Second Thoughts

The Most Insincere Form of Flattery: The BBB Steals My Idea of Honorary Consul

By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor

From my "Honourary Consulate of Titania" installation at the Home & Garden Expo Design Contest in SL in 2019. 

Shorter-than-your hand summary: the Bellisserian FIC did in fact steal my idea of honorary ambassadors (here's the proof below) but it doesn't matter because it's not copyrighted. I called it "honorary consul" in my inworld story because that's more the proper term in my view;  but let's be thankful at least the residents in this RP aren't all Americans, many of whom actually acquired in our virtual world their first experience of something called a "passport" -- and can't find RL countries on maps. At least some of the BBB aren't Americans and have some grasp of international affairs -- I think -- such as to work up models for government and foreign policy to replicate in virtuality (shudder).

I don't want to be one of those people because I'm my own ambassador of my own projects, and so should you be. I think there are better ways to sell premium accounts -- which ultimately is the purpose of this strange RP of a RL government and foreign office. But likely it will be mainly harmless and eventually sink of its own weight. It's worth following so they don't start trampling in your back yard. But remember, there is only one way to stop an exercise in player government engineered by the game company: make your own, and displace it. 

 

Slamming Operation Mainland

So Jezebel Bailey is "no long with" the BBB, and yet the august personages at the BBB still saw fit to leave her permissions on to the comms. I personally wouldn't do that if someone left my business or project, but ok. So Jezebel got on the horn the other day in the BBB Users Group (population 567) and ragged on the Forever Tourist program of Operation Mainland (population 699). I have my differences with OpMainland but generally I think they're a good thing, like I think the BBB passports and travel are a good thing. I'm all for exploring, especially the Mainland. I personally am a solo player and have my own small group Mainland Appreciation Society (population 44), and larger, long-time project, SL Public Land Preserve (population 850, of which about 650 have logged on in the last year), which has many supporters, but I'm not really here to be in the virtual equivalent of my high school government or college newspaper editorial board; for one thing, I don't have the stamina to sit for 12 hours or more a week in interminable play-meetings where nobody pays me.

Just for the record, because you can't find these things out unless you 1) own property in Bellisseria and therefore are eligible to 2) get a BBB passport and 3) get invited into the BBB Users Group if you apply for to host stamp in the passport game, here's Jezebel's note verbale to Operation Mainland:

Just wanted to put in my 2 cents because you can never totally leave the BBB when you love and believe in it as much as I do! The BBB is expanding as it has to to keep everyone happy and enjoying their passports! Just know this, the BBB is accepted and has the LL backing. You will never, ever get sent to a sex club, a shopping mall, or any place not authorized by both the BBB and LL. The BBB offers unique stamps for your enjoyment and fun in finding them in hunts, or from the weekly list that Sun puts out,
Every placement of a dispenser is carefully selected by the owner of the dispenser. No you do not make your own stamps for anywhere you happen to go to. But if you want or think a stamp dispenser could be placed somewhere, either mainland or Belli, drop a not to Sun.
The reason for this little tirade other than saying HI, is because someone thought they might be considered disloyal for going to another site. I didn't know what they were talking about. I thought they were talking about the expansion of the BBB to mainland. So here is what I think!

1. The BBB works with the moles and lindens on placement, both in Mainland and the BBB.
2. You have the most incredibly talented people working almost 24/7 on making sure everyone who is a part of the BBB, enjoy being part of our BBB group,
3. You cannot be disloyal. Just remember WE do not show places on our web page that have not passed all requirements to hold one of our dispensers.
4. If you want a travel list for us, we do not take the our list off of the places search engine. That everyone can access.
5. I LOVE THE BBB AND WHAT WE HAVE ALL CONTRIBUTED TO ITS GROWTH. Also, the moles and Lindens that have assisted with its growth.

With all this dribble passed on to you, my friends, its a free to you, game within a game that keeps on growing. Thank you all for your continued support! (do I sound like a politician yet?)

Safe travels!
Bel

Now, OpMain may have a blog where this is posted, but I only know that it is issued in the group, which I will join now to fetch and leave, because I don't want to be in groups that are like my own groups, I have enough to do. Oh, except the link in the group is no good. Ok, hmm....After clicking like an idiot for 15 minutes I finally found it -- they really need to put "BLOG" on the splash page so that you don't hunt until you find it under "location list" which isn't intuitive at all.

Again, for the record, here is Fionie's Memorandum:

Because I genuinely want to help residents travel the grid, please understand that there should never be any ‘feelings of disloyalty’ for having any kiosk from any other participating passport program. It honestly doesn’t matter to me HOW a resident finds a cool place to visit - just that they do. For location owners, I want you to do everything you can to promote your SecondLife businesses and locations - if that means having every possible kiosk of every type of game on your land, I encourage you to do so! 

Forever Tourist was never created to upset anyone - it was designed to include businesses in a passport style game AND to create community by allowing ANY resident to be able to instantly participate. If you want to understand the specifics of why I created Forever Tourist, I did an in depth video talking about it’s design, what my goals were, and the steps I took to start the process. You can watch it here. 

I have been and will continue to work with the LDPW team to try and find a way to make it easier to grab a stamp on some of these public places by placing a Forever Tourist kiosk. I only want to do this if that means we don’t have to change the rules that we have in place to let everyone participate. I haven’t been able to create a way for this to happen just yet, but conversations have happened with ‘the powers that be’. Don’t worry - I won’t give up. 

(For those who want to deepen their foreign ministry RP, here's a list of terms from the State Department you need to learn.)

It's been interesting to me to see how people who try to suck up to get along with the Lindens and deal with them in partnerships then get burned, jaded, cynical, etc. It's partly because nobody knows history; they ought to read about Clubside Granville.

The old forums archive are a rich depository of history and more people should mine it before the Lindens some day delete it, like they did the townhall transcripts. Oh, the reason I'm not in that thread is because at that particular period in history I was banned from the forums.

In any event, Operational Mainland took the higher road and made a statement setting the record straight about Jezebel's jab -- which I guess was motivated by the fact that somehow within their circles, some people thought getting involved in OpMainland meant "disloyalty" to the BBB (or visa versa). Interestingly, while this was playing out, OpMainland was featured in Destinations and constantly on the splash screen, so at some level, Lindens "want to be fair" and recognize any resident group "doing something positive". Some people are on their own planet or don't want the kiss of death or live in bitter rejection but I've always found that if you want a sustainable project where you are free and not co-opted, you have to play SL without the Lindens as much as you possibly can, given that you still rely on them for things like roads, clean water, and hospitals. Wait, I mean, just the first thing, the roads. Oh, but not in Corsica, where -- oh, never mind.

