Second Thoughts

If Linden Lab Ran the United States...

Naturally socialists Nobody Fugazi and Vint Falken see nothing but evil in the idea of Linden Lab running the United States of America or The World.

I wish I could find the article now by the guy who compared the U.S. Constitution to the TOS of Second Life and found it terribly wanting, of course. Anybody? I can't seem to find the link -- but it was sobering.

Obviously, on the down side, the removal from the service for "any reason or no reason" and the ability to confiscate all your property means that the state could kill you and seize all your property arbitrarily -- as the anonymous poster comments on Nobody's blog -- and of course, no reasonable state does this, and only the most totalitarian states routinely engage in this, and not forever, as people rebel.

But let's push it further...

1. When the state kills you and seizes your property, you can come back on an alt and use an anonymizer. In fact, it's wise for citizens to keep a number of "mule" alts with property and money at the ready for just this occasion when the state exercises its arbitrary and oppressive rule : )

2. There are no taxes, only rent -- or you can live free, camp, squat, fly around. Rent is fairly low, given that you get shelter, a place to have sex, a place to work and socialize all for about $25 or $50.

3. You can talk to 1,000 people at once in a group, and not have to ever pay a telephone bill.

4. The president, vice president, and many secretaries and deputy secretaries of state have office hours once a week, and you can always IM them.

5. You can pretty well instantly liquidate all your property to land bots or yard sales, and many rentals are refundable in case you run out of cash.

6. You never die, and you can set it up so that when you do die in real life, your spouse or children get your avatar and all his property, and your store can remain open and your creations can keep selling indefinitely. The state collects no death tax and does not insist on any burial procedures.

7. There would never be any elections, which has its down side, but you'd also be spared the expense and tedium of watching two candidates insult each other and tell lies for years. If you didn't like the government on your sim, make a new group with yourself as owner and move to a new sim.

8. You can easily be banned from the state blog and forums (media) but you can start a third-party blog that they can't touch, and also hold innumerable live debates inworld pretty much without interference.

9. The state builds roads and parks for free, without taxation. To be sure, this means you have to put up with juice bars and bowling alleys called "Hot Balls", but you can always fly to another sim.

10. The state lets you keep a limitless amount of inventory without charge, and you can store it without having to take up space inworld.

Lindens Strike A Blow Against Inworld Group Democracy

Although there's no official Linden blog about this yet, new SL version 1.21 adds a disturbing new feature, group moderation tools, that were long an obsession of certain controlling types, and now, inexplicably, were moved to the front burner as a "must" for group fixes -- skipping over other much more annoying issues, like "group chat error", poor group layout buttons, broken group searches both within search/groups and within the group itself for names, etc.

Tateru Nino describes the feature without comment as to the ramifications, but here's the thing: this concept of group owners being able to shut off anyone in the group from speaking, yet retain their group membership, was first proposed by Angel Fluffy, he of the rapist "capture roleplay" furry game and other oppressive activities, such as destruction of the embryonic SL democratic institution known as "Features Voting Tool" (shot at dawn by Torley Linden and folded into the cumbersome JIRA, run by a select group that constantly closes down other people's proposals). Other Prim-A-Donnas joined the cry for the ability to rope people into groups, then shut them up, and force them to listen to One Voice (various BDSM type groups or hellion landlords' groups).

What is really far more important for most people is the ability to remain in a group, yet opt to temporarily mute group babbling, so as not to have to leave the group. That is, more users than owners have made the demand to control the group experience -- yet apparently making an entire group temporarily mutable or minimized and not noisy isn't technically feasible. Hence this other placebo, moderating individuals.

Thankfully, groups are defaulting to having all members included with group chat permissions, which can then individually be undone. If they hadn't, I would have gone through more than a thousand people and granted them all chat permissions. I simply believe in open groups. It isn't the chaos everyone imagines. I do have a strict rule that you can't spam the group with sales announcements or even help queries. Any newbie who does this is politely forwarded to the Ravenglass HELP group or directly to the manager. But I want people to retain the ability to get on the group if they need to with an urgent message, say, about a griefer crashing a sim, and I want newbies to have at least that first-time stumble for help before they learn how to get at a manager, and learn how to trust that IMs with full requests are much better than random shouts in a group "Anybody there? Why is the land eating my furniture?"

