Parking the Avatar in Harvard Yard

If you couldn't get into Harvard in RL, you might have a chance in Second Life -- that is, if their server isn't full with more than 100 avatars.

Harvard has come to Second Life with a little more flourish than Microsoft, yet still keeps a low profile.

With dwell about to be cut in half, the world is poised for one whallop already --and it's clear that it was time for the Lindens to kick all the gamerz and lozerz off the servers because the big guys are coming to town.

Now the gulf between the indigenous poor and lower middle class in SL -- the vast bulk of the 200,000 people mainly on basics, and the tiny middle class supporting or engaging in indigenous business -- yawns before us even greater, as wealthy big business and educational institutions come in to take their place on SL's servers and create the Better World -- most likely without us.

Our world's fabric is not only torn, the world itself is shattered to as many pieces as the grief balls can spawn and replicate within an hour...Another weekend of lost business with the grid closed due to grief attacks, some of them personally delivered to my sims, taking up hours of Lindens' and my time to figure out and clean up, and then extra costs to replace houses that got returned or deleted.

Private islands never seem to get affected quite as badly.

Friday night at the Sutherland dam, we met to discuss the dollarization of Second Life, and the widening gap between indigenous SL business inworld and outworld new RL-based business in SL. Indeed the acceleration is so fast, so profound that my term "indigenous business" will simply be OBE'd in a matter of months as the "newcomers" with the names in the list like "Rich" or "Book" or "Kivioq" begin to see SL as Their World, Their Imagination.

The oldbie beta-era "big business" of SL itself, like Cristiano Midnight's ANOmations and FlipperPA's SLBoutique.com which merged or morphed into Electric Sheep Company, interestingly, far from being overtaken by the newcomers, have been at the forefront of networking with larger businesses and getting whatever contracts, connections, and positioning needs to be done to survive. It will be the usual  social Darwinism of SL. Everyone will be told to "create or die". Everyone will be shoved off their camp chairs.

And not only them, as all kinds of new and old individual contractors have turned their back on Governor Linden, like Anshe Chung, will stop working in dull state factories producing prefab newbie housing or look-alike dresses for the masses of blingtards, and gone to work for wealthy new clients trying to get into the hottest thing since my jammed and broken toaster: the 3 Point D Internet.

Remember how SNOOPYBrown Zamboni was able to get CNET to quote him saying "Everybody who's anybody is getting an island now in Second Life?" Well, they did, kinda. To the point where I've been joking that the Lindens really should create a newbie program called FirstIsland where the servers only cost $512 USD to start.

Not that these large corporations need any discounts. When I heard from Tony Walsh's Clickable Culture Daniel Terdiman's CNET article that Harvard had spent $18,000 $15,000 on prepping their island in Second Life, at first I marvelled. Wow, how could they get ripped off and spend so much on terraforming and a build?!

Well, easy, when you start to think about it:  at $60/hour or more, programmers don't come cheap in RL. While we might think of terraforming and fiddling with the wonky build tools as not really "programming" (it isn't), it's skilled computer/design/graphics/ work and often involves scripting work.

Translate that even to $33/hour like Jauani Wu of Canada might get or something like that or less that Eggy Lippman might get in his country, and you figure before you know it, 10 hours a day in that 30 day period when you MUST make good on your island development before tier hits to make your investment pointless, plus expenses of supplies, etc. gets to be the 350 hours of developing time you can purchase for that figure. Seems to be more expensive than the kitted-out private island fully loaded that Anshe was offering on ebay, but still within the same range.

I was expecting, when I heard about the $18,000 spending spree, some other branch of Harvard, not sure why.

I had to chuckle that it turned out to be the Berkman Center, as the last I focused on the Berkman Center, Ethan Zuckerman was debating the Lindens, and I was furiously responding to his blog and trying to convince him that even people interested in saving the Third World should still use Second Life -- Ethan had made the comment that he wasn't so impressed with SL until the kinds of people he worked with in Africa and Asia were represented there.

Actually, some of them are already here, even without any help.

(Kinda like that guy from the public radio station who opened up his Future Salon appearance by questioning whether there were any "people of colour" in the audience. I had to guffaw to myself, picturing the real "people of colour" who were off elsewhere in SL doing a huge range of things, whether business, architecture, culture, media, and not making any fetish about their "colouration"
lol. One thing they were NOT doing was sitting on a laggy sim listening to some middle-aged white dude pontificate on the need for affirmative action in virtual worlds).

So I paid a visit to the sim called Berkman ("Synthetic Berkman"), studied the website in detail, and IM'd island manager Ansible Berkman to discuss the problem I had trying to sign up, or link to, or reach, any actual information about how I could get into the SL version of their lunch-time series. And it turns out, what they mean is that they will broadcast the lunch into SL on a stream -- but it's not clear if the people inworld will interact with those in Harvard. I explained the 40-avatar limitation issue to him, which apparently he hadn't thought about.

We had a long discussion about the mainland vs. private islands, development, the platform, the world -- in which I concluded: I am town to his gown.

The Harvard sim is a painstaking replica of the RL Harvard, with classical structures and brick walls that don't appear to have the legendary ivy on them yet, but that may be because they haven't been to Fate Gardens yet to buy the rest of the plants (there are some trees).

Following the sherpas/gentleman scholar approach, Harvard has indigenous help, either their own employees and students with fresh avs who seem to have some familiarity with SL, or long-time players like Weedy Herbst, who, it is presumed, is doing something related to audio/visuals/learning/streaming something since she is known for making radios in SL.  Much of the build is done by coos Yellowknife, not anyone I've heard of, but it's a big world!

Texturing is very hard to do. While awesome (look at the reflective window work!) I don't think this is the most stellar job in SL -- there are texture artists like Tempest Veil or Amberly Kinsella or all kinds of people who just do texturing very well, like Barnesworth Anubis, because they do prim work too. And as I think about it, it isn't even about texturing skill -- it's more about the ambit of texturing you take on. If you start out to texture a BDSM island, a virtual suburbia of the mind, or an exotic Goth palace, something about the suspension of belief involved leads to make the kind of surreal or a-little-bit-more-than-real texturizing needed to sustain that illusion/immersiveness.

When you take on slavish RL versimilitude, you're stuck with reality. Reality doesn't always "sing" in a virtual world. It's flat. It tends to look like a cardboard cut-out and look less real than, say, Chrystin Hathor's fantastical wooden tree house which Harvard also opted to deploy on the Berkman sim. So, to solve the "lame reality in the virtual context" problem, you reach for tricks like little prim crennalations. Note how the texture and the actual prims segue here:

  Given the number of prims you get on an island, and the huge open spaces still there, it seems more prims might have been sculpted for the Harvard look, but somehow, texturey versimilitude was what the owners/stewards decided upon.

I personally think the whole idea of making a versimilitudinous Harvard was the wrong way to go. I think they could have referenced some of the classical build, but just as  RL colleges don't build their new gyms or libraries or Islamic Studies Centers in the old mossy classical mold, so they could be putting their Second Life campus out to more modern-styled architects  -- especially given that it is a virtual world. It's hard to know how they envision what they are doing, or whether they consciously decided, "let's have a whole new experiment" or "let's preserve the ideal idea of Harvard in cyberspace." I think unconsciously, it's the latter. (Knowing how these things can work, these decisions might have been beyond them as conservative board members or funders -- or the perception and pre-anticipation of their stodgy needs -- might have been a factor.)

