Second Thoughts

The Tragedy of the Commons: A History of Protest in Second Life in Five Acts

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Come to my SL20B Exhibit! There are more than a dozen freebies, many of them historic artifacts!

Among the rules for exhibitors at the SL birthdays -- which have grown more strict in recent years -- aside from the ban on commerce, tip jars, your company logo (!), etc., there is this:

*10. You may not use or display hate-oriented content at your SL20B build. Political affiliations, statements or content of any kind are not appropriate for the Birthday. The Second Life Birthday event is a place to celebrate the anniversary of Second Life and display creative endeavors by Residents. If you are not sure if something falls into these categories, contact a Mole Coordinator. You may not display content that expresses a political opinion or would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups or Second Life. Any content that is deemed offensive, harassing, insulting or bullying will be removed, and the owner will be removed from the event. This will be determined by the staff of SL20B at their discretion. Their decisions are final.

As we know from the SL forums, the notion of "hate-oriented content" or content that "would defame, ridicule or disparage other residents or groups" are tremendously overbroad concepts and certainly don't pass muster for US First Amendent jurisprudence, and for that matter, even Art. 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a private corporation, Linden Lab is not required to supply First-Amendment level free speech, so and here we all are.

I view this as merely an interesting, challenging writing assignment to see if you can apply "the View from Nowhere" -- so hated in particular by leftist media critics like Jay Rosen. I feel such a "nowhere view" is actually a good thing when it consists of layered perspectives so that the reader can form their own judgement. In the old days, the New York Times would typically have a "nut graph" or a graph early in the story providing, say, five perspectives of an event. There would be the perpetrators, the victims, the bystanders, the experts, the government officials and so on. Reporters have given up investigating these perspectives; worse, they delegitimize many of them. 

I don't pretend to any full history of SL or even full (or especially unbiased) account of the events of protest in SL. But I was a witness of many of them and I think I can bring more information to the table. 

Why do I write such long posts? Because I think out loud and write as I go. You're not required to read them and can skim. This essay is broken up into 18 vignettes in world -- several cover one event or topic in two notecards, so the "vignettes" are not so distinct. Due to health issues, I hardly had any time to do this build and notecards and nearly dropped out. But I did want to be present for the historic SL20B and get this topic passed and validated. If you go to Tapestry of Time, or read the official 20th anniversary commemoration booklet, you realize the Lindens tend to reify certain events in their own corporate history (the "Prim Tax Revolt" is always worshipped as much as the "Boston Tea Party" in RL American history and simulates it, right down to crates of tea thrown into the ocean). They also tend to focus not on social developments that drive their software revisions, but technical issues -- now we have sculpties; now we have mesh; oh, there's a shiny, PBR, oh now we can finally link prims 64 meters apart from each other (which means you can put walls on a sky platform that size and link them finally).

Protests about how software affects organic people manifesting as avatars? Not so much.

That is one "use case"; there is another "edge case"; there is a "bug" or a "feature". The software-driven life, not based on any kinds of laws of nature or natural law or organic values,  which we have all lived thoroughly for 20 years has now invaded all of modern life in developed countries and will only become all-pervasive.

The recent fumblings by Meta (Facebook) and others with what purported to be "the dawn of the Metaverse" (which we know dawned in 2003 and had conferences and white papers by 2006!) and the reiteration of the wheel lets us know that we still don't have the necessary attention we deserve!

THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS: A HISTORY OF PROTEST IN SECOND LIFE IN FIVE ACTS

Welcome

Welcome to my exhibit for SL20B! I'm still a newbie at almost 19 years in SL now, but over the last two decades, I have done a lot of thinking about this glorious virtual Experiment in International Living which we have on these fair servers, and the lessons we can pass on to the new legless and blind Metaverse Engineers: leave in everything below the waist, keep the TVs off your nose and the boxes off your head, and zone, zone, zone.

Much of the stress and strife of virtual worlds and the cost in staff time and trouble in customer tickets can be boiled down to the Tragedy of the Commons. Read up on this concept if you haven't heard of it, but if you have been in SL for even 30 days, you've already lived it in the round.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

The Second Life grid represented as the paddocked green pastures of the islands and homesteads; the gated communities of Bellisseria; and the wild mainland where large eyesore builds, grid-wide transportation games, enormous RP castles, etc. contest for the view, amid clumps of wildflowers and manicured lawns.

Few remember now how the Electric Sheep company, one of the "Big Six" resident developers or "solutions providers" for outside RL companies in SL, managed to tag every single item in SL and then organize a global search around it, which led to an uproar as people's casual sale items left to $0 for their friends or their adult furniture was suddenly thrust into the public eye. Eventually, this led to an object menu section where you can check off "show in search," an item that is generally irrelevant now (does Firestorm's Area Search even require it?)

Many of the protests that developed in SL over the years related to the ruination of the virtual experience of the many by the few, and the effort by the platform providers to provide the maximum freedom of creativity to grow the world, but not yield to forces bent on destroying it to fulfill the whims of the few.

Within a few years of its founding, Second Life was forced to abandon the dream of harmonious civic life on a contiguous mainland and offer private islands for people to get away from each other, represented by the sheep paddock here, and give in to strenuous customer demand for planned communities with more rules and predictable content, which began with Brown and Boardman and continued to Bellisseria and similar Linden Home communities.

As in RL, citizen protest emerges against rules and against other citizens' groups with the dominant theme that Second Life is "not a country" (although founder Philip Rosedale said he was making one -- and did, whether recognized or not). It doesn't have the features of real-life liberal democracies or for that matter rigid authoritarian regimes but is a private company with a Terms of Service. We already live in the Customer Service State predicted by games theory thinker Edward Castronova (Escape to the Virtual World - 2008).

Yet there can never be enough staff time to address all the complaints accruing in a place where hell is other people - in 3D, streaming, and where even the most attentive and dedicated customer servants could please everybody. And so the "game" that has emerged throughout the years is to get enough attention to one's recipe for happiness and have the TOS amended in this or that direction. Some redactions occurred internally; others were a result of external pressure, whether by small groups or fare more rarely, by mass movements (which are almost impossible to form in SL for lots of reasons).

I have made 18 vignettes somewhat arbitrarily that illustrates this process; some deal with specific events in time, and others deal with chronic themes over the years.

History is written by the victors. And Mainland rentals agents are not the victors in this game. So this is understandably a dissident history, and features moments you may never have heard of, such as this: did you know that in 2004, you could be voted off your group land which you purchased on the auction and paid tier on regularly, by tenants who paid no tier? Did you know one resident company asked for an obtained a box on objects "show in search" to be able to search the entire grid and harvest the search results for their use? This feature remains today on object menus, largely unused or not understood. Did you know there was once a volunteers' group with 8000 residents in it who met in an enormous Greco-Roman palace?

Naturally some events have been left out and if you think of any that you believe should be included, ,leave a notecard in the Complaint Rockets to the right in the Better Living Through Land Impact room.

Be sure to pick up all the interesting historical freebies or art works, vote early and often on all your alts, and leave your actual signed notecard in the mailbox to bring back the Pony in the Welcome Area -- or any other feature request!

We find the drinks we offer from Kittykat Ninetail's "THIS IS MINE" dragon are perfect for reflecting on everything related to the cry of many a resident down through the years: "I get to do WTF I want on my land" -- and the consequences for us all. And you should sample beverages offered at further stations to bolster your stamina in considering SL's rich history, only a slice of which I am able to give here. If you remember these events differently -- write your own history!

I am grateful to my dear friend Alazarin Mondrian/Alazarin Mobius for helping me with the build and providing signage and props. Also special recognition of Bump Squeegee and Silas Merlin for their art works displayed here.

Happy SL20B!

Prokofy Neva, Curator

Content and Discontent, Richness and Sadness

Prelude
Content/Discontent

The entire history of massive online role-play games, virtual worlds, social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence could be summed up in this phrase:

Content/Discontent

Game gods, virtual world devs, social media entrepreneurs, VR devs and our newflangled "prompt engineers" all face the same dilemma:

They make a thing.
Some people like it; some don't, they vote with their feet.
They let people make a thing; some people don't like it, they leave (and you can't have their stuff)
They make a thing -- some people "take it to real," as the kids say, in RL courtrooms.
They don't make a thing -- people complain.
They make a thing -- people burn through it and want more.
They make a thing -- users break it.

You get the idea.

Lindens make a gorgeous virtual, contiguous world with a sun that rises and sets, a moon, trees, grass, flowers, and like God on the 6th day, they made fugly but serviceable avatars, and then doubled back later and put in fish.

The didn't have to make animals because Sion Zaius entered our world and created the sion chicken, whose food inworld is now literally running out because Sion had to go back to college. Content/Discontent.

The content which the Lindens enabled with their inworld building tools and permission for outworld uploads of textures, sounds, and later mesh, is rich, ornate, as intricate as Maru Kado's Kasamawashi animesh cat here.

But people have poor graphic cards; they experience lag; stuff breaks; *they* break it -- and, as Wallace Stevens says in "Gubbinal":

"The world is ugly and the people are sad."

They sit in the Sad Chair, they talk to their Sad Little Friend the Cloud, they do Sad Things that make more sadness.

Their loudest complaint is:

"This isn't like RL."

Linden Lab refuses to get involved in inter-resident disputes and prohibits the naming of names on the forums.

But if anyone, Linden or resident, makes rules for compatible living, someone is sure to feel too constrained and bark:

"This is TOO MUCH like RL."

Linden Lab has rules based on RL jurisdictions, prohibiting the crimes of gambling, fraud, child pornography etc -- none of which is sanitized by being virtualized.

Everyone finds their way across the thin line between Content and Discontent, or they don't find the thin line between Sanity or Insanity.

***

Act 1, Scene 1
Prim Hoarders

Every virtual schoolchild knows the glorious history of the Prim Tax Revolt, spoken of in reverent tones and told and retold to a high polish.

The reality is, some of the instigators were Linden alts, so it was one set of Lindens against another set of Lindens on a policy issue, with some residents getting involved.

Yes, wasn't it terrible, like some horrid oligarchic Scrooge, to charge people by the prim??? Gosh, that sounds like some rental agents we know!

But before there was the Prim Tax and the Prim Tax Revolt, there was another thing that is instructive to know about in terms of our Tragedy of the Commons, and that is: Prim Hoarding.

So in the old days, people would get a parcel of land, and because the prims could be accessed like a vast well on that sim for all (as they can in grouped land on Mainland rentals! Imagine!), some people would build huge, complex, and not necessarily beautiful builds. Although there are some fabulous old builds like the Cathedral in Mocha not to mention the wondrous Linden builds like the Moth Temple.

And some people who weren't particularly talented but thought that some day, they might want to build something or hire a builder, would stash hoards of prims under the ground to use them up -- a kind of prim-soaker. Of the type we had to keep in some sims (the Estonian Embassy in SL's cornflower crown was good for this purpose) to that *griefers* wouldn't fill the sim with griefcubes which used to make people's prims return to their inventories.

So people just rezzed out a bunch of cubes or some high-prim item -- and in those days, there was no "Convex," no no no.

So quite reasonably to deter that behaviour, which good will and good neighbourliness couldn't stop, the Lindens decided to charge by the prim. Then people, especially prim hoarders, rebelled.

Then they charged by the *meter* and made the number of prims per meter standard.

Progress.

So while there were many Lessons Learned and imposed, such as "be clear on your protest goals" or "use humour" or "be willing to compromise," there was another darker, force at work, which we already explained was Content/Discontent, and that is the Law of Virtuality -- somebody is always making a thing, and somebody else doesn't like that thing, or wants to hog resources to themselves, and prevent others from having them.

In RL, there is "tort law" and laws about "attractive nuisances" and "zoning" but in SL, we have meters and standard number of prims -- or land impact as they are now known (virtually the same).

Be grateful.

***

Act 1, Scene 2
Magic Wand vs. Griefcube

After the Lindens rested on the 7th day, their residents got to work building out the world, in some ways worse -- much worse -- and some ways better, but that was the plan, and we all know that God loves us and has a plan for us, don't we?

So somewhere along here in the early days there was a wondrous magician named Starax who made an amazing wand. This wand, when clicked, could produce all kinds of things from detailed, anatomically correct Vertu Cows to goldfish and lions and horses (and we don't really know because we're newbies, and missed that early chapter but someone will catch us up.)

So these items would come out of the wand at a clip and replicate across a sim. They were on temp rez, so it didn't seem like such a big deal.

Meanwhile, less creative sorts who read the Something Awful forums, and later 4chan, thought it would be fun to go around and find items that people had rezzed out from the Linden Library, such as Philip's Party hat, which the Lindens had thoughtfully left on all perms to help people "share" and "create". (Now they've gone in the opposite direction and put things on no transfer which is a shame, but you'll see why in a minute.)

So not before long, sims would be regularly deluged with self-replicating cubes, often with horrendously ugly, vulgar, and illegal images on them, and typically with some nonsense being spouted and sometimes numbered prims announcing their births rapidly in chat. Often, this would crash a sim, if some other sim crashing device wasn't used.

And the beauty part? As they had originated from an individual resident's library, and then been seized because they were pre-checked on "share" and all perms, they could now look as if they were grief objects made by that prim creator, who was then vilified and AR'd as a griefer, instead of the victim of a griefer. That's why you always need to look at the prim *owner* or deployer in a grief attack.

These mass attacks would occur particularly during public events, like the goodbye party for Robin Linden, an early VP. Or during a town hall. Philip got so mad once he threatened to call the FBI. The entire grid would be shut down sometimes for days at a time -- essentially, this was a DDoS attack, with zero-day exploits.

Lindens scampered around trying to patch exploits and built what they called a "grey goo fence" which stopped self-replicating prims at least from crossing borders, or replicating as fast...or something -- get Andrew Linden to tell you if you can find him (he is no longer on staff).

But that nerfed Starax's Wand and a great outcry went up on the forums and in the land. Now, the forums are typically read in any game or world by less than 5% of the user population, but still, it Had an Effect, which is always the goal. It seemd Starax's Wand could still work, in a way, but by then, Starax had stomped out of the world. Of course, he was later to appear on an alt and work for one of the big RL developers but not everyone remembers that part. There was even a little Starax museum in Patagonia which we helped to keep free of weeds and Starax himself apparently came to it.

We can't represent all the forms of griefing here which are myriad and diverse and wondrous, even more than Starax's wand, or the Mysti-Tool, or Alazarin's 600-prim castles or anc's friedberry gatchas, my personal favourite. Because if we represented them, we'd be banned here. So take it on faith -- griefers wrecked havoc for at least 5 solid years before the worst of them either were finally banned or grew up in RL and got jobs at Intel and other virtual world competitors-- which maybe this was what it was all about all along.

Some people weren't affected by griefing and never thought it was a big deal; others experienced it daily and filed ARs that went nowhere for years on end. There was a strange drama of "allowing creativity" and "complying with TOS 2(c)" -- a now removed section of the TOS which we personally found useful which went something like this "interfering with the enjoyment of Second Life by other residents."

There is much that is overbroad in the TOS and some found that particular clause overbroad, but it fits. The Golden Rule still works pretty well as an organic norm often hard to enforce in code.

Griefing -- more than high cost, lag, curbs on lifestyles, etc. -- has likely caused more protest than any other thing in SL, but only the Lindens know how the ARs are trending as they no longer publish their partial Police Blotter which was helpful.

Enhancement of the land tools -- which we couldn't fit in to this exhibit -- helped control the experience more and more for residents -- they could turn off fly to prevent griefer swarms, although this also prevents much of the thrill of SL as the avian creatures we are. They can turn off scripts for "everyone" and only enable "group" to run them, which can be closed. And so on.

If working the land controls isn't enough, a newer sort of Linden now with names like Governance4 Linden tell you to file ARs accurately and in detail and they will have an effect.

Everyone knows ARs seldom work, but the workarounds that evolved to fill this gap -- various resident vigilante groups -- can be worse -- and again, space and time did not allow us to enlarge on that topic which in SL terms, is actually an interesting prequel to the Edward Snowden story.

Remember: if you are ever cage-bombed, the trick is just to sit on anything or be animated by any object.

***

Act 1, Scene 3
Griefer U

The visible or physical destruction of griefers is one topic, but there are myriad forms of other types of griefing -- ranging from briefly amusing chat to repetitive spam to annoying catcalls to actionable hate speech and more.

And there are all kinds of tricks and fakes and maneuvers especially making extensive use of the affordances of alts and the ability to fly (which is why "fly" is turned off in so many places.)

One might say that while SL is a place of enormous creativity where many have found friends and even soul mates for life, it is also a place offering incredible opportunities to inflict pain on other human beings.

There are certain extremist scholars who view offenses against RL social norms and corporate terms of service as merely "transgressive" or "ludic" or "neuro-atypical" and fascinating subjects of study to be encouraged and kept free of condemnation. But the people who live in virtual worlds tend to realize at some level that if there is something you are doing that you wouldn't do in your grandmother's living room, maybe you shouldn't be doing it, or at least not in public.

Is griefing a legitimate form of protest or merely another form of crime? We're going to go with Door No. 2. If you want to oppose The Man and knock over the twin towers as "satire," do it on your own sim at least. But you don't have a sim, do you? Or even a micro-parcel. So that's why you're griefing in a sandbox, eh?

Sometimes these behaviours are blessed as "emergent" by the platform providers who, after all, never forget that they are a Lab and we are all in an experiment.

Other times, they are allowed for a while -- sometimes years -- and then disallowed suddenly, and we don't always know why.

Extraordinary feats of kindness and self-sacrifice have been made on this grid along with extraordinary feats of cruelty -- but if you gave your log-on to someone else, that's on you. Protest as you will, LL doesn't get involved. And so on. The line is drawn clearly there.

Elsewhere, as a one-time VP at LL asked pointedly about the activity possible on a 16 m microparcel: "What are you doing on there, your knitting?"

Make a parade of alts to spy on or harass a lover who rejected you -- likely you'll be able to get away with it although in theory, this can be grounds for action. There isn't any limit on the number of basic or premium accounts any more "as long as they are not used for ill" as a top Linden explained -- but this has to be tested through the AR process by others.

One thing is certain, this Road to Hell is paved with the good intention of Encouraging Creativity.

The RL effigies of myself allowed to proliferate on my virtual lawns for years on end and the packs of Soviet palaces and Stalinist regalia were creative, I suppose -- prim sculpture really is a wonder and a lost art, at that, nowadays! But if the sacred pledge of virtual world makers to their denizens -- that if it is not on the profile inworld, it is not fair game -- is to retain its glory, then it has to stick for everybody, not just people you like.

Then on a separate but related topic, I personally wonder if art requiring virtual platforms and artificial intelligence can rightfully be called "art" in the full sense and I prefer to call it "artifacturing" when it comes to MidJourney although I concede that the creations of SL are far more like RL creations.

Trust me, I am unable to keep my hand and eye straight long enough to paint anything remotely like this Blue Owl on Porcelain Cup and I even manged to flunk art class in High School.

And I'm not so sure of the meaning of this Blue Owl which I personally didn't make at all but merely "prompted" to be scraped from the chaos of images on the Internet like the bits of chainsawed books in "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinges in a strange future library which were glued back together virtually!

In fact, somebody who can actually make a nice little Blue Owl like Dalriada Delwood of MOoH! is much the greater artist.

But even she may have gone on the Internet to get ideas because haven't we all?

Still, it's hard to imagine why even the mundane creativity of norms living in little houses on the hillside with picket fences and decorating with the top Coastal Grandma decorators of Happy Weekends had to die for Plastic Duck. You know?

Yet all of us had to have a little bit of them die in order that Plastic Duck live -- although have you noticed he hasn't been around for ages?

At a certain point when the drive to allow creativity out of some socialist ideological fervour or technolibertarian fever dream crashes on the reality of user attrition and less sales of regions and more abandoned land, the Lindens do act. Protest works.

It just takes a long time.

And I think in the long, run, we'd all rather have our legs. PS our eyes free to look at RL along with SL at the same time.

***

Act 1, Scene 4
Ad Farmers

As long as there has been land enabled for sale in SL, there have been extortionists finding ways to get people to "buy back the view" -- or even buy passage out of their own property without ban lines.

Ad farmers buy up cheap parcels and cut them into small pieces and then put an outrageous price on it to encourage people near the land -- which may sprout spinning cubes, laggy cubes, large billboards that encroach elsewhere, etc. -- to "buy back the view."

Few remember how these micro-parcels first appeared, unless they were born during the early years when "First Land" was available -- and they clicked the wrong button on the land menu.

: (

If you clicked "abandon" by intention or mistake, your land would fall into 16 m2 parcels -- that means 32 individual 16m parcels which rapidly fell prey to swift or bot-deploying land barons who bought them for $16 meter before you could scarcely gather your wits. Well, you'll be sure not to do THAT again -- except you might, again, by mistake, on another account, or comfort a friend who fell prey to the same insanity. That is why among the reforms to the land tools were "scare screens" with "Do you really want to abandon your land?" -- and then this fall-into-pieces system was retired and the full lot would abandon intact.

