The Tekkies Try to Take Over

For a long time, I've been keeping a series of notebooks in my head with the working title, "The Geek Religion" that would take you through all the karma running over dogma, the dogma chasing the catechism, all the stuff inherent in the tekkie belief system. It's a lot of work! But it's a big edifice to build, gosh, almost worthy of a wiki or something (!), and now I have to say I'm being OBE'd, and have to begin to block out some Twitters and such on this growing problem of the Tekkies Taking Over. Oh, don't worry, I'm not *that* worried. We've seen in history how the social movements and cultural upheavals of the West Coast might accelerate and overnight turn from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to Altamont and Charles Manson, but by the time the cultural revolution perks back through the grounds of the middle states and Great Lakes and crosses the mountains, it morphs out more gently to become a decade of starting little mall shops with records, tye-dyed shirts, happy-face buttons, and strung beads, which ultimately becomes a multi-billion dollar music business. So it's all good. Still, the road can be rocky on the way across the country.

I've always had this working hypothesis of the root problem of these nerd folks, that because they were rapidly digitalizing the world, putting everything on the Internet, on networks, in computers, in electronic devices, that they were imagining they were Specialists in Everything. Like, if they keep a database of statistics, or create a stock exchange online, they are Economists, not just, well, garage mechanics. If they arrange templates to intake health care information, they are Physicians. If they make serious games to teach something, they are Educators. If they help you communicate, shop, publish your blog, they are Fashion Consultants, Life Coaches, and Editors. See what I mean? The idea that the medium, the tool, the pipes -- because it involves *them making or running it* also controls what is in the pipeline. The original car drivers were mechanics, too. But..in time other people could drive too. Some nit asked me if I thought the Wright Brothers were being "elitist" because they didn't make an airplane "that everybody" could fly. Of course not. They made theirs and flew theirs first -- but they didn't say, as they took off, "We're an open-source project that everyone can join, make an API and plug in a widget." But that's what today's Wright Brothers do -- they claim to be a passenger airline when they haven't even gotten off the ground yet.

And that's just all wrong. Because they aren't the experts in the other fields, as much as those fields are (temporarily) growing to depend on them; worse, their ideologies, which tend to be impractical and of the extreme right or left, cannot be allowed to creep full-blown into the body politic, as it will become totalitarian, and destroy the very creations they built, supposedly to enhance society and all the other professions. So it's ultimately in their interests, in sustaining themselves as a class, not to run everything, because, as the manager tells Ice in the video Hey Ya, "Don't mess it up for everybody! Greyhound don't float on water!"

So...what do you do about these people? Well, one thing you do immediately, post-haste, tout de suite, is push back, which of course is my hallmark phrase. A pushback is generally what these people do not get. But they need it. And it's normal. Feedback loops are part of their own tekkie systems...but often systems they've dismantled, while they were trying to get some other piece to work. That's ok. We will forcibly put it back into their task list if we have to. And we'll do it without a goddamn wiki.

Now, you say. What is your evidence for this presumed takeover? Isn't this just tinfoiling, as Eric Rice says in coining a verb about me? Oh, I frankly *don't care what you think*. Because dropping tech memes, poisoning the Twitter wells, virally Digging and Dugging all over the Dig-Dug-osphere -- well, it's just not all that. I have only one statistic to tell you folks: only 20 percent of voters read political blogs. That means...even those 20 percent don't read your little microblogs published on Wordpress with huge white expanses and little black letters; and they don't play games. They don't go on game forums. They don't know what "troll" means. And they think South By South West is a movie with Humphrey Bogart. So there.

First it was Raph Koster, talking about Darfurian corpses and corpses in WoW at GDC. Do you think that millions of Ultima Online players didn't pay attention? He knows they did -- that's who he's playing to, not the posters on his blog, who are a niche of forum-posters.

