Busting the Backchat

Backchatters unite and fight for your rights! lol But those rights don't extend into disrupting the discussion itself. Who gets to determine the limits? The blogsophere solved this problem by witch-hunting Sarah Lacy; Scoble solves it by having a separate discussion "just for geeks" so they can ask "their questions". Paging Eric Rice: are we now going to have to have separate drinking fountains?

All I've said about Richard Bartle is that his concepts for games are socialist -- enforced egalitarianism. You would think I had disrobed the Pope! But I had to say that...Because they are. Just listen to what he says. He wants games not to have RMT, and he wants everyone who enters their spaces to be "on a level playing field" -- not just to have equal opportunities, however, but to have equal outcome. How so, equal outcome? Because he doesn't want anyone to put cash in (evil riches from evil real life!), or to cash out (evil profit!). He's willing to invoke moral persuasion or even threat of expulsion if you don't believe as he does.

If a designer and a group of his fans wish to make a closed game where they can enjoy the socialism they could never establish in real life, who's to stop them? In the name of freedom of expression, they get to do that, if they can find the $130 million or more needed to design and publish a game, as Richard himself explains, and can make do with the some $15 million in profit they can make after that. It's their right to keep their game closed, surely, under a TOS, just as anybody has the right of free assembly to make any club they like and keep others out under rules that don't violate real-life law (i.e. discrimination against minorities).

That's never enough for game gods these days, however. We live in a world where game makers tell us that reality is broken, and *they* can fix it. That Bartle's fellow Terra Novan, Edward Castronova, can publish books in which he actually calls for making the real world like these games. "Learning from their lessons" in "serious games" and such. So, I'm sorry, but when you reach that point, it's more than just to begin to examine the motives, ideologies, capacities of people calling to control your game -- and maybe your life, too.

The furious frenzy that is kicked up among the thin-skinned, arrogant, and neuralgic (oversensitive to sharp criticism) tech set is astounding. You would they didn't work for big IT companies that run on the capitalist profit motive and pay them on that basis, or something lol. I don't know the root of their fury, but part of it is simply *not being in control*. Far from the marginalized social misfits that people still imagine them to be from the *last century* -- and I mean like *the first part of the last century*, they have gotten their hands on the controls of most of your life already. Everything from school attendance records to employment histories to health background to criminal records to romantic affiliations to banking records are online, or digitalized, and in the control of these technicians, these gamers, who would like to put more game elements into your life. It's more than right and just to ask: but what's their plan for all this control? Control they insist on having?

Not surprisingly, Broken Toys had a furious rant about my perfectly normal commentary about Bartle yesterday, with their usual frothing claims of *me* being the nutter -- with the usual fatuous and inane exaggerations of my blog that only serve to illustrate this Broken Toy himself is the nutter. Wikipedia *is* evil -- many of us can agree on that! -- but I don't just rant and rave and spin conspiracy theories, I, just, oh, read the news. Read the blogs of former and even existing employees lol! That's all it takes these days! Wikipedia's founder is like the Eliot Spitzer of Web 2.0 these days lol. And I've had very detailed analyses in the past of just how insane Wikipedia gets -- and not surprisingly, with a system of anonymous and unaccountable editors without demonstrable credentials who hide under the cloak of openness and accessibility.

I've had to take endlessly amount of trashing from the nerd-packs for noting that...oh, nobody has heard of SWSX. Well...they haven't? I'm *quite* certain that my never having heard of it before I hung out with gamey nerdy Web 2.0 types like Eric Rice or Tony Walsh or Peter Ludlow isn't some sort of outliar. I could call up 50 people in real life right now, or even just IM all my non-SL facebook friends, and they won't have heard of it. Or if they have, it's sort of a distant thing that they can't afford, can't take that seriously, and doesn't impact their use or thinking about social media in any read way.

To state that nobody has heard of a geeky gamers' social media conference in Austin, TX that so far has consisted of a) a lot of bar-hopping and b) a scandal around how the Facebook guy was interviewd by Business Week isn't to betray some hopeless loserhood: it's to explain that the hopeless losers have to get a grip about their actual control and influence culturally, which isn't in pace with their technical control.

The goons in the back of the room couldn't get their own interview with Zuckerberg. Who are they? They are geeks and IT guys and perhaps game devs or start-up tekkies. They have "an idea for an API*. Robert Scoble said they had the "better questions". I'm still waiting. I don't see them. I watched Scoble's Dev Garage session with Zuckerberg where the geeks were supposedly now "allowed to talk" now that that mean Sarah Lacy wasn't "hogging the show". And..what did we hear? Some goofball getting up to the mike and telling us that he doesn't want his parents and sisters to see the same pictures he sends to his girlfriend, and whine whine, FB doesn't let him do this.

Zuckerberg of course rightly blinks at that and points out that there is the granularity already. Of course, this webcam wanker could be sending his photos on email or having a private Flickr account or whatever it is people do who need to send pictures to girlfriends they can't send to sisters. Facebook could even be used for private IMs and private links. As far as I can tell, you can select the set of friends you want to get some stuff and not others, but if you can't, and there are technical reasons for this, eventually they'll be surmounted. The geek dude wants to be "different things to different people". Let him argue this out with his fellow geeks who demand interoperability and data portability if he wants to make sure his life compartments never get mixed up. I'm failing to see the rich, complex, complicated tech questions that were just dying to come out from the back chat and were so "suppressed" by the Business Week gal who asked the normal thing of this over-feted youth: "*ARE* you worth a billion? How so?" I mean, can't we *ask that* without being screeched at and told to show are tits? Hello?

So, where are we on the backchat? The backchat in Second Life is sacred. Never tamper with it! Never stop it or block it. For one, it's typed, so it's not disruptive by any reasonable stretch because people especially watching video or listening to sound can simply ignore it and not watch it. Most backchat these days is arranged in groups to keep it cross-sim because of full sims and multiple venues. So if you hate backchat, leave the group. It's an open group. Join again any time.

I remember tech goddess extraordinaire Torley Linden constantly trying to control the backchat at Linden townhalls in the old days, and giving up, and conceding that at least a group chat had to be allowed. In fact, one of the reasons the Lindens gave up townhalls is that they could not stand the backchat. Corey Linden, Mr. Information Wants to Be Free Open Source, for example, couldn't *bear* that I backchatted a very normal, and very short repartee to his claim that they had "run out of sims" and that's why there wasn't first land.

(They hadn't run out of sims. They obviously found servers to *sell them* as more expensive islands, duh. They just didn't want to keep *giving away programmed servers and programmers' time on first land servers* duh. Let's be clear on this. Let's not pretend there is a "land shortage" in this socialist system. Let's realize that the Bolsheviks wanted to sell the crops and oil abroad for hard currency, and let the People freeze and starve at home. I was booted for writing this in *one sentence* about there not really being a shortage. A griefer who had name-spoofed me and was ranting nonsense was permitted to allow and keep spouting. I was booted from Second Life for 2 hours as a miscreant for telling *the truth* about the Lindens. They stopped their townhalls not long after that, unable to stand backchat.)

