends, societies, groups. This could be age or gender or culture at work, of course, or simply a blatant fact: that these immersive worlds are least impressive and effective in acting upon the very generation that has been exposed to them the most. They may pull the curtain aside and see the little man behind it way, way faster than we do.

Not six months after I declared 2006 to be the "Year of the Avatar" (and all kinds of famous people then copied me yuk yuk), now the eggheads are declaring the "avatar" metaphor to be "dead".

(BTW, I was the one in another TN thread to pose the question of what it would be like to have games/exploration of worlds without avatars, i.e. no body or human or animal like thing, but rays or light or simply chat or perhaps some other thing...)

The avatar had a brief existence as an expression of the soul in an immersive 3-d streaming world, or game, or legend, or society but...as soon as the world was washed out to make the web, the avatar became about as interesting as somebody's Yahoo account named sexxxyhaht4u2@yahoo.com

Part of the problem is the outing of identity. While they promised the identies were secure and there was a firewall between them, they were sharking us, as I should know. But it's not just me -- look at the uproar in the blogosphere now as someone with a popular political commentary blog is "outed" to be someone more complex, with possibly a conflict of interests...

Just as there was a stampede for anonymity as a source of creativity, there was a stampede in the backwash in the Metaverse ebb and flow as some people then wanted their own literal real-life names to better position their brand and business. A Linden told me that if I were tired of all these description-less avatars calling themselves "Prokofy" in SL (one called "Prokofy Fugu" is even blamed for grid-crashing during the birthday) I should trademark my name (!). Gosh, $139 to prevent the False Dmitrys of the world? Looking over trademark law, I'm given a little pause...it talks about trademarks being refused to things that don't seem what they are...and I have to wonder if virtual land in pixel format on servers I don't own might not fall into that category...

When we make e-mail handles or blogs, we make up names and personas that are kind of like Avatar Lite. They represent some facet of ourselves, exposing some aspect while hiding another. These are artifacts of the soul. They were bound to merge.

Philip Linden seems to say he wants SL to become like the web, and everything he puts into the mix these days, whether promised HTML-on-a-prim or promised web-services (whatever they are, exactly), or even the dull RL shirt he put on instead of his old rocker's T, seem to tell us that the walled garden of SL, as Tony Walsh called it, the world or worlds-within-worlds, are going to have to thin out, become less deep, lose their immersiveness, become more open, and...flat.

On the one hand.

On the other, in fact Philip and the others are rushing with often what seems like unseemly speed (driven by investors? competitors? the adrenalin of conviction?) in fact to making worlds that are even more worldy -- but more like the Little Prince's tiny planet than a connected, contiguous open grid.

These mini-worlds or fiefdoms have little geographic sense unless their wealthier patrons or more savvy businessmen have created continents out of 4 or more of them. How much world do you want? Caledon or Svarga or RFrye Isle are all worlds -- spectacular worlds, worlds within worlds, with legend, colour, sights, sounds, and culture. They're about as worldy as you could want -- as long as you aren't on the ban list, and as long as you can basically afford the price of the rental admission to live there, which is rather steep in SL terms.

More and more people are rushing in the door, and I personally find myself curiously unconcerned about the greater griefing it means (my solution is to bolster the police blotter with things like Prop 1533 to name all names in discipline cases and establish a justice and dispute system with policies and institutions, not think up more coded technical ways to control parcels--but of course that's hard work).

That is, I welcome anything that removes barriers to account formation, especially for foreigners, and simply people who want a third life now that others have made their second life miserable. I see a lot of use of alts by oldbies precisely to get away from bad relationships, stalking, griefing, and bad associations. Everyone likes to get a second chance, especially when Second Life, which was supposed to be that chance, is ruined.

I'm the first one to protest to Daniel Linden, however, because I don't think the Lindens are telling the truth (to themselves, first and foremost) about the increase in griefing and the increase in the overall surface area of griefing. However, the hysteria whipped up about these accounts, and the Limousine Liberals like Cristiano Midnight protesting about them, are mainly interested in freedom for the sex business and freedom from possible harassment or entrapment for improper behaviour with minors -- griefing with its nuisance or destruction faction is not of interest to those who already live on low-traffic core sims or sequestered private islands.

So the ultimate irony is that all those people lecturing us about how we have to stop being worlders and get with the platform, and how "nobody logs in to every page in the Internet" as I was somewhat peremptorily told today by Foolish Frost, are actually the first to think up a hundred ways to close up these "web pages" and in fact make worlds! It truly is the richest irony!

Foolish Frost has a very interesting thread in which he celebrates all these accounts being formed without ID and wishes for the disappearance of ANY registration requirements like on the web but then...proceeds to think up an elaborate system for anyone who secures a hunk of land to make anyone they don't like not only banned from that land, but unable to see it, hear it, or know about it. He calls it "cloaking," and it's his answer for how we can live on servers in peace and harmony. Hiro Pendragon had once suggested something like this with a misting up or disappearance of people on the other side of my land border -- avatars, houses, ugly signs -- poof. I found this rather like air-brushing people out of history.

In fact, it reminded me a great deal of C.S. Lewis' "Great Divorce," where Hell happens to be just a place where you can't see Heaven very well, everything is grey...you are very tiny...and the blades of grass are so real they are as hard as diamonds and hurt your insubstantial feet. You take care of the problem of evil by just...making it small and almost invisible.

I have always maintained that the creation of an Archipelago of Egos in this fashion will not only be a closed society and an atomized society, but like all closed, atomized, destroyed societies with no social fabric, they will be units rife for totalitarian ideas -- on two counts. One, the forces that are able to withstand the centrifugal force of opening up worlds to the web and flattening everything out of the vertial immersive experience are the very societies like BDSM RP or Gor or other elaborate and controlled game play that provides its own internal, social controls to keep out the openness and spontaneity of the rest of the world. Two, anyone with just one Big Idea, or operative universalist theory, will be able to penetrate the rigid but therefore brittle walls of the walled-in cisterns. Precisely because they are walled in, these little mini citi-states and Republics of Me will be as easy to knock over as the Incas once they lost their chief.

Information wants to be free, you say? Free market models always prevail because they prosper? Think again. In SL, many, many people in fact enjoy the lifestyle of having or being a slave, and a slave subject to the most refined forms of pain and suffering. We can have the Suicide Girls and the trussed-up Pony Girls but...we can't have yard sales. Yard sales are evil, and to be controlled, if not eliminated. Freedom...but not freedom for *other people* to sell *outside my commece circle* say the oldbies who want to control the economy like FlipperPA Peregrine (who is busy invoking the threat of lawyers over a new competitor whom he claims copied his TOS language -- I had a guy once copy my info card word-for-word, even including offers and features he didn't even have in his rentals, and I personally contacted him and told him he was a lamer and an idiot and made him rewrite his cards--people copy my stuff all the time LOL.)

And now the old socialist failed experiment of Neualtenberg has finally bared its fangs and made an appalling new guild-type arrangement where some people, called "meisters," will get more land and better houses if they are more creative and can cover their rent with a certain percentage of their sales (the Government or in this case something that is more like the Central Commitee will hinge their rent payment to their sales by garnisheeing their wages -- this used to be called "indentured servitude"!). Those new or less talented will be granted pushcarts to work their trade and study with their meisters until they can create and sell better. It's hair-raising social Darwinism, Marxism, and fascism all rolled into one.

Other than these obvious and funny internal contraditions -- which we're likely to see plenty of now as those celebrating open accounts and "information wants to be free" get busy closing whole swathes of SL down so they can stream these new accounts as they wish into their microbrewed filtered worlds as the worldiest of all of us worlders -- there are a lot of open questions:

1. When will the Lindens stop calling us "residents" and call us "browsers?" What is it we *live* in when we *live* in SL. For a time, the politically-correct Lindenist way of referring to one's relationship to SL was to say you "used SL" (like a tool, or a drug, for that matter). But they didn't call us "users" like Microsoft called us users, they called us "rezis" and not only because we rez into their world. Will we see some new nomenclature to reflect the changing reality as we lose the world beneath our little avatar feet?

2. Is "try before you buy" really going to work? There's a lot of excitement about something like Amazon.com coming in and making it a clickable experience to share books and thoughts with others in little Starbucks or Borders-like cafes. But...are you *really* going to want an avatar that has the same proportions and body fat as your RL self to get a realistic look when you go shopping? If you are...then you'll be clamouring for making yourself be able to be invisible in appearance mode, for when you switch your cool, hot SL body with its skimpy tart's outfits for your plain self with its saddle bags...I'm somehow thinking this is never really going to take off.

