Second Thoughts

Bohemian Nook

Bohemian Nook Check this out! Visit Alice (212, 72, 41)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

What my lovely new mesh rail car looks like

What my lovely new mesh rail car looks like with message telling me "no rail here go to Tulliptree" Visit Sandbox Decorus (117, 27, 29)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

This is In Fact Where You Get Your Premium Gift

This is In Fact Where You Get Your Premium Gift Check this out! Visit Sandbox Decorus (87, 24, 60)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Ravenglass Realm Beach

Ravenglass Realm Beach Check this out! Visit Ravenglass Realm (23, 159, 26)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

"An Emporium of Edge-Cases" and Ginsu's Super-Sad But Off-Point Posts

While I was thinking of the legendary founders of Second Life like Mitch Kapor, I recalled Ginsu Linden (Gene Yoon), who wrote these supersad posts here and here calling Second Life a failure, and falling on his sword and blaming himself for that failure.

I noted them at the time, but I was busy with other things, and the whole "is SL a failure or not" meme was really a bore to me. Somebody at Slate had written something clever about five years too late that SL had failed (news flash!), then all the leading lights of SL like Pooky Amsterdam came to the old lady's rescue. C'est la deuxieme vie.

Ginsu's first post was about how SL failed -- in the sense that he was reporting a fact that it did fail, not thinking up reasons why it did -- although he did some of that, and then referenced Terra Nova -- of all places! -- as finding nevertheless some good niche uses out of SL like distance learning.  But his second post was blaming himself:

So. I failed as a person. I failed the team. I was responsible for many elements of our strategy, execution, culture and management, and those decisions aren’t the ones I regret. What I regret, to the extent that I’m capable of regretting such a rich learning experience for me, is giving up. I don’t mean at the end, when I was tired and disillusioned and looking around at a company I didn’t recognize and a future I didn’t want to live. A lot earlier than that, I gave up on people that we needed, people who were flawed and fragile but necessary. I let people fail, I let people go, I let people hide in their illusions and fears, I let them give up because I’d already given up.

The irony was, when I joined the company, I was supposed to be an experienced hand that would bring some sanity to a crazy world. But I indulged my own worst instincts - throughout the craziest times, when I could’ve done the most good, I just brought more crazy. I was having fun, but I chose my own twisted growth over a higher goal, and at times I was just plain mean or selfish or drunk. I really wasn’t ready for the opportunity that Linden Lab presented to me. I really wasn’t the guy I should’ve been when I got there; I didn’t know what I needed to know until I left.

He goes on to muse:

It’s true that Linden had a way of hiring certain kinds of people and forcing them to confront their own deepest flaws – but I think that’s beautiful, a feature not a bug.

So, Ginsu doesn't say, "I'm sorry I called your magical place a 'product'. That was callous and cruel of me." Remember when he did that, and what a blow it was to people, and how angry they got, hearing him say that at Metanomics?! Remember how all the forums toughs in the big-boy pants told everybody to suck it up, because Ginsu was right, it *is* only a product?

But he doesn't feel sorry about that.

He's talking psycho-babble gobbledgook -- or perhaps it's some sort of Asian cultural face-saving ritual that just doesn't scan for me, especially far away on the other coast. Drunk? Why was it acceptable for employees to be drunk? You got the impression the management -- if one could use that word -- was way too lax about things like that.

Here was a staff that could do all kinds of things. Hit on the customers, have sexual relations with the customers -- online and offline. Even make sexual attacks on the customers as occurred at least on one occasion at a conference. Or punched out the customers, inworld and out in real life. Or griefed the customers, inworld and in real life (remember "Ban Prok!" chalked on the walls of the Linden Lab building and Lindens coming out to shake the hands of Woodbury University Griefer-in-Chief Edward Clift?). Remember Rodney Linden, putting a WU piece in his Linden bear to mock people, and stalking me with Tizzers on my sims? I'm recalling now a Linden who made a crude sexual remark to me and another avatar that really gave me pause. I really didn't like that because it was so unprofessional. It made me feel bad. That Linden didn't last long. Others did, with such blatant conflicts of interest.