Backchat has grown better and better, precisely because it has been allowed. However, there is still the problem of heckling. I wrote yesterday about the problem of the SWSX backchat and now Scoble has a full report.. The problem there isn't the institution of backchat, which must be allowed to flourish. The problem is when it moves into disruptive media for the sake of disruption of the speakers on the platform. That's clear. What is less clear is how much control should be placed over room backchat for the sake of the net nannies in the audience. I can't view them in any other way. If someone in an audience is offender merely by another person typing a line with a view different than theirs, what are they doing sitting in social media?

I'm waiting to see when the backchat of this session with Bartle is published -- although room v. group chat may not be published, we'll see. Yet another reason never to depend on what you think will be total capture of these revents, because censorship can creep in.

This morning, I log on and find a reprimand (of the Soviet type) from Prof. Robert Bloomfield. He has received complaints about the backchat "getting out of hand" and I'm to "watch it" and he is "speaking to the others," namely Intlibber Brautigan and Temporal Mistral. He writes:

"I have received a few comments about group and local (CMP) backchat during yesterday’s Metanomics. There was a fair bit of highly-charged discussion that was off topic. I am sending this to all parties involved, to ask that you respect people’s desires to keep chat channels both polite and on-topic. Thanks!"

I asked him if he could point to some specific, objectionable speech, asked him if his advertisers were complaining (he said not) and whether the complainers were related to the two hecklers.

These two have been regular, frequent flyer hecklers at any meeting I show up at. They were absolutely brutal at the panel where I spoke, and I simply ignored them because...there were two moderators (and it took two moderators!) in both room and group chat to shut them up -- to get them to stop harassing and heckling and making outrageous claims (of the sort you can see very visible on display by the anonymous geektards rounding up for the kill at Broken Toys).

I absolutely stand by my backchat remarks. They aren't intemporate. There is nothing wrong with them. Rob is wrong. He may feel himself to be a moderate moderating extremists, but what he's really doing is engaging in false moral equivalency. I have no doubt the record, if published, can illustrate that.

I remember I made a blow-by-blow analysis of an old Linden community round table where Blue Linden and others accused me of "taking up all the chat". When the chat log was rolled up, low and behold, you could see how utterly false that was. Numerous people were backchatting, speaking out of turn, and speaking off topic. Droves of them. It's just that they spoke in the goofy geeky cultural style that the Lindens *liked* that they didn't find *rubbed them the wrong way*. I've analyzed the long chat logs with Meta Linden, too, where one imperious geek queen can completely hog the microphone to talk about her bandwidth issues over and over, even though private account problems are supposed to be off topic, but any sort of one-liner from me, of the type like, "Could you tell us why premium sales have dropped so precipitously?" is considered "trolling" or "inappropriate" lol. I am accused of "taking up all the office hour" for a line or two, while these queens scroll on endlessly, alternately screeching and flattering Lindens.

I really had it out with Beyers Sellers (Rob Bloomfield inworld) with his claims. It's the hallmark of a civilized and liberal free society that principles like "the right to face your accusers" are in play. Of course, there's something inherently absurd about having to have a judicial process about *the nature of speech in a supposedly free debate around a speaker in SL* lol, but that's how Soviet the society is.

Here's what the accuser said (still anonymous):

"At events such as today's, the backchat seems to deteriorate as people turn their focus towards responding to her inane accusations. This distracts from the speakers and the topic at hand. While some backchat is of course fun, Prokofy seems to want to take control of the conversation, which is disrespectful to everyone else there."

Well, even Rob conceded that I hadn't said anything "inane". I simply said the unspeakable, the blasphemous, the word that dare not speak it's name -- socialism! I declared a game-god, who is for closed economies and enforced egalitarianism as *gasp* Marxist in his approach! The horrah!

Why is it "disrespectful" to characterize something as socialist? Could we find...um...another term to described closed command economies lol?

The hilarious thing about this is that Intlibber, who is an avowed anarcho-capitalist of the Snowcrash Friedmanite type (although he's all for asking for healthy handouts of spaces on the Linden DPW work crew for his own builders lol), will say, in the course of this same backchat, "I agree, Prok" when I point out, well, the socialist nature of what Bartle is saying.

Can't we criticize games? I mean, just as in the Soviet Union and in Cuba today, a thriving black market develops because people refuse to buy into the illusion of redistributive justice, so gold farming naturally develops in games. Perhaps it's time, like EA-Land figured out, to *allow this*? To graduate, in world terms, from the primitive Marxist societies with command and control by "advance garde" and allow people to buy and sell their own content and profit from it? I mean...this is radical these days lol?

But Intlibber has only one agenda: silencing me because I can mount a credible critique on his own agenda, which isn't any prettier than the socialist agenda in terms of its ambitious to control other people. He ruthlessly went to work trying to do this at the Herald, spreading lies and memes, inciting demonstrations against me, siccing his b/tard workers on me, etc. He was disgraceful and rude at the panel I spoke at, without a single legitimate thing to say. If you're going to keep barking "libel" at a blogger, you have to come up with the examples, the evidence -- you have to be able to resist the truth defense, frankly. Intblubber has never been able to do that, preferring, instead to keep spouting the defamatory remarks just to see if they stick.

Temporal Mistral's degree of fury and malice isn't comprehensible to me, as I don't know him. An alt? Somebody with a beef? He ranted to me inworld for half an hour, claiming that in an interview with Lordfly more than 2 years ago, I "promoted Ginko". Huh? This is the sort of rabid insanity you get in the SL culture of people gossiping and fretting and fuming online, stewing in false information for years.

Read the interview, and decide for yourself. Also read this article. I know it must put Busybody into a frenzy, but the Herald was first on the story, and pointed out the real problem: the Linden's censorship of debate on the issue.

There's several things happening at once at these Metanomics sessions:

o Some people feel they are in a kind of special little coterie of elites and progressives who want to control the discourse. This isn't just talk about economics; this is economic power itself. So they want to control the talk to control the economy and their reputation in it. That's why it's good when the media is a separate, stand-alone business of its own, and not essentially an entertainment or feature production from one business. The economically powerful want the discourse has to be in a manner or style that they have a comfort level with.

o Some people are violently opposed to any ideology, criticism, or comment that doesn't fit with their tribe's conformist viewpoint -- they are constitutionally unable to allow it to stand without flying into heckling rages -- some of these people have long histories heckling me really for no good reason than that they wish to silence a critic. Others are just very young, or very insular, and just haven't had much exposure at all to debate, given that there is nowhere in their lives where debate occurs. It doesn't occur in their games, their AIM chat, their homes, their schools -- so they never see it, they find their like-minded, and stand in the corner and snicker with them...and stay that way for the rest of their lives.

o Males in particular on the subject of technology, especially geeky males, feel they have pride of place and must dominate the discourse, and are especially intolerant of females, or any one in any class they feel to be socially or intellectually inferior

When these three things are all going on at once, you get this or that fuss-budget complaining that "Prokofy is taking over the chat".