The interiors work better just because, in indigenous Second Life, they've got lots to work with from the Harvardy/preppy school of fussy 18th- and 19th-century Americanized European interiors. A red velvet banquette made by Baron Grayson used ubiquitously in every domme's private chambers in a BDSM castle in the world of SL fits right in for Harvard's hallowed halls on the platform of SL. Walking around inside, you begin to fell as if you *are* in college.

But...are they going to get enough versimilitude in their "using" of "the SL platform" to generate worlds, too? We shall see. Just like the mainland is sucking hind tit now (frankly, it's in the failure-to-thrive syndrome stage), so platformism and realworldism are going to so overtake worldism now that for a long time, we won't see the world these people make while they overtake us all and also likely make many decisions affecting the platform and the world in secret.

Wandering out again, seeing the famous bridge, you cross something that feels like the women's lacrosse team field or perhaps an elven archery plain, and emerge on to something that has the usual self-conscious SL self-importance (SLelfimportance?) of Learning. This Learn Land has a huge board of pictures of all kinds of twisty prims, made by The Sojourner from Dreams, which is an island where various classes are held in SL, and which was the site of this "community fair" last month.

The Harvard people have earnestly gotten to work making a manual for SL. At first it seems overwrought and overwritten, in the way manuals always do. But as you get into it, you realize that some people have come along who might actually get a proper game manual written, given how clueless most of the volunteers are, how wonky and inaccessible the "wiki" is, and how biased toward The Sims Online Prok's very useful and extensive help cards are : )

Perhaps, with some tooling and dying, they might emerge with something useful -- the prim table is an interesting concept. I must confess I wouldn't use it but might put it on a wall in a newbie area like a kind of Table of Elements. Seeing it, you wonder why nobody ever thought of it before! And why isn't it in every sandbox!?

I used to think the Lindens would sell off the blingtardy mainland to Sony or some other big entity, maybe only in the form of a license, keep the private island continent area for big customers like Anshe etc. to have the steady income, and focus on the Edu Grid realm to build their own empire. But who will develop whom?

For a very long time, I've been waiting for the East Coast intellectuals to "discover" Second Life. Our country is bicoastal, and we need the left brain of the East to balance the right brain of the West, and the more right politics of the East to balance the left politics of the West.

 

Comments

[Tony Walsh]

"When I heard from Tony Walsh's Clickable Culture that Harvard had spent $18,000 on prepping their island in Second Life..."

Hmm, I don't remember reporting this figure, is it possible you read it somewhere else?

[Cocoanut]

1. Well, needless to say, I love and adore the fact that it is so true to the rl Harvard buildings!

2. I wish they would break this sort of thing off from the regular people, despite your warnings that it will ghetto-ize us. I think maybe I have reached the point where we are already ghetto-ized completely, and the only thing that having us together with them does is make us realize it more, and basically have to stuff it down and like it.

I really do think we could be more vibrant, and less hobbled, if we could have a separate grid.

In other words, I'd rather, if we are always going to be on the back of the bus, that we had separate buses.

All the secret influences and everything are going to happen anyway, regardless.

3. I will have to go study that chart!

coco

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

Why didn't Harvard just buy one of the main land sims and make it part of the vast, flyable landscape?

[Khamon Fate]

"I really do think we could be more vibrant, and less hobbled, if we could have a separate grid."

Gee, ya think?

[Prokofy Neva]

I imagine that ESC, or the Lindens, or whoever, explained to Harvard, or they figured it out themselves, that if they want control of their venue during events, they simply have to have a private island. They arent interested in integration and exploring the world, they want to have RL events to which this island is tethered.

Coco, I suppose that what Lindens or thinkerati could tell us about your notion of "the separate grid" is that if we want to have some integrated worldly world without them "making us stuff it down," then we have to pay Anshe Chung or Adam Zaius or some other developer to make that little world for us, and live in it.

I find that repulsive, myself, but I think that's the message.

[Cocoanut]

I guess we should be grateful we still have the mainland. I envision a time when we won't.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

"They arent interested in integration and exploring the world, they want to have RL events to which this island is tethered."

Neither am I. Neither are most of the granola-eating, sandal wearing Techie-Wiki types. So why is it wrong for us to want our own, home-hosted estates?

"...then we have to pay Anshe Chung or Adam Zaius or some other developer to make that little world for us, and live in it."

Kind of like you pay Google, by way of Blogger, to host Second Thoughts?

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

...sorry, Typepad. I was thinking of comic bloggers, not VirtualWorldHipsterBloggers.

[Khamon]

Jarod, Jarod, Jarod, you're failing to honour the false perception that there's a difference between LL hosting a world and any other profit seeking business hosting a world.

You're also failing to honour the double standard that it's okay to push people off on their own grids when we think they're damaging our wora'uld, but not okay for people to want to host their own grids when we want to be part of The Community All Hail The Central Community.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

Oh, right... Respectful ignorance. My bad.

[Prokofy Neva]

Jarod, but you can't host your own servers. And I'm skeptical that they ever will have anything like you imagine, just like you can't host your own Google, either, or your own tripod.com.

If I pay Google/Blogger/Typepad to host my blog, I get a template, but at least I get to configure it and govern it. I don't even have that level of control within my leased Governor Linden estate land - but then, I don't really think the analogy holds. I know *you* want it all to be just one big Internet with lots of pages you click through, but I want something deeper, more immersive, and more sustainable than that.

I don't want a Google or a tripod, I want a world. They aren't worlds. And hanging a 3-d capacity windows desktop thingie off the Internet or my computer isn't the same thing as a world.

Furthermore, if they're going to have a big centralalized asset server and server farm, I'm for them not having apartheid and having the private islands live better than the "mainland," or Gov. Linden's Estate. They need to have equal rights and avatars equal before the law.

Khamon, I'm not getting whether you are referring to me kicking people off the grid or what.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

Yes. (http://www.googlestore.com/appliance/product.asp?catid=3) You. (http://www.googlestore.com/appliance/product.asp?catid=2) Can. (http://desktop.google.com/enterprise/index.html) Host your own Google.

As for "hosting" my own Tripod.com, well I do have a web server running from my home PC that's accessible to the rest of the web; if I wanted to, I could open it up to friends for hosting (I have done this in the past). So, yes, actually, in a sense I can "host" my own Tripod.

Which leads me to your saying this, "I don't want a Google or a tripod, I want a world." I have bad news for you, then. I'm going to assume this isn't from Freudian slip of yours declaring plans for world domination and continue discussing Second Life.

Second Life, the Wora'uld, blessed by the Linden, is just software. From a trekkie-wicki point of view, it's not even that different from Google or Blogger. It's an interface that's rendered by the data sitting on some servers somewhere. Second Life is just a 3D interpretation of the information, where as Google and Blogger stick to a 2D format. (Of course, once SketchUp, Google Earth, and Google Maps start being mashed-up, that might be an outmoded notion.)

> And hanging a 3-d capacity
> windows desktop thingie off the
> Internet or my computer isn't
> the same thing as a world.

But it is the same thing as Second Life... So I guess that was a Freudian slip back up there. Yikes!

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

>I know *you* want it all to be just
> one big Internet with lots of
> pages you click through

Actually, this is what I want: http://jarodrussell.livejournal.com/545028.html -- vast sprawling oceans that I can sail on, deep blue depths where the mermaids and mermen play, and maybe a ship of pirates I can captain as we sail the seas.