But really, as staff -- those early editions of the Lindens -- quite a few of them were awful. Maybe this bad behaviour was normal in Silicon Valley and normal in start-ups (apparently it is), but it wasn't normal for most normal people in real life. In fact, it was that sense of how unlike real life they were that constantly made me criticize them on the forums. They did not play fair. They played favourites -- and gloated about it. They made a fetish out of respecting privacy and LGBT, but they were the first to out me as the opposite of my avatar, and let my RL information get paraded on the forums so that I could be further harassed -- and to this day, I am harassed in real life because of this. Shame on them. Shame on them.

The stories of Linden bad behaviour are legion. A key problem is that they took the help from the user base or friends of existing staff. So a third of the staff were the loons and misfits Mitch Kapor talked about, put in charge over others to lord it over them and swagger around and misbehave. Some of them were really mentally unstable people with substance abuse problems.

Of course there were very good people there, too. Robin Linden, Joe Linden -- the adults. Dedicated Lindens who are still there today. But too many of them entwined in the open source software cult, like Soft Linden, still lording it over others on the JIRA.

I remember the most important thing for us -- the most important thing! -- when we banded together as landlords and merchants, a group that was hated and villified by all the socialist open source freaks on the forums, wasn't somehow a land discount or some sort of special privilege for businesses, but an ethics code for the staff. A code of conduct for the Lindens. We wanted one written, and we wanted it published. We wanted it to have basic things in it like, "Lindens have to stop spying on customers in invisible mode" -- Anshe Chung was certain that they did this often, I found some evidence of it a few times because they would accidently leave prims even if you hadn't seen them as you were right on your sim. Or things like "No Linden can endorse a product or service or event of a resident" -- to prevent all the blatant misuse of this "feature" of SL by the FIC -- the privileged "feted inner core" who were the beta-testers and blessed content producers.

In other words, what I'm trying to get at is that Ginsu is apologizing for all the wrong things, and that's exactly the problem -- these software loons were clueless about human relations, about normal rules of human community, and gloried in it.

Is SL an "emporium of edge cases," as Ginsu calls it? No, the world is a normal place where people do normal things like go to malls, play games, and have sex, and God bless them. Some of them are a bit more esoteric and do things like attend religious services, form study groups, have political discussions, or learn subjects. It's the Lindens who are the emporium of edge cases -- head cases is more like it.

I'll never forget the time we went to that South Korean karaoke bar after bar-hopping at some other places following SLCC I in 2004. Eight years ago! Philip, Ginsu and probably some other Lindens like Jeska were there, and the main fanboyz like Hiro Pendragon. Philip chose the song "Jeremy Spoken" for his karaoke, and there we all were shouting "hoo hoo hoo". Then we were chatting with Philip, and I remember he seemed to be trying to say something to be nice. I couldn't see anything in the karaoke book I liked. I ended up saying I liked Joni Mitchell when Philip asked me what my favourite musician was, but I don't really have them arranged as "favourites" in my mind. He said immediately, "I like Joni Mitchell," even though I wasn't really sure that he did, and he probably didn't.

Somehow we fell into a conversation about land in SL and the essentially philosophical problem that any land owner or anyone in business had with Philip, his ideology, and his whole perspective. I explained that the reason people liked to keep an account at Gaming Open Market was because they could cash out their Lindens there, and then if they were banned, which could happen unfairly, could make a new account and bring their money back in. And I made the analogy to Russia with capital flight, and business people not feeling as if the economy or the government was secure, and that they might nationalize property, and that's why people liked an "offshore bank".

Instead of conceding that this was a perfectly normal position to take -- indeed, it was the only rational position that anyone in business could take with a platform for business run by only one company with hippy dippy notions of the economy (Philip hated arbitrage and always let it be known that he viewed the land business as a necessary evil -- if it were up to him, he'd just roll out the sims at an automatic flat price per square meter, because to him, only content on the land mattered, not land itself. Funny how human nature and people's determination to make an economy despite the worst that the technocommunists throw at them prevails!".