The FIC is Not a Conspiracy, It's a Report

Fionie Frimon wants to be a Mole, i.e. one of the select contractors of LL with the last name Mole which involves certain privileges but also involves enormous amounts of hard work, especially as they are now tasked not only to build roads and houses, but to be sort of Gentils Organisateurs like Club Med and organize "fun," moderate the forums, and help build community centers launched with two residents' wedding, at which Patch Linden will be best man. That last bit has raised more than one eyebrow among oldbies and several acknowledging, "Hey, Prok, you were right about the FIC."

The FIC (the Feted Inner Core or privileged caste of SL with connections to the Lindens) is not a conspiracy. It's a report. (Read the original thread about the origin of this term.) My critique about the FIC isn't rooted in jealousy because I'm "not a coder or a maker"; I just think there should be demonstrable quality and there isn't always. I think there should be activities that involve a registrational approach -- a set of criteria for a contest or an event, which anyone can apply to and participate in, rather than a discretionary approach -- where you apply, hope you meet the criteria, which can be arbitrarily applied, and then get rejected for reasons that are unknown. In the US, anyone can form a corporation by sending a small fee to an office in Delaware. It's only later, if you fall afoul of the law or don't file taxes, that bureaucrats then focus on you and restrict your activities. In Russia, the theory is the opposite: first, you take an applicant and drag him through 14 offices and grill him and  put him under the scrutiny of everybody from the secret police to the cleaning lady. Then you issue the registration or permit -- but it's on sufferance, if you stop  doing favours for the bureaucrat. Well, different countries have different cultures...

Also I think any FICness should be publicized. I don't know this lovely couple; I personally couldn't marry a man named "Riot Hax" but that's just me. I've sure he's a lovely fellow. My further comments are here. PS no need to put me in the ban list as a) I don't have a tuxedo and while I have a wonderful petite avatar from Fallen Gods, I don't like getting stepped on in big crowds. I'll wait to see the community center after all this lag inducement is over and hopefully there will be freebies.

I imagine -- I hope? -- that this initiative didn't come from the Lindens, but came from the betrothed residents (unless, of course, one or both of them are Lindens themselves lol). And I imagine that the Lindens, keen to build up Bellisseria and get some traction for their new community center in Fantisseria (and more sales) -- especially after the rather botched Trick or Treat pumpkin thing -- decided to accept the request and justify it by publicizing it on the forums so "anyone" can come (if they follow all those elaborate instructions and can fit on a sim meant for 44 people) and say that it's really about opening a civic center "anyone" can use (if they are premium and in Belli, of course).

There Can Only Be One

So Fionie has built her own very ambitious program, populated it and rolled it out successfully, while also managing an abandoned land reclamation business and doing her own building and writing and of course managing her RL jobs and family. But from what I gather, the Lindens -- the Moles -- have not granted her the recognition of having Mole locations within her network, unless she joins the BBB -- merges with them, really, only as a Mainland "honorary consulate" in a sense -- which she doesn't want to do. She is still "in talks" -- just like Bill Burns is now in Moscow with the Russians.

I think for her, the problem with joining the already-blessed BBB-Linden alliance is that you weren't there at the formation, and you will play second fiddle and if anything, hurdles will be devised to make sure you don't disrupt the program by actually joining. I suppose OpMainland can always issue stamps "on the fly" by merely going to a Mole location and issuing one but you know? Through their "DIY Kiosk" system. If I get time, I will try to figure this out and do it for Magellan's Crash in Columbia.  There are a lot of places in SL. You don't need the Mole places to have fun -- and you can have fun visiting them without all the stamp stuff.  "Don't burn down Party committees; build your own." (Jacek Kuron, Solidarnosc).

The Lindens are guided by a concept that they can't cater to "all these groups" (even though there aren't many of them; it's actually a small world; and only a few would pass muster given their usually strict and arbitrary and not always  public criteria, as with the newbie gateway helping centers. I'm not sure the BBB is so wild about such a merger either, but I personally have put stamp machines in both; I travel on both and enjoy the sites, and I don't want to get too deeply into it because I sense it will involve long waits at drafty aerodromes at high elevations without visible rentomatics, waiting for Rick to bring the letter of transit, and sadly concluding "We'll always have Ahern."

The template, of course, is the sailors and Blake.  Read history, please people. And, fast-forwarding from that post in 2009 to 2021, I think I don't have to argue any more (as I used to have to do) that such amalgations that "cross the blood/brain barrier" are about commerce, first and foremost. Sailing brought the Lindens more business, and why not? That's a good thing. It brought the "Lindesidents" in their Linden/resident "Sea of FIC" group WINDFALLS in rentals and sales of land around Blake -- that can't be argued. Was that a good thing? No, because it helped create havens for monopolists charging outrageous prices and in fact suppressing participation in SL. Are there ways to play SL without getting caught up in all this? Yes, just like you don't have to get into the best parties in the Hamptons to have fun. Will the Lindens drop their FICing to ultimately get more sign-ups? No. Not only does Silicon Valley not work that way, high school didn't, either.

What is an Honorary Ambassador?

In any event, that skirmish was last week's news, and now there's today's news, which is the BBB has now formally stolen my idea of "Honourary Consuls", which was part of a story I started in 2019, and which is manifested at a BBB stamp location called "Honorary Consul of Titania". (The "us" is European/Canadian spelling I got used to long ago going to university in Canada and Russia and working for European outfits, but if you don't have enough space, like on a limited stamp template, you drop it). I could start a long explanation about how "Honorary Ambassador" is really a different thing in the UN or OSCE or other multilateral institutional context, like with Wonder Woman. Graham Greene wrote a novel about the other kind of figure, the Honorary Consul. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, you can do what you want in SL and mangle world culture in any direction, who cares.

The "Honorary Ambassador," Bellisseria edition frankly sounds like it is modeled after the Soviet Friendship Society's latest incarnation in modern Russia, Rossotrudnichestvo which is basically the arm of the Russian state that goes out and runs influence ops abroad to recruit assets.

How to explain this for the young? Well, no one has yet proved Michael Cohen was in Prague (but keep in mind that unlike the Bear Castle, where your BBB stamp would prove you were there, and you would need another BBB stamp to prove you were at Eulennest -- Michael Cohen could have gotten a stamp in Italy and flown to Prague and it wouldn't show up) I did find that the then-rep of Rossotrudnichestvo who shows up in the Steele memo did not tell the full truth about his own trips to Prague.

ANYWAY of course the SL version of this is basically just about the Lindens having some trusted comrades who can go and rope in other residents' groups and bring them under control association with Linden projects. Nothing sinister in that! If it leads to rentals/land sales down the road, keep in mind you have to work nights and weekends getting even a Blake Sea business launched -- do you all realize that?

