Virtual Darfur. Screenshot by Ethan Zuckerman
By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Pierre Omidyar's new venture with the crypto gang of journalist activists -- Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill -- will fail, even though they have appeared to dump Journalist-Hero-Coder Jacob Appelbaum along the way.
Skip down below the fold to the headline WHY NEWCO WILL FAIL if you don't want to read the back story here, but I think it's an interesting one.
VIRTUAL DARFUR
One day in about 2006 or so a Canadian radio journalist interested in "progressive" issues IM'd me and asked me to come to a dinner where there would be a number of interesting people who followed human rights and humanitarian affairs, and even the famous e-bay founder Pierre Omidyar. She said he would be in disguise with a different name.
After a delicious-looking dinner, which we didn't eat because we couldn't, but only interacted with animatedly, I flew around the field behind the open-air table and soon Pierre was shooting me with some kind of nerf gun that sent puff-balls or chickens or something into the air...
Yes, it was Second Life, not real, except, more than real in some ways. These were the people who formed the virtual Darfur in Second Life, an installation that was supposed to raise awareness about the suffering of the Darfurians in Sudan, as they were being massacred by the janjawid, the government-backed vigilantes on horsebak who hacked and killed people, destroyed villages and stole animals and sent people fleeing into the bush. The "before" and "after" satellite photos were devastating. (I should note that I worked on the issues in Sudan/Chad for several years in several groups at the UN so was indirectly related to this.)
Virtual Darfur and other projects like virtual Guantanamo was a subject of great hope by techno-utopians and great derision by techno-realists -- but of course, Rik was actually quite pragmatic about using the technology for education and actually had projects funded in Second Life for youth, and Ethan turned out to be really more of a utopianist, because he could never stand it that Second Life cost money and attracted mainly people who could afford it (he never got it about all the Brazilians and Poles and even Africans on free accounts who in fact showed up there) and believed that until tech could be made free for everyone by some magical power, no one should waste time on it when they could be saving humanity some Better way. Oh, you know, like blogging politically-correct stuff at Global Voices...
To be sure, I was the first to say there was a creepy aspect to the Darfur installation that was not intended -- Second Life is rich with creative possibilities and objects and props and textures, and you can build almost anything and evoke a real sense of place and mood, but somehow, the props that could evoke mass murder just weren't available. It was in little details, like the fact that the campfires used in the display had robust logs with cheerful crackling and shooting flame sounds and animations, and seemed to have been lifted out of your Girl Scout camp, not the desert. The tents and chairs and such also had that clean modern, feeling of an American national park outing, not the desperation of an African refugee camp. People who poured in to see the interactive diarama would tend to do things like take out their marshmallow sticks, provided by a particularly clever Microsoft island active at that time, and it would sort of spoil the somber mood.
Worse, griefers soon swooped down on it trying to wreck things and overload and crash the server so people couldn't visit it. Anything that had any serious purpose would be ripe for attack by 4chan and Anonymous in those days -- the idea that these thugs "evolved" into "hacktivists" who genuinely took up good causes is absurd, because in fact they were just the opposite and cynically remained so even as they engaged in reputational laundering. The griefing parties then triggered a vigilante group named the Green Lantern Corps to come guard the camp and then they endlessly sparred, detracting from the original subject matter.
Screenshot by rikomatic. I should note that the graphics of 2006 or 2007 are very primitive compared to much improved rendering today in 2013 in Second Life.
So...I happened to have met Pierre virtually in Second Life where he was an early investor and had a secret avatar, and also chatted with him frequently in the early days of Twitter on my avatar @Prokofy and my real life account @catfitz.
A BETTER WORLD
Pierre's stake in Second Life wasn't about merely making money or encouraging innovative 3D technology, although that was part of it, but it was because he was imbued with the idea that the Internet and social media and content-rich virtual worlds could make a Better World. This Better-worldism is an intense variant of the California Ideology that leans more to the technocommunist and collectivist than the technolibertarian and individualistic. I always saw Pierre as something of a Robin Hood -- he took from the relatively affluent (by Third World standards) working and middle class people on e-bay trying to sell their used hair-drivers and old baseball cards, clipping a crumb from each transaction like that dad in Bonfire of the Vanities (as he explained to his son), and then taking those funds and plowing them into various non-profit causes to help conflict-ridden Africans or poverty-stricken Americans or promoting various "progressive" causes like gender awareness.
