Done

Lately, more and more I've had a distinct feeling of being "done" with Second Life. You know how you might be in a relationship, and you've had lots of arguments and annoyances, and one morning you get up from the breakfast table and you say, "I'm done" and you walk out lol. It's like that, you just get tired of arguing and not being happy.

What would make me "done" with Second Life, is a topic I've been actively mentating for some days. Oh, it's not about "OMGODZORZ1111" and having a drama walk-out like a Torrid Midnight or something like that. Being "done" with Second Life isn't the same thing as leaving it or cancelling it. For me, I have my tenants to whom I remain very committed to helping have a SL -- perhaps a better one than mine!

No, I mean what makes you spend long hours doing all kinds of extra projects and ideas and innovations and experiments. That part. If Second Life is no longer intellectually compelling, why would you spend long hours on it, or even lose money on it? I've been willing to do that now for some 2.5 years, but I become less willing more and more. So I want to think out loud about what makes people get "done" with Second Life, and I think my reasons are probably rather different than most people's:

1. Invasion of Privacy. When I came to Second Life in Sept. 2004, I had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Of course as is well known, that was taken away from me against my will, by the Lindens doing nothing. That was a painful awakening, to find that they would not enforce their own TOS equally just because their pets were involved, and Pathfinder, IRC channeller and five minutes before that feted resident, was at the switchboard.

I found that because I didn't keep my finger on the abuse-report button -- I never filed them -- I couldn't enter their police state and have it work for me. So over and over and over again, I have people both outing my gender, often gleefully, as if they are just discovering "news", or serving up my private life details like my address and phone number to me on cards in the game along with threats, or taking my picture and performing obscene things with it, as SC just did at an alt orgy the other day (so much for Joshua Nightshade "apologizing" and removing the obscene pictures of my bust; he and the others merely did the same thing over again). Even a puppet is made of me and used to grief people -- as the Virginia Tech memorial was griefed, and people actually think that I would make an ugly puppet of my RL self and use it to grief people, it's nuts.

Invasion of privacy is what happens when you become famous, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. Most of the invasion of my privacy happens with outrageous malevolence, with gangs of junkyard dogs insisting that I forcibly behave as a female, or "show my tits" or whatever -- it's a disgrace. I'm also frequently told that I am a travesty to "real" transgenders who have suffered for their status or even had painful operations, therefore I'm a parvenu and a poseur. Those arguments are especially specious, coming from the GLBT police, who are more zealous about imposing conformity on what gayness or queerness is than most heterosexuals I know regarding any attitude of intolerance to gays. Yes, look to the lovely gay community of SL for some of the most appalling hateful and spiteful attacks on me, there's nothing like a gay male in SL playing a female to behave absolutely atrociously to me.

Everyone knows about the "mentor" Jennifer McLuhan who disgracefully pried and pried on SLhomepage, saying she "just couldn't help herself" and just "had to ask". I hate licentiousness like that in people.

I had a magazine writer ask me if I'd give an interview on "why I have a male avatar". I told her that as I'm a public figure, she of course can write about me, but she should just go Google what other people have already written, I'm done.

2. Invasion of Privacy. Did I say Invasion of Privacy? I mean also in the larger sense, with the Grid Shepherd, the vulgar ambitiousness and greed of ESC to be first with a search, and the braying of someone like Spin Marton on Twitter, lecturing, lecturing, hectoring, hectoring that "we are all on a public grid" and "it all should have been build this way at the start.

I began to feel that "done" feeling the other day especially with two articles I read. One was on Terra Nova, about the new State of Play Academy in There. I marveled as I read the papers of people like James Grimmelmann about privacy and the Internet, about IP concerns -- I realized there were *normal, thoughtful people out there taking these issues and studying them* instead of Bolshevik extremists and anonymous cyber-terrorists in SL that you get constantly gloating that they can zoom into your house or scrape your data our out your RL. Other games and worlds simply do more to work on these issues; other kinds of people who are thoughtful don't take the extremist "information wants to be free" hacker mentality that you are dispensed in Second Life as gospel. I just get so "done" hearing those people hammering and hammering on the same narrow range of notes that are self-serving and commercially rewarding for them. They show all the ferver and zeal of the born-again trying to convince you that Jesus has personally told them what to do that day in life -- they can't listen to sense.

The other article in Forbes was signed by Philip Linden, but it read more like a PR piece prepared in Catherine Linden's office. In one of the paragraphs, however, his voice shines through. He describes the great freedom of having an alter ego (as the article is titled) that can prototype businesses without fear of failure and without inhibition, etc. (it's a wierd pitch to companies: "come be like all these foxes and dragons and drag queens I have in here, even though you're a RL business").

He describes this scene where he says that all your business data is up on a board "painfully" open. And I thought, but why? I mean, what's that all about? And then after reading that he also talked about "and seeing how your neighbours' businesses are doing" that he means that he envisions a world with no proprietary data. A world of businesses lifelogging. Of businesses behaving like they do inside Linden Lab, where they post projects and projects and self-criticism all the livelong day like some cyber version of Communist China. And he's fine with that, and sees no problem with that.