And from their perspective, this kind of roping in is necessary. I was the one saying the other day that the Lindens don't have the equivalent of the one-way propaganda stream Radio Tochka (a rather abominable thing in Belarus which you can't turn off) to beam messages to all or at least some select residents, since people don't read the forums, bat away splash screen announcements, and don't read emails with the word "spooktacular" in the header. You know? So that's all good, again, from their perspective. We're not going to wait for Committees of Correspondence to be formed on every sim or even every continent to deal with the Lindens now, are we.

Honorary Consulate of Titania

I've run this story of Titania and its hapless Honorary Consul M. Carter Blanc of Telehub Ross (as in carte blanche, get it?) for some time now in various forms. It lasted through over 3 years of the Home & Garden Expo design contest participation where I won prizes for "best story"; it then had various sequels on my blog and inworld manifestations, and then it became a place in Bellisseria in Porridge Pot, and then finally it got a BBB stamp.

There's a very low-key "Letters of Transit" game associated with it, which few people play because it's very obscure and hidden and almost analog in nature -- and that's not usually what works in SL where attention spans are miniscule.

Even so, it's a thing, I chisel away at it sometimes and sometimes I get messages from it that there are "3 people" who played it or "0 people" in a row some weeks. It's just one of many things I tinker on, I think it's cool, and actually not so hard, but surprisingly few people who get stamps even bother to go inside a house to get its freebies, let alone play some mini-game within it. Oh, well.

So when I applied for the stamp, I explained some of this to Jezebel Bailey, at that time dealing with the applications. So here's the conversation (and remember kids, it is not a crime to publish chat logs outside the SL servers -- they don't have jurisdiction over other companies' servers in their TOS! In fact, it's a duty, to hold both residents and people in power to account -- that's important in any world. And it's all part of the gorgeous mosaic of SL history.

2021/04/07 19:45] Second Life: Inventory item 'Bellisseria Passport Application 2021 - Prokofy Neva' offered
[2021/04/07 19:46] Prokofy Neva: Hi, here's my passport application. Thanks
[2021/04/08 11:35] Second Life: secondlife:///app/agent/81f1414f-62d6-482a-a0e6-366ba7998661/about is offering friendship.

Would you be my friend?

(By default, you will be able to see each other's online status.)
[2021/04/08 11:35] Second Life: Friendship offer accepted.
[2021/04/08 11:35] Bel (jezebel.bailey): ty
[2021/06/18 15:33] Prokofy Neva: Hi, how do you get the HUD for the extra passport pages when you run out?
[2021/06/18 15:33] Prokofy Neva: or does it automatically deliver to you
[2021/06/18 15:34] Bel (jezebel.bailey): do you need a new hud?
[2021/06/18 15:34] Bel (jezebel.bailey): or another hud
[2021/06/18 15:34] Prokofy Neva: I have the upgraded passport already
[2021/06/18 15:34] Bel (jezebel.bailey): you should have gotten 3 of them named visa
[2021/06/18 15:34] Prokofy Neva: ok let me look
[2021/06/18 15:35] Prokofy Neva: why yes, it helps to search under the word "visa" and not "passport"
[2021/06/18 15:35] Bel (jezebel.bailey): haha that should hold you at this point
[2021/06/18 15:36] Prokofy Neva: yes I'm not excessively traveling
[2021/06/18 15:36] Bel (jezebel.bailey): but we can give more when needed
[2021/06/18 15:36] Prokofy Neva: I do have both vaccine shots but
[2021/06/18 15:37] Bel (jezebel.bailey): if the other person doesnt
[2021/06/18 15:37] Bel (jezebel.bailey): yours is no good
[2021/06/18 15:37] Prokofy Neva: yes I realize
[2021/06/18 15:37] Prokofy Neva: I realize you may start giving out shots soon
[2021/06/18 15:37] Prokofy Neva: I have a rare immune disease in RL but I don't think it applies in SL
[2021/06/18 15:38] Bel (jezebel.bailey): YES thats what we need next time
[2021/06/18 15:38] Bel (jezebel.bailey): next upgrade that when you go to locations for stamps it asks if you have any of the following
[2021/06/18 15:40] Prokofy Neva: you have to have your shots yes
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: you seem like an important bureaucrat
[2021/06/18 15:41] Bel (jezebel.bailey): and if you reply wrong it denies you the passport
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: yes
[2021/06/18 15:41] Bel (jezebel.bailey): hahah I shall talk to NOrth
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: it could be random
[2021/06/18 15:41] Prokofy Neva: if you are important I will send you a thingn
[2021/06/18 15:41] Bel (jezebel.bailey): send away not sure how important I am but I have a bit of pull
[2021/06/18 15:42] Second Life: Inventory item 'Confidential Envelope 2' offered
[2021/06/18 15:42] Prokofy Neva: so this is a Letter of Transit from the Honorary Consulate of Titania
[2021/06/18 15:42] Prokofy Neva: these are rarely issued
[2021/06/18 15:42] Prokofy Neva: and they entitle you to certain goods and services
[2021/06/18 15:43] Prokofy Neva: which you cannot be told about
[2021/06/18 15:43] Prokofy Neva: altho one thing is known publicly which is the Diplomatic Pouch in 3 Bellisseria locations
[2021/06/18 15:43] Prokofy Neva: where you get a gift
[2021/06/18 15:45] Bel (jezebel.bailey): the diplomatic Pouch is that a private thing?
[2021/06/18 15:46] Prokofy Neva: no it's public but only works if you wear the Letter of Transit
[2021/06/18 15:46] Prokofy Neva: which you can only get at certain times
[2021/06/18 15:46] Prokofy Neva: if you think the BBB is bureaucratic, Titania is...glacial
[2021/06/18 15:47] Prokofy Neva: but since the prizes are all things I make, let me say that this isn't what you would call a high volume game
[2021/06/18 15:47] Prokofy Neva: : )
[2021/06/18 15:49] Second Life: Inventory item 'Honorary Consulate of Titania' offered
[2021/06/18 15:49] Bel (jezebel.bailey): would you mind if we used some of your ideas tweaked a little?
[2021/06/18 15:50] Prokofy Neva: well they aren't copyright at the US Bureau of Patents
[2021/06/18 15:52] Prokofy Neva: are you a Linden on your day job?
[2021/06/18 15:58] Bel (jezebel.bailey): hahah yeah but we are pretty careful on the things we use and if its ok its ok, Brat!
[2021/06/18 15:58] Prokofy Neva: well I will denounce you on my blog for shamelessly copying my ideas but let's see I think I had 37 readers yesterday
[2021/06/18 15:59] Prokofy Neva: I noticed that when I posted about a slidehow I had at one of my locations from Xenon Linden some Mole HASTENED to put up a slidehow TOO
[2021/06/18 15:59] Prokofy Neva: so trust me, it will not be the first time in my 17 years of living virtually that someone has copied my ideas and not even credited me
[2021/06/18 15:59] Bel (jezebel.bailey): hey word of mouth is the quickest way to get things out there and bad word of mouth is even faster
[2021/06/18 16:00] Prokofy Neva: We do not have a free press in Second Life
[2021/06/18 16:00] Prokofy Neva: in Bellisseria there are only groups
[2021/06/18 16:00] Prokofy Neva: so I'm sure your capacity to put out bad word of mouth is enormous but honestly, I don't care, I do my thing
[2021/06/18 16:01] Bel (jezebel.bailey): oh we will credit you!
[2021/06/18 16:01] Prokofy Neva: so what is your Linden name?
[2021/06/18 16:01] Bel (jezebel.bailey): when people start bitching about having to do the shots records I will give you all the credit
[2021/06/18 16:01] Bel (jezebel.bailey): I am not a linden I just run the BBB
[2021/06/18 16:02] Prokofy Neva: the Lindens have written in their TOS that they can take any creation of any creator and use it in their PR and have a paid-up perpetual license to do so, and really, that's common
[2021/06/18 16:02] Prokofy Neva: yes sure, you'll give me the credit to pile up more hate on me, that's understood : )
[2021/06/18 16:02] Prokofy Neva: I personally am pro-vaccine but you will find a lot of anti-vaxers in SL so good luck
[2021/06/18 16:02] Bel (jezebel.bailey): well I am not a Linden so I dont steal your stuff
[2021/06/18 16:03] Prokofy Neva: well as I said, my things are not copyrighted or patented, that would cost too much to do in RL
[2021/06/18 16:03] Bel (jezebel.bailey): at least I ask before I do
[2021/06/18 16:03] Bel (jezebel.bailey): yeah it would
[2021/06/18 16:03] Bel (jezebel.bailey): to bad you couldnt pay for it with Lindens
[2021/06/18 16:03] Prokofy Neva: I would think an attempt to do a vaccine like thing, even though it fits perfectly with the passport idea, will get all kinds of static
[2021/06/18 16:03] Prokofy Neva: but you could leave it to the venue owner maybe
[2021/06/18 16:04] Prokofy Neva: then they absorb the grief
[2021/06/18 16:04] Bel (jezebel.bailey): We would
[2021/06/18 16:04] Bel (jezebel.bailey): we would put something like Make sure your records are up to date
[2021/06/18 16:04] Prokofy Neva: hmm would I put this on any of mine? Maybe?
[2021/06/18 16:07] Prokofy Neva: I think there are two basic ingredients that define a virtual world
[2021/06/18 16:07] Prokofy Neva: 1) a sense of place 2) drama
[2021/06/18 16:07] Prokofy Neva: so you get this working for sure
[2021/06/18 16:09] Bel (jezebel.bailey): Absolutely