There was something that always bothered me about that grand wealth transfer because the people who were thus shaken down -- and the prices kept going up and up on e-bay to sell stuff and people like me got chased away -- didn't get to vote on the causes. Oh, businessmen are free to do what they want with their profits, of course, but the whole model -- shake down some people who have a little bit extra, give it to the nonprofit class to donate overseas to the poor or help themselves to become more powerful as a political/cultural force at home -- struck me as one that didn't have any recipe for how society could continue into the future.
In other words, there wasn't a path to create new business people and new wealth, there was only the redistribution of existing wealth in a politicized manner.
Oh, don't get me wrong. There were some great causes in the Omidyar grants, and in fact, I used to work for some of the organizations and indirectly, why, even my small salary was paid for by this process. But that's just it -- too many people in that non-profit class never question the model because they depend on it. They don't explain how capitalism -- which makes these things possible! -- could continue in their social-democracy model.
SOCIALISM IN ONE SIM: NEUALTENBERG
Pierre had a close associate named Haney Armstrong who worked at Linden Lab as a community manager -- his name was Haney Linden inworld, as all the Linden staff took the same last name, and their real first name or a pseudonymous first name.
Haney was very enthusiastic about the Better Worlding capacity of Second Life, and immediately created a contest among the early adapters -- whoever submitted a project to create some kind of online experimental community for a cause would get a free simulator or server on which they could build their utopian world.
The collection of open software freaks and Singularists and transhumanists as well as designers and curiosity-seekers and those interested in the mechanisms of civil society online (like me, who came along later) were not very willing to come up with ideas for this contest. Maybe because after they got the free sim, valued at $1000-2000 depending on its style and location in the simulated world, they would still have to pay a maintenance fee of $195 a month to keep it going.
So there was only one entrant and thus only one winner for Haney's contest -- a plan for a socialist world called Neualtenberg after the alpine-style sim it was on. Haney was delighted -- it couldn't have been more up his alley to have Europeans and Americans devoted to communal socialist experiments take up this sim.
Some day entire dissertations could be written about this virtual "socialism on one sim" and I myself could write at least a few book chapters, but suffice it to say, it ended in tears, with one of the main founders, Ulricha Zugzwang, flying through the world and deleting all the buildings she had constructed in a fit of pique over a squabble with others over some sectarian matter -- she was tried in absentia and banned permanently for "high treason and terrorism." Another spinoff of the sim devoted to more pure socialist ideals created a guild system where you had to know the people and be chosen to open up a shop or cart as a merchant in their village. At first your rent would be higher, but then if you proved yourself and sold more, then it might be lower... In other words, these sims ended the way socialism often ends in real life -- and then some.
In Second Life, you can see the Sea of Omidyar, named after Pierre, and sometimes I would row my boat around the sea, filing dispatches to the Alphaville Herald about men out booming the waters in search of Lost Lindens, staff that were fired for reasons that were never explained and who we said were thrown into the sea...
Pierre seemed to cash out somewhere after that seed round -- it's not a public company but its stock did trade brisquely for awhile in the secondary markets when it was really popular. I don't think he bothers with it any more, I'm not sure.
OMIDYAR NETWORK
Haney left, and swimming up from the Sea of Omidyar, emerged as the community manager at Omidyar Network, another venture that Pierre organized that I joined for a time on the edges -- it was awfully politically correct there and it was really hard to have a real conversation because there were just too many PC types there.
There were two other big problems with this network -- no, three:
1. People found it hard to criticize anything about Omidyar Network in form or substance because they were grantees -- they felt they had to play along quietly. This is always the problem of what we delicately referred to at the Soros Foundation as "the problem of a living donor". You're not getting a grant from an institution administered by officers, but you're getting it directly from the rich guy, and he (and his wife) who were also in it sort of throw a magnetic charge over the thing -- people are endlessly trying to get seen and suck up.
2. People who do good all day don't really feel like then coming to an online service and chatting about their do-gooding at night. That is, maybe some do, but there is a certain chore-like quality to it, and a surreal quality. I had only so much time in the day to work on, say, Belarus or Sudan issues, these were part-time jobs for me at the time. I'm the sort of person for whom human rights has been a vocation, not just a job, and I would often work on causes for free late into the night -- but then, it had to count. I couldn't justify as a freelancer coming and chatting for an hour and typing ideas for activism on top of that -- at least, in that sort of constrained atmosphere where there were moderators, with topics suggested by them, and that climate of people trying to impress.
Worst of all, they had a reputational rating system, where you could be rated for your comments -- and this added a gamification which also tended to detract rather than add. The few people who were either highly paid at no-show jobs or on fixed incomes had the time to endlessly type "lessons learned" and earn points from the mods, but the rest of us couldn't keep up.