Obnoxious

It always amazes me how obnoxious people can get in Second Life, and how they can't bear a taste of their own medicine in the form of a firm pushback.

It's also interesting to see how people imagine -- and demand! -- that everything should be more and more fully automated.

There are now rentomatics that expire, but don't release yet -- you can't pay them, because the existing tenant can come and pay them, and if he is in arrears one day, then he can pay and it will only count 6 days. That would be nice to have. But also kind of brutal. These same systems also can automatically flush the prims off the lot the minute a parcel expires, and keep counting prims (although I often see that type of feature "done" on malls where I rent).

I'm debating whether to commission someone to make me a whole new customized rentals system, because I refuse to use Hippo Rentals, as I see no reason to deal with people who are keyword stealers, plus, even if that weren't the issue, I wouldn't want to turn all my commercial information over to someone to data-scrape. I also want flexibility, and I get that by not being over-automated. I can respond to customers' individual concerns, i.e. they can't get logged on to SL itself because SL itself isn't working, or they are in the hospital.

Anyway, here's today's offerings.

The Group and the Meta-Personality

I recently finally went over to join Plurk, which I don't like, because I saw such a flurry of people friending me on Plurk. It was odd. I'm not there, I haven't said anything, I have no presence - why are they friending me? I pictured my Plurk self, living this jolly life with people friending and fanning me and giving me "karma" points which they have there, but I was never there. I could have this entire fake Plurkian life and no one would be the wiser.

I don't like Plurk because it spreads out a time line which it thinks is being cool, but it is merely annoying. When I'm ready to tune into Twitter a few times a day, I read the "replies" and I read the sheets in front of me, as far back as "older" will go. And that's it. I'm not going to read it all day, nor do I need to see a time line all day. These services are wells you dip into, not streams you bath in 24/7. Otherwise they are time sucks. You get what you get.

Another thing I hate about Plurk (besides the dumb "karma" shit which is based more on using the service and having the game-god gift you with karma for doing stuff on the service than anybody actually liking *your content*) is the private groups. These are death. They are to the free Internet and death in general to the spirit in which the Web 2.0 has thrived -- openness and transparency and accountability. Enabling these little cliques that can shut themselves in merely means that like 6th grade girls, they talk about you, "telling lies/well that's no surprise". I managed to catch such a clique in action the other day with the usual suspects who stalk this blog: Dale Innis, Chestnut Rau, Harper Beresford, etc. etc. There are about a dozen of these giddy souls who post to each other all day long, replete with smilies and goofy song lyrics and breathless news of their partnerings and sobs over their de-partnerings and all kinds of hugzzz. They behave more infantile than teenagers do, because you expect more of adults. I always marvel that people behave in this cliquey and goofy way on line, but I suppose it's their coping mechanism for the stresses of revelation that the Internet itself brings, and the stresses of modern life that marginalizes and atomizes them.

Game God Makes Good on Avatar Rights!

I was surprised to get a beta invitation to Raph Koster's long-awaited Metaplace, and discover that the Terms of Service contained something that resembled the Bill of Rights (see text below the fold). Now that his news embargo is off as he himself has blogged on his new rights, I want to describe my experience. (Keep in mind that his world is still in beta and no doubt the Bill and TOS will continue to undergo changes).

I blinked and re-read it, and sure enough, it seems old Raph is making good on his promise of avatar rights, something he himself first articulated and tried to figure out how game gods could give.

I was immediately surprised that the "bill of rights" provided for freedom of *religious* expression, but qualified that such freedom should not be used to "disparage" other religions. His current redaction is "Peacefully represent their religious beliefs, but not to the exclusion or disparagement of others." Uh-oh. Raph may not realize that he has stumbled into the main free-speech debate in the UN these days, which is about "defamation of religions," or as many have described it, a "global blasphemy law".

This is the sort of thing the Organization of Islamic States insists upon to discourage criticism and caricature of Islam, such as seen with the Danish cartoons. Countries like Iran or even Russia can decide that merely participating in an unrecognized religious group (like Bahais, or Mormons) constitutes disparagement of the main state religion; there are many cases in countries like this where criticism of religious controls and punishment of non-believers is called "defamation" -- especially when state and religion are intertwined.

