The turbulent events in SL this last week are represented most visually by a bulging police blotter yesterday with a very uncustomary 7 incidents -- this on a holidary weekend! -- for forums abuses alone. One has a funny imagine in mind of bulging local jails, with an angry and petulant Malachi Petunia and Lektor Hannibal hanging in shirtsleeves through the bars, fanning themselves with rolled-up copies of the Herald, demanding justice ROFL. Where are the lawyers in this town??? In fact, the lawyers who began to murmur about unfair and unequal TOS enforcement and began to abuse-report numerous racist posters and posters with personal attacks are probably one of the key factors in galvanzing this absolutely unprecedented police action by our Linden friends on the boards.

That, or the place is just getting more repressive and has more dissent since King Philip's unpopular moves this week.

Countries in transition to democracy or to just some kind of reform often are under terrible stress from their leaders and they often tend toward numerous political parties and even more numerous newspapers. The political scene is kind of the equivalent to poor countries where countries have to have a lot of children -- one to die from some preventable disease, one to sell in marriage to help the family's finances, one to work in the fields, one to succeed in public office, one to give to the priesteens...

As predicted, Metaverse Justice Watch has now split into at least three groups:  I and Cocoanut Koala remain as officers in the original group keeping the same name (as well as some officers who have not been online and haven't caught up to events); Anshe Chung has split off to form Concerned Citizens taking many of the tenants which she bussed into the group to pack the elections; and Lordfly Digeridoo, who remained constantly defiant at a public Q&A about MJW and would not state his own views, has formed the Resident Action Committee. Enabran Tamplar has shown his powerhouse of tekkie skills by forming the Itty Bitty Kitty Committee to play to the Tinies vote; Stinky Queso has made Metaverse Justice League with the predictable superheroes lampoon.

Like Mao said, let a thousand flowers bloom!

The reason I refused to leave a group in which I had been an officer for 3 days was because I refuse to give in to bullying and "IM Democracy" of the type where impromptu flash mobs who signed up into an open group get to jeer and catcall and decide things.

The officers of this group did not agree to elections out of the existing "soup to nuts" composition of the group; we did not get notification of the drafts for this plan cooked up by Anshe; some were offline or out of town and couldn't respond; and when Anshe IM'd me on the afternoon, she told me to get my tenants into the group to flesh it out from all the griefers and opportunists that were pouring in it, and I said I refused to be manipulative like that. She sent me notecards that I couldn't read right away as I was extremely busy with tenants; she then asked me if she should publish these notecards on the forums (therefore her claim that I spoke out of school in IM Democracy are fake because she was even contemplating putting it on the forums).

Another reason I refused to leave a group was because even refusing to take a voice vote in that impromptu flash group, Anshe began private IMs telling me to leave after refusing to answer my emails or talk to me for 24 hours and then foisting a pre-cooked fait accompli of ill-prepared elections, with people I did not view as likeminded in the project -- indeed anethaema to it.

Yet another reason I refused to leave is because instead of holding an open, democratic meeting of the very officers she herself invited to the group, Anshe maneuvered and met with 3s and 4s of some officers urging "shadow control" of the larger group and tactics like closing the group completely right on the eve of elections to prevent anyone from her tenants and others filtrated through her hands to join.

And finally, a reason I refused to leave is because Anshe, failing to muscle me by her combination of silence for a day, siccing of my friends against me in private convos, IMs telling me "there's the door," then used one of those old TSO-like Sim Shadow Government tricks -- sending me a game option with a blue pull-down menu that I might mistakenly click on. This game-option was a new invitation to Metaverse Justice Watch as a member -- but if I clicked on it, I'd instantly reduce my status from officer to member. Good thing I am schooled in SSG tactics to remove your land or force you into marriage and didn't click. She could have tried flipping officer recall -- but she herself disapproved of that tactic which had just been urged on her and point one on the last officers' meeting agenda from me had been to disavoid the hippie-dope-smoking group tool functions LL had provided, and refuse to accept any and all use of "officer recall" and fight for its removal. "Officer recall" is destructive, anonymous, paralyzing, and unfounded. It is seldom used to remove tyrants legitimately; it is often used to grief and paralyze groups and subdue them to the tyranny of the rogue.