But that wasn't his reaction, of course. Instead, he looked stricken, almost crying. "Linden Lab would never, ever..." he began, and the end of his sentence was drowned out in the noise of the next karaoke, but I knew what he was trying to say was: "We won't take your land for no good reason." I hadn't been banned yet from the forums arbitrarily for my legitimate criticism of insider privileges, but like others, I really looked askance at the problem of the threat of banning from the world for a "speech offense," and had to wonder about the stability of the whole "investment" that people made.

Philip then propelled me over to Ginsu, as if he were saying, "Here, talk to my lawyer, he'll reassure you." I remember it was noisy, and late, and I didn't really feel like trying to make Ginsu understand the whole thing. I seem to recall that he "got" the notion of the legitimacy of the offshore thing better than Philip.

I wonder if that conversation, in its way, sparked several things them to happen -- Philip moved them to put the GOM out of business by starting his own currency exchange.

Where Has Mitch Kapor Been All of Our Second Lives?

Mitch Kapor's avatar in Second Life. Screenshot by Fleep Tuque.

Over on my other blog Wired State, I have an article Who Was Really Behind the Anti-SOPA Campaign? Not the Grassroots but the Astroturf Machines of Mitch Kapor.

I think it's a pretty good summary, based on a lot of tech blogs bragging about the "real" forces behind the campaign (griefers can never help but victory dance!) -- which they hasten to tell you "isn't" Google and isn't some big tech company but scrappy little NGOs that "came out of nowhere," as Mike Masnick said, lying through his teeth. He knows full well in fact as I outline that it was a hardened and seasoned cadres of the anti-copyright movement who had been funded for years in a number of projects by Mitch Kapor.

Where has Mitch Kapor been all your Second Life, you ask? Do you remember him at the 5th birthday party when he spoke? That time he spoke about the "emotional bandwidth" of Second Life, a term I think actually an IBM lady invented. He called us "pioneers" -- but misfits:

When you see this resin, you should be seeing a big red vertical arrow just at the margin between the early adopter phase and the pragmatist phase. That is really where we are today and I think that has some very important implications and I want to talk about that for a minute. So the first is, in the earliest wave of pioneers in any new disruptive platform, the marginal and the dispossessed are over represented, not the sole constituents by any means but people who feel they don't fit, who have nothing left to lose or who were impelled by some kind of dream, who may be outsiders to whatever mainstream they are coming from, all come and arrive early in disproportionate numbers.

It was the way the west in the U.S. was settled. It is the way Second Life has been settled. And in fact those early pioneers find a very arduous environment. In the early days, you really have to want to be here because life in certain ways is very very difficult, in fact too difficult for most people. It is unavoidable in some sense that there will be a very high attrition rate in the early years while a platform is being built out. It doesn't stay that way of course, it can't, but the difficulties of conditions cause those who stay to really bond together, have something in common.

Was it the way Silicon Valley was settled? So that boys from Brookly who once went to Yale and worked as psychologists could take up computer science and forge the new electronic frontier?

I always thought it was odd that for someone who invested in a company and led it -- and for such an idealistic company -- Mitch had nothing ever to say. He is very quiet. He never blogs any more and only produces anodyne tweets for the most part. Maybe his PR people told him that after that 5th birthday speech backfired, he should just not talk. I also think he totally lost interest in Second Life because he was immersed in other projects.

Remember, Philip was deposed from the CEO position and put in as board chair, which meant Mitch had to become then just a regular member of the board.

What do they talk about? Who knows, it's a private company and its minutes aren't on the record.

So despite the fact that we really know little about what he thinks or does, except what some tech blogs and a bit of mainstream media might report, Shava Nerd took enormous exception to my article outlining the connections among his various causes leading to the defeat of SOPA, dubbing it a crackpot conspiracy theory. Er, no, it's a report how Mitch Kapor funded the organizations and nurtured the people that killed SOPA -- people who had spent their lives fighting copyright, who only in recent years, with large injections of Soros money, began covering up this criminality with a "free speech" cause.

Shava has been busy self-righteously writing rebuttals -- and drawing in another guy who I had heard of but never encountered, the famous ESR, Eric S. Raymond, he of Cathedral and Bazaar, Linux, etc.