It was curious that he singled out *religious* expression, and not cultural, political, social, etc. But the simplier language elsewhere about "freedom of expression" in general would seem to cover that.

Of course, this distinct and separate problem around religion shouldn't detract from the overall marvel of having made a Bill of Rights in the first place.

LL Circling the Wagons

I swear I should hire myself out as a clairvoyant and Psychic Friend for something more than the $500 Lindens I pick up now and then to read the Magic Compass lol. This evening I had a very strong sense that the Lindens were about to do something big and bad. I think I even said this to a few friends, they are my witness. I even pulled up Robin Linden's profile to write something like, "Hey, my spidey sense tells me you're about to pull off some caper that's not going to be so good for us," but then I froze, couldn't type, had to crash out, and then got busy with house work and forgot about it until I looked in World of SL and saw some trackbacks.

Obviously, as we've been noting here and there in the blogosphere, the Lindens are circling the wagons again and calling it "better communication". Now Robin gets on the Blog and tells us why Bitter World is Better World.

o the forums are being outsourced -- hooray, you might say, if you are me, and have asked them to outsource them to a professional company for ages, because they can't moderate their special friends, especially the ones with NDAs. But oops, this big, impersonal, multilingual unnamed "group" that is going to just watch for misfiles and spams is more likely than not simply to delete lots of stuff that doesn't fit

o the blog comments are going to be...reworked. Rewired. They will be sent off to the forums if they are general topics, ostensibly because of the 150 limit, the wackiness of trying to follow such a long scroll without search, etc. But...the trend has already been to send such separate discussions to forums where the Linden who exiled them only pokes their head in now and then and then cuts off the comments anyway, by date, if not by number.

o there are to be subjects by "experts". But that's like constantly telling intellectuals in the capital that they have to go out and pick potatoes or sew the harvest and stop shirking work. That is, it drives people to seek only "socially useful content" like "how to make Windlight pretty pictures" or "how to weave a basket with sculpties" when what people want to talk about is "what's your plan for protecting our intellectual property?"

o there is now to be more Linden time for "a conversation," freed of rerouting, checking for spam or repeats and siphoning off expert stuff to experts. But...who will be holding this conversation? Katt Linden? So far, she really has had nothing interesting to say, but a lot of superficial hypey corporate things that are so content-free that they actually make you long for the high-octane overcheery vacuousness of Torley -- and that's saying something!

o nothing is said about delinking permabans on the forums with world permabans; nothing is said about vacating past permabans. Nothing. Ok, then. Without the former, the latter would be an empty gesture anyway.

Socialist Media or Media for the Public?

I've been amazed to see how CCP, the maker of Eve Online, simply, without a lot of angst or fuss or forums wars (as far as we can tell, anyway), organized a player governance council.

Imagine, this world that only has to deal with imaginary starships and skill-grinding and mining minerals (the spacebux aren't supposed to be sold outside the game, but of course are) can have a governance council of players brought to company headquarters to discuss features and help make decisions.

But we in our "not-a-game" of Second Life, where the spacebux can be legally cashed out for real dollars in far greater quantities than are made from blackmarket activity by Eve Online, don't get to have any presence in the Linden councils except through horribly stratified and controled FIC institutions like SL Views and AWG which are appointed, not elected by the resident base.

Live Journal, a blogging service that was purchased from the owners of this blog site I'm typing on by a Russian company SUP, also created a council of bloggers and experts -- and rapidly became involved in deep politics of social media you find all over these days (leftwing idealists like Danah Boyd and Lawrence Lessig want to retain free accounts -- which make for more furies if not for more furries -- and the Russian company, after first promising to keep the community as is, moved to eliminate the freeloaders and force people to pay for subscriptions. Good!

Then I read how Fred Wilson, a VC backer of Twitter, is getting "tired". Like Susan Wu, another VC backing Twitter, he's starting to get bored and restless -- and conscience-stricken -- about the inanity and frivoloty of Twitter, that is so far, despite signing up "the masses" and their enlightened avante garde like Robert Scoble or Steve Gillmor, have failed to save the world or make it a better place (the affluent California student day-tripping in Egypt got sprung from jail after twittering, but not his hapless local translator).

