The Legal Nihilism of Second Life

I haven't had a chance to think this topic through properly, but then, that's never stopped me from blogging eh? : )

I've always been profoundly troubled by the essential legal nihilism at the root of the Second Life experience. It works on a variety of levels, with a variety of premises, that work more or less like the following:

o Linden Lab is a private software company, not an elected government and not an international or intergovernmental institution, so it has no need to have its world-product answer to any higher notions of the rule of law as understood by international treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or U.S. law like the First Amendment.

o Linden Lab as a real-life corporation in the State of California has to abide by local law and regulations, of course, and it does that, but its world-product is a fictional metaverse, even if not "a game," and therefore is not subject to the laws of the State of California or for that matter, even the law of gravity.

o Second Life is a world governed by code-as-law. Everything in it is governed mechanically by servers and software.  To the extent that it can have concepts like "democratic vote" or "privacy," it can only be something programmed by a programmer as an emulation of these valued things, but necessarily will have its limitations.

o Concepts from civil societies under the rule of law like "the right to face one's accuser" or "the right to a fair trial" or "the right to counsel and an adversarial defense" or "the right to discovery" have no meaning in the world of Second Life because they are not pertinent to a private software company, or its responsibilies to a private club joined by subscription, even if that subscription is open, free, and on the Internet. These concepts would be hard to administer anyway, and cost too much to staff and organize properly.

These premises could be debated, they could be modified, and I have no doubt that other software companies with other worlds will figure out how to modify them and debate them under the pressure of social demand. Why, just today I got in my inbox something called Shared Space for $495 from Caligari that apparently enables people to have meetings and manipulate objects in a 3-D users' space where they can also put in objects with animations. Looks expensive and hard to learn and use, like Croquet. And that's why we don't see competition to Second Life emerging any time soon -- but eventually we will.

All of these premises would be fine to live with as a kind of temporary solution, as a kind of makeshift camp-out kind of experience as we walk West in the great pioneering experience of the 3-D web.

HOWEVER, that's not where Lindens, their sympathizers, their pet groups like the FIC and SIC ever leave it. They are ideologically much, much more troublesome with these concepts, and leave me really worried about how this Metaverse is going to turn out.

Their concepts, based on the preceding idea that "real-life application of law and jurisdiction is limited," then begin to be transcended like this:

o Code-as-law works very well. In fact, we find it works absolutely stellar. Why have "no" votes on a voting mechanism? That just causes negativity and the inability to make positive proposals that administrators can actually work with to change things. It's much better to enable people to do the work of making positive proposals, even 100 different ones all amounting to the same thing, and tell them they have to get 500 votes or we won't pay attention to them.

o All truth resides on our servers. We capture every chat, animation, movement, transaction, behaviour. ALL of it has copies that reside with us. We might or might not dump some or all of this; we're not telling, however. You sign away your rights to privacy with us; and we're deliberately vague about what third-party sites attached to us do with the aggregated and meta-tagged information that they scrape off your avatar and his movements and transactions. Given that all truth resides on our servers, and we don't recognize any chatlogs you gather because a) we forbid the publication on our forums of chat logs and b) you could always be editing and faking them on your side, including outside the SL application, we have no need for adversarial defense, segregation of witnesses, even concepts like facing your accusers. We already know what happened in every single griefing incident, you can't provide any alternative version of this reality because we see everything, so give it up.

o Our abuse reporting system may be overwhelmed, backed up, or dependent on an informers' network of residents willing to report on their fellow residents, rather than our own discretionary surveillance (though that is used, too) but we have the best, most impartial, most wise people administering it. They are fair and just. They shouldn't be second-guessed because a) they have truth on their side as all truth is server-side and b) they are just good, hard-working dedicated and wise and just people in general. You are a troll and even a fucktard for suggesting otherwise. In fact, you must have problems with authority, and be suffering from "control" issues if you can't accept that we are the bestest, wisest, most fair people -- even though of course, we can't tell you a) what percentage of appeals to our decisions are honoured and thereby we admit error or b) just what it is we are really doing with all these cases, only some of which are published on the police blotter and only some of which are resolved by action when "resolved".

o We do so have juries in our system, and your claims that juries and other notions of a fair trial are absent from Second Life are false. Why, when someone is facing a permaban, we have a system where the bare skeletal facts of the case are sent out at random to jurors who then recommend whether a person should be permabanned. Why, sometimes we even heed them. If the names of the people, the precise details of the offenses, and any circumstantial or extenuating or adversarial information is available, why, that's not relevant because a) all truth resides on our servers and b) we have very good and wise pepole and c) we can't interfere with people's privacy and reveal the details of disciplinary actions against them -- although of course, for us, privacy is a very arbitrary thing, because we don't mind if third-party sites scrape data about interactions and proximity and publicize it using our software and LSL calls.

 

o Code-as-law in fact is a great thing. The meat-world, with its democracies and its representational governments and such, is highly flawed. Why, people who get elected are often only the people with the most connections, the best family or corporate ties, the most money, the most ability to get on TV. They aren't really democratic. And institutions like the Congress or the Parliament are corrupt, and are responsible even for allowing unjust wars to be waged on other countries and for graft and pork-barrelling to abound. Therefore, our system that enables masses of people to pull levers, even in a more limited situation where they can't vote "no," is better, because there isn't the ability to corrupt it in the same way. Of course, our system is programmed by an elite task force of programmers, aided by only those residents we like and respect because they have the knowledge/experience levels we can respect, but that's not elitism, that's just excellence, and those of mediocre skills or lesser intelligence aren't able to appreciate that.

o Yes, our platform crashes, our system is buggy, but hey, we work hard and we have dedicated people. What have YOU done lately besides bitch? And furthermore, we recognize internally that our systems are coded simulations or emulations, and we understand far better than you do their limitations, so you really need to cut us some slack and give us more credit for understanding the limits of our Godheadedness here; we know better than you. So shut up.