Then it was Jane McGonigal talking about how game companies were really really good at making people Happy. They had Figured Out what people need to be happy -- to feel useful, and a part of something useful (Lenin understood this too! Hey, so did Hitler! And Jane did, too, repeating this exact same PowerPoint exactly the same, twice, once at GDC, and again at SWSX!). Games were so good at fixing stuff they could Fix Reality -- which of course, Ian Bogost is already putting the fix in.

Then it was Michael Arrington getting on Charlie Rose -- Charlie Rose! lol -- to tell us crisply of the Tech Agenda. Here, the Sage of Silicon Valley. Many people have never *heard* of Michael Arrington. They'd have to look him up on Wikipedia and appear smart. He can make a start-up live or die in the drop of a paragraph or nowadays a half Twitter (I now understand that basically Twitter was invented *to do just that*) and there are thousands of grown men who tremble at the thought of an Arrington linkie to their blogs. This is unimportant to most people, because most of the time, the things the start-ups make, well, wind down. They require turning on and off again many times, they break, cost a lot, and then seem to require buying a new more expensive one because the old one is obsolete. But...the main thing is that Arrington has figured out what "Our" position is on China and decided that Obama is "good on China" and that's why he needs to be elected. Are you laughing yet? China?!

Does Obama even *have* a position on China? *Thinks hard*. He may! But...it's not important. The important thing is to get him elected, and then Arrington and other gurus around to advise him will just *drop in the tech meme* that will fit for the moment.

Charlie Rose, that goofy, fake, down-home overgrown grinning bozo on the education channel, senses something is Up. He tries a ping. "Yeah, that was awful, how Yahoo looked, coming up before that congressional committee," eyeing Arrington, not 100 percent sure he will nod vigorously, as Charlie expects him too -- aren't Californians people who care about free speech?! Arrington Knits His Brows in faux consternation, and tsks. He tsks a few times, and creates the illusion that he cares about selling dissidents down the river. The meme is dropped; it sticks. Everyone will leave happily assured that Arrington cares about jailed Chinese bloggers -- deeply.

Except, he doesn't, really, because if you listen one beat after the meme-drop, he begins to look thoughtfully into the 196 meter draw distance and say something like "Well, you know corporations have to worry about market share..."

Bingo. We can now unpack this. And that's what he's up to. He wants to make sure we have a neo-Nixonian China policy, and if Obama doesn't have that *now*, by the time the California Democratic machine (and those weird Republican Friends of Obama) get done with this, he will have that position.

I remember about 2 years ago someone pretty connected in Washington just telling me very flatly, matter-of-factly, that it *will be Obama*. Not, oh, he's a likely candidate. But, *it will be him*. Like, "the smart people who run the world already got together, and that's what we want*. "Who?" I asked back then, just like any other people who didn't know every single name of every senator from Illinois.

There was more from Arrington on net neutrality, which he got Charlie to just roll over and bark about because he made it sound like something every good liberal should love because it sounds like fairness and lack of censorship to be colour-blind about content. The problem as I've written is the WoW rogue server patch download hogs and Bit-torrent bullies sucking down entire movies they've pirated anyway. Why we have to be neutral to behaviour is beyond me, but this is not a debate you win, it's something you have, like the flu, until it's over.

But lately, it hasn't been enough for the tekkies just to say they are going to vote for Obama, or that he is likely to take "our" position, they want to really start slinging the hash and the mud the way various groups of very disgruntled former Hilary backers are slinging.

So here comes Dave Winer, another one of those people that no one has ever heard of. That is, he's hugely famous in a technical crowd as the inventor of the RSS feed and a Harvard guy and all the rest, and beloved by Scoble, but ask the average person in the New York Public Library or standing in Times Square or even in the lobby of the Century Club who he is, and they will stare blankly. The reality is, most Americans just aren't even familiar with the names of all these inventors of machines that have taken over their lives. They know the name of Bill Gates; some might remember the name of Mark Zuckerberg; but everybody in between is a big blur