Second Thoughts

A Conversation With Michael Linden About the #Scourgemobile

Here's as far as I got querying Michael Linden about the #Scourgemobile as it has now been dubbed on Twitter by Holocluck and others:

 

[2011/06/11 17:30]  Prokofy Neva: Michael, the Linden roads are your domain, can't you do anything about the Scourgemobiles? You know, the AnneMarie Otoole cars and buses and boats on all the roads and even waterways and railways. And then this other character Yavanna Lllanfair who claimed to me her pods, which are just like AnneMarie's nuisances, are "Linden approved". Can't you develop a policy about these? Like ad farms? Even mitigate how *frequent* they are? They are just flying through the air everywhere and piling up and just a huge eyesore and nuisance. Why can't you act on them?!
[2011/06/11 17:30]  Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2011/06/13 14:35]  Michael Linden: (Saved Mon Jun 13 16:03:55 2011) The moles and I just build the roads, sorry.
[2011/06/13 14:35]  Michael Linden: (Saved Mon Jun 13 16:04:39 2011) Any change to the Terms of Service and Community Standards would have to come from the Governance and Community teams.
[2011/06/13 14:36]  Prokofy Neva: Can you hazard a guess as to whether sending unmanned scripted vehicles over Linden roads is a violation or not?

 

So, Michael is dodging this and "working to rule" like a good metaversal myrmidon. He doesn't answer my question.

And in fairness, he isn't in charge of G-team, or Governance/Crime Control any more, although he can sometimes intercept a pass, so to speak.

There supposedly isn't a G-team anymore, but really, there is, because if you approach Concierge, asking them to treat grief prims on your sim as a physics problem rather than a governance problem, they will tell you that you have to AR it and "governance" or even "g-team" will take it -- even though they don't exist any more.

The Lindens maintain this posture so that G-team doesn't acquire a visible head, like Harry Linden, or Michael Linden (who once held this position) because griefers then target that Linden all the time and harass him.

So what to do?

I think we have to have a demonstration. Who's in?

 And as I think of it, Michael cleverly *does* answer my question by implying that the nuisance vehicles *are* legal, and that making them illegal would require "a change to the TOS" (as RedZone did, remember). Hmm.

Creepy-Scary

I don't know anything more about this than Tateru Nino has posted, but it goes in the folder marked "Creepy-scary Things About Second Life". The Lindens have hired a former government official -- the White House operations chief to be precise -- to run their government liaison office.

Some people might find something counterintuitive about this. Why would these hippie Californians hire a Republican? Well, that shows how you don't understand hippie Californians. Hippie Californians, for one, can change to a Republican ticket in a heartbeat when they feel their interests warrant it (look at their Republican governor who was obviously elected by a majority).

But more to the point, the Lindens are all about a new version of the California Ideology which has a number of features in common with some forms of what are associated with Republic ideology. These would include Social Darwinism, promotion of state-like big business and strategic corporations and discouragement of small business, heavy ideological control of education (Democrats can be guilty of that, too). The Lindens want to build a platform that will change the world. They don't care what they might have to do to get there, and with whom they might have to ally, temporarily or permanently. They don't like abitrage, for example, which is a socialist or socially conservative aversion, but they have temporarily partnered with greedy land barons, as we are known, to accomplish their goals (I just happen to be reading now about German-funded Lenin in his sealed train returning to Petrograd lol).

If you are Operations chief of the White House, you know every major purchasing agent in town. You know who signs checks, which doors take the deliveries, who gets the vans moving and who is responsible for wheels up and wheels down. You know the people who *get things done* to make the machinery of government work, regardless of who is in power. You have to juggle an amazing amount of tasks, involving traffic, logistics, media, personalities, payroll, administration. Most likely the website and email tasks fell into your job description, too. I have no special knowledge of this, I'm just reasoning logically.

While presidents and vice presidents come and go, foreign and civil service people stay. Oh, sure, droves of political appointees fall out of the government offices into soft landings in corporations, law offices and NGOs, but they merely mark time there and keep in touch with all their buddies until they are back in power again. The Beltway is a belt, circulating the same things and people.