Probably few people noticed this article in an industry publication called Computer Power User, Q&A With Philip Rosedale.  It meanders along with the usual wow, gee-whiz talk about virtual worlds. Philip, who has a B.S. in Physics, talks about the difference between trying to manipulate the physical world with its atoms and its barriers and its obstacles like mill-work and such, then he moves on to talk about why Second Life is so compelling because of the ease of manipulation and simulation.

Except, underlying this whole conversation is a realization that I'm having about his center of gravity, which I feel is so different than my own and many other people's: unlike the real world, of accident, of God, of Nature, of other people, of randomness and a certain diversity of agents, if you will, which you might or might not be able to appeal to (your landlord, your Congressman, God), the world of Second Life is all controlled by only one thing: the code. That is, it all takes place on servers run by software and programmed by...those most excellent people. So, unlike real life, with its divergency of actors and agents and higher instances of appeal, in Second Life, there's only the one group of agents and the one code -- and then, of course, that special grouplet of friends allowed to violate the rule set for everyone else about reverse-engineering, called "libsecondlife".

Philip at first seems to give a nod to a rule-of-law concept that would be borrowed in its beauty from meat-world -- that the rule of law means that states and people must subject themselves to a higher law, that the state is not above the law, that people cannot be above the law. He does that by implying that the code, once written and executed, is above him or anybody, it has a life of its own.

But...unlike God or Congress or my landlord in RL, all RL powers that have either their own autonomy, or the collectively-granted autonomy of either a political process or a lease, and the ability, in one way or another, to be appealed against, at least in theory, the programmers in a thing like Second Life are not to be appealed against -- and they're only one set of them. They know best. Their code is law, after all. As we know from our first set of principles, and our second reviewed here, they are the bestest, brightest, and most sensitive and wise and talented people.

On top of this hubris and excess comes another common premise seen not only in SL but other game settings -- that game gods, game devs, programmers, are Experts in Everything. They're Experts in Everything because all those other fields in which those other people in the humanities, and not the sciences, were acknowledged experts in, like literature or anthropology or sociology or economics or psychology or philosophy, are all things that, willy nilly, have to be put into code and simulated for a place like Second Life. Everything has to be reduced to a program. So economics, justice, philosophy -- these are all 01010101 routines, a yes/no, a switch, a program, a code. And that's why it's better to let those fields be run by the engineers/scientists/computer nerds who have to reduce those other fields to code -- because they know best. They're the coders. They know how it has to be done. And you are stupid.

If you point out that their LindEx economic system, or their land auction, or their abuse-reporting system and banning system is poor, a bad simulation, a broken simulation, not working to serve the public, they bristle, and get shirty. Why? Because not only are they wise and good and doing the best they can, your assumptions -- that meat world is better -- are belied by the fact that now you spend all your leisure hours with them. They're coding, doing the best they can, to make a virtual world. This is how it has to work, and there are objective reasons for that, and you as a non-coder can't understand that. Meat world was flawed anyway, with its corrupt and its arrogant politicians. If you point out that they emulate much of the same behaviour they claim to have departed from, well, you're a politician, too.

It's understood that the platform might not be the best; perhaps the engines, or the open source software used in it; or this model or that model might not be the best, but *it's the worst except all the others,* like meat-world democracy, and P.S. see above premises: the programmers are the wisest, bestest, kindest and most well-meaning people ever  found in the history of the world to undertake a revolutionary transformation like this so, shut up, you are a feeb and a chode.

If you want to understand this better, read, and re-read this fascinating article. Philip will explain that he's not a gamer. He's a physicist who wanted something that would help him realize the visions for his inventions faster, and more manipulable.

From there, he made this leap:

I always wanted to be able to make things and as a creative person kind of externalize my thoughts in a way that was more facile. I imagined myself sort of standing in the darkness and bringing things into existence around me as a way of building. And I couldn’t do that in the real world. I can think of cool gadgets way faster than I can build them with my hands. We’ve all had that feeling. So I wanted a place where you could just do that, where you could just take your brain and literally manipulate the world around you. And moreover, I always felt deeply that if you allowed a lot of people to do that together, you would get something that was kind of where we all want the world to go.

Oh? We do? We all want the world to go *that way*? Surely not. And that's the problem at the heart of this world that starts as one man's vision to make a playspace for inventions to thrive and live, and a playspace to collaborate with other people also skilled at inventing and making inventions thrive and life -- they have their beliefs, their ideologies, about which inventions are cool, about which people are the best to collaborate -- they have their subjective thoughts about lots of things, really. And they don't necessarily dovetail with any of ours. Yet we have a right to be their, too, in that space and even object: no, the world can't go this way, we don't like it - it's not working!

So where is the legal nihilism, you ask? I'm finding in talking to people in SL even quite educated and experienced that the concept of "rule of law" are poorly understood. Philip recognizes that the law of physics, and the code-as-law created in conformity to them, are higher than himself. And yet...in doing so, he conceives of himself as a marbled statue of a Greek God. He imbues himself with certain imaginary powers. He and his fellow coders are, after all, in god-like fashion, arbitrarily, and sometimes whimsically, controlling this code, making decisions about it, making decisions about people's lives (privacy or no privacy, push or no push) and making them subjectively, outside the coding process itself per se, but in a kind of hive-mind collective tribal process that he has only hinted about with things like his Tao of Linden, or which you can read about (in my case, with mounting horror), in things like this little-noticed discussion of the Love Machine and the software used to govern it.