So fast forward to November 2021, and we find I'm not getting the credit because they didn't choose the obnoxious and controversial thing (vaccinations! whew, what a circus that would be!) but chose the "honorary ambassador" idea (I think this convo makes clear that I would only get credit for bad things that would lead to more hate, right? That would be consistent with past experience lol).

Why do I say "insincere" form of flattery? Because the idea is being stolen in fact without the credit -- but then we knew that -- and of course without me being offered an application to be one of those "ambassadors" or to "be in the room where it happens." But again, I don't want to be one, I'm my own ambassador for my own groups and locations (and so should you!). We can all be happy if the Lindens get more premium accounts, right? It's good for Second Life as a whole, yes?

Yes?

I used to be more confident affirming that premise of "the tide that raises all boats" than I am now, still...

I have to have a chuckle about how these people must not study international affairs in even the most casual way. So in real life, you have "ambassador plenipotentiary" -- that's appointed by a government, the "permanent representative" at the UN -- the US has five of them in New York alone and some poor countries only have a budget for one, in Geneva. Or you have honourary consul -- that is a lesser status usually more informally designated to represent their country's business interests in a city where there isn't already an embassy. So there isn't "honorary ambassador" in the way they are using it (which is more like consul). 

So what happened in recent years for all kinds of reasons, one of which is people don't understand what "honorary consul" is (an archaic term from the British Empire) and confuse it with "consulate general" -- yet another function which gives out passports. So now at the UN, they have "honorary ambassador" AKA "goodwill ambassador" to take on cultural functions on a specific issue, like, let's promote women's empowerment. So then you get this - a debacle around Wonder Woman (yeesh). The "honorary ambassador" or "goodwill ambassador" in the UN context is usually promoting a theme or an event, or a campaign, like "the Millenial Development Goals" as I saw in my 15 years covering the UN for various NGOs.

So they are not going out and recruiting various constituencies of people to "advocate for them in their home country" (in this case Bellisseria, as the newsletter explains). So the "honorary consul" in say, Nizhny Novgorod from America, is trying to drum up business for American companies there (well, at least until one professor of business who had taught there for 20 years was arrested for supposedly not having his visa in order). So ideally, if he is not in jail, he is helping Americans with contacts; he's not trying to find Russians to take back to America to help them develop businesses (and why do that when you have Donald Trump to do that for you -- or in theory, the Russian honorary consul in, say, Miami). Diplomacy is a system of reciprocities based on elaborate international law like the Vienna Conventions and practices; the informal "consul" or "goodwill ambassador" fits into the official structure. It's not one way, as it is in the SL edition -- the Lindens pick some people they like who they think will service as evangelists -- to use the Silicon Valley term borrowed from the Bible -- of their premium account -- those people round up the usual suspects under colour of "representing their interests with the Lindens" -- and then they buy premium.

Of course people argue about this sort of thing in RL --  different countries have different traditions -- and guess what, again, it doesn't matter, because we're in a virtual world and who cares.

With the BBB, we already have confusion generated by their term "Travel Advice" which sounds too much like "Travel Advisory" in real life. The BBB's "Travel Advice" is a list of recommended sites for tourists or businessmen, to promote more travel. The State Department's "Travel Advisory" is the opposite! It's to warn travellers of dangerous conditions. For example the State Department has a grade 4 Travel Advisory about the country Colombia due to COVID, civil wars, and -- as my son and his wife who just went despite these official US government warnings and warnings from their parents -- it has terrible drivers that make New Jersey look like a day at the beach. The first time I saw a "Travel Advice" from the BBB I did a double take -- were these aerodrome operators actually going to blacklist Mainland venues they didn't like? But no, it's ADVICE not ADVISORY -- you're supposed to slum it for an afternoon at the Mainland and get stamps!