3. What's going to happen to those of us who bought parts of servers on the mainland? It's hard to understand the Lindens' vision for the mainland. On the one hand, they are finishing off the unfinished bit. They're likely to reach the end of it by the fall in terms of the number of sims they said they'd sell. Sims on the auction bring them only $1000, and private islands bring them $1250, so they have no incentive to sell sims that then produce many owners on them as they are sold off. Will they offer trades of land to islands? Or simply tell us -- which they are tacitly doing now -- to sell off mainland holdings if we want to secure our investments and switch to islands? The oh-so-savvy FIC types like Adam Zaius long ago made this move, and of course Anshe Chung, non-FIC though she is, is the preeminent mistress of the private island realm outdoing even the Lindens in putting out servers for people to live on happily.

At one point, when Moofp Murray saw all this land in Governor Linden's hand unauctioned and sitting there, he developed the theory of the death of the mainland. Governor Linden then got off his ass in the next few months to do a veritable, if you'll forgive the pun, land-office business, and sold a record number of parcels in March-May. Now what? People live on them, especially new people. What is the commitment to them? Could we get a statement?

4. Is HTML on a prim really going to be all that? I visited a secret Linden installation today (OK, how secret could it be if I was able to see it on the map and fly right into it LOL) with a strange acronym, owned by Cory Linden, that showed a kind of bazaar, with lots and lots of webpages (screenshots on prims) -- including our own Second Life Herald. Behind each web page/stall were little rooms. Perhaps this is how they envision the HTML-on-a-prim working, that people are actually going to warm their little avatar hands around the fire of a screenshot of a webpage that is a prim with HTML in it that you click on to read that page...except one of the key features of SL culture has been absence of much text. The visuals have always taken pride of place. Oh, to be sure, there are IMs and notecards. But they never worked on creating books except the hard way. I'm not sure that people are going to first come into an immersive world with an avatar they create and dress...and then hurry out again to the wider web to read pages, while their avatar dangles AFK -- even if, as Philip says, they will now have the thrill of being able to talk to all the people who are now on that webpage with them. (It's likely that the first pages that will become 2-D/3-D in this fashion will be webpages like 3pointd.com or the Electric Sheep or others whose content often consists of being "about the thing itself" but ultimately, we're likely to have more depth and diversity with that cafe/book experience already hinted at by the appearance of Amazon.com staff in SL.

5. Will LL change their land/income business model? Currently a large chunk of their change comes from auction sales and island sales and then tier. This is essentially server space maintenance fees. These fees are likely going to get lower if they want more people, and that means they may sacrifice one of the key elements of the SL economy -- virtual estate land sales and rentals, which hinge on the concept of the discount tier level. The Linden's old friend Ulrika Zugzwang has long lobbied against this "exploitation of teh ppl" which she claims comes from awarding land dealers bulk discounts for higher levels of tier (half a sim is $97 US after owning one sim, not $125). The rentals business can command as high prices as they do (I say "they" because I don't charge these prices) by counting on the fact that an individual pays $25 US to own 4096 m2 plus 512 m2 in SL on a premium account, whereas at the discount level of $195 US for tier, I'd pay only $12, at $.002960 US per meter. (Some island dealers are starting to charge only $15 US now for the 4096 to compete with Anshe, who continues to charge $25 US).

Philip has always talked about flat tier so I'm quite prepared for him to junk the main engine of the economy in the belief that he can substitute lots of smaller land holders or lots more wealthier big parcel holders who will have other entities like hospitals, universities, government agencies, or big business to pay tier, and not care about how to make it back.

The destruction of a good chunk of the virtual estate sector will only be hailed by the communists on the forums, and even someone like Anshe Chung or Adam Zaius will likely not protest to the point of quitting. Why? Because a year ago, the Philip and other Lindens sent a very strong message: content uber alles. By breaking the backs of all but the hardiest and most persistent land dealers on their auctions with land glut, the Lindens already ensure a flat price of $5/m which changes little, really. So what they're telling us as social engineers is that we need to have *content* on the land to be able to charge more for it -- either a compelling house or theme or RP or services of various types. Exploiting merely the differential between bulk tier rates and end-user tier rates will be junked as "so 19th century". Of course, it will deprive many of the mom-and-pop and club-sim micro-economies of their livlihoods, but when has that ever troubled the Lindens?

The Lindens can afford to monkey with the tier system now, because many of their customers have gone basic or keep only a 512 to get the $500 stipend each week --and many are on the islands renting from wholesalers, or they pay tier as individuals on the mainland. If the Lindens reduce the tier of a 4096 to $12 or $15 for everybody flat across the board, so there is no longer any differential, mainland owners can only be happy -- they'll now pay $10 or $12 less to own the same land. Island dealers who counted on that discrepancy between individual and bulk tier at first will now not care, because their customers who will still go on paying $25 for their increased value ever really comparison shopped and never wanted to own land and pay tier to Governor Linden, only to deal with griefing, lag, and ugly builds. The extra $10 they have to pay now will seem inconsequential for what they get -- it's a kind of subscription fee to a world...the world the Lindens declined to provide.

So it will be a handful of people like me still offering low-cost rentals with freer terms on the mainland who will be royally screwed. Interesting!

6. If the Lindens offer "host-your-own-server," what happens to the Mainland? Many tekkies are dying for SL to go open-source so they can host their own servers and do their own thing with virtual worlds. They're actually more worlders than they care to admit when they rush to have everything opened up to the Web, to be like the Web, and be all "information likes to be free" stuff, but in fact hurry to make their home brews in their basement like Jarod, and shut out people, thoughts, speech, images, builds, scripts, etc. they don't like. The truly ironic thing about all this is that those of us who were for a world on one grid actually conceived of it as more open to all than what we'll see coming out of all these types clamouring for open source. They will make like-minded little enclaves and shut their doors, and you wonder how much they'll even recruit to replenish their own niches.

This is a common phenomenon in all societies in transition: political factions and parties of every stripe, and newspapers of every political affiliation, proliferate like mushrooms after the rain. It was Lenin who said "Before we can unite, we must differentiate." The differences between Tekkie Vision 123498 and Tekkie Vision 1239487 is going to be indistinguishable and based on subjective preferences, chance impressions, snap judgements. It will be many years before alliances are made, and they'll only be made by really strong, totatalitarian personalities.

I'm thinking Lindens may keep Governor Linden's estate to indoctrinate newbies, and with certified instructions and courses coming, with further stratification, feting, indoctrination, conformism, the Mainland will become harder and harder to inhabit as a place of creativity. Already we see this in the way the entire greeter/mentor/helper/instructor industry is controlled. Once you get past Jeska's Januses, you may be doomed to roam the slag heaps of forgotten first land, abandoned casinos and malls seized and forgotten by the Governor, their greeter scripts still chatting into infinity about money balls and camp chairs, and the entire experience might be like that wrong turn in Back to the Future that occurs if the mother doesn't marry the original father, or if someone steps on a butterfly's wing and we never speak English....

7. Are verified accounts going to make a caste system? I published an announcement that I will rent to any type of account -- this is the opposite of some landholders who are going to demand tools to be able to ban automatically anybody with this "unverified" status on presumption of guilt that they are griefers. This will open up an increasing digital divide, the gray avatars forced to log on from public terminals like in Snowcrash....

8. Is business actually going to improve? The theory is that with many more people, and more connectivity to the Internet, business will flourish. I'm all for that. But I do wonder if it will work as planned. For one, there is quite a sizeable content-creation base that will resist the appearance of big business for no other reason than that it constitutes competition -- they will fight hard, until they stop fighting (like Aimee Weber gave up her childish notion of a global strike) and get jobs with those RL companies...until the thrill wears off on either side. Everyone will come in once -- as I keep saying, but SL could be a one-trick pony unless there is more interactivity, experience, friendship, love, socializing, fun to be had by these "mixed reality" events than we've seen up til now -- and that means worlds. That means *somebody* has to make the worlds, and while the Lindens would like nothing more than to outsource and delegate this onerous function, they still do run the servers and they need to create a dispute resolution process run by reputatable and rotating residents with Linden supervision.

Right now, SL is like a Nantucket or a Greenwich Village. A small cohort of people with a certain lifestyle, mainly wealthy or living such a Bohemian life that they need no wealth (or can mooch off others) are able to live La Deuxieme Vie. This life consists of talking about technology, using technology to make other technology, predicting the Next Big Thing, going to conferences and getting drunk or laid or both, hopefully in RL rather than SL, and doing some thinking and having interesting conversations as well, and doing what all great alternative social movements do in the end...selling out to the Man at the end. All these people will end up working at Google or Microsoft and like Philip, they will hope "they can remember these wild days".

These cultural enclaves will either boutiquify and form the nexus of urbanscapes and suburbancapes around them by people inspired by them to at least shop...or they'll collapse.

What will then become the new engine of creativity? 

