My comment at Gizmodo unfortunately trapped under some peer approval system out of the view:
ReTweet: jmalthus @spin Yes! Web2.0 is about social media, and guess what people like to be social about? Themselves. Social Narcissism
— Eric Rice (@ericrice) April 18, 2007
@spin Yes! Web2.0 is about social media, and guess what people like to be social about? Themselves. Social Narcissism.
— Jesse Malthus (@jmalthus) April 18, 2007
Eric Rice, [one of the early famous podcasters in California and promoter of social media] is a friend of mine from Second Life (his avatar's name in Second Life was Spin Martin). And I remember this tweet very well back in 2007. It was addressed to Jesse Malthus, another friend of ours — who put it on his profile in Second Life. Jesse Malthus was his avatar's name; his real name was Jesse Higginbotham,
Sadly, just two days after that re-tweet, that bright young man who did a lot of coding and testing in SL was killed in a car accident at the age of 17. You can read his obituary which I wrote on the Alphaville Herald, "a virtual paper for a virtual world" that was "always fairly unbalanced."
It's great to see him immortalized in this way, he surely deserved it.
Like a lot of young people who die, Jesse's Twitter feed seems eerie and portentious. But he wasn't a depressive or bully victim and didn't die of drugs or drunk driving -- he was just on his way to school early in the morning in a car full of kids driven by a gilfriend who lost control of the car.
Jesse and I used to get into huge arguments over the "copybot" issue - he was a member of the notorious libsecondlife which "liberated" the then-proprietary code of the viewer through reverse engineering, then got involved in deploying an inworld terror of merchants that instantly copied any object or avatar skin (although never server-side scripts, which is why coders who made a living selling scripts and animations could never grasp what copybot felt like in "little dress-maker genocide," the disgraceful term they used to openly ridicule the valid concerns of designers.)
I had no idea all those meetings we had at the Sutherland Dam (I used to hold a Friday-night salon to discuss the issues of the day) that Jesse was only 17 years old. I thought he was a 30-something IBM employee.
What was interesting to me about Jesse is that a) he told me the true story of who was responsible for copy-bot and expressed regret about its havoc in the world b) he worked to have his group yank the code from subversion until there were better checks and balances on this mayhem.
At that, at the age of 17 -- good parenting! Meanwhile, much older and more seasoned coders expressed rampant cynicism and hatred of anyone who valued copyright and advocated making as much uproar as possible with the monster to destroy the community -- and of course, to the glee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (it was in the early days of Second Life I began to first hear about them and their war on copyright).
His parents have made a scholarship to promote technological education in his name.
It's funny to think of those early days on Twitter, which were very much connected to a lot of people in Second Life; they overlapped.
People who were already acquainted in SL began using Twitter as an "outworld" meta-communications platform to say some things that either might be censored on the company-run forums, famous like all MMORPGs for their bannings, or simply as a quick way to organize people inworld and outworld at once around common topics. Several enterprising coders made Second Life-Twitter relays and made word sculpture gardens with the tweets visible as banners wafting through the air in the 3D world -- I ran these for awhile myself until they broke due to some new patch either on Linden Lab's side or Twitter's side.
Second Life itself, in fact, had an inworld communications systems that enabled people to chat in real time and groups as large as 8,000 would all follow a conversation speeding by at once. The artifacts of SL very much anticipated the issues and problems of social media to come in the following years, regarding intellectual property, privacy, surveillance, democracy.
Here Robert Scoble recalls Malthus:
It was @jmalthus who died in a car wreck this week. He was a Twitter friend of mine. So sad. Was only 17.
— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) April 22, 2007
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