They're quite capable of stretching out their fingers and typing, but they prefer to fume in silence, and try to control discourse by quiet little discussions with "our set" about what "we" find acceptable -- this is Cornell, after all, and not SUNY Binghamton. It's Ivy League (I wish we'd see more evidence of actual brains from this setting -- there are almost never any comments on the blog lol).

Or they're quite capable of just typing their own sectarian opinion, but accepting that others will have them too -- but instead they heckle.

Once a gang of these types gets steamrolling, they find it easy, like Sean Percival to write "nuclear fail" about someone asking some pretty normal and honest questions of a fetted little social media magnate, and they find it easy, like Sean Percival, to say "you are not contributing to what we are trying to build here". Imagine, the fatuous pompousness of stuff like that.

All I can do in these cases is try to shed light on the process itself.

o The people making these anonymous, police-informer style complaints and trying to take over moderation should be challenged to stand up publicly and should be challenged to back up their claims. They may not be in the majority as they imagine. If they *are* capable of rallying the "majority" (whoever shows up?) to their side, then they need to be challenged on acceptance of minority opinion without inciting forced migration.

o You would think that chatlogs speak for themselves. They don't, as many people see them through the lens of their particular agenda. If they are "progressives," any hint of any criticism of socialism will make them see red -- literally -- and they will imagine that whoever makes these remarks is somehow "Ann Coulter" and "hogging the conversation". It's very psychological. I've done very long exigeses of these in the past.

o The moderator -- Rob and his staff -- should resist calls by this or that party to silence backchat. *Their response to complaints about how backchat is going must be to have MORE backchat, not less.*

What, then is possible?

o If people want a nice ladies' lunch at these things, with the dulcet tones of the idle rich to prevail, then they can have that -- anyone can make a club. They can't pretend it's a serious debate about virtual economies, however. Instead, it's an old boys' club. In the age of social media, using new media to enhance rather than break up such old boys' club seems suspect to me.

o Backchat can degenerate miserably into brutal heckling. So either grin and bear it -- it's only typed text, it need not even be heeded by ladies whose delicate eyes can't bear to see it. Or moderate it -- have people on hand urging the nasty attackers like Temporal or Intlibber to stop it -- or face ejection.

o People who sit in these meetings listening to them who are shy, quiet, unable to express themselves, etc. need to look at their anger and sense of inferiority. Why are they trying to silence other people just because they don't talk? Can't they type? Do they honestly expect only an occasion "LOL" or "That's really awesome" to come across the screen?

Ultimately, I really oppose little private moderation expeditions and little chastisements handed out privately.

It's very important, if you think someone's speech is "out of hand" and "breaking the rules" (whatever they are) that you make the call PUBLICLY so that the public can see -- and judge -- whether the call is proper. It's better not to be doing any sort of silly moderation of this type, but if you wish to have some moderation, to prevent obvious griefing (spam, hate speech) or intolerant heckling then...moderate.

Moderation is always most successul when you can name names. "Intlibber, please take up your badgering of Prokofy in IMs and don't disrupt the group chat, please." That's all. No need for little secret police reports.

If, however, if the request is, "Prokofy, could you please not say so much in backchat? Because it's intimidating other shrinking violets who are afraid to type" I can only say "They are anonymous Second Life avatars. Let them type and get over themselves."

Because that's essentially what's being said, when Rob says:

"I am merely asking you to be sensitive to the requests of the many other people who are in the local and group chat channels. I am talking with Temp and Int as well."

Well, back up such claims. Let's see who the "many other sensitives" are. Then I can judge. Do I want to spend my time sitting in a laggy sim with a bunch of oversensitive net-nannies who grow screechy at an honest tagging of a game-god's game nostrums as "socialist"? Or do I want to engage in intelligent conversation with other reasonable men and women?

In order to try to keep imposing his role as "Ivy League credentialed moderator over the community of Second Life* (sigh), Rob has cooked up a theory of "externalities". This is rich!

"Beyers Sellers: backchat is a common resource, so every individual's comments have externalitiesx
Beyers Sellers: those externalities can be positive or negative
Prokofy Neva: If someone is unhappy with what is said in backchat, they can post a comment, not bully the moderator
Beyers Sellers: I think when you and temp and int got into it, the externalities were largely negative"

So, this...socialist theory of backchat, if you will, posits that backchat is a "common resource". Therefore, no one can partake "too much" of it. And no one should "try to get the upperhand."

Well, that's reasonable except...anyone can type a line. The room chat line space is an endlessly scrolling constantly renewable resource. Time isn't renewable, but chat space can fill as fast as you can type. So, type.
Attention is NOT a renewable resource, but if you don't want to pay attention in SL, you can do a handy thing: mute the person. Their chat ceases showing.

One of the "blondes" (as she called herself there) who imagined that opensim was a threat to the land business in SL (I'm not seeing that it is) imagined that my critique of opensim was based on my presumed "land baron status" (she gets to make an ass out of herself and herself, by assuming). Discussion of opensim might be declared offtopic. But...is anything truly off-topic in backchat?

If I come to a lecture from Richard Bartle, I come prepared mainly to listen to him, type a few obvious remarks in backchat, and ask him a relevant question. I did all those things.

I don't expect to have to battle off hecklers and harassers of the type like Intlibber, who even helps the b/tards in the goon's school of Woodbury to deliberately buy property next to me and harass me from it lol. I mean, if ever there wasn't a more obvious form of harassment than Intlibber standing around gloating and heckling in Furness, I wouldn't know what it was. These sorts of "gameplay incidents" occur far off camera for Prof. Bloomfield.

If these two "go at it," and no one shuts them up (and no one did), I don't see why I need to sit in silence and be harassed. I will defend myself.

Again, I can only quote Ziggy Figaro, who once very wisely commented on all this, that most bannings occur due to lack of moderation, not due to moderation itself. Those who moderate fairly, who get hecklers to stop, who intervene to stop harassment, have no need to ban either the hecklers or their target.

Comments

[sean percival]

You thought that interview was anything but a huge failure?

Are you speaking at SLCC? Lets have a heckle match, I imagine you would handle it better.

[Prokofy Neva]

Gosh, does an alarm go off in the Mahalo office when your name appears on the Internet, Sean? Do you keep scraping Google and such for appearances on the hour???

Oh indeed I didn't think it was a huge failure. I guess you didn't read my blog:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/03/the-children-ea.html

What is a huge failure is tekkie insolent Internet culture. And to the extent he keeps imposing *that*, your friend Mark Zuckerman will be the huge failure.

I've had to face incredible heckling constantly in SL, and it doesn't bother me. I just had to go through this at a Metanomics panel. Why, *you* are one of the griefers and hecklers, you should know.

I don't think I can justify going to SLCC this year, no.

[sean percival]

Of course I have my Ego-NORAD setup :)

[Robert Bloomfield/ Beyers Sellers]

How should people interpret this post's pastiche of Ms. Lacy's interview of Mark Zuckerberg and my interview of Richard Bartle?