8. Everything else isn't going to stay in place, so will SL keep up? Right now, I see movies and new avatar capacity and other stuff happening even in my Yahoo browser -- I see more games, more 3-d stuff happening all over, even outside of what 3pointd.com covers. My favourite gas station or supermarket won't clear all the hurdles to come into SL, they'll make some el-cheapo version of a 3-D world using some other model that will give enough of the visual and social experience to keep most people happy -- and it will be free, too, and not require such a high-end computer and graphics card.

9. The RL doesn't stay static, either, so what happens with the next big war with the Arab world/the next big blackout/the next big terrorist attack/the next big recession? Nobody has yet figured out how to make virtual worlds and our avatars in them work without their tether to the real world and it will only take one such big lesson of the Real Life kind to sober up lots of people quick.

Country or Company or Country Club?

Second Life Views is a program that has proved controversial not only because I objected to it. Of course, on the forums, it's mainly only Cocoanut standing up to the small but persistent inner core of the forums who keep defending the status quo ante ("Founding Fathers Syndrome") even to the point of hysteria. But there are enough other voices resounding on forums and blogs and in world that I hope the Lindens reconsider their notion of forming a permanent resident advisory board.

Some on the forums have purported to find some analogy between our making Metaverse Justice Watch last summer, in its original incarnation, and this "permanent resident advisory board". Of course, there's a big difference: we were self-selected, and all we did was petition the Lindens. To be sure, we were stuck petitioning them like boyars appealing to the tsar, or guilds appealing to the king, in a medieval set-up, not like customers, more like supplicants.

Four things resulted from this meeting -- other than the vilification we were subjected to on the forums.

1) First, the one request we had, for the Lindens to develop and relase their employee ethics requirements, was fulfilled. They did this after about 6 weeks. From discussing this topic, many believed that Lindens were not allowed to maintain big businesses and earn money, lead big non-profit projects, or garner reputational enhancement or extend it to partners or friends. The ethics manual of sorts, a rather wan and thin document (though it's good *something* exists) didn't really clarify this issue at all. Later, we were to watch aghast as Lindens in fact maintained their big RL or SL projects -- finally the attention brought to this issue compelled BuhBuhCuh to "out" that he was Ben Linden (more on this another day -- it's funny that after all the thuggish threats made against me by Hiro and others, the outing proved to be a big non-event for this Linden and his pals, and I think most people didn't notice, didn't care, and haven't glommed on to him anyway now that they know his "true identity").

2) The second thing that happened is that we were told that neither land nor wealth were recognized as stake in SL, unlike RL. This reified the content-creators hold over SL, to our dismay, and helped preserve the model of SL as "Content Tsar's Kremlin" -- create or die, be a creator or be a consumer, etc.

3) The third thing that happened is that while the telehubs weren't on the agenda, contrary to popular hysteria, when they *were* put on the agenda later in the summer by some in the same group as the original MJW, the Lindens took the meeting, took it seriously, and agreed to the buyback. I think it's one of the few times when we can point to the Lindens actually heeding something the land baron lobby said, and acting on it (I suppose their willingness to put in telehubs in the northern atoll continent was another concession, except later it seemed Lindens were letting us know that telehubs were planned for the Iris Moth temple anyway, and I suspect that what the Lindens had really been about last year with first the atoll continent, then the map, and then p2p was trying to do something that was originally supposed to have all 3 things at once:  a spectacular new continent with an intriguing legend; no telehubs in it to mar the experience; and the map and p2p to be able to hop all around it with ease and preserve its pristine beauty. But coding being what it was, they had to sequence these developmental phases.

People imagine the land lobby to have all kinds of clout; in fact the Lindens are always breaking their backs. It's been rather sagely pointed out by a smart friend that the land glut continues on the auctions:  the Linden has devalued another 5 percent in the last month, but land price has only increased by 1 percent, and that doesn't even fit their notion of expanding to meet the population. Something's up.

The failure of the land lobby to get their way is just part of life -- interest groups don't always get their way. If it were a company and customers, it wouldn't matter. If it were a guild and the Middle Ages, it would be too bad too if the landowners failed to beat the craftsmen. In a country, however, it does matter.

4) The fourth thing that happened is that seeing this grassroots organizing by a group of its highest-paying customers, bar-none, the Lindens reacted by attempting to subtly co-opt it. First, they sat idly by as the "community" savaged all the people in MJW (to this day, the forums freaks are still ranting about an alleged claim that we all called everyone else "tourists," when this was only one part of what Anshe said, and was meant in the most ordinary way -- that many, many, MANY people drop into Second Life and NEVER COME BACK (something most people don't even want to talk about, until it gets on a Harvard blog, and then finally Hamlet nee Linden blogs about it).  And LL even cooperated in the splitting of MJW -- manually removing me from the group at Anshe's behest -- and enabling MJW to be made into a farcical political theater occasionally taken over for laffs by Jauani or one of the other regs like Nolannash or Enabrat.

Then they made the Community Round Table. This was going to serve as their cleaned-up, controlled version of a residents' lobbying group by taming and neutralizing it, citing the Big, Bad, Unruly Town Hall meetings. They looked blindly at the audience of these meetings that were so griefed, and refused to admit that it was just W-HAT and their hangers-on and plausible-deniers inworld.

They handily booted me fro the CRT mailing list early on using various subterfuges, but then the CRT got overrun, too, and presented them with a problem: how could they meet privately with the people they liked, and get away with it, with all the scrutiny?

Indeed, one of the main reasons that FlipperPA and the Lindens want to get the hide-from-map function going in the game is so that they can meet with each other, and big clients, and whomever they want, without any transparency, or any pubilc accountability. They want secrecy, invisibility, and most of all, a free-hand to do their thing without complainers or exposers getting in the way.

Making this ResGov, patterned after the ResMods, or one could point out, the Quislings or the satraps or the Russian overlords of the 'stans, the Lindens can feel less nervous about this big world they can't even physically see anymore with all these people on it.

They know that while everybody bitches about resident government, they will roll over supinely and take it up the ass sublimely if it is something like this, where the "company" invokes a "focus group" and the need to listen to its "customers" in the usual consumer model.

One of SL's Greatest Economic Minds (yes, Jamie, there's more than one!) said at the Sutherland Dam last night that I need to drop my "mercantile model" because Lindens are going with a "consumer model" for their business and economy.

Except...I didn't think up the mercantile model, our um progressive Lindens did. SL is nothing so much like a company town of the 1930s, and their corporate philosophy stems from the most ancient and creaking idea of one big CEO and loyal family members, some of them literally relatives (the Lindesidents), and the numerous tool and die makers or welders or clerks or typists spread out through the mammoth chain of factories and franchises all over the land. There's nothing at all modern and "consumer oriented' about this -- in fact those of us with inworld businesses and customers are forced either to go out of business due to rising costs and rapid inflation, or mimic the LL old-fashioned top-down hierarchical model as we queue up and wait for attention from the Concierge, pay heavy taxes to advertise our wares in Classified, pay land fees that would make a Russian serf quit-renter blush, constantly double our prices, and suffer occupational hazards of all sorts that aren't even really studied properly yet by science or government.

In fact a consumer-oriented model (everyone things this is going to be open-source) is years away, possibly even light-years away. In fact, just like they dumped a lot of people off the world with the removal of events grants and development incentive (and now are monkeying even with the payouts to their instructors with a new voucher proposal (!)), so they will dump off many amateur sim owners who rent directly from Governor Linden when they go open-source. Where will those consumers go? They'll be forced to queue up to the few prosumer/satrap overlords whom the Lindens will have developed by that time as the Game Masters, the few who will get licensed copies of the software and either have their own servers or get special discounts on the servers, wholesale. In fact, the model is more like Moscow, the Central Committee, the regional party secretary, and Bishkek than anything recognizable modern, free, flexible, and equal. 

Only when Second Life becomes more like Napster used to be, where people buy and sell worlds and their contents peer-to-peer with out queuing up to Linden Lab, anshechung.com, or SLboutique.com, could there be a real "browser" and "Internet-like" experience like Walker is always talking about on 3pointd.com

Some competitors to LL are already thinking in talking in those terms, where there will be home-brewed light and portable Worlds for Windows or something, but it's not there yet. What's far more likely is this oligarchic model we have now -- which isn't an accident. Many people especially on the forums think of our current actual Second Life, with its brutal prices, land fees, and auctions won  by mainly one company, with hugely stratified land prices and a land glut, as somehow just an aberration, something that is this one person's fault, or something that is corrected by this or that little measure, especially of the bromide type, such as "learning to understand this is a GAME and having some FUN in it!"

Instead, people must realize that it's this way because it *is* this way. As much as the Lindens are enlightened despots, enlightened game gods, as much as they listen more to their customers and by contrast with the Sims Online are a benign tropical paradise dictatorship, the fact is, they are still despots. Code is law. Cory reigns supreme. There is no voting "no". Robin gets to pick 8 people...and 8 more...and the IRC channelers get to cluck or whistle in approval or disapproval. This is how it is. You couldn't change this unless you bought out Linden Lab -- the only way to overthrow it literally -- and that's not going to happen client-side.