The problem is, that's not ever going to be possible if we only have one world where every 256^m of land costs $1,2000 (or even $512). There's enough processing power now sitting in my computer at work to host my own sim, a sim that could be hooked to my sim at home and to Khamon's computers hosting sims that we could probably build a nice Pirate's Island between us. Toss in a few more friends and computers, and we could likely get an old, Victorian/Spanish Armada colony going. If we chipped in and got a computer at a colo, we could probably flesh out our boundaries with a few void sims, and hook up with other pirate fans. At that point, we would have an immersive, compelling world that we not only built but also could be enjoyed and experienced by other people who didn't have their own worlds -- much like I've hosted (and host) people's websites, I wouldn't mind hosting someone's cottage or their ship.

Yes, I like "one big Internet with pages and pages to click through" because that means many things. It means there are a lot of people making pages. It means there's a lot for me to read and learn. It means I can share ideas and have other ideas shared back. I don't want one, central AOL or one dial-up BBS; I want "one big Internet" that's created from many AOL's and Charter's and Comcast's and PeoplePC and Juno and more.

In the same way, I don't want one big Second Life. I want "one big Internet" that's immersive and adaptable and open and expressive as Second Life, but that's not going to happen as long as your "deeper, more immersive, and more sustainable" world is, in practice and design, the same as AOL.

[Prokofy Neva]

So you can host your own Google? But would you *want* to? When Google hosts its own Google? And does your Google you're hosting have the same stuff in it as the out-there Google?

And I know all that about how it's all just pixels and boxes in a blue warehouse in Cali etc. but honestly Jarod, you're being too literalist here. A world -- and no need to put on fake Celtic/Gaelic/Hobbit whatever airs by calling it "Wora'uld" -- this reference, if it comes from some sci-fi thing or beta-joke or something is lost on me except as some Gaelic imitation -- a world is a world of realtionships, people, flow, exchange etc.

You can't have that on a google or a tripod. i can't take the google earth and delete the park benches on my RL plaza -- not yet anyway!

I can't do anything with all the crap on my tripod site except look at it, and email you the link to look at it.

The world of SL on its servers with its pixels is able to do much more. I think that counts for something. I think even if you had all those bells and whistles you talk of and host-your-own and roll-your-own, all you'd do on it anyway is just do more geekified chat like the IRC channel, and noodle around by yourself in august solitude doing coding or scripting or PSP or whatever, so...why dump on me? Why is it so terribly naive, uncool, stupid, uneductated to want a world, which is not only the servers, but the people and their interactions, and so on too, and whatever facilitates that for them?

You mock me out and say I'm engaged in Freudian slips and world domination crap, but what, you want a huge 7 seas, AND a ship , AND mermaids??? Huh? You can have all those things in SL, and then some. What, it's never enough, Jarod? Never enough?

As for costing something, yeah, it does. Hardware, people's time and labour, costs something? Or did you think you're entitled to endless socialism just because you're a tekkie?

As for chipping in and splicing together stuff with your friends in your basement with scotch tape, why not just do the same thing in SL? All the features are there to do that. I mean, you don't generate your own electricity or make your own metal and plastic parts for your computer, why get gunshy about who owns the colos?

I honestly think this is just some property fetish at the end of the day.

Not really about anything real.

I don't want AOL or BBS either. I want an Internet too. I think reading foreign languages I have a good deal better long view of the Internet than even you, Jarod. It's a big world out there! but we HAVE that. Somebody today at this conference in SL and RL said that there was no such thing as having to make the 3D Internet as a separate thing, or add virtual worlds to the Internet, the Internet ALREADY is a virtual world or worlds. I think it was Will Harvey said that. Not sure if that's the case, but I don't get why something you and Khamon hack together out of spare parts in your basement is going to be anymore interesting than some old used car you take and soup up.

I'm just not buying your AOL model. There is so much more flexibility and diversity in SL and such less control already, that the AOL analogy simply doesn't fly with me. It's not persuasive. AOL was very pre-packaged, guided, hampering, annoying with pushing updates on you, etc. AOL is like a cult. YOu have to practically give them your first born to get off the service if you ever mistakenly think you can just sign on with the 1000 hours free disk to just boot up a crashed computer to the Internet to redownload juno or something. It's insane. I hate AOL. My experience of AOL and SL are completely different. The only thing really that SL pushes at me are those dumb blue drop-downs.

You are constantly whining about the architecture. You're missing how much you could do with it already. They'll probably get around to doing the stuff to enable you to think in your basement someday. Meanwhile, I don't get how sour you are about all this stuff. It's not rationale to me, it feels very emotional, and I think it's about Philip looking at you cross-eyed once or something.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

> Why is it so terribly naive,
> uncool, stupid, uneductated to
> want a world, which is not only
> the servers, but the people and
> their interactions, and so on
> too, and whatever facilitates
> that for them?

I don't think it is uncool to want that, but I think it's very naive to think one company can give you that. Let's use your electrcity example. How many power companies are there all over the world? You couldn't power the world from one generator in one location; you have to stretch it out across countries. And because it's spread out when one goes down, others can pick up the slack. You know, barring a disaster like the one that hit the East Coast a couple of years back, but even that disaster didn't take down the entire U.S. grid.

How many times now has the central grid gone down this year because the world is hosted by one grid with one asset server by one company at one colo?

> Never enough?

To quote a great movie, "The world is not enough." (I just like world domination jokes. You'll have to excuse me.)

> I think reading foreign
> languages I have a good deal
> better long view of the Internet
> than even you, Jarod.

Feel free to think it. I think being able to read computer code and technical documents gives me a pretty good view. Personally, I'd rather know how to steer a car than to brag that I can see it's driving off a cliff, but that's just me.

> I'm just not buying your AOL model.

AOL was once the single, largest gateway into "cyberspace." SL is now the single, largest gateway into "the metaverse." I think it's as an apt comparison as anything else.

> You are constantly whining about
> the architecture.

If, what, four grid crashes in as many weeks doesn't prove that the architecture is flawed, what will it take?

[Prokofy Neva]

Jarod, I don't believe I ever said "one company will give you that". That would indeed be limited in vision. Obviously, there will be lots of things that will begin to converge, virtual worlds, 3-D sites, applications, Worlds for Windows as I call it. And people will hook all kinds of things together, like people hooked up the Internet to like the coke machine in their dorm.

But that's taking it very literally again. I think what I mean is the *model* of the world that they seem to have at LL. That is, the servers all in a grid. Some central authority. I don't think that authority can go on being LL for ever at all -- that would be awful. And I don't think it can be just a string of LL's favourite companies like ESC or whatever that make some big Party Committe for the Metaverse. I think it will probably have to be ultimately affected by RL governments and international agencies in some way. I think anything that has people in it will have to be regulated in that way. I realize that isn't your dream, but frankly, endless sandboxing gets a bit old.

The world has gone down countless times -- and yet there *is* a world that can be missed by the colos going down. and that's the point. There is a world.

I remember skipping the AOL stage. We had all that grainy stuff before the WWW on things like Hayes Smartcom dial-ups, with gophers and goto // this and that with no pictures. I remember when the pictures first came, we had to put in the placeholders. We went from that old thing that was the early Internet before the WWW, skipped AOL, and went right to the Internet as we know it know with webpages.