I don't doubt that these groups will be larger, and even more effective than the group I'm leading, and that's OK. In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised to log on the next day after our five-hour contentious meeting and find myself in a group with only the W-HAT guy and a disbanding notice from the Lindens. I'm a bit puzzled why so many people remain in MJW even as they've gone over to join the other groups -- I expect they are rubber-neckers waiting to see where "the real action is" or "the power" who "gets to meet with Philip" and throw their weight behind that group.

Khamon Fate predicted accurately that the group would break up as the founder, Anshe Chung, would fall out with the first person proposed to join, Prokofy Neva. I found Anshe to be deceptive and manipulative (why are we not surprised). It's a shame how hitching my wagon with SL's largest land baroness only cost my close friends and associates to say they were "disappointed" in me.

What happened was not only an old story, it was an increasingly typical story in an international Internet setting where worlds collide and where civilizations actually do clash. People from different experiences and backgrounds really do have different attitudes and knowledge about how groups are formed and run, what political power is and how to speak with it, what business interests are and how to defend them and make them socially responsible, and so on.

Ulrika Zugzwang I don't agree on much, but we probably both conceive of Second Life as a kind of oligarchy, run by powerful, unelected leaders who has all the levers of control but -- I would add (probably Ulrika wouldn't) has loyalist classes of designers, architects, programmers, etc. (the tekkie wikis, and their core group, the FIC) to help not only prop up, but diffuse their power.

They can do this by ensuring that whenever any issue of their accountability (as distinct from their power, which is the proper and legitimate power of ownership) comes up, their loyalist oprichina enforcers cry "but it's their servers and we're lucky to be here and shut up."

The first thing that King Philip, this powerful, unelected leader (he's got a right to be those thing in a high-tech company in California) tells us is that we don't need representative government -- it's archaic, and run by vested interests and well-funded politicians anyway. The second thing he tells us is that he has a way to find out what EVERYONE is thinking (and it's not just by keeping all their chat logs) and that's pretty much just fine with the technically superior who form the creator base on the platform.

Many of these people (many 20-somethings, many Americans, many inexperienced suburbanites) feel that a combination of town-meetings, the forums, and a lot of groups and IMs can serve as a ready-made, swift, and viable substitute for representational government. Wiser students of political history might look at this set-up and call it something more like corporatism, a term not originally denoting business corporations but the bodies, or corporate parts of society (from the Latin word "corpus") that the ruler relies on to support and disseminate his rule, i.e. guilds, industries, businesses. Says Wikipedia.org: "legislative power is given to corporations that represent economic, industrial and professional groups. Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the decision-making process."

So on the one hand, Philip Linden tells us representational government is passe and he's not going to promote it, and all the tekkies in SL cheer because they hate their RL politicians and governments in many cases, often tending to be on the political left. But on the other hand, he does a fantastic switcheroo and tells us that the kind of group he'd like to meet with would have to be open to all and represent SL. Represent SL! Even he doubled back on this the next day in a forums post and said a) he had no right to dictate such an entity and b) it actually made sense to have a kind of normal lobbying system where the car deals would form up and meet with him about Havoc 2 coming or not coming, or whatever.

Now, how do you achieve representation in a diverse, changing, often bizarre population like SL? The Lindens concede the inadequacy of Town Halls, where Phililp or another Linden appears before a docile group  mediating residents' prepared questions through Jeska Linden, who usually passes them on, but not always. Since the Lindens encourage pre-formed questions on the forums in the days before the town meetings, Philip often arrives with his staff having prepared him a cut-and-paste of answers to the forums, which he then pastes out to the chat.