Now...we're supposed to discount this country stuff entirely, we're supposed to discard Philip's famous quote as just an example of him smokin' weed, and we're supposed to wise up to the fact that currency exchange, social and economic classes, massive immigration, control of borders, signing of treaties, etc. doesn't amount to a country.

OK, fine, let's jettison all this country stuff for the moment and just take the company stuff on its own terms.

Of course...the forums armchair analysts, especially those with little or no business experience in RL or SL, are fond of wagging their finger at your and admonishing you to "care about LL's bottom line" and "realize they have a business to run". LL is something more like a government-funded experiment (that's why they call it Lab) or a non-profit venture -- it's doesn't yet make a profit. In fact, it's long-term life might be better secured as a think-tank for the Metaverse rather than a software company, which would be a respectable role for it.

But let's just suppose, given that they are "very close" to being profitable (a few more islands! a few more thousand customers!) that they are a real company. And that what they're holding is a "focus group".

Of course, in "focus group" terms it's a bust -- you don't pick people for a focus group *this* way, reaching for a few categories from A to B.

If there really was a "focus group" being made, we'd see the following avatars who really represent SL:

o big, busty black female entrepreneurs "representin' from Hotlanta" who have sizeable amounts of island or whole-sim mainland land holding and events and/or content business and a heck of a lot more fun in SL than most forums-posters.
o some Victorian-clad Caledonian 32-year-old female lesbian musicians who play live music on weekends
o 40-something part-time Wal-Mart employees who work as call girls at Barbies (male or female in RL; female in SL) and live in Prok's rentals until they can buy their own land
o teens posing as adults with names like 1234KewlRick who are talented weapons makers pulling in as much as $50-100 USD a week
o 30-something American males who are insurance adjusters in RL who find love and big palaces and bling in SL and rent from Azures
o 50 year old programmers literally having a second life with SL and who sample BDSM in lite amounts
o Italian or Arabian princes in RL who are squandering the family inheritance on huge shopping islands, bling, and girls before they get bored and go off and play WoW

Well, you get the idea. Not the FIC, or the anti-FIC but completely other kinds of people -- there are lots, lots more of them on the grid than you or me.

So this isn't about the actual customers, even the actual island-buying, premium-account buying customers, such as to make a focus group. Focus groups, and I've been in them, and also made them, are drawn from your user or subscription base or even funders and they are made up of demographics, zip-codes, etc. We could have a whole long discussion about what a focus group is or isn't, but let's face it, that's not what the Lindens are making when they take Kex Godel or Alliez Mysterio -- these are people that either they expect to tell them about programming issues possibly with a very critical eye and mouth (we keep hearing this claim that there are angry young programmers pissed at LL for all kinds of righteous reasons) or people that they figure will tell them stuff they can't be bothered to find out about -- like how the hell you can make a dime off buying 29 of Philip's pet rocks, also known as islands.

I think this isn't really about getting advice from the People, or the Symbolic Representative Groups, however -- the Sounding Board concept. It's more about the message they want these Platonic Ideals to take *back* to the People.

I think the Lindens honestly function in a kind of cult - the love machine concept, this "we're all in a barn together" office layout (I'd make short work of that, as I think anybody who has ever had to run an office would) -- the fatty breaks, the whatever -- whatever that je-ne-sais-quoi is the Essence of Lindenor that they'd like to get people to grok on in person, since conveying it over broadband proves so difficult. If nothing else, you'll get to smell what kind of air freshener they have in the bathroom and take it from there, and also give us the skinny on whether they meet state regulations for emplyoee lunch rooms.

Now...if we're going to reject this idea that it's a country -- sending messages back to the People who emerge convinced and come back and spread the gospel (no doubt this line item is under the "evangelizing" category of PR) then...we'd have to assume that picking 40 customers (remember there will be more than one group) out of the 24000 online any one day isn't the best way to sample even a company's opinion or even the best way to convince all those skeptics like Prok (or that guy on a Harvard-related blog I was just reading who said his first sign-on to SL "wasn't pretty" and he quit in frustration).

So...let's stick with the company thing a minute. The company and its needs and its bottom line (this is the assignment Surreal and others have given to Cocoanut to work proposals against) is supposed to be Uber Alles, correct?

Wrong. If Second Life, the platform and the grid and all the things on it, were just about One Company, All Hail the Holy Company, it would be utter folly.

The reality of Second Life is that it is about *many* companies. It is a prototype of a web application, a software package that will be part of the 3-D web and what's called the Metaverse. So...how it deals with *companies* now given it's long-term prospects is really important.

And this is precisely what they aren't looking at in any systematic way.

The *companies* of Second Life are people who run businesses in SL. They run content, land, event,  venue, or service businesses. These are small, medium, and large. They generate revenue, even if -- much like Linden Lab itself!!!! -- they are "almost but not quite yet profitable". Why only look to the 2000 people who generate $20,000 a year in income by not really billing for their hours and letting their RL gigs feed their online hobby? Why not also look at a lot of other people -- thousands who still manage to cover tier and then some? Each and every one of these little or medium or big operations are tremendously important not only for Linden Lab as a company, but for the Metaverse as a prospect.

Companies. Companies that have other companies, connections, families, co-workers, vendors, suppliers, customers. Very, very few (they tend to be the FIC and *are* the FIC because of this) residents ever use SL in their RL jobs. Of course we know the celebrated Flipper has done this with his gas station, and there are others who are "RL in SL" in ways that are innovative and interesting, though hard to prove valid as a cost center for most businesses.

And of course we have Twentieth Century Fox...once. We have Microsoft...once. We have Wells Fargo...once. We have Warner Brothers...once. Maybe twice. But...their long-term visibility or presence is a wildcard right now.

Resident-created businesses aren't terribly interesting to the Lindens. They actually seem to have a bit of contempt for them, because they've stopped all of their incentives, not even keeping something that would have been a really obvious incentive, like a small business or even any business award that went to avatars that could actually show inworld profit in their accounts over revenue and expenses, or even just substantial revenue enhancement through attempting various strategies.  They could even consider bringing back a voluntary leader board of those willing to subject their accounts to such scrutiny.

But...they are far more eager for quick fixes with big-named companies that can ensure huge splashes of media coverage (be sure to read all the way down the comments on this one for a good horse laugh).

Companies that are just companies, in a vacuum, selling widgets, might bring in their main widget-buyers or advisors in the industry known for good widget-making for a confab and a look-see.

But...remember last year when a bunch of people made what they called "RL FIC Invasion of SL?" Flipper was on it, I think, and I remember Jake Reitveld was on it and gave a thoughtful talk about it at the Sutherland Dam. I distinctly remember what he said: "They want resident government, they want the residents to take over the world, they want to make that possible." THAT is what it's about.

So...let's parse this. How can you take over a world, when there is no world? How can you rule a country, when there is no country? The same people who happily tell you to get over your little fantasy that there's a country turn around five minutes later and talk with somber and fake altruistic faces about governance of the complex world of the grid. Somebody has to Help the Lindens because gosh, it's so big now!

So...there's a lot to think about there, but stick with the Big Company among Many Other Companies model that I'm suggesting.

You are a big supplier of servers, a downloadable client to access those servers, the illusion of land, and a kind of very light and largely ineffectual police service. To make that service/company work, you have to have lots and lots of other companies -- virtual estate sellers and renters, builders, scripters, clothiers, events-planners etc. who take care of all these customers who come in the door. Because that's the model -- it's not about making content, pushing it, have the customers burn through it, making more content. It's about putting out the skeleton for others to build content and push and burn through.

Of the people they've picked for round one, two fit that model of companies-within-the-company -- Alliez and Nexus -- and one, Catherine Omega, is related by marriage, as it were, to the chief clothing making and RL-gig-lander and builder Aimee Weber.

Second Life is a nesting doll of companies. Inside the first matryoshka, is the biggest SL company, Anshe Chung. Inside that, is somebody else who buys Anshe's land or rents Anshe's land, and so on, down the line to the littlest t-shirt maker in appearance mode who sells in a first-land shack for $5.

All of the matroshki can only make sense within the nesting-doll set-up. Nobody buys just one nesting doll, or the smallest, or the medium size -- the whole point of nesting dolls is to buy the package.

And each layer of the nesting doll depends on the previous bigger doll to open it up and uncover it -- unless you unpack the dolls, you can't see what is underneath. In much the same way, any business within SL not only depends on LL for its very essence on the servers (it can't exist yet apart from them), it also depends on LL or some other bigger doll within the nest to open up and uncover it -- the dependency is hierarchical.