3. For me personally, what was nasty about this particular earlier form of humanitarian Facebooking was that my personal data was not secure. It wasn't long before griefers in Second Life grabbed my real name, location, and address from this service, which was supposed to be membership-only but was open, and then pasted it all over various anonymous forums where people could then use it to harass me at home. I really hated this outing of my privacy, complained about the problem several times to Haney and others, but they just weren't willing to do anything about it. They were not willing to discipline and sanction the person who did this to me because I guess he was in their crowd. BTW, I think that's one of the same people who vandalize my Wikipedia to this day.
For these reasons (I imagine) or probably others that were more intricate involving factions or lack of cost effectiveness, this experiment was shut down. I think it's just too hard to get people to be in a virtual community online virtualizing their do-gooding -- it really doesn't result in a Better World. There wasn't any, as they say in this business of non-profiting, any "value-add."
But then, I never come at these projects as capable of changing human nature at all, as I'm not a transhumanist or Silicon Valley Better Worlder, like Pierre and the others. They should think more about governance and due process and human rights online and how to manage, not change, human nature.
BE CIVIL!
Oh, except that they did. Pierre is a smart and thoughtful guy. He next created a social media project for Hawaii, where he spends some of his time (I believe he's also in San Francisco and elsewhere), where he is from originally. This was supposed to be a civil place where there would be no griefing of the crude Second Life or Youtube kind, or even the more refinded mind-fuckery of the Well or even his Network. This would be subscribers only, with rules, and people would be rewarded for civility and everyone would live happily ever after.
Except, as I'm told by those who have been in it, and as some have commented privately here and there, it was boring, nobody went there, and there wasn't a market for it in Hawaii. I'm not sure why he didn't take it national or world-wide, but maybe he had this idea that unless people are hyper-local and tied to their real-life roots, online can't work. Otherwise, Ulricha Zugzwang comes swooping from the sky and blows up your simulated building...over whether you had 2/3 majority or absolute majority or a commission of scientists to run your planet...or Haney blocks you on the forum because you've been down-voted by the stay-at-home moms.
NEWCO OR NEUALTENBERG
So now Pierre Omidyar turns out to be the billionaire behind the story of a new new media site that will bring Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and other neo-journo-activists on board for the new new....thing.
Once again, what I saw in Second Life and the next 2.0 generation on the Web in and around Second Life comes to real life, so to speak --- the West Coast invades the East Coast. And all the topics I've been following so avidly -- with such alarm -- come together once again.
WHY NEWCO WILL FAIL
Let me explain why I think this will fail.
First of all, Pierre isn't John Perry Barlow. He's not a wild cowboy on the Electronic Frontier. He's not a vain movie star like John Cusak. He's not a controlling little nerd like Cory Doctorow. All of them have had a good long run with Electronic Frontier Foundation and more visibly, BoingBoing.net because they're wild and mine the counter-culture.
Pierre, however is a gentleman. He's more refined. Think "Paris" and "ancient Persian culture" (he's Iranian-American) rather than raw California. Unlike EFF, he doesn't fund nonprofit organizations that are revolutionary juntas in disguise lawfaring their way to power; he's the kind of guy who supports the International Criminal Court.
Unless Pierre had some radical epiphany at Burning Man I haven't heard about -- he doesn't talk to me much now because I really disagree with all his causes of recent years like anti-SOPA -- he isn't somebody who wants to destroy everything about society. Unlike Barlow and some of the people around EFF and related groups, he has built a business that -- whatever its Robin Hood qualities -- followed the basics of profit and loss and commodification, without claiming that "information wants to be free" and all that other commie dreck (although he buys some of that stuff).
FAST AND FURIOUS
But here's the thing about Pierre I'm thinking (and anyone is welcome to argue with me). I think he is finding that slow path of civics -- socialist simulators, networks of do-gooders arguing with each other over fine points, civil chat online that proves too boring -- is just not bringing about that Better World he seeks fast enough.
I think he and Jeff Bezos (another early investor in Second Life) and Mitch Kapor (who still remains on the Second Life board, but who left EFF years ago, a subject I will return to) really want to see some results before they die. They are tired of taking their organic protein smoothies and multivitamins, as someone once jested in SL, and consoling each other while they wait for the Singularity (the geek Rapture). They want something to happen now.