The theory of the insta-chop-up was that your neighbours, all being people of good will, would only take what they needed for extra prims -- why there might be several cheerful souls right on your sim who would take the few prims each, leaving it for others to take as needed, like a pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, right?

Except like a lot of things in SL, it didn't work that way until many years later, bots were banned for use in land purchases -- although the amazing speed at which certain barons show up at your elbow if you mistakingly click "anyone" when attempting to put land to sale to yourself or another person.

But to back up a bit, we spent many years -- from about 2004-2008 or four long years -- protesting the land extortion racket to the Lindens and trying to get them to adopt a policy about it.

This wasn't easy, because there were many legitimate uses of microparcels -- some people made maps, or surveyed the grid, or monitored which sims were sharing which server (contiguous land is not necessarily on the same server) or provided freebies for new residents or created various types of stations for RP games. The Lindens couldn't investigate every 16 m2 parcel and ARs were not always made in good faith as the AR system itself was always wielded in various internecine resident group wars.

Even so, it was pretty clear if you followed the money and followed the alts, which tended to have to be in the same groups and tended to win the same auctions -- which in the old days, helpfully showed the name of the avatar who won the auction.

Several groups sprang up to try to rescue abandoned land in tiny amounts and put trees or seating on it like mini-parks, or AR'd ad cutters and urged people not to buy the microplots and feed the madness.

Eventually after many meetings with Lindens, various townhalls, blogs, petitions and even a "Zoo of Ad Farmers" with the hope that "name and shame" might work (it seldom does in anonymous virtual worlds), the Lindens devised a policy where ad parcels had to be limited to one per sim, and the signs put on them could not be obtrusive or encroaching.

The problem is that some land barons bought up microparcels and re-rented or re-sold them and didn't always police their tenants; there are always those bold enough to park a giant billboard like the one shown here and root it on a 16 m2 to make it sit over Linden road shoulder. So it's an endless maintenance chore.

The ad farm situation is better than it used to be 10 or 15 years ago, but it is still a major maintenance and AR chore for both Lindens and land owners. There are ALWAYS edge-casers. There are even some who deploy the famous "Good Neighbour" kiosk with rules to live by many agree on to keep sims looking nice -- and use them to force people away from their land.

Island dealers could only gleefully follow the sufferings of Mainland dealers and deploy their own billboards, "Want to Get Away from Mainland Blight? Come to the Islands!" which only added to the problem.

Our own view is that only preventing land under 128 m2 from selling to anyone but its owner to change its group (or not at all) along with a managed, networked, tasteful Linden-owned ad system on roadsides and in infohubs and welcome areas (as there used to be) will fix this problem by replacing what drives it: the demand for advertising that can reach eyeballs, in a world where there always is too much bad advertising and not enough good advertising reaching people who can make use of it. Lindens shy away from billboard blight, but their own Mole billboards used as teleporter boards or other signage let us know they can make fun or even beautiful billboards and sell the ad space on them to residents.

Along the way might come a total ban on all resident roadside advertising, because Lindens prefer to use code-as-law rather than organic policy to solve problems because they can't eat up staff time. It really is a dilemma for the most well-intentioned.

Lindens also devised a policy some years ago that land under 96 m2 cannot show up in search. This prevented the use of microparcels to game traffic, by creating dozens of them at a venue and skewing search results.

Residents trying to maintain their properties are also vexed by giant air towers, spires, spinning orbs, and all kinds of junk deployed even on land not for sale -- for reasons that often escape passers-by. Lindens will sometimes act if there is a cluster of these nuisance towers, but given that their policy is about *advertising* or *sale* of land, just putting up a giant nuisance tower worthy of St. Simeon Stylites is not enough to get Governance Lindens to act.

Suffice it to say, the struggle over micro-parcel sales and ads, while abated some over the years with a series of Linden policies in response to resident protest, will continue until some greater intervention is devised.

See if you can guess why there is a box of donuts in the middle of these microparcels for sale, and those with correct answers will win a free prize.

***

Act 2, Scene 1
The Pizza Guy

Protests against prim taxes or Mainland griefing or Copybot are often the best known form of protests and viewed as the most successful in SL.

But in my view, the protest against the voting function in the original version of groups in SL, and removal of the feature of "officer recall" was among the greatest achievements in SL.

On January 14, 2006, I posted a blog titled
"Imagine if the Pizza Guy Stole LL"

The fanciful premise of this essay was to compare what the group tools enable/impose on SL businesses and non-profit groups with their equivalents in real life.

What if, in order merely to enable the pizza guy to make and then deliver a pizza and set it down in your office, you had to also enable the delivery man to take your office from you and be cut into all your profits?

Cory Linden (Cory Ondrejka) saw the post and discussed it with Philip Linden and they could see the point that I and other land owners had been making for many months to no avail. The original group tools were intended for collaborative projects of various types, whether communities of affinity or discussion groups, but not originally envisioned with land, which developed over time as a product available as "First Land" inworld to newbies or from auctions arranged by LL (mainly of entire sims when the world was growing by leaps and bounds).

Faced with the problem of how to have tenants join a group to set their vendors and wares out for sale, ,yet not be able to cause any damage or return any builds, Anshe Chung and other land barons used to switch out their entire malls to other groups every night manually, to make prims not set to the tenant's group disappear or to manage other aspects of a mall such as parceling, then put it back into the tenant's group again.

In SL, I found that I could create a land group and group my land as the system encouraged to get 10% more tier to apply for extra prims. The Lindens invented group land to facilitate communal activity -- which they idealized -- particularly group building -- an activity which has featured over the years more as a distant ideal than a typical reality.

Most builds are done by either a landowner herself, solo, or she hires someone else to build for her, or groups cooperating on builds do them either in serial fashion or with separate assignments -- a simultaneous group build with some people casually able to return the prims of others they don't like using the "share" feature is not the norm -- in fact, like blowing up land to terraform it, we could describe it as "declining" and not "emergent" behaviour.

But if I decided, for the convenient of my tenants, to have an open group anyone could join on the honour system to set prims on the parcel they were renting -- a behaviour seemingly consistent with the hippie-style commune nature of early group tools -- then any member of the group could trigger "officer recall" and vote me out of the group, and off land that I had purchased and paid the tier for.

In the early version of groups, all payments to the group, such as from a deeded vendor or a land sale, distributed exactly equally to all the group members -- there wasn't even a way (as there is now) to distribute according to the Soviet reformist maxim: "from each according to his ability; to each according to his work". And all group fees or "dwell" -- a form of incentive based on land traffic in the early days -- also distributed equally.

"Officer Recall" was clearly invented with the ideal of having civilian control over leaders manifested within the virtual world, as a way to prevent tyranny. But like other well-intentioned world-construction decisions made by the platform providers, it was not used by people of good will but used by bad actors, or sometimes triggered by mistake. The tyranny became the few over the many.

While the vote played out over 3 days, the officer with the group powers could not use them - he was prevented from thereby selling the group land to another group or expelling those who triggered the disruptive recall and continued to grief in other ways.

This in turn caused many businesses to fill their groups with multiple officer alts who, in the event of the recall of one officer by bad actors, they could keep their land and control their groups.

Then LL decided to crack down on the proliferation of premium accounts, which people would buy for their then-512 m,2 tier allocation and ability to buy "First Land" for $512, and misuse the function intended for a one-time help to make up an entire sim of $1/m land at a time when entire sims sold for thousands of US dollars on the auction. Residents were ordered to cut the number of their accounts to five, and cancel the rest.

When I cancelled my accounts, I wrote the reason for making the alt in the first instance -- to prevent the destructiveness of "officer recall". Philip then caught up with me at a RL meet-up -- the first SLCC in October 2005 in conjunction with the "State of Play" conference at NY Law School and asked me why I had done that.

Yes, people held conferences about the Metaverse in *2003*, although some think the Metaverse was invented by Meta in October 2023, 20 years later!

I sat down at a computer terminal and showed Philip how group land worked and the problem with "officer recall" -- it wasn't the first or the last time that an interesting discussion with him revealed that he was not familiar with every aspect of his creation and their ramifications!

I once complained to Philip that a book device released by a resident for the occasion of Cory Doctorow's appearance in SL and his giving away of his work "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" was not on "mod," and couldn't really be hailed as the "first printing press" as so many were saying.

(You can find a free copy at this station by clicking around.)

Of course, freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one, as the old saying goes, but Philip's response was one I never forgot:

"Someone will make everything."

He was absolutely confident that anything that was needed in the virtual world would be made; if one product or tool or script wasn't optimal, someone would make another and it would get better.

This has happened slowly and unevenly, and "someone comes to town" is overbalanced by "someone leaves town" constantly in SL.

***

I'm not doing so well in this poll, as it seems 430 people want to permaban me, but I also discovered this old script doesn't work any more to stop more than one vote on one avatar. So somebody may have had the patience to click this 430 times, who knows.

Act 2, Scene 2
Group Tools Reform

The reform of the Group Tools in 2005-2006 is one of the most fascinating -- and overlooked -- chapters of Second Life history.

It's hard to remember now, but long before Twitter, long before Facebook, even Second Life groups had real-time chat with numerous people, and the ability to hold talks in world with the ability to save transcripts. The first person to make an RT on Twitter was actually a Second Life resident -- because they were already familiar with that gesture from a very good early form of social media inside this virtual world: group chat.

The flaws of the current iteration of Groups tends to overshadow how truly clunky the tools were in the early years and fails to recognize that the cure for the key beef nowadays about Groups -- chat lags or doesn't work at all -- is simple:

Discord.

And really most games and worlds have always cultivated outworld solutions for inworld communications that either were too clunky or too heavily moderated: TeamSpeak, Gchat, Skype, Twitter, etc. There are actually SLers still on Plurk, which you never heard of. So we can't take the knock on Group chat seriously when there is such an easy workaround -- Discord, used by numerous merchants and affinity groups.

Next. We saw how in "The Pizza Guy," there were terrible flaws in the group originally created by that unique amalgam of technolibertarianism and technocommunism that makes up the ideology of our beloved Lab. Never change, LL!

But Lindens could see the problem themselves in their own groups they needed to accomplish inworld tasks from land management and customer service to staff meetings.

So they launched on a total reform of the groups and began by convening a series of inworld workshops with interested residents. Up until that time, the top Lindens would hold town halls on four-sim corners to maximize the number of participants "in person," then make available relays (they looked like old-fashioned radios) for any resident to hold a listening party on their own sim. They also began holding office hours and in the early years, they would even do walkabouts on the telehubs and welcome areas and talk to residents.

But to my recollection, the Group Tools conferences were the first of their type where people were in smaller working groups with Lindens, asking questions and proposing alternatives and getting feedback. It's one thing to protest, including with your feet, but it's another thing to try to work out alternatives and solutions.

The different-sized Laminak tables here with mismatched chairs represent the results -- more granulated tools, more flexibility, more possibilities for everyone, but not a perfect fit. Along the way, the Lindens faced demands such as a desire to have all owners to join simultaneously so that no one owner would be controlling the admission of another, but that was not technically possible.

Some Lindens kept failing to understand that "officer recall" might be a boon in a hippie commune where everyone put in 512, but one person was hogging the prims on group land that was collectivized, but in a rentals operation, where prims had to be managed fairly and apportioned, it was a bane. When I explained how "officer recall" could be used perniciously, a Linden told me that I would just have to lobby the other group members and prove to them that I was a good manager.

Except...I had paid for the land, and continued to pay the tier every month, and collect the rent to pay that tier. If someone felt that arrangement was tyrannical, they should refund or not rent in the first place -- the premise is different.

So land could be stolen by one rogue officer, taken away from the owners who paid for it and worked it, under the guise of "democracy".

When they finally grasped this, the Lindens went overboard and removed voting completely from the group tools. I remember one of the last (the last?) votes in a group of 8,000 people called "Concierge" at the time (which has now been revised as "MonCierge") and a proposition was mounted to protest changes to the TOS regarding copyright and LL's use of resident content, which many were unhappy with.

It may have been that the lag induced by having to check group membership and handle poll questions was too great, but like other early democratic features of SL, it was deprecated for the greater good.

While there was a certain amount of Sturm und Drang in the group tools process, and the Lindens never returned to quite this "workshop" format (the select "focus groups" with special friends was not as open and democratic and under NDA) -- it did bring about one of the greatest achievements of Second Life: tools to enable the kind of differentiated roles and granulation of function needed for every kind of group on group land or private land, whether a small group of friends, an RP sim, a store, a rentals agency, a university, NASA, or really anything you could think of with more than one person -- and some people took a group of alts to group their land and gain the tier bonus and ease of management.

The beauty of the group tools comes in the Roles, which can be calibrated or granulated to give people greater or lesser amounts of control of land, suited to their role -- as a partner in an RP community, as a romantic partner, as a tenant in a rental, as a shopper in a store, as an employee in a non-profit. So once the roles were set up properly there were the issues of cash and property -- deciding whether people could remove group-set prims, or equally receive all proceeds from a land or objects sale -- now there was no forced collectivization.

There are still some annoyances with groups -- search does not work with a pasted in name but only the first few letters can be typed to find it manually; after about 350 members, the land groups don't load so well; at 500 members the Lindens decided to make a bug a feature -- the group members cannot see the others in the group. This is not an option to select, so that say, shoppers are not "outed" to each other, but evidently a default. The groups can be hidden from one's profile.

The groups can still be griefed, especially if open -- people still invade them begging for cash, or spamming ads for their store, or spouting trash about other residents, sometimes pretending to be "bots," and we find all too often, group members believe an anonymous day-old alt ranting in their group, instead of someone in business for years in SL. But these problems are fixable by moderators with the ability first to select who can speak and second, who must be kicked from the group to maintain decorum. After all, if anyone is unhappy with a group's rules and management style, they can form their own group for 100L.

The fact that a key feature of the new Premium Plus account is 140 groups lets us know just how important groups are to Second Life. We never thought we'd use them all up, but we did and have to constantly leave some to make room for others.

***

Act 2, Scene 3
Mentors

There's a lot I could say about the Mentor.

Or maybe just a little, because this new version of them coming up may not last, like past iterations.

Mentors are older residents deployed to welcome areas, infohubs, etc. to help new members of SL.

They exist both as the result of protest about lack of care of newbies and retention -- which is bad in general for business and socializing. And themselves become the subject of protest when they inevitably fail to produce results that fit everyone's ideal society.

Remember your high school government? OK, everyone wants an ideal society, but no one wants to put in the work and those that do become martyrs or villains.

So people protest the various forms that Mentors have taken over the years as examples of favouritism or ineffective onboarding; but people also protest the lack of any kind of systematic efforts to retain new people when business begins to lag and concurrency falters. Periodically a forums or blog post or a RL news story refreshes the sense of futility and despair.

So let us just contemplate in general the Bonfire of Bad Ideas, which included things in the long-ago past when group tools were being reformed, such as "let's have islands where the residents can only file an AR with the island owner". This would be great for certain types of RP, said a Linden no longer on staff. This will be great for Retention because people will be Free.

We felt that if, for example, subs in highly authoritarian forms of RP were forced to give their passwords to abusive doms under threat of ban or worse, or forced to do things against the TOS, they should have the right to make a private AR to the Lab, where the name would not be publicized, and some person in authority could in theory respond to the situation if it was not a mere resident-to-resident dispute. Fortunately, that's more or less the regimen we have today, with no "home rule" for islands as much as it might be desirable in some aspects.

Another really hard-and-fast rule has been that only Lindens can ban from Linden land. This always seemed like a really, really good idea to us for any Mentors or related volunteer program, even though as we run a resident infohub on Governor Linden land (an old program following the demise of the Telehubs and the collapse of the first rendition of the Infohubs -- there are 10 of them) -- we have often wished we could ban the people who specifically came to grief us, and put out large pictures of our RL selves on the land using rogue viewers.

In our view, only paid, full-time, benefited staff can help entry and retention in RL as in SL. But it's a luxury for the Customer Service State so there is always the temptation to reach for Ladies' Auxilaries or druzhenniki (auxilary police).

The interesting feature of the newest rendition of Mentors is that prospective Helpful Hals and Helpful Hannahs must agree to work two-hour shifts for free, and promote the SL viewer unless asked about alternatives. Inevitably the cry went up to provide some perks or gifts for such shift-working Mentors. (Hey, I know, let's have them put their stores right at the first landing, as was done in the past.) Having worked far longer shifts for less than minimum wage in RL and SL, I think I'll pass.

Still, I'd invite you to look into the face of this sad and tired boy in Silas Merlin's sculpture. His feet are blistered from running as a First Person Shooter without even a voice, as in Zelda, and he has run many, many a mile across games and worlds and now arrived in SL. He stares listlessly into the distance, idly wondering whether SL is a game, or what the heck it is. A kind bird, but a bird spouting incoherent nonsense nonetheless, tells him that F1 is in the Viewer now.

He doesn't know what F1 is, or what a Viewer is, but ok....

Can't anyone HELP??!

I could go on, but I can only say Sic Transit, Gloria Mundi.

I have one name for you -- "Lucy Linden".

And I have one region for you -- "Tenera".

Look it up.

***

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

***

Act 3, Scene 1
Telehubs>>p2p

The Lindens always said they felt guilty as game gods with god modes that we mortals did not have, so they were keen to add point-to-point teleportation (p2p) as quickly as possible.

The anti-telehub lobby on the forums was strong, in part for justified reasons as some telehubs had become avatar traps and lag monsters when surrounded by heavily trafficked malls -- which were there because the way people used to get around in SL was by first going to a central telehub in a region, then flying on their own steam (or taking a jetpack or plane or boat) to their final destination.

I remember Waterhead Telehub, which I used to call "Headbangers' Ball," because each time you landed there, you banged your avatar's head on the ceiling inside the building -- the landing wasn't put outside for the longest time.

Then I would have to fly 1,000 solid meters, often in strong headwinds with tough sim crossings, to my first auction-won sim of Ravenglass. It hadn't occured to me when I got it that getting to it would be such a problem (and I actually won an auction once in Portage where I quite simply could not get to the sim due to the lack of void sims at the time and difficult sim crossings).

Unless I stayed put on that sim and never went anywhere -- and that's actually how a lot of early pioneers lived, not usually traveling that much because it was a chore.

And those with businesses now located 1000 or 2000 or more meters or many sims away from a centralized telehub sprouting a giant mall felt shafted, and left behind by "Progress".

THAT drove a lot of animosity to the telehubs, which Philip Linden had invented under the influence of the theories of urban planner Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs envisioned hubs in New York City which often came into being, where a subway stop or a stop below the El would engender stores, services, large apartment buildings, parks where people would congregate when they came home from work -- or conversely, in the areas where they went to work.

Philip reasoned that the virtual world could operate the same way -- and he was right. The problem is that not every one shared his embrace of commerce and some people thought virtual worlds would be better off without malls.

Or at least...there could be the highly specialized boutiques of some early designers, where new designers could sometimes get a corner if they essentially elected to serve as apprentices or unpaid clerical and PR staff. But these were located far from telehubs, and wasn't it terrible that now these newbies competed with them!

Anshe Chung may have commandeered most of the telehub-adjacent land through market capture, but she was democratic about her rental tenants -- anyone who was willing to pay the somewhat higher rent -- even another land agent -- could get a space. That's how I got my first office at a mall in Clunn -- that has remained abandoned land now for many years.

I once asked Philip Linden which sims had the most sales on them and he said quite frankly, "The telehubs." Telehub land would command double and triple and more the average land price -- and new ones continued to be rolled out despite some residents' and Lindens' protests -- and often in bucolic surroundings with plenty of space around their squat, concrete Chicago urban style to make them less "avatar traps" with the inevitable malls that appeared around them. The Moth Temple in Iris didn't start as a hub -- but ended as one with the most beautiful build of all of them.

Then Anshe Chung and a few others noticed something that wasn't readily apparent to non-tech types -- the Lindens were tinkering with the world map. They were preparing it for the day when anyone could click on one point on the map -- and directly travel to it from any other point, hopefully not landing in deep water or the side of a wall (which oddly didn't work for telehub sims where the landing was forcibly set -- and never changed, which is why you land in the water in Ross, for example.)

Suddenly, Anshe stopped renting out the telehub land she won at auction -- she used to keep the stores of her regular clients and put them out herself for their convenience to set up right away. Instead, she put the land to sale.

A new generation of would-be land barons snapped them up, and were thrilled at the opportunity. One built a Wild West sort of mall around Midge. Lindens publicly expressed their skepticism about the usefulness of telehubs, and one day I took Robin Linden on a tour of telehubs, so that she could see with her eyes that they were not all like Fuji -- the notorious avatar trap that was the reason for so much animosity. By that time Brownlee had been deployed -- although not yet with the Mole's juice bar. As we stopped at each telehub, we would see friends or various people who recognized her and we would chat and look into some stores. The telehubs functioned in fact as envisioned and weren't the lag mess claimed.

But the Lindens were determined to go ahead with their plan to abolish the telehubs as forced landings, install p2p, and convert the old telehubs merely to company inifohubs with their own kiosks with information about orientation and buying Lindens, etc.