"PR: What are the physical laws of the Internet? They are not human laws. We have observed that laws like ‘gambling is illegal’ are not meaningful on the Internet. Law is not broadly meaningful on the Internet. So what is the law, then, of the Internet? It’s HTTP. What you can do with that protocol, say SSL extensions, that’s the law, the physical law. Can you securely communicate over the Internet? Yes. So the law is that you can do that. It’s a capability, just like physics. Physics says that you can use electromagnetic radiation to send signals at a distance. Well, the fact that there’s a broadly accepted standard called SSL means that you can basically send cryptographically secure information over a long distance across a network. The code is the law, and the code is God. So people always say, ‘Are you guys gods?’ What I always say to that is, ‘no, but the code is.’ The most broadly accepted versions of the protocol are the physical laws and then by extension, depending on how religious you want to be, they are what we think of as God. So if you were to draw it to mythology, I think the Second World authors are most like the Greek and Roman gods. We’re imperfect. We sometimes disagree. Maybe very rarely we actually fight. And we have certain specializations. There’s a guy here named Andrew who was the first employee, and he’s like the god of weather because he’s a physicist and everybody knows that he worked on the fluid-dynamic systems that are behind the weather. So if anybody is going to twiddle around with the code, like if you want the code to change, if you want the character of physical law to change around how the wind blows, you should talk to Andrew because in a decentralized development environment Andrew might take care of you if you want something to change.

CPU: If I pray to him and sacrifice.

     PR: Yeah, you pray to Andrew, and Andrew changes the weather. So anyway, if I was to do another avatar, I’d be like marble, like one of the Michelangelo slaves or something. I would appropriately fit the concept of an imperfect but inherently human and well-meaning—hopefully, on a good  day—Greek god."

You would never know it from talking to Lindens, of course, who are only drinking one colour of Kool-Aid on this concept, but the idea promulgated by Lawrence Lessig that "on the Internet, code is law" is a controversial idea, and one with many debates all around it from the right and left. On the left, more radical powers inject "critical Marxist thought" blah blah and find ways of justifying "worms against nukes" and such. On the right, net-nanny aspirations and prudishness and religious zealotry, or the desire for heavy political control, introduce various filters, things like the Russian SORM, and all the rest. These are the sorts of things that the Electronic Frontier Foundation addresses.

The Lindens have been powerfully influenced by Lawrence Lessig. He's the one credited with convincing them to give their residents IP so that they could copyright, sell, and make a fortune on their wares.

But...their revolutionary zeal around this concept won't go so far as *really* protecting copyright, as anybody struggling to get answers about DMCA takedown notices or allegations of copyright theft knows. Furthermore, while wishing to adopt Lessig's radical, Marxist-type notions of "all property is theft," etc (take away old dead guy's property and give it to live brown boys, etc.) they don't then insist that the first generation of people who benefit from this concept of the liberated property of a corporation and the liberal understanding of mash-ups swiped from the Internet itself anyway in the form of textures and animations then extend it to the next generation with a robust first-sale concept (hence the screaming about girls who sell big content creator's beds at yardsales without clearance from them).

You'd never know it, of course, from the milieu created around Second Life by its makers, with the hyping through the Hamlet nee Linden Au PR machine of Creative Commons ideology, etc. that there is even a debate around any of these "received wisdoms" (i.e. that code is law; that software governs everything and every property relation; that we are all beholden to game gods).

But there is, in articles easily found like this one, "Cyberspace Self-Governance: A Skeptical View from Liberal Democratic Theory by Neil Weinstock Netanel on the Harvard Law School servers:

Netanel takes on John Perry Barlow's manifesto (Barlow is among the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation):

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
- John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Reading such heartfelt comments from the drum-circle tribalists these days is, well, underwhelming as I fly around combatting griefers and listening to tentants rage at me because I'm not doing "enough" to combat the griefers.

I recently invited John Pery Barlow to come and speak or at least hang out in Second Life, because I feel if you're going to have ideologies promulgated like that on the Internet about the glories of cyberspace, you need to come and eat the dogfood and see the results of your handiwork. No fair hiding on the conference circuit -- come and see what it's like, living on the Mainland.

Netanel takes on this cyber-libertarian claim, which might have been drunk with their mother's milk by every single person at Linden Lab:

"The first component, which I will call the claim of liberal perfection, views cyberspace norm creation as the paradigm of liberal rule. It contends that cyberspace self-governance more fully embodies the liberal democratic goals of individual liberty, popular sovereignty, and the consent of the governed than does the "top-down" administration of even the most democratic nation-states.   n20 Cyberians view territorial representative government as a fundamentally flawed attempt to implement liberal democratic ideals. Representative democracy might be the best we can achieve in "real space," where collective action, information, negotiation, and mobility costs make unmediated forms of governance highly impractical. But, cyberians posit, the global networks of digital communication and data storage that underlie cyberspace create unprecedented possibilities to drastically reduce those costs. They offer a wealth of information, instantaneous and inexpensive mass communication, and a seemingly infinite choice of virtual communities, discussion groups, and rule regimes. As a result, cyberians claim, cyberspace not only constitutes a jurisdiction apart from territorial nation-states; it is also a fundamentally more liberal and democratic one.

They run their company with this ardent and even zealous belief; they run the world with this same set of beliefs, often flying in the face of the reality of the brokenness of the ideology. It's good to see a Harvard law professor then take them on (I'd highly recommend cutting and pasting this Internet HTML page with no white margins into an ordinary Word document to make it more readable):

"Cyberpopulism fails to provide a workable mechanism for protecting the liberties of minorities and dissenters. And in attempting to remedy this failing, cyberpopulism moves towards an equally unworkable neoliberal regime of unanimous consent and dissenter exit."