It's not the architecture that's flawed. That architectuer makes it possible to have a shared, coherent, contiguous world. What's flawed is the people who grief it, and that happens because the Lindens still continue to get up in front of big conferences and say how awesome they think self-replicating fish are. When they can stop sustaining sandboxing like that, we'll get somewhere.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

> I realize that isn't your dream,
> but frankly, endless sandboxing
> gets a bit old.

I like how you keep repeating this theme, but repeating a mis-conception doesn't make it true. Let me say this in the most simple terms possible: allowing me to host my own sandbox grid neither means Second Life ceases to exist nor does it mean every other person in the world is forced to live in a sandbox grid.

If the conditions were ever met so that I could host my own grid here at home, it would mean that a good many schools, all over the world, could not only host their own grids, they could also link their grids together to form an Eduverse. An Eduverse where kids from all over the world could meet up in a safe, controlled environment.

That's one reason I want to be able to run my own little grid at home, because it means IT people would be able to setup grids with surplus computers at schools, hospitals (imagine if hospitals could run grids so kids stuck in hospitals could chat with other kids), and the like can run grids. A personal sandbox is my shorthand for "cheap, easy for all."

Quit being so literal.

> There is a world.

You got that from Philip, didn't you! I like to imagine him saying that as a tear slides down his cheek. "There is a world... And that's the point!"

Yes, jokes aside, I agree, that is the point. For a lot of people, before Second Life, there were worlds; they built their worlds from IM's, chatrooms, email, and blogs. I mean... You may not have said that the metaverse should be run by one company, but until the architecture changes so that anyone can run a grid from their basement, only Linden Lab can run a Second Life grid. That's why the main grid, the teen grid, and all the private estates use the central asset server. (That may change in the coming months, but such a change strengthens my criticality of the architecture.)

> When they can stop sustaining
> sandboxing like that, we'll get
> somewhere.

When I can host a sandbox on my home computer, they (Second Life, Linden Lab, the "metaverse" at large) won't have to sustain that.

[Prokofy Neva]

Jarod, it always sounds to me as if you and Khamon are talking about a set of circumstances peculiar to yourselves and your own situations/universities and extrapolating from it.

What I find hilarioud about what you say is the internal contradiction. On the one hand, you say you want SL to be "more like the Internet" where you can host-your-own. But on the other hand, your argument for "host-your-own" is to say that you need a safe, controlled environment for students. Yet the Internet is hardly that thing -- it is not controlled, and not safe. It's a huge, sprawling, uncontrolled thing, in fact.

The "kids in hospitals" thing seems like emotional pandering, frankly. Usually hospitals don't allow wireless and cell phones because it interferes with their own emergency and other medical equipment. It's unlikely that a hospital basement-made world is not going to do that. Maybe that problem will be overcome, but you can't sell technology or ideas on the strength of the appeal of how it will great for poor people and suffering kids in hospitals. SL in general, I realize, creates a climate whereby the concept of saving and helping disabled people to have rich and rewarding lives through the metaverse is a constant refrain -- it's very manipulative emotionally.

Once you make your basement world, how will you connect up? What set of overarching universal values will you be willing to concede? I often find that the "united we stand/divided we run free at last" school of thought has scorn for universality.

Because you don't seem to have a plan for a public commons, universality, shared values and space -- *dissemination of civilization* -- I can't concede to you your basement tapes and you're overriding of everything people have established over the millenia to make your basement tapes link up to someone else who also has that revolutionary/destructive/non-Euclidean/whatever
point of view.

Sandbox is my shorthand for the
refusal to countenance either the
preservation and enhancement of the old meat-world based
civilization, or even refusal to
concede the need for a new one
with universality, and a celebration of the endless revolutionary destruction of these things in the name of some Brave New World and Bright Future which you are only able to define by...invoking sick little kids in the hospital -- something you would think a great technical mind wouldn't resort to.

I didn't get anything from Philip.
Philip gives me nothing. In fact,
I once told him he didn't seem to want to really make a world -- and I'm not persuaded that he does. And I've written him that this or that thing he is doing is destructive of the world -- and he doesn't seem to care. So please, I don't wait around for Philip Linden to make a world or set of worlds, I work at it myself at least in my patch.

We have different associations with the word "sandbox" -- but I don't see that the world-germination that the Lindens have done with their invention is sufficiently rooted yet such as to send these seeds all over. Study the history of the camera, how it went from use by governments or corporations, to perhaps one professional person in a village, to eventually being in every hand.

The culture has to catch up with the technology or it becomes destructive.

[Khamon]

Yes the culture has to catch up with the wora'uld's technology in a lot of ways.

e.g. http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=104751

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

> What I find hilarioud about what
> you say is the internal contradiction.

No more of a contradition than your saying, "And I'm skeptical that they ever will have anything like you imagine," in one post, and in another saying, "They'll probably get around to doing the stuff to enable you to think in your basement someday." But I guess I'm just being petty there.

It's not a contradiction on my part, it's ignorance on your part. Yes, I want it "open like the Internet," I want anyone to be able to set up their own grid, online or offline, just like people can setup their own web servers and email servers and databases. But I also want people to be able to create protected, yes, even "gated" worlds if they want.

In specific regards to a protected Eduverse: I say it should be protected simply because I dislike the idea of free range targets for paedophiles. Sure, the Internet's there, it's a dangerous place, and kids are on it all the time, that's not going to change (and, I'm not even going to try and suggest how we could fix that). However, setting up the Eduverse so that only students and teachers, registered and maintained by per-school login systems, would simply mean my tax dollars were giving kids a relatively safe and dedicated area for school. It's not a way to fully protect kids from the Internet, it's just idea for the use. It's also a way to kick graduates out when they finish school, and free up resources for enrolled students.

As for the hospital scenario, you're welcome to call it "emotional pandering" if you like, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a possible scenario. I mentioned it because for some reason my brain was in "Think of the children" mode, for some reason -- maybe I was trying to be manipulative, it's not beyond me. If you want me to think of business models that don't tug at the heartstrings, I'll be happy to provide a few.

> Once you make your basement
> world, how will you connect up?

Off the top of my head, it'd work one of a few ways: one would be the basement scenario, where I have two or four sims running for myself hooked up on my personal network. Another way would be a host who sets up their own world, and provide a similar service to what Second Life already does; these hypothetical businesses could agree to form one massive grid and/or they could sell small, themed grid services to people. Linking sims isn't hard, and the geometry of it is even less hard when you factor in void sims, from a technological standpoint.

From a social standpoint, I imagine linking up would work the same way web rings do now. You might have a grid manager who arranges the geography of a grid for a group. When people join, she tells them where to place their sims, when they leave she either fills in a temporary void sim or slides another forward to fill in the gap.

I imagine there will be other ways -- look at things like RSS and XML, who would have predicted those as a means of linking up services back in 1991 or 1992?

> Because you don't seem to have a
> plan for a public commons

What do you mean by "public commons" here, because when I think of public commons, I think of libraries and parks? I think of places where everyone is welcome to come, talk, and share ideas. If we're going to translate that over to Internet concepts, than places like Google, Wikipedia, and LiveJournal and services like free Wifi are what immediately come to mind. Sites like Google and LiveJournal aren't public in the "paid for by taxes" sense of the word, but they are places usable by the public to both find/hear about new things and exchange ideas; Wikipedia is paid for, in part at least, from donations by it's users, and it's about as public as you can get a website to be. I can't help but think that if anyone with a few hundred bucks could start up their own grid, some people wouldn't get together and form a Portal World as a public commons. If everyone and their cousin had small, disparate grids, a 3D service-world that helped index and link those worlds (either in the "HTML link" sense or the "sims next to sims" sense) could make a mint -- much like Google and Yahoo have.