Your faithful servant snapped the last picture of a telehub, carrying a poster "Save Our Hubs!" before Lindens gleefully deleted it, which at that time was posted on the Snapzilla-run device for anyone to put pictures on the Linden front page (that didn't last for long, obviously).

Then there was ANOTHER kind of telehub protest -- one that wasn't covered by the media or the forums in particular, but was also one of the most important protests of SL history:

http://alphavilleherald.com/2005/12/extra_extra_bar.html

The newbie land barons, seeing now the writing on the wall, felt they'd been sold a pig in a poke. Even Anshe began to realize the full extent of the damage -- the new infohubs would not be a draw and the malls around them would get overgrown with grass -- much like the malls of RL America with the appearance of the Internet, then later COVID. The Lindens tried to desperately drum up interest in the infohubs by sponsoring a hippo contest -- anyone could take a basic hippo model (the Lindens had adopted the hippo as their mascot due to some arcane coding term) and embellish it into a character. You can see ours in a tree at Memory Bazaar in Ross.

But before p2p was installed, another stage in this drama unfurled, which was the launching of the Heterocera continent withhout any telehubs at all. Everyone had to fly over rough seas to get there -- and a few enterprising souls started ferries and planes to haul people to the new paradise.

Forums regs rhapsodized about land unspoiled by urban and commercial blight -- the Lindens also staged a short-lived experiment in leaving Linden trees and grass on parcels, rooted elsewhere, so that they could not be removed. This forced pastoral idyll didn't go over well with people who bought land on the auctions -- unlike those on the forums who lived back at the ranch on the Colour Sims of the first days of SL.

Somewhere along this road I learned from Xenon Linden, the builder of the Moth Temple, that a telehub didn't have to be a squat, ugly, bug -- like the ones you see here (take a free one home, they're sort of cute when shrunk!) -- but could be anything, with an invisible telehub landing disc inside the build (as in Iris).

As it became clear that telehubs were going away for good, there were now dozens of very angry customers, who began to mutter legal phrases like "bait and switch," and demanded a meeting with Philip and other Lindens.

They threatened to "cash out" and stop buying on the auction unless their now worthless telehub land was bought back. Philip made an offer to buy back telehub land at the rate of $7.5/meter (not the $10 or $20 or $30 once enjoyed), and many took him up on his offer. The Lindens said that if anyone opted to keep their telehub and not take a buy-back, they could submit a proposal in a competition to have their group run an infohub on Governor Linden's old land, set to their group.

After they shelled out a fortune in buy-backs, which they had once taken in on the auction, the Lindens still prevailed. They rolled out some beautiful new sandy and pine-tree covered sims that looked like private islands, with new textures, but which were actually still mainland -- the sims are named for artists and scientists. In order to keep their market share, Anshe and others had to buy those new sims -- using their telehub buyback funds and more.

This was one of the turning points for some land barons in departing the Mainland forever and working exclusively with islands and homesteads.

***

Act 3, Scene 2
Copybot

The story of the pernicious script known as "Copybot" unleashed in Second Life is well known and covered in all major studies and articles about SL, Google is your friend.

But I'd like to recount some aspects of the story not covered as much as the main outlines of the crisis, which involved hundreds of angry and frightened virtual merchants -- some fearful of their RL livelihoods -- shuttering their stores, blocking their vendors or asking mall agents like me to put up ban lines -- and refusing to sell until the Lindens "did something".

Cynics ridiculed their scandal as "little dressmakers' holocaust" but perhaps didn't realize the scale and numbers of "little dressmakers" who at least offset the considerable costs of SL (especially for second- and third-world nations) or actually covered RL bills with their virtual wares.

Many on the Internet and most in Second Life are aware of an essential truism known technically as "the analog hole" -- if you can see something on your screen, if it has been streamed or displayed to you through your browser, you can copy it in a variety of ways, even if some deterrents are deployed.

The greatest wonder of Second Life is the permissions systems enabling a choice among modify/copy/transfer because it enables manufacturing and shopping -- "a willing buyer meets a willing seller over a price" -- the most prevalent activity of SL, dwarfing even socializing, sex, games, or music. And the miracle is that these permissions hold, and not as mere markers for a social norm easily overridden. While rogue viewers and techniques have abounded, generally their deployers are caught and barred from SL, with notable exceptions especially in gacha rares.

The cynics said that everyone should simply "Get Real" and live with the fact that everything online is copyable and they should just allow copying and distribute freebies and make their living on, oh, volumes of sales, or custom work, or -- like the authors who claim they sell books by giving away books, make money on the Ted Talk circuit, if they can break into it.

But people who had benefitted from the genius of C/M/T and the regime that seemed to hold, felt Something Should be Done. They didn't feel they should be driven into the chore of RL DMCA takedown notices, or registering their mark, or engaging in any RL business necessities if the whole point of a virtual world was to make more possibility and enable more people to benefit from the Internet instead of seeing it destroy their livelihoods.

I personally was summoned to a sim and had a gleefully malicious griefer boy copy my avatar and array out a dozen of him as he roared with laughter. Not being much of a clothes horse, I didn't immediately see the disaster involved in this prank, which I thought would just lead to a lot of mistaken identity and griefing episodes. Years later, I went to a Metaverse conference in 2007 (yes we had those! Before 2023! Let Grandpa put in his teeth and tell you the story!). A group of us went to a bar and I fell into a long and interesting conversation with Raph Koster, the famous game designer (Star Wars Galaxy etc). He had invented at that time a prototype open sourced open-ended sandbox sort of world-not-game which he used to flesh out ideas for how to make these worlds work, and which some of us had joined. As he spoke and I asked a lot of probing questions (about copyright issues, for one), I noticed a very young boy, too young to be served in the bar and whose mother may not have liked that he was out this late), edging closer and closer to the conversation, but not speaking out of shyness.

Finally, people began to head off to bed and just the boy remained. I asked him what his name was in SL -- and it turned out he was a notorious griefer, and the copybot deployer. He said he lived in his mom's basement -- "But I pay her some rent," he added defensively. "Where's Dad" is a question I had long learned not to ask any more.

"Why????" I finally asked in despair. Why the griefing, the ban evasions, the theft.

"Because the Internet poisoned my soul," he said in all seriousness.

The story of Copybot actually begins much earlier, when a group which I'll dub "Perverse Engineers" reverse-engineered the viewer -- an action that was in violation of the TOS of that era. These fellows set about god-moding and stalking and harassing and griefing people around the grid and of course contrived to copy especially textures, which anyone could do with a series of steps right within even the legal viewer at the time. Some of us AR'd what we felt was an obvious TOS violation but apparently they had some encouragement from some Lindens -- because the Lindens were about to open-source their viewer *anyways*.

When the time came to ask questions on the forums for the Town Hall -- as we still do today -- I asked pointedly why this group was allowed to reverse engineer the viewer and grief people. For this I was banned from the forums, but still remained to attend the town hall. Somehow the question had still reached Cory Linden, and he read it aloud and began to answer it. Just then an avatar of a few days with a name created to look like mine began swooping around and heckling people -- and to no one's surprise, *I* was soon looking at the ominous "administrative time-out" screen and cooling my heels back in RL. When I emerged an hour later, I found a bunch of the particularly tough looking Perverse Engineers flanked around Philip as if holding him in protective custody.

Just as I could not prove I was not a camel, I could not prove I had not done any swooping, although server records would show it. Or maybe not.

The viewer was open sourced, and Cory Linden then left the Lab, some said over a dispute with Philip over whether the server code should be open sourced as well.

It so happened that I was in touch with some of the Peverse Engineers who came to the old Sutherland Dam discussions on Friday nights which I hosted, one of whom sadly died in a car accident in RL at a very young age. I was tipped off that one of the big developer firms working with RL companies had ordered "Copybot" to be coded (or a version of it) to make instances for live music concerts -- shards, as in a game, where the band would be mirrored many times over to enable thousands of people to see those avatars. This seemed like a super-structure in search of a base, if not an accident going somewhere to happen -- and sure enough it did.

Copybot had a thousands midwives and no paternity, however and while I had sources for this story they needed to hold on to their jobs and their sponsorships so we had to issue a retraction at the SL Herald, the notorious muck-raking tabloid of the early years of SL edited by Urizenus Sklar and Pixeleen Mistral.

While not everyone wants to connect up the dots, the Copybot scandal led to Linden policies about Third-Party viewers, and various showdowns and knockdowns and revisions along these lines -- and lots of dead sion chickens kicked offworld, let us just put it that way for now.

We now live under a regime where "Copybot can't be stopped" because "you can't stop Copybot" and inworld groups devoted to copybotting and a Github page with the Copybot script persist "because it can," but Lindens still insisting that certain groups have their leaders step down to spend more time with their families and revise their inworld activities.

While once "unlawful copying" was an offense contained in the Abuse Report template that could be submitted and sometimes get action even without an additional DMCA, today, that category is gone from the AR form.

Copybot compelled the Lindens to change wording in their TOS and attempt to remedy the complaints of masses of merchants -- and this wording was to be redacting and changed and dropped over time leading to more protests and walk-outs.

Merchants then tried their own remedies, which included the completely ineffectual script you see here that would supposedly spam a copybotting viewer or script and get it to stop.

Today, the mechanism for copybotting is different than those used in earlier days and some people feel it is "less of a problem" while others weep constantly on social media about how they've been targeted. The breedables industry has been particularly hit with mutual recriminations and even RL lawsuits.

There's one category of creator who ostensibly never has to worry about Copybot, as their creations execute server side and not client side: the scripter. The one recorded instance of the copybotting of closed scripts is disputed.

It is no surprise that those whose work is most protected against copyright are more cynical about the complaints about those who are most vulnerable to theft -- even to denouncing certain anti-rez scripts that work well enough, if not perfectly, particularly for those compelled to comply with full-perm mesh makers' TOS.

Merchants have responded to the challenge either by giving away more freebies; building up loyal client lists and doing custom work; putting their items in bags or HUDs or other types of packages that ostensibly deter theft; banning people and their alts with illegal IP detection systems; not putting their products on "mod" -- although this has zero deterrence value.

Surprisingly, in the food sector, some major creators simply put the takeaway food on all perms -- because when you get down to it, who is going to bother to re-sell a fork with a bit of chicken on it at an odd angle, or a tilted wine glass? It doesn't matter.

And some full perm creators have in fact specified in their TOS that for props such as food givers, they suspend their usual mandate to bar "transfer" -- but then they specify that "no mod" must be used. Well, at least a script is safe that way, although of course the whole lot can be bundled into a separate box. Of course, most people -- again -- buy platters of food for their beauty on the table, not in the hand, and the market for plywood boxes with famous creator's food bits in it is strangely....empty.

As with a lot of situations in Second Life, the hysterical hypothetical need not apply, and the edge case need not drive policy.

Even so, for many sectors of the virtual market -- bodies, beasts, buildings -- copying remains a serious threat and causes people to give up, to go to other third-party model sites and reduce their contribution to SL. And who can blame them, those "little dressmakers" in war-torn Ukraine or refugee overflowing and earthquake stricken Turkey or crisis-ridden Brazil? Or even a COVID-ravaged city in affluent America.

The dream of anonymously marketing your virtual wares on the strength of your talent and your constructed persona, free of taxation of bricks-and-mortar costs or real-world authorities with their hands out, dies hard, but the hill it dies first on is Copybot.

***

Act 3, Scene 3
Welcome Areas

If you TP into the original welcome areas of Violet or Ahern or Ambat these days, chances are you will find they are pretty quiet. There might be a newbie or two struggling, spread-eagled, with appearance or standing in bewilderment or AFK. A lone, sad older resident might also be AFK with a sign over her head: RENT ME.

One reason is a curious recent development: the Lindens have removed the term "infohub" from map search. While the infohub symbol remains on the map, and browsing the map can turn up such spaces, they are no longer in search at all.

Instead, we have a brand new set of Welcome Hubs with shopping, ersatz gambling, a sandbox, and tutorials, and new mentors. *Some* old infohubs still retain the ability to set home (this function has been removed from many of them despite the confusing message that you can set home on Mainland hubs).

As the great baseball legend Yogi Berra might have put it, The Welcome Areas (infohubs, orientation islands, hangouts and other Linden-owned areas) are so crowded nobody goes there anymore.

But if you know to hunt for "Social Island" and some of the newer entry points (Firestorm Island, Belli Hub) you might find 40 avatars filling the sim, or at least 6, with much the same mixture of useful help and trash talk as the old days. Yet no pickets

At one time, every ongoing protest in SL would play out in the Welcome Areas, whether against VAT tax, or ad farming, or putting Voice into SL (denounced as a ruiner of magic and outer of genders by quite a few, and today -- as I can attest from looking at many, many parcels -- Voice is often turned OFF or sometimes fails to work in public events).

Early throngs of hardy residents would go to Governor Linden's mansion in Clementina to protest, but that was before they learned she was never, ever, there. Yes, she. We have seen her twice in our 19 years!

There are still public spaces where newbies are heckled as I can attest from rolling a new alt the other day but generally, this type of behaviour was thoroughly discouraged. Even so, there are patches of "wall sitters" as they were dubbed -- groups of bored, restless youth (or senior delinquents who should know better) who voiced inappropriately for the rating and confused or ridiculed the new arrivals. Other bands of residents would fight them -- and then the welcome areas as such would become the theme of protest.

I suppose the earlier renditions of them could be called sort of Hyde Parks, especially when the famous Jeska Linden would tell people sparring on the forums to "take it inworld," in the theory that if you could see your antagonizer in person, you might be nicer to them. We're here to tell you that doesn't work, just like a demand for RL names, age, location, occupation don't help social media to become more tolerant, either.

Recently I came across a resident who had returned after many years, and wrote this in her profile:

"In 2006, Second Life was wild and unpredictable and amazing. Mass user protests, mafia gangs, and land barons. Ready, Player One! Snowcrash coming!

Second Life is prettier now, but something is missing. It seems reserved, careful, and a bit cold. The unpredictability is gone. Maybe everyone just grew up. The unknown is known. Limits set. Expectations in place."

Experiments in what might be called "managed democracy" haven't exactly proliferated in SL but there have been some:

o the original Linden walkabouts -- it's hard to believe now that Jack Linden, a computer professional with considerable RL experience, who began as a modest liaison in SL and worked his way up to VP, would actually stand in the WAs for hours on end, and hold office hours frequently to wrestle all the most urgent questions of the day, such as ad farm destruction of the Mainland.

o town halls (which were more interactive with spontaneous questions rather than lists submitted and curated by talk show hosts)

o workshops on specific issues such as reform of the Group Tools

o focus groups (yes, LL used to select some of their special friends to come all expense paid to California and give feedback, all placed under NDA)

o RL meetups -- a series of SL community conferences under various auspices with varying degrees of disaster were held over the years 2004 to 2012 before they broke down and devolved into inworld Open Sim conferences or select groups such as Educators, to which Lindens were invited to speak

o the Features Voting Tool -- this was actually a really great page in which anyone could submit a proposal and collect votes for it. It should simply have been left alone. It wasn't. A "helpful" resident who actually seemed bent on destroying it offered to help "clean it up" and went to the Lindens first with a list of duplicates, in his view, then with a list of "undoables" or "poorly worded" proposals -- and busy Lindens were grateful for his input. As the FVT, which had grown thick and dense vines around a weak trunk, began to be pruned, authors of proposals began to howl, since they didn't think they were "undoable" -- and the Lindens should decide this, rather than residents with agendas. One day we woked up and the FVT had been deleted entirely by a Linden.

o the old JIRA voting system -- at one time, it was possible to make a JIRA proposal specifically about bugs but also about features, more broadly understood, which would then also be about policies, and also collect votes. Today, since the reconfiguration of the JIRA under Oz Linden, the system is very different.

At one time, your faithful correspondent introduced a proposal that was revolutionary -- that anyone could continue to collect votes for a bug report/feature request and JIRAs could only be closed by Lindens who made a judgement of "can't do". The volunteer helpers who pruned the JIRA and similar systems would not be allowed to close anyone else's JIRA. This essentially opened up a way to create a "no" vote to the hall monitors who inevitably appear to clean up in any group, sometimes with the tacit approval of the company. Amazingly, this proposal was passed, and implemented -- but then removed some years later.

We could note the chief flaw of these voting systems is that you couldn't vote "no". Voting "no" is vital to any democracy and a part of any robust proposition system on local ballots. But in the ideologies of Silicon Valley, voting "no" is viewed as "negative," or an anomaly in the system. Some people think it is "not possible" to vote "no" on the JIRA as configured for use by Linden Lab.

But I caught up with the makers of JIRA at TechCrunch one year and quizzed them on this. They confirmed that any client of the JIRA could configure it to vote "no," but also had trouble understanding why it is necessary. There is a tendency to think that "upvoting" or "getting to yes" or "taking a straw poll" or "direct voting" is going to "fix" democracy. It never has.

The "no" vote -- especially with the added functionality of undisclosed vote -- is absolutely essential and would rid both Lindens and residents of a lot of their illusions if incorporated, and redistribute the balance of power. Even if the "no" vote became only symbolic, it would have a cumulative effect.

We felt so strongly about this that at one point, we created a "JIRA Mirror" where people could collect mirror votes on JIRAs they had posted, and of course the results were fascinating. There is more on this subject in other venues, but one thing Governor Linden might consider doing in honour of the 20th Birthday is to pardon those banned from the JIRA.

Today, certain factions hijack the forums occasionally with impunity; Moles, who were once associated only with creative endeavours are now diverted to loathsome moderation duties; and various groups associated with large continents or large stores or RP groups tend to hold sway.

There isn't any form of democracy today within Second Life across the grid, and the efforts to create the institutions of democracy outside of it (such as the Herald online tabloid or various professor and game developer blogs) have all fallen into disrepair. If the Customer Service State gives people more or less what they want -- if there is a product and they themselves aren't made the product -- they are content and don't see the need for dissent.

For a brief moment in time, relatively, on the old forums, we had the Features Voting System and even large group voting tools even in Concierge; we had live interactive townhalls and a far more free-wheeling forums -- go and look:

Don't be afraid of scary warnings -- the Lindens didn't update their certificate but it's a perfectly safe site. Try it on Edge if Chrome doesn't work.

If there is "socialism in one sim," it doesn't count, because such RP expeditions don't influence policy for the grid; it is Solzhenitsyn's idea of democracy but not Sakharov's.

People who regularly talk to their Mole and Linden friends, who bid in charity auctions to have sims named after them, who have their weddings in new community centers, they don't see what the problem is here!

"Lindens are a scarce resource," a Linden once commented in an office hour with many residents clamouring for this or that change. And indeed they are, and that's why virtual world construction can't rely on them.

Lindens have put up with so many protests about lag over the years (even Linden Lags parody t-shirts) that they have now put a button right in the viewer under WORLD called IMPROVE GRAPHICS SPEED.

Our advice is to never touch that button.

[Linden Lags Tshirt]

***

Act 3, Scene 4
FIX SEARCH

There's a lot I could tell you about this subject -- I've written reams and reams.

One way to sum it up is this: In the beginning of our world, the button on the viewer to get your virtual world started was titled:

FIND

And you did.

Now it's called SEARCH. So you keep SEARCHING.

In 2012, the Lindens decided to move from Viewer 1.23 to Viewer 2.0 by decision of then-CTO Oz Linden, immortalized here with the "mirrors" he promised would come some day (and so they have in PBR, we're told).

The Search in 2.0 had a terrible interface, the Lindens used Google Search Appliance instead of the interface and code they had before, and it simply stopped working. There were many layers to this decline but the Lindens then -- as now -- insisted they were working out the bugs and improving it.

Meanwhile, Firestorm "forked" so to speak, and KEPT the version of search from 1.23 which the Lindens then RETIRED.

We have Cinders Roxley to thank for this decision and this effort, which is why we have a statue in her honour at the Lost Gardens of Slosser.

The decision to keep a normal search that returns clean lines on an exact word search of a person or business or venue meant -- was, among other reasons, but in my view the KEY reason -- that Firestorm began to be used by likely 80% or more of the user population, by the Lindens' own admission. They say they can't give precise numbers because the same people use different viewers but we have our sampling of tenants which have convinced us there are only four of us: -- me, another oldbie like me with failing eyesight, a newbie who just landed and hasn't gotten the memo, and some guy testing his furry avatars on different viewers. The end.

What has kept our world thriving all this time is the ability of people to SHOP, and GO TO THE PLACES, and BUY and then FIND A HOME and live happily ever after. You know?

All you have to do is search for a business or location -- "Linden Lab" is one good one to test -- on both viewers, and I won't have to keep explaining this. I use Alchemy personally to see my own Search/Places ads.

I've learned this will never change; this is cast in stone; this is a religion. So I step away quietly and go on Alchemy as needed and muddle along.

What keeps me occasionally returning to this topic is I remember a night in...2018? Before the pandemic, anyway. When I saw search was broken and not returning as it did -- which at that juncture wasn't great, but still had some use. And various Lindens hurried to fix it, and within 48 hours, it was back to status quo ante. Then on another night in 2019? (before the pandemic) it broke again.