Bingo! Sound familiar, eh? This essay is rich with thoughtful and well-reasoned argumentation against every silly thing you've ever felt uncomfortable about foisted on you in Second Life -- the concept of "the community wants it" or "we are the best and fairest resmods" or "if you don't like it, leave".

There plenty of thoughtful people who consistently argue against the "code as law" extremism implicit in Philip Rosedale's thinking and explicit in the world he has created. They aren't horrible Bushies or neo-cons or anything of the sort, either; they just aren't revolutionary zealots. Volokh has comments on his blog and James Grimmelman is referenced, who gave an interesting talk at SOP III last year -- yet in these very noisy and confusing big conferences with game executives, big business, corporate lawyers, and all manner of things in between, it's hard to hear whether this debate is really being had (although in part, last year, the "Gr8 Deb8" was all about that, i.e. can meat-world law of governments and countries govern this fabulous cool thing called cyberspace and the Metaverse.

" If so, we need to take a cold, hard look at some of the incongruities and limitations of private ordering. An untrammeled cyberspace would ultimately be inimical to liberal democratic principles. It would free majorities to trample upon minorities and would serve as a breeding ground for invidious status discrimination, narrowcasting and mainstreaming content selection, systematic invasions of privacy, and gross inequalities in the distribution of basic requisites for netizenship and citizenship in the information age," concludes Weinstock.

Ultimately -- and I'm going to work on all the interstices needed here! -- I feel that code-as-law is about legal nihilism. It is like the old adage that martial law is to law as martial music is to music.  Code-as-law has lurking behind it the discretionary and arbitrary will or whim of groups of elite programmers unaccountable to any higher law or institution, with absolutely, unshakeable belief not only in themselves as having all the perspective they need to do anything, but that they are Experts in Everything. They hide behind the concept of the Metaverse as needing to be a vast open playspace for people from all different countries to quietly execute the code they think needs to be executed by the lights of their internal, sectarian, and often revolutionary and zealous beliefs. They are unwilling to subject themselves to any higher law or higher power; that contains the seeds of their nihilism.

I could add as a footnote that the term "legal nihilism" is very well understood in Soviet studies precisely because people have to deal with the after-effects of societies destroyed by revolutionary justice that demolished legal systems, lawyers, judges, courtes, etc. and substituted them with terror and the misuse of the law and prisons to punish political dissent and maintain executive power. So that's why thinkers tend to use this term to try to capture the problem of remaking these societies so damaged by the undermining of the rule of law and people's belief in law. "The law is a bridle; it can be turned any which way," is a Russian saying; "Give me the man, and I'll find the case against him," was the adage of Stalin's prosecutor, Vyshinsky." In discounting and repudiating the old meat-world's law and legal systems and institutions like parliaments, the code-as-law crowd put in its place a law that is merely at the behest of unaccountable and arbitrary coders, to which there is no recourse.

Comments

[Kyrah Abattoir]

you seems to confuse the license granted to you to use a software (secondlife object, AKA: licensed software) and the SUV rusting in your backyard (a pile of scrap metal).

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't drive SUVs, Kyrah; they're suburban attack vehicles, they are dangerous killers, and they pollute the environment. In fact, I don't have a car, I live in the city and take the busy? But that wouldn't stop you from ascribing to me all the evils you imagine of all "red-neck Americans, eh?"

And yes, I believe if I buy into a world with tier that I'm a partner in a business, using a product on an equal basis with others, deserving of some basic respect and some basic concepts of the rule of law in a civil society.

I become perplexed when I find that there are, instead game gods and and a virulent little clique of programmers who believe that "code is law"...just because they say so lol. Not!

[Kyrah Abattoir]

code is law, as long as you can't bend it, and since YOU obviously can't bend it , it will stay law of the little virtual world we all share. Though whenyou know more you can push the envellope a bit, but it remain a hard wall that can't be broken.

what make you think code isn't law?

[Prokofy Neva]

Because it's not? It's a manufactured thing, made by people. It's not carved in stone by God. It can be changed. By those people. And by other people who urge them to change it because it's the right thing to do.

If this is opaque to you, go back to making spandex.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

yes but SL is just a bunch of rules and logical constrains really, a simulation of RL, you can't substract yourself to gravity in RL isn't it?
and in SL can you buy a piece of land without paying the price written over it? no.

and i am not making spandex fucking bitch.

if it's opaque to you go back to your little "ravenglass sim city"

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Prokofy, as time goes on, your articles just keep becoming better and better; one of these days you should split your blog in two, one for "Essays on the Metaverse", under which this particular article would be at the top.

I must admit that I haven't kept up (yet) with all the references in your article, but I will, I will... But just by pointing us to those references, nobody can accuse you of having an one-sided opinion based on your opinion only. Instead, this essay becomes a summary of several opinions, rewritten through your own style. To rebutt and debunk your article means rebutting and debunking each and every one of the references. I wonder if anyone is really up to it — or even has the background to do it.

Not knowing what *all* Lindens think — but just using a smoked window to Linden thought through people allegedly closed to them — I was recently shocked by the comments of someone who told me (in a very nice way) that I should stop complaining, or else Linden Lab would remove any support on projects I might be involved in. This, naturally, came as a shock. My first reaction was obviously one of rejection; surely my friend was joking? The second reaction was naturally to stop being so naive: naturally, as a company, LL might like constructive criticism, but not in public. Do it publicly and they'll stop listening to you.

From the perspective of a RL software house, this is something that is understandable. However, LL has an unsolved issue that they have a tremendous difficulty in dealing with: how much should they interfere?