Thus, the fact that this guy worked for Dole, who is fabulously famous and popular especially due to his Viagra ads, and is Repubilcan, doesn't mean anything to the Lindens, because they understand what the word "Operations" and "White House" mean.

If you've ever gotten a government contract, you know that it is a daunting process, with many acronyms, pages, procedures, and people in various offices who must be contacted repeatedly. If you are lucky enough to get one, you need to hire an army of accountants just to monitor and report and handle the thing for all those offices, chewing up the budget considerably. Navigating your way through that welter of paper is tough, and if you want to go that route for funding, you have to staff up. That's what the Lindens have done. They are not going to be expecting Heather and Tiffany to keep buying islands in the 100 pack version forever, because they can't make a better world with Heather and Tiffany, but they can with Scott.

Dear Lindens, No, Don't Listen to the Communist Shill, Please

Bettina Tizzy is trying to get all her friends in the closed country-club Not Possible In Real Life as well as use high-visibility fora like Metanomics to flog an absolutely AWFUL idea: putting Creative Commons licenses in the Second Life viewer.

As I tried to post on her site: I totally oppose this idea as it encourages distribution of content for free, not payment of content creators and not protection of copyright laws in a context where copyright theft is rampant.

Creative Commons is a ruse -- a pretense of caring about copyright that actually merely weans creators from the idea that they should *charge for* their work. It makes the Internet an endless freebies barn, and only encourages the communist idea that everything should be for free, and people should work for free "for the good of the community".

You don't have to have a Creative Commons license to share something in Second Life; you just check off "copy" and "transfer" - a permissions system that was already ostensibly inspired by Lawrence Lessig -- although he is merely creating a vast subterfuge that is trying to undermine copyright and private property, in fact (and he's now left Creative Commons).

Proof of the lack of usefulness of the CC license for real people really trying to make a living (versus subsidized troupes of content makers subsidized by corporations) is that inworld, on Democracy Island, the CC license maker has virtually no users. It's just NOT needed.

Metanomics Fueled by Ad Extortionists and Data Scrapers

Looking over Metanomics latest sponsors (and noticing how Cisco departed when Christian Renaud departed from Cisco evidently), I saw their "primary sponsor" is now Simuality. I tried to recall where I had seen that name, and the name of their CEO, Antony van Zyl, before, and reading down into the fine print, there it was: he has started the SLIPPcat ad system in Second Life. (Dusan has a good write-up here about SLIPPCat).

Ugh, ugh, ugh. And that in turn is what is fueling two of the most notorious ad extortionist and viewjackers of Second Life, Chrischun Fassbinder (Mr. Lee's Hong Kong) and Ancient Shriner, ad-farming Masons and failed Coldwell Banker reps in SL who still continue to blight the land with big, ugly viewjacking commercial towers.

For years, Chrischun was a low-life ad extortionist, notorious for his "Mr. Lee's Hong Kong" ads with fake broken Chinese slogans, based on the character in "Snowcrash" and just as rapacious and cut-throat within SL. After putting out ugly towers, usually only advertising his own freebies or crappy Internet sites selling gimmicks, he would set the price of the little 16 m2 parcel to a $9985, which I guess he had found to be the "optimal" point at which he could get people to "buy back the view". Many did. He could afford to literally wait years for some people to do this -- sometimes innocently, not realizing they were fueling an evil empire.

I've had him all over, and in vain ever gotten him to leave. I have had him in Patagonia by the roadside for close to three years now, since the sim's birth. I continue to be puzzled how he was able to get ahold of that little piece -- for a time some of us were convinced they had some sort of script that was able to seize even snippets of Governor Linden roadside protected land, because it was such a mystery. Somehow, two or three of the extortionists seized these little parcels; one remains to this day with his land set to $8000 for a 64 m2, impervious to abuse reports, and the other is the giant ugly gleaming tower of the current ad network -- which has only gotten bigger and more blighty.

Oh, it isn't for sale anymore since the Lindens' new policy, and that's supposed to make it "better" -- in fact, it is merely a cunning malicious duck under the radar. I used to think a reasonable policy was to have ads go roadside, but lately, I've wondered about whether that is reasonable, given that they hijack the view in nice residential areas -- often cunningly claiming that the areas are "turning" commercial because there is one store there -- which is often there in the first place because the ad blight showed up and the residential owners were forced to move.