And stayed that way. And got worse. And some obvious problems were fixed but basically, the interface today -- well go look.

The Lindens need to fiix search. Then they'll have a growing world. They don't want to, possibly because they actually need to throttle growth given insufficient resources, so they don't.

***

Act 4, Scene 1
Price Drop/Fee/Tax Hike

Surely after years -- decades -- of protests, SL's protesters would be ready to retire?

After all, they now have Linden Assisted Living -- Bellisseria, Fantasseria, Sakurasseria and the soon-to-come Ponderosaserria with enormous 2048 m2 ranch spreads.

These zoned and better-managed regions with new mesh customizable houses are an answer to the chronic protest of people on the Mainland facing blight, or lonely islanders in silos left with no-show landlords. Bellisseria is the best product that Linden ever made, although the bien pensant falsely believe it to be "like" the Stepford Wives.

It's actually more like Trumansville, if you pay attention.

Bellisseria only bred the desire for more and better and different and more prims and more meters -- remember the Prelude, Content/Discontent?

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have enough prims -- but we'll let you in on a secret: most tenants do not use all their prims, far from it. And another secret: mesh items aren't necessarily a lot less land impact.

So now that the wolf at the door is merely a lawn ornament; Honey West whom you were too little to watch is a hipster collage and you even have a plaster elephant -- 10 prims! -- on your lawn, just like the neighbour's! ----

Why are you still protesting? You got homesteads without having to first buy an island. They're unattached and proliferating now and filling up with big ugly black boxes just like the Mainland -- but now there will be 2028 ranchettes!

WHY ARE YOU COMPLAINING?

If you have a comment, you can rocket right out of here!

LOL

Although first, leave a notecard.

But we'll tell you what people still find to protest:

o the fee increases for purchase of Lindens and cashouts which came soon enough after the lowering of the cost of tier and the increase of prims per square meter;

o application of US state taxes -- ouch, ouch, ouch (unless you're in like Montana);

o more fee hikes for conversion of Lindens to dollars and process of credits;

o lack of void sims laid out in a row from their Mainland properties with money-making venues and the newest Bellissseria content;

o the strangulation of the Mainland in various ways;

The Russians have an idiom: "frenzied from fat".

One thing we've noticed: if you complain about lack of managed land in SL, you will get what you wished. So be careful what you wish for.

***

Act 4, Scene 2
GachaPWND

The ban in August 2021 on gachas, a form of commerce involving selling sets of items via random pulls, sparked massive protests on the forums and social media on both sides of the issue. I believe it was the biggest blow to the virtual economy in 20 years, and we are still feeling the dead cat bounce two years later.

As usual, those backing the company policy (especially those who benefited) were eager to leverage their loyal positions to harass and silence opponents. Threads were closed, forums bans were handed out, and some lawyers got bully pulpits that others didn't, but there was no recourse: the ban hammer went down, merchants had 30 days to get rid of the machines or face disciplinary actions.

The word "gacha" comes from the Japanese term "gachapon" the term for machines containing small prizes for a few coins -- they were originally modeled after the American gumball machines found outside supermarkets.

The SL edition also began at a low price of 25L for a few decor items and evolved into mechanisms to sell sets of fancy hair for 100L. While there was also a vocal chorus preaching against the Las Vegas/Lost Wages aspect of the gacha, they were massively popular. If you asked the critics claiming they were "shocked that gambling was permitted in the house" and told them to turn out their inventories, you might find a croupier would appear and say, as to Capt. Renault, "Your winnings, sir."

While the opponents of gachas tended to focus on the random nature and the enormous amounts people would pour into them to get the "rares," they key feature of the gacha phenomenon, which ran for more than a decade, was that it was a way for people to enter the economy if they had no skills in design or coding and insufficient capital to start a land-related business. People hoping to offset the cost of SL, which can be considerable even just to buy a socially acceptable outfit and body) are able to buy low and sell high or sell in high volume, as they can with breedables.

Gacha machines have also been a way for creators to make sales at themed mass shopping events in an environment where they are increasingly competing for attention in search among a proliferation of weekend and weekday sales.

While many people have the impression that some law was passed in the States or some prosecutor overseas sent a warning from another country such as Germany or Japan, in fact there is no such law or warning, at least known to the public.

There is a US law on online gambling such as poker which prompted Linden Lab to ban slot machines, poker, roulette etc years ago. But recent court cases have found in fact that judges sided with the big platforms Google and Apple regarding lootboxes -- which strictly speaking, is a different animal than a gacha as gachas in SL are not required to advance gameplay as it is not a game as such. And in theory, minors under the age of 18 should not be on the plaform (although 16-18 years are permitted in G areas). The main driver of the lootbox lawsuits were parents angered at children running up credit card bills to play an online game.

The US is a country of common law where judicial interpretation and legal precedents establish the law of the land and where international law or law from other countries is not self-executing. Again, there was no judicial ruling to prompt this policy.

But since Linden Lab is a private company it can make any policy it deems necessary, and in this case took preemptive action to limit liability for litigation, a standard business case.

The irony is that while the old form of gachas were banned, a new form emerged called Miepon or other names that still involved machines with sets of desirable decor or outfits, but you could see which one you would be purchasing in a chute -- removing the mystery of the blind pull. To be sure, you can't be sure when the coveted rare will come which means the aftermarket and the Lost Wages are still relevant,

Even so, there is no question that the overall level of gacha frenzy is considerably reduced. The shock to the economy was considerable and some merchants ended up out of business. The critics who sneered at them that they couldn't drive traffic to their stores are forgetting that this is an attention economy -- search functions poorly, there is both too little advertising of the right kind and too much spam, and mass events by large companies (viewed by some as cartels) heavily influence the market against "a nation of shop-keepers".

The inimitable Daveosaurus of Crocodoggle, beloved in SL as both a developer and DJ, created a parody item called "GachaPWND" with a play on the term "gachapon" and the kids' term of art for being beaten in a game -- "pawned". Merchants who had drained the pockets of their fans in search of "rares" now got their comeuppance. But since clever designers and scripters ultimately succeeded in keeping the broad outlines of the gacha experience and some of the re-sale economy intact, who was really PWND?

The constant proliferation of new weekend or weekday or really 24/7/ sales which were weakening the economy for creators before the ban has not compensated for the role played by gachas in the economy -- hence even more appearing every week. Every inventory is bursting and every home is flooded, and no one could possibly wear all the outfits they have purchased even if they changed their clothes 10 times a day. This is a feature of virtuality that hasn't been sufficiently studied -- with the ability to replicate without expending RL materials (except server space) and when goods don't wear out, economies seem magical.

But when inventories are so large they can't even be searched anymore, and every weekend sale living room set looks like the other one, have we discovered why virtual economies always tend toward entropy and failure? Or maybe not?

Now we've also deployed Daveosaurus broken gacha machine to symbolize a "gated community" of sorts -- Linden Homes, the answer to the Second Life Tragedy of the Commons for tens of thousands of people who now don't have to wake up and find anything unpredictable in their view.

Critics of Linden Homes have likened them to the movie Stepford Wives, but it wasn't the homes that looked the same in that movie, but the wives who began behaving like identical ideal subserviant drones after their husbands turned them into robot replicas. Perhaps the song popularized by Pete Seeger, "Little Boxes on the Hillside" is a good descriptor?

But there are a wide variety of Linden homes and they are customizable up to a point. Perhaps Trumansville is the better trope with the same scenery repeating and the controlled life, but the Moles may have a lot of repetitive tasks, they aren't actors, but contractors meeting customer requirements, a feature of proprietary software companies often absent from open source experiments.

With the Commons expertly managed by Lindens and Moles, there is relief to the eyes as to texture, land impact, and covenants specifying the removal of Christmas trees after holidays, a limit on cats, and even prohibition on the ban systems that hark back to MMORPGs in the way they return you home, to your spawn point.

To be sure, people run through 351 prims, even if the house doesn't count, pretty fast -- which is why we are about to get 2048 ranchettes! Can Bellisseria homesteads be far behind?

Freed of the stresses of the Commons Tragedy that pits neighbours against each other (remember the neighbours' gigantic submarine that brought all other scripts to a standstill or the club on 4096 of land that filled all available avatar slots for that region every night, so no one could go home not to mention infestations of glowing towers?), the Linden Homes areas are said to create better communities with richer and more rewarding events, including DJ parties, the stamp finding game, and art shows.

Yet no lot can be put in search, no commerce is allowed, even a yard sale or charity flea market, and all social life is driven to groups -- groups inevitably heavily controlled by their founders, often spawning anti-groups.

We didn't find Juneteenth on the calendar or anything like the elaborate sculptures and installations of ArtKorner's weekly HUD, but there's the Legacy Mainland for that, right? After you're done with a round of the GTFO transportation game.

For how long?

***

Act 4, Scene 3
Privacy for Me/
Bounce for Thee

This vignette doesn't need much explication.

The yellow ban lines, blocking your view.

The inadequate ban lists that are numerically limited, or overcome by some rogue viewers, or which don't work above a certain height.

The candles and crystals and wishful thinking -- door locks? Sit hack anyone?

We did have quite an ominous looking animesh bouncer guy out here but he was 17 li so we took him down.

Both the desire for privacy -- and not always for the reasons you think -- and the desire for travel and exploration are always in conflict and always spawn protest.

It's hard to believe there was a time when Philip actually said for a moment in time that he would deprecate the "teleport home" or "bounce" scripts that so aggravated life on the Mainland. Then a caucus of Lindens and old residents squawked that the 3 1/2 elevators then operating in SL very slowly and clunkily would no longer work, so the script had to stay.

Certain merchants and influencers got their way on this, especially those who sold security orbs.

The Lindens had a brainstorm a few years ago -- truly genius. They added the function "Avatars Can See Me" to the land menu which can be switched "on" or "off".

Nothing like being totally invisible from outside the lot for privacy!

Of course, by definition in a virtual world, you are in public and it is hard to take yourself out of the public eye but of course it is constantly done with a huge variety of skyboxes, security systems, and then the continent Zindra, which isn't so much the "adult content" continent as it is "the zone where your enemies can't AR you" for swearing (as they can in PG) or classical paintings with partial nudes (as they can in G) or flying around with your bits outside (as they can in M) -- which they do merely as a form of retaliation usually over other beefs.

That's all that's about.

"Privacy" encompasses not just the view of any activity or furniture or scantily clad persons, but the right to be free of encroaching trees or builds, other people's prims on your land, rooted on theirs, and even an ugly view.

So the Lindens responded to the constant flood of complaints about how ruined the view got from signs, ad farms, tall buildings, and just plain fugly beach houses and spinning neon signs by allowing the third-party viewer Firestorm to put "derender" into the viewer.

The Lindens themselves have always steadfastly held to a Shared Vision of a Shared Vision and I'm with them there -- I think you should have rules people abide by -- soft norms or hard code laws -- to make views and lives tolerable and not rely on making the world a fractured fairy tale where no one sees the same thing.

I don't know how long that notion will last with the Lindens but they've had it for 20 years, and enabled a wide variety of options to ensure users the level of privacy or interaction they wish, by choice.

Every student of the Internet's history knows the story of "A Rape in Cyberspace" -- and everyone knows that when Meta began to claim the first Metaverse, they failed to learn not only from The Well but Second Life, which made a lot of progress on enabling freedom from the company but freedom from other users, as well. Soon the headlines were filling up with the rediscovered invention of the wheel.

A movie was once made for TV, a detective thriller taking place in Second Life, in which a character shouts "Log off! Log off!" to another character to get them away from an evil influence.

Until AI has a map of your house in its mind's eye and you in it, unless you're in a place like Iran or Russia, you're safe from prying eyes in RL for now. And in SL, you have many options to protect your privacy -- so many, that the frequent lament of newbies and returnees -- it's impossible to find a friend and things to do -- may have been the result. The privacy the individual seeks soon attaches to groups of like-minded with clubs whose main purpose is to keep others out.

***

Act 5, Scene 1
The Future is NOW

Dr. Harry "Happy" Cox, who you may remember from Firesign Theater, says "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG'. And as we know from a Firesign skit, "The future is HERE, the future is NOW".

The future isn't turning out like we thought and here we all are now soaking in it.

What will YOUR future be like in SL? If you like, go to our ancient Magic Compass at the geographic and magnetic center of SL in Ross (yes, really!) and take a reading (click on the fortune cards for the LM).

Harry has a question for the big Linden town hall for the 20th birthday:

"Will chatGPT take YOUR jobs?" Some of the work of Moles and Lindens may be further automated.

And more importantly, this:

"Is all of SL a giant LLM for you to use to train AI on? Are you sitting on a gold mine?"

As I noted before, unlike the giants who inhabit Silicon Valley, LL hasn't slurped up customer data to pitch ads to customers or sell to outside ad agencies.

But could it use the petabytes of chat and content and signage and labelling as an LLM to train robots?

Would it want to? If so, what constraints would be put on it?

I predict that the next iteration of the Tao of Linden (click on the rations to get it) will have to say something about artificial versus organic intelligence and comment whether it uses customer data for anything, whether pitching ads or for "world experience" or "improving the platform" or however it may be phrases. The role of bots will have to be better defined not just in the TOS but will have to start in the mission/values statement of the Tao.

We all have a big advantage because we've all been living up in the future for 20 years and other people are just going to come and know it.

We know what it means to be banned globally from the main outposts of society. Could that pan out in RL? We know what it means when merchants ban us from their vendors on the MP and inworld for all kinds of reasons, good or bad -- maybe they believe we have Copybot; maybe they don't like our blog. What about a future when you can't buy bread because you criticized the president?

We know what it is to have houses that are networked and public and visible and cammable by everyone. Will RL get that way?

Will the best parts of SL prevail in a RL all-encompassing Metaverse, like "getting to know someone from the inside out," as a figure in one of Draxtor Dupres' videos about romance in SL so beautifully described it?

All kinds of people from all kinds of places and stations in life and perspectives sometimes come together to cooperate in SL on all kinds of things, from live music to art to breeding smart cats and keeping the view nice and sailing into the sunset. Is that extendable to RL?

The "weak ties" once celebrated as a boon of social media are never discussed any more because they too often turn so vicious. Do virtual world "weak ties" work better to create viable communities?

I find it shocking that some tech on Twitter says the Metaverse started in 2022 and points to some industry working group -- and says if some company isn't in it, they must not be relevant. They have a very cramped notion of "Metaverse" that largely revolves around interoperability for a few big platforms.

Of course there is a lot more that goes into world-making, from security, privacy, regulating commerce, ensuring creators' rights to enable a viable market, and deterring crime effectively.

Linden Lab was convening Metaverse conferences in 2003. I went to the first one in 2004 ("State of Play" conference at NYU Law School, followed by the first SLCC meet-up).

I'm old enough to remember the first white paper on the Metaverse in 2007 with Jerry Paffendorf (SnoopyBrown Zamboni in SL)

Wire magazine has an article on the Metaverse this week acknowledging the role of Second Life in shaping Roblox and VRChat. Philip Rosedale is chided for anticipating SL becoming far bigger than it has, but if it influenced other worlds -- it has indeed grown bigger. Who had adult content in Roblox on their bingo card?

Wired speaks lamely of the need to organize easy AR reports as in SL -- but we know that's not enough, not without external blogs, social media, internal forums, and resident community groups where you can discuss issues and where you can address grievances and bring about meaningful change.

As the old END anti-nuclear slogan said:

PROTEST AND SURVIVE!

If the world are to live and be places where we move and have our being, we have to care enough to protest, offer alternatives, and being willing to compromise, just as in real life.

I always have.

END

Goons

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

 

 

This post from last summer is an incomplete part of the Walton Wainright/Contraption story but useful for a number of topics - top creator fascism in SL, the vicious open source movement, the coderati rulers of worlds, etc.

 

The history of Firestorm/Phoenix has yet to be written by the non-victors of course - using a post like this, for example.

 

 

Koda Dax

liked a reply to your Tweet

Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ziebzen

and

Tiny Mute Lizard

liked a reply to your Tweet

Hello there! Copybot/copyright protection scripts do not work. The process of a copybotter viewer just needs to have someone on sim to wear the item , and they can just right click > download the model and textures. Rezzing or purchase not required.

 

 

 

 

 

Walton Wainwright

liked a Tweet you were mentioned in

Yes. People need more education on what copybotting can/cannot do, otherwise you have a ton of paranoid people going the greatest lengths lol

 

 

 

Ȼᴏƒƒєα 

liked a reply to your Tweet

Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Java Nova

 

@JavaNovaBean

·

20h

 

Replying to

@CerberusXing

and

@Prokofy

I've known him for like... a few months. After I trolled him with Greg :D he's a great fella and a brilliant laugh. He's a good guy and it's sad to see people attack him when they barely know him personally at all

 

1

 

 

 

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Java Nova

 

@JavaNovaBean

·

21h

 

Replying to

@CerberusXing

and

@Prokofy

I am very confused with the logic of it? Like, he helps so many people in so many ways, but he's getting attacked for telling people how copybotting actually works and how no-rez scripts / no-mod items still don't stop the copybots...

 

6

 

 

 

1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eerie Eric

 

@ThatEerieEric

·

21h

 

Normally I don't promote this shitbird site to call out people but after doing some extensive research about

@Prokofy

i've learned so much about them. Let's do a thread. C;mon down!

 

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The Firestorm Viewer

 

@PhoenixViewerSL

·

21h

 

Replying to

@Prokofy

Our software is opensource. There is nothing we can do to mitigate users modifying our code except to close source our code. And that is not possible without violating license agreements and user trust.

 

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Tiny Mute Lizard

liked 2 Tweets you were mentioned in

From what I understand, they have a food giver with copy/trans permissions inside the giver (which is needed for all givers), and they have a script inside that keeps the owner from taking out the food and reselling it as-is.

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Walton Wainwright

 

@SLContraption

·

22h

 

Goodness, I'm in bed and it's still going. All because I went to go roleplay in a popular new rp sim, then had to change my character & buy a whole new similar set of clothes from a different brand because my outfit was no mod and bloated with unnecessary scripts over sim rules

 

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Java Nova

 

@JavaNovaBean

·

22h

 

Mannn, I'm sorry you're still getting stick for this. I hate it - scripts lag the crap out of sims and no-mod means you can't turn them off. And ripping them out doesn't work because YOU CAN'T BLOODY REZ THEM

 

 

 

 

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Prokofy Neva 

 

@Prokofy

·

19h

 

Why don't you big content creators call up the creatos of the anti-rez script used most off, such as Bosh, and have it out with them? Why are you harassing all creators?

 

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Java Nova

 

@JavaNovaBean

·

19h

 

I... I am not a big content creator 8D I have a tiny teegle mod shop with like 4 sales total lmao I'm not harassing *all* creators. I'm only replying to one because I am confused at this hostility over one person trying to explain that these scripts won't prevent theft...

 

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Prokofy Neva 

 

@Prokofy

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19h

 

I don't know why you imagine that I believe Copybot can be stopped by any script. That was never the point. The point is anti-rez scripts have other uses, and for full perm models, protection scripts are helpful to prevent theft not by Copybot. Longer and more complex convo

 

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Walton Wainwright

 

@SLContraption

 

Replying to

@Prokofy

and

@JavaNovaBean

https://twitter.com/SLContraption/status/1544947779642040320… Complex convo answered, on my third repeat.

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Walton Wainwright

 

@SLContraption

· Jul 7

I will quote my 2nd line here: "The only time it's appropriate is for HUDs or something being used in a functional game." And clarify that anti-rez has its place in functional situations. Anti-rez in no mod/no transfer wearables does not protect & inconveniences users.

Show this thread

 

8:29 PM · Jul 7, 2022·Twitter Web App

 

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Prokofy Neva 

 

@Prokofy

·

19h

 

Replying to

@SLContraption

and

@JavaNovaBean

Next time you have a tantrum about your outfit for your RP sim, why not call up the scripter and ask why he sells it rather than berate creators who use it, for a variety of reasons? PS I don't like bloody spiders clutching my face, call off your hit squad and anon goons.

 

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Walton Wainwright

 

@SLContraption

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18h

 

They're not anon goons or my hit squad, they're SL users that find your degradation into insults and ignorance to proper points made, and I've noticed you've been harassing their unrelated tweets. I WILL ask that EVERYONE to please refrain from responding continuing this.

 

 

 

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Your Alts, M'am, Once Again, and STFU

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

I never, ever, delete blog posts -- ever. If there is some factual correction to be made in them, I will insert it into the text at the end. Rarely, the platform provider may get bombarded with utterly specious copyright claims and get a post removed, but I can only think of one or two times that has happened in my entire life of blogging spanning some 23+ years. I also don't delete tweets unless I've made a typo or name spelling error in them, and then I repost them. Extremely rarely, I might notice that an effort to get a point across in a normal conversation among a few people isn't effective given the ugly pile-on propensities of Twitter especially now. So then, I might delete and make the point elsewhere inworld or not at all. But generally, my policy is never delete. Ever. And the setrecs (setting the record straight) can be made, but they aren't as numerous as imagined.