I think Jeff Bezos would never have bought the Washington Post if a) the anti-SOPA campaign hadn't succeeded with so much Google juice and b) Snowden hadn't become a sensation. This showed him a) the power of trying to influence Washington to get what you want and b) the instant, emboldening power of hacking and leaking as a new revolutionary method. And it's all online, where nobody actually gets hurt, or so they say...
Hacking and leaking as a form of activism and journalism -- journo-activism (I hate the word "hactivism" because it ascribes do-good impulses to cynical nihilists in Anonymous) -- turns out to be the swiftest, most mighty, more effective way to get attention, get power, "get things done" in the world right now. That's why we'll see lots more of it.
It's like Walter White's 99% blue crystal meth.
If there were no Internet or no Jacob Appelbaum, and no WikiLeaks or Snowden, having a newspaper wouldn't be very fun -- it would be dull, civic work and dull occupational work -- a journalist I know once explained to me frankly that journalism is an occupation, not a profession, with very obvious guild rules and methods.
I can see why Omidyar, who didn't have as many billions as his Second Life-related friend Jeff Bezos and couldn't buy the Washpo for a mere $250 million, also wanted to do things his way. He wants his own thing, and better to build it up.
THE CLASH OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESSES
But Pierre has very clear and definite ideas about human affairs -- way more threshed out than John Barlow. Frontiering isn't so much his thing as settlement. He really has a greater drive to be politically-correct, in a way. None of these people are about creating free and open societies with pluralism; I think Pierre more than most others in the Better World biz has very clear ideas of what is proper and civic.
The problem with that sort of didacticism is that it drives people away. They don't feel free. They feel as if there aren't choices and options. When people feel that way, they go away. It's boring for them.
For now, Omidyar loves Greenwald. But that won't last. First of all, Greenwald is a douche, and is nasty to everyone he deals with sooner or later and will not only bite the hand that feeds him, he will chew it off and spit it out in public as news. Pierre will not find that very nice -- and some of his friends will complain to him about this privately, then publicly.
But more of concern, Greenwald, who may be a douche, will demand to be absolutely free, or at least want his own viewpoints to rein supreme. These will not always dovetail with the Better World of Pierre Omidyar -- white supremacists and Ron Paul loons and such that are around the creepier sides of Greenwald are definitely not going to be to Pierre's refined taste.
Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill are even more loony, and while at first enthralled with their raw revolutionary power, Pierre will sour on them. Greenwald is at least a trained lawyer who practiced law, and a blogger with a lot of miles under his belt as a commentator, even if his wildly biased "journalism" as such is shakey. But the others are far less polished or trained. Poitras started revolutionary film-making as a kind of political hobby she got good at, and has mainly draped herself in revolutionary "treason chic" to get ahead with a legend rather than a compelling body of work. Scahill is a dropout who was nurse-maided by Amy Goodman so he has no thought of his own outside the shrill, rigid "progressive" ideology of Democracy Now! Jamie Kirchick has done a good expose of everything that's wrong with them, and of course I have my famous timeline about all the Snowden characters and their dodginess.
BTW LibertyLynx and other twitterers think that if Pierre is in or from Hawaii, maybe he was there during the celebrated Spring Break of Code where the Hackers' Convergence took place. I really don't think so, because he has not been part of that particular crowd, although they overlap. Their culture is different.
NEWS YOU CAN USE
But I think Omidyar can bless Snowden and company because it turns out to be a very rapid and fulfilling way to get power and influence, all wrapped up as civic journalism. Nothing messy like the Black Panthers or the Tea Party. And that it looks like sort of a Better World.
I think Pierre is enough of a businessman that he will want this paper to have all that "news you can use" and movies and celebrity gossip and health columns as well -- but then, there may not be room for it in the market. After all, you already have all the staid old-media newspapers trying to become that way online, and you have Huffpo, which is really their biggest competitor. I think most people looking at the market and the struggling models that The Atlantic or TechCrunch or Huffpo have to use would say that there isn't room for another one of these -- called NewCo for now, because Omidyar hasn't released the name.
People put up with the political-correctness of Huffpo in various preachy op-ed pieces -- which don't get as much traffic as the tot-down-a-well and cat-up-a-tree stories -- because they get other more generic news of the day for free.
But to keep Arianna in shoes, Huffpo has to sell high-priced tickets to exclusive seminars and conferences where the greats of Silicon Valley share their insights (i.e. about how you can give content for free and still get rich!).
NO BUSINESS MODEL
Newspapers cannot live with subscription or special offers of paid content; newspapers need ads to survive; online ads don't make enough revenue; therefore newspapers are dying. Those that live have another model, which is selling niche ads in the lucrative gadget market, or selling seminar tickets or other special events.