One would expect that any "benevolent dictatorship" would do much more for the residents than what LL does in-world. After all, where is any pretense of a justice system? What are LL's ethical and moral codes of conduct, and how will those be applied to their world? What kinds of social and economic transactions do they oversee, encourage, or protect? What individual rights, as "citizens of the Metaverse" do we have, and how can we get protection of those rights?

The answer is simply that LL doesn't care; or, if they do care indeed (some at least do, and are quite clear about it), they can't/won't do anything about it.

The alternative, then, seems to be simply anarchy (or, more reasonably, some form of capitalist libertarianism, since we have a working economy after all — a place where "agreement is law", and there is nothing else but that). But this is also not true. For that to happen, LL would need to provide two things:
- total detachment from RL laws (more on that later), so that people would be able to enforce their own laws if they wished;
- selective blocking of parts of the grid; thus, the metaverse would become (once again) several private islands (growing from 1 to several contiguous sims, of course) without any sort of interconnection. Or even communication (or else you'd get griefers in!)

Now the first part is highly unlikely to ever happen. As a Californian company, they will remain bound to Californian law. Which means that sooner or later they have to deal with issues like gambling and prostitution inside SL; they need to address hate speech; they have to keep minors out; they have to enforce DMCA; and so on.

So at the very minimum, even if they probably would like not to address *any* of those issues, they can't escape RL laws, no matter how they try. Thus the ToS becomes more cunning over the time, like clearly stating that the "Linden dollar" has no value (while the Linden dollar has value because people — half a million people, perhaps — give value to it. It is no more an "artificial currency" as, say, the Euro, or its predecessor teh ECU: things are valuable because people attribute value to them. And writing bold statements to the contrary — "if you accept ToS, you have to accept that the L$ is not worth anything" — is simply a smokescreen for lawyers).

I would say that LL will always have to have minimal interference on the grid, whether they like it or not.

The second point is exactly the one referred by you as "code as law". If they wish to give people the opportunity of doing things as they like, and waive all responsability of it, it means — coding things. It means being able to block people out of participation. It means that people inside their "domains" (let's not call them "countries" for now) will need access to all possible tools to deal with things with their own hands — *without* ever needing to ask anything from the Lindens. In a way, this is what is currently happening with the private islands and the new group tools due next Wednesday: "code as law" empowering people, more and more.

At some point, I think, this dual nature of LL will have to break apart. They simply will be unable to "enforce law through code" more and more — to allow people to take matters in their own hands, and relieve LL of their duties — and remain compliant with Californian law. One of two things will happen. As SL grows — although not as much as most would like; at this point, we should be having over 10-20 million users, like any decent-sized "social Web" environment like Flickr, YouTube, Friendster, or something like that, and not the puny 250,000 "regular users" — the more unmanageable things will become. For instance, "age play" vs. paedophilia is something impossible to determine at the in-world level; if the police force gets a complain, they will have to have access to RL data which only LL can provide. And sooner or later a court decision will force LL to either actively remove child porn and disallow "age play" (since you cannot dissociate it from paedophilia in a virtual world), no matter what LL thinks about it. People are now giving iRL interviews on how the LindeX can be used so well for terrorists or the mafia to launder their money — which is complete BS (there are far more efficient ways to doing so) but the public *believes* these stories (they believe anything they watch on the news anyway), and thus will ask their local authorities to investigate. Again, LL will need to address those complains as well.

Put in other words: LL cannot exist, by itself, in a legal vacuum, and thus, their product, Second Life, cannot exist either.

(The only alternative would be a total decentralisation of LL into several different countries with different laws; thus, say, keeping the PG areas in their Californian co-location facilities, and pushing the Mature areas — always the ones with more legal problems — into, say, a co-location facility in Amsterdam :) But the legal nightmare would be unmanageable...)

The alternative, of course, is to provide "more code" and let people forge their own laws as they like, so far as they sign a new ToS where LL simply does not claim any responsability on what people do with their technology. After all, after 9/11, when terrorists claimed to have learned to pilot airplanes using Microsoft Flight Simulator, Microsoft was not charged for "providing tools for terrorists" — all they needed to claim is that MFS is simply a game, and that the license agreement of that software clearly states that Microsoft has no responsability if their tools are used for illegitimate purposes. Also, they (MS) are not to be blamed if people freely exchange very detailed maps on the Internet, which can then be used in MFS for providing "airplane pilot training" for terrorists...

Being a person of a moderate view on everything, I don't think that this is an either/or case. LL must, despite perhaps their own will, comply with RL law to an extent, and this means "interference" with their virtual world. On the other hand, "code as law" will provide users with their own means of deciding what they want to do — on their own private estates. I imagine that in the not-so-very-distant future you will have LL effectively owning a bit of the virtual world — their mainland — where the Community Standards will apply. And they will lease private islands without CS (most likely operating from other countries), where people can do whatever they want — but cannot expect any "Linden protection", no matter how crude and unfair this "Linden protection" is these days.

I still think that the "natural evolution" of Second Life is not a Linden-controlled democratic land, where the running of the (main)land is defined by democratic Linden-oriented institutions and a legal system run by Linden Lab and their transparently elected/appointed judges. This is clearly not LL's own views — they're too far to the left to believe in any of those ideas — although it could become a possibility on the "Linden Estate", or what we call the "mainland". Instead, the "natural evolution" is the fragmentation of the virtual country in several communities, each under its own "law system" (even if the "law system" is totalitarian/anarchistic — people will quickly find out what happens to their utopias). Under this model, even abuse reports would not exist — people would have no "protection" from LL at all. Their reply would be laconic: "The CS only applies to the Linden Estate; if you move elsewhere, it's up to the people living there to enforce their own rules".