So far, given every fact I have, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever, in my life, to delete this post, this post or those updating it that came after.

Why? Because those alts are all belonging to the same person, as any idiot in Second Life can tell. They have similar names, dates, and groups. And the payments they made came immediately right after another, within seconds. These are universally recognized in SL and any other virtual world as alt behaviour.

Let's say, if in the course of publicizing these four original alts -- and a fifth that came on still pretending they were all unrelated -- I accidentally included a name of someone unrelated to the alt nest. 

Or let's say, one of the four isn't the alt, and four out of the five are.

That person would most likely do the thing most people do in SL: ignore it. Because it doesn't matter. Because they stand for themselves, and their alts, known or unknown, and what some landlord thinks in some two-bit 50L rental about his customers chiseling him in a policy of "limit one per person" in cheap rentals, and his blog, which is hardly seen by anyone these days, do not matter.

Let's say said person mistakenly included in a list of alts decided that they still had a discomfort level from this low level of "publicity". They might IM me once and say, hey, that's not me, would you mind taking me out of that list? To which I could say, "Oh, sorry" -- if I checked, and you really had a case.  Or, "Oh, I'm not convinced, and I need to deter people who repeatedly do this to me and shake down my cheap rentals." 

What Would Normal Person Do

If they were rational and normal -- and many people in SL are, although I understand a famous artist in SL once said, "Everyone in SL is broken in some way" -- which is also true -- they would shrug, chalk it up to life on the grid, and move on. Because my blog would sink below the fold and into the sands of Internet oblivion where in fact my blog actually stays, because of Google bombing -- SEO techniques to ensure the Internet either "never forgets" or "forgets forever and never becomes findable" -- both of which are practiced by amateurs and even large, expensive firms.

What a normal, rational, human being whose alt has been outed would do, had they used four of them to shake down 4 x 50L rentals in a one-per-person rental unit (80 cents US), would say, "Oops, what can you do, my bad" or "Those are not my alts, good sir, why the very idea!" in indignation just to defend the honour of alt-uniform. But then they'd be done. They'd be gone. We would never hear from each other again -- and believe me, I have plenty of these experiences in SL so I know the difference.

If a person really was wronged, they could say clearly, "It's a coincidence, those are not my alts." They wouldn't keep repeating like a broken record, "I did nothing to you" -- not actually a claim that they were NOT alts  -- in the mistaken conviction that grabbing multiple rentals in a limit-one-person area "does no harm." But it does. It's deception. And it takes cheap rentals from other people. My response to this chronic deception is just to make less and less cheap areas. I have probably a quarter of the number I used to because people are assholes and grab and deceive in this particular arena more than others. I sometimes have larger areas at the exact same price so they don't have to take four little rentals and put one skybox in the sky over them; they can just go on a platform that is larger and be done with it. But not endlessly; so the problem persists. So the hell with it, find somebody else to torment.

Absent Accountability

"I did nothing to you" is first of all, a failure to recognize when personal and community harm is done, and I'm here to keep you getting that lesson forever if I need to.  Secondly, if the claim of "I did nothing to you" is "my gender deception is not your business," then sorry, it's the business of all of us in a world that makes this easy, but not free from consequences.

What would a person do, if they were ignorant not only of the Streisand Effect, but 0blivious to common sense, or they were in some private jihad they needed to pursue? They would continue to harass, harry, threaten, bully, rant at me. They'd enlist strangers in this jihad. They'd enlist tenants in this jihad. They would endlessly stand around on a Linden infohub where they also had a beef against a Linden and another resident, and add my company logo and name to their "Picks" retailing their grievances. They would stand in front of my office on the Linden road so they couldn't be expelled and picket me so that all prospective customers would see a demonstrator and I would lose business (didn't work; we all AR'd them; finally they were gone.)

So that's what "lexdisia" and "troppicolor" and "troubletrixie" etc. and her legion of alts do. Any normal person -- or even in broken-people SL -- could tell her: by constantly bringing this grievance to public attention over and over for years, you're ensuring that your alt nest loses its privacy. Otherwise, you might still have it.

Motivations?

If they still do it, then they are mentally unbalanced but usually you can ban and mute such people or LL eventually permabans them because their insanity isn't limited only to you. That this person can keep recurring despite multiple ARs from all kinds of people on various issues, and not just my alt-abuse-in-cheap-rentals issue, lets me know one of three possibilities:

o the Lindens allow this crazy person to harass me as they find it useful;

o the alt of a present or past Linden is behind it -- it's hard to imagine anyone else would have that long a memory; most griefers grow up and either work for Intel or become professors;

o the Lindens can't control their grid effectively because they are unwilling to ban popular anonymizer sites or effectively ban frequent flyer griefers with hash bans or whatever they need to do.

Modus Operandi

I've lost track of the many times this person has harassed me, my tenants, and strangers (and sometimes pretended to be "concerned strangers" to boot). But the latest one takes exactly the same form as all the others:

o the same person with the same or a similar name of someone who should have been banned contacts me, threatening me and giving me "one last chance" to remove a post.

o  they put my company log in their profile with insults or threats, telling everyone not to rent from me and my "legion of alts" (LOL) which then is reported to me by various passers-by;

o  since they are immediately blocked, they get some passer-by involved in contacting me to deliver their threats; or that's an alt; or they're all related;

o they hang around the same Linden infohub sim (Barbarossa) they always do, related to another grievance they have with a Linden which sounds crazy to me;

o a person repeatedly contacts me with cryptic remarks on yet another name which is likely related;

o the person marks their profile with "deleted" except it isn't lol.

Etc.

So...Block/ban/move on.

AND PUBLICIZE. Because you have to do that to eradicate vindictive insanity in a virtual world; ARing, blocking is not enough.

Why?

Because ignoring griefing does not work, and ARs don't work, yet publicity does get rid of it -- it can simply take a long time

So this time, we will have a post on this subject to instruct the general public as to why this sort of thing happens, in such crazy fashion, and so often.

Why is this happening? 

Answer: because this person is a disturbed male deploying female alts to harm others. Sometimes these profiles speak of being a "ladyboy" or some kind of variant of m2f. Sometimes they don't and appear only as women -- and ah, that's the problem.  I would simply take them as female -- unless over the years, I notice the same person griefing me now has "ladyboy" or some version of m2f now on their profiles.

I'm not here to help you enact your broken gender issues on my time or in my rentals unless you a) pay the rental box b) abide by my simple rules and the TOS; c) don't grief me or your fellow tenants.

Likely, somewhere in this broken person's online history is someone they gender-deceived who is furious/hurt/won't speak to them now that they've discovered this on Prokofy's blog (let's hypothesize) and now said broken ladyboy must raise Cain in order to get Prokofy to delete this connection so they can go on deceiving that other person (let's say). Maybe not. But likely, given the frenzy around the demand to delete the post.

Well, sorry, I don't help you with your gender deception. I don't practice gender deception myself and I expect others to be decent and not practice it either, although it has been practiced on me a number of times. I lost my privacy at the dawn of Second Life because vicious assholes think that the way you win an argument online is by outing somebody's real gender and their real life details -- a practice now known as "doxxing" because of the "documents" posted on Pastepin or elsewhere, often with a gleeful note that these facts were all discoverable online and therefore "fair game." Sorry, but I don't think my elderly mother-in-law's name and address being discoverable on line means she gets to have police or pizzas at her door because some git in an online game has a beef about their e-house. 

Jump, Tor Will Catch You

Just like I don't think the former Linden (!) and Tor gal should get the pharmacist in NJ fired from his RL job because Ms. Privacy -- who felt her identity should be hidden behind seven seals on Twitter but who posted herself on top of the Washington monument in RL -- doesn't appreciate the hilarious satire that said pharmacist delivered to her: "Jump, Tor will catch you." That's not misogyny; that's not incitement of violence; it's the perfect putdown to these legion of fucktards who think Privacy for Me and Not for Thee is a viable life credo. 

Now, I'm totally aware that the story of this particular sad loser in Second Life may not even rise to the dignity of having had some important online relationship ruined because their gender deception was uncovered.

Transgender Totalitarianism

I'm totally cognizant of the fact that this may work an entirely different way, as it has all too many times: Lexdysia/TroubleTrixie/Colors may simply be a typically nasty m2f who hates, hates, hates women, lesbians, and f2m, especially f2m who don't hide their virtual or real status. I've sometimes wondered if the reality of my just not caring sweet dick-all if you fuck with me online in this way - and fight back -- is something that makes these fragile, insecure gender-challenged youth go ballistic -- because they live in such fear and self-loathing. We all know that Tizzers, once she finally completed her transition (she looks great BTW), and found happiness, began to grief less. Right? As did her RL husband, deployer of the Giant Refrigerator of Ravenglass.

I do have one question. Did Tizzers have her dick cut off? That might help me and other frequent, long-time victims of her griefing know if she is really serious and Grief-Moor has ceased, you know? Hormones can be stopped; surgery is forever. That's the kind of brutally serious point I make to people who griefed me for five years or more in a virtual world, causing actual damages, merely because I publicized their antics and abuse-reported them and because -- and this is the important one, an insight I got from none other than griefer-coddler Peter Ludlow -- they didn't want me or others to use the Internet in any other way than they did, which was a sandbox. That's all that's about. It's not an argument about creativity or "transgressive behaviour." It's a debate about whether you allow totalitarianism in the world or not. This streak of atrocious behaviour lasting for years isn't something where you get together for "old time's sake," and you kick back and have a beer and chat about these hilarious antics with the griefers themselves as the moronic Intlibber writes in comments I don't publish because you can't grief me and have your comments posted here. No. Say, how's your crypto account doin', big guy? 

Transgender Rights

I believe firmly in transgender rights; I believe firmly in the inherency of transgender. That's precisely why I fight transgender extremism that tries to take away choice from other people and to coerce people to adopt their beliefs. And it is indeed about trans-totalitarianism, the most extreme end of the transgender movement  -- transgenderism, and yes, I'll call it that -- that lives in a violent, rigid, ideologically controlled world and wants to extend that rigid, ideological, and violent ideology to others by coercion.

In other words, transgender extremism which is the last bastion of male chauvinism.

I first encountered transgender extremism in Second Life; now I see it in Real Life.

Men adopt female alts in games and virtual worlds for all kinds of reasons. Some claim, given our non-mouselook view in SL, they just want to look at a female butt as they fly around instead of a male butt, it's more attractive. Some are just involved in RP and stories of various light or heavy types, which is their right, and I stand by it. Some merely like to experiment, because you can, and that is their right, and I stand by it. Some are actually in transition in RL, and that is their right, and I stand by it. Some are only in transition in SL and may remain there and that is their right, too.

But some just have found an effective way to grief people, by a particular kind of culture jamming, and an f2m simply seems like a good target to them, whether they do this out of a motivation of fear, hatred, self-loathing, or lack of empathy. That isn't their right and they can go fuck themselves with that attitude, and I can and will AR them and publicize them when they do that, the end. They might be in any one of those legitimate categories outlined above -- but they don't get to use any of them as cover for harassing and attempting to silence or coerce other people, no they do not.

So I'll say this again and again and enlarge on it in another post.

But for the purposes of this post, we have before us just some sorry-ass SL loser who can't get gone and who thinks they can keep agitating with their efforts to gain totalitarian control over what others say and do -- by threats and coercion. "Last chance to delete a post"-- or else. Or else what? A lawyer contacts me? An AR is filed against my blog or inworld? Some effort is found to frame me? Some RL violence occurs? That's why I publicize these things, and don't play the game of "don't feed the trolls."

And I'm here to say: no you can't get your way, you infantile loon, go away.

Again, I also like to record these incidents when they happen so that in the event a sorry-ass loser like this "takes it to real life," and hits me over the head with a hammer, the police know where to look.

Publicity is always the best weapon.  

 

Isabelle Charen and Hamlet Au Very Gingerly Take Up the Topic of Grossly Distorted Women's Bodies in SL

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

Thesis:

The wild distortion of bodies in SL is a form of violence against women, especially pernicious as it hides behind the popular causes of body-positivism and transgenderism. If women commit this violence against themselves, assenting to, or even reveling in grotesquely huge or scratched and bleeding and bruised skins, that doesn't legitimize it.

Note: in SL, as in RL, the taking of photos of people without their permission is not the violation of any RL law or SL TOS. If you don't want to be blogged about as you strut your stuff at a public event, don't strut your stuff. The end. Banning me from a sim or event because you don't like the pictures of yourself or your client  -- or what is said about them -- won't leverage your power and ensure the persistence of only docile -- nay, slave-like bloggers-cum-PR agents -- there will be another one like me along in a minute. Give it up. Public discussions with illustrations are needed in a liberal democratic society.

So SHamlet, as I've long called him, has a  YouTube show now with Isabelle Cheren, who is a great tweeter and vlogger (you must see her character Auntie Va Gina). As many of you know, I hold nothing but disdain for Hamlet nee Linden Au (read the note at the end if you need the back story*).

Still, it's a "moment" when something historically interesting happened today. For the first time that I can recall (you'll correct me), the essential problem of horrid BODY DISTORTION -- dysmorphia, if you will -- in SL was raised by our public figures -- to be sure, very gingerly, very PC, with plenty of caveats to avoid the haters -- and certainly not deeply in the way I know Isabelle could do this, were she on her own blog solely (but yeah, they all worry about Monetarization...) -- but still....

So let's dig in, shall we?

Last week, SHamlet decided to publish Cajsa Lilliehook's "Bingo Card" on SL Photos on Flickr.

Casja titles her post "SL Flickr Always Showing You The Same Tired Tropes? Play Cliché Bingo!" -- as if the issue is repetitive photo work (she's an expert on SL photos and an artistic photographer herself) -- which side-steps the real roots of the issue, but still...

It hardly got noticed or got a comment -- except for a few giggly notes that yeah, short arms, LOL. Now Cheren will give it more boost.

Time to Poke the Flickeristas

This intervention may have become more possible when SL Flickr is at an all-time historical low and there's less liklihood of backlash -- thousands of SL residents left Flickr for Twitter or other services when Flickr decided earlier this year that all adult content even broadly understood (nude SL avatars) could only be published by paid accounts. Most SL people, even top designers, do not pay for their Flickrs, and Flickr itself always has a message urging you to "show your thanks" by buying them the premium Flickr. 

So the Flickr photogs have scattered, and now their works sometimes show up under low-follow accounts with "content warning" covers on Twitter and now Mastadon, but they have reduced their "reach" considerably. Therefore, time to take a poke.

Flickr is where you see some very good stuff, but also a lot of appalling dreck -- just like all SL fashion and art. SL and all its related social media venues of course is the very embodiment of a concept you don't hear about any more called "the long tail".

Flickr is where you learn that girl haranguing you on the forums is likely a boy in RL, because she has nothing but photo after photo of herself giving blow jobs to various over-endowed males. It's really not artistic, hon. It's not even good porn. Ladies, I think we can agree that focusing ONLY on dicks is something that generally girls don't do in their photos and SL in general. Argue you it as much as you like -- I know.

OH, and before we get any further on this -- and yes, wait for my next blog called "On Transgender" -- we'll note that yes, I'm a dumpy, overweight ugly old lady in RL, too -- gosh, like some of these distorted avatars! But no, I'm not "jealous" or "self-hating".  Are you? Did you ever endure shit like this in SL? 

(The invasion of Twitter by SL Flickeristas was part of the backdrop for the great Contraption Beat-Down this past summer -- which I blogged extensively but which still awaits that shorter, thoughtful round-up blog you really need to understand that it's not about me or even Walton or even anti-rez scripts or even his foul-mouthed mean-ass posse -- it's about the highly-rigid class and rewards structure of our virtual society and what powers are exerted to maintain it this way. And as you know, I'm not a Marxist about these things. If you missed all this, scroll back on my old blog posts, but this one tweet really sums up a lot of the brutal, inane, schoolyard violence of Second Life, if you ask me.)

So in general, the Flickeristas of SL are feeling vulnerable, having lost their prime venue for their works (and what a shame, too -- I stopped going because I didn't want to pay any more, either, without all of them, and now I have run out of photo space) -- and they still haven't really adjusted to Twitter -- and now about half a year after their exodus, Twitter has turned into a raging dumpster fire in Bayonne, NJ which the cops have been bribed by City Hall to ignore.

So...Cajsa -- and SHamlet -- have cast the BODY DISTORTION ISSUE OF SL as a "boring photos" problem. Like, it's ok to have some photos with "dicks as big as a horse". Or it's ok to have a few photos with "children's eyes and faces put on adult bodies" for...some redeeming reason we haven't quite learned yet, but let's say it exists. It's merely a photographic staging problem -- not anything deeper. It's even ok -- more than ok, let's be proud, ladies -- to have YUGE T&A in SL. Certainly, it is!

But...but...some of it is kind of icky and gross, they imply.

Well, I suppose we should accept any legitimization of this topic in any form, since the standard response is:

o It can't be put on the forums, those threads will be deleted or the person raising questions about these outrageously ugly grossly fat and overendowed women in SL must be misogynist, or anti-trans, or a Rethuglican, or worse, a genocidaire of one kind or another. 

o You can't put it on your blog outside SL in any form -- see above, you will be mobbed and hated and cancelled.

And now...

o the problem of too-short hands that couldn't reach around and wipe even a modest ass is a far more troublesome problem! Yay! Strawberry Linden -- who established what we might call the Ass Wipe Arm Measurement Standard for SL, fretted recently that a video she posted with herself and others doing a lovely dance highlighted some issue of a too-small head or a too-short arm. Nobody noticed it but her and 3 of her girlfriends. Meanwhile, this "flaw" will be allowed for ever and ever, amen, to wipe out the real problem of slices, cuts, and bruises on women's bodies in SL and the demands for, and uses of, exaggerated demeaningly fat bodies for women. Hello, avatar!

Squishy Thighs

o Example: recently, when I verrrry cautiously raised the issue of the "squishy thighs" (as they are euphemistically called) being suddenly "everywhere" and wondered "how did that happen" -- I wanted to understand the technical and social dynamics -- I got glared at and stomped on and unfollowed recently. These aren't garters, ladies and gents. These are binders that maim and kill.

Even though it ought to be disturbing that suddenly, thousands of virtual women are binding their upper thighs to the point of painful indentation and harm (if done in RL) as a "fashion".

So the way it works with these bodies, from what I can tell, is one of the makers, like Reborne, will make a thing, and then the others copy it. Not literally Copybot it, although that can happen of course, but they are "inspired" to make similar products.  Or (if I understand correctly), there are some creators who make a thing like such thighs as body parts that is sold as a feature to body makers (or maybe not, but they spread like kudzu). 

Hence the season's tortures (or delights) for bodies just in time for Halloween: thighs squished tight even to the point of bloodlessness and even with barbed wire and blood  -- by contrast in time for overstuffing at Thanksgiving -- rounded bellies and "love handles" tacked on to normally super-model-slim mesh bodies (if they aren't the dysmorphic bodies in the first place, in which case they don't need "love handles".

Kardashian on Steroids?

Some fashion analysts trace the grotesquely fat women of SL to the Kupra body, in which a sort of Kardashian on steroids, or a Brazilian bombshell, was to be the ideal -- a pretty face with normal features, long hair sometimes put up in a bun, and then GIGANTIC hips and buttocks. The look is "She has such a pretty face, too bad..." of the type of comment that singer Chrissy Metz heard all her life, providing fodder for endless magazine articles about her attempts to diet.

But Kupra was hardly the first big fat lady body of SL and hardly the only one now. Those of us who go back to the time when there were only system bodies and clothes and sliders know that there were always a few griefers in particular, and possibly a few genuine transgender kink types, who made grotesquely fat women's bodies "for fun" and waddled around even poking people with their giant attributes.

 

Big doesn't have to be ugly -- and can be beautiful -- when there is attention to line and proportion

Strained, Chaste Discussion

Isabelle and SHamlet go through a very strained, very chaste discussion of these tortured bodies of SL. They genuflect to the four compass points as one does -- they opine that perhaps they're just people expressing themselves -- which, they hasten to assure us -- they surely have the right to do in a virtual world. (And Isabelle, not surprisingly, served up more of that line to me later on Twitter.)

But then there's that troubling tendency -- which has become a tidal wave recently, making this past Halloween the absolute goriest in SL history -- of bleeding, scratched, bruised, damaged skin -- not just a red hand imprint on buttocks, not just a winsome scratch "that embellishes an empty face" (as Gorky said in My Childhood about Russian violence, domestic and public, in general). No, these are tears, rips, gaps, horrors -- mutilation. Like the photos of RL people I have seen or met who have gone through Russian filtration camps, in the Chechen, Syrian, and Ukrainian wars. That's why I think such things should never be played with.

And why you will never see me going to bid for Patch Linden to be sprung from "jail". The RL father of my RL children spent 9 years in the GULAG and his brother and grandfather perished there, along with friends and colleagues. It's not something you play with. But that's just me. For most people in SL, Gorky works find. Slashes and bites and blood are fashion and liven up a dull virtual world -- which always has more reality than humankind can bear.

This isn't in the bedroom -- this is a public figure at a public event, setting the tone. So I say, "Look at yourselves. What the HELL are you doing?!"