Another way in which Phil takes the pulse of the nation is to have walkabouts, that ageold institution of despots and wardheelers the world over, where he descends into the world and hears his subjects cry out either praise or condemnation. Sometimes really good meetings get going in the Dore Welcome Area or some other venue. People rekindle their fond memories from the beta-test days and get into an informal chat with their Fearless Leader. But the world is getting bigger and bigger and other ways have to be found.

At a meeting at Pathfinder's house some weeks ago to discuss changing the name system in SL, PF proposed making up a regular group of residents who meet with the Lindens to discuss their proposed changes to the platform. This seemed eminently doable at the time because it seemed probably there wouldn't be 50 people who would log on regularly and go to the trouble of working at this sort of meeting -- which requires struggling with al the cross-IMs in the room, IMs from customers, fast-scrolling chat in which people are still struggling to catch up with something said by people 3 people before them, a situation worsened by a turn-taking approach to group discussion which means everyone cuts and pastes their preformed theses anyway.

I figured that the Lindens would accept whoever showed up to talk in this fashion and it would probably be fairly workable, as the single-interest type topics each week would change each week and ensure variety of the public in the meetings.

Now, these Lindens, who tell us they eschew representative RW-type of government because of "bought politicians" are going to say that various citizens groups, filled with bought members in one way or another, who ram through elections, are going to be their "representative" interlocutors? Huh?

The transcript of the five-hour meeting shows dozens of people logging on and saying they are Ansheland tenants sent a group invitation to join something that has been in the news, and they obviously clicked "yes," thought they had no idea what the group really stood for and worse yet, had no idea whether elections were to be held!

Let's call this really unsatisfactory electronic soup "IM Democracy". It's a good term because it captures that sense each person now has, unmediated by any "evil politician" been empowered, legitimately or not, to say "I Am Democracy." It should work better than it does. It doesn't work very well to justify the expectations that it can serve as a more well-conceived system of governance in SL.

The five-hour meeting of MJW was a good example of group IM democracy in action -- catcalls, insults, idiocy, people logging on late and tuning and trying to get the story, points rushing by, people with malicious intent capturing parts or all of the chat log and pasting it to other Internet discussion groups or webpages and then framing it all falsely (like Cristiano's attempt to smear me with an idiotic statement that in order to get people to vote for me in MJW I'd lower all their rents. Baloney. I'm against elections, and I opposed the manipulation of dependent groups of people in things like rental groups as I felt Anshe was doing.)

Am I afraid of elections? Of course not. I don't want them because I think MJW should be a small group. It should speak truth to power, and groups like that are always going to be fairly small in society. At certain points in history, they might be the small flag that finds itself in front of a mass movement. Since such mass movements inevitably lead to changes in power, they quickly find themselves at the rear again nipping at the heels of those who trampoline into power on the backs of mass movements.

A self-serving post with garbled interpretations and a lot of hectoring hidden under hippie homespun advice (as so much hectoring gets hidden in SL) by Mulch Ennui tries to portray the events of the last week as some kind of "clash of the titans" and "Anshe and Prok first putting aside their differences but then Prok not being able to compromise and cooperate with Anshe's bringing in of Aimee" or whatever.

Why would I have differences with Anshe? Could it be that any differences I have with Anshe Chung could be *identical to the same that many on the forums and in the FIC have*?

There is probably no person on the grid who has bought as much land from Anshe Chung as I have. Think about it. Most big land dealers buy straight off the auctions, if they win against Anshe on the auction. They don't buy from her. Most very large clubs or various other businesse might buy from her, but they have a choice from whom to buy large, standalone tracts from.

But I'm in the rentals business not on just a few sims, but on something like 50 sims. I have smaller parcels of 512 and 1024 and 2048 clustered in communities on these sims, but not taking up the whole sim. In most communities, my tenants and I are sharing the sim with other residences or businesses. So that means that land going up for sale on those sims is nearly always for sale by Anshe Chung -- she claims to own about 40 percent of sales in SL. Many, many people unable or unwilling to sell land on their own, liquidate to Anshe -- she's always willing to buy any land as long as it is at her price, far lower than you like, but better than $1.