I also think of all the public Wifi spots that are going up, as well as state operated web sites that have been in place, and can't help but think that at some point cities will have their own grids. And maybe that'll end up being the public commons, city/state/federal operated hubs to which local users hook their civic grids.

Look at Joi Ito's island, where people from the Creative Commons have their talks. Maybe his island is what the future of public commons will look like. It's not unheard of for a library, civic center, or play house to be built thanks to a donation from a millionaire (I am assuming Joi Ito's loaded, but don't quote me, okay). Perhaps future, digital public commons will be paid for in-part by such donations.

But, again, what do you mean by public commons?

> ...something you would think a
> great technical mind wouldn't
> resort to.

I suppose the fact that bipedal robotics excite me because they offer a possible way to help paraplegics walk again is just my invoking sympathy through the mention of gimped cripples. Suit yourself, personally, I like Bright Futures brought about by technology. Sick (and dying, you get more sympathy if they're dying) kids in hospitals was just something that popped in my head as I was listing stuff you could do with grids. Is there some socially beneficial aspect of the technology that I can mention that won't be emotional pandering? If the only grounds I have to argue for personal grids is, "Hey, I bet terrorists could use one of these to plan their attacks," then you've backed me into a pretty small corner.

Kids in hospitals came to mind because (a) I remembered that some people had been using Second Life to help patients, (b) Second Life has proven to be a great place for like minded people to hook up, (c) "Child's Play" has shown that video games are a good way to help kids stuck in a hospital room pass the time, but (d) it's also a example of a world that would be best served if it wasn't just out on the 'Net or accessible by anyone. You could replace "sick kids" with "veterans" or "people in jail" or whatever kind of group that could benefit from meeting, sharing their situations with others, but in a place that wouldn't be under threat of grey goo attacks.

> ...I don't wait around for
> Philip Linden to make a world or
> set of worlds...

Which is good, because you'll be waiting a long time! I'm not waiting either, I'm looking at things like the "Half-Life 2" system, Google SketchUp, and I need to go on and setup an IMVU account soon. I keep "whining" about Second Life, because if they would ever just sell their stuff shrink-wrapped (like Microsoft sells Sharepoint and IIS) or open it up (like the Apache has done with their web server) people wouldn't have to re-invent so many wheels. They've got a viable product that people like, if they'd just shift their business model a bit, they'd not just benefit and grow but so would a lot of other online communities. I'm not exactly waiting for the Lindens, but I would like for them to sync up with me so the Bright Future might get here a bit sooner, rather than later.

[Prokofy Neva]

>No more of a contradition than your saying, "And I'm skeptical that they ever will have anything like you imagine," in one post, and in another saying, "They'll probably get around to doing the stuff to enable you to think in your basement someday." But I guess I'm just being petty there.

a) I'm skeptical that you, on your own, can make pirates, mermaids, and 7 seas that are a WORLD with OTHER PEOPLE in it and b) I'm certain that some day they'll let you tinker in your basement to make something that is a pale imitation of that, but has no sticking power or compelling immersion, with other people in it. No contradiction at all.

I think the real problem here, Jarod, is your absolute ignorance and refusal to even contemplate anything other than your own field of expertise. I at least try to contemplate and learn about your field.

It seems to me patently obvious that when you host your own server at work to handle your interoffice stuff, or your own email list-serve, that's in a context called "the rest of the Internet out there run by other people, governments, and corporations".

You don't just run the entire thing yourself in any kind of even microcosmic way. You have servers, that connect up to ALL THAT OTHER STUFF.

The problem with the 3-D world, then is analogous to that. But it's fragile now, and if you were just to turn over the license of how to do/make/keep SL to all and sundry, they'd make a million fractured worlds. It's not even clear how they'd ever hook up again, if at all. There'd be no REST OF THE INTERNET OUT THERE to put the context in.

You have to think not only literally of the little world of pirates and mermaids you're going to make in your basement next to the septic tank, you have to think of the aggregate of all the worlds, how people will interact, how they will sell content and buy content and how they will cross from place to place. I guess you're just thinking somebody ELSE will worry about that?

Well, I'm all for that *somebody else* being the Lindens, for better or worse, simply because they have the leverage now -- owning the software and the server farm -- to shape this thing in its infancy. Perhaps in the future, it will utterly be obliterated. But at least for now, they can try to make some coherent set of norms/rules/cultural memes.

It's precisely because they are ALREADY doing that and doing it in a haphazard and often awful fashion (like not having the capacity to vote "no" on the voter thingie on the web page) that I intervene and raise such a ruckus as I do. Like first impressions and not getting second chances to make them, you only get a first chance to make a second life. That chance may last five years in the making before someone else invents it. In that time I think it's terribly important to get the metaverse right, and not just hand it off to Hiro Pendragon or the Goreans or you to tinker in basements.

It's precisely because you can't stick your head up above your basement tinkering that I really ahve to worry. You aren't given a single thought about how people will relate in virtual space to each other -- you don't care. You just think the ability to let you create something to the max is all that matters and trumps all.

As for the Eduverse, who could disagree with all those things you said? That's why they made the Teen Grid. But I'm still not getting why you don't get an invisible private island for your school? So many are already doing this. Cost? But they give the islands out for only $950 and $150 tier for educational institutions.

Linking sims isn't hard, and the geometry of it is even less hard when you factor in void sims, from a technological standpoint

Yes, they do that. It's called the SL colo. They link the sims. And people like Anshe make continents. You seem to fetishize the importance of having your own colo somewhere else. Location, location. Why should it matter? If Ll gives out the licensed software to use in this fashion, it's not likely you'll be able to think and knock around with the code and make your own World for Windows. Would you be happy if the Lindens at least sold you the license to the thing? Without thinkering privileges, like Microsoft Office Suite?

I've got the IMVU account, I puttered around, and I found it as barely more interesting than my Yahoo Messenger. In fact, my experiences on Yahoo Messenger are more rewarding because we have real-time whiteboarding where two of us can share in drawing a picture or putting up sketches or sending images to discuss. I put up an avatar, and I can send stupid Madonna sound clips and even make backgrounds like Apple Jacks cereal where my avatar can dive into a bowl of milk. IMVU is more expensive, and I'm annoyed at how many kids keeping IMing me asking me to cyber, bleh. I have no idea of the age groupings on that thing, and I just find it hugely trashy.

Of course, I'll continue to visit when I have the chance just to keep up with it. The guy did tell me yesterday that they aren't going to have flea markets though.

I don't think the future really is so Bright. Nobody has really thoroughly studied the health impact on people as the animals that they are by using all this technology. I'm not certain that decapacitating our physical abilities as a race and hypertrophizing our mental capacities and hooking ourselves up to neural networks etc is really advancing us as people.

I'm always asking myself everyday, what has the Metaverse done for me lately? Here FlipperPA and Hiro are telling me I'm already too late for the mother ship departing for the Metaverse and I'm going to have to swim like hell across the ocean of cyberspace to keep up. But honestly, I'm already soaking in it and I can only say, the Metaverse isn't a viable place for us all to be yet, and detracts as much as it adds.