I actually don't see much connection at all. Some folks in the back of the room gave Lacy a hard time, which interfered with her interview of Zuckerberg. In contrast, some folks in the Metanomics backchat went offtopic into an acrimonious but largely irrelevant discussion of opensim. This didn't interfere with the interview itself, but rather with other people's experience with the backchat.

I heard some complaints about this, and so I contacted the three parties involved: Prokofy, IntLibber and Temporal. Two of them simply said "sorry, won't happen again." Prokofy reacted with this post.

I stand by the points I made in our IM discussion. Backchat is a common resource, so everything said in it imposes externalities. My hope is to make those positive, not negative, which means that comments should be on point, constructive, and generous in spirit, so that they encourage others to participate.

By the way, you seem to be under two misimpressions. First, as far as I know, no Metanomics audience members were offended by your comments about Richard Bartle's socialism, or anything else you said about him. That is not at all the point--it was the comments that were *not* about the topic at hand that caused the most concern.

Second, you seem to believe that it is somehow inappropriate for me to contact you privately to say "hey, I am getting complaints about your behavior from people in the audience." Are people not allowed to talk to me about my events? Or am I not supposed to pass on such information? Or is it that I am not allowed to react in any way to those comments?

Finally, if you are going to report all of my IMs in your public posts, at least give me credit for my clever jokes. Like when you said "Moral equivalence. I reject it." and I said "is that 'reject AND denounce?" OK, so you had to be there (and be really into the Obama-Clinton race).

[Prokofy Neva]

Robert,

If you can't see any connection, I don't know how I can help you. The stories are about power. Other bloggers are starkly naming it -- it's about the new media's disruption of power, power of elites, power of elite journalists, and hey, power of elite professors in Ivy League colleagues. Deal with it.

If you are precisely talking about the debate on opensim, I could point out one thing: this debate took place before the beginning of the event, before Bartle began speaking, as far as I recall, but I'd have to look at the transcript.

But...nothing is off-topic for backchat. Backchat is backchat. It's what people wish to talk about freely. Not what YOU get to prescribe and script in your little prefabbed game panel.

When I'm you, you didn't specify to me what the offensive speech was. I had to keep guessing. You didn't say. You didn't produce any logs, you couldn't NAME it. So that's why I had to extrapolate and guess -- ah, could it be that somebody was upset that their favourite game icon was called a socialist or something? Which is obviously what got the panties of the broken toys gamerz in a bunch.

The two stories of backchat are two stories of how backchat is dealt with by the establishment.

In the Lacy story, the backchatters were so insolent and uncivil that they rose up as one and seized the microphone, broke the fourth wall on Lacy, began to have this meta conversation about her behaviour, she began to meta- them back with calls for back-ups on witnesses of Mark's statements he was now backing down on, and catcalls and Twitters and mocking and all the rest. And they overthrew the speaker -- the prepped and prefabbed journalist who was hired for the occasion to put on a show, a scripted fireside chat with a famous social media magnate.

In the tinier pond of SL and tinier example of Metanomics, before the meeting, not interrupting the speaker, not even directing the chat at the speaker, two hecklers who have a long history as frequent-flyer abusers (the record amply shows that in the panel where I spoke on SL media, etc.) began to harass me and expound on their extremist views about opensim, and I fought back.

The entire episode took place in typed chat, did not interrupt the scripted revent, and made no call on the panel moderator or

All that happened is that the ladies were scandalized and bitched to you because somebody criticized opensim and they found that view "inane". You should have told them to shut up, mute speakers they can't bear to soil their eyeballs viewing, and understand that backchat is where people backchat, and they need to grow up and trying to stop controlling people's speech.

If they are offended by something in backchat, they can stretch out their two hands and type a line themselves without sitting and bitching in silence in IMs about how "the chat is taken over".

It isn't taken over by having people argue about opensim.

Oh, and opensim is in fact fairly topical because it has to do with the idea that there is always the capacity to design a more perfect utopia where the economy and society will be more ideal.

Of course it's inappropriate in your smarmy little informants' world and police state of Second Life, where you pick up these awful habits, Robert, to have little private hectoring lectures with people. It's indecent. The very idea that you are trying to moderate somebody's backchat privately in this muscling sort of way is appalling. It's just outrageous. It's not what the university should be about. Indeed, the university is NOT about this; it can only become this when the university is chasing after game and VW companies and trying to get points in some reputation enhancement game.

You need to be called on this sordid little controlling of speech and powerplay, this moral equivalency of my defense against two known hecklers, both, bTW, with extreme *capitalist* viewpoints, from what I can tell lol.

Seriously who the *fuck* are these smarmy little fanboyz of yours that they decide what is on topic in chat BEFORE an event, even? and even if it were during an event, WTF? ESPECIALLY before an event, but even during, it's an outrage.

I could understand if this was somehow in Voice, or this stopped the speaker from speaking or if it stopped someone from asking a question -- like the Lacy incident at SXSW. But...it wasn't anything like that.

This seriously needs to be exposed because you need to be called on what you are doing here: trying to control the discourse, trying to call the debate for the same of controlling power of some actually rather hazily-identified group. We can't even *see* what this is about with this anonymous police-state denunciation.

Opensim, a reverse-engineering of SL even in defiance of the LL (rather loosely guarded) TOS restriction on reverse-engineering, is hardly free of controversy. Many people are asking perfectly legitimate and ordinary and normal questions about the sucking out of copyrighted content from SL in the process of making an opensim. I guess you haven't been following this. The defenders of the project are the hacker types who defend any such hack. To call the critique of hacking somehow "an inane theory" is to have grown entirely out of touch with reality. Second Life will do that to you.

As much as I watch the Clinton Obama race, I didn't catch the reject/denounce reference, but sure, I reject AND denounce ha ha ha.

[Robert Bloomfield/ Beyers Sellers]

So just to make sure I am understanding this: I should tell people who make comments about your backchat to "shut up" because no one should be "controlling people's speech."

Every time I think I have it, it just slips away.

But maybe I should think about this in terms of universities...which are all about letting whoever say whatever they want during classes. Wait, now I am getting confused again.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, Robert, indeed you must tell them not to control other's speech.

Yes, indeed that's absolutely correct.

Because people trying to curb and control and censor others' speech in a common discourse are harming the project of free speech an open inquiry.

If you are the steward of such an enterprise, in this setting, yes, you are responsible for keeping the space open. That means you have to say "no" to people who try to close it.

You have to gently but firmly tell them to a) use their mute button if something is offensive (I don't recommend that, but it helps flightly young girls especially whose eyeballs are damaged by robust arguments) b) leave the Metanomics group entirely, where the backchat takes place -- they can join it when they have recovered from their vapours and c) not even come period, if they are worried that something might frighten the horses.

Seriously, it's truly insane to allow a police-informant like this to control the discourse. They aren't even *right* about their claims. BTW, the backchat isn't loading -- it says "page not load" on your page -- and we can't even see it, and I dare say even when we do, it won't contain the room chat history, only the group chat (and this "offensive speech" took place in room chat, not even in group chat for the most part!)