This is what causes all that water chopped up in your view suddenly that you wake up and see flat Anshe Chung signs on, and start screaming at me about in IMs -- that's the land I eat for breakfast. When a neighbour in Cub liquidated to go to buy in the islands, he got a swap with Anshe -- and instead of contacting me to buy the land, since my communy was right next to this property, she instantly chopped it up into 512s for a quick sale (all land barons engage in this nasty practice and justify it) and marked it up to $9.7/meter because it was near a telehub. That mean the liklihood of stores or clubs suddenly coming on those 512s next to residential houses was now enormous. Instead of leaving this beautiful promontory to such a fate, I decided to eat the costs -- at a time when mature, even waterfront mature was selling for $6 or less per meter. While I was in the process of doing this, a griefer from another drama bought up a square in the middle and terraformed it up hugely, making all my purchased squares useless -- yet another problem inherent in the 512-chop-up. Anshe, when contacted, shrugged. She's too busy too look around land she sells to see if it is my community to offer it to me, understandably, although the fact that twice, she had already sold me land in that community off her auction purchase might have helped refresh her memory. Whatever. It's SL.

I tell this story only by way of explaining that the anger that many people experience toward Anshe Chung in SL is one that I could easily share because I'm probably a 100 times more often in the situation they are -- faced with being *forced* in order to save my view, or make my home, or whatever I need to do, to buy land at way above market price. But what is a "market" in this controled situation? Despite this situation, I've always tended to defend Anshe. She's a smart, skilled, and effective business person. If people think Anshe took over the land business, it's not her fault -- I blame the Lindens more for their inability to attend to how land gets valued and societies get made and civilization gets strengthed, because they are simply more fascinated with the tekkie and content side of things on the platform and because they themselves appear to have the kind of unfocused, utopian social-engineering ideals about a world that only tend to usher in power-grabbers and land-grabbers.

While Maxx Monde calls for a boycott of Anshe and me and anyone else who he thinks "did something not in our name and met with the Lindens" (bah!) I would find that vindictive and misguided. One can try to lesson one's involvement and participation, however, in businesses that don't seem to reflect one's interests.

Last week, before the town meeting, and after the announcements of the new Linden currency exchange and the destruction of GOM, Anshe contacted me to tell me of two things that really burned her up. Anshe blows hot and cold on talking to me -- sometimes she finds me useful, sometimes she ignores me. Some months ago, she formed a group called Palladins of Justice. She conceived of the top investors of SL taking on justice issues but in a kind of elitist way. The group wouldn't be open, and we'd all get to wear these really nifty group titles called Palladin. I flew around having fun being Palladin Prokofy for about two hours and then flipped officer recall on Jauani Wu, whom she had asked to join. I heartily oppose this function and used it in this case just because the group had a joke feel from the start. I felt that if Jauani Wu was on the forums libeling me as a "pyramid schemer" and proposing an end to the 10 percent bonus for land groups, he wasn't really a Palladin of Justice in the broader liberal sense I think Anshe and I envisioned it as -- he really should just stay in Nberg if that's his political neighbourhood. The group was a big yawn, nobody read the messages, and I quit when I needed to make another land group.

So Anshe had long wanted to make a justice group, but just kept trying on different glove sizes. Before we together hit on the MJW title, she was asking me if I'd like to make an Anti-Corruption group. The corruption was implicitly in the FIC or even Lindens. I said I felt this was really over the top -- we had absolutely no grounds for making any such specious claim about any resident or any Linden. Before naming groups so wildly, we should first investigate, document, raise questions in a civil manner through the right channels etc.

Anshe loves making groups -- she once made a Russian-speakers group with SL's like four Russian speakers in it, made us all officers, but we all left. Groups don't get made from the top down to help people sell land.