Well, that prompted me to write quite the letter to Fred Wilson on his blog, which I will cross post here:

Chilling the JIRA

I just got this "Notice of Disciplinary Action on the PJIRA" June 18th, and I have no idea what it's for. That is, none of my posts have been edited or removed. No Linden has said anything. I don't know whether the issued a whole bunch of these to everyone arguing now on the JIRA, or whether I'm singled out. If I'm singled out, that's pretty unfair, as there quite a few frequent-flyer asstards on the JIRA who behave outrageously. Tegg Bode, for example, is declaring me now to be a Russian, and as a Russian, prone to making isolationist proposals, i.e. I don't agree with the copyleftists. Is such ethnic hatred allowed on the JIRA? You have only to peruse through any of my proposals and see the numerous nasty, vicious, name-calling and hatred -- and I'll bet dollars to donuts none of those people have the slightest notice from LL.

I truly do not believe that I've said a single thing on the JIRA that warrants any disciplinary action under the TOS. I don't try to "skirt the TOS"; I just behave normally and say what I think. For anything you might try to claim as "actionable" about anything I've said, I could find you 10 other things that the opensource freaks said right above that which were left untouched.

It could also be Torley exacting revenge, he may have control of the discipline levers there, but I'm not sure, since I think it's Rob Linden's bailiwick.

I can only say what I said to Torley when he started harassing me for trying to make the meta issue truly meta: don't try to accomplish with bullying and threats of banning what you can't accomplish with reason.

I really wonder how the Lindens feel they can go on with this "project," as Khamon sort of scornfully calls it, without using the scientific method of an open society which involves questioning, criticizing, debating -- and yes, in a robust democracy with clashing politics, will involve calling names, and *that's ok*. How do they think they can do it? To use methods like lustrating posts or deleting posts or issuing ban warnings and then outright banning means that you cannot have a normal society where various visions of the truth and the issues as people see them are debated. You have that horrible sanitized world of Torley's "gladdiction" free of "mindjunk" and you have Solar Legion's nauseating collectivizing of all your thoughts, always looking over your shoulder not only for Big Brother, but to see if Little Brother, your fellow resident, approves of what you say or will inform on you.

I notice the Lindens never made good on their promise to lift the bans on the forums. That's not going to be their special announcement from their special guest at the Birthday, of course LOL.

Well, what is to be done? Don't burn down Party Committees; build your own. Oh! And...vote for this JIRA, which is about trying to force some accountability from the Lab and their little ARing fanboyz by at least making them indicate the "offensive speech" they are trying to fit under these arbitrary and overbroad definitions.

Good for Lindens on SLB5

Sorry, I'm going to continue to take the view here, unpopular with the soi-disant "thecommunity", that the Lindens are bungling the 5th Birthday. And I'm going to continue to say, "Good for Linden." At last they may be growing up, and fending off these sectarians and extremists who are constantly trying to hobble them and take over. As I've always said, it's great to have tolerance and rights and pluralism. But that's different than *promoting* minority groups exclusively and especially over the majority, and that's different than *clogging the public space with extremism*.

And true to form, these extremist and minority groups, like the kid avatars and Goreans, are proving why tolerance of them has to be very much conditioned on preventing them from taking over the public space, because if they are allowed to do so, clamouring for hegemony under the guise of rights, they will ensure that no mainstream perspective is shown, that other viewpoints are not provided space, and that there is desensitizing to the troublesome aspects of their extremist views. And that's of course what they're all about, pouting and stamping their feet if not threatening violence to get their way.

It seems Trinity Coulter has stepped down or been asked to leave from the SLB, and I can only applaud and say "Good". I have her on mute, after I saw her atrocious and manipulative behaviour on the LC Traffic List. Carl Metropolitan, who thinks she does good work, and I have a big disagreement on this, but I really loathe simpering little "peacemakers" with Gorean and Wiccan groups in their profile, who keep intruding with fake "conciliatory" messages to people strenuously disagreeing, basically with one aim: to put themselves in power. Anyone who has been struggling to take over SLB, which is a poisoned chalice of sorts, far from being someone "serving the community" is hoping to take power, prevail with their view, and use the occasion to lobby for special interests.