As for your exaggerated and fake and tendentious comparison to university *lectures* of the formal type, geez, stop trolling.

Uh, do you come up to a group of students furiously debating something before your lecture, and tell them to shut up?

If a student -- let's say the child of a wealthy and influential father -- told you that they were offended by some of the robustness of the argument among other students before a class -- came up and complained to you and asked you to deliver a little homily to those people and tell them to stop, would you do what they asked?

Or would you stare at them in amazement, and say, Jennifer, cover your ears, hon. Don't come to the class early. Put on your i-tunes. Do what you have to do, but I'm afraid you can't expect me to control people's speech.

Now let's say during the lecture, your speaker or you were particularly lame. Let's say your little fangirl in the front row took offense, and heard the clattering keyboards of the boys in the back of the room IMing or texting each other.

Let's say she could look on her screen in some sort of college Meebo type chat room, instead of up at you talking, and read their backchat, in which they argued furiously.

And now she comes up to you after class and says to you "Those nasty boys are arguing! They're typing and chatting when you are giving your fabulous lecture! Make them stop! They're bad! If you don't, why...my daddy won't give to the alumni fund anymore!"

Wouldn't you find this extraordinarily awful? I would hope so. You couldn't control your students' backchat.

If it is "public backchat" so to speak, you could ask your flightly young female friend to avert her eyes, not look, close the screen.

By the same token, you simply must do the same thing to protect backchat in Second Life.

If the "disruption" came in Voice -- stepping on the speaker, or back-talking the speaker, you could have a right to declare "foul".

But it is typed BACKCHAT Robert, and your claim that this has to be moderated as you are doing is misplaced.

If you do insist on moderating, as you have done (it took two moderators working full time to keep these two hecklers from constantly disrupting the event with their backchat when I spoke, remember?!) then...moderate? Hello? Moderate. That means...going after those two hecklers and telling them to stop -- if your paramount goal is to prevent anyone from fainting from the vapours.

However, if it were me moderating, I'd simply let Brautigan and Mistral type away. Let them rant and rave. They discredit themselves. They will be ignored. People can mute them, and talk among themselves. I don't advocate muting, as I find that really Stalinist, but it's an option for those who are intolerant of speech.

It doesn't bother me if someone heckles me in typing while I'm voicing. I can respond of not -- we're all grown-ups here, except for the heckling children.

All I can say, Robert, is that the free market simply won't bear the kind of controls you, and presumably your sponsors, are placing. People will break out of these confines and go somewhere else. In time, you will be eclipsed.

[Crap Mariner]

I've been pondering this one for a bit, looking through the transcripts posted at the website (Thanks for posting the transcripts and backchat, BTW. Helps for folks who track via podcast... if only there was an easy-to-find audio-only RSS feed?)

Doesn't appear terribly off-topic to me. Drifts here and there, but still relevant and worth considering, I'd say.

Had my own run-in with "security" at an event over backchat/heckling/"enhancing" the audience experience. (MST3K meets Paisley, so to speak) But instead of being approached directly over negative reactions from other audience members, it was left to pile up until it all came down at once.

I figure folks have the Mute option if they don't want the Stadler-and-Waldorf style commentary - works pretty well from my end, since I see a lot of (Muted) swimming about titles at Schmuckfests. And if it crosses a line, they can ring me up directly or the "authority" figures they report to can politely mention it.

The concept of backchat, though, it's pretty darn mind-blowing when you try to model it in RL. It's like mind-reading or thoughtcasting. Instead of a single "reality" channel to pay attention to, you know have multiple channels of information hitting all at once.

Some folks just can't handle multiple primary streams of information coming in, multi-tasking, I guess.

Add in the Mute factor, and you now have different... dimensions? parallel events going on at once? Some people are there just to hear the speaker, others to interact, some to MST3K it, others to network amongst themselves, etc.

Eh, I'm drifting off topic now. Relax - I'll just warn myself.

[Temporal Mitra]

Well, since I have been maligned in print here, despite Prokofy mispelling my name, I will respond.
I have not made attacks on Prokofy...I have instead used well thought out comments to espouse my own opinion, since that is the right of every resident in Second Life. Prokofy claimed I accused her of libeling me, something that never happened. That was a statement made by Intlibber Brautigan...I merely said that one person's opinion should not be reported as hard news...that an op-ed piece was not news. But I am not overly surprised that Prokofy got the facts wrong...she seems to do that a lot...only recalling what she wishes to remember...in exactly the way she thinks it may have been said or happened, regardless of what chat transcripts may prove or disprove.

Our conversation about the OpenSim project was very simple...Prokofy claimed that the creators of OpenSim were elitist, because not everyone had the training and/or knowledge to use it. I attempted to explain that:
A) OpenSim is in development, and so as an unfinished product it DID take a certain amount of technical skill to use it.
B) That the OPEN part of OpenSim, did not, as Prokofy asserted, mean that it should be OPEN for everyone to use, despite their lack of technical knowledge. Instead it means that it it Open Sourced...
None of this seemed to have an impact on her position that it is elitist...but using her logic, and her terminology, almost everything in the world is elitist in some form or fashion. Your local plumber is elitist, because he has special skills that allow him to put in a water heater....your mechanic is elitist, because he can fix your transmission...the car maker is elitist, because they make an automobile that you can't repair.

As for the backchat that happened at the Metaverse function...I allowed myself to be drawn into a discussion with someone that cannot keep things at the level of a discussion. Prokofy has to make everything a conspiracy, a battle between classes...or an out and out rant about what Prokofy wants...and what Prokofy really wants is attention...an audience...because she needs that.

I gave my word to Robert Bloomfield/Beyers Sellers that I would not allow myself to be drawn into off topic debates by Prokofy again...because allowing myself to be brought down to her level is like wrestling with a pig...you both get smeared with mud, and the pig likes it.

[Temporal Mitra]

oh...and one final comment, I NEVER stated anytime that Prokofy was responsible for GINKO...I stated that she was responsible for advocating SL "banks"...despite others stating that there was no real need for unregulated and unsecured "banks" in SL...and that the creation of the whole concept of banking in SL was what was responsible for the GINKO mess...again...please stick with the facts, Prokofy...

[Prokofy Neva]

It's hard to justify the time to take on Temporal's tendentious talk in detail, when of course chat records and inworld chatlogs would set the record straight -- which I'll track down and do.

Temporal indeed chimed in with Intlibber. And indeed savaged me inworld for suppostedly supporting Ginko's. He's a total aggressive and not very bright abusive personality. I fail to understand what is driving his animosity to this day.

I've rightly described Opensim as an elitist coders project. It's not open if you can't code. Coders refuse to acknowledge the lack of technical skill as a lack of openness. I'm familiar with that problem.

The Lindens began that way, too, but they gradually had to make the interface immediately much, much easier to use, and introduce the land model and such, precisely to be make it possible for lots and lots of dummies to come in the world and populate it.

Opensim will keep hiding behind its beta status not to do that -- forever, for all we know.

BTW, we should get some truth in advertising here.