How to Get People to Buy More Premium Accounts

So these grand personages in our virtual world will fan out and spread Belli love among non Bellis lol "They will represent and advocate for Bellisseria on the relevant continent. They'll be expected to get close to local residents and also to become their advocate within Bellisseria," as the BBB newsletter says.

Nota bene -- I don't wish to apply for this job and I suspect trying to manage all these "goodwill ambos" will become a burden, like keeping up the persona of the grumpy BBB official, and it will be retired. Maybe those people who always want the Lindens to build a railroad through my land in Grote will get recruited by this thing (land which the Lindens themselves auctioned, which was purchased by a furry, from whom I bought it). But these sorts of volunteer jobs are work, and doing them in a virtual context often leads to burn-out.

If I need to "advocate within Bellisseria" -- where I am a property owner -- I can handle that on my own I think? Or file a ticket with Support? I'm not planning a Trash Can Cuisine picnic with three-legged sack races any time soon in Belli so I don't need any Linden connex.

Ultimately, the Lindens can only justify the "honorary ambassadors" if it leads to more competition with Prokofy's rentals  more premium accounts of people who get homes in Bellisseria. I mean, how could you validate the staff time otherwise? As for the residents who sign up for this, one imagines it will fall closer on the spectrum to the American notion of such a job, involving sending people like Shirley Temple as ambassador to Czech Republic for a political favour because she donated to the presidential campaign, not sending highly trained British cadres with languages and years in foreign posts, or sending Russian officials abroad who are extremely loyal and now need to be rewarded for their service to the Motherland. 

I'm hazy on the part where these ambos "advocate" for say, Mainland customers of Linden Lab who are in, say, railroad groups that grew up around the old SLRR, "in Bellisseria". How does that work? They get these old furries to drop their grumbling about different guages and ride the rails in Belli? PS they need more than two rez areas to build up usage of that RR, and they need to overcome the tech fussing and put it in obviously places like Camp Sandwich and Ramstein Forest or whatever those places are called. BTW, if you are in Randelshtam, or whatsis, which has the great zip ride, the Honorary Consul of Titania is right behind it so come get a stamp.

I imagine that isn't going to work with that constituency. Or say, they go to one of these elaborate old elven communities or centaur havens like Rose Haven and get them to buy into Fantisseria, which is mainly norms who just put out some witch stuff now and then, not fullblown RP (and that's a good thing). Nuh-uh.

Really, the puzzle for the Lindens is this, and I feel for them: how to get real people and not yet another alt of GhostofaGhost Ghostly -- or Prokofy's alts, for that matter -- to pony up $11.99/mo or $99/annualized. 

The fact that the Lindens now send the Moles to moderate the forums (!!!) instead of using their actual talents building and scripting lets us know that the Lindens are meddling experimenting in the Metaverse again.

Showing Up

I guess they will have to iron out these details but I think as Woody Allen said, 99 percent of life is just showing up (but you don't want him to show up). I think some people wouldn't want Lindens at their wedding nor would they want to be strung into helping the business of some Belli House Beautiful matron who makes house add-ons. As the earliest Lindens used to say: "Lindens don't scale." Hence, the birth of the Moles, who scale better because you can pay Ukrainians $10/hour and it will seem like a lot of money. But the job is big and Moles don't scale ultimately, either, plus, after you recruited and trained all these people and you are done (for now) rolling out Belli homes, what can you do with them? (Oh, I know! have them moderate the forums!).

So who can you have scale? The FIC, the trustees, the worthies, the people who aren't even like Ukrainians and don't even need $10/hour, although the prospect of having their DJ business pump up could be attractive.

I think it's important to remember that many, many people bought premiums and joined Bellisseria, and not just the old FIC and their 10 alts each. It's a good thing for new people. And the lion's share of these people are not in the 120 or so Bellisseria groups, and not only because they said bad words and got evicted. The overwhelming majority of the "citizens of Bellisseria" did NOT put out the Moles pumpkin Trick or Treat buckets. And that's actually the hope of this Trumansville -- that it will live and thrive on its own terms, without the "help" of insider residents and their Linden/Moles.

 

Update: I tried my idea of using the Operation Mainland DIY Kiosk, which you put on your head, to record a Linden site (in this case Magellan's Crash). I took the picture, clicked on the box -- but oops, it doesn't work because scripts are turned off for "everyone" at these Linden sites. So I stood on my land adjacent to it, to get it to work. Not very satisfactory as there won't always be resident land you can stand on with scripts turned on for "everyone" near Linden sites, either. The Lindens make it hard to bookmark many of their "newer" sites in Nautilus, Corsica etc because they merely call it "Protected Land" and its name doesn't save on a landmark. You have to make the landmark and right on the spot, rename it to the Linden name of the place, or your own name, or a sim name, to find it again. They do make it hard! 

PS Notice I didn't get into a discussion about how the BBB, which is basically the same thing as the core founders of Campbell Community (it took me awhile to figure that out), may not be the best "ambassadors" to be sending out to community groups to recruit them to Bellisseria/premium accounts given how they and their land baron of choice just treated the "hinterland" residents who supported their community and even some of their core -- by putting all the easements and roads to sale in large batches for low prices when their land baron Maecenas found his business wasn't doing so well and had to shorten sail. Unsuspecting residents were lured into Campbell to buy nicely landscaped parcels in a planned community on the open market in Mainland for 0.4/m -- a rare occurrence on Mainland. Then a few days later, the easements and roads all went to sale -- got bought by various people -- got abandoned -- leaving these sections in a plight something like Pleasantville in the Twilight Zone with Anthony Fremont. And here we all are. But this is for another post and another day. 

PPS It occurred to me -- I should have realized this earlier! -- that this particular FICing with the Hax-Anatine nuptials is to keep up with the Jones in the Metaverse. Recently, Roblox made new people-like skins for their blocky kids that look like Legos. AND they announced that you cannot have partners, weddings -- you know, sex -- in their angular world. Makes sense, because it's mainly for children.  No politics, either -- but that would have been harder for Patch Linden to fete -- no politics are allowed in Belli or the forums, although tacitly conceded inworld on the Mainland and on private islands -- there are still Trump lawn signs all over the Mainland and various socialist and anarchist and even communist projects, one of which harasses me routinely in Marietta at my anti-communist memorial.

The Lindens want to show with a high-profile society wedding also launching the community center that you CAN get married in SL (although not everyone is going to get a company representative as a best man, but most people won't care about that part).

I don't know the estimated share of the economy that weddings possess but it's a very big business. Not everyone wants to get e-married but some of the content produced for weddings (like Atelier's new items at Anthem) could be purchased for any occasion, especially bouquets. Many people feature their wedding in their picks as the highlight of their virtual lives, just as in real life.