This troubles the bien pensant SHamlet -- he'll excuse and applaud BDSM but not THAT much of a public display of disaffection -- but then comes the "uncomfortable"  silence -- and mention of "that issue," as these two very vaguely reference what is in turn euphemistically called "age play" in SL but which in fact is child pornography, and banned by the Lindens because in many RL jurisdictions it is a crime.

Still, can you be sure? Wouldn't want to step on anyone's self expression! The tap-dance done here is fascinating -- and again -- on her own, Isabelle would be more frank, but there you are -- the price of getting 2,800 subscriptions -- which is huge for an SL vlogger -- is precisely that. You do watch what you say. She claims not, of course in this discussion which hinges on the liberal premise that you can always impugn to another human being engaged in some awful act some sort of rationale that would be justifiable. Well, no. You don't. Putin had an unhappy childhood but that doesn't justify mass murder.

"I Like to Jiggle Jiggle"

At one point I was making a folder of these grotesque body distorted women of SL but I can't find it now -- and for more biting satire around them than I can deliver, go and see Naria Panther -- in this case, 13:40 for example. She simply goes to the latest merchant event and pans her camera around. These aren't exceptions or freaks. We've all seen them many times. I have had the precise same experiences, as we all have, looking in horrid fascination as an amply-endowed lady-love jiggles to a halt in front of a display she wants to examine -- and then keeps jiggling and jiggling, way past the sell-by date, and way past anything like RL atall.

The racks on these babes would deserve their own zip code -- if their ass cheeks hadn't been gerrymanded ahead of time to get their own damn county. One wonders -- delicately -- how they, er, do it, without creating all kinds of rendering and eclipsing issues for the SL engine. BTW, if you want to see SL porn done properly, with all the technical issues studied and generally solved, at least with slender bodies, you can join the group Black.Sand furniture group (the guy is Russian, and for him it is the каракум) and see the link to Google docs in his latest notice.

But Are They Really Like That?

Big bosom, sure -- but not grotesque. And thighs are adorned, not squished. It can be done, ladies!

I decided to just take a quick tour around the main events this evening -- although most of them opened yesterday or a few days ago and have now utterly emptied out, their cam sims utterly useless. THAT is the state of the SL economy and the product of an excessive proliferation of events. Still, there's a few points that can be observed:

o Fashion, you know? An angular dress can be very bizarre or extreme in Paris, but by the time it gets to Schenectady's dress-makers, it will be rather dumbed down and softened. And just because creators MAKE these hideous get-ups,  with photos of the stupidest-looking models they can find, doesn't mean people buy them or wear them -- or if they do, wear them all the time. If they're on mod, they might revise them. So it's hard to know how prevelant this FASHION is in actual USE without real sociological study;

o If you take the top "Big Girls" event (didn't it used to be called THICC? that's the word used for this style anyway) -- you realize that as in the cover picture of the event, large does not mean ugly or distorted. These are beautiful bodies, in proportion, or even if not in proportion exactly, still done esthetically. Esthetics do matter, and there are universal notions of what constitutes aesthetical lines, even if they can differ from culture to culture. Harmony. Balance. Restraint. You can do "big" or "busty" without being an atrocity. In fact, I noticed (I'd never gone to this event), most of the wares on sale were not even as "large" as in the cover photo. They were merely what you might call "curvy".

So to be clear here, Big Girls and the kind of bodies and outfits at this event is NOT what I mean -- or most people would mean -- by "body distortion" in SL.

This is more what we mean by "body distortion" in every way:

Is this what we mean by "distorted"? Well, for some, here, yes. Notice the men aren't distorted; the women are! Still, that's not what most people gawk at, except for good reasons.

o So, in short, where you see the big bums in particular, they aren't THAT big as the extremes that Panther found -- or that I've seen over the years and that seem to stand out. That is, if you just look at the events, what they offer, and the people who go to them, you see there is a LOT LESS body distortion in SL than you might have thought. To be sure, there is still SOME -- and I see it around at other types of events or among my tenants (although not at art gallery openings and not at the top-spending level of tenant). Yes, I correlate outrageous body distortions with the poor, for all kinds of reasons, in my observation. Again, argue if you like on principal -- but you haven't seen thousands upon thousands of tenants, and I have.

YET IT IS STILL PREVELANT ENOUGH TO SPREAD AND DEMAND JUSTIFICATION -- WHICH IT SHOULD NOT.

o Occasionally, you could even find that the "bruised and battered" look isn't meant to mean "BDSM" or "domestic violence victim" but "girl who clambered up a mountain and maybe scraped her knees". Like this person:

Not, like the grotesque character at 10:18 on Panthar's video -- grotesque mainly because of her dreadful jiggling.

Does that mean that Panthar is lying? Cherry-picking? Distorting herself? No, she's reporting the truth of the situation -- there is more and more grotesqueness out there. But there are distinctions and the top designers and their customers make them -- fortunately for the aesthetics of SL.

Another example of a person who emphasized her butt and put on garters -- but not to the point of pain and distraction.

That doesn't excuse the enormous amount of fashion AND use of damage that I see all over SL -- it's a culture indeed of sadism and masochism in every way. Virtuality amplifies and rewards this. That's why I worry deeply.

(No, I don't agree with you that BDSM is just a "lifestyle" -- I think it's an aggressive dysfunction that does not keep to its own supposed rules of consent whatsoever and has bled out extensively into the public square. At the level of my rentals, I accept that BDSM is a choice for the bedroom, and I'm colour-blind, and don't "go there" because I believe strenuously in privacy and tolerance and pluralism (as distinct from an endless parade of belligerent diversities). But as a choice for society to tolerate, I reject BDSM. I don't like it when people go into events with their clanking chains (often in the form of pixels, but still), with degraded slaves crawling behind them. It's simply wrong. The extraordinary number of "safe houses" for subs lets you know that.)

o It's also important to note that body dysmorphia and BDSM are intertwined but not coterminous. And that's helpful to understand when thinking about this problem -- which, BTW, there is little you can do about in a world for adults, but it is an issue you can discuss and guide your children on. 

So on moral grounds, even by their ultra-liberal lights, the Lindens should ban "Capture Roleplay" sites. On technical grounds they can't, having once accepted that BDSM as a category can be tolerated as "adult". If they got into adjudicating what is "Capture Roleplay" and what is "BDSM," even if making a public/private distinction, they would be endlessly parsing badly-filled out ARs or their own grainy screenshots. They won't be doing that.

All children go through stages of hatred and dislike of their bodies, and other children sadly help them to suffer in these stages. Like Kimmie Dawson, quoting her late friend Genevive:

She said 'I like giants
Especially girl giants
'Cause all girls feel too big sometimes
Regardless of their size'

I don't  believe the cure for these childhood woes that persist into adulthood is grotesquerie in the public square of SL as a normalizing phenomenon. Sometimes it's good to leave things as an aesthetic and moral issue, realizing you can't legislate around it. In fact, when you can't legislate, or shouldn't legislation because of "too blunt an axe," that's all the more reason to take a moral stance and condemn it. And so I do.

The wild distortion of bodies in SL is a form of violence against women, especially pernicious as it hides behind the popular causes of body-positivism and transgenderism. If women commit this violence against themselves, assenting or reveling in grotesquely huge or scratched and bleeding and bruised skins, that doesn't legitimize it.

My conclusion from years of observation of this issue is there are three reasons for the grotesque distortion of women's bodies in SL -- ranging in degree of prevalence:

1. Women wear exaggerated bodies and outfits of this nature because men like it, or they think men like it.  They do it sometimes happily, and over-do it -- they do it under pressure. But the source of their doing this is not in their own hearts, except in the sense of neediness. Here's a so-very-SL scene -- the girl is stark naked in a large public event, standing close in front of her boyfriend who is gazing at her, oblivious of other males -- or females -- ogling here -- with the tell-tale tag of a "demo". She's trying on a body or body part or skin or whatever for his approval.
   
   
   
   Yes, it's simply a Thanksgiving weekend shopping outing for this loving couple. But could you think about it, please.
   
   
   
   "How about squishy, but not TOO squishy, hon, ok?"
   
   
   Yes, there are men who like such grossly distorted bodies, especially huge asses -- everybody remembers the song "Baby Got Back". And no, this isn't just a Black cultural issue, because dysmorphic bodies in SL range in races and don't seem over-represented to any one.
   
   
2. Some trans women adopt the exaggerated, heavily sexually endowed and provocative look as part of their transition in RL or their choice in SL. I don't perceive transgenderism as RP. The RP of transgenderism isn't necessarily the same thing as the drag queen but these are separate issues. Some feminists that are labelled as TERFS call this a "kink" -- like the RL shop teacher who insisted on coming to class with giant boobs and gained the right to do this in her school (I just hope her boobs don't get caught in a lathe). When observing types who do this, sometimes among tenants, I'm kind of amazed that they don't seem concerned at all about how they are perceived by others -- and are oblivious, if not defiant. My own conviction is that this form of virtual transgenderism, whether by RL transgender people or SL aspiring transgender people or just jokesters is not rooted in actual kindness to biological women. There is a certain hatred that comes out that is a dynamic involving shocking and inciting others, so that they then disdain or even hate this distorted female body. I don't think there's necessarily anything "healthy" here -- I think the desire to distort the female body outrageously is a dysfunction and it's fine to question it. 
   
   Of course, we're not supposed to question it -- which is why SHamlet weighing in on this topic -- during the week of the aftermath of the Club Q massacre -- is interesting. The Lindens and their hangers-on are always hoping to "clean up" SL and "manage" the "adult content". To what end? A sale? Of course, Casja's Bingo Card was published on November 17, days before the Club Q massacre. That's not the point; the point all these issues are coming together everywhere, and they had a felt need to air them.
   
   3. Finally, some women with huge bodies in SL have them in RL and want to "be themselves" and "be body-positive" and "overcome stereotypes". And more power to them. I notice that most of the women who do this do not hideously distort; they just have large or even obese bodies, but their ass doesn't stick out from here to Nebraska, you know? Their boobs don't poke your eye out in revenge. That's the thing. You really can feel the difference.
   
   
   
   
   Bodies that tile the female form unnaturally so it can be more accessible to males are troubling, but it's all too common in RL and SL.
   
   So...stop here for a minute. The greatest form of distortion in SL is precisely the gigantism of the buttocks, and secondarily, the breasts -- often the breasts are made childishly small by comparison to the enormous ass for contrast. Of course, this position is associated with men simply banging a broad, like an animal, not seeing their faces or interacting with any other part of them, as distinct from laying on top of them, gazing into their face, and asking them what they would like. And on the Bingo card, this holds only one delicately phrased box: "implausibly big hips and thighs".
   
   No, Casja. They aren't just "implausible" -- they are hideously huge. And they aren't just the hips and thighs -- they are the buttocks. Putting a square "ASS CHEEKS" in all caps doesn't convey that these are GROSSLY DISTORTED -- it conveys merely that they are shown -- like the "camel toes" and the men's "packages". (A term SHamlet uses several times in the show).
   
   I don't think there's anything to celebrate with no. 2 as there is with no. 3, but sexual preference isn't something you can dictate or change -- whatever cultural factors go into shaping it, there's inherency in gender and preferences for gender, in my view. Prosecuting some elements of it, regarding children and enslavement and brutality in particular, but it's hard to change. In our virtual world, the fact that SHamlet and Isabelle have now set the bien pensant tone for this as being "disturbing" when it involves "printing children's faces on adult bodies" and "painful" when involving "squishy thighs" -- and merely deserving of derision in horse penises -- and particularly troubling when it comes to gashes and bruises. They hypothesize for a minute that some women appearing in SL all battered and blue maybe "working out issues" or something but I'm not buying that.
   
   As one of my blog commentators famously said about my discussion of the child avatars "working out issues of abuse" by making their child avatars subject to simulated virtual abuse: "What's in it for Daddy?" Why is he being ever-so-helpful in putting this "child" partner through their humiliation? Indeed.
   
   Shamlet and Charen staking a little bit of a claim on this subject is welcome. Yes, it's partial and needs to go further -- but ultimately it isn't going to change anything for the masses. Still, you can be sure that certain mavens on the talk show and art gallery and Linden office hour circuit are going to slightly adjust their wardrobes and maybe heal up some of those many bruises and scratches. The gauntlet has been thrown down.
   
   PS: You can also be sure that a certain number of gals will come in and now and "set me straight" with defiant millennial or Gen X or Gen Y "gurl power" that their mutilation is a form of glory. I just don't get it, they'll say! 
   
   To which I can say: how come the men aren't scratched and beaten and bruised? Huh? How's that for a question. And PPS -- sometimes, not often,  you will see men, too -- especially Black men -- with these "adornments" which also bears pondering.
   
   Will the Lindens change their TOS to forbid mutilated skins? Of course not. They'll invoke zombies and aliens and war sim RPs. They'll invoke whatever they need to invoke to keep this particularly high-paying constituency. I have AR'd some of the most hideous Halloween gore bodies and skins and outfits -- to no avail. And how could there be any reaction when the Lindens own haunted house contains a pick-up truck with mutilated dead bodies in it? For me, it's a pick-up truck nearly identical to a photo I wrote about from the RL Battle of Ilovaisk, which is why I never go to the Linden's haunted house every year. They never take that monstrosity down. 
   
   I realize that I haven't been able to illustrate this post with the really most grotesque images we already all know about. That maybe I fail to make my case, and not only for that reason. The default assumption about virtual worlds is that everybody would want to be tan, fit, and 21, with maybe larger boobs or dicks than RL, but not at the grotesque and obese level we see them. Yet that is NOT what happened in the reality of our virtuality, and we need to study the three reasons I have outlined -- and others -- for an explanation.
   
   It's good to cry "Hold, enough!" in virtual worlds. And so I do.
   
   
   *I view SHamlet, who was the official Linden court blogger for too many years before he went "independent," as something of a talentless hack. Enthusiastically and uncritically blogging about the Lindens' every fabulous move in those early years was really noxious. The Alphaville Herald with its tabloid approach and biting satire was truly preferable.  I've had an ongoing critique of him for years for all his distortions and outright lies serving the Lab and the cool kids, and it's been a mystery how he makes a living (and he even has another book coming out about the Metaverse). I guess it's the speaker's fees, like with all the tech journos. I can't imagine the ads on his blog bring in much but he is popular in the way state media is with a certain SL crowd. SHamlet only benefits by bringing on Charen, who *does* have talent and a following, but of course he'd bring on a white girl who isn't going to be too critical of the Lab, and not one of the numerous kick-ass Black bloggers on YouTube who don't even get a mention even when the Lab itself features them. 

   Does this sound mean? Then you don't know the history of SL or his completely self-serving and disingenuous interview of me, calling me a "Noam Chomsky" (!) merely because I criticized LL and its favourites and tech in general -- which wasn't popular 18 years ago as it is now! This summaries up the whole thing for me: at the end of SLCC I in 2004, Philip asked everyone in the conference (perhaps 200 people?) to pose in a picture together, because he said SL was like "the dawning of the Internet," that the "whole new world" of the Metaverse was something we would all look back on as being founded then. This is where I BOLTED from the room. It was a crazy instinctive thing. By that point it wasn't just that I myself had suffered in SL and been targeted for all kinds of hate campaigns, including by Lindens (yes, by Lindens), it was that I was watching the damaging effect on other people -- that was back when I thought I saw the future of the Internet was inside SL (not much different than Philip) and that it "had to be stopped" -- before I realized SL was merely a concentrated form like a magnifying glass starting a fire on a leaf -- in fact the phenomena that led to 8chan and mass school shootings wasn't just in SL, it was all over the Internet. More on that another time.

   So as I RAN from this room -- I valued SL, and I appreciated Philip, but I didn't want to be in the "Founding Fathers" photo and take responsibility historically. So...who should I meet rushing in the other direction, so as not to miss the photo op? SHamlet! Of course! He couldn't BEAR to miss out -- FOMO -- and had to be present at that Founding Fathers (and to some extent Mothers) moment for "the Metaverse". Hard to remember now that we talked about "the METAAA-verse" even more and as wild-eyed and crazily then as people do now -- and we laugh at them, we jaded consumers of corporate virtuality. Too bad humdog isn't alive to see this. Or maybe not.

   I'll admit freely that I haven't followed SHamlet too closely in the last few years because it seems to me he put his blog kind of on autopilot with re-pasted forums posts or mass media news and plenty of posts by valiant worker bees like Cajsa Lilliehook who diligently post original content for him. That's always the formula, girls!  He was ATROCIOUS on the gatcha issue as I noted, unnecessary amplifying a lawyer who was entirely doing the Lab's bidding instead of challenging them.
   
   And here's all you need to know about SHamlet: because I have had a long-standing criticism of him (such as this post about his economic favouritism or this critique of his reporting on skins for minorities or this left-handed praise ), which began with his mocking interview of me, he devised a policy for his comments section that would ONLY apply to me. If I ever commented on any of his posts on New World Notes, I would have to put my RL name in full. I couldn't use my avatar name. No one else had to suffer that sort of exposure to harassment that comes with giving your RL name around virtual world types  -- only me. That is, he wouldn't bar my posts on grounds of obscenity, or trolling, even as tendentiously understood in those circles, because it wouldn't be there. That's the thing. He would instead force exposure of RL on me -- to the legions of griefers showing up in his comments (more then than now) to harass and bully me further in RL and SL -- just to make a criticism of him. That's despicable and can't be justified in any way, and the more discriminating leading lights of SL get that. 

Loony Luna Bliss Just Has Two Questions to Answer But Won't Answer Them and Spouts Nonsense about Nanobots

Loony Luna has put this in a comment, but I'll answer it in a post so it doesn't fall from view:

Prokofy, I fear there has been a grave misunderstanding between us. I entered into the thread to challenge you regarding the demonization you frequently exhibit toward all technology. When I spoke of animats related to artificial intelligence I was referring to nanobiotechnology, and I asked you to look the word 'animats' up for a clearer understanding. This refers to the way 'tiny robots' could help us medically in the future, and is a very exciting field. Instead, you lumped me in with some sort of technocommunism ideas of yours by accusing me of being part of some kind of techno-cult, and I received the following message from you, which you failed to mention here in your blog: " Prokofy Neva: Coming into a thread about finding facts regarding griefers, and spouting your theories, which I don't support at all as they are fascistic, is a form of harassment itself. It's not about you "disagreeing with my ideas." It's about harassment with your theories that only support griefing in the end, in a thread seeking ways to curb them. So I saw what you did there. It's not merely a derail. It's a form of harassment with ideas that you seek because you imagine they give you power or your group power or some cult power but they are abusive to others. You have not been democratically elected in a liberal democracy under the rule of law to provide your "help" on "AI"." Basically, you are saying here that I'm an abuser...a facist, a harasser, supporting griefing, part of some sick cult, trying to circumvent democracy or rule of law. THIS was what I responded to. I guess you forgot about the above message from you?

Let's see if we can try again to deal with this SHEER IDIOCY, shall we? 

What you see here is a clear exhibition of someone so caught up in various half-assed spiritual and tech cults that they can't recognize that their ideas are -- to put it charitably -- "alternative".

They imagine they are "the norm" and "standard" and "OK" and the rest of us are hopelessly mired in FUD -- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

Challenging tech cults isn't "demonizing" -- it's challenging tech cults that need to be challenged, like you'd challenge Scientology (which tech cults often themselves love to demonize, and understandably so) or challenge Moonies or challenge the Catholic Church because you don't like their beliefs about gays. (My answer to that is: go over to the Episcopalian Church then. They allow gays, they even have gay priests and they have a very similar liturgy. Instead of demanding that a mainstream religion change to your alternative views, go to the alternative).

YOU challenge things all the time, and sorry, YOU and YOUR BELIEFS will be challenged right back.

On this question, I'll repeat what I wrote to this sorry individual inworld which I already put in a blog post here:

[2018/02/26 20:48] Prokofy Neva: Hi, I didn't realize you were such a tech cultist, good Lord. Now here's what you have to read: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/418728-encroachment-on-robin-loop/
[2018/02/26 20:48] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2018/02/26 20:49] Prokofy Neva: the person in that thread is named "animats" -- he's a total asshole -- oh, unless you think rape RP is fine, you may, I don't know, tech cultism often goes together with those extremities of depravity as well. Well, I don't want it on my lawn, dear : )
[2018/02/26 20:49] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.
[2018/02/26 20:50] Prokofy Neva: you also have to see how insanely wrong and crazy the Lindens are here - the road isn't repaired, it was never my fault, my customers are struggling now, animats is a total freaking asshole, get a grip Luna, I thought you were better than this http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2018/02/a-linden-injustice-robin-loop-road.html
[2018/02/26 20:50] Second Life: User not online - message will be stored and delivered later.

OH, UNLESS YOU THINK RAPE RP IS FINE, YOU MAY, I DON'T KNOW, TECH CULTISM OFTEN GOES TOGETHER WITH THOSE EXTREMITIES OF DEPRAVITY AS WELL.

This statement doesn't accuse Luna Bliss of "extremities of depravity" -- it has the all important article "unless". This is like "if...then" in code, you know. 