Opensim appears to be a project that both Intlibber and Temporal have *invested real money in as venture capitalists*. Amirite?

I totally understand the point about open-sourced not meaning open to use. And...that's just it. I've written for years about how open source=closed society. That walled gardens, paradoxically, provide more opportunity and more freedom for more people, and are therefore more truly open societies.

Temporal as a tekkie and opensim businessman just takes this literally, is unfamiliar with my larger themes in writing about this, and merely tries to declare me in "error" when he is in "stupidity".

Here's the deal with Robert Bloomfield: I don't give my word to do any such ridiculous thing as let the likes of hecklers such as Mistral and Brautigan intimidate me into making omerta-like deals with the privileged mafia of the discourse in SL. Hell no. I will not make any such promises. Hell no.

In fact, I find it really nauseating that in this very same smarmy little lecturing IM,
Rob actually had the nerve to play this game:

"We're having Nick Yee as a speaker next week. And knowing of your criticism of him, I'm sure you'll have a lot to say."

See? He imagines he can incite the bull Prokofy Neva by waiving a red flag, but then put the bull back in the corral when it doesn't suit him. He's such a *user*.

No, I will not be gracing the seminar with Nick Yee. Because I don't like being used -- which is what Nick Wilson did with Second Rant -- whip up Prokofy, incite speech, get everyone to come and see the drama, and then quietly go in the IMs and say, "OH, could you shut up? Because some of our sponsors or influential audience members are upset at the backchat."

No, truly, fuck that shit. Nick Yee can kiss my ass, and so can you, Robert : )

Enjoy.

[Ace Albion]

It's funny. A truism in SL if you provide products or services is that nobody reads anything, ever.

But when you go to a meeting, or an event, suddenly everyone can't help but read everything. It melts their brains, so much text scrolling up the screen. They have to read it all, and then they're upset that it's stuff they don't want to read.

Nick Yee, eh? Hmm, I wonder if his complete misunderstanding of the mechanics of "avatar gazes" in SL is on the interview question list.

[Robert Bloomfield/ Beyers Sellers]

@Ace, you bet! We will definitely be talking about the paper I think you are referring to (Yee, N. & Bailenson, J.N. (2007). The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed Self-Representation on Behavior. Human Communication Research, 33, 271-290.) You can find it here: http://www.nickyee.com/pubs/Yee%20&%20Bailenson%20-%20Proteus%20Effect%20(in%20press).pdf

Feel free to join us, Ace. You too, Prokofy...though naturally you will have to watch your language. The invective in the last sentences of your last post would get you booted from any Cornell classroom in an instant, and my policies for Metanomics aren't all that different.

[Prokofy Neva]

You know, I'm glad you mentioned that Ace. That's just what I argued about with the eggheads at TN when they fatuously published Nick's "fabulous" study about the avatar gaze.

Like the study claiming that voice increased cooperative behaviour and collaboration in WoW and therefore was "better".

These people just get the game companies to pay them, in one way or another (conferences if not direct consulting fees) to say what the game gods want to hear.

And here's a good example of why Benjamin Duranske's fatuous and self-serving (and game-god serving) claims that I am "against all professionals" in SL or "against all academics" needs a thorough trashing.

I'm not at all against all professionals or all academics. But by God, we've had an awful lot of dreck pushed at us by these gamer-lozers like those at TN, and we as consumers and simply as the intellectual public at large have a right to demand better quality control.

It's not a question of being against academics: it's a question of needing *better, higher-quality more serious academics*.

There's an enormous about of crap in this field of "ludology" which is made up of people in other fields where they are failures -- by their own admission.

Castronova self-told tale of being a grade-B economics professor in Podunkville U is iconic -- I just saw YET another fabulous retelling of it with YET ANOTHER FAILURE to drill harder on this newfangled expertise in a publication with a name like "The Walrus" (will have to find link. It was awful.

I definitely took on Nick Yee, and that was one of the reasons I was bounced from TN. One day when all his little friends were praising and feting him for his CNN interview (yawn), I said acidly that he had no call to dump on SL as he had done with his eternal whine about the suburbia of SL. I felt that using the incredibly high-profile bully pulpit of CNN to engage in this kind of incitement of cultural hatred was appalling.

And that's what it is. What it really breaks down to is this, as I've written before: When fabulous Nick Yee gets up to trash the McMansions of SL on CNN, he is trashing young black and Hispanic Americans or white working class trailer residents or Korean or Chinese kids in cities who parents are still at the deli and restaurant stage. It's class warfare.

In fact, it's a peculiarly American sort of passtime, this cultural trashing, as the trashing is often done by, as my Mother might have put it, shanty Irish whose lace curtains were only put up yesterday. Perhaps it's that American-induced sense of insecurity in the immigrant or the minority that incites them to engage in cultural trashing like that as tribal bonding with elites they hope to fit in with. I don't care whatever sensitive, nice-guy stuff you can tell me about Nick Yee (yeah, I read that self-serving medical horror story of his, too).

If any of the McMansion dwellers of Second Life were to get on CNN and trash successful educated Californian Asians who study games, it would be considered the most appalling racism.

But for him to engage in *cultural* hatred is not only ok; it's encouraged as an academic, televised enterprise -- as it is for this fakester that Annenberg is giving 40 acres and a mule to.

Does Nick Yee live in something like suburbia in his fabulous California life? Or does he live in a fabulous apartment? Or what fabulous lifestyle of the rich and famous does Nick Yee of Stanford have? I mean, how questionable is it for him to come on and dis people in SL for putting out what he airily imagines to be a "wasteland" (suffering from the same moronic cultural hatreds as this architect described below).

Nick was also on hand in the NYT times article where I was also quoted pontificating about the usual crap of the sort of "redefination of spaces" blah blah and use these worlds more creatively blah blah.

I could SLAP somebody like that who doesn't work as hard as we do. SLAP THEM.

It's truly an amplification of a cultural problem we see in real life, where elites constantly define themselves by trashing what they view to be as a vastly inferior culture of religious believers driving around SUVs and waving Confederate flags, etc. never able *themselves* to build and maintain any kind of compelling culture.

It's why these people keep *losing elections* they could win if they weren't such deep assholes. But of course, nowadays, their frequent theme is that representative democracy is for re-res anyway, it is "top down" (rolls eyes) and they can therefore install their "grass root" with their massive social media/game/VW engine "for change" blah blah.

[Bopete Yossarian]

"BTW, we should get some truth in advertising here.

Opensim appears to be a project that both Intlibber and Temporal have *invested real money in as venture capitalists*. Amirite?"

As Temporal Mitra's business partner and co-developer, I know for a fact that he hasn't invested *anything* in OpenSim. We don't have it installed on any of our servers. So I'm not sure what kind of truth in advertising you are referring to.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, I won't be joining you, and yes, I'll tell you before, during, and after that you can *kiss my ass*. I'm not a student at Cornell and never wish to be. Metanomics isn't a class at Cornell, either. And I haven't engaged in invective in these events, nor have I said anything remotely like what I might say on my own blog, but I've stated perfectly normal, everyday, common, justifiable criticism of the extremist hacker movement such as you'd find coming from the very corporate sponsors of your very Metanomics. Hello?!