People (like myself!) usually compares Second Life as the next-generation 3D WWW. There is a reason for it. If Flickr displays child porn (something that "code as law" will never catch!), the FBI will arrest Flickr's owners — but not the Apache Foundation (which provided the web server where Flickr's applications run) or Microsoft (which provided the Web browser). Only Flickr is responsible for enforcing the applicable state law on the content of its users.

This is what I think that ultimately LL will need to address: having the whole mainland PG, and strictly enforced, not unlike what happens on the Teen Grid. "Enforced" in this case means "compliant with RL law" and assuming responsbaility for the kind of content there. And leave the rest (the private estates, which outnumber the mainland these days anyway) in the hands of the people owning it — forfeiting responsability over those areas, and relying on the estate owners to comply with their own (RL) legal systems. And people would be free to choose where they would want to live (virtually). The market would show which of those utopias would survive, and which wouldn't.

But this means a radical departure from the current philosophy of Linden Lab. Some tell me that they still believe in this "better world" and are reluctant to interfere more — which would be the consequence of going towards more responsability. Others tell me that they wish to become less and less involved in Second Life, the virtual world, and more and more in Second Life, the platform for *others* to develop the virtual world. What ultimately they will choose will change what we think of "Second Life" totally.

I don't expect that to change in the next 18 months, though. And then we'll see what happens.

[Prokofy Neva]

Gwyn,

I can't really divide my blog up into sections and essays, it's just not on now, and while I realize it's long and dense, it's frankly no more long and dense than sitting and trying to read and make sense of the long scroll of feed coming off Tao Takashi's World of SL.

I find it very troubling that you'd be given even a veiled threat like that. It feels like some Lindens, one would like to think it's only "rogue Lindens," i.e. not with central command, are trying to rattle your cage, as they did with Cristiano and as they have done with me or anybody who is critical. And that's wrong. They shouldn't be doing that. And I find that often it's their "friends," who are the more thuggish, that is, like Hiro Pendragon was when he thuggishly threatened me with being banned because I openly asked about Ben Linden being Buhbuhcuh, and getting free airtime on General for his projects -- and look how that ended -- Buhbuhcuh outs himself, there's no story, nothing to see here, move along, and the world turns on its axis. So threats like that are empty.

I don't see how you could possibly be viewed as "critical" anyway, Gwyn -- are you just trying to pump up your street cred with this story??? -- because you always say what the Lindens are going to do five minutes before they say it, you're applauding the forums closing and all the rest.

The moral of the story, of course is: don't depend on them. But of course, we all do. Just try to depend less.

You've been a bit hard on their Love Machine stuff, but my God, surely they expect that NOBODY is going to buy that stuff, it's just wacky, they're way out in left field with that stuff and they have to eat that if they really believe in it. They have to prove people are wrong about it by really achieving something, not by silencing the guffaws about it.

And that's what might be happening -- as they get under more pressure to produce, if they can't produce, like any entity in power under pressure, they will be moved to lie, prevaricate, cover up, and disappear people.

And the people they are disappearing now are the forums posters. I think someone summed it up to me today very well, watching the SLCC video and being rather sickened by it:

" the whole thing is so the FIC and LL can carry on without being watched".

And that's about the size of it.

Now, you think that the Lindens will spawn some international entity, that will be John Perry Barlow's dream at Davos (http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html)
(geez, that's definitely NOT working out JPB, I wish you'd come a take a look at how your dream is doing in SL!).

Then they'll still have their company or 501-c-3 or whatever in California but not worry about the people piled on their servers any more than, say, tripod worries about the people piled on their servers. Well, yes, that's quite possible, I suppose, and yes, I don't think they can keep Second Life, the "largest established/permanent floating/crap game in the multiverse" going forever in such a hands-on manner any more than Nathan Detroit could!

I wouldn't give too much credence to the idea that local people reading something about terrorists laundering money will urge local authorities to "do something". In fact, a marvelous plan to really snarl up the terrorists of the world for a good bit would be to lure them into Second Life and have them work the micropayments on something like mainland rentals for a bit, then try to cash out their gains through the Lindex, then wait for their PayPal credits to arrive. They'll be driven mad.

What's more likely is that congressional committees or campaigns related to elections in a year will decide to harp on something like BDSM or ageplay or some such scandal related to what someone uses SL for related to a campaign, or possibly business supporting a campaign.

The essense of what you're saying about group tools and the islands is that -- the Lindens are going to cut everybody adrift, wash their hands of the problems, and then not look back, like Ruth, lest they turn into a pillar of salt.

I have to say, most late nights, when I look on the list, and I see only two young Lindens coping with a population of 9000 people, at least 10 percent of whom are actively griefing, it's madness, and I feel like the inmates are running the asylum (I can only hope some invisible Lindens are also out there too). Last night I saw a furious demonstration against ageplay that crashed a sim twice.

I can't help looking at what JPB wrote again and again, and how much it applies to the "masters of the metaverse too," "Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here."

But...they did put in concepts of property and identity and movement, Gwyn, and they borrowed them from meatworld and didn't say "this is just temporary scaffolding, then we will kick it out".

Of course they are in no position to run a democracy, a government, or a justice system. Yet, they have the trappings of one, as I keep saying, and pretentions to absolute power with their code-as-law concept. So either they have to make good on that, or let it go.

Now, making good on it means outsourcing the social relations and the justice. Just like governments hire private police forces to handle the really hard stuff like sorting through which foreigners to rendition, they may do something like that, bringing in the Dyncorps of Cyberspace, or even give a nod to some resident-based private police like Green Lantern. So far, they're holding the line on that, swiftly punishing those who try to scare other residents by saying they are police sanctioned by Linden. But all it takes for them to change this is just to like somebody, the way they like the FIC people, for them to "get on the same page," for them to "get in the IRC" channel. They don't have a *policy* about police; they have only their gut feelings, and gut feelings can change; guts can get used to stomaching things.