Of course, any of the dolls might try to form their own relationship outside the nest, but we don't have a lot of examples of that. In fact, one way to look at it is to see that the big doll is actually a set of littler dolls that it has GOM'd.

Akh, as Tyutechev put it so inimitably, "Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone."

Making the Trains Run On Time

Ordinal Malaprop, SL's equivalent of Rube Goldberg, Victorian-style, has made a cool thing -- a web map application that not only shows off SL to the Internet but evidently, actually helps make something inworld work better.

It's the neatest thing on two legs this week in SL, and I want to be the first (after Ordinal!) to blog about it.

Her Caledon Tram had the same problems that Nigel Linden's train had up in what we used to call the "new continent" and have now taken to calling the "atoll continent" (It actually has some moth name but I can never remember it).  Nigel's was good for many an uproarious time as it would run off the rails and fly over the prairies to the ocean and sink in 8 meters deep, or would pile up cars and crash, or simply disappear. I suspect this has something to do with timing, sim seams, and the angle of the Earth to the Sun.

In any event, the no-nonsense Ordinal was not content to sleep in Europe on her different time zone while North Americans fussed over the train bunching up. So she figured out how to make a web application that would help make it run on time. There's something that rezzes in world, too.

I'm not certain that this train-running-on-time thinger that she has made *requires* the web connection, but since it has something called " a message via llHTTPRequest" which goes "to my Tram Ping Server, with its current location" and the "server then records this information in a file," I'm thinking it does.

So much of the stuff in SL that takes you out to the Internet doesn't really bring you back. Or is a nasty experience. Like the official SL forums, for example. Or Second Citizen, where the Poison Posse reigns supreme, having been drawn off like pus from their infection of the SL forums.

Or other things that brag about all their "apis" or their use of "social software" but which just appear to be so much circle-jerking -- in fact the jerking is so irregular and the circle so broken that it's more like broken-rectangle-jerking.

One of the things Hamlet, Pathfinder and other assorted Lindens and Lindesidents always go on about is "delicio.us". Leave aside the cutesie URL -- um, yeah, we realize it's supposed to be "tasty".  (These cutesie URLs will never be as funny as all those anti-Lukashenka sites that make ample use of the fact that "net" means "No" in Russian lol).

I'm just not getting it about delicio.us. I find it utterly vapid. The material is always arranged by date, which is useless, unless you're an addict already to somebody's page, and for something supposedly arranged by topic, it doesn't seem to be set up that way. The topics are stupid, wavering between Funk & Wagnall's and generic Cool, which is always first-cousin to Lame.

So you'll get somebody's cool blue graphics page, with the kind of range of BIG and tiny typeface that looks like the labels on the face lotion jars at Kiehl's, and then all that stuff. Like it will say:

Architecture
Avitars
Cars
Lime
Second Life
Temple Cats
Virtual Worlds

or some other noveau groovola type of thing, but you click on it and really get nowhere.

A good example is the "Resident Blogs" list that Pathfinder has set up. I don't know why this thing always seems *still* stuck on Aimee Weber, but it's partly because 10 different blogs might have written about her exploits or something. Go look at it, and you'll see how hard it is just to see a list of blogs, or a list of residents, in alphabetical order, which would make sense.

The new-age kind of "let's just kinda grok around with it" stuff is supposed to be "intuitive" or "viral" or some other clap-trap, but it's also just stupid. I really wish somebody would go to the trouble to make a normal alphabetical list of all the blogs and/or all the residents to click on with all this typeface and dumb-ass sounding categories signifying nothing.

Delicio.us seems more about a popularity contest, too, where Satchmo can get his friends to click and save stuff and it goes up higher on the list, or somebody with just time on their hand to be a super fanboy can keep saving their friends, and it all floats. This is that "wisdom of the crowds" stuff which actually translates to mob idiocy in a setting like Second Life and the tropism of Lindens to pick their pets. (What's hilarious about Pathfinder, btw, if you haven't checked in to the WAs and his Explorer cards lately is that rather than feeling a modicum of shame for having picked Ulrika not once but TWICE for the picks in the same week (!) and then not updating the card and leaving it out for AGES, he then went and did that again, picking something twice (now utterly unmemorable) and even writing 'I know I'm picking this twice, but..." Will they ever learn???)

These inane social software things reach their apex in something like slprofiles.com I hope everyone reading this will join slprofiles.com and come and Be My Friend 4 Life. If I can only get enough of you to click on me and make me your Friend, I can have More Friends Than Aimee. In fact, I need to take a leaf from the old Will Wright manual for ballooning in TSO, where you *pay* for friends.

These exercises don't enhance the world, while taking you out of it. They don't deepen the viability of it, it seems to me, but just create more inane time sucks, mindless popularity exercises, and more bad grainy pictures of nakie girls and their cats titled "Me and My Pussy".

I have this awful feeling that the Lindens are going to be trying to get into the MySpace game with our avatar profiles, which of course, many people have honed to a fine science, with their picks, pictures, sayings, classifieds, First Life Info, skills, etc. etc. It has an option to check it off on the web, and I think you can do that and appear in the SEARCH now (I tried it and it didn't work but may it will soon). Can you picture the secondlife.com bogged down with this stuff? Probably they'd like to keep it off site and are just as glad to have something like slprofiles.com do it.

Meanwhile, there are more serious applications afoot. One of the most promising ones is www.slhandbook.com run by a new resident named Clubside Granville. I admire Clubside not only for taking on the Lindens right off the bat, challenging the received wisdom that you can never, ever, ever get Governor Linden to change his land, to simply jumping in, hiring a bunch of surveyors, and making a third-party information site without FlipperPA, and without Adam Zaius. It's so refreshing to see somebody just do it, and have the skills to do it, and not being also trying to tweak the platform and economy their way while they're at it.

It's hard to know whether the labour-intensive data entry required for something like this can be maintained, but I gather Clubside is trying to automatize it. What it could mean is at last some order to the chaos of sims.

We all know how bad the FIND works in SL -- even FINDING the FIND is a chore for newbies that I often help them with first thing -- it's that little button hidden at the bottom of the screen, sometimes visually seeming to be mixed up with your task bar from Windows.

SLHandbook looks very busy with too-tiny print at the moment, but that will subside -- it's clearly a very rapidly growing and very intense operation, and that's a great thing to see. Pictures randomly appear, but there's no dumb rating of them like on sluniverse.com  We get some window into a variety of sims with a sense of  real curiosity, "let's go explore this," rather than queuing up at Metaverse Messenger and waiting our turn with the Sim of the Week to see if we can get on the Kewl Kids' Sim List. Ideally, everybody will get to be a kewl kid on slhandbook.com if you just bother to file the data. Lots more could come out of it -- shopping data that is leveraged and becomes a significant counterweight to the Electric Sheep's SLB -- something I'm all for. The more competition the better, especially if those involved are not driven by their need for profit or fame, but by a sense of public service.

Ultimately, if a site like slhandbook.com and other sites get working right, and the HTML-on-a-prim and Mozilla thing happens right in SL, then we could actually open up a little window like a little Zabar's or mini yellow pages in our user panel and use it to get around SL. The dream of typing in "dress, little black" and arriving right at the right shop could be realized. Add this capacity to the inside of the group tools (which are promising to be able to have inventory moveable within it) and you could really make the social software thing rock for a purpose, not just to show off itself and get all giggly and giddy about the technology itself. How? By having better management of everything from rentals to political causes, RL and SL, or things like records of the auctions or the winds of Second Life for sailors. Imagine making a Farmer's Almanac for Second Life that actually lets you predict when that *better* sunlight is going to shine (have you ever noticed that turning on the sun yourself is never quite as good as that natural sunshine?) and the best days to buy on LindEx (Friday evenings).

I guess this is a good time to mention Max Case's Neighbours. Max Case has always been a major irritant to me, ever since he deliberately griefed two of my events with pranksterish, annoying questioning meant to obstruct. Still, if he had created something that helped us maintain a watch on the Lindens and their tendency to make misleading claims about their servers, I was cautiously supportive. He got all uppity when I queried him what he was doing with all the data he was scraping -- they always do! -- but I was willing to have my privacy invaded (isn't it already??? duh, it's the Internet, duh!) for the sake of being able to go to Lee Linden and say, hey, you're overstacking my sims again dude, cut it off.

So after I finally got the Max-o-tron or whatever it is called, and wrestled Max about putting the thinger out more strategically in his store, I flew around with my HUD. It dutifilly recorded the fact (Seemingly) that on Alston, Furness, Maryport, and Ravenglass, sims that I watch over like a mother hen with chicks because my rentals are scattered all over them, were all overstacked. Worse, they were overstacked with some of the private island high-traffic sims, like Anshe Chung's Plush. Now THAT was annoying, I thought to myself, not only is the mainland kicked in the teeth every which way, it is once again sucking hind tit here on servers in competition literally with Anshe's prime servers.