So one more time:

LUNA BLISS, DO YOU THINK RAPE RP IS FINE, YES OR NO?

YES OR NO, LUNA BLISS, STAY FOCUSED

IS RAPE RP FINE WITH YOU? ANSWER THE QUESTION, YOU HAVEN'T ANSWERED IT YET, YES OR NOT.

So let's explain once again that Rape RP is among the worst form of BDSM in SL and is legal in adult areas as a public club -- on the theory that BDSM itself is legal, so why not?

Both are to be condemned, but as I've noted before, one can posit a tolerance of BDSM as a personal choice in the privacy of one's sex life, in one's home. That privacy and individual space could in theory be posited in a liberal democratic state as a necessity for freedom.

But what happens with this cult is that they are always and everywhere trying to push outwards into the public arena to normalize themselves and undermine the legitimate rejection of their cult.

Under U.S. law and EU law, "consent" is not recognized as an exoneration from the charge of assault. God knows, the BDSM cultists and edge-casers who like to be contrarian tried to push this with an appeal of a case, I believe it was from Germany at the European Court of Human Rights, but it FAILED.

Read the law -- "consent is not a defense when assault is the offense".

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 5 states that, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”  And that stands. You don't suborn it as a BDSM cultist by invoking "consent".

That's because actual bodily harm stands as an actuality and proof that "consent" doesn't diminish in law -- and in common sense and reality! -- and the mental assault of BDSM that might get a pass may be challenged as well if the court has reason to consider that the consent is a sham.

Note the actual real-life jurisprudence:

The criminalization of sadomasochistic behavior in R v. Brown was affirmed by the European Court of Human Rights when Brown was considered at the supranational level as Laskey, Jaggard and Brown v United Kingdom (1997). In the decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the state unquestionably was entitled to regulate through criminal law the infliction of physical harm and the Court was not persuaded that the applicants' behavior belonged to the private morality sphere and therefore excluded from State intervention. 

So consent is not recognized. We who watch all these machinations also don't find the invocation of "consent" very trustworthy in the virtual context where it can try to get a blessing as "lifestyle" or "roleplay". There are too many cases "gone wrong". Too many calls to the police of cases in RL of desperate people. Too many "sub support groups" in SL. Too many abuse reports. Too many everythings. Too often, the person espousing BDSM as a sub has a history of sexual molestation and domestic violence. The idealogues are always trying to erase these facts.

Even so, in the SL context, as I said, one tends to concede the privacy of the bedroom as an element of the individual's freedom -- but it's on shaky ground, especially as the BDSM practitioner himself often wants to push out into taking over the public sphere -- or anywhere else he can get on a sim. That's why the sub always has to have a notice on her profile that if anyone has any "problems" with her they have to take it up with her dom -- drawing EVERYBODY into the drama that way.

So to return to the public roads of the Mainland:

The reality is, somebody trying to slyly introduce more widespread use of the RLV third-party BDSM viewer that enables you to restrain people and do other BDSM actions is merely an ideologues's efforts to normalize the cult.  That's what's underlying this ideological subterfuge and sabotage. It's not accident, comrades that my Flamingo Court Motel was chosen as a venue to start this campaigh with a provocation that the provocateur would know could ensure him maximum publicity -- and maximum punishment of me on the forums and with a 3-day ban. I truly don't care. It's very instructive to let these things play out in a virtual context so that you see what really goes on -- provocateurs with oppressive ideologies use the AR system and the forums try to subvert norms and impose their reign with the RLV viewer, even, by wacking at high profile individuals and pretending to be "helpful". This active measures agent has also made sure to have an "Excellent" on his forums avatar which he get by making various seemingly "benign" posts and likes and getting others' likes. It's such a transparently manipulative game that one scarcely needs to  comment.

There is absolutely no reason to bless this. Even the crazy Klytyna who is always ranting about the Madlands (the Mainland) says the Lindens will never go for a "kludge" -- a crappy workaround of sim seam "problems" -- involving using restraint from the RLV viewer in some fashion AND a channel which as EVEN Klytyna notes will be exploited by social misfits, i.e. griefers. This isn't rocket science.

That loony Luna keeps thinking it is rocket science, science that we should "bless" and not be afraid of is only more stark evidence of how deep in the cult she is. Once again, Luna Bliss:

ARE YOU OR ARE YOU NOT FOR RAPE RP, YES OR NO.

I think the Lindens would be within their rights to ban it as a public club or site that has mazes or some kind of build to enact these creepy fantasies out is no longer a private matter inside the home. Of course, the Lindens don't have a concept of "a reasonable expectation of privacy". They think it's fine to allow spam cars on the public roads that can go in your house or lawn. They have sometimes been known if they get a hostile AR from your enemy to go inside a PG house and remove some classic work of art that involves a nude. They're crazy that way, too. It's always about literalism and enabling your enemies -- especially if those enemies are the Lindens' friends.

I also think it's wrong to parade chained human beings at public events. It's because then WE are forced to join in, in this oppression of this other human being. We're supposed to buy the line that she has consented to it (it's usually a woman, but it can sometimes be a man). Well, we don't buy it? It's a backlash against feminism and the progress of women's rights in Western civilization. It is a cult filled with lies that starts with the claim of consent, which has so many red flags around it, and keeps going through the notion that the greatest form of love is to turn yourself into a slave obeying the commands of a narcissistic. It's a perversion of the love taught by the world's great religions which has to do with self-sacrifice, but not oppression, with "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you" -- empathy -- which is really quite different than the oppressive fuck-you hedony of "an it harm none, do what ye will" -- because narcissists aren't the best judge of what is harm, you know? Ever. Certainly the hugely devious and depraved Alistair Crowley wasn't, if you read his sordid history. What did he leave behind but a lot of broken lives, and a lot of recipes for assholes in the future to break other people's lives? Nothing good.

Calling out the oppressive nature of the BDSM cult and the Rape RP cult isn't "demonization" or "not recognizing people's rights" because they don't have rights to impose this on others and even make it part of their fake shtick that they don't. But of course they do -- the BDSM personality in SL is always stamping his foot and demanding instant service and gas-lighting and pulling the football away from other people, whether they are store clerks or rentals agents. We've all seen it and of course this kind of person finds it impossible to go "out of character".

And once again, Luna Bliss, she of the Bible-reading and Ashram living and other supposedly "peaceful and benign" activities that seque into her tech cults is free to comment:

ARE YOU OR ARE YOU NOT FOR BDSM IMPOSITION ON THE PUBLIC SPHERE, YES OR NO?

ARE YOU OR ARE YOU NOT FOR RAPE RP YES OR NO?

ARE YOU OR ARE YOU NOT FOR USING RLV AS A 'WORKAROUND' TO THE SUPPOSED 'PROBLEM' OF SIM SEAMS? YES OR NO.

So let's look at the rest of this nonsense:

When I spoke of animats related to artificial intelligence I was referring to nanobiotechnology, and I asked you to look the word 'animats' up for a clearer understanding. This refers to the way 'tiny robots' could help us medically in the future, and is a very exciting field.

Actually, um, no. Anyone can go and look up animats -- I have -- and see there is DEBATE around it as there is on any artificial intelligence. I think it's no accident that the Kremlin, which represents one of the most aggressive and oppressive forces on earth, has put a lot of investment into this field as they hope to use it control people and things. Technology does have the engineers' ideologies welded into it in troublesome ways -- the lack of a "dislike" button on Facebook is one obvious example -- but technology is also wielded by coders and techs who want power over other human beings and whose ethics are lacking and skewed, to say the least. They are not regulated in a liberal democratic society and should be.

The animats field IS NOT in fact bout nanobiotechnology, that's only one sub-set of it.

Some cultists think that it's fine to have tiny robots injected in your skin and bloodstreams. I don't, and find this field totally unchallenged and unregulated and also PS not implemented but that's not an excuse to act against it.

I remember Sidewinder Linden, a Linden with cult technologies as I discovered, kept arguing strenously for nanobots, saying, why, we allow medicines into our bloodstreams, and look, they have time release mechanisms and so on and how are nanobots different?

That's surely a specious argument, as chemicals aren't coded. They are elements with properties, or mixtures of elements, with known properties. BTW not all their side effects are always known

Chemicals which are a limited substance are not at all the same as coded chips or coded anything. Code depends on the will of the coder, and one shouldn't pretend this isn't in the equation. The coder or programmer can also change the action of nanobots in a hostile way.

We already see how terribly infested the Internet and computers are with hackers who spread spam, bugs, malicious code, and cause trillions of dollars of damage. This article just talking about some of the Russian hacking gives you an idea of how vast this damage is, and how much it affects lives. The malice of hackers is enabled in several ways -- by the same kind of thinker and persona being on the other side of the firewall as the computer security person whose ideology is often no different, and who tends to blame poor security rather than the malice of hackers for problems -- the inverse of the rule of law as it has been established for ages. The coder and hacker do not recognize any rule of law over THEMSELVES.

"Mathematics makes the state obsolete," sneers Andrea Shepherd of Tor, a former Linden. That about sums up the sheer lawlessness of the crypto-anarchist and their total indifference to others and their privileging of their own whims as the authoritarianism by which we must rule. PS Andrea savaged another Twitter user who *rightly* criticized her arrogant bullshit and Tor's abusiveness by mocking her on Twitter and blatantly mischaracterized his satirization of her as "sexism" and "misogyny".  This fellow, whose name was Gerasimov spelled in a l33t sort of way once kidded, "Go to the Washington Monument and jump, Andrea, Tor will save you." This was a reference to the Biblical temptation of Satan to Christ, who said "the angels will save you lest you dash your foot against a stone," telling Jesus to jump off a tower to prove He was God. But Jesus did not need to prove this, nor at Satan's bidding.

Andrea then proceeded in good Second Life fashion to ruin this guy's life, hunting him down, finding his real name, emailing his bosses, and getting him to resign from his job and leave Twitter. What a total asshole is Andrea! THIS is the totalitarianism we live under from the code-as-law crew. No thanks. 

Unlike doctors and lawyers -- professions that have board certification, societies, and ethics charters -- computer programmers have NOTHING. Their societies for "responsibility" or "ethics" in fact aren't about the ethics of THEIR OWN FIELD but about how to wield tech in some politicized aim elsewhere, against others.

So I totally get it that Luna Bliss may think nanobots are the saviour of humankind, and perhaps she has some urgent case of her own relative (she has written about her daughter on a card on her sim) where she thinks this might work. That doesn't mean that the rest of us can't criticize technology and be highly skeptical of the ethics of those we already see are hugely problematic -- like Musk and Thiel.

There's more in this vein:

Instead, you lumped me in with some sort of technocommunism ideas of yours by accusing me of being part of some kind of techno-cult, and I received the following message from you, which you failed to mention here in your blog: " Prokofy Neva: Coming into a thread about finding facts regarding griefers, and spouting your theories, which I don't support at all as they are fascistic, is a form of harassment itself. It's not about you "disagreeing with my ideas." It's about harassment with your theories that only support griefing in the end, in a thread seeking ways to curb them. So I saw what you did there. It's not merely a derail. It's a form of harassment with ideas that you seek because you imagine they give you power or your group power or some cult power but they are abusive to others. You have not been democratically elected in a liberal democracy under the rule of law to provide your "help" on "AI"."

Luna implies here that I've insulted her but it's her tech cult ideas that are the insult. Her constant heckling of me in the thread in which I'm trying to stop griefing by Woodbuy alts masquerading as my "bot" and spouting racist nonsense is simply creepy. She never condemns the Woodbury griefers. She also lacks total curiousness and empathy about how to stop this form of griefing by stopping conference calls -- something that many people want. Indeed, this feature is available on Firestorm, which Luna no doubt uses like many do. She can't explain, like others boosting Firestorm -- which she likely does as well -- why, if you CAN turn off the conference calls, hundreds of angry people harass me with claims I've spammed them. Wouldn't they shut it down after one spam and call it a day? Either they do NOT have Firestorm or hey, this is not enough. People should have the right NEVER to be conferenced. EVER. Opt-out FOREVER. What stops Luna Bliss from accepting that? Her tech cultism?

Luna is spouting sheer nonsense about me needing to take LSD -- as if that removes griefing -- and then even admitting herself that she is derailing the thread. She's merely word-salading now.

Basically, you are saying here that I'm an abuser...a facist, a harasser, supporting griefing, part of some sick cult, trying to circumvent democracy or rule of law. THIS was what I responded to. I guess you forgot about the above message from you?

Um, no, Luna Bliss, I didn't "forget" this post but I stand TOTALLY by my remarks which indeed were the proper pushback and self-defense to your weird culty heckling. If you find "the shoe fits," ask yourself if it really does?

Go back and look at your BEHAVIOR in this thread -- heckling, ridicule, stupidity, culty nonsense, with no recognition of the actual problem at hand, and no empathy for it. Note: NO EMPATHY. Because -- tech cult.

Why are you excusing griefers? You never once condemn them in this thread.

Why are you heckling me during a perfectly reasonable and normal effort to stop conference call spamming which most people don't want even if it doesn't involve griefers impersonating me with racist Trumpkin sayings.

You haven't supplied any use case for the need to spam everyone on a sim. Why are you morally blind to the problem of spam in conference calls?
Do you think just because a coder "can" and just because code "is" that we must argue backward to acceptance? Why? You likely don't feel that way about guns or the atom bomb.

THAT is the problem. You're silent on this question because evidently -- and prove me wrong here -- your tech cultism means that you must "excuse" every exploit and "allow" every coded thing. Well? 

YES OR NO, LUNA BLISS, ARE YOU FOR CONFERENCE CALL SPAMMING OR NOT?  YES OR NO.

In fact, sick tech cults do circumvent democracy and the rule of law. You're unable to invoke any actual normal real-life notions of restraint, choice, moderation. In short, a tech cultist.

But I've broken down the two questions here that you can answer in the negative IF you are not a cultist. So go ahead, I'll wait.

LUNA BLISS, ARE YOU FOR CONFERENCE CALL SPAMMING OR NOT?  YES OR NO?

LUNA BLISS, ARE YOU FOR RAPE RP YES OR NO?

Instead of spouting about nanobots and demanding that I expand my mind by taking LSD, answer those questions.

PS

So I log in after my completely unnecessary and unjust 3-day ban from the Lindens to find this message:

(Saved Tue Feb 27 15:36:02 2018)Hi :) I'm not a tech-cultist, but I'm discovering new ways technology could be used to benefit our consciousness, our spirituality. I don't have a firm enough grasp of it all to explain well just yet -- it's a lot to take in. I do understand the dangers that go with this though, and careful attention must be given along the way. With great power comes something great or horrible depending on what we do with it. Luna Bliss Virtual World Designer
[14:39] Luna Bliss: (Saved Tue Feb 27 15:40:01 2018)I think you're imagining that I condone all these punks that harass you, and I certainly do not. My comments on the forum related to your reference to organic law, and I'm very interested in artificial intelligence atm. I guess I took the thread on a kind of derail, but I'm just so enthused about what I'm learning (how technology could help us in the future with AI) that I could not help it ;0 Luna Bliss Virtual World Designer

So again, um, yeah, that's why I wrote my post about griefers exploiting the friendship consent function of calling cards? As none of us consented to have griefer bots as friends spamming us. Derp! 

And yet Luna had to come in to the thread and heckle, go off topic, ridicule and introduce all kinds of BULLSHIT simply because she COULD NOT BEAR that her tech cults were being criticized.

And rightly so.

And I'll go on doing that because in fact I have no demonstration that Luna "Bliss" has any awareness of the harmfulness of tech, if she can't even tolerate a thread on spam from bots.

I'm not enthused by artificially intelligence or the intelligent artifice that promotes it from coders who are the ones who really take power with it. Seeing their ethics-free behavior and appalling destructiveness and oppression in the last 20 year that I've been writing on this topic, I have no reason whatsoever to get all dewey-eyed and girlish and sigh about the wonders of tech. 

Luna Bliss cannot stay focused and off drugs or off the high of tech cultism long enough to answer to specific questions. I may never get answers. Or I will get answers but with some lecture. Or answers with a caveat. At this point, I have little faith in the tech cultist of having self-awareness. Bye!

animats going after land sellers -- why such a busybody? Go play on your own sim dude

As this is a thread that may get closed or disappear, let's capture it:

• Is "LIFE Properties" owned by Linden Labs?

By animats, Wednesday at 03:08 AM in General Discussion 

 

Posted Wednesday at 03:08 AM

Is "LIFE Properties", which holds a huge amount of land full of placeholder buildings, separate from Linden Labs? Or is it just a name Linden Labs uses for real estate?

 
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Gadget Portal

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Posted Wednesday at 05:11 AM

That's just some resident. LL doesn't sell land like that.

 
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Callum Meriman

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Posted Wednesday at 05:37 AM

Often thought it's a Linden moonlighting.

 
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iamyourneighbour

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Posted Thursday at 04:52 AM

Lol I am the guy that puts propaganda poster near then to discourage people from buying them

 
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November Velde

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Posted Thursday at 04:56 AM

I wanted to buy a piece of abandoned land and filed a ticket, as required. I was told that it would be put up for auction. I replied asking why auction it when there is direct interest. I did not get an answer. The auction went off and as predicted, Life properties snapped it up. This one, unlike any other of their lots, has not been set for re-sale (at an astronomical price) nor is it available for rent (also like most any of their lots) and has been that way since they claimed it. So, perhaps there is some connection. Or perhaps it is a coincidence.

 
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Gadget Portal

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Posted Thursday at 05:04 AM

I suspect they use a bot, or bots, to buy up the land, then go back and set them for resale by hand later.

Also, LL seems very inconsistent about land they set for sale directly and put for auction, in my experience. Probably depends on which agent reads the ticket.

 
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iamyourneighbour

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Posted Thursday at 02:41 PM

Imo the turn over isn't that high, my little marketplace shop racks in a messy 1.5-2K L$ range a day while one of their held land, beach block too, has been sitting there for sale for over three month. 

Maybe me jinxing it has an effect, IDK. 

 
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Prokofy Neva

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Posted 38 minutes ago

Why do you care, animats?

That's the real question.

If someone wants to buy up a lot of land, that is legal. They are not required to sell it or rent it. They can do whatever they want with it, as long as they do violate the TOS. It's not a violation of the TOS to not sell your land, or sell it for a high price.

Interfering with another resident selling or not selling land is harassment, iamyourneighbour. Why are you doing that? If you imagine you keep your own business afloat by trying to get other people to stay away from abandoned land you want as a great "easement" without paying tier, I'm sorry, Second Life doesn't create and sustain that condition for you AND you don't get to harass others to maintain it.

And again, animats, If they put buildings on it and just have it as a "placeholder," that would not be your business?

This isn't my company, but I happen to know it's a real company with real land holdings and sales, I've bought and rented-to-buy from them as have many others.

Again, what possible business is this of yours? 

Do you have some idea that you should get to decide when/how/for much/in what manner some company gets to sell land? You don't.

Usually when somebody starts a thread to harass one business they don't like for any reason or no reason, valid or not, the Lindens shut down the thread.

My answer:

  On 2/22/2018 at 2:41 PM, iamyourneighbour said:

Imo the turn over isn't that high, my little marketplace shop racks in a messy 1.5-2K L$ range a day while one of their held land, beach block too, has been sitting there for sale for over three month. 

Maybe me jinxing it has an effect, IDK. 

No. And if your business model depends on "jinxing" others, it is immoral and likely a TOS violation can be found to report you.

What you have to understand about a big operation like LIFE is rentals math, which I'm not sure you understand.

To look at one piece of land and say about it "wow, they are losing money selling it at that price when no one buys it, why I can run circles around them selling my little 512s" -- it's just fallacious. Because you aren't seeing their HUGE operation.

It's like in RL, companies buying in bulk and selling when the market warrants it, and warehousing it otherwise.

It is cheaper for a big landlord paying bulk tier, especially if they have a further Linden bulk discount which many of them have, beyond the group 10% or the bulk discount available after $195 tier -- to simply leave land for sale at a high price.

Why?

Because the tier they have to pay on that land -- even for months at at time -- is NOT going to be higher than the high price they charge for land. So they can STILL make a profit.

Look at ALL their sales on the many sims they own and you will see that the higher price they get pays tier and leaves them a profit; their keeping up prices also rewards them. That's why they do this; that's why they stay in business and others don't.

Only very large operations can do this; Anshe Chung could do it. I'm not in the land-selling business but the occasional times when I want to sell a parcel, I can't afford to do that. Nor can you.

To pay tier months on end on land that "yields nothing". To wait 9 months or 18 months for it to sell. It wouldn't be practical or advisible at my low level or yours.

For a giant company, it is, as they help keep prices in general high when they do that, i.e on Zindra. There is nothing illegal about this; it is the market, albeit in the distorted form that SL takes as there are no longer any freely-available public data on these matters. 

You don't know who wins the auction often; you can't see if they bid up the price (you could see this before) and adjust your own purchasing accordingly, and encourage others as well not to buy from people who deliberately jack up auctions. That used to happen; now it can't, there is no confirmation or information. Seeing what you see in world is not confirmation as land can flip and change hands rapidly with many buyers after an auction.