If you can't understand -- and your little fangirlz in the front row can't understand -- that my speech in that event was normal and acceptable, and that the hecklers who harassed and bullied me are the problem, and need moderation, then you deserve every *fucking* invective that can be hurled after you. Because you can't distinguish between normal speech and abnormal harassment.

Anyone reading the transcript of the meeting -- read it! [if it will ever load on that page, now it is showing page not found] -- can see what assholery is at work here.

Opensim -- and their protectors and investors -- are being coddled for some curious reason that is unfathomable to me, and criticism of them -- legitimate criticism that contains no obscenity or ad hominent attacks or any "TOS offense" is being suppressed in the name of "backchat propriety" but...backchat that wasn't even during the event, and not even in the group!

These are principles at stake -- this is what I tried to get you to understand when you delivered your first smarmy little homily in world to me when I pointed out tartly that now that Nick Wilson was decoupled from Metanomics, that you needed to shed all the bans and blocks that had been unjustly inserted (by the way, inserted due to heckling in the group, and inserted due to speech after an event, and in room chat too).

And you kept whining and muling about how I had to watch it and I ignored you. Finally you invited me on a panel (!) and I agreed, and I don't think a single thing that came out of my hand or mouth was objectionable, obscene, inappropriate, or actionable.

Instead, you could see, and the world could see, how two hecklers in that meeting behaved abominably, and required two entire staff people to put them down, repeatedly, and even that didn't really work.

See? And yet you have the temerity to go on giving me cowardly little homilies.

Does anybody have the transcript and can they paste it here?

The effect of letting brutal, lying bullies like Brautigan and Mistral run the rules for a session like that is really, really creepy. I mean, it just boggles the mind, the thuggery of it. But that's ok, Rob, keep it up, and you will simply be exposed by it in the end.

[Prokofy Neva]

>As Temporal Mitra's business partner and co-developer, I know for a fact that he hasn't invested *anything* in OpenSim. We don't have it installed on any of our servers. So I'm not sure what kind of truth in advertising you are referring to.

What is Intlibber's financial relationship to OpenSim?

Given Temporal's business interests and his ardent defense of Opensim, and his collusion with Brautigan in this meeting, it's quite natural to ask his business relationship to opensim.

If he has none, great! No one has claimed he does! What's been called for, however, is truth in advertising. If two people are going to get up in a meeting and heckle and harass someone who makes the most normal, basic, reasonable criticism of a hackers' project, I'd like to know what motivation is driving it. Of course, the usual SL assholery and tekkie insolence could be at work, but I sense there's something "up" here that perhaps can come out in the comments : )

[Prokofy Neva]

Can't seem to find the secret copy of a notecard passed to me of a meeting in which Intlibber was described as investing in Opensim.

This could be premature speculation.
Reuters says he is only "eyeing" opensim:

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/01/25/opensim-worlds-lure-second-lifes-outcasts/

BTW, as with the Herald, Intlibber's purpose in heckling and trying to goad and incite me and get Robert Bloomfield either to delivery homilies, shut me up, or banish me, is to remove my influence from the discussion -- apparently he's deathly afraid of any exposure of his failed anarcho-capitalist ideology.

The thuggery involved never ceases to amaze me. BTW Stoklitsky's recent Herald tell-all about being in the PN all along, I wonder how that helps Intlibber's "libel" case that there was no connection between his Woodbury pals and the PNs, that they supposedly "hated". Does he ever scroll back and look at all his own lies lol?

BTW, Intlibber is in the transhumanist extropian mafia, too, along with fellow-travelling crypto brainuploader Duranske lol.

http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/2007/12/

http://transumanar.com/index.php/P30/

BTW, Busybody has put up a lot of good and evidently credible reporting that is critical of Intlibber, but one never knows, of course, looking at the source:

http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/936

Intlib faces a class-action suit:
http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/924

etc etc. I don't go for bank drama, I leave that to the little penguin, but whatever's up here, it lets me know that somebody isn't content to have their socialism-on-one-sim and feels threatened.

[Taemojitsu]

Holy @#$%, you write long articles. I wish I had more time to read.

>Wikipedia *is* evil -- many of us can agree on that!

Wikipedia is not evil. Wikipedia does has its flaws; for a fair and balanced summary of such, see here:
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Wikipedia

However 80% accurate knowledge is better than no knowledge at all, and for many disciplines it's more like 99%. Stuff like math. The controversy actually works in its favor imo; sure you might get biased editing on obscure articles only you and one other person cares about, but on the REALLY controversial stuff only the most neutral of neutrality will survive on the article's page.

[Prokofy Neva]

what total neuralgic *freaks* there are at Metanomics!

Check this out:
http://www.metanomics.net/11-mar-2008/recap-richard-bartle-visits-metanomics#comment-2346

Here's an anonymous fucktard who comes on this forums, where I have not posted literally for months -- not banned, just not bothering to post, perhaps one post in all that time.

And because there was so much froth about Bartle "not" being a socialist, I took just one section of his speech and went over it, illustrating the many socialist type elements of what he was saying.

Rob said it was just "control". I said it was "Marxist ideological control". etc.

So along comes someone with a retarded fake acronymn name who begins to whine and mewl that I can't be allowed to post. That I will completely frighten away the dozen or so people who want to post and these many new readers coming.

Hun?

I went back for months. I saw most event postings had NO -- ZIP -- comments. NONE. Some had 1. Perhap s Michael Wilson's appearance had 5 -- that was because Tao published something and I commented (they all hated Michael Wilson because he has a closed proprietary world, and guess what! he's not a socialist! lol So they loathed him).

What an awful bunch. If they were so eager to post...where have they been for the months upon months that they could have been posting?

Don't they find that hypocritical?

People are so horridly intolerant in SL, they can't bear to hear an alternative opinion, they must have ever conversation, every event, reinforce their existing tribal beliefs.

Scary.

[Ace Albion]

I don't know what is so confrontational about it.

The Magic Circle *is* the Berlin Wall.

[Robert Bloomfield]

The backchat from the Metanomics group log is now posted at http://metanomics.net/files/BartleBackchat.txt.

The (at best tangentially relevant) discussion of opensim did occur during the event (which went from about 11:15-12:15SLT). and was more actively engaged than it seems here, because SL groups were being quirky that day, so the vast majority of backchat comments were local (and sadly not retained).

I personally don't find this backchat to be all that objectionable. Really, the only person who seems to think any of this is noteworthy is Prokofy. I simply wanted to mention to Prokofy that I did receive some complaints, in hopes a forestalling escalation that might lead to a reinstatement of the ban Nick imposed way back in September.

Oh, well.

As far as the website goes, it has never been particularly active--the events are popular, and get written up in other blogs, but we don't get many comments on metanomics.net. That may change now, as we are getting a new webmaster, and are working with the metanomics community to build more engaging web content.