When you talk about all your basement hookups, I don't hear any notion that even Snowcrash had of some kind of central boulevard, or Grand Central Station. Could you concede of a need even for such a hub or series of hubs?

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

First off, you're right: I couldn't make a world. I absolutely suck at social interaction with people. The thing is, though, other people aren't. I've got friends who can network and make friends and socialize like you wouldn't believe, but they couldn't run a web server if their life depended on it. So, you know what we do, we collaborate. I host their site, and they run the site; I'm the button pusher, they're the ones who interact. I have no real delusions that I'll ever build a Pirate World, but that's okay. I can have my own Pirate Island at home and help other people build their Power Ranger Universe. My argument is that I want the tools to be sold so that we can do both.

Second, What fields of expertise am I supposed to be learning about: blogging, being a land baron, a social commentator, or an economist? I've been blogging for years, I was part of the group that bought almost all of Zoe, I've been talking about virtual world social dynamics at Terra Nova since it's early days, and I have a Bachelor of Business Administration. Despite your continued insistence, I'm not just talking about this from a h4x0r point of view. What field of expertise am I lacking in? And since we're discussing credentials, what expertise do you have in this arena?

I've got news for you, Prokofy, the metaverse has already been turned over to all those sundry users out there and it's already fractured, broken, and not connected. Right now the metaverse is Second Life, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, There, Puzzle Pirates, MySpace, LiveJournal, XBox Live, NintendoWifi, and so on. There is no central world because there's no central protocol.

Yes, virtual worlds are in their infancy, but so was the Internet once. The Internet didn't grow and develop by having a central authority, it grew because people were aloud to tinker at things (in their basements), to throw things out and see what worked and what didn't. A lot of it (ARPAnet) was paid for and guided by the government, but most of it, the tools we use today, were developed by people who had no idea what they could be used for out side of their own offices and networks.

Do you think the people who wrote MySQL or OpenGL had Second Life in mind when they wrote that software. Heck no! MySQL was done as cheap way to avoid using big, expensive solutions like Oracle; OpenGL, I'm pretty sure, was invented as a way to make violent, bloody video games easier to make and sell. I know Linus Torvalds didn't have visions of the metaverse in his head when he started the Linux ball rolling; he was just trying to figure out a way to make his own Unix machine out of old 386 and 486 computers.

Take your camera example. Started by the government, moved to academia, and then to the public. Do you think anyone working on that project had any idea that one day people would carry cameras in their pockets, much less that they'd be attached to telephones that worked without wires. And no one could have predicted that as far as ten years back, not even Futurists gunning to describe the future.

No, I don't think about social interactions, because, you know, I don't need to think about it. In September of 2004, during a week off from work, I banged out a little piece of wiki software to learn how a language worked. I had no idea anyone besides me would use it. That software was the first wiki to host the SL History Wiki. I don't need (or in many cases, want) to think about how people will use tools, because whatever I think of would be so limiting it wouldn't be funny.

Make the tools available to people, and they'll figure it out. Shrink-wrap Second Life, put it on the market for $50-100 a copy and someone will figure out a way to use it that neither you nor me could think of. You can say that Second Life is good for socializing and probablu list a number of people who would never have met without it. That's cool. I can list people I would have never met if not for eBay, if not for Unix, if not for LiveJournal.

No, I don't think about how all the social dynamics work: I have to, because they almost always sort themselves out.

> Location, location. Why should
> it matter?

The same reason the President and Vice President fly on seperate airplanes. The same reason you diversify a stock portfolio. The same reason you don't breed with your own family. The same reason companies have off-site backups. The same reason why the Lindens have their own, personal inneroffice grid. The same reason you don't put all your eggs in one basket.

It matters because the world goes offline when one colo loses power. It matters because of things like bottlenecks in traffic. This is why I "fetishize" location and why I won't recommend buying a private island for our E-Learning classes, because when one grid crashes, all the sims on that one grid crash.

I'm not averse to web hosting or even sim hosting, but the same way web hosting works because every provider can setup their own rack of servers for their own clients, so too will sim hosts need to be able to setup their own grids and asset servers for their own clients.

If Linden Lab sold Second Life the same way Microsoft sells Office -- individual lisencing, software developer kits, an API for writing plug-ins -- I would be extremely happy. I would jump for joy and probably put myself in more credit card debt to buy a copy of the software. Because, at that point, not only could I hole up in my basement and play with scripts, but people like Joi Ito (and other venture capitalists) could invest in companies starting their own grids, and when they started offering private islands at $100 a month, I could get one and link it up with my friends sims.

I really don't have any comments on the negative side-effects of computing. In fact, I'm probably proof of it to a large degree.

Finally, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: "Snowcrash" was wrong. "Snowcrash" is a glorified bulletein board based off of Neal Stephenson's extrapolation of how The Well would work in fifty years. "Snowcrash" has no mention of peer-to-peer software, RIAA lawsuits, iPods, or even Aibo. It's speculative fiction, and it was (and is) wrong.

Neal Stephenson gave an interview about his later, 1999 book "Cryptonomicon" once. A large part of "Cryptonomicon" is about building data havens, colo facilities in places with no extradition treaties -- re: Sealand. The interviewer asked him if he thought data havens were still relevant, and Stephson pretty much said they weren't. Since people could carry gigabytes of information around in their pockets, there was no real need to have one, large place to store such information.

If you don't believe me, and think that "Snowcrash" was right, then all I have to say is this: at least Hiro Protagonist had his own backyard version of the Metaverse, so even when he was adrift at sea with no connectivity, he could drive around in his own little world.

[Prokofy Neva]

It’s odd that you say you “suck at social interaction” and yet you want to shape the entire social experience in your tools. AND you want to make those tools in a vacuum AND not think about how others will use them. Irresponsible! It’s almost as if you think this is even a virtue, being so clueless, awkward, and disconnected. It’s not!
Could you answer the question: would it be enough if you got a license to use this at home that was more like a Microsoft Office, that it didn’t let you come in and mess up the code – you’d have to buy it out of the box? I’m just curious if that would be acceptable. I mean use on your own server.
The fields of expertise that the creators of the hardware and software of the worlds – and their critics among other creators of hardware and software such as yourself – is the expertise needed in what we could call I guess socialware, given that the word “soft” is already taken up for the term “software”.
Socialware these days, because it’s so new, is always created by hardware and software creators, and the people who, in the old days, were allowed at this sort of institutional thing for society aren’t let near it, and don’t even know about it. It’s not personal to you – I mean your class of irresponsible, abstracted, tekkies.
The fields would include: political science, sociology, psychology, comparative religion, literature, anthropology, governance, business administration, media studies, journalism -- even things like hotel management. The humanities. Because…humans are involved, not just machines. I marvel at why nobody notices this.
You claim the metaverse already exists and has already been turned over and broken and fractured. Well, no, not really. They wouldn’t have a conference called Mapping the Metaverse if that were true. And frankly, I’m not at all convinced that World of Warcraft is the Metaverse. That is, perhaps it’s a little metaversal-antechamber or waiting-in-the-wings sort of thing that can become metaversal if it has more hooking up to other stuff to give it an economy and more versatility and custom content. But it’s just a game now. X-Box Live with those teamspeak sort of group playing things that seem to be more readily available than the equivalent of WoW (unless you start using stuff like Skype) is arguably even more of a metaverse. In fact, I’m not sure that Panelverse, as I call it, has even made an actual good working definition of what the metaverse *is*. Of course, I’ll be the last to know, as the metaverse will bite me in the ass before I acknowledge it, eh?
One of the really annoying things about all the people discussing the Metaverse is their earnest, boring, and insufferable insistence that this is going to be *just like* the Internet was, once. Well, why? Says who? The Internet isn’t even like the Internet was, once. It’s not even like you think it is, if you browse around on sites like Berkman and read all this scary stuff about Transcal (Transvaal? Something scary that sounded like the Government Taking Over). This is a debate, Jarod, with schools of thought, and different arguments lining up. If there’s going to be a centralized authority, de facto or de jure, better to shape it. If it will be utter chaos, better to figure out remedies from that chaos.