The mind boggles, if this is true, that at this stage any organizer or group would be fighting to put in builds showing a child, an adult, and a bed. They're out of their freaking little minds. This is not the norm, it is not appropriate, and it need not be promoted -- to scream about Congressman Kirk simply can't distract from the point that the overwhelming majority of people from the huge diversity of countries and cultures in SL simply find kid avatars creepy, for all the reasons I've discussed about the acting out of dysfunctions and traumas, and trying to "put one over" on the Lindens and smuggle in bed pictures or push the kid thing past the sell point is hugely inappropriate. I marvelled that the Lindens could put a Gorean in charge of this bash -- and while their public stumbling and backing and filling about this is going to give them a black eye in the PC "thecommunity" blogs, let them bravely soldier on to the finish here and portray the birthday as a PG, mainstream event that isn't hijacked by extremists and special interests.

Carl is also saying that "Tateru Nino is the only person who has ever organized a successful SLB". Well, that's again, the viewpoint of "thecommunity". I've found each and every one of the birthdays overwhelmingly a turnoff. Too FIC, too Burning Man, too much clogging up sims to stare at Lindens. Somebody suggested that residents should be encouraged just to make their town parades all over, and have the Linden principles visit them, instead of having 320 people alternatively crash off a 4-corner sim. Now's the time to be reviving Linden radio to tune in on any sim.

The Lindens are very reluctant to accept a real democratic governance role, serving the public interest, because they want to flee governance completely, and therefore they fall prey to hijackers of the left or right. But now that we can peer into the distance and see a world of multiple grids, many worlds, a Metaverse, perhaps the Lindens can rise to their historical challenge and govern with more wisdom -- hey, govern *period*. There is nothing wrong with governing. Governance is what creates civilization, which keeps possibilities open for everybody, rather than closing them off because of a parade of this or that special interest. Few foreigners understand that the much-cited First Amendment is restricted as to "time, place, and manner" by local ordinances, and that's ok. The Halloween gay parade doesn't get to parade around naked or with extreme sexual explicitness because children are also going about all that day. The "million man march" of a really only 50,000 rewarmed Black Panthers doesn't get to block rush-hour traffic on Time Square, but has to go to a park. The anti-globalization and anti-war demonstrators can march, but not right up to the Republican National Convention building so they don't interfere with the right of that party to its freedom of assembly, too. And so on. Balance, restrictions for the sake of providing space for all.

Touching Assets

This Zero Linden Office Hour meeting was supposed to be a celebration and chalk talk about Zha's "one small step for avatar" -- still held close to her chest because it has to be, oh, cleaned up and the OpenSim people have to sign off on it. Like I've been saying, this stuff isn't so...open....

But instead, because I was there quiet for most of the meeting but asking a few questions and carrying a pitchfork and the title "Angry Townsperson," it turned into a discussion of how to protect assets -- or asses, depending on how you view it.

It's fascinating piece of social history to see how the IBM people (Zha Ewry and Dale Innis) act as distinct from the Lindens, or worse, their pets. The IBMers have been corporate political types for long enough to know how to act in a public situation like that -- you keep patiently and soothingly affirming the basics -- that you care about some sensitive issue, even though, of course, we know you don't -- deeply. Nor do most of the people in the room -- if they make stuff, they give it away for free, and they constantly gloatingly remind you that if you can see it, you can copy it.

But not so Lindens, and their pets. Lindens aren't as trained in the corporate culture, not as professional, and therefore you see how Tess can't help sounding rueful about simply wanting to teleport over there to those other worlds to show it can be done, regardless of the larger consequences for IP, and she can't help sounding openly naive when she asks "how *will* you handle inventory, Zha?". Winsomely -- and tellingly! -- she tells you that the whole point to have interop is not to have walled gardens -- heedless of what the real meaning of a walled garden is for most people -- privacy and IP protection. (Note how I'm blasted as a FUDite for raising concerns about links to OpenSim, but goddamn, one of the tekkies is going to make sure he only goes there on an alt, because his credit card might show up emblazoned on his t-shirt...) Then Zero Linden just wants to let you know that he's been to the dentist and is about to go on a much-needed vacation and wants to be grumpy. Lindens are used to being bathed in glycerine at their every office hour, seldom of the nitro kind.