Re: >still think that the "natural evolution" of Second Life is not a Linden-controlled democratic land, where the running of the (main)land is defined by democratic Linden-oriented institutions and a legal system run by Linden Lab and their transparently elected/appointed judges. This is clearly not LL's own views — they're too far to the left to believe in any of those ideas — although it could become a possibility on the "Linden Estate", or what we call the "mainland".

I don't think the Lindens will give up the concept of a drop-down TOS and CS that they attempt to ever more elaborately create -- for awhile anyway. They've invested too much into it and it is too much the culture of not only the MMORPGs but the Internet and its service sites as a whole. Nobody reads those TOS, but they're their to cover their ass.

However, you're right that they aren't interested in running and ensuring democracy. They want the group tools to do that for them -- code-as-law. They just are waiting to see -- how bad will the disputes get? They are cooking up a covenants system -- but consciously not having a disputes resolution in place -- they simply aren't going to think about what it means to accept $1500 US for a sim and set-up from a person, but have that person lose his $1500 investment because some furry looks at him crosseyed and expels him from the group and bans him from the sim he paid for. Sound familiar? What WILL the Lindens do??? WHOSE ownership will they honour? We know, already. When Hank Ramos and Adam Zaius have a fight over this and that and land gets swiped from the group -- the Lindens swoop in and take the group and boot Hank. When Anshe and Prok have a fight within a group -- they Lindens allow Anshe, the group founder to remove Prok but do nothing when another officer invites me in. That is -- they try to take the most literalist, passive way out.

I think they will go on trying to make young kids, especially telecommuters, and resident community leaders bearing the brunt of community service, to handle this load for them.

When the group tools come in, everyone will be able to ban people from their land, even in a rental. So all rentals customers will have no need to go to Lindens. With ban, access-only, and push turned off, there's only the issue of rezzing the prims out -- but I think they are probably working on that idea of whiting out all the disliked people and prims from the world next.

If people you've banned or muted can't rez prims on your land, if they are rendered invisible, they can't grief. So unless they think up some really new clever griefing technique, there will be nothing to do, and they'll either swim upstream in the hard spawn to becoming content creators, or leave Second Life.

Of course, on the way there we might see a growth of new griefing behaviours like sending the $1, or sending the group joins -- these are the things that increased hugely in The Sims Online as bad behaviours when EA.com got the parcel ban/rogue roomie destruction problems in hand. I remember nights in TSO batting off literally thousands of group invites and dollar pays -- and that will be the new frontier for asswipes in SL. Then a patch will make it so group invites are timed and can't be spammed, or that payments can't spam or whatever, in fact I hope they're already thinking of this now.

But...they have no incentive. Because, even with griefing, people keep joining and they suffer least from it on private islands, where the Lindens earn the most money, so it's all good.

What I don't like to see happening now is the tremendous defensiveness, secretiveness, and bristling -- or silence and muting -- that we're getting from some Lindens on this whole discussion. They simply are refusing to have it. The treatment Blue Linden gave to me for raising very normal and natural questions about why we can't have a jury of our peers and face our accusers in their final permabanning procedure is very indicative. Well sure, go ahead and write me off as merely being extreme or abrasive or a conspiracy theorist - but the fact is other people, with far milder dispositions and presentations than me, got no better answers and got nowhere, either.

You can say, oh, well it's a software company, they can execute people at dawn if they want, they're not bound by the rule of law broadly understood. But...why not? And what does it cost them to do the right thing? How many people do they permaban such as to constitute so much work? What could it cost to assemble people inworld to actually talk to someone facing the loss of their Second Life permanently? Shouldn't people get more than a summary expulsion with a few anonymous avatars given only a cursory description of their crime?

And the reason why they don't do this, I suspect, isn't because it's time-costly or involves losing face or means they'd have to reverse a decision, but because it would remove them of the executive authority to summarily execute without the procedure.

That is, I think they already just delete people and ban them without any due process whatsoever. They can do that because the people have become dehumanized for them. And frankly, that's not hard to understand and concede them, if people named Sperm Rush and Virus Field, possibly only the alts of others banned, come in the world and on day one, land in a stranger's house and rez out giant self replicating turds and penises and scream like hyenas. Those aren't people; they're monsters. So why give them a 'process' -- a deletion without notice might be just the thing -- and frankly the caseload of such people now is probably so great, that they simply can't keep up unless they make summary decisions like this.

But...that sort of dehumanizing and justification of removing even their shabby inadequate due process is a slippery slope. It begins by removing people everyone can perceive as criminals not worthy of a second life; it ends by removing outspoke intellectuals without whom a second life world seems wrong, even unimaginable.

I just don't like the way they are going about this -- not discussing it, hiding from people wishing to discuss it, and then getting angry at their critics. It's not good.

I can see now that whatever their rhetoric or even genuine aspirations at the beginning, the Lindens have abandoned their dream of an ideal world where their liberal values would find root and articulation. The reality is that their weak liberalism created a soil of licentiousness that led to the opposite of what they hoped -- hardcore lifestyles that give them bad press; feuding and fuming on the forums; rampant griefing; even RL type denial-of-service crime.

I still think they don't have to invest a lot of time or effort or political capital in just encouraging residents to make their own justice and dispute resolution system, and allow them to compete naturally without interfering in them, but still to create an Ombudsman Linden, or a panel of Linden/residents with some credibility and rotation, who can resolve the meta disputes after they've been hashed inworld.

People always fear that such offices will be overrun or expectations will be too high; yet if they are rigorous about demands that all local remedies be exhausted, if they simply insist that people must learn how to make their own cases adequately (that's always the biggest problems with such institutions -- people can't make their own complaints right), then they have some chance of coping.