Appeal to Linden Lab Re: 3-Day Forums Ban and Response

No surprise here -- it took Dakota Linden less than 24 hours to cut and paste the TOS back to me without responding to what I view as a troubling phenomenon I never used to see on the forums -- removal of content without a notice of a disciplinary action, sometimes when threads are closed for everyone. I'm not for having these infantile speech laws but if you have them, I think they should be practiced consistently. So if you remove a post that says something critical of Linden Lab and its staff even in the mildest form, or any form, you should generate a notice that says "Warning, your content has been removed for trolling". Or "spam," as it was designated when I opened two other threads besides the official company-made thread about the gatcha machine ban. I thought it useful to make an appeal for the record, so here it is, with the curt response:

#1758300

While I realize it is futile as no Linden will challenge their boss, I would like to appeal the current 3-day forums bans and past actions against me on the forums as I see they are arbitrary. When only the company can make a thread on such a controversial issue as the gatcha ban, and any other thread, even conducted with civility, is dubbed "spam" as mine were, your reputation for legitimate critical forums suffers. I made a list of demands to LL regarding mitigation of the policy, not opposing it, pulling my list out of a 300+ page thread as a very distinct different subject. There was no "fighting" in it and it was calmly discussed. Two of the demands, ironically, have already been met. My 2nd thread was in the "Merchants" sub-forum and was about strategies to cope with the gatcha ban, not addressed in the main thread which was mainly about whether it was illegal or legal, whether the people who made or bought gatchas were predators or chumps worthy of contempt, etc. In that thread, one repeated commenter injustifiably kept dubbing the thread as spam or trolling and may have AR'd it, but I don't think that's where this ban came from.

Curiously, my comment in the main thread about how Bellisseria residents, which includes me, as the middle class that can adapt to this change and buy more expensive non-transferable furniture, and that other forms of illegal activity will re-appear in SL as people cope, was simply removed and no reference was made to it (see attached), i.e. it was not characterized as "spam" or given a notice. That's disturbing. While I view the forum TOS and enforcement as a "contract of cohesion" often clumsily enforced, it has its own logic which many people accept. Removing content with *no* notice and not under the description of a given offense is arbitrary even within LL's terms.

Legions of posters have referred to Belli as "Trumansville" or "Stepford Wives" and criticized its uniformity. Quoting Pete Seeger on "little boxes of ticky-tacky that all look the same" is no different; what is "ticky tacky" if not virtuality? Surely you can concede the houses have limited variety and repeat endlessly? Surely you can concede that Belli, which I have praised as a successful Linden showcase project helping retention and socializing as well as the economy, is not for everyone? Far worse criticism has been tolerated; all that's different here is that it comes from me.

 

This is the 4th time I have had content removed, on some occasions, without *any* notification at all, which goes against the corporate standards of due process you have established in 18 years; in one case, a comment was removed without action, yet the response to it including a copy of it was not removed, illustrating the haste with which the removal was made. In another case, in the middle of his busy workday, Patch came to a thread personally in which forums regulars were harassing a newbie who dared to use the term "sim". Path insisted that we call these entities "regions" and posted a redlined copy of the Knowledge page (!) then removed my comment in defense of the newbie, closed the thread, but took no moderation action against me. This is truly unjustifiable, when the harassers of the newbie are left unscathed. Deletion of content with or without thread closure, with no notification of action under the TOS to the user, should not be allowed.

 

Another time, the reasons were again inexplicable and again involved Patch personally -- and mysteriously. If there is a rule that no poster can criticize or mention in any critical light the VP of Program of LL, then say so, put it in the TOS for the forums. I think this grows from a personal antagonism that may have begun inworld in 2007 on his original avatar, whose identity I don't know, but suspect as one of a crew who constantly harassed me on the forums and inworld for my critical comments about their favouritism. LL has come a long way from those days of the FIC and improved its practices, and since banning me arbitrarily from the forums in 2005 or 2006, a ban which was reversed as soon as the relevant Linden left that position. Personal antagonism is understood, given the toxicity of the forums and anger at policies which sometimes LL is forced itself to implement due to law (although no relevant law or cases have been cited in this curious sudden gatcha ban). But the tools of moderation or inworld bans should not be wielded by those in power simply because of irritation. That is why I make this statement for the record, again, without any expectation of action.

 

• Dakota Linden

  said 16 hours ago

  Hello Prokofy Neva,

  
  

  Linden Lab just completed its review, at your request, of a disciplinary action taken against your account.

   

  Our investigation shows that the suspension of your account was correctly applied in alignment with the Second Life Terms & Conditions and/or Second Life Community Standards. You may review the Terms & Conditions in full at https://www.lindenlab.com/legal/second-life-terms-and-conditions.

   

  If any further information is required, Linden Lab will contact you regarding this incident. Otherwise, please consider the matter resolved.

   

  Sincerely,

   

  Dakota Linden

  Account Specialist 

  Linden Lab

   

  
  
  

I'm going to be sure to send a response that Dakota Linden should get a "long lunch" when asked to rate his work because I think he pasted the TOS back to me very neatly. and expressed the nature of the "managed democracy" of the forums quite aptly.

 

I'm going to note for the record, although they could be entirely unrelated, that I've had a string of incidents lately in which the behaviour of various now former tenants or random harpies flying from the sky seemed calculated, as if to force me either to abuse report them or be accused of abetting their violation of the TOS or, to be riled and then break the TOS so they could AR me, i.e. swearing in General. I can only take these things in stride and move on.

 

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!

Tangled Web-382

Well, put away your feathers, you won't be knocking me down. And I'm sure more than a few nags will pop up to say "I told you so, nyah nyah."

Today is November 14. The Lindens in fact met their deadline for -- be still my heart -- implementing a JIRA proposal that I made about a year ago, battling patiently and firmly, to enable people to post proposals or bug finds, and not have others close them, WEB-382.

To understand the full ramifications of this proposal, you have to realize it flies completely in the face of the dreadful Wikipedia ethos (or lack of ethics, really), which enables anybody to come along and destroy the content of anybody else, inciting endless editing wars, until some tyrannical manager comes along and locks a page or thread. This Wikipedia destructiveness, enabled in the name of "freedom" and the ability to "always correct with the facts," inevitably leads to tyranny, as we can see time and again in many fiercely-debated wiki entries, where finally "some people" come and close all debate and content precisely because everyone had the freedom to destroy everyone else's entry. Thanks!

In our JIRA context, there is a dedicated and fiercely tribal cadre that sees themselves as "caretakers of the JIRA," fellow geeks empowered by the Linden geeks, who see it as their "mission" to go around "cleaning up" the JIRA by closing what they see as unwanted, redundant, "nonsensical", fixed, can't-do, etc. sorts of proposals. Of course, there is a world of difference between a proposal that affects some social and economic aspect of Second Life, and a bug find that affects the software, but of course these tekkies don't see the difference, and wish to shoehorn everything into a "reproduce" and a "patch or GTFO" mentality. If a proposal doesn't fit the culture of "open source" freakery, if it isn't about stopping "all business but my business," if it isn't about "we never met a script we didn't like," it can be killed.