The Internet, like the camera, went through the stages of government, academia, business, personal user. But the Metaverse amplifies, reduces, distorts, accelerates with phenomenon velocity precisely because of the emotional quality involved in people interacting with others not behind the anonymous 2-D screen and their keyboards, but having immersive and intensive experiences of soul meeting soul.
Your examples of all those mysquirrel and yoursquirrel people just underscores my point – tekkies working in a social vacuum without conscience or higher valuation. The very fact that people have “no idea” about these things they are concocting is every reason to get many kinds of people who do have ideas to be involved. In fact, I find it thoroughly distressing that the Futurology stuff has very few people visibly in the humanities. There ought to be anthropologists, sociologists, etc. as well as writers, poets, priests involved in this “Future” that others are busy making for us, without us.
No, I don't think about social interactions, because, you know, I don't need to think about it. In September of 2004, during a week off from work, I banged out a little piece of wiki software to learn how a language worked. I had no idea anyone besides me would use it. That software was the first wiki to host the SL History Wiki. I don't need (or in many cases, want) to think about how people will use tools, because whatever I think of would be so limiting it wouldn't be funny.
Well, this is irresponsible. And the SL History Wiki remains the provence and property of just one camp of people precisely because it’s not easy to use, and precisely because it’s the stupid Wiki concept that anyone can come along without any editorial judgement or responsibility and undo the work of others, and anybody can also flash mob it and put in their buddies or take out their enemies.
Re: “Make the tools available to people, and they'll figure it out. Shrink-wrap Second Life, put it on the market for $50-100 a copy and someone will figure out a way to use it that neither you nor me could think of. You can say that Second Life is good for socializing and probablu list a number of people who would never have met without it. That's cool. I can list people I would have never met if not for eBay, if not for Unix, if not for LiveJournal.”
You know, meeting lots and lots of people is over-rated. How many people do you REALLY have time for Jarod? And really value? And get some value back from? Perhaps we need to do more with less. Endless creation of millions of people in social networks is not a goal in and of itself. And if it is, it is too easily overtaken by modern totalitarians.
As for the idea of location and eggs in one basket, ok, those are all reasonable and obvious arguments. But I can also posit a completely different scenario. What if you had to conceive of how to address the problem of murder throughout the world? And a code could be disseminated, broken, rewritten, obeyed, or disobeyed at will? In a way, that’s what happens, as it’s ok for the state to murder in New York State or for a mullah to murder an adulter in Afghanistan, or for a 16-year-old boy to murder his father’s murderer. Lots of different codes. But…in fact there is a basic conception that “thou shalt not kill” is a pretty basic rule for all religions/codes/laws/cultures. Imagine if not even some working hypothesis could be created on this matter, and you’d never know whether you could kill or be killed in any given country or state?
They are already working on spreading out those colos if I understood it, putting them in Europe or other areas of the U.S. As for E-learning, you’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It works *good enough* to get going. I’m not at all impressed with all the educational stuff I see coming out of SL, it’s not about learning so much as it is about playing and experimenting with groovy technology, which I guess is sorta kinda about learning, but it’s just the usual tekkie geeky quest to find a way to bless and sanctify what he enjoys, hacking around and playing games, into some income-producing venture.
If Linden Lab sold Second Life the same way Microsoft sells Office -- individual lisencing, software developer kits, an API for writing plug-ins -- I would be extremely happy. I would jump for joy and probably put myself in more credit card debt to buy a copy of the software. Because, at that point, not only could I hole up in my basement and play with scripts, but people like Joi Ito (and other venture capitalists) could invest in companies starting their own grids, and when they started offering private islands at $100 a month, I could get one and link it up with my friends sims.
Ok, but that’s different than demanding that SL open-source their software and give it away for free. If you have to pay $500 for a license or $1500 or whatever, that’s not open-sourcing it. And if you can’t monkey with it as it is, that’s not open-sourcing. It’s just allowing you to use it. So why aren’t you specifying this? Why does this discussion always end up being about LL being socially compelled to give away the store? And how can islands cost only $100, when we’re told that servers cost $1000, and that’s the rockbottom price? OK, maybe $780 at Sam’s Price Club, but the point is, not $100.
I really don't have any comments on the negative side-effects of computing. In fact, I'm probably proof of it to a large degree.
As for Snowcrash, you’re talking about the technical architecture, the ability to have some little version in his pocket. But what I wonder about is your attitude toward the social interactive space, the Boulevard. Where/What will be the Boulevard of all the Basements?

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

> It’s odd that you say you “suck
> at social interaction” and yet
> you want to shape the entire
> social experience in your tools.

I believe I said I'd provide the tools, and people could do with as they please. If wanting to give people tools to make things and not spend all my time worrying over what they're making is wrong, then the hammer and kitchen knife industry is a lot more evil than I'll ever be.

If it's irresposnsible for me (and my class) to make tools and not think about how others will use them, why is it then not irresponsible for you (and your class) to not be making these tools. If programmers working in a "vacuum" are so dangerous, then shouldn't your social thinkers be out there making and patenting the tools to prevent us from making a mess?

> ...you’d have to buy it out of
> the box?

That's be fine with me. I'm rather comfortable using Office, Visual Stidios, and other Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) products in that capacity. Open source has always been an option that I like, but that's all it has been: an option. I may recommend Second Life "open" their code, but I can't remember that I've ever wanted them to just give it away for free. Some of Microsoft's code is open in the sense that developers can work on the guts for specific projects, but it's not public domain, free, or lisence free. There's a huge difference in "open source" and "free open source software."

> Socialware these days, because
> it’s so new, is always created
> by hardware and software
> creators...

You do realize the reason that the first programmers were typically psychologists and mathematicians is because up until that point, there had never been programs before, right? Heck a lot of the first computer programmers were electrical engineers; nowadays, we've gotten to the point that programmer and technician are two seperate jobs.

Your assertion that "the people who ... were allowed at this sort of institutional thing for society aren’t let near it" is glaringly false. No one is stopping a psychologists, sociologists, theologists, etc. from writing software. Thanks to personal computers and fourth generation languages, people who aren't professional programmers have the ability to pick up text editor and start working on projects.

Again, I ask, since the tools are so readily available, why aren't the people qualified to make these decisions also making the tools? Seems like your class is more irresponsible for seeing the danger my class is causing and not doing anything to stop us.

> And the SL History Wiki remains
> the provence and property of
> just one camp of people
> precisely because it’s not easy
> to use...

Poppycock! I was using the wiki the other day, and it's simplicity to use. Anyone who can remember how to use parentheses, semicolons, and the copy'n'paste function can master the Wiki's markup language. Also, any good Wiki has the ability to reset flash mobbed entries. Also, anyone with an ounce of sense will do a quick Google search to find corroborating evidence or the lack of it.