I thought about trying to reason with him; about trying to argue against that sort of "let's let it all hang out" philosophy and how destructive it would be to private enterprise, when I realized it would be hopeless. For Philip, private enterprise isn't a value (except, hypocritically, it is for his own company, where he does everything in secret, like governance prototyping that only 10 residents get to try out before it's locked in).

Philip actually zealously imagines that everyone will just love being on a giant JIRA tasker and Love Machine like he does.

But they won't. To be sure, you can tell a lot about your neighbours' business in SL that you couldn't in RL. You can see his traffic numbers, and if he's not using camp-chairs, they don't lie. You can see his land holdings, or prices, or see if he expands or contracts merely by right-clicking on his land. I am constantly invaded by newbie rentals agents who come in and rent my house in order to study the system and copy it. I just laugh at them. There is nothing proprietary about it, really, but if I see one of them totally copying the entire contents of my lease card, even offering free events spaces on my land (by accidentally forgetting to edit down the card), well, I do complain LOL.

But you can't run all businesses like that, and in a sense, private enterprise hinges on the ability of a company to present themselves favorably -- at some level, whether it's about cooking their books even a smidgeon; shielding the public from some negative things about their product maybe better left unsaid; not putting their worse foot forward. The ability to lie in a sense is protected by privacy, and to some extent, that's a good thing, it is the oil that makes commerce work. If everyone in RL were endlessly scraped and published -- and taunted -- they couldn't function. The strong would eat the weak. Philip calls SL "truth serum". Truth serum isn't always what works, or what people want. In fact, the truth of constant exposure and lifelogging and business logging that Philip envisions isn't truth, it's actually the Big Lie substituting a mass of open, public facts for the discretionary, voluntary narrative that people wish to speak, which, after all, which gives our human lives their deepest meaning.

And of course, that's ultimately want Philip, who often ascribes to social Darwinistic methods in the way he has implemented new features abruptly, would like it -- let the strong eat the weak.

3. Certification. Lindens talked about this before, and dropped it. That they would sneak it in by having a couple of these new macho Lindens just put it over everybody in the usual revolutionary Bolshevik style they love to do things lets me know just how wrong it is. It will limp along and eventually be put in by force of habit and force of Linden and FIC will, no matter how much you object. You will be told that if you continue to object, you must be fraudulent and and shyster yourself. Before long, if you refuse to register and certify yourself -- they're going to have land management as one of the areas -- then you will be made to look suspect, like you are not skilled, like you have something wrong with you. My eyes bug out of my head when I think of all my hours and hours and years of hard work in Second Life, and how quickly, how facilely, how callously it will be undone by some aggressive type like Heretic Linden (what a name, eh? Says it all, huh?)

4. No Consultation. SL Views was bad enough -- that system is really galling and depressing. The Lindens have given up on town halls and community meetings, closed the forums, banned people arbitrarily from the blog, and taken up "office hours" to which they don't even come.

Today, I went to Robin Linden's office hour, and I dunno, something about sitting on some sort of flower in a glen with butterflies suddenly made me think I wasn't an adult trying to do something serious like figure out what the hell the Lindens were thinking by throwing out universal rule of law and replacing it with arbitrary tyranny on islands -- but that I was on an episode of the Barney show. I felt that any moment, I'd be given a snack and told to take my banky and have a nap after singing "I love you, you love me, we're a happy faaaaaamily."

I asked a question about the "home rule," and ultimately was reprimanded by Robin, who first said I was typing too fast to keep up (sigh), then told me I was attacking, then told me I wasn't being "very nice" by using these "not very nice terms". What can you say to that? Um, should I call the system one of "Bantustans?" Home-rule isn't "very nice" but it's basically what it's all about, and not all that perjorative, frankly. I mean, what the hell *can* you say to a virtual world executive who has just implemented a feature with their selected, preferred customers without your involvement? "Gee, Mrs. Linden, that's a pretty dress"?

Zee Linden didn't even show up to an office hour, and I tried asking three pointed questions to Meta Linden, who punted and went off brightly to discuss really important things like what percentage of, oh, Belgians log in at any one time...

I've always tried to minimize the damage that the Linden bannings have caused me, not to dwell on them, not to care about them, I've always moved on. But sometimes, it looks very bleak. I go and post something on this new wiki, and I realize it's probably 15 minutes away from being wiped. There's a kind of sinking feeling when you see all these sycophants gathering around the Lindens and yessing them. Reading the transcript of a meeting with Rob Linden made me puke. All that obsequiousness, and all that Yoda-like tekkie infantile shit, talking in italics and the third person about extraneous stuff and yessing and wooting and yaying the Lindens. An open-ended world shouldnt' be like a game, with fanboyz. But...it's worse!

5. Entitlement-happy Customers. I had a really bad spate of them, and I think I fought them off pretty well. It's actually gotten very quiet now, because I have lots more Asians and Europeans, and frankly, that means people who are simply more cultured and polite. They aren't aggressive asshole blowhards for the most part -- although of course they've got some of those, too -- there's just less of them per square inch. There's nothing worse than some methed-out or 40'd-up uneducated retard from the MidWest with $1.50 US in his pocket to spend on your apartment in SL who bosses you around as if he were at the Four Seasons Sheraton on 42nd Street in New York.