Except...it wasn't true. I documented all the alleged over-stacking and sent it to Lee Linden. Lee is, of course, one of those storied Lindens that people love to sit around the campfire and toast marshmallows to. Most people have Lee stories and many find it fun sport to try to top each other. I think my all-time-great Lee story was when I once complained to him about Erie lagging and tenants moving out, and he hurled me that old Linden chesnut about the "physics objects". I didn't buy it, and pressed him further -- he finally reluctantly conceded that he'd check (given that he was answering LL email from what seemed like home at an odd hour, I was impressed). The next day, he left me a message that went something like this: "I checked Erie. I didn't find anything. Maybe it's different when there are no avatars on it."

Well...yuh. I had one of my Second Life Special Moments (TM) at that time, realizing that it was silly, night after night, trying to put tenants on these sims and getting them to be happy. The sims work *so much better without avatars on them* that really, we should just put sculptures on them and watch from afar as they spin silently like blossoms...

I remember I first fell for that physics bit from Phoenix Linden, not knowing what he was talking abuot, and accepting this as the reason why Louise was sick. To be sure, when a crashed helicopter was stuck in Ravenglass Hall the other day, sim FPS halfed, and the FPS was in the toilet. I moved like a drugged fly, trying to find the problem, dreading the thought of calling Lee and being told it was a physics object once again (they always say that). Well, I think a helicopter does qualify as a physics object LOL.

But in Erie, now for the second time, and no with NO avatars in sight, with its sims ostensibly overstacked like an overbooked airline, sharing space with 4 other sims that were nowhere near it in that wierd Cat-in-the-Hat algorhythm the Lindens got going to get the server farm perking, it turned out that Max's data was all wet.

"Go and see those sims and see which servers they are on," Lee instructed patiently. I have to say that for me, talking to Lee has never been a frustrating experience (except in person on the phone where you don't have some typing lead time to calm your nerves) because he's so brainy and logical. You will never get an illogical thought from Lee Linden. Lee Linden is nothing if not logical.

I went to the servers, clicked on "About SL" and looked at those "agni" numbers. By God, they were different. That is, if I had a list that looked like this:  Erie, Plush, Loon, Hiatus, Plethora (ok I made up those last 2 sim names, geez, who can remember them these days), when I actually went to Hiatus and Plethora and looked under the hood, the numbers were *different*.

I pinged Max and asked him about this -- I double-checked on Neighbours, but each time, while I had different sims, when I actually rushed to p2p, the sim numbers were different.

How to understand? Max didn't respond. Well...hmm...I suppose the sims are overstacked for only brief times...or in fact there is a lag in data.

THAT the sims are overstacked seemed one of those received wisdoms. The Lindens seem to deny it. I suppose we can't learn the truth. In any event, a third-party website has once again been called into question.

Which brings me to my favourite topic, the topic that makes Cristiano hopping mad, and that is the scraping of data.

Few people probably noticed the altorific "Jiggly Puff" (he of no picture, skills, comments, or anything on his profile, despite some time on him) asking really outrageous questions under the guise of "SL Answers," the lobbyist's dream spot (because you ask a question of those polite Lindens, and no other resident can refute you, so that your tripe gets to stand and the Lindens are likely to do a smackdown because they won't want to get involved).

"Jiggly Puff" simply asks Philip to give him the store. He wants to know why there aren't LSL functions to turn over all land data and all group data to him, Jiggly Puff to...uh...study.

Why? why should proprietary data from LL -- and by extension my proprietary data and yours, too -- go to these pseudonyms and anonymous avatars who don't sign the TOS outside of the SL realm? No third-party site is bound by the TOS (nor should it be, except voluntarily). Contacted inworld, JP told me he was just interested in studying stuff or some vague answer, but of course, he could be a famous land dealer or famous IRC channeler or who the hell knows.

I don't see an answer yet to these questions -- thank God -- but I can't be sure that in fact the Lindens, who love server data as much as the next wonky tekkie wiki, won't just hand it over.

Well, aren't we all for information flowing freely? Sure, but why only into one hands, to those who are not publicly accountable? Tekkies always tell you smugly that "information and knowledge want to be free," while they help themselves handily to the locks and keys to it in the code.

Grabbing land data will yield huge amounts of commercial data not only on the land business but all businesses taking place on land, information on all business deals and land changing hands, and even the people who visit lands and the outing of alts. Same with groups -- grabbing groups and their dynamic history can be the kind of information that various mafias and clubs and RPs might pay for or even virtually kill for. Who's in, who's out, who's banned, who's not, etc.

I find it hugely annoying that no one thinks about these things, ever, except to laugh uproariously in your face and tell you that you've got a tinfoil hat on. Yes, and it's dripping with egg salad, too.

I suppose ResAd or ResGov or whatever the Lindens are going to call their Quislings will be first to grab at this stuff or comment on them, given what we're told about all their capacious programming.

Someone, in making sure the trains run on time, we have to make sure we don't end up with regimes infamous for making the trains run on time, but running over a lot of people in the process.

FIC-OFF

An amazing FIC-off is about to take place -- a World Cup of personalities selected by the Lindens for an exclusive, all-expense-paid trip to SF to consult with the Lindens on the future of Second Life.

The next group of 8 in this wierd ochocracy will be chosen to come during the SLCC -- imagine getting chosen to be in the A-list and getting your way paid to SLCC. See, Gwyn, your way will still be paid, not to worry if you can't really justify that kind of expense coming to SLCC from Europe.

Just in time for SLCC, of course, some wit has made a t-shirt with the slogan FIC-off, which they think is a fitting commentary to me -- "fuck off, Prokofy, with your critique of the FIC, because...well...there *is* a FIC and we prevail."

If you bought that line that it's "your world, your imagination," you're a chump. In fact, it's theirs. If you bought the line that the FIC "is an interesting myth," as Robin Linden once put it, you'd be dead wrong -- hell, it's an interesting *reality*. You think I don't get sick of writing this truth? I do. Yet, it's still true, and even more true than ever.

Just take a gander at the Second Life Views list.

"Yet another Linden circle jerk," said bladyblue Bommerang, commenting on the announcementi n the forums. Commentary was mainly running positive -- natch, with that crowd. You know, I wouldn't have put it that crudely, but...yeah.

Pham Neutra -- yes, the clearest signal that the Lindens are socialists at heart -- a German social-democratic type of commentator, always digging at the large land dealers, writing knowledgably enough about the economy, but always with a moral, a message, leaning towards the left. Top writer for SLOG, probably its most frequent contributor, somebody I spar with frequently in IMs -- because I can't post on SLOG, nor can anybody else. This Blog list of FIC de la FIC filled with top scripters and programmers say...the comments thingie on their blog is "broken". Of course, it was only after campaigning endlessly that we got them to open it up in the first place.

Oz Spade -- 2003, I think of Oz Spade as a venderable oldbie, though he isn't as old as some, and as a programmer and IRC channeler. He's an officer of Ouranos, the FIC builders' group that always wins the Linden contests. He's in the SL Education Senate and other elite groups.

Nexus Nash -- 2002. Business partner with Adam Zaius in secondserver.net, GIGAS, and of course Azure Islands, where he has probably been coining money. They have about 50 I think, if not more, hard to count. When Philip Linden logs on to SL, that's where he goes, to talk to these folks. There's at the center of the firey core of SL -- programmers, third-party site operators, land dealers who aren't Anshe yet who make a profit, established burghers of SL. Rarely posts on the forums, but doesn't have to -- has the ear of LL already!

Catherine Omega -- partner of Aimee Weber. Need I say more? Well, yes. Because as a programmer and another 2003 birthday avatar, one of 5 out of 8 avatars who have been selected from early adapters -- which is really making a statement. It's letting us know that the Lindens just can't let go. They would have invited Aimee except...Aimee has a very good reason not to appear in RL to others (she didn't come to the SLCC), and Aimee already has their ears, eyes, website, RL-in-SL gig referrals and lots more. So inviting Catherine is like making a statement, "we love you Aimee, but you know, if we had you, it would really look way too FIC-y, so we'll invite your inworld partner listed on your profile, someone who is an accomplished scripter, and that will accomplish the same thing".

Salazar Jack -- a venerable and respected oldbie. Creator of beautiful sims, preserved land, and legends on the forums. Who could say a word against Salazar Jack? Certainly not me. I've always had good dealings with him, and admire him for staying out of the forum regs' controversies and keeping a kind of quiet authority. But...he's one more 2003 birthdate, oldbie, early adapter. 4 out of 8 is too many; 3 would be a lot; the Lindens have 5 out of 8.