I'm sure Gnutenberg heard the same argument when he invented the printing press. I know the mass media said the same thing when people started blogging. Encyclopedia are saying the same thing about wikis now. Wikis aren't perfect and they can be gamed; they're just tools, though, and if you're going to use a tool, you need to have enough common sense to know how it works.

> ...you’d never know whether you
> could kill or be killed in any
> given country or state?

You can be killed anywhere (even with hammers and kitchen knives), whether it's legal or not. Rules and laws only work when people agree on them and mutually enforce them. It works the same way with computers, protocols only work when people agree which ones to use and mutually work with them. Networks have been doing this for years: Microsoft had a protocol, Novell had a protocol, Apple had one, Linux had one, etc. People got fed up trying to bridge varying networks, and started agreeing to use specific protocols; they got together, threw a bunch of stuff out there, and watched what stuck. The web, email, video game libraries, operating systems, printer formats, and more used to be very anarchistic, but they evolved over time into systems that could work together.

To answer your question, though, I'd let people decide on how laws should handled by their region and culture. I'd abide by the "killing is evil" concept, but I'd distribute the authority per group. Pretty much like it is now.

> It works *good enough* to get
> going.

To quote you, "I’m not at all impressed with all the educational stuff I see coming out of SL." Education isn't a templated stamp, and it requires a lot of contouring, editing, and working with material and systems. That's why I "fetishize" locations (or the owning of the server). I'm not impressed with SL's educations system, and i doubt I ever will be.

> And how can islands cost only
> $100, when we’re told that
> servers cost $1000...

Because technology gets better, resources get cheaper. Ten years ago, it would have cost you upwards of $10,000 for a machine as powerful as the one you play Second Life on now; now you can get that machine for less than $1,000. In a few years when quad-core chips come out and emulators (like VMWare) become the norm, giving you one machine then with the power of sixor eight machines now, hosting fees will go down.

[Prokofy Neva]

“I believe I said I'd provide the tools, and people could do with as they please.”

This sort of attitude is what gives us things like nuclear weapons plus computers that don’t ever really work right. Analogies with hammers and knives are inept, because those tools are embedded in a context where lore about their use is easily passed on, where humans very much control the environment where they are usually used, and where they don’t take over the environment in unforeseen ways.

“why is it then not irresponsible for you (and your class) to not be making these tools. If programmers working in a "vacuum" are so dangerous, then shouldn't your social thinkers be out there making and patenting the tools to prevent us from making a mess?”

BTW, I don't feel I have to recite RL credentials for anyone. Google me. Oh, but leave out the wrong spellings/middle initials so you don't get that poor person found guilty of plagiarism.

See, this is creator fascism – create or die. It’s even worse than corporativist fascism that divides society into corporate classes or groups based on trades or skills – because it says only creators/programmers/graphic artists/ count, and either you have to acquire their skills and be inducted into their guild, or you should shut up. This is hugely irresponsible and dangerous. This attitudes runs through all of SL and much else of the technical world. There’s absolutely no notion of how different classes/groupings/levels of skills etc would cooperate in a society in which all the kinds of skills/learning types/contributions are welcome and recognized. It’s a grand “fuck you, I make it, you break it, you buy it”.

“You do realize the reason that the first programmers were typically psychologists and mathematicians is because up until that point, there had never been programs before, right?”

So? I had just said what it is *nowadays* so raising the involvement of psychologists in the past is no excuse for shutting them out now with your creator-fascism.

“Your assertion that "the people who ... were allowed at this sort of institutional thing for society aren’t let near it" is glaringly false. No one is stopping a psychologists, sociologists, theologists, etc. from writing software.”

See, this is how awful your ideology is: creator fascism. Create, or shut up. Create, or die. Either make these things yourself, or shut up. I can’t think of a time in human history when the creator/technically-abled part of society was so arrogant, so untethered, and running so roughshod and so rampant over all kinds of values.

The psychologists, theologists, etc. should be *in on the process of making the Metaverse, too.*. Your dismissal of them, your failure to heed them, is outrageous hubris. The Metaverse affects people in an immersive, 3-D way like nothing before, and yet you want to have the fashioning of it all to yourself, and refuse even input or criticism from any other field.

“Thanks to personal computers and fourth generation languages, people who aren't professional programmers have the ability to pick up text editor and start working on projects.”

This is bullshit. This is like saying that movie cameras now are sold in camera stores so anyone can make a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Of course they can’t.

"Again, I ask, since the tools are so readily available, why aren't the people qualified to make these decisions also making the tools? Seems like your class is more irresponsible for seeing the danger my class is causing and not doing anything to stop us."

More creator-fascism -- become qualified, make stuff, or shut up. The tools you claim are so easy are not that – we have only to see how annoying SL is in the useability department. And they aren’t accessible to whip up a world – so your condescending call to untechnical people to “shut up and learn” is just a variant of “shut up and create” – and a dodge of your responsibility.

More thoughtful scientists and engineers throughout history who really gain major respect are far more holistic and well-rounded thinkers than you, combining insights from many fields, and not insisting on the tool-maker and the tool as the center of the universe around which everyone else must array themselves.

“Poppycock! I was using the wiki the other day, and it's simplicity to use”

Um, that might well be a function of you having written the program? It’s not so easy, even after studying it, even with plenty of editorial/Word/computer sort of capacity. It’s not an easy template with 1-2-3 -- or rather, it's easy enough to write something eventually after study (I have) but harder to work the levers of how you keep it there from being erased by others. and it’s no accident, the people who have arrogated this “history-telling-function” to themselves don’t want additions.

"I'm sure Gnutenberg heard the same argument when he invented the printing press. I know the mass media said the same thing when people started blogging. Encyclopedia are saying the same thing about wikis now. Wikis aren't perfect and they can be gamed; they're just tools, though, and if you're going to use a tool, you need to have enough common sense to know how it works."

And they keep on saying it, because it’s still true. I’m not surprised that you celebrate the evils of Wiki and Google.

“You can be killed anywhere (even with hammers and kitchen knives), whether it's legal or not. Rules and laws only work when people agree on them and mutually enforce them.”.

You’re letting the tools and their needs drive everything without reflection or sense.

“To answer your question, though, I'd let people decide on how laws should handled by their region and culture. I'd abide by the "killing is evil" concept, but I'd distribute the authority per group. Pretty much like it is now.”

See? No rule of law. No authority recognized by all, created through participatory democracy, but just endless little governments-on-a-prim.

“Distributive decision-making” which replaces democratically-controlled authority, just as it is replaced in a wiki or a google, with authority being “whoever clicks the most.” “whatever the local group wants” or “whatever the culture is” – the despotism of the group, the tyranny of the clickers. I’m not surprised that at the end of the day, you’re for returning to the tribal methods of Africa from whence we all came – proving that all the much-ballyhooed slogans about scientific progress covered up the greatest regression.

“I'm not impressed with SL's educations system, and i doubt I ever will be.”

I’m not impressed because they hype themselves. I guess I’m thinking that the only way to get over the hype is to plunge in and do it, you seem to have the capacity and the materials and setting, and your reluctance to do this seems curious.

“In a few years when quad-core chips come out and emulators (like VMWare) become the norm, giving you one machine then with the power of sixor eight machines now, hosting fees will go down.”

The cost of SL sims have gone up, not down.