Other cultures have just built in more cheeriness and apologies than what we get nowadays in America, which is sullen, retarded, aggressive -- and actively stupid -- people. Like I get this girl who out of the blue, IMs me and calls me a "cunt" because...why? because her deadbeat boyfriend hasn't paid the rent in their townhouse. Days have gone by, even more than the usual 48 I allow. Notices are unanswered. Finally, under my rules, if someone else wants to pay, they can ask to have the things removed. So they are. Whereupon someone who I can see full well in the group is logging on daily, and studiously igorning my messages about overdue rent while they are online, erupts into a fury thinking their stuff is "stolen". I eat a lot of this shit. I'll be eating more of it before I'm done. But I don't see a way to solve it at root except by telling people to refund and move on when they are like that -- I won't make money by slavishly waiting on gratuitously rude people.

Or some girl out of the blue, IMs me and tells me scathingly that my land is a "cat box" and that I've put a fence around it like real life, and aren't I retarded -- but it's not even my land, or my fence. LOL. People are so fucking ridiculous. Like that girl that IM'd me to tell me my Tiki huts rotted, and she could build better ones. How do people get to be such rude fucks? Lack of parental intervention.

6. Bad SL Performance. This is usually cited as the main reason people leave. For me, if my personal hangouts don't work, well, they don't work. I fly around to another one. I have land on 60 sims so I'm never unhappy. Or I just fly somewhere else if there's a bunch restarting. But what I can't bear is not being able to help my customers. My God, I had 3 sims, each of which took 3 days to get the Lindens to restart. I mean, that's just unacceptable. I had people refunding all over and screaming at me. Some were very patient. But even when groups of us would nail several Lindens at once, they wouldnt' answer. They've failed to make an automatic system to deal with this common problem, making you get lost in Support@ or bug files. I finally found a non-Concierge Linden at one point who helped. One of the 3 was over a long weekend, and it's the sort of thing I swallow, eat, and move on. But it gets weary. I feel stupid when I simply cannot effectively help my customers. Most computer/online/IT things run 24/7. Why can't this thing, that I pay nearly $2500 US a month to, in order to run a business, run on weekends, with people whose names are lit up in the People List instead of hiding from me? Ultimately, this problem no. 6 just isn't that big an issue for me, and it won't ever be the reason I'd be so totally done with SL as to sell out. But I add it to the list.

7. The Hacker Mentality. Living in SL, being exposed constantly to the ideology of especially the extreme Lindens and libsecondlife, you feel as if you are in an echo chamber. There is never any dissent, never any questioning of this dogma, which gets promulgated with more and more zeal, insolence, and harshness. You can't get any of them to listen to reason, and they just drone on and on. Ultimately, there isn't democracy, there is only a forced migration policy. You can only say, "Ok, thank you very much, but I think I'll either wait for a more comfortable and user-friendly game to come along or spend more time in real life."

When Second Life felt more open-ended, as if it wasn't finished, when you felt that it was free, that there might actually be change, mitigation, interesting new twists to the challenges (as there was with the telehubs, for example, where the Lindens didn't get to do exactly what they wished), it was intellectually compelling. Now it is less so. A tiny group of Lindens and their pets will decide to open source the server code the way they wish, with their friends, taking care first to instill their values into every byte and bit. It will be rather hard to overcome once its mind-memed around with the help of other shrill and rigid tekkies. These basic premises will go like this:

o forced lifelogging -- no privacy, opt-out at best, but never opt-in, search, scrape, at will
o collectivism -- no dissent, or vote with your feet, forced migration, not consensus and participation
o socialism (see the previous two premises) that mitigates against capitalism (except of course when it comes to their company and their venture capitalists), i.e. devaluing land, refusing to zone, insisting on depressed wages with Supply Linden sales, etc.
o lack of copyright protection and copying as an aggressive form of thuggish culture. I don't really make anything so this issue shouldn't be so much of concern to me, but I worry about how you can get stuff paid for when everybody steals. All the countries I've lived in with collectivism, leading to theft, built into the system like that collapse.
o lack of diversity -- an aggressive zealotry about certain RL political paradigns, known as the "progressive agenda". Example: Virginia Tech shooter tragedy is seen as a function of conservatives lobbying for guns in the 1980s, not liberal lobbying for deinstitutionalizing of the psychiatrically ill in the 1970s. The problem is guns, and how to get rid of them (a concern I share) but never the problem of how hard it is to get someone who is a danger to themselves and others committed to an institution.
o secular humanism to the point of rabid intolerance for anyone who is religious in any organized way or merely spiritual -- and aggrandizement of E-Z religions for the modern online type like Zen or paganism -- this wouldn't matter if again, it wasn't about enforcing the most smug and stultifying conservatism under the guise of being free and progressive.

8. Griefing. When I read the Forbes article, I saw something that finally explained to me personally the awful hold that W-hat and its spin-offs have on Second Life. Philip waxes ecstatic about Huns Valens, who took a simple flight script that Lindens had made and modified it and did more with it and made the first Flying Machines. That must have been a heady moment for the Game Gods, when their Adam became co-creator in the world. I don't blame them for immortalizing and FICifying that moment.

But the rest of us tuning in a few years later see Flying Machine Huns Valens victory-dancing in screens of the grid-crashers; Huns writing nasty and malevolent apologia for W-hat and all its works, constantly telling us that there are only a few bad eggs yet never condemning the griefing they do; Huns justifying Copybot and all the rest of it. Philip is blind to all that. I'm not the only one who sees the chronic W-hat/V-5/Y/Z/tard problem as basically rooted in the ability of the Lindens to tell off their supporters and basic substrate, the IRC channel and libsecondlife. They can't do that...because they're in on it themselves!

Griefing gets tiresome. There's a pattern that has repeated now about a hundred times for more than a year, and no matter how many times I report it, no matter how many times I try to get Lindens, or support@ or even the top brass to look at it, it is never solved, despite their claims to be able to ID hashmarks. The pattern is always exactly the same, and is being done by the same people:

a. Come in on an alt and grief me by offering TPs to Baku, sending me Plastic Duck edutainment cards, making little one-liners to annoy me, even paying my rental boxes with a dollar or even full payment -- anything to get attention to annoy.

b. Griefing my rentals -- prim littering, ugly signs, cut-off furry heads, whatever.

c. Griefing of some major venue -- the Anshe press conference, and now the Virginia Tech memorial, using my objects, as if created or even owned by me, or the VT memorial, using that awful Prokofy puppet

d. And finally -- coming soon, kids! -- griefing of the entire grid with self-replicating objects. In October 2006, I had literally 2 million objects come flying back into my account while I was away on business with a poor Internet connection. An object was somehow spoofed to show me as its owner, possibly by exploiting group-deeded items or something, and thousands of people grew angry with me, thinking I had littered their parcels. Of course I hadn't, it was the usual v-5 crap, the Lindens knew that perfectly well. My account didn't work for a day while they had to make some special script to unload it, and finally it was given back. To this day, stuff still returns from that event to me. I'm pretty done with that.

Yet despite seeing this pattern play out over and over and over again, when the first thing in the list happens in the lather-rinse-repeat, the Lindens ignore me and don't ban that account. Each new account is treated as never having a prior offense, although they are all in the same classic griefing groups.

At Robin's office hours, when I raised that problem again of identifying specific griefer groups that are known to grief events like town halls, of course Tao Takashi and other "progressives" were there to argue that you can't ban a whole group, why, that's against civil rights and due process. Sure. But then what's your plan, when a townhall is systematically, deliberately attacked by a range of the groups sitting in the bleachers and constantly heckling, spewing particles, etc. This isn't "some unverified kids" here and there. This is a dedicated, organized group. Once the Lindens ban the group and its victory dancers, they'll be getting somewhere. Except...they don't need to, as their software will sell regardless.

9. Open Source=Closed Society. Open source is supposed to mean, well, openness. Lots of people getting access. But it never means that. The same little precious cabal that runs the forums or the lists or the features voting runs this, too, and they make a sect and keep others out. And it will become more and more technically difficult to take on. If you are forced to spend $10,000 US and buy servers and a T-1 line to host probably a fraction of what you leased from SL, how can you continue in business as a rental company? You can't.

Mitch Kapor made it clear that "investment in land" isn't really prudent at Davos when he mentioned the open-source. While the Lindens make noises about how there will always be a mainland, I'm not sure I want to hang around and be made a fool of when they abruptly close it and send us to a URL that has their pets as the new licensed hosting agents.

10. Corporate invasion. I'm not a socialist, and I undertand better than all these libsecondlife types that big business will simply have to become involved. They will have to come in, and with commercial and market interests in mind. try to make something of this Second Life platform. That will definitely not be easy, as I know because I've done this myself for 3 years. But there isn't a place for the knowledge and experience that we have acquired. We really are road kill on the superhighway to the Metaverse. The task of the amateur really is to leave gracefully now.

The Lindens, with their indifference or even sneers to problems of the mainland like grief-builds and extortionist signs, the libsl and FIC attitude toward the "middle class" if you will -- it all sucks. I really get done with it. There is no desire to have a world. The membrane of the world gets thinner and thinner with each passing day. You go to event after event and find people are at work, not having fun, and frustrated, and even angry.

I could stomach these performance and prim and griefing problems for the years I did because I thought we were building a *better* world or something really new and different and spiritually challenging and intellectually challenging. But I can see from these people that they are merely building, period. Just building. Putting up a parking lot, paving paradise. Having a marketing seminar and mouthing platitudes.

The Toxic Twenty always write that I deserve this griefing and unpleasantness I've suffered due to my critique of the FIC and favouritism and collective dogmatic approach in Second Life. But that's not it at all. The wonder is that I didn't have lots more company. I *should* have had lots and lots more company because the intellectually honest thing to do would be to comment, critique and even fight the unequal enforcement of the TOS, the favouritism, the insularity, the dogma. But, for some reason, those minds that are out there able to grapple with some of these issues, whether a Clay Shirky or Edward Castronova are themselves regrettably too orthodox in approach. You have to have skin in to have something worth saying about SL, and they don't.

A new set of issues will have to be found to remain intellectually involved in Second Life. The issues of freedom, identity, privacy -- they can't be fought successfully in this sectarian and controlled environment where dissent is so harshly punished. Or at least they can't be fought without either very deep pockets, or lots of leisure time to make endless alts. The issues of copyright, intellectual property, teaching, knowledge -- if the Lindens go back to an ancient medieval apprentice system instead of the new laws of the World Wide Web to spread information and knowledge, well, what can you do? I already have the Catholic Church to go to on Sundays in RL, I don't want to be going to it the rest of the week in Second Life. Dogma is dogma, even when dressed up in cyber clothing -- horribly stultifying, the stench of the hobgoblins of little minds, or something.

The issues of governance remain mildly interesting, but even there, you see what might have been an interesting experiment being pre-cooked. One Linden will be allowed to run it roughshod, because the others are busy. Chadrick will see a pattern of someone getting lots of bans, and will 'take action' -- on behalf of the "community' -- which includes his friends from beta in his life as a resident like Taco Rubio or Lecktor Hannibal -- ugh.

Still, as Voice comes in, as the island have some kind of "home rule" that might merely be a flop, not a lesson in Balkanized tyranny, there is something mildly interesting to watch and comment on.

I'm going to be on the lookout for more intellectual issues of the day, hopefully there will be more. It's not interesting to me to sit around endlessly and have Tech Talk about the technology itself, with no ever interested in talking about the pros and cons of applying it, and how it affects people. It's just not intellectually challenging to be brayed at by donkeys constantly telling you that you have to flay yourself on a public grid. I don't like that feeling-- that SL is a rich man's toy, something they add on to the gaggle of cameras, videos, vlogging, podcasting, blackberrying they do. It's not a world, it's merely a platform, an avatarized communication system.

It seems to me that basically what's missing in SL, if I could be parochial for a minute, is the East Coast, that is, some kind of more philosophical approach that would take a longer and deeper look at the ramifications of SL outside the shrillness and glibness of the IRC channel or Resident answers, with its socialists and anarcho-capitalists cavorting like caricatures of those stunted ideologies.

Except for Harvard, which hasn't had much of a footprint, no institutions or organizations or intellectual figures of the East Coast have gotten interested in SL in any kind of big and demonstrable way. SL has its boosters and those following it avidly in California or London; it has its Midwestern professors going to game conferences and seminars. But to me, it's just interesting to see New York Law School sort of turn its back on SL and go to There, or to see Terra Nova scorn SL, although I've become annoyed with for its backwardness and dogmatic game analysis. Normally in life, these various movements and ideas from the West Coast sort of get transmogrified by the time the East Coast picks them up, and that modifies their rough edges. That hasn't happened yet.

A brain trust is needed that is international and catholic, if you will, not sectarian and dogmatically "progressive," with a wider variety of positions about virtuality than can be found at TN or at LL. They need an online active journal that doesn't veer off to specialized concerns like art or architecture or marketing and business.

Well, these are just my initial thoughts on "done-ness" and a rough sketch, which I haven't completed. You have to want badly to bother with SL; you have to be "not-done" or you can't bother.

The reason I bothered isn't because I don't have a life. I'm 50 years old, and have had more life than most people ever dream of having. Russia's first president who died yesterday, Boris Yeltsin, was someone I met, and whose books I translated and whose family I worked with -- I cite that as must one of the numerous things I've been interested in and done in RL and will go on doing hopefully in the next half of my life.

Most people make comments like "don't let the door hit you/where the good Lord split you" if you post something like "Done" and that's ok, because I don't mind doors slamming on me, they slam all the time on SL. The doors to the forums, the doors to the blog, the town halls, even IM chat with Lindens have slammed, slammed, slammed, -- even badly working scripted doors on laggy sims slam my avatar's ass. That's ok, that isn't material. Because being "done" doesn't mean "leaving".

But the reason I bothered is that I intuitively felt the first time I even came on to the Sims, and then flew around Second Life some years ago, that we will all be doing this lots, lots more in 5-10-20 years. That it will be everywhere in the urban, developed world. The only thing that could change "avatar based communication systems" is video getting a lot easier to use and a lot less expensive to make and show -- and that's happening, too, but avatarization is likely to remain, anyway for cost and other reasons.

Yes, it will all be our lives. But I'm not sure it will be a good life.

Comments

[Doubledown Tandino]

You're not done with second life... if you were done, you wouldn't have written this blog entry about being done.

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, as I said, "done" doesn't mean you're leaving. But you can definitely be "done" on certain topics that are futile, and it's good to make charts of the pros and cons always on a venture that requires this much time and money expended on it.

I personally am made physically revulsed when I see a world that is supposed to be open and available to anybody to make contributions move to a two-tier system, where a bunch of Lindens "just decide" to open up a closed shop called "the mentor/instructor/volunteer" wiki.

I remember calling this months ago, saying, uh-oh, there they go, taking the private mentors' groups and channels they had in world, and now making a closed, password-protected website, where some of them will be sure to badmouth and grief those they don't like, and those people won't even know they're discussed -- like Ban-Link.

So far, anyone can log in. But note how the whole thing is structured -- bug reporting, knowledge, certification -- it's all one seemless wiki thing. And that whole wiki culture and mentality went into making it.

No, I'm not for making dramatic exits. There's never a reason to do that. But you can feel "done," that's for sure, and outline the reasons why you are just "done," that's all.

[Baba]

This article gets a +1 for Copybot reference.

[Mikyo]

Zounds. I had no idea i was defending self government on the same forum with someone who met Boris Yeltsin. I could have made a better case, doh! Some things are worth standing for. Avatar chat may be the future, but I don't believe that future will be ruled over by the Lindens. That sea will have many other fish. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, it won't be ruled over by Lindens. The question is what is the best strategy to make that happen, in cooperation with them, or in deadly pitched battle with them. This requires some serious reflection.

[Nicholaz Beresford]

You sound tired my friend (if I may call you that, despite that I'm probably a tekkie, liberalist and open source whatnot).

I said it before and will say it again, I like your writing and thoghtfullness, and paradox as it may seem, I like it more when you're tired of fighting and when you just let the words flow ... it's then when you shine.

I agree with Mikyo, in the years to come, there will be a sea of metaverses, and like the sea, there will be beautiful reefs and dark menacing places.

Today we're locked into those few places out there in the sea of the 2D web, SL, TSO, Wow, There ... and they already are very different. Others will come, and they will be built by people and companies according to their ideals, some shrill Vegas strips, some cold and superficial like the deserted corp sims today but some colorful, idealistic and worth living in.

I hate to bring in the open source idea into this, because I know we disagree there and I don't want to fight, but today's problem is that the tools of building those worlds are in the hands of a few and they can do as they wish.

SL so far is the place with most freedom, but still the back office power is in the hands of the few that you call FIC. And that part will change.

I don't like fighting, in fact I don't believe it will be a battle, I belive it will just be diversity and people voting with their (avatar's) feet. I might even build a metaverse myself, once I have the tools and leverage, the same way that I have a 2D forum running now with my own ideas of administering it.

I love SL, despite the shortcomings and one reason why I do not own land (or don't plan to) is that I don't want wear an SL collar. It's the best place I found so far, but once a better place appears, I'll move on.

It's just not there yet, but I'm sure it will.

[Prokofy Neva]

I disagree, I think you need to fight. But you have to have an overall value in doing so, there has to be some gain from it, and also, you have to determine that it is not futile.

[buridan simon]

One of the problems with 'the good life' is that it is not a universally shared system. That the sl system is predicated on having plural and interacting 'good lives' is perhaps one of the things you are/were fighting against by promoting your perspective of the 'good life', though I admit, I would really enjoy hearing what a good life in sl would entail for you, currently I have this feeling that you would be very free, but everyone else would be severely limited in freedoms in order to protect your freedoms. But, I could be wrong. Nonetheless, I wish you the best of luck with your next set of pursuits.

[Gigs Taggart]

Prok,

I'll write to you here, because I know you'll read it. I sometimes think in IM/chat you don't even read what people are saying before you fly off with a huge reply.

I notice you are turning more and more against people like me. We have more in common than you think.

Not all open source people are in favor of opening the server. Not all open source people are part of what's going on at opensecondlife.com. We are individuals.

I'm interesting in which meeting with Rob you read. I can't remember a meeting where we didn't rake him over the coals about something or another.

Keep in mind, we talk tech because that's what we do. We aren't in those meetings to debate the finer points of virtual world governance. We are there to make sure SL remains a viable platform 5 or 10 years down the road. That's not going to happen unless there's a process of constant reinvention.

I probably have as much invested in SL as you do. I plan on protecting that investment. Open source is one way that I do that.

I am not a socialist nor am I collectivist. I'm sure you know that from reading the IRC channel.

Here's my invitation to you. You complain that SL lacks that open ended feel. I propose to you that Open Source is your opportunity to vote with more than your feet. We already had a very useful discussion where we identified several important bugs. I invite you to be civil, and work with the open source people, or even just work with me. I'm ready to work with you.

[Storm Thunders]

Sometimes, I wonder if the core of many of the decisions I see are due to age. Most of the people at LL are very young. They haven't been watching and participating in communities long enough to intuitively know the long term results of the choices they're making, and how those decisions will shape the future. Concepts like privacy and fairness have to be explored before their depths and consequences are understood.

I'm not really disturbed by the self-governance trend in SL. In a world where we can't be killed, tortured or imprisoned, it gives people opportunities to learn at relatively little cost. Ideals are formed and tested, dramas flare, and we have the social effects of our choices shown clearly if we're brave enough to look.

The efforts to separate the talented and skilled "us" from the ignorant blingtard "them" fascinate me. "Your world" and "Open to everyone" ideals are crashing into deliberately made barriers and policies. Making the distinction of verified vs unverified, blocking unverified accounts from even reading the forums, help and support have been steadily eroding since I've arrived, education stipends disappeared, we still have Orientation areas that churn out people who don't know how to use Search, and now certifications... I see all these efforts to stratify the population, and I wonder about the causes and triggers. Is it about the media limelight, or feeling overwhelmed by all the new people, or finances and market share, or ???

[kirpaan]

LOL Prok you want all the drama of a "I'm leaving forever" post without making an ass of yourself like you did over at second citizen by not actually leaving.

So you pissed off at LL and any user with any name recognition. That aint news. That's all you write about.

[dandellion Kimban]

It is interesting to watch how open source people are commenting on Prok's blog (myself included) and I cannot get over the impresion that Prok is one of potential OS supporters without knowing and willing to addmit that :)
OK, now a bit more serious... open source movement (in SL and everywhere else) has some serious problems. One of them is bad PR. I remember when, during the one single hour of Richard Stallman's lecture, I was about to throw anything heavy at him three times. And it is not only Stalman that makes bad reputation of open source. Open source is far from being socialist, or hippie, or collective in a bad way. It is far from a try to take away people's intellectual property.

[Prokofy Neva]

One of the problems with 'the good life' is that it is not a universally shared system. That the sl system is predicated on having plural and interacting 'good lives' is perhaps one of the things you are/were fighting against by promoting your perspective of the 'good life', though I admit, I would really enjoy hearing what a good life in sl would entail for you, currently I have this feeling that you would be very free, but everyone else would be severely limited in freedoms in order to protect your freedoms.

This is the sort of statement that makes you profoundly an asshole, buridan. It's completely false, and completely uncalled for. It's something you *imagine* and *impose* on others -- making them unfree.

It's hardly appropriate, given that I don't eject people from my land merely because they've criticized me or said something I didn't like. Ejecting and banning and imposing your conformity on others is *what you do*. So I'll just have to take this as a projection.

SL should remain many things for many people. But it isn't. The freedoms are closing off, as this kind of hectoring rectitude a la buridan becomes more and more common. One has only to read his blog or listen to his comments to understand the shrill and nasty tone taken to those who don't believe as he does.

I don't define the good life in the abstract in some ridiculous utopian exercise. Rather, I can be quite sure that a setting that allows the endless expansion of buridan's ego and powers has to be suspect.

[Prokofy Neva]

I've written before about open-source culture and it's critics, even among those supporting open-source. Open-source culture not only has a "bad name," it is a nasty, thuggish culture in reality, and we have SL to show that to us.

Gigs, you fail to understand the simplest thing that I proposed: moving the button. Instead, you invent 8 hard things to undo, not always irrelevant. Even if all you want to do is edit in the method you prescribe for group management, the editing menu isn't on the right page, i.e. the page with group titles. You immediately dismiss a list with group titles, saying group titles don't convey functions. Except...if the user set them up that way *to* convey functions, then they *do*.

Storm, I've always been self-governing in SL. ARs do little good. I try to use a combination of bans, boycotts, publicising of bad behaviour, warnings to others in groups, etc. to already do anything that the Lindens my dispense in their lordliness. I think the methods people have put together inworld ranging from groups to warning systems like SLAM to blog discussions are collectively probably more effective than ban-link type tools.

[Cocoanut Koala]

I think people of our generation, Prok, had certain ideals really drummed into them.

Freedom, fairness, equal opportunity, justice, the idea that what happens to the individual happens to all of us - all that was soundly pounded into us at school, at home, everywhere. Every DAY.

Today in SL, where we don't have decades of law built over centuries of hard-won experience to protect these and similar values, these ideas seem almost like a quaint afterthought to many, like a nice thing to think about occasionally, maybe, but not really vital, not any single one of them.

I think part of this is due to the educational fad of the last couple of decades of trying to get students to think for themselves - to put it charitably. In fact, it has imbued them with extreme moral relativitism, and a resultant inability to make any judgments whatsoever.

And home and community apparently haven't made up for this failure of the school system.

I think this might partly explain how you and I can be so aghast about a ruling entity which, for example, cavalierly allows open persecution of some individuals, while at the same time allows some more rights than others (to grief, for instance), at whim and deliberately so.

Or the absence of any sort of democratic process, however rudimentary, in something that functions as a world and has people living in it, or any concept that this might be a problem.

Or the dismal lack of thought given to how a system might affect individuals, along with the attitude that it doesn't matter if a system affects people adversely, as systems are more valuable than individuals.

Or a company culture which under the mantle of tolerance actively encourages intolerance towards those who don't share their particular and rather peculiar belief systems.

Or the notion that no individual has any true privacy, or, more startlingly, has any right to any privacy.

I could go on.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot we can do about this, aside from providing a running commentary on it for posterity.

I suppose various peoples are regularly doomed to repeat history's mistakes. We're seeing it now in microcosm, daily, online, in SL. I hope this isn't a harbinger of what awaits my children in decades to come in real life.

coco

[Kristian]

So you're done, like when you break up with someone but still live with them and sometimes when you're both lonely and bored have crazy sex and then smoke a cigarette after and talk about how it's too bad you drive each other insane because the sex is fantastic done?

[Cocoanut Koala]

*correction - by "at whim, and deliberately so" I mean at the whim of the individuals in the ruling system, not at the whim of the griefers.

[Prokofy Neva]

>I think part of this is due to the educational fad of the last couple of decades of trying to get students to think for themselves - to put it charitably. In fact, it has imbued them with extreme moral relativitism, and a resultant inability to make any judgments whatsoever.

Cocoa, that is so well put, and really an eloquent essay, and a summary of what the deep problems are not only in Second Life, but the new social media, made up not only of moral relativism, but no inner moral compass at all.

[Yumi Murakami]

What freedoms are you actually expecting from SL, though, Prokofy?

[Prokofy Neva]

The fact that you put the concept in those terms, Yumi, lets me know that you don't understand it.

Freedom is not something LL or SL "gives". It is something you take or make yourself. And that is what I've always done.

What I'm saying is that the price of continuing to do that is too great. People who try to challenge the basic precepts of Linden Lab's cult -- and I can only understand it that way -- and by extension the whole tekkie geek extremist hacker mentality that I indicate here -- are very harshly sanctioned. The sanctions range from abuse inworld and harassment with LL doing nothing to stop it, to exposure of your private life and endless ridicule and harassment on your own blog or in other forums, to actual bannings by LL from its blogs or people inworld.