We must have talked more than an hour about what group to made. It was clear to me that Anshe was putting me in this group as a lightning rod. She fed me the stories about Jeska modeling (it was on her land for sale so she saw it first) and Governor Linden -- I went and investigated the situation, found it to be as she said, and blogged it. I knew she was just throwing red meat to Prok -- I can be reliably counted on to froth at the mouth over the FIC. I knew that Anshe would be using me in some fashion, and ignoring me if I raised any objections about how she ran the group (as she did with the Palladins) but I figured it would be an interesting ride to see how she'd do it.

Throughout the day, she added about 8 more officers such as Philo Hatfield and I invited Cocoanut mainly because of her brave fight on the forums and because she has a good head on her shoulders. I didn't have time to sit down and think of 10 "stakeholders" among all my networks -- and money and land would not be my only definition of such a person. We set a meeting in which some of the people like Blue Burke were AFK most of the time. It's incredibly hard to take really busy people with heavy customer contact and get them to function in a group -- I myself left a half dozen time during this four-hour meeting to wait on customers and was constantly dealing with IMs.

I suggested we send a letter to Philip and ask for a meeting outside the townhall process. I just don't know how often -- if ever -- this is done but it seemed like a worthwhile gambit and making up the "ask" for this letter was itself a useful exercise for this group which had never really met before formally despite everyone's beliefs in land baron cabals, etc. Such meetings take so long no only because of "IM Democracy" but because people are still feeling their way with each other. We decided simply not to deal with the GOM -- if we wasted a letter and meeting on the subject of the Town Hall, we'd only get the town hall paste-ups in to the chat history all over again.

After the town hall, nothing changed about our letter -- even in the fast-paced environment of SL. We sent the letter and to my surprise we almost instantly got back replies. I figured at first when we were trying to get the letter sent before the Town Hall that we'd be brushed off and told to just go there and paste questions to Jeska. There were no ground rules set for this meeting. Indeed, we never discussed them. Nobody said "let's make this a secret meeting, try to get some off-the-record promises from Phil, and let's not tell the press." That's just garbage. People just figured it was a normal working meeting -- like the name meeting with Pathfinder, which was on the events calendar but not covered by the press; like the events working group with Robin which is not on the calendar and not in the press, either.

I suggested we work up a press statement and issue it right after the meeting but others rebuffed the idea because they were trying to reduce the potential flame wars.

Why would anyone post a meeting like this on the events list? That's absurd. It's not a town hall, and 40 people are not useful in a working meeting -- 10 or 20 are hard enough. SLCC -- the user's convention exploitively run by Hiro Pendragon -- since it's first brainstorm meeting inside an SL Future Salon, has never, ever once held an open, inworld meeting. This -- from a group claiming to have an open wiki approach (bleh) and taking all kinds of suggestions. (Indeed, Hiro even sent me a nasty reproachful IM claiming I had a lot of nerve closing a meeting with Lindens and reproaching him for not holding open SLCC organizing meetings -- geez, what are they afraid of, unpalatable, unprecooked ideas?)

And why have instant elections to make some populist claim that we have legitimacy and are elected? Elected BY WHOM? The Thinkers didn't elect their officers; no one thinks Thinkers is illegitimate or doesn't represent someone or isn't interesting and helpful because there are no elections.

Editorial Hare doesn't win any awards for brave citizenship journalism by flying into a working meeting -- he never flew into the SL Educational Senate or Ouranos, where Pathfinder Linden was a member, or the RL-Invasion of the FIC of LL. He flies where he thinks he can do the most damage. Editorial Hare is an alt (we won't speculate whose) -- and that ought to tell you right there how much of a citizen and how much a journalist he is when it comes to his brave ventures. I have no doubt that a Linden tipped him off to the meeting, because I don't think he's a student of green dots collecting near Waterhead. The press wasn't blocked from this meeting as has been falsely claimed, but there wasn't a notion of having a public event, either -- and why does there have to be when the interaction of press and public and government isn't a fixed formula in a democracy society?