[Patroklus Murakami]

Robert

The link doesn't work, at least not for me. I get a 'Page not found' error.

Should be:

http://metanomics.net/files/BartleBackchat_0.txt

[Prokofy Neva]

Rob,

We're going to that link, using either Firefox or IE, and it keeps saying "Page not Found". So please check, and paste into a comment somewhere if it seems to be working for you anyway, because it isn't working for some people.

You're wrong that the backchat about opensim occurred "during the event". It did not. The event may technically start at 11:15, but the speaker didn't start speaking at 11:15. The backchat began before 11:15, and continued *while we waited for the speaker to arrive, and for all the usual audio glitches to be worked out*.

Are you completely forgetting that you spent some 10 minutes or more trying to link in Richard and get him heard?

By the time he actually began speaking, people then listened to him, they didn't type in back chat -- duh.

Furthermore, as you rightly note, the conversation your hysterical little girlfriends (or big 40-something tekkie neuralgic boyfriends?) object to took place in room chat, i.e. on that sim, audible within a 96 m2 -- not in the group.

Therefore, those somehow offended by it have a very simple solution: mute/avatar name/

But, that would imply that there is something "wrong" with this chat. There wasn't.

It wasn't obscene.

It contained no adhominem attacks on my side, although the two hecklers did their usual thing (as you can see, it's very easy for them to do stuff like your "informant" and say "Oh, an inane idea" just because they don't agreed.

It contained a perfectly normal, few sentences of typing, that said, "Open sim isn't the project it imagines, it is closed, because you cannot participate in it unless you are very technically proficial." (Frankly, not even all programmers get it to work, it's the usual beta thing.)

This is a legitimate statement; it's a statement summarizing a philosophy that you may not agree with, but even the Russian founders of the open-source movement would agree EXACTLY word for word with what I said -- that open source projects lead to little cabals who then get in the way of a true public open source project. This debate is easily confirmed by googling the history of the movement; reading a few pages, and realizing this debate has at least two sides to it; it has these sides *within the movement itself* and it isn't "hysterical" or "inane" or "out of control" or "off topic" just because *one* of the ideologues in this debate -- your police informants -- can't bear to hear the other side -- which is held *by open-source proponents themselves*. Are you aware of this at all? I just never know how deeply you think, or are versed in various intellectual currents, since you often seem so shallow in your approach, merely trying to put together a good show.

If you "personally do not find this objectionable," then shame on you, Prof. Bloomfield. It is NOT objectionable. You have to be able to stand up to bullies, and say, look, I understand you don't like Prok's views, but you can mute people you can't bear to hear in room chat, it's not disrupting the event, and we have moderators on hand, and we'll make sure they do their jobs. End of story. Trust me, it will not be ME that these moderators will have to do their jobs *on*.

By moral equivocating, by saying "I'm too chicken to stand up to this person making a claim I don't agree with," and insisting on ME behaving in an equal-opportunity bash with these hecklers, you are betraying intellectual freedom and open discourse.

You can't, if what you claim is true, that you found anything personall objectionable, in good conscience tell someone to shut up and act as if they need moderating. I wouldn't even be in favour of telling those two hecklers privately to shut up -- because you shouldn't be making secret denunciations and side deals.

You should merely make sure that the moderators do their jobs, in public, and reprimand them personally if they cannot restrain themselves.

What you've done now, is let them win, and trust me, they are laughing like hyenas with vicious glee.

I'm definitely making a big deal of it because it really is a morality tale for our times and for Second Life, not just some little chat.

I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't say anything objectionable. But yet I'm told to shut up, just to avoid having to deal with two other stronger, more thuggish bullies. What's up with that?

What's particularly revolting about your remark is your threat of a ban "like Nick Wilson instated."

And...what would that ban be about, Robert? Language that you personally didn't find objectionable? That was NOT objectionable? Huh?

Nick Wilson made a ban on a whim, a power play. He both caved to a powerful metaversal agency, the Sheep, caved to sponsors, who were worried about any critics of the Sheep or other companies coming into this seminar, and he caved to two asshole tekkie hecklers, one of who was a frequent flyer nuisance, Sean Percival. So you let thugs like that stamp on free intellectual debate.

Your blog is silent because Nick placed a very severe chill over it. He would never let any debates proceed over 10 exchanges. There were several nasty and shrill types with very heavy opinions (John Lopez was one) and several private hecklers begging Nick to remove me (Benjamin Duranske was one) and he caved to the problem of standing up to them by just shutting all speech.

And that's why it's a big white blank desert. Nobody could talk. It would be interesting to talk, but not when there's no freedom. And when big sponsors' logos stare you in the face upon log-in, and you have to think -- do I ever want a job with those corporations? Should I watch what I say?

Imagine if a university had big logos like that in the classroom!

The idiot anonymous poster, who is merely one of the cunning hecklers, is claiming there are "12 people" who want to post and "12 more" who are going to come in. They didn't post for 9 months lol. They're going to post now, merely because I'm banned? They've had since October 2007 to post since Nick banned me -- where are they lol?

Your persistent notion that the discussion of opensim was "tangential" is one of the evidences of your shallow take on things, Rob. Firt of all, backchat knows no concept like "tangential" or not -- people end up talking about what's important to them if the speaker is boring. In this case, the technical glitches going on waiting for the speaker was the boring part.

But opensim could even be addressed because of the issue of *world design*. Bartle has his notions -- very rigid notions -- of how games should be made -- I call them socialist, you're at least willing to call them 'controlled'. The anarchocapitalists, of which I'm not one, love opensim because they think they will be able to install their regime in it (and it will have its own rigidities). They envision a world where ageplay and bankplay will all be legal! Etc. So the issue of who gets to make opensim and how open it is; what kind of social system will prevail in the overarching design of the overarching architecture around it -- these are important issues. They're socioeconomic issues, as it happens, although they may not interest you as an accounting professor.

[Prokofy Neva]

Taemojitsu, you're a typical tekkie. You find Wikipedia works for you, on strictly technical math issues. Of course, I'll bet I can find some mathematicians to disagree!

But it isn't just "little obscure issues I care about". On the topics I actually know up and down, I'm always appalled at how governments, PR shills, biased paid flaks, etc. have pulled the pages to and fro. You know, Chechnya pages written by Cossacks, that sort of thing.

Yet even on major topics that aren't little obscure corners -- the Middle East, new media, Dick Cheney comes to mine -- there are horribly biased factors at play tugging -- and often pulling the blanket all on themselves. I'm amazed at how long some pages are on stuff that really isn't important except to little leftoid tekkie clans, and how other pages that should be longer and more critical get a brief "stub".

It's not interesting to me to explain the many ways that Wiki is objectively evil to tekkies -- they won't get it, they are set in their ways, they just parrot back the same stuff. Any more thoughtful person with a more renaissance background and outlook, capable of thinking conceptually, understands the basic problems inherent in Wiki, and they explain them -- it doesn't take me to do this. Google the criticism and see it. The scandals around Wikipedia's founder now aren't some sort of accident -- they go to the heart of the matter.