Alliez Mysterio -- This is a comment that says, "Anshe, we will find our own friends who are island queens, too, don't mess with us."  Alliez broke with Anshe last year, and started her own island empire. She has at least 30 I think. When they did that dreadful "most powerful women in SL," her name was posted many times by her active fan/tenant base. Alliez can't be said to stay out of the forums...because she seems to have any number of shills pumping her land on "Happy Landlord Tales". Of course, I'm quite willing to believe at least some of these people are genuinely happy tenants!

Kex Godel. Oh God. The first FIC who got me banned. Petty, pedantic, in-like-FInn with some Lindens, ugh. Kex is old and established FIC and IRC channel. In fact, I think the IRC Channel can say that the team they've fielded out to meet Team Linden at the SL FIC-OFF is well represented from their end.

These people are going to become part of an advisory group that is said to be "permanent". That means a proto-government of sorts from Lindens.

Here's my post on Robin's blog that sums up my critique.

blaze Spinnaker commented what I had originally commented to Robin's post about this concept: they couldn't eat their dog-food, and couldn't come inworld.

Well, time for my next blog about....

BANNED AND CENSORED!

Somebody's idea of "public library" comes from Thomas Kinkade...

Looking for some items for the infohub project this evening, I couldn't find them in inventory, so I went to visit the ICT Library in Pickerel.

Once a good example of a great use of a PG sim (SL's best kept secret!), and a resource on the mainland -- a place that has a diverse and open public contrasting with the private islands -- the ICT has now put up a big sign that it had moved.

Disappointed that what had been a great part of our little corner of PG paradise in SL in Grace and Pickerel by St. Paul's Cathedral was now getting sucked into the private island maelstrom, I clicked on the landmark...only to get this message:

YOU ARE BANNED FROM THIS REGION.

Imagine that!

In RL, it would be difficult to "ban" someone from the use of a "public information source" or a public library. In fact, even if you were to go in a library, like one of those mentally ill homeless, and shout and spit and deface books, it would be hard to imagine a situation where the library would be able to ban you forever. Indeed, if they called the police, and the police removed you from the premises, there'd have to be some kind of due process for them to do this, your rights would be read to you, and you'd not likely endure anything like a "permaban" from the premises.

In SL, people are banned for bombing, griefing, flying around naked in PG, verbally harassing by shouting racist slogans, etc. That all seems reasonable.

But...banned because during a meeting, in which they had patiently sat through a Newspeak introduction, they happened to *express an opinion* that the program was lame and not serving its intended sector of the public?

Banned on speech grounds? From a public library?

That's outrageous -- and it's the sort of thing that really needs to be fought hard -- and fought hard now, because if we don't, this is what we can expect more of in virtual worlds -- virtual worlds that far from exemplifying the open and free and linked nature of the Internet, are exemplifying more and more the closed and gated grounds of the country club.

Is Second Life going to be a country club or a country?

Let's go over again how Marian Librarian -- Lorelei Junot -- and her colleagues could come to a decision (I have no idea how it was made, as it is not a transparent, due process) to ban me.

1. They advertised on the open events calendar in SL an event that purported to be a discussion for business people in SL to share experiences.

2. I came to it and it seemed to be already a closed little grouplet that was perceiving itself as having a "mandate" from "those who came to Katt Kongo's talk" to "continue to meet weekly". This little sort of closing-in-upon-itself happens all the time in SL. Of course, if 30 avatars may have come to see the popular and vigorously self-promoting Katt Kongo of the Metaverse Messenger, at the SL Library on this occasion, there were now a grand total of 6 avatars, at least 2 of whom hadn't been to the previous meeting (the advertisement just wasn't seen).

3. SL is going through a big upheaval now, with the removal of dwell and the destruction of many resident projects and businesses that relied on it, and the displacement by these original, indigenous projects, by well-funded outsiders. This process was horribly exacerbated by the Lindens suddenly announcing that they would *sell* the Linden, i.e. print their currency rather than merely arrange the interface for buyers to meet sellers. This led to a 30-point drop in the Linden as faith in the currency began to evaporate. In this context, people in struggling businesses are looking for answers, and looking for real support, not fake training exercises by RL people completely unschooled in SL.

4. Accordingly, I asked on what grounds this "public library" felt qualified to "teach". No one expects a library to be an expert on every subject; their role in a community is to organize experts and resources for others. The lame answer I got back was that the person chairing the meeting had no RL or SL business experience whatsoever. The speaker advertised didn't bother to show, and the organizers didn't know why. And one librarian lamely volunteered that the very struggles of the library itself to get up and running was "like" a business.

5. I challenged this concept because unlike the rest of us struggling in resident-based business, this library got a discounted, non-profit rate sim for $950 instead of $1250; its tier is $150 instead of $195. Furthermore, it's drawn heavily from Linden staff time in the form of Pathfinder Linden and other Lindens, and has enjoyed liberal and generous donations of equipment, time, and Lindens. Indeed, the entire project was made possible by "an anonymous buyer of the private island" who I imagine to be someone actually very close to the Linden machine -- it's just a hunch I'm having.

6. As the record amply shows, the discussion took a turn for the worse, particularly because libraries found it difficult to admit that resident businesses have difficulties; that they as outsiders have privileges that the pre-existing residents don't enjoy; that people in SL business need not these lame, irrelevant "RL training" empty exercises, but political transformation and changes in economic policies (and how could they be expected to adopt a more sophisticated approach like this). All kinds of NPR-esque, politically-correct teminology and language patterning was deployed, with all that kind of horrid, smarmy, Children's Public Television "modeling of behaviour" that drives any sane and normal person nuts:

"Prokofy, we want to provide programs from people here in sl to meet your needs."

etc.

and then little barbed comments of the type,

"Prokofy, what does your group do?"

I had vowed to provide my 10 reasons why I have a fundamental critique of this "Second Life Library 2.0", they got erased accidently, so let me try again -- and this is important to understand for the larger issue of why this banning of someone on speech grounds is such an ominous thing in general for the Metaverse.

1. Public libraries, in RL, are public enterprises funded by tax dollars because it is in the public interest to have educational and informational activities be free and available. The public library is among the most vital institutions of civil society. Yet it is no longer one that governments and publics support, beyond educational and intellectual elites, and not even these to any substantial extent. The library as an institution is being transformed in RL as libraries face horrible losses of revenue as the world shifts from print to electronic media, as people use Amazon or their home-based Internet for research, work, or entertainment, and mainly only the very young, very old, and poor use public libraries. Their hours have been reduced, and they've scrambled to revise themselves in this vastly changing scene and become more relevant.

2. The RL library related to this Second Life Library (about which I have only a sketchy idea since it doesn't really lay it out anywhere) is no doubt a library in that very situation, trying to leverage new media, interest of young people, etc. to position itself better to attract scarce RL patrons. Therefore, when we come to participate in their programs, we're part of what enables them to show off to funders that they are "relevant," and that they are "doing good." They can report that they had "prominent business people" and "helped train SL businesses" or even "helped retrain SL workers displaced by radical economic upheavals" or whatever shtick they may deploy -- but if we're going to be used in that fashion in their fund-raising, then we have the right to demand some accountability.

3. Public libraries grow out of civil societies and democratic governemnts. This library didn't grow out of any such thing, because it doesn't exist in SL. Of course, the lack of a world and its substance is of little interest to people merely using SL like a giant book shelf to arrange their vanity projects on for better display. No matter what kind of life that world had or has outside of the bookshelf and the 3-D resume coat-hanger. That's the thing that really galls me the most -- that we don't have any kind of representative government, or even any kind of loose, grassroots assembly to discuss projects of public interest, and in that vacuum, anybody and his brother can just come along and say "We're the Second Life Public Library". There's a tiny elite of Lindens, RL in SL cadres, people like Eloise Pasteur, "Thinker, Educator, Mentor" who flog their mentor title and SL oldbie status for something like this -- and that's what constitutes the "public". The rest of us, if we complain, can expect to be banned.

"Thinker, Educator, Mentor...and exclusive vendor of commercial products in special Linden-subsidized non-profit space."

4. Really, who gets to use the "Second Life" name? I know that when two law students tried to create "Second Life Superior Court," the Lindens ordered them to remove it. When Shaun Altman named his stock market "Second Life Stock Exchange," he was urged to change it, and did so, calling it "Metaverse Stock Exchange". There are a million things in SL called everything from SL Boxing to the SL Public Land Preserve which I founded. Yes, anybody can decide to use the term "SL" and "Public" -- and shouldn't they, if they open up their sims to the public? Yet...how is this decided? I'm happy to open up that debate entirely, including regarding my own use.

We didn't get together and make a public library; it just arrived, on the same little cat's feet that Microsoft or Harvard's Berkman Center or countless other big projects arrived without too much visibility, ushered in by Lindens on wings, and assisted by the usual cadres from the FIC and SIC.