To get a sense of the incredible obstacles to a simple premise of democracy and respect for individual rights, go and see the tremendous resistance I faced to the simple idea of having, in this "your world/your imagination" on this so-called creative platform, which stresses the right to IP alone among others, the right to have your content not destroyed. The right not to have anybody else close your proposal.

Concierge Customers Take Angry Protest to Nautilus Waterfront

UPDATE: Protestors are urging residents who are outraged at the price hikes and unfair process to vote MISC-1776 on the JIRA. As of 6 pm SLT the proposal had already garnered 1457 votes.

I'm reporting live from the waterfront in the new Nautilus continent where the new-paint smell from the Lindens' themed build is still in the air and packing boxes are everywhere. Yet the very land barons who just spent anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 per 1024 m2 off the auction here are protesting madly, waving red and black banners with red, bloody hands with a stigmata-like hole in the middle -- a kind of grim parody of the famous hand-eye logo of Linden Lab. They are mad as hell at new price hikes on openspace sims, have formed a protest group Save Our Openspace Sims, and have turned out 100 avatars on 3 new sims to demonstrate.

Concierge customers are rioting, we're told, having "set the Linden offices on fire," which of course they can't really do in a virtual world, and even with fire prims on Linden land with auto return, but which they're doing with self-immolation.

Concierge List is crackling with protest and swearing and hate. Sarah Nerd, popular land owner, newbie helper and wacky content maker, was banned off the Concierge List last night for saying "Fuck You Linden Lab!" at the news that she and her fellow land barons are taking yet another hit. She was among many land dealers whose inventory was devalued some 40-60 percent over night earlier this year with the "savings pass-along" and island price crash, who is now facing a 67 percent price *hike* on the open space sims she converted to because her full-prim sims sat empty after the Lindens price hike. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Many on the list and on the waterfront are talking about "bait and switch still," noting that by upping prim counts, making parcels divisible, enabling placement anywhere on the grid, the Lindens were nodding and winking about these openspace sims for uses other than those claimed on the website, where careful caveats alert customers who read the fine print that the sims can't be used except for water or forest, and tickets on performance issuances will not be accepted.

Everbody has a story. Typically, someone will tell you about "my girlfriend and I and our boat and home and our careful use of this sim, which was only used very lightly" lol. But the presence of the home, the boat, the sex-bed, etc. all bely that "light" use. "I only had 4 tenants on my OS, it was only light use," somebody is swearing to me.

I'm standing among the usual under-dressed and over-dressed SL crowd, and the Babblers are on full tilt, as French and Portugese residents have joined English speakers from the US, UK, Netherlands and elsewhere.

I guess I'm finding it rather, er, ironic that the black-and-red flags are waving on Kalyrra Heart's heavily-priced land here, with the slogans "You ruined my home, you ruined my SL," which is exactly what she did to others for years on end with her extortionist ad farm parcels and blighty signs. Karma much?

I've got the transcript of an impromptu Concierge chat with Jack Linden, who emerged earlier this afternoon, but it doesn't say much, will post in a bit.

Dear M Linden, Fix the Groups! And Join Some To See What I Mean!

Dear M,

While I recognize you've focused on macro-stability of the whole platform, getting it not to crash, and you are making progress, you should focus on micro-stability which in fact impacts user experience far more, as many people just cheerfully relog after a crash.

But what really annoys and wears you down is the chronic group chat problems, as groups are the essence of Second Life. You cannot find groups in search, even huge groups; you cannot chat in groups without constant errors; you cannot search within groups for their members but have to go through the entire list to find them. All these functions that worked fine a year ago today are all badly broken, possibly because of data base strain. Other facets of the group interface, i.e. positions of buttons for ease of use, etc. all need work. A huge bug is the "share with group" problem where even people who are not enabled in the permissions of the group to access deeded objects can access and sell them or put malicious scripts in them.

I always feel as if those of us paying so much tier, and taking on so much sub-management work of customers for LL, namely *inworld* and not outworld business, are like orphans, constantly ignored, even harmed, and now bunched together with "consumers" in a group LL is less interested in, after "enterprises" or "education" -- neither of which, AFAIK pays as much tier as the inworld businesses collectively speaking in the "consumer" group. And it's because of this lack of attention to inworld business and all the issues that go with it like groups or ad farms (which you are far, far from solving!!!) that you aren't helping the people who are allied with you to increase retention in fact do their jobs best.

You should find a way to focus on *fixing groups* in the next quarter. You could ask Robin Linden about some of the issues as she was here from the beginning with the first overhaul of the groups when they were transformed from hippie communes to businesses (it used to be any officer in the group could vote you, a tier-payer, out of the group, or steal your land; thankfully all that early hippie stuff was removed). But now you have to focus on making them really functional for *inworld* business. Outworld business has less need of them. Some of these big corporations never even bother their heads about autoreturn and grouped land and group permissions, which BTW is how they get griefed with flying phalluses, etc. They don't use the broken group tools at all, which is why you aren't hearing about them. We do.

I don't need to tell you that people want more than 25 groups -- you've heard that. But why do people like me spread 75 groups over 3 avatars? Because groups don't work. Because I can't have a land group over about 250 people, or it breaks down and I can't manage, expel, chat, send stuff reasonably as the groups get bigger. By 1,000, I have a basically useless group.

Groups are the connective tissue of SL; you keep wanting to make SL "like the web" and start ill-conceived projects like "landmarks" which had no internal social demand, but is just a geek affectation of "making SL's viewer like a web browser". Instead, you should *make the world work inside* and that means things like groups and ad farms, which you haven't solved, because you aren't willing to grasp the nettle of discretionary policy and remove chronic offenders because they are chronic offenders, instead of devising rules to capture them and only them; you are also not willing to put in effective mechanical solutions like "no division of land under 512".

Put some groups on your profile, M, and start learning about what I'm talking about!!! Join the Lindens' Concierge group with 8,000 people, to see what chronic 'group error in chat' is like for example.

Prokofy Neva

Abusive New Abuse Report Categories

Wow, I guess the Lindens really do want us out of there, in preparation for the creation of some super-sanitized edu-biz grid.

A whole boatload of very bad stuff coming in the beta/preview version of the new abuse report categories, discovered by Suezanne Baskerville.

A new offense is called "Commerce" -- "Failure to deliver product or service" which is a hugely capacious, baggy and abusive concept, as any nit harassing me about land they think should be for rent and is taken (as you saw in previous posts) and continuing to harass me and incite hatred can AR me for "failure to deliver service" and make it stick, have me banned, and have my land taken away from me.