Patagonia is a beautiful, nicely landscaped atoll sim, and remains beautiful despite being blighted by two main factors -- Chrischun's ad tower, and the evil csven Concord's persistently nasty big black box, which sometimes hides scripted scraper objects it, surrounded by ban lines against me, where he never comes, never works, never sells anything, never does anything but spite me and everyone else on that sim. It takes a special kind of nastyness to do that sort of thing -- and remains as a testimonial.

But there's something else I realized about these ad towers of the two Masons -- I hadn't thought of before: not only do they hijack the view, they hijack eyeballs that other people deliver on land they tier.

i-World, Not Your World, Not My World

So I went to the i-World fandango yesterday -- and I didn't even have to break my vow to be Done With the Lindens because there wasn't a Linden in sight for hours on this 24-hour rock concert -- they put some select residents up to minding it.

The acts all seemed to be great -- there were old friends like KaClick and Frogg and Jaycatt, and also some new people I hadn't heard who were great -- a Scottish singer named POL, shown here bravely getting his boots wet in Linden water...oops, that's just my lousy SL on Windlight.

There were the usual girls demonstrating with FIX SL signs, it was a lag-o-than. Lots of bitching on the forums, to the effect of, why don't you fix our game instead of putting in these lame events?! And the fanboyz who say, but Lindens shouldn't have to work on weekends lol.

I find it increasingly hard to go to the live music acts these days because of this:

Watching the Detectives

Green dots half hour into the show.

The stars came out tonight in Second Life, it was exciting to watch the green dots blink on, first on one CSINY island, then on a second, a third, a 100th, a 420th. The figure was finally released -- there were said to be 416 sims, although 420 claimed by Sheep insiders.

But the numbers of people on those sims, for the three hours I watched them before, during, and after the CSINY show, couldn't have beat 5,000 concomittant, and no more than 20,000 max total arrivals. In fact, it's probably far lower. Of the 420 islands, there were no more than 2-10 people on any given island in those 3 hours. There were 35-70 people piled up constantly on 3 of the big Orientation Islands, but they weren't getting off.

I was also getting newbies at the regular infohubs, including in Ross, where several furries, dancers, Philip-clones said they were CSI newbies and then began struggling to walk or fly. I redirected them out to the clue sims but they weren't terribly keen to go there -- these were the people that typically like to get OFF an OI they've been forced ON.

So if a million viewers was supposed to make 30,000 log on, it didn't work. I don't know what number they'd use to declare success. There weren't more than 4,000 people on these sims, sorry. I was only rooting for them to succeed, while heavily critical of the Sheep's crippling of the worldview through the browser with SEARCH ALL. Still, like many of us, I'm asking the same thing the detective asked when his partner in CSI on the TV show said that people make businesses in SL. "Why?!"

/Fail

"Now shall we see/if power change purpose/what our seemers, be." The Duke, in "Measure for Measure".

It's something like the phenomenon whereby debtor nations force concessions out of their creditors because they have them over a barrel. Renowned virtual world economist Ted Castronova is allowed to fail big, when he blows through a $240,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and doesn't get his much-ballyhooed "Arden," a Shakespearean world, up and running for the public (or even for designated users), and declares it stalled/failed. He ends up only with sympathy and congraultations -- and a self-justifying, pugnatious rebuttal to even mild criticisms. All he can say is that he should have made this grad students on the project more into slaves and run the project like a despot.

Huh? So little critical review of this fiasco, which few outside the charmed game circle of the Ludiumites got to see, and so much fanboyzing. Benjamin Sycophanske was lined up among the first to kiss ass -- here's a post that is unlikely to get past his ban-hammer of me on his blog:

1. Sycophanske says the Annointed One never really had very much cash with a quarter million anyway -- why, that's not enough to pay the code monkeys. But...this wasn't a VC angel, but a grant-giving foundation. Big difference. That hurts, in a program line in a budget at a philanthropic institution that won't be able to gin that up again. And that makes it very hard to go to the well again not only for Castronova but any academic like him trying to do research in this field.