And they've both been savaging me on G+ and in my blog comments -- great! Bring it! I love a good argument.

But I stand by my post, because I didn't claim Mitch Kapor personally pulled a string and Shava and ESR lifted up their right arms and then clicked on an anti-SOPA petition, that's absurd. I said that inspired by his heavy ideological take on the Internet, his ardent belief in removing copyright, his still-capacious sums of personal wealth, he founded organizations that promote his beliefs and continue to influence politics and even have more influence than ever. These include Electronic Frontier Foundation, Participatory Culture Foundation, and Fight for the Future (this last one is more of a front organization, I maintained, as it has little substance -- it only has a very slight web page with just the anti-SOPA campaign and not much presence or depth).

Mitch seems to be ahead of his time. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't user friendly, and never go used by more than a few hundred thousands -- Microsoft took the lead in office software. While we were wondering what happened him when he wandered away from Second Life, he was fervently pitching Miro as the next great home of democracy and disruption of TV. It wasn't. It seems mainly to survive as a way to arrange your porn and illegal movie downloads (and some would say that's a lot like what happened to Second Life, although I personally reject that analysis). He funded Downhill Battle to hate on and finish destroying the music industry after Napster got done with it, but it fizzled out, too, because the music industry didn't die on cue. EFF was founded to provide legal defense to illegal hackers facing legitimate prosecution and has always retained its criminalized feel, lawfaring away against copyright to beat the band. Participatory Culture...what does that do again? It's seems mainly a campaign funding vehicle to work on things like battling SOPA.

Of course, there are lots and lots of other things Mitch Kapor does -- helping underprivileged teens in inner cities and so on. He is widely admired as a nice guy by those who know him. And I'm sure if you tune in on a certain wavelength, he's just ducky. Who doesn't like a goatee and a Hawaian shirt? Sing along with Mitch!

But I find these organizations he has made and the people in him -- and of course the figure of John Perry Barlow and some of the others -- downright sinister in their destructiveness, all under cover of techno-utopianism. How did he meet Barlow? I can't find the answer to that question. Maybe they went to Bohemian Grove. Or a Dead concert? Or who knows...

This is a good info graph showing the connections.

Why do I return to the figure of Mitch Kapor?

Because I really resent the fact that he had a good thing in Second Life that had found a way to weld community/commerce/content (as c3 would say!) with more or less working tools (c3 would disagree) and a very avid if small user base. But he sneered at it because it wasn't ideologically correct according to his fervent open-source religion. In fact, everything about it revealed his open-source cult to be a fraud and a failure. That's probably why he turned his back on it.

People didn't want to create a commons and share and click and make Creative Commons licenses -- like he and his pals could pretend was happening in some huge phenomenon on the Internet (it was, and it wasn't...). When given freedom, they chose copyright -- and how. They fought fiercely for it. It more or less worked, even with the obvious holes. They also didn't sit around in politically-correct drum circles singing Kumbayah and figuring out architectural plans for greenhouses in Nepal. Instead, they built tacky malls, had kitschy art shows, went to maudlin amateur live music shows, and had tawdry sex. Imagine, the temerity! People always mess up things for the utopians!

 

Trapped Inside My Former Linden Home!

Trapped Inside My Former Linden Home! Check this out! Visit Atalef (170, 106, 46)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

Moving out of Linden Home

Moving out of Linden Home Need the tier for the land preserve. Visit Atalef (161, 135, 56)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

AJ Keen's Digital Vertigo: Our Collective Future is Splintering Our Identities

Andrew Keen's (@AJKeen) new book is coming out May 22, Digital Vertigo:  How Today's Online Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us.

It's a great read, thoughtful and penetrating as can be expected of Keen, and a good antidote to other books out there styled as critical, like Rebecca MacKinnon's Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, which still celebrates the Internet social media phenomena itself, while critical only of certain actors and policies, or even Evgeny Morozov's Net Delusion:  The Dark Side of Internet Freedom darkly morose about cyber-utopias without criticizing the collectivization of online life.