All of the things that Anshe said in this meeting came from a notecard she herself drafted and pasted (talk about pasting!) which most of us had little or notice of and didn't consent to in parts. The calling of other residents who are our customers "tourists" was one blatant example -- the sudden proposal to Phil for a non-disclosure agreement about his internal ethics code was an absurdity and as offensive to him as it was to us. These are the tactics of crony capitalism and state capitalist oligarchies and those who try to jockey for power with them. They're not mine and those of others who were in the room. This is what I mean about different cultures.

On Wednesday morning, four of the officers met to discuss the group's activities -- those who were online. Anshe had already spoken to me of the need to form a secret group-within-a-group to really conduct the business because the group was fast filling up with hecklers who joined merely to torment us, gawkers, clueless, and well-meaning but uninformed people. We didn't even have a really good charter of principles to disseminate -- there simply had not been time. I formed a group called SL Stakeholders on Yahoo and kept it closed (I imagine she wanted to be able to blame the idea on me later) and thought it would be used for at least the officers, but she made it clear that we should be communicating and deciding even in a smaller group and actually used the word "shadow" several times.

I wrote her an email and said I refused to have partial or secret meetings of officers, we should have the scheduled meeting on Sunday as already planned, and not have any shenanigans. This meeting would be for the *officers themselves to chose more officers and decide the issues about inviting others like major content creators*. Rather than have elections, I thought it made a lot more sense to hammer out the statement of principles -- still very hazy -- so people could get what they were joining. Anshe ignored my mails and Yahoo messages.

I was roundly taken to task for holding a public Q&A without notification -- but that's because the group's internal messaging device, already a hack of the silly voting proposal which is the only way to leave a "hard copy" message to all those offline -- was jammed with an abusive officer recall flipped on Anshe. We talked openly about having to have a meeting to respond to forums challenges in world -- half the people there were AFK and didn't notice it I guess. We were very busy and trying to get the notices out was difficult.

Clearly, Anshe's purpose from the beginning was to use me on the radical flank as a lightning rod to distract from the really great challenge of her -- the person most people in SL feel they need justice from -- forming a justice group. I still think it's right for her to form a justice group but her manipulation of her tenants, and her sell-out to FIC types to get the glory as being "representative" is repulsive.

Her task in exploiting me was to make sure I frothed about the FIC -- so that they could all beat up on me as we began to interact and feel each others' positions, I could react sharply to their total lack of congruent interests on the justice menu, they could be coy (as Aimee was in this meeting, hardly saying anything) or belligerent (as Lordfly was, hardly stating any position) and then they could all tell Anshe behind the scenes that they really liked her group, but Prok was the main problem. Get rid of Prok, and you have a group.

Anshe now has a group called Concerned Residents that has FlipperPA Peregrine in it, he of SLBoutiques, who was the one who invited Jeska Linden to pose as a model in his billboard ad (see my past blogs). I challenged Flipper on this test question about Jeska, and he demurred. The other symbol of injustice which we originators of MJW supposedly agreed on -- Aimee on the website five times (we recently got a completely evasive and even wacky justification of this from Catherine Linden) is now thrown overboard as Aimee herself joins Anshe's group.

It's clear to me what's going on. In Russia, they describe this situation as "power is lying on the ground." It's when autocratic rulers can't cope and their rule is slipping; various demagogues and clever rogues like Lenin come along and "pick up power because it was lying on the ground." Rootless mobs, people ready to join anything, massive discontent, angry cluelessness - and even the "aggressively obedient majority" (as Yury Afafanasyev so brilliantly described the hordes of garden-variety communists in the Soviet union) are even beginning to cave a bit.

King Philip has made a series of really unpopular decisions -- and it's really equal-opportunity unpopular as in crashing the GOM and borking business; staking away stipend ratings and borking event organizers and ordinary people; putting all the auction on wholesale sims for $1000 putting wholesale out of the reach of ordinary people, etc. When kings do this, they need help from loyal sectors of society to help ease the transition. He was more than relieved when he met with us and called it a bright spot because here was a group, that could be rebelling by setting all their entire land holdings to $0 or $1 for sale and tiering down their holdings, but instead, were meekly beseeching him for...what? A pledge to keep telehubs? No. A promise not to flatten tier? No. Instead...the pages he *might* be willng to tear out of his employee manual to show us about Linden codes of behaviour...and *might* be willing to discuss in terms of the Jeska problem.