2. I haven't seen academics burn through grants that size -- and keep getting them -- and get tenure. Sorry, that's no excuse. It's a big grant, it could have been "crowdsourced" more and wasn't, and the students related to this project based at a university presumably wouldn't cost as much as a "code-savvy project-manager type". Ted's response: "In future work I will subscribe to the Lee Sheldon Fascistic Theory of Managing Creative Projects, which, if I my improvise, is to tell your volunteers and employees to be slaves or be gone." Um, that's not necessary -- this sounds like a personality problem, not even a management problem.

3. If the project had been about, "make a game to help people learn Shakespeare," that would be one thing. But it was "make a world to study virtual economies". So...why wasn't an existing platform like Second Life used? Especially given that Castronova went to Neverwinter Nights in the end..

If game-gods think it's all good because an academic whom they're willing to forgive learned humility about world-building, that doesn't justify the cost for such an expensive experiment.

Even Tony Walsh, while being more candid than any other blogger that the Emperor Has No Clothes, made a post that sounded like a clap on the shoulder at the old boys' club. "I really don't mean to kick the dude in the nuts, but holy crap, Ted, given everything you know about synthetic worlds, what made you think building one from scratch wouldn't be so hard?"

Um, Tony then hawks himself as a consultant in the future for projects like that.

/Fail

Creator Fascism

After a hiatus from the Second Life Herald where I really do not wish to post anymore as a "Junior Author," I thought it would be interesting to shake things up and post a piece from SLCC about Philip's transformation into a concerned customer-service rep. This post came after a long talk with Urizenus inworld, where he kept urging me to post, and said the Herald wasn't as interesting "because he and I weren't posting". Right. I guess bukakke is as interesting as it gets, and poor Uri was reduced to recycling the chapter from his Pirates book AGAIN (I am so embarassed). So, wracked with pity, I went to post at the Herald, knowing full well that the predictable gaggle of junkyard dogs would foregather to chew on the bones, that Artemis Fate could reliably be counted upon to be an arrant bitch and that all those "Anonymouses" and "Realities" and "GetALifes" would show up and bark and bite. Which they did.

Pixeleen published that piece promptly -- but this new Junior Author crap doesn't enable you to post a photo and its credit alongside it. I had sent her an email (and also Uri) with the photos and the credit lines, and somehow she ignored them. I sent another one, saying it had posted without the credit, please put it up. She ignored it. I reached her inworld, sent her an IM, urging her to put the credit -- I know how anal people get about their credits. She didn't reply. She's tied up always in RL and SL, gets up early, goes to work, is too busy, and it sits there for 12 hours. I finally post the credit in the comments, and praise Tarah Oh of Ugotrade for the interesting interview.

SheepBS

The wires are all a-twitter with the announcement in the wee hours today of a new "strategic alliance" formed between CBS, that staggering old-media dinosaur, and the Electric Sheep Company, still wobbling on its lamb limbs. What's in it for the little people?

I'm guessing they *aren't* going to call the project "SheepBS," but it's indicative of the world in which we live that I didn't feel as if I could put a title like that on a blog at the Herald without fearing Walker, whose own blog is sponsored by the ESC, would pull the plug on me.

The news of the $7 million infusion from CBS for our favourite FIC sherpa company isn't really all that surprising. After all, they had contracts with the L-word and Star-Trek, and the CBS guy seemed to be gushingly in love with them. And small wonder, because the Sheep deliver the dream to people who otherwise would still be stuck in appearance mode and getting their asses caged in the Welcome Area.

I know the Sheep have been hiring like crazy, and few people realize how many regulars at SL have been sucked up by the Sheep Borg -- Torrid Midnight has essentially now left the nasty, back-biting world of SL fashion and now works as an events manager for the Sheep; SnoopyB Zamboni who used to be a futurist for a think-tank called Accelerating Foundation is now the futurist-in-residence at the Sheep; look on the web pages and you'll see lots more, some hired from real, some from Second. They're going to be moving into a big loft in Brooklyn and it will probably be a cool, happening sort of place.