Why is that worth bothering? Because the Metaverse itself will have senates or ombudsmen or some kind of governance some day, people aren't going to just be in their groovy hive mind hitting levers on scripted objects that a few get to run and analyze and manipulate. People will not stand for it. John Perry Barlow didn't stand for it in real life; I hope to God he won't stand for it in simulated life, either. And there's no reason why the Lindens shouldn't be the progressives on justices, instead of the reactionaries. It's within their powers and capabilities as people.

>Instead, the "natural evolution" is the fragmentation of the virtual country in several communities, each under its own "law system" (even if the "law system" is totalitarian/anarchistic — people will quickly find out what happens to their utopias). Under this model, even abuse reports would not exist — people would have no "protection" from LL at all. Their reply would be laconic: "The CS only applies to the Linden Estate; if you move elsewhere, it's up to the people living there to enforce their own rules".

Yes, we saw the seeds of this when the Gorean master urged the Lindens to stop listening to TOS complaints coming from his slaves -- so they'd have no recourse. He wanted all complaints coming out of his sims to be bounced back to him -- I can only say "ugh" to that idea. Yet Daniel Linden loved it -- because he wants "local law and custom" to prevail like he's Mr. State's Rights in a federalist papers' America.

Except..local custom will involve stifling the cries of slaves actually abused real-life style by this controversial lifestyle...

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

Prokofy, for once, I don't have any comments on your post — I subscribe it in its entirety. The difference in my attitude, I guess, is that I'm not actively "pushing" for LL's change of attitude, but rather passively accepting what they'll throw next on us, because I saw how effective some things are — namely, not at all. The "telehub" lesson was my end to naivete in SL regarding LL's ideas for "their world".

BTW, I finished to read your link to Netanel's paper. It is most interesting, and I'll be passing it around. It should be required reading for all "direct cyber-democracy wannabes", even if they disagree with Netanel (which I don't).

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, I think Netanel's paper is a very good antidote to Beth Noveck's paper on groups and democracy.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "telehub lesson". If you mean that the Lindens hastily took a means of transportation out for purely ideological reasons, destroying businesses in their wake, to satisfy the demands of one minority class, mainly content-creators, then sure, that can be a good example of how Lindens a) don't pay attention to people after they do the "your world, your imagination" stuff and come back in and intervene in bad ways and b) even from the perspective of their interfering social engineering, do something stupid and counterproductive, because they could have put in p2p AND elected to keep telehubs just on those sims that they converted to infohubs -- duh. That way, when someone typed in the name of a sime like "Ross" or "Hyles" they would land not in the water at the 128/128 center, as they do now (or on Prokofy's floating deck in Ross attempting to mitigate that experience for people), but in the middle of a hub with news and information. That would have been easy to do because it would simply mean *leaving the telehubs in place*. As we know the squat ugly buildings were not relevant, and all that's needed to perform the function is a small green disk that in fact hundreds of private islands have. The fact that all the private islands got to keep their telehubs, enhancing their business, while all those 44 mainland sims got theirs destroyed, along with the surrounding business, is one of the real lessons of SL -- how the Better World concept breaks down to mean "better world just for me and my friends".

BUT what you'd have to concede is that the telehub debacle is also an example of successful citizen action. It's not touted as such by you and your leftist friends on the N-bergs, because the citizens doing the acting are middle-class store owners (not even the wealthy land barons so much as the next tier of mall owners who unwittingly bought telehub land in 2005, even as the smarter land barons like Anshe and Blue sold their hubs and moved to private islands because they saw how the wind was blowing).

Middle-class action by people trying to save their businesses is never as fun and groovy and impressive to all the ideologues of the left who love to write about citizens' action -- they'd rather that these citizens be leftist and be all about sticking it to the Man, refusing to pay prim taxes when the Man was trying to figure out how to pay for the damn thing when he had all these hippie squatter scripters on his servers. Or they'd rather it be about saving Darfur or children caught up in sex-trafficking in Thailand, somewhere far away from the pristine never-raining sims of Second Life.

But this middle-class activism was really important, too. For one, it showed how dialogue and negotiation with the all-powerful Lindens was just as successful as trying to mass-av protest and grind their servers to a halt.

Through a series of meetings with the top Lindens, the telehub mall and store owners, despite profound hatred and harassment from "the community" on the forums, persisted in demanding that the Lindens compensate them for their "eminent domain" takings of their telehub business. They insisted on either getting a buyback or they would sue under the "bait and switch" concept.

And they WON. The Linden gods came down off Olympus, had their lawyers look at the "bait and switch" issue (in the summer, they had sold telehub land set to bid at a higher price and higher value, though they knew full well they'd be retiring the telehub system in the fall).

They then proceeded to a) create a buyback system and did some buying back (though this system was imperfect and some people got to cheat) and b) create the infohub development program (though this system was imperfect and some people either didn't get a chance to participate or didn't get as much land/prims).

I think that's an amazing thing, given that the snarky tekkie default about Linden Lab in every debate is, "They're a software company and they get to do WTF they want and once you sign their TOS you're collared."

No, that's not true, and we've demonstrated it's not true, on these big stories of the prim tax revolt and the telehub mall owners revolt, and there are many other littler stories.

Ultimately, the Lindens are smart people, just like you and me, even though they've elected to play the role of game gods in this game : )

Therefore, I continue to believe that you can and should engage with them, not become passive and roll over when they do stupid/destructive things, and attempt to reason with them and meet with them. Their ability to climb down off Mount Olympus may diminish with time as there are more mortals and more game gods, but I naively persist in my dream for a Better World, too.