FUCK THAT SHIT, Lindens, and seriously, I mean that sincerely, and you better not put that in the viewer. It has no business being there, as the complexity of consumer problems in a virtual world with anonymous providers is not solved by a very abusable and overbroad category like this.

Oh, sure, people LOVE the idea of being able to go after bad business. SOMETHING has to be done about the chronic "failure to deliver product or service" we all suffer from. But...that's up to residents to devise in their own organizations, and with their own means, whether by notarizing agreements and having groups like "Honourable Land Dealers" or rigorous consumer reports (which just never get started properly in SL) or whatever it takes. But a ridiculously vague "abuse" like this will not only flood the Lindens with reports, it will make it impossible for anybody but the Lindens' most precious pets to do business in SL, as they will be completely vulnerable to prosecution of arbitrary trifles.

Back Off Katt Linden, Or People Will Leave

Those of us who have been in Second Life for a number of years understand that this isn't just one game or world, but a kind of super matrix for social media and the Metaverse and the 3-D web. The experiences and policies and prototypes being done here are going to have a great impact.

Therefore it matters when the Lindens get it wrong, and it matters that people fight back vigorously, or they are ceding territory for free speech and freedom of creativity not just in one place, but everywhere.

I don't follow the forums that closely, because there is rarely an intereresting conversation, and in fact, it has become quite toothless and tame, despite what the scaredy cats think about it now. But even they are shocked into anger and silence by recent moves made by the new Communications person hired to manage the forums, Katt Linden.

I've been totally unimpressed with Katt Linden for months, mainly due to her smarmy and supercilious posts on the blog and annoyed by her over-moderation, but I didn't think it was worth bothering to criticize. I figured either a) the Lindens are not serious about really making a good forums and have sent her in to destroy it, so it's not worth bothering with or b) the cringing types willing to go into such a sanitized forums will rule the roost and you won't want to be there anyway.

The supine bunch on the forums really need to start engaging in outright civil disobedience to get the Lindens to stop pressing further their draconian new "forums facelift". It rots, it sucks, and I hope Robin Linden personally responsible for this -- it cannot be done without her knowledge and consent, and it was she who hired Katt Linden. Every single poster should be putting up a post with a URL linking to their blog or any blog related to SL, get thousands of people to do this if you have to, and get the Lindens to stop this nonsense.

When Robin discussed changes to the forums some months ago, she held out the promise of lifting forums bans. None of that has happened. That turned out to be totally fake. Instead, a rather worse thing happened: a vague connection between permanent forums bans and inworld banning, which hadn't really pertained in any real way, since "Prok's Law," i.e. the invocation of this "scare" *after* I was banned in June 2005, but the failure to apply it to some really bad offenders like Ulrika Zugzang or Siggy Romulus. Now Katt comes along and tells us that in fact it's very much going to pertain, and only after lots and lots of people protested (mercifully, they aren't THAT supine), she backed off only a tad, saying permabans on the forums MAY lead to permabans on the world. Sorry, folks, that's not good enough. In fact, it's more of the same, and it's unacceptable. No one should have property and inventory confiscated without due process over a speech offense. It is not the law in the United States of America and many of the other countries where SL is reached. In fact, to have any confiscation, due process or no, over speech, would require really extreme circumstances, and might be in the form of a fine for a non-public figure who could show malice and show loss of livlihood and couldn't mount a truth defense -- three factors that few SL posts would meet as a test, since most people are speaking their minds sincerely and believe what they say; LL's livlihood isn't harmed by some post on some forum seen by some tiny percentage of people, and what bothers the Lindens the most is the truth. That's why I'm banned -- my permaban is a disgrace and an injustice, and should be reversed.

Our Terrarium

People seem not to have noticed this strange article in the New York Times, perhaps because the other article about griefers overshadowed it, but there it is, our old fearless leader Philip Linden saying that Second Life is like a terrarium.

Well, thought I. Why should only Philip have a terrarium? (i.e. all of SL). I want one, too! I figured with all the garden stores in SL, surely there'd be tons of them. I found only one! At Dania's garden store in Tuzandi. So I decided to make one myself. With one thing and another, it went phantom, probably because there is some function of sculpties that makes them phantom, too, and linking it made the entire thing go phantom. No matter, that way I could walk right in, and feel myself the concentrated essence of terrariumness. You can buy my rich content for $25 at the ALICE UNITED FRONT AGAINST AD-FARMS and help pay for that parcel I bought in Alice to save it from the choppers.

Philip says SL is like a terrarium, for businesses, that they can prototype stuff and meet there and whatnot. Well, sure, I've always said that you really can accelerate a business proposition in SL and see if it works. In a small SL business geared to inworld realities, so to speak, you learn really fast. It rents, or it doesn't rent, and you have tier to pay, so you find a way to present it better, or you sell. SL is a brutal task-mistress in that way. But it's also fun to try to see what works, learn from mistakes, try this or that.

After awhile, however, like Truman, you fly up against the rounded wall of the terrarium, and you feel exasperated. The Lindens. And their policies. Like Jack Linden's new post about zoning, which makes me feel sick at heart because once again, it means the existing mainland owners will be screwed, left behind, while some new product is wheeled out that can only benefit new buyers. It was bad enough with LPDW and Bay City; now we are to face a host of zoned sims that will naturally sell for more, and drive everybody to them, sucking out what life there was on the core mainland where people themselves struggled to zone -- and with no help from the Lindens. It makes you gasp, really. Why do they keep doing stuff like this? A commentator on the forums (comments have been driven off to the forums) noted simply that businesses cannot succeed when they are constantly disruptive with policies and their non-enforcement like this.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Philip at an SL anniversary. Now he's preparing to vacate his chair as CEO of LL.

Hat-tip to Robbie Kiama on Twitter for being the first I saw with that line, "Long Live the King," a play on the name of the new CEO as well.

Philip Rosedale has picked his successor in the job as CEO -- Mark Kingdon, formerly of Price Waterhouse Cooper, who will use the name "M Linden".

M as in Millenium? Or like some rap star?

In another scoop handled by Adam Reuters, instead of Eric Reuters who does all the work at the possibly-trade-mark-violating site of secondlife.reuters.com, M had something rather intriguing to say, that I think would be music to the ears of most businesses in SL:

“Maybe it was the right place but definitely the wrong time for most big brands,” Kingdon said. “I’d like to see a continuation and even acceleration of the incredible in-world development we’ve seen from engaged, highly participative residents. that will create the richness of experience and vibrant economy that’s so important. If there are companies that can participate in the organic growth of Second Life, it’s a great place for them.”

Well, how about that!