I'm the first to educate people that making loyalty tests can be like McCarthyism. But making a test case of a political issue like the Jeska or Aimee or other issues in a rapidly-moving political situation isn't McCarthyism, but helping factions to sort out. After all, if you don't like the answers I like to that test, you make another group -- even a bigger and more powerful group.

People think this is a time for building bridges and having group hugs. It's not. There is a civil war always brewing under the surface of SL between the land holders and the top custom creators and ordinary people get pulled and tugged between us. This antagonism is not helped by pretending it does not exist, or blasting people who grasp this and report on this as causing it; it is an antagonism that must be mitigated by recognizing *equality of stakeholders*.

Philip Linden should not be throwing all the bids and boosts and referrals to the FIC; he shouldn't be crushing resident-created business in the name of helping mainly content sales which have been lagging; he shouldn't be selling land on his auction wholesale and then handily declaring that "money and land are not stake in SL." They are! Too! It's a question of *equal opportunity on a level playing field.*

Why would I urge any kind of "filtration" of content creators? They're my customers just like yours. I create content too. But that's not what I mean. Everyone really does know what I mean, as much as they will try to demagocially claim that I was "boycotting content creators". I mean those in power in partnership -- and sometimes even in collusion -- with LL who are privileged and unaccountable.

Unaccountable -- unaccountable as to why they get to have Jeska as a model, Pathfinder as a group member, Jeska as a model, Shaun as a DJ, and a lot more. We do not have a Directory of Developers open to anybody -- this isn't the celebrated tekkie wiki where anyone can paste in. Uh-uh. But we don't have accountable criteria, either, or a message that real efforts are being made to reach out beyond the tired circles of beta testers.

We don't have an unequivocable statement from Robin Linden, who seems to be kinda in charge of tasking the lesser Lindens to behave properly -- about the Jeska modeling issue or the Shaun DJing issue or many other Linden lovefests. We have silence. We don't even have the generic code book yet to see if that kind of thing might fall under employee conduct guidelines internally.

The message Linden Lab gives out now is really clear: come here, use your imagination, make money. Once you get here, it's time to absorb the subliminal message, however: if you are screened through our filters, if you are dubbed a top content creator or programmer, if we like you, then you'll be our partners in developing the platform, and we will either cut you in on the deal or we'll cut you out and destroy you, depending on how it goes. Plan accordingly.

Legions of lifers and stipend-suckers and charter 4096ers who never develop a thing sit around the forums and pontificate self-righteously about how business in SL should be expected to take really harsh risks and get their asses kicked constantly (they want to kick them because they hate commerce and want everything to be "free" i.e. subsidized by LL). They want barons to suck it up if their land devalues and they fail to see the telehub land issue as a basic consumer protection right. (The long-term consequences of world-destruction inherrent in the GOM crushing is lost on them in their zeal merely to increase lagging sales.)

It's one thing if you buy telehub land, it doesn't do so well, people move to private island sales, you failed. LL doesn't owe you anything. It's another thing if LL sells a telehub sim on the auction opening the bid at $2000, you buy $6000 worth of such sims, and a mere 10 days later, the company opens up an active discussion about removing telehubs completely and replacing it with p2p. That's really misleading advertising when it offers land at the higher bid.

Even given the harshness of the content death match in SL, it's still possible to try to develop more clear, more accountable, more human rules of the road. These would include timely notification and discusison of major changes -- and not in the Kabuki Theater called the town halls. There's no reason on earth or in cyberspace why the Lindens cannot meet with various groups of seriously-convened stakeholders -- people with a state in this or that feature of SL that might lose or gain in a change. Phil himself gave as an example car dealers -- those who will be affected by Havoc 2.