Keen's book is (deliberately) to be released just in time for Facebook's IPO -- and that's more than fine, as the public -- when you go public! -- and public intellectuals should be able to weigh in on their concerns about these social media companies.

Lots of people will be getting rich off Facebook stock, but we who have toiled in its content and connection vineyards for years are only further diminished -- and Keen's arguments and careful case studies clinch it.

Keen goes even further than his critical The Cult of the Amateur in demanding to know what we really get from all this social media socialization. While it would seem we have harnessed engines to "empower" ourselves and express ourselves, we are diminished precisely because we become fractured into mere reflections of ourselves.

It's the first book I've seen that really analyzes the collectivization of social media that is occuring, where you *can't not* be online -- that if you don't connect and "share" you begin to be suspect or left out.

It struck me as I was reading his musings about being alone in a city as the quintessential urban experience of privacy that like communism, to which I always compare it, the social media revolution is profoundly conservative. In fact, it seeks to take people back to an agrarian life where they were all in a community with a commons -- even aggressively coercing them back to this pastoral life. It's actually a profound reaction to modernism and to the individual urban life. Keen also indicates that the fierce competition among individuals and individualized expression also seems to be driving the socialization.

It's funny, just after I was reading parts of his book, I came to my blog and saw Posterous wasn't auto-posting correctly. I went back to the Posterous homepage and saw "We have been acquired by Twitter!" and the dashboard all changed. Sigh. The slogan in the upper left-hand corner on the splashpage now says WORK LESS, SHARE MORE. Indeed.

Keen also captures the intermediary phenomenon of these platforms (see The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord) and how they get in the way of life constantly -- and yet their tug is incredible. Insect politics! He describes standing in front of the "Auto-Icon" of Jeremy Bentham, originator of the "panopticon" notion (and builder of prisons as well as utilitarian philosopher) -- he had himself preserved, like Lenin. Keen muses on his theories as he stares at the waxen head of Bentham, and sees how the Panopticon has come scarily to life in our time for everybody, not just prisoners, and then he thinks that he really should Tweet the picture of Bentham's booth with a witty saying, "I UPDATE THEREFORE I AM." He then stops himself, and keeps it private (until this book, of course, where at least you can see it within a larger context of a body of thought).

It's also the first book I've seen to treat Second Life as a philosophical problem, not just a social or cultural manifestation ("SL as flying penises") - although of course the seminal anthropological study is Coming of Age in Second Life by Tom Boellstorff -- Thomas Malaby's far thinner treatment, Making Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life was made in cooperation with Linden Lab itself and is a corporate study of LL, not a study of the SL society.)

Keen speaks of "the second life" lived online as the philosophical phenomenon, of which of course Second Life is the originator and most essential form, I suppose:

The Internet— with its virtual worlds like Second Life— has transformed the idea of immortality from a religious metaphor into a digital possibility.

But he also addresses Second Life the world, and discusses Philip Rosedale, its founder. Here's a taste:

As we stood together drinking champagne in the fading light of the Oxford evening, Rosedale -- a bronzed Southern Californian whose athletic physique seemed more suited to the well lit utopia of Second Life than to a darkly gothic ninetheenth-century Oxford Library -- and I warmed up for the Union debate with a little intellectual joust of our own. We were comparing the merits of Benjamin Woodward's nineteenth-century physical building with the transparent architecture of the twenty-first-century virtual network.

"So how does being here contrast to being on the Internet" I asked him, sweeping my half empty champagne flute around the library. "Which experience, do you think, is more memorable?"

I won't spoil it for you by telling you Philip's answer -- you should buy the hardcover or Kindle versions while they're discounted on pre-order -- the release date is May 22.

I'm still reading the book and will have much more to say -- but I must say I'm finding it frustrating trying to read the PDF review copy -- I don't have a Kindle or tablet or even mobile to be reading this on, but I'm just sitting at a desktop. And I really want to hold it in my hands, so I'm ordering a hard copy.

 

 

There's a StarGate Base Here Now

There's a StarGate Base Here Now Maybe that's why they thought it fit. Visit Palomarian (72, 180, 67)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous