Disrupting Media

"Hackers" -- part of an installation on Orange Island by SL artist Filthy Fluno.

"Disruptive technology," I find, is technology that one group of people think they will be using to disrupt another group of people, without disruption to themselves. It's not a very nice term, eh? Makes you think of toddlers with the Terrible Twos if you're a parent, trying to get work done. Of course, the tekkie sages describe it as something "changing the world," like cars. Seldom do these disruptions only *benefit*, however. For example, we get oil dependency, air pollution, along with liberation of travel. They also have all kinds of unintended consequences -- teenagers for the first time can go have sex away from the watchful eyes of parents; suburban sprawl is created not as a destination place but as a pass-through for easier consumption, and so on.

Is Second Life disruptive media? I'm not sure. For all I know, it might be a profoundly conservative backlash to that other disruptive media, the Internet, which made everything very impersonal, anonymous, facile, and even nasty. In fact, it could be a pastoral, idyllic throwback to a more intense interpersonal immersive experience -- i.e. back to the old real life of the pre-industrial age, where people sit around campfires or fireplaces and tell stories. Isn't that what it's about? It's just that you get to mix and match the people better than you do in real-life with Gramps and Auntie Ann and Bub and Sis.

Still, Second Life is ultimately disruptive of the entertainment industry and also business applications industry because it enables ordinary people to write, script, stage, and act in their own shows of any genre, or control their own commercial environments without so much dependency on specialists and talented people. Second Life in fact answers that famous forums' mournful question, "What about the people with no talent?" superbly -- as I can tell you, as a Person With No Talent (you wouldn't think it was possible to actually flunk Art in high school, but I did.)

So what about the role of journalists? Are they obsolete? The fact is, they are scurrying around to leverage this new technology as much as anybody, and people who are already elites in other areas aren't satisfied to be just professors of accounting, but want to be journalists, pundits, chroniclers of history-in-the-making, too. This is the context for understanding Prof. Robert Bloomfield's email to me, which I want you to walk through with me. And to participate, you have to realize that this is disruptive media, so, I'm going to disrupt. That's what we're here for : )

Let's Make a Media Wiki!

First, I get an IM from Rob with this request inworld, which basically, I ignore, since I really don't have a ready-made way of being *nice* about it, and I figure, in the spirit of Christmas, best to just not answer.

Now, today, I get the same request, more urgent, in my email box, and addressed to me at my real-life name. Would I respond to a series of questions intended for the VP of Marketing?

It seems Rob, who has gained fame for himself as an SLCN machinima star, has an interview scheduled with Robin Linden, and so he has written me this email for a variety of motives. What are they? I speculate:

o to show off that he has an interview scheduled -- to which I can only say, but basically, I think any serious person who writes a lot about SL with some audience can get an interview by asking, it may be harder than it used to be, but one can try;

o to try to claim community backing and support from those who are "immersed" in Second Life to fortify Rob's sense that he is playing the role of a "leader" of a "community" that looks to him for the function of approaching important Lindens;

o to try to fix up his crappy questions before he has to show them to a Linden VP -- and yes, they are way too overbroad and fuel for 10 interviews, and will violate all sorts of rules of good journalism by enabling the subject to talk endlessly on their hobby horses in preset phrases which you can already collect from the Internet and make a scrap-book out of, without the interview;

o to affect an air of collegiality, that "we journalists and bloggers and Important People in Second Life" are all in this together, and we should share with each other. when these rare opportunities for exclusive interviews with Lindens occur

o or all of the above -- so let's all share, ok?

I often find that some of these journalists who are professional journalists, i.e. at Reuters, call me up and ask me for interview questions. I never know whether they are a) lazy and can't think up anything and want people to work for free b) timid about their own questions and needing bolstering; c) looking to show off at the hot subject they have to interview; d) hoping to gain street cred as having lines out to the community.

It would never occur to me to write another blogger or reporter, when I had an interview or a story, and ask them what questions they could give me. Why? Because I figure the person I'm interviewing already has enough to say, the problem will be trying to be selective. Because I already have bunches of questions. And well, because, it's my story.

Does *everything* have to be goddamn wiki?

The entire thing is one of these false relationships and badly-premised interactions that R.D. Laing would have had a field day with in a book like Knots.

Who gets to be a "spokesman for the community" and ask questions -- and get answers -- from those in power? The Fourth Estate used to be the organized institution for this process; today, bloggers and just anonymous forums-posters in part fufill this role -- and sometimes badly. Of course, Rob publishes on websites like the MIT site, where you cannot post if you are a commoner and mere mortal -- you have to be either an MIT graduate, or clear their considerable hurdles for registration. Meh.

A Critique of Academic Observation

My main critique of Prof. Bloomfield, in that piece and others, is that while it's good that he calls for "self-correctives" of virtual worlds rather than external agents, in his eagerness to have something to study in Second Life in terms of an emergent virtual economy, he is too frenetic about creating it himself, and assisting at bringing it into being. He can't decide whether he wants to just observe and study the emerging virtual world, or get in on the ground floor of the deal of the century, for reputation enhancement, if not for outright monetary game, either profit or grants. Certainly SL has helped Rob solve that eternal quest of "public or perish."

But what is particularly distasteful about the greed to make, not just study, worlds is that he vigorously flogs the idea of resident-made bodies like the SLBB (now renamed the Virtual Business Bureau) or the SLEC (taken over by Intlibber Brautigan). This is awful stuff, as those of us who have had to deal with this eternal bane of SL existence know. People making "watchdog" bodies are heavily suspected of "taking power" even if they have ostensibly transparent and simple goals. And more often than not, they *are* all about gaining influence and power, and whitelisting themselves, and blacklisting others.

I think it's good if various consumer groups get started to defend their interests, and are very clearly marked as interest groups. We have a lot of them in SL; we need more. They can consolidate and form umbrella movements. But to make of them the organs of government when there is no liberal democracy, no free elections, no possibility of exercising legitimate power, is a farce. It's a game. Just because somebody needs a business model for a class is no reason to rush this process.

Questions for the Lindens -- and Answers

The jumble of topics/questions put together are completely too ambitious, but let's all discuss them, shall we? Given that we are all in this together: there's no reason I, the Infamous Antagonist, should get this email, and not you, or that in this age of New Media Possibilities, one professor in a prestigious university should have all the power. Here's the list for Robin (and hey, if Robin has nothing to do on her Christmas holiday, she can get a heads up, too, that's the wonderful world of wiki media : ):

# the rather unusual role of a "VP of Marketing and Community" in a virtual world;
# age verification;
# Linden's policy regarding resident-to-resident business disputes (such as: what are their plans to hand over power to resident groups, like the dreaded SLBB?);
# the sensitivity of LL to the needs of residents who are developing software, land or businesses;
# how LL balances the needs of their many different types of residents;
# what the separation of the grid from SL means for residents, and what challenges it brings her;
# how LL addresses the problems of differing legal jurisdictions across its resident community;
# whether we can expect to see action taken to stamp out any other activities (as happened with gambling;
# and her predictions for the future.

Quick reply:

o VP of Marketing is a perfectly normal job for the game world and this is ultimately a game of a kind, (even though as the The Office guy quipped, hearing Dwayne say, "There are no winners or losers" -- "Oh...there are losers!). It's world-as-product, and that has to be marketed to the people in it almost as much as newcomers and the general public

o Age verification is limitation of liability. It is really, really boring to keep asking about this and it sets up the Lindens to pontificate and repeat themselves. I don't think reporters should be pestering the Lindens about this any more until they a) implement it and there is some field data b) they can get beyond the paranoid leftoid blogosphere and do some real-live reporting on Aristotle to debunk some of the craziness people are reporting on it. Nothing short of a hands-on, real-time direct interview with Aristotle executives themselves would do for me here.

o Don't even put ideas into these Linden heads by talking about "handing over power to resident groups". Yeesh! This will be happening over our dead bodies. I did not elect, appoint, acclaim, approve of any SLBB or any other entity to run me on my land. I pay Linden tier, and I signed their TOS. End of story. The Lindens will not be handing over power in this facile way. That will occur naturally when they open-source. In the meantime, they are building these witless "tools"; see previous blog on how silly and pointless they are when people can't use them to solve the real problems they solve of a) sexual harassment, stalking and griefing and b) fraud and theft.

o Perhaps the subject of GOMing, or "sensitivity" to development is theoretically a good question, but it is very vague. Who gets to decide what? The Lindens long since abandoned hope that the content produced by the general public would be so kick-ass that it would help them sell the platform or even develop the platform. Instead, they've put all their eggs in two baskets: a) exclusive metaversal development agencies who give them plausible deniability of they fail b) volunteer coders who make patches, some of which they use. The rest is not important to them.

o How LL balances the needs of many residents? LL doesn't balance the needs of many residents. Residents must find their own way to balance. Next question?

o Grid versus World separation may be a promising question, but perhaps not the question for Robin Linden. The reality is that the hopes of the Lindens is to have grid-level customers who buy islands in bulk and take care of communities for their so they never have to deal with any individual customer -- ultimately, they hope to devolve all billing, maintenance, abuse report, etc. to grid-level customers. So what is the world, then? The original core world which they still directly run? For how long? Or the conglomeration of all grid-level worlds, many of which will likely be shut off from each other at the customer's request?

o How does LL address the problem of different legal jurisdictions? Please, no entres to filibustering. This is an obvious thing, and don't give them an excuse to pretend they are high-minded here. They're practical. They dumb down to the lowest tolerable common denominator. They don't say, "We have 75 percent non-American customers, let's not obey the US gambling law". Instead, they impose it on all customers, because when it comes to crunch time, they're in California, not in the fabulous virtual space. They don't say, "We have 25 percent American customers, let's use the First Amendment and ignore the concerns of Europeans about depiction of child pornography" -- instead, they abolish lewd "ageplay". They sink to the level they need to sink to protect the grid. This isn't an interesting question. Next.

o The Lindens will not be telling us of any other activity they expect to "stamp out". They are likely not going to "stamp out" banking fraud, but merely be helpful as the FBI, or some other law-enforcement body investigates it. I can tell from experience that when investigating fraud, these bodies can take FOREVER on cases because they often want to catch in the net as many really major offenders as they can, and they are unlikely to bother with some $774.17 heist in SL that should go to small claims court. So don't look for any quick fixes.

o As for predictions of the future, I got some of this, anyway, from Robin, with the point about no immediate plans for open source in 2008. This is also an open invitation to fluffballs.

So, let me ask all of you reading this. How can we fix up this situation, where a person has decided to interview Robin Linden, has gotten the interview because of who they are, in a meatworld Ivy League college with a prestigious "Metanomics" program sponsored by high-profile companies in SL, but has a collection of, well, loser questions that will lead to pablum, or even serve to reinforce badly-conceived ideas (like "let's hand over power to a resident-driven business bureau?)

What would *you* do if you got an email like this?

Ecology of Media

I'm thinking again of Uri's "ecology of media," with the right to have even false premises floated, or speculative notions printed and the role of others in verifying them or discrediting them. The fact is, it's more complex than this, because there are always going to be elites who imagine only they can tell the truth, and massage the facts to fit that truth. That's the premise of particularly the movie version of The Golden Compass, where the Magisterium, the Authority, tries to confiscate every last alethiometer, or truth-telling compass.

In our era, any one of us can seize it and tell the truth. Or can we? The premise of the movie, again (which I saw -- it was great!) was that only people designated by a higher power than the Magisterium in a prophecy, i.e. the girl Lyra, could get to tell the truth with it -- you had to have the power.

The fact is, that while anyone can grab the compass, they can't always speak the truth with it, for all kinds of reasons having to do with lack of information, laziness or ineptitude in gathering the facts, egotistical concerns, ignorance, limitations. Still, this "disruptiveness" had to come about sooner or later, and it's important that any one *can* grab the compass...because you cannot preordain or predict where excellence may come.

But more to the point, the difference between organized, professional and commercial media outlets and homegrown bloggers is expertise and ability. The lines for what determines this are completely blurred now, of course, as even the staid Grey Lady has all kinds of blogs and comments and readers' input even into ethics and policy for the paper itself.

The Speed of Media Change

It's curious to think that I might never in my lifetime get an op-ed piece into the New York Times. I've had letters to the editor published; I've spoken to editorial board members about editorials and provided input for them; I've had translations of other people's pieces published on the Op-Ed page; I've been quoted in news articles (in my RL field and related to SL). But I know what goes into getting an op-ed piece published, and I am fairly resigned to the idea that I'm just likely to ever make the cut, what with the need to write only 850-1000 words, be a recognized expert or celebrity, fit with the news concerns -- and, as one editor once explained to me, write so that a 12-year-old can read it, and so that the average business person can understand it -- and so on.

Yet, in 15 minutes, I can write the same 250-850 words and post them in the comments section on one of the Times blogs, bypassing the editorial obstacles to the letters page or the much more unreachable op-ed page. The speed with which unmanaged content can read the eyeball -- maybe even more eyeballs than saw the printed edition -- is what people mean by "disruptive," but it's hard to say whether all this collective disruption is going anywhere.

Boy, was Time Magazine snarky about their own selection of "You" as the "Man of the Year" last year, and boy, did those Old Bolsheviks prevail, with the ghost of Strobe Talbot lurching through the hallways, in making Vladimir Putin "Man of the Year" this year -- an Enemy of the Press if ever there was one.

And Time wasn't half wrong, because what do we have to show for ourselves, we Me-Media types? That idiot fake prima dona bawling on You-Tube about Brittany (that only made me like Brittany's new video more!); way, way, WAY too much about Scooter Libby; ring-tones of the King of Spain telling Hugo Chavez to "shut up" (love it, love it). All, uh, important stuff, but not, well, a Tom Brokaw special or a Meg Greenfield editorial, eh? And if we compare oranges to oranges, You-Tube, except for the Guild, isn't as good as Roseanne (pre-lottery) or CNN...is it?

The sheer speed of news and commentary often mitigates against thought. The speed and 24/7 nature of news is something everyone takes for granted.

I remember only 30 years ago when we actually used to gather news very carefully from closed societies, get it out, put it into a press release, and hand-deliver that press release (faxes were not yet in widespread use, and even the duplicator had expensive photostatic paper). We could never be later than 11:00 am to hold a press conference; never later than 1 pm to get out a press release to deliver, because there were actual hard-copy deadlines, none of this flowing 24/7 stuff.

Hand-delivering to the 20 or so major news outlets in New York was a chore, but a lot of them were in the same neighborhood. You would walk into a large, marble building with gargoyles or Art Deco motifs and take the creaking elevator. Then, you would wait patiently for the gal at the AP or the Daily News to decide if they could use the press release, which you had carefully written to a certain length to fit their needs. They would tell you if they could "do a screenful," by which they meant not a computer screen, which they didn't have, but a printer's screen. At the end of the piece, you -- and they -- would write "-30-" to signal the end.

Going to the Times back in those days was an even longer process, waiting to talk to a reporter who was extremely busy -- you came in person precisely because you couldn't get through on the phone, so you dropped off the package.

If you worked in an organization, and had to print a booklet or magazine, you would make sure to use the union men, who would print a little "union bug" at the bottom of your stationery or publication. This was the right thing to do.

To think in my lifetime, I could actually span the era when newsrooms were still filled with men smoking, clattering on typewriters, cutting and pasting up other papers and press releases and notes on paper, filling wire baskets of copy, and people shouting -- to the clean, noiseless, cubby-filled smokefree, industrial newstext outlets of today, well it's boggling. I can remember even as a very small child on a kindergarten trip seeing the old-fashioned "hot type" presses at work in a village newspaper, and contrast that to my own blog typed on the Internet from my living room today.

Disruptive, and yet, not really disruptive enough, as changing media production didn't change people essentially, it only changed their environment and some of their behaviour. Most people still trust their friends and relatives in their "tribes" or networks than they do "the experts".

Mahalo Wahala

That's why when people try to resist Googlization, like Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, they turn to their tribe. I can't for the life of me see why this sort of site is seen as "better" -- but again, I look to start a discussion here and find people to help think this through. Let's make a Search Engine Critique Wiki and Woot! The premise of Mahalo is to hand-write the entries by people who are "greenhouse" workers as they preciously call them, and who are "experts" in this or that field. I urge everyone to go to mahalo.com and attempt to unseat Sean. He wrote me a pretentious little email about how he didn't put in his own links for his own book -- my, how noble! And yet he instinctively put in Slboutique.com and ignored Slexchange.com to site one of many biases. You can add links there, but only after they are cleared -- and by him. This is worse than Cristiano's search service. And this it the wave of the future -- away from the originally disruptive media of Google that threw everything into a giant maw, and then churned up only what people click on the most like monkeys (Wikipedia, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy) to...well, this. My blog is now in this list because I've been "cleared".

You can judge the Second Life page by the fact that its curator is, of all people, the self-promoting Sean Percival, who has not only griefed me at meetings, but stalked me around to taunt me, including in the Metaversed meetings. In fact, it was his nastiness to me in the group Metanomics that led me to say "Fuck you," and then get expelled -- and that's so typical of how the new tribal me-dia works, it gets taken over by a few, who are malicious to others and then keep them out if they fight back. If I'm put in now, it's merely as a tactical dodge not to appear biased. Go put yourself in, gentle reader!

So what you get in Mahalo is a kind of cultural snapshop of Silicon Valley circa 2007, making a platform widget thingie, a dot.com of the new Web 2.0 type, that is supposed to take off and become popular and challenge the status quo. So it's a kind of interesting sociological study of what people like this find important. Digital cameras. LeWeb3. The Hobbit Movie. Kane & Lynch. Yes. The world's first Valley-powered Search Engine.

When will they hook it up to the East Coast, let alone Middle America -- hey, and the rest of the world, which will not find Russia-Chavez-King of Spain their only touchpoints, or "Wanda Jean Allen" on the short list of the world's numerous human rights issues. "Everything foreign affairs" gets you a predictable "Gays in Iran" and "Footballs Offend Afghans"? and the usual over-emphasis on the Israel-Palestine conflict and Guantanamo.
Puzzling why "Anatoly Serdyukov" former Russian defense minister who resigned, would get his own page in Mahalo. Ultimately, a site like Mahalo makes you feel helpless, because it tells you that if you don't like something, write it yourself and get it cleared. You are supposed to be empowered by this. And you are supposed to find it all more transparent if you can see the little dweeb who owns the Second Life page now. I find myself, a big hater of Wikipedia, actually driven back there after a spell on Mahalo. Maybe it's the cloying little yellow flowers.

When you are banned from a site, you learn the limits of "disruptive" media -- which of course, hasn't been very disruptive of the tekkie bastions who want to keep their sanctum sanctora like Terra Nova or Tech Crunch (where I post now and then, but usually in stark awe that someone like Duncan Riley can get away with being so horribly mean, sexist, and agist about something like Margaret Atwood saying the Internet is producing stupidity -- I guess he's a case in point.)

I could write reams about the sites I am banned from, but it boils down to one thing: these sites were not moderated well. You would think that if they banned me, that must mean they were well moderated. Nothing of the kind. The people on them would either have a heavily biased moderation policy, giving their pals a pass (like the Lindens), or worse, no moderation policy at all, so that when a menace like Csven Concord would get started with harassing, obsessive, even sexist and abusive talk, no moderator would step in, nobody would stop him, nobody would even comment, leaving me to fight back by myself.

Disruptive media isn't just about some handful of people in Silicon Valley getting to rewrite the A-list. Unfortunately, it not only disrupts us, it disrupts them. It disrupts pretentious experts and search engine rewriters. When all the disruption is done, perhaps Margaret Atwood is right; berhaps she merely belongs to a different time, like Anna Karenina.

Comments

[Robert Bloomfield]

Prokofy,

Thanks for providing your thoughts on each of the topics I am considering for my Metanomics interview with Robin Harper. Whether I am writing about accounting standards or preparing for a newfangled SLTV show, I find it helpful to seek advice from people who have thought about the issues in question. While I rarely get such publicly critical responses, I still chalk this up as a ‘win.’ After all, I get some helpful input in winnowing topics and crafting questions, along with a little promotion for the show (which, your readers might want to know, will take place on January 7th, 11am SLT… join the Metanomics group inworld for notices of all upcoming events).

As far as your ‘main criticism’ of me, you are right that I am looking into a variety of opportunities in virtual worlds, including conducting academic research in SL, creating new worlds in which to study financial regulation, and helping executives and enterprises navigate the metaverse. I will need to be careful that my more active and visible endeavors don’t jeopardize my academic research, but at this point I don’t see many problems.

I share your concerns about the SLBB/VWBB and SLEC....they have a lot of work to do to establish that they can be effective and evenhanded. But industry-sponsored self-regulatory groups arise and succeed frequently in the real world, so I am not ready to concede that the idea is fundamentally flawed or non-democratic. Mostly, I am surprised that no competitors have arisen to challenge their positions.

[Prokofy Neva]

Rob,

Are you saying that you are a paid consultant to executives and enterprises? I'm not sure what you mean by "help".

So the businesses that advertise on Metaversed.com and Metanomics pay for advertising on the site and the shows, then they themselves are the subjects of the interviews (that's often how it has been working), then they also pay you as a consultant?

You say, "will need to be careful that my more active and visible endeavors don’t jeopardize my academic research." I imagine like all vain creatures, your department heads or college board members or whoever is in the decision-making capacity is more likely flattered and impressed at getting all the news coverage for their institution rather than thinking if there *is* a conflict.

But I *do* ask if it is a conflict of interest to be studying the entities that pay you -- that's one of my chief critiques of Metaversed as it developed, that the people on the shows were the advertisers. I realize it's one happy little party, and I am merely viewed as a "troll" for raising this, but it has to be raised as a public matter.

What kind of research does the public get when the subjects of research are so close to those who study? Given the profound impact of games and worlds on people, especially young people who play them a lot, is this a good thing?

I raised these questions with Aaron Delwiche. He pondered these matters himself. Eventually, he went on leave from his academic post and started a metaversal development company, and then even went to another one. He also does events in world.

Perhaps this is an inevitable stage of this field.

You don't share my concerns about the SLBB etc because at every turn, you promote them, and merely wipe away any confrontation about the essential problem they pose by saying they are "at an early stage" or "you hope they grow" blah blah.

But the entire premise is wrong. They are not counterparts to the RL institutions as I've noted repeatedly -- the SLBB is nothing like the real Better Business Bureau.

Industry doesn't sponsor the SLBB, it is an independent non-profit monitoring business. Industry doesn't sponsor the SEC, either, my God. These are just basic, obvious truths. Industry groups are good for self-regulation, but that's not what these things claim to be -- they behave as if they have the credibility of a non-profit not associated directly with business, and they behave as if they have the credibility of an agency created by an elected and accountable government -- which they don't.

Competition shouldn't arise against them based on these models, because it merely perpetuates the same flawed concept, that groups of businesses inworld can whitelist themselves and blacklist others, or play government with other people's money when they are anonymous and unaccountable.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh, BTW it's helpful to remember that I'm banned from Metaversed Island and group and by extention Metanomics (and you've been fuzzy about whether or not you are going to uphold this oppressive ban).

Why? Well, here's the whole story for those just tuning in,
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/10/canned-from-the.html

but it has to do with moderators not moderating, in fact, and allowing stalkers and harassers, like Sean Percival (who now runs the Mahalo page) to have their head. Then if I fight back, I'm banned for saying "fuck you" in a group and also telling another creep off who told me I was a "middle aged loser" blah blah blah. I told *him* I'd punch him out. I'm proud to be a "middle-aged loser" if that's what I am, doing what I do : ). Actually, what a lot of it was about was criticizing the Sheep's viewer.

I suppose *this* is an inevitable stage for "new technology" too, especially of the 3-D communication variety, where young arrogant males get to be rude assholes with no consequences, and where the people selling advertising to companies that pay them to cover them decide what the discourse is.

So, new media, if this is what it is, definitely cries out to be disrupted, just like old media.

[Prokofy Neva]

Oh! I forgot to mention, while we're discussing the guy who owns the Mahalo page on Second Life now, Sean Percival (sean Voss in Second Life), this is what he had to say about presiding over getting me banned from the Metanomics group in SL:

"As far as I'm concerned you are too counterproductive to be a part of what we are now trying to build here."

[Desmond Shang]

>>"I share your concerns about the SLBB/VWBB and SLEC....they have a lot of work to do to establish that they can be effective and evenhanded. But industry-sponsored self-regulatory groups arise and succeed frequently in the real world, so I am not ready to concede that the idea is fundamentally flawed or non-democratic. Mostly, I am surprised that no competitors have arisen to challenge their positions."

I suspect that the fundamental flaw comes down to identity verification.

Without that, any determined scammer can leverage a trust-measuring group and then simply disappear.

Also, there are big problems with definitions and terms.

"Bank"
"Stock Exchange"
"Business Bureau"
"Hard Evidence"
"Verifiable Claim"

I think it is a foregone conclusion that character assassination can *and will* be done via disposable identities and so forth. Most decent folk simply refuse to believe anyone would stoop so low, but therein lies the problem.

Even ebay's remarkable trust mechanisms have the same difficulties re: identity. Scammers quickly build sterling reputations, sometimes over a couple years in collectibles or other high dollar areas - then simply 'vanish with the loot'.

I look to ebay - once they solve that problem, perhaps the metaverse can adopt the solution. But they haven't. Sure, ebay may largely be safe for selling yardsale garden gnomes, but... so what. Our grid is already 'good enough' for comparable small transactions - anything that really isn't worth going to court over.

Best I can tell, there won't be a good substitute for real world justice and regulation. Industries often self-regulate under threat of sanction by governments - regulate, or else! In fact, governmental roles are typically in direct conflict with industry; that is what government is all about. Looking out for its citizens (even if only as a mechanism for maintaining control itself).

* * * * *

I have one silly, stupid way of evaluating effectiveness, and SL 'regulatory' bodies don't seem to pass the test very well.

Say for instance you gave $L 1000 to the average grid resident, with an agreement he will give it right back. Your odds of getting it back from Joe Average aren't perfect. But are they better than your odds with some of these 'regulated' groups? Heh. For anyone with any experience on the grid, Joe Average wins the day, hands down.

Here's another. Ask Joe Average what he thinks about various businesses on the grid. Usually you'll get a straight, honest answer. There won't be people who have paid him money to 'list' with him; generally he'll honestly say so when he doesn't have a clue. He won't quietly de-list the biggest 'bank' from 'membership' and also forget to mention it during its collapse.

So I see these so-called regulatory agencies *even worse* than the average guy on the street - an indication that something is deeply broken. It doesn't surprise me at all that few others would wade in these same waters.

[Prokofy Neva]

Desmond, that comment is SO astute -- that these grid businesses with names like "bank" and these "regulatory agencies" are *worse than Joe Average*. That is, they give the lie to the wisdom of the crowd -- or prove it -- or something....

I don't think it's at all about verifying identity, however. Quite the opposite. It's about trying to enhance reputation. Enhancing reputation is the entire name of the game in the Metaverse. People start banks to feel and look like big men on campus; they start regulatory agencies to look good. Vanity is the driving force of the Metaverse, not surprisingly, and it's very easy to be vain there.

That's why I think the solution isn't so much about verifying identity. I can think of 10 people whose names I don't know in real life -- and I don't need to know -- who I would trust to give $1000 to, and would expect to get it back at the end of the year as $1100 or whatever...And you're one of them, as chintzy as you were about Alice. I don't need to know your real name, even if you give it. And half the time, I can get even the real name and address of even an evil actor like Plastic Duck, but what could does that do?

No, what's more important is deed, not profile, and even word, on forums. Behaviour, predictability.

And I'd rather see a group form like the Honourable Land Dealers, that just says "We're going to bind ourselves by these few rules" and make rules like "if our landbot buys land from someone who didn't mean to set it to "anyone" we will return it" or "we won't carve up land into ad-farms" or "we won't switch prices on a client hovering over a land deciding whether to buy it and making an offer" -- or whatever their set is.

And that's how to do it. Make a group in which people say "We will bind ourselves by these rules" rather "We will judge others as to whether they fit our bill or not."

The first thing to do is to work out a position on ad farms and sign extortion. It's a travesty that this SL Virtual Business Bureau allows in as its member Chrischun Fassbinder, who puts up those awful signs still, some of them still left out at extortionist prices ($30,000 in Brown, for example), and now with even uglier and taller signs on them, but not for sale, even if you ARE willing to be extorted to buy back your view.

[Jane2]

My question would be about localization and its effect on retention rates...and what if anything LL plans to do about its competing and countereffective efforts in partnering with foreign companies (often not beloved in their home companies I am told) yet not allowing any orientation cross-communication between the English (American) grid and the rest, translating wiki pages ("all things wiki" isn't helpful when you're trying to convey information and build enthusiasm for SL simultaneously in 4 languages).

So much of the grid is non-English-speaking now but you'd never know it. I understand their reason for not releasing retention rates, but I'd be interested in their stats re countries of origin. Percentage would be fine.

[sean percival]

Hey Prok!

Yes I sent you what I thought was a rather nice email, instead of a reply I only find this.

I'm not going to try to defend your supposed griefing actualizations. Your mind is set, and obviously you are not easily swayed. For someone how loves to razz others you certainly don't take it well yourself.

You contributed to the SL page, you are an authority on the subject so your links were added. Like I said in the email, Mahalo is open and not as closed/biased as you naturally think it is. Go add your links to Wikipedia and see how long they remain. In any case thanks for your recommendations.

Shamless self promoter? You betcha, you do the same. Post about your rentals much here? ;) PS Click my name to buy my book, Prok I would be glad to send you a free copy. Its no trouble really, as you have pointed out already I'm one of those Audi driving, iPhone using, web2 geek gatekeepers.

Keeping fighting your fight, and for now... POOLS CLOSED

[Prokofy Neva]

Sean, you are a total tool. I'll never forget what you wrote, "You are counterproductive to what we are building here." What a fucking lunatic elitist thing to say, as if there is a "we" that gets to "build the metaverse" and other people who "get in the way" are "counterproductive". Who gets to decide that?

From my very first encounter with Mahalo, and the inane twitterings of Jason (my favourite was his repeated gushing about "the Louve" while he was in "Paris France Europe" ROFL -- I could see it was biased. Anybody can. Jason got 50 friends or whatever, out of the Valley, to write up a totally leftwing silicon tekkie wiki thing -- not surprisingly. That's his idea of "correcting" and "fixing" the Google issues.

Griefing is *EXACTLY* what you do in SL when you come to a discussion not to honestly take part in it, but to be annoying, to poke around, to heckle. And why come to my office? Just to snoop around and be an annoyance. In fact, the griefing attack that occcured right at the same time you were at my office -- coincidence much?

And while use a famous slogan from a racist, anti-semitic group, the Patriotic Nigras (Pool's Closed) if you aren't one yourself? Cheering them on, are you? Why join their groups in SL? Are you just commonly naturally to this state of assholery?

There's nothing "open" about a system that has people clear and vet links -- and putting in someone like you, they've signally just how awful it is, precisely because you are a smug, elitist -- and griefing -- geek.

I don't need to "add links" anywhere. How stupid! Google finds the links, or...I go on link readers or link sites that collect them by people or sites who seem worth bothering with (like Scoble or Technorati).

As for sending me your book, I hardly need to give my home address to someone who consorts with the PNs. Ugh.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Sean, you are a total tool. I'll never forget what you wrote, "You are counterproductive to what we are building here." What a fucking lunatic elitist thing to say, as if there is a "we" that gets to "build the metaverse" and other people who "get in the way" are "counterproductive". Who gets to decide that?

-----

Chilling, isn't it. Totally chilling.

coco