Worse, why would any one resident's group, even a feted outside RL entity, be entitled to use up a public good like the name "Info Island".  This is the equivalent of "411". Why is "Info Island" not owned by the federal government, but owned by a private entity with an anonymous donor? who decided this? I know none of us did -- but that's because we don't exist -- there is no civil society except the nonce groups and flash-mobs and "wise crowds" that the Lindens get up as their posses to run little projects like this.

5. Why is this public library venturing into the roiling waters of business in SL? This is a controversial, even painful topic for many, with the crash of the Linden, and the seeming destruction of the indigenous economy in favour of the Linden's bottom line. Why aren't they sticking more to traditional library-like topics like one I see on the calendar today about art and culture, something they're better suited to do?

I'll tell you why, because they are climbing on the craven bandwagon of the Business Week article like everyone else. In their PR, in their funding, in their selling of themselves, they'd like to be able to say they were "relevant" to the biggest boom phenomenon associated with SL -- business. They'd like to say they provided "value add" and "helped serve the community".

All of this is fake. Their guy didn't bother to show up. Their meeting was lame. People challenged it (and not only me) and they not only got defensive and manipulative, using their social-engineering concepts borrowed from the vast library of child-control and child-centric ideologies out there, they even banned a vocal critic from even entering the space to use the library and its resources. They know nothing about business, and understand less. They got 30 avatars to gape at Katt Kongo, so hungry are people to get rich quick and touch the hem of the garment of anybody who seems to have, if not gotten rich quick, gotten media coverage quick looking as if they did. That's all. To pretend something else is happening is a vast fiction.

6. Why do the Lindens do stuff like this, hand out the 411-like name "Info Island" and the non-profit status and all the rest of the feting they do? Well, because they can. It's their servers and they can do what they want to. And that's the worrisome part. Any game company or virtual world company that wants to take over the airwaves can do so, like Mr. Lee's Hong Kong and the other franchulates in Snowcrash. There's little to stop them from doing that. And they are doing that, and thus our world is being created brick by sectarian, closed brick -- little particularities, little egos, little closed connections, taking the place of a public open space.

7. Lindens don't feel any sense of accountability, and if a protest against the decision of this sectarian little walled garden called "Second Life Library 2.0" to ban an avatar on speech grounds were protested to the Lindens, they'd shrug. They'd shrug REALLY hard. Because as we all know from the last town hall, Philip Linden personally feels that "civic redress" is what should be encouraged for the private island world. Ugh. And here's a good example of the kind of world he is unleashing by absolving himself of any responsibility for arbitrary banning. He may have thought "civic redress" would ban people who fall just short of TOS violation and continue to bother private island owners. "We're not going to be able to stop this," he says. It's like the Bush guy -- let him roll, he "can't be stopped" because "people have to have freedom and creativity." Of course, the freedom and creativity of *others* stepped on when these egos are allowed to run rampant in the public space are things Philip just doesn't think through.

8. When I pointedly asked Lorelei why she should get a $150 sim and I shouldn't, she can't handle the shock of the challenge and the exposure, and told me "You do not have to use the library". Well, that's ridiculous. My challenge of the lameness of her little "business meeting" (which the people in it were IM'ing me about and agreeing with me was lame) and my challenge of the legitimacy of "Second Life Library 2.0" shouldn't be defensively and idiotically lurching to extremes and telling me I don't "have to" use the library.

What, Lorelei Junot, an avatar, is allowed to determine who can and can't use public spaces and public knowledge resources? Huh? By her own whim, just because she feels dissed during a meeting?

...and somebody else's idea of "public library" might be drawn from a public urinal.

A RL equivalent might be one of those kind of lame exercises I see in my own public library. Someone will have gotten a grant to "promote women" or something and they will have a flimsy poster up made with dutiful civic-looking clip-art icons about "preparing women for the workforce". Some motley assemblage of people unemployed at 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon will come to the library. They'll be taught to "dress for success" and "network" and "prepare a resume to catch a recruiter's eye" and all the rest. All well and good. That's what public libraries *do*. They are "resources."

Let's say you attend such a forlorn little gathering in your public library, sitting at the back table next to a couple of the homeless people who are asleep in a warm place since they close shelters during the day. Let's say in between listening to the screams of unruly kids parked in the library after school with indifferent babysitters, or even on their own, left to themselves by parents who can't afford afterschool programs, you struggle to hear how you can "leverage your real life skills" in say, caring for children and old relatives and managing a household, and convincing someone to hire you (let's say you're a welfare single mom).

You might listen to some annoying librarian go on about "skill sets" and "networking" all those other buzz words and you might finally interrupt, "Hey, hon, do *you* have any experience looking for a job in the real job market, as opposed to the non-profit, government-funded sector?" Wouldn't you prefer that she tell you how to ace the post office exam or get to the right people in city hall to get the coveted part-time school-crossing jobs? If you challenged such a "lesson-giver" including her use of public space and public funds, would you expect to be banned forever from the public library? Of course not.

9. Somebody might "helpfully" point out that if I had a 501-c-3, I could give that Tax ID number and application to the Lindens and also apply for non-profit sims. But of course I do, and I have 10 others I could draw into sponsorship if it came to that, but that's not the point. The point is whether or not this is going to be a *virtual* world and a *better* world or just Second Verse, Same as the First. The virtual world makes new kinds of non-profit work possible, with the acceleration of networking, exhange of knowledge, etc. What's really appalling, given all the Better Worldism game that the Lindens talk, is that projects like supportforhealing, which they even fete in some ways, has no non-profit status. Numerous indigenous projects of this sort that have to do with teaching the hard skills of the world itself, like New Citizens as we noted in the previous "Librarians" blog, don't get that recognition of discounted sims. What would it take to get the Lindens to cut loose some non-profit sims to the people REALLY eating the dogfood and trying to live and work and do nonprofit educational work *in* the world and *about the world itself*?

10. We're rapidly coming to a point where far from being a treasure trove of openness and accessibility, the private island system is only perpetuating the "walled garden" or "country club" aspect of life that we were supposed to be getting away from by coming on the Internet in the first place! The Second Life Library 2.0 is a failure exemplifying the failure of the Lindens' original Mainland vision of open and diverse space. They need to "control their parcel" and keep out people like Prokofy Neva who might not pay their library fines.

Everything that I've been jumping up and down saying would happen with these private islands has happened! I kept pointing out that when the Lindens create tools for mass-banning on islands, something Philip actually seems proud of when he talks about people "banned from large land masses" by code-as-law, it would lead to arbitrary decisions like this based not on any kind of real criteria of TOS violation, or actual standard and open notion of griefing, but on the whim of somebody with ruffled feathers -- Lorelei Junot, the land owner of record. It wasn't enough for her that I left her meeting when she asked to, and concluded it was a waste of time to be involved.  It's still a mystery to me why this library has to be involved in organizing business groups, better organized by business people themselve, in venues where they can give each other dwell/traffic (of the list-topping, not payment-giving kind) and support each others' products.

I IM'd Philip during the town hall about where I'd appeal such a banning or "civic address". To whom? How? He didnt' answer, because there is no answer.

I'm going to try a variety of places -- from the RL supervisors of these people in SL to the American Library Association. The more I read this transcript over and over, the more I marvel at the outcome.

Michael Pate made a big show of answering my last critical blog, "Librarians," with one of these smarmy, politically-correct comments:  "Just as in RL, we have no interesting in supplanting or superseding anything anyone else is doing. But also just as in RL, not everyone in a community will see the need for or wish to use our services. We will gladly attempt to meet the needs of those we can and wish the others well."

What's interesting about this self-selected set of people and their Linden feters is that they adopt the same line of thinking as we see on the forums. Group-think. "If you don't agree with even any aspect of what we're doing, there's the door."

I don't need a public library to solve my business problems in SL -- it's proven itself irrelevant except as another headline-grabbing, self-promoting "only about itself" sort of typical, vapourous project in Second Life. Perhaps in time it will grow up, and get over its infantile and juvenile phases where the people write endless blogations about all the neat and kewl things they WOWZER did in WOOT Second Life. However, I remain committed to the principle of keeping public spaces open -- anything that calls itself the 411 of Second Life with titles like "Info Island" and "Second Life Library" cannot be banning on vague speech grounds.

Ultimately, what is worrisome about these projects is their destructive power of the world itself.
As I said in my last blog comments:

"The presence of RL-funded entities with anonymous donors who give them whole sims, and the Lindens feting of these high-profile projects they can show off themselves, by giving them $150 tier and $950 islands, skews the environment for business. It makes it less and less viable for people to use the Linden and micropayments and inworld development that exists within world and not funded by outside entities. This is obvious."

It's not at all clear that taken together, with their own aims and interests, they will make up a world themselves. They very likely will. It will be a sanitized and increasingly totalitarian one where, on the slightest whim, a person who is "sole owner" can elect to restrict freedom of movement and the free flow of information and goods on a whim. That's wrong, dead wrong.