I don't think a group should be skewed by the stress and haste of producing agendas to impress Phil, however. Groups need to form, gel, get coherent, trust each other, figure out what's important, and not waste their own or the Lindens time by having impressive meetings for Editorial Hare to cover and posture on the forums about.

I look forward to keeping this group open.

Comments

[Anonymous]

"cost" ?

caused?

So much for proofreading.

[Mulch Maker (aka Mulch Ennui)]

PROK SAID: "A self-serving post with garbled interpretations and a lot of hectoring hidden under hippie homespun advice (as so much hectoring gets hidden in SL) by Mulch Ennui tries to portray the events of the last week as some kind of "clash of the titans" and "Anshe and Prok first putting aside their differences but then Prok not being able to compromise and cooperate with Anshe's bringing in of Aimee" or whatever."

REALITY WAS: I actually said you handled yourself better than Anshe. Anshe was bussing people in. You outed her and for that and the super secret ninja group (err paladin group).

Anyway, get your facts straight Prok. Gandhi and Jesus would strangle each other dealing with the pressure that the forum Jackals put on you 2.

And you can either take my advice or not. Quit venting at everyone. You don't know me, you may think you do, but you don't. You may think you are better or smarter than me, but I may disagree.

If you are a guy you would ENVY my job, the people in my network, the places I have been, the things I have done. The life I have created for myself. I don't work in SL, it's a hobby. I don't need to work here.

I own a business and work 10 mins to 1 hour a day and support my lifestyle. I live in a decent house, drive a decent car, and have more time than anyone I know, which is a commodity more precious than any other.

When I think of you, I hear the phrase over and over "Does Not Play Well With Others." Your venom knows no limits, friend or foe. I even said that often, you and I take entirely different paths to the same conclusion. In other words, I agree with you more than not.

However your mini novels of your "wrath" when someone breathes in the wrong direction and how they must be Bolsheviks or FIC because they dared respirate in a way you disapprove of makes you a completely distasteful character. There's a lot I like about you Prok, but unfortunately, you make it so hard by stacking the deck against yourself with your misplaced tirades.

My main problem with the way you handled yourself was using MJW as your personal soapbox. Anshe was long gone and you had made Amie an officer as I was trying to make happen. The way I saw it, if two enemies took the same position and worked together for a common goal, there was no limit to what could be accomplished.

However the forces were determined to ruin it because , well, they weren't involved (and wouldn't have been interested if offered).

ESPECIALLY this week, for personal reasons, the MJW notecard is important to me. But when the personality became more defining than the issues, I split. I only faulted you with never yielding the floor, Anshe was far less sympathetic than you.

[Prokofy Neva]

Like I said, lol, "A self-serving post with garbled interpretations and a lot of hectoring hidden under hippie homespun advice."

An "instructive comment" like "take my advice...quit venting on everyone" is *exactly that*. I don't "vent on everyone". I do vent on people who deserve to be vented on, however, and I don't need to take anyone's advice on "how to win friends and influence people." You go do the diplomatic work diplomatically that you think you're capable of doing lol, Mulch. I guess that's why

BTW, you and Sansarya need to stop referring to MJW as "defunct". Just because you left it doesn't mean it is defunct. It's been hijacked by Bolsheviks, to be sure, and Jauani Wu is making a laughingstock of himself and the officers he bused in, but neither I nor Coco left it -- yet.

I find it profoundly ironic that in a meeting where Anshe was given the floor by the consensus of the group -- and took advantage of this trust by writing up her own too-wordy and sychophantic notecard in place of our agreed talking points -- and in a meeting where you spoke out of turn with an irrelevancy not agreed upon by the group, and got Anshe to give you the floor simply because she was being nice -- and in a meeting where I did NOT have the floor...you accuse me of "not yielding the floor". This is one of those log-out-of-one's-own-eyes situations, to be sure.