I should reprint my recent Twit-spat with copyleftist Glynn Moody so you can see how business/tech press survives -- and it's only by those big ads from SeaGate and expensive conferences like TechCrunch. BUT the real money comes not from the conference goers; the conference sponsors pay $10,000 or even $50,000 just to get a keynote speech at these things and hawk their gadgets.
NewCo doesn't have gadgets to hawk; it has no product to sell, which enables TechCrunch and Huffpo -- both bought by the geek-hated AOL -- to survive. Tech press functions as a mere wrapper around the gadgets; its purpose is to sell tech. But NewCo's only product is shrill, politically-correct "progressive" news hating on the government -- and there's already a lot of that around wanting to be free.
The Guardian, whatever you want to say about its lefty politics, is a real newspaper with real expertise. The people get up in the morning and put out actual news and update it 24/7 -- they don't just blog in their shorts in between dog feedings and beach walks with boyfriends. And that's what somebody has to be doing -- the leaks from people like Snowden just isn't enough.
There's also the issue that if Newco tries to function as a revolutionary lobbyist -- which is what some wanted EFF to do (and which led to its split into Center for Democracy and Technology and EFF 2.0) and doesn't make a firewall between business and journalism, and between journalism and sources, they will get arrested for breaking the membrane between felony (stealing files) and editing (taking stolen files and publishing them). I'm sure that idea secretly delights Pierre at some level, but not as much as John Perry Barlow -- he doesn't want to be the one to get arrested.
I don't know how Pierre envisions the end game. The Republican Party shatters and dies and one super Democratic Party emerges that decides all things through a committee of right-thinking people of him and his friends? Congress is disbanded or turned into a focus group and operator of We the People? Does he think of the courts?
And how will it feel if the Snowden leaks finally do lead to a new terrorist attack, or some great big loss abroad related to China or the Internet or Brazil, or a new recession or realization that the old one wasn't over? How will he sell newspapers?
Greenwald has been able to keep the interest level in his writings high because he does vary them even though they're all in a vein; Poitras and Scahill are much more woodenly ideological Johnny one-noters. They can take that same deep anti-American posture and keep trying to get new material for it, but Democracy Now is boring, and left-wing radio like WBAI fails and dies because people don't like watching the same thing all the time, even if they agree with it. I think Jon Stewart can be as successful as he is because he doesn't just spout his stuff, he frames it as a polemics with Fox News.
NEWCO NEWS?
For a brief, heady moment, I thought Jay Rosen had actually produced a piece of journalism -- the first in the decades since he worked for about two days in a real newspaper in Buffalo or something and then quit -- when he actually interviewed a newsmaker and brought some real news forward. (Usually his online project is filled with "progressive" agitprop).
Then I read the end of the piece and saw that he himself was one of the Better Worldniks that Pierre had consulted in the project itself, so of course he was flaking it. Gosh, is it turning out that the newnew is like the oldold?
How could Pierre prevent failure here, and make NewsCo be more like ebay and less like Omidyar Network?
One would be FREEDOM -- real freedom of views, variety of views, plurality of views. Not the cypher-punks and crypto kids and their Hate America First who ignore Russian crimes but a true variety that accepts that there are ranges of views from people who aren't sell-outs in a liberal democracy and that institutions of liberalism matter. I don't see we're getting that. Hey, the invitation to blog isn't in my email box : )
Another would be LIGHT MODERATION -- open comments without prissy pearl-clutching civic moderators so that real polemics can happen. I don't see that happening, either. One way Huffpo and DailyKos and Red State succeed is by offering an oped or blogging platform to a large horde of people who then provide free content. I think a lot of this gets missed and it is very frustrating to break through as an accepted blogger if the editors only have one perspective, but it can be considered as a model.
Another would be EAT WHAT YOU KILL -- in other words, if it turns out that shrill, whiney anti-Americanism doesn't get traffic and views and followers and re-tweets, don't artificially keep propping up such journalists with your billions. Only the journalists with an actual following survive -- if they do face competition intellectually from others who don't share their views.
I expect none of this will happen, and it will fail. I won't be sorry. The money scraped from me from the years I sold my used books and kids' games and dolls and even Pokemon cards and my The Sims Online avatar (sold at $150!) in order to survive as a single mom of two just doesn't feel well spent to me transmogrified by the great and the grand and the Better-Worlding and given to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill to destroy democracy.
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