Dissidents in all situations where they face persecution not only from the state but various non-state actors always have to weigh whether it's worth trying to keep protesting at home, staying within the country, remaining active on the street or in underground publications, etc. or going into exile, either internal or external. Perhaps they don't wish to be killed and so they begin writing under a pseudonym abroad. It's kind of like that.

For a long time I thought the key to this problem, which I found early on, was nevertheless to engage with the world and the company on its own terms, suffer its sanctions, try to remain positive, attempt to run a business, etc. When I was permabanned from the forums in June 2005, I thought the way to go was to be like Roy Medvedev (allowed to live under house arrest and even received foreign visitors) not Anatoly Scharansky (imprisoned and finally exchanged for a spy). It seemed like the relevant thing to do. And I will go on doing that as I wish to keep my business going.

Now I find it a more urgent task and a more relevant task to try to get outside media, especially more thoughtful writers than the usual gushing game/computer industry media and glib wire services, to write about these problems as they apply not only to SL but social media in general. That means both trying to write myself but getting others to understand the issues and write, too.

[Cat Cotton]

Little advice here Prokofy :) Make an alt and live your Second Life as you see fit. In the past nearly 4 years now. I have heard a lot of lip service from just about everyone. In the end find what makes you happy and just do it. No amount of press has changed what I do day to day in SL. I live to have fun, build and texture. For me at least it's the only real purpose of SL. I tell you this because I have not only created one alt, but several in the past nearly 4 years. I have yet to lose my core passion for what I think SL is; A blank canvas in which to paint your world, your imagination. Screw the masses and what they desperatly want SL to be; SL is in fact nothing more than what each individual makes it. Commercial, non commercial; I don't really give a shit. FIC non FIC well only in their own minds; these days. The playing field is leveling because more and more creative ppl have entered SL. Even if no one else gets it; What I read was you writing what you were thinking out loud.

Who's side am I on? Mine.

Cat

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks for your comments, Cat, but alts aren't really my thing. That is, I have other accounts, but they are obviously all my alts, with the same land groups and such on them.

If you can't be yourself in a place like Second Life, where can you be? I would find it very restricting to have to be looking over my shoulder, trying to be an alt all the time.

[Desmond Shang]

>>Now I find it a more urgent task and a more relevant task to try to get outside media, especially more thoughtful writers than the usual gushing game/computer industry media and glib wire services, to write about these problems as they apply not only to SL but social media in general. That means both trying to write myself but getting others to understand the issues and write, too.

I'll give you one thing, Prokofy, you do operate at 'grass roots' level far more than the pundits at Terranova do, and while I find many of your conclusions are inaccurate, the grand opinions of the pundits on the usual blogs are even less accurate.

For instance, I doubt many of them could ever run a successful Second Life business, for all their supposed insight.

New Media overall is the key issue, and avatars are just one facet. I'm not of the SMS or 'texting' generation, but the youth are, and they are taking over.

I'd like to hear what they think, not from pundit data scrapers that haven't really been in an online world and interacted casually with strangers since the late 90's.

The rules, and the assumptions are changing fast.

[Prokofy Neva]

My conclusions aren't inaccurate, Desmond, as they are informed by a great deal of time spent not only on other social media besides SL, and reading and contributing and debating in forums, but going to meet-ups and conferences in RL. So I stand by my conclusions, such as they are.

You have no basis for saying I am inaccurate other than that you are a smug burgher on a curio simulator of the 19th century, and the owner of some kind of RL computer biz. Sorry, no sale.

[Prokofy Neva]

>So you're done, like when you break up with someone but still live with them and sometimes when you're both lonely and bored have crazy sex and then smoke a cigarette after and talk about how it's too bad you drive each other insane because the sex is fantastic done?

I realize this is something you view as oh-so-clever, but it strikes me merely as puerile and stupid.

Taking care of tenants and doing donkey work running a business in SL because of your commitments there isn't like having sex.

And I don't imagine I'll be having sex or even a cigarette with any Lindens, griefers, FIC, or any other hostile parties.

The job of a dissident is a difficult one, nobody really understands how difficult until they undertake it. It's shocking and appalling that I have so little company. Some fraudulent thing like the SLLA isn't dissent, that's just a self-serving posturing.

Dissidents in different situations face different options, as I said, internal exile or external exile or moving to more long-term education of other citizens to raise awareness, or trying to engage more powerful foreign friends.

I think one of the feelings of "done-ness" that came from Robin Linden's office hours yesterday was the way she talked very casually and glibly about the whole metaverse construction project.

Khamon was being a fanboy and smirking about people who "didn't like y'all's making yourself a public node" of the Metaverse, boosting the open-source stuff in this meeting, and then Robin said something like "I don't see Mike Wilson hooking up his world to ours any time soon" (I will get the exact quote later).

Something about the entire setting -- Khamon smirking and feeling superior, Robin feeling like she runs a world and only deals at the level of meta worlds with big guns like Mike Wilson -- you rapidly begin to feel, as Cocoanut often puts it, "like chopped liver".

Not even pate on the cocktail cracker, but...chopped liver.