So again, the question is this: why the harassment of people who sell land in ways you don't like, and the implication you are going to "get them"? With a provocative post like this, and with the comments that pile up it?

If you don't like those high prices, don't buy them? You have WAY more choice than we had 13 years ago.

If the Lindens don't like this, then rather than allowing griefers and forums posters harass people, they need to make a policy and then deliver it. If they don't like large land holdings and monopolies, they can bar it on their servers for any reason or no reason in the TOS, the end.

They used to try to "get rid of" Anshe by printing so many new sims they figured she couldn't buy them all. They were wrong.

At this point, I would guess that anyone buying abandoned land appearing on the open auction is doing the Lindens a favour. 

I myself advocate that abandoned land NOT be put on the open auction until FIRST those who LIVE ON THAT SIM can bid for it in a local auction or simply request it. I believe the Lindens should just set any land to sale to anyone who requests it, full stop. Their notion that there are all these people who should fairly have a bid at land next to you is totally misplaced. You're the best caretaker of land on YOUR sim and you should imply get it on request. ONLY THEN should it go to auction.

Lobby for reasonable policies like that instead of heckling people with signs, putting up nuisances to drive away buyers, posting harassment messages in the forums. It's not all your world, either. It belongs to all of us. The Lindens need to end their aversion to governance and put in a few simple policies to stop driving conflicts.

 

• Edit

What is Means to Suffer Losses, What it Means to be Stalked and Harassed

A threatening, stalking day-old alt named KillGriefer Blogger, making dollar payments to harass, and stalking me to my location in SL.  This alt also swore at me in bad HUD Russian. Um, this is art? This is education? This is "OK"?

Well, SLuniverse.com Sharia Court is not to be trusted, no surprise there. Just when it seems as if the case is closed and the verdict from Mullah Shang was going to stand, there is a wild last-ditch effort to try to erode what is achieved by this very rough justice. Of course, one has to note the hypocrisy of Cristiano Midnight, who usually comes into discussions about Prokofy to say "no fair discussing Prokofy, he's not here to defend himself" -- usually to cut off discussion that in fact exonerates me lol -- but who has let *this* thread go on for an abnormally long time -- I guess because he sees it as an anti-Woodbury thread, and they are are all there in spades to peddle their lies.

In the weeks when Loki Clifton was "holding talks with the Lindens" and meeting with "Jack, Cyn and Jeska" (!), I was writing letters to the Lindens. I was demanding some kind of ultimate resolution of the chronic Woodbury infestation problem. I was writing letters with long lists of their offenses which I had AR'd -- because Lindens inevitably, in a big system with thousands of ARs pouring in, tend to see each incident as a limited, narrow thing, and if it is only a complaint about say, harassment dollar payments, or flying around buzzing from parcel to parcel as they get banned, to ignore it. Below the radar, or not serious.

So I was trying to show the patterns, make the lists, identify the groups, show that this was a systematic, deliberate, conspiratorial grouping action, and therefore required two things: a) suspension of the group, as its sole purpose was for harassment and griefing (not education); and b) confiscation of the land, as it was used solely for griefing and harassment (not art). The Lindens took these two demands seriously. I've blogged about all this repeatedly already, but it's worth stating again: they gave me form letters, they used their stock phrases out of the customer service handbook, but they did take it seriously. It was *a* factor in the Woodbury banning, and an important one, so it is NOT true that I say the harassment of me for three years (which the Lindens were liable for) wasn't a factor. Of course it was.

It occurs to me as I look over the screenshots that I took and kept as documentation of griefing, which I sent to the Lindens, that one particular nasty one could have helped make the case about "cyberbullying" that might have finally resonated with at least their desire to limit liability for litigation (that's all that we have to motivate them; little else does.)

When I sent a picture of a day-old Woodbury alt tracking me (apparently using some viewer that reveals map location even without friend permissions) to where I was in the Rekviem Cafe (see photo above), and that day-old alt's name was KillGrifer Blogger -- i.e. a harassing incitement message to kill a blogger about griefers that these griefers don't like -- I think the Lindens took it seriously. At least, as seriously as their flawed TOS lets them. Yeah, everyone knows that when a day-old robot alt named KillGrifer Blogger shows up stalking you in SL, that they can't REALLY kill you; they are just assholes, trying to intimidate you. Even so, it's not allowed. It's not right. It's *wrong*. 

Says Ramen Jedburgh: Prok suffered what huge losses for what? Seriously, the only thing I was aware of (since ~2007, maybe 2008 or so) was people showing up at the dam, idling while making petty comments that nobody could hear anyway, then leaving. Did something else happen?

Adds the vicious fictional "law student" Joanna Falmer:

Give me a break. It's a video game and she didn't suffer "losses like crazy". If she suffered any losses, they were probably mainly caused by her own behaviour. She chose to engage in feuds with various people and groups over the course of several years. When she daily harrasses people on her blog, some people will react (when she describes her defenders as assholes (you) or griefers and stalkers (Dale Innis), imagine how she behaves towards her perceived enemies - she really needs to wash her mouth out with soap). Yes, both parties probably behaved somewhat childish, but it's not like she suffered "losses like crazy" just because Woodbury University had a parcel in Ravenglass (she could easily have moved to a private island - Linden Lab could probably have offered her land in exchange, which happened in Lias' case, after her complaints about the infohub in Bear) or some people came to her public meetings.

Desmond concedes that when I say I suffered mad losses, I really suffered mad losses. That's true. Ramen is a fucking retard. Desmond concedes this even with believing that I "lie" about him in my erstwhile critique of his venality in SL.

That's because he's in the rentals business, and knows how it works. If some asshole has flown into your client's house with a giant penis, like the BlakHax alt did on a number of occasions in Ravenglass (and Ramen can't be unaware of this), why, that client, who has paid US $26 (L$7200 Lindens) for a large house on a large lot REFUNDS. And then I *LOSE* that US $26.  When that happens four times, it's *over $100 US real dollars*.

This isn't "starting feuds" with someone; it's minding your own business when someone decides to mount an aggressive and obscene attack on your tenants "because they can". It isn't "attacking someone on my blog" -- writing about these antics in an effort to try to get exposure and condemnation of the group in the interests of civilization is the right thing to do.

So, ever the minimizer of people griefed, because he's a dysfunctional liar, Imnotgoing Sideways, has this lie to contribute:

You're talking about someone who described two entries in a shout box, three months ago as "Constantly and repeatedly" just yesterday. (=_=)

I took the step back and found a liar making gross exaggerations about my own behaviour. Why should I believe anything else this liar says? (=_=)

Yeah. Two entries is two too many; that it takes place three months ago or is "only two" doesn't mean it isn't stalkery harassment. Everyone knows that. And dozen entries from a half dozen people tag-teaming and group-harassing is what "constantly and repeatedly" means. Not "the two entries" but ALL the entries *from this deliberate griefing group that this freak is deliberately a member of*. That's what group harassment *is*. Collective action to harass people. Again, look at the screen shot *just* of the inbox, when a lot of the entries in fact were already deleted, when the harassment friending shots were not included. Multiple people sending multiple notices from the Woodbury University group on AU *to harass and annoy*. Documentation. Irrefutable.

Multiply that over and over again with the entire list of things I've already documented -- putting up "quarantine" signs on newbie homes and telling them they were evicted (a few refunded and left, or fled, scared without even refunding); flying around over and over against just to bother people (tenants complain about people coming in their house; when we check the visitor tracker in that area, it's the Woodburies flies who are always sitting on the dung-heap next door on their land). Invisible Woodburies ringing doorbells -- that feaks people, they leave, kaching, refund. Woodburies giant griefing cubes glowing -- people feel their view is ruined -- REFUND.

Then far worse attacks -- someone's entire home is dismantled, because they were new and left it in share. An expensive US $50 home is taken to bits, with pieces of stereos and walls and lamps scattered all over the sim and in the air. Very unsettling. Very nasty. That person at first appears to roll with it, but then...simply leaves. Doesn't come back. Doesn't pay their rent when due. *Leaves SL completely never to be heard from again* even though that person was a RL artist and intellectual interested in exploring and attending events. That person is griefed DIRECTLY by Woodbury goons who TAKE APART A HOUSE AND GRIEF IT AND DESTROY PROPERTY, and that person doesn't pay me US $26 for that house; and he is lost to the Lindens in general, for ever buying more land or a premium; he's lost to the musicians he would have tipped; he's lost to the other builders and craftsmen he would have bought from.

Oh, we get it. This is the "Theater of Absurd". We're supposed to not take the SRS BSNS seriously! We're supposed to "poke fun" at ourselves or roll with those endlessl poking us! We're supposed to laugh at mass culture and suburban tastes.

Except...how many times do you think the joke has to be made to "get it"? To succeed as "art"? Would hundreds of times over three years maybe be *too many times* of dismantling a suburban house because you hated its mass culture taste, and scattering it on a sim because you hated the blogger who owned it who exposed you as evil?

The answer isn't to shout, with gleeful Dale-Scale malicious cynicism, that hey, you put your house in share, that's your problem. Newbies do that often, confusing "set prims" with "share prims". Some housemakers compound this problem by leaving their builds in share with group for some annoying reason (sometimes because they are made up of parts from multiple creators, I guess, who the hell knows). If someone takes something out of the Linden library, it was ALREADY put in share. Alyx Stoklitsky, by his own admission, and other regular Woodbury griefer alts hanging around Ravenglass ROUTINELY scanned the entire area (perhaps with a script), looking for people who had done this newbie mistake. They would take paintings put in that freebie frame that is in share; they would take people's prefabs or rugs accidently left in share; they would take deeded TVs that are obviously in share; and they would move, break, bury, scatter, litter them all over. Even after Woodbury was banned, one of the alts came back, Commissar Kozlov, to find a newbie-share accident, a picture frame, blow it up, and push it in my face, as if to say "See? Even when banned we will keep doing this.)

Because they can. Because the tools let them. Because they think the answer to stopping them from doing that lies in changing the tools, not in having civilization and having law.

So yeah, there were real losses. Lots of them. Dozens. Maybe a hundred. Hundreds of real US dollars. Maybe more than a thousand.

Someone might say, but why did you put up with it? Simple: this was my flagship sim, the sim for which my entire business was made, with a build that I had paid for in the middle of it by Foolish Frost, a landmark build that everyone know.

Why would I move something like that because of a bunch of thugs? Why would I cave into thugs, dismantle a build I paid for, move to another flat pancake sim away from this beautifully landscaped oldworld sim near the newbie orientation centers and waterways and infohubs. Why? Why would anyone be required to give up their land, builds, and business to satisfy the strange dysfunctional geek-religionist notion that the way to solve thuggishness *by them themselves* is for their victims to move, change, accommodate? What sort of logic or morality is THAT?!

The cynical sordid little fictional Joanna Falmer says, in a supreme act of bad faith, says I should have moved to a locked-down island to get away from Woodbury's *deliberate* purchase of land to grief me, and *deliberate* mounting of attacks on me, regularly. Why? The solution is to delete their group and land, not for me to move. Don't like losing your property in a virtual world? I don't like the idea of confiscation of property without due process and compensation, either. But just what sort of fair punishment should there be of people who DELIBERATELY buy land to grief and DELIBERATELY cost hundreds of REAL DOLLARS in losses?

Is it being a masochist to stay under those circumstances? Of course not. I have lots of sims -- I go to other sims. I reparcel the entire sim, and change it from luxury large rentals with huge expensive houses -- a magnet for griefers with giant penises -- and put out out empty lots, or small cabins. It becomes a newbie loss-leader. Newbies are griefer-magnets, too, but at least the losses are mitigated. I warn people moving into the ugly griefer build neighbourhood that they can expect griefing. If their idea of a view doesn't include a Soviet submarine and somebody riding a glowing vehicle named "Prok's Chicken Hope", then they are in the wrong rentals. I found quite a few plucky people that were happy for the low price and ignored the griefing --- they weren't there much. One person even moved in deliberately to help pay rent and abuse report the griefing -- thanks ichabod! 

So, I adapted, I adjusted, I moved on. I spent my time on other sims, developing them. I put up a profile grabber to let the griefers know they were being watched, and I banned them as soon as the alts appeared so they couldn't fly into the tower to harass people. I reported them, and encouraged my tenants to report them.

I shouldn't have had to do this for three years. I especially shouldn't have had to do this for three years AFTER this group's island was ALREADY confiscated for harassing PRIOR to that in 2007. I shouldn't have to do this because I'm a "poor middle-aged single mad mom". I shouldn't have to do this because I "write a blog attacking people" (er, I only attack people who do *those* kinds of things).

I shouldn't have to, just because it's a virtual world. It's not about victimhood; it's not about pity. It's never been about that. A thousand dollars of real money over three years is a loss, but nothing compared to the real recession's losses which I've also suffered. It's not about feeling sorry for myself; it's not about self-pity; it's not about "taking two to tango"; it's not about getting "karma" and "just desserts".

It's about documenting and exposing and fighting back what is wrong. That's all. And doing it on behalf of other people -- my tenants.

And here's a bit of strange emotional hysteria from the unstable Hypatia Callisto:

And Prok has done this too - as many other land barons have - even blogged it, Prok even threatened me on SC when I merely mentioned her bad changes to the terraform (I had terraformed that whole area nicely, when I prepared those lots for Serra and you out of your old land next to Robin Linden - when you gave your lot to Robin, who later sold your lot to Prokofy starting that whole mess with me), which is why I sold my land in Alice and cancelled my premium account.

Um, I never terraformed anything deliberately to harass anyone, or terraformed "strangely". Bad changes? I have no recollection of this, but it is hardly anything that couldn't have been fixed -- of course, like Desmond's deliberate tree-waving for months on the property of one of his friends who bought land for him.

Desmond sold for a song, or gave away, some of his smaller prim parcels in Alice. Hypatia did as well -- there was a square near Robin's garden. She didn't do this under duress; she did this because Desmond moved out of Alice, and she is one of Desmond's ardent fangirlz, and she left with him. No one harassed her; I didn't do a thing to her. I have no idea what her emo rant is about, but claiming that you've given up your premium account and left the mainland "because of the evil land baron Prokofy" is an outrageous lie. Desmond himself broke up his camp in Alice -- full stop. His little friends, that he had once given land to, also ended up decamping -- full stop. No one forced them to do this; no one needed their land in cheap PG which is impossible to rent except to a very niche audience. Honestly, that people think they can get away with crap like this!

Well, not as long as I am able to go on blogging, and setting the record straight. The record here should be ample enough -- and I have hundreds more screenshots if you are somehow unpersuaded -- that these people deliberately, systematically, egregiously griefed me and caused me losses in Second Life, with the Lindens' connivance, for three years. It's now ended, at least for now, at least in part due to my abuse reports and appeals to those Lindens, one of whom is now quitting (Jeska Linden). I wonder if Jeska will ever tell us what she knows...

I Want to Play SL on a Box

You wouldn't believe what I went through to get a new computer to play SL. In fact, no one in Concierge or among the geek squads of SL want to believe this, and that's why SL doesn't grow. They argued and argued with me, instead of figuring how I could buy this box. They had "suggestions" that all amount to not buying this box, but buying parts that do not make a box. I wanted to buy a box. I finally did, but it took an entire day to accomplish this seemingly simple task.

I've really come to believe that the single greatest reason for user attrition in SL isn't the interface, it's the graphic card. There is a heavy bias among Linden tekkies against this notion; they don't believe it. As we all know, they speak disparagingly to us about having "computers ready for Kindergarten". As I told Jack Linden today, I had a computer that wasn't even taking solids yet; I had another computer that couldn't hold a Cheerio between its fingers yet, and they couldn't play SL. This is a graphics card problem. It is not about people living in the dark ages. It is about the Lindens living in the Twighlight Zone in denial.

Torley is of course the main cheerleader for this grotesque notion that people are to blame for backwards computers -- we are told to "chop the slop" and let go our illusions that computers are to blame for problems with Windlight, even though the JIRA will explain that it is buggy stuff and leaks and flaws, not our cards.

It's very hard, in this windstorm of propaganda about the computers never being the problem to make this point, but it has to be made: no one should have to build their own computer, or custom-order parts from wonky sites like NewEgg (I wish I had a dollar for every geek who tells me, like it's some elite insight knowledge, about that site ROFL), or go to "your local independent computer store" or in general, engage in any tekkie wiki geeky bullshit whatsoever. They should be able to walk into a Best Buy or a Circuit City (well, wait, they went bankrupt, forgot that), pay $1000 or $1200, and get a box that they turn on within 20 minutes to play SL without a lot of mumbo jumbo.

After all, that's what they do to play WoW, Warhammer, Spore, the Sims, Final Fantasy, and a zillion movies and YouTubes.

The Lindens should assign a staff person to do nothing but canvass Best Buy and Dell and all those sites and stores and find out what is actually on the market that isn't custom built, and try to adjust the software accordingly -- that is, if they do want to increase retention.

Greedy Guni

Ugh, I've dealt with Anshe Chung for 4 years, and I've generally respected and supported what she has done, although there have been times when she has behaved like an utter asshole and gouged the hell out of me and engaged in what can only be called "sharp business practices". That's how she got to be an SL millionaire, and I understand that. I'm always welcome NOT to pay her exhorbitant prices.

But I feel on the openspace gouge, ACS needs to be called hard, and needs to become accountable to the many hundreds of their customers, if not thousands, renting these sims.

Right now, Guni is holding a town hall, from which I've been ejected for asking too many uncomfortable questions, with a gaggle of his sycophants chiming in to silence me.

The fact is, all this time, ACS has been gouging on the OS sims. They were the lucky ones, due to being so large, who got them second after Adam Zaius, 4 to a pack, when they weren't offered as easily as they are offered today to everyone with one click in the land store. So they bought hundreds if not thousands of them, and the tier on all of them was grandfathered. That means they paid $50 per sim in tier, and charged us $85 in tier.

As any one hustling the OS sims now, the most they can charge is about $90, and normally the market price is $75, but that's for *the class five, non-grandfathered, $295 tier sims*. These are *class four, grandfathered, $195 tier sims*. I've been paying $85 for a class 4 OS with no estate perms -- as have many others. Why? Because for one, I didn't realize at first that it was still class 4. It doesn't sit up and bark and tell you that. I also didn't realize that people with the $50 sims were charging only $65 lol.

So I think it's reasonable to expect that Guni, in making his price hikes now due to the Lindens' announcement, be cognizant of the fact that he has gouged all this time, and not hike the price at all, or hike it reasonably, not overpriced Dreamland style. For one. If he wishes to hang on to his customers. And at the very least, if he raises the price to Dreamland/gangland-style of $150 or more, to offer estate management perms -- something ACS does not offer on any OS sim, new or old.

The reasons they are mumbling about this strange practice of refusing the the EM perms make no sense. They are saying that because some are within regions of the same name, and not separate estates, they can't do this. But...they can. They merely have to make them their own estates, as all the other managers do. Every single other SALES agent of these OS sims is offering EMs. With the price hike, that's an absolute requirement.

The Stubborn Geek

Terrible geek stubborness and viciousness on this question of Windlight from radarm -- and the crippling of Second Life for many people who don't have good enough graphic cards. I'm one of them, and my SL is now reduced to an absolute crawl, especially with this last security update. Duh, I know how to fix the settings to "turn it off" -- but that's not the issue. It's not about dumbing it down -- which doesn't really turn it off. Windlight was calculated to be a game-changer, and is. No one in fact needed it -- except for a handful of gamer geeks in San Francisco trying to "keep up with the Jones" -- although those Jones like WoW or Ultima don't even need this heavy a graphic card rotation.

You can't use your old viewers pre-Windlight because...you can't. Windlight bores me profoundly with its pina colada tropical hues -- they look awful on old New England mainland -- but I guess that's the idea -- to make you flee your grey North West Coastal rock and murky lakes for more blistering white sands and teal seas.

Radarm, who has always been a nasty character to me, is ranting about this still -- and me here. And I push back, as is known, and I also have further ammunition from, of all places, Hamlet nee Linden Au -- he's repeatedly blogged about this, in the face of Torlian inanity and Pollyanaism, and now has blogged twice in one week.

I don't know why, since the Lindens declared Día de la Liberación more than a year ago, why they can't make a non-Windlight, viewable viewer. Remember the Dia? Declared by the Revolutionary Linden Comrade Zero Linden? Here's what Commander Zero had to say back in June 2007:

"The day of liberation is almost upon us. In the next release, 1.18, we’ll be shipping a project called “Message Liberation”. This project lets us make almost all viewer updates be optional, so you can download them if and when you want."

So...why can't we make Windlight's later updates completely optional, Comrade?

"Now, to be sure, there are still some kinds of changes where we’ll require you to download a new viewer. Closing security holes is a likely example. And there are others, like some database maintenance, where we’ll have to close the entire grid for an update. But, our aim is to do these as little as possible, and Message Liberation goes a long way to making that possible."

But Comrade, you didn't say Windlight was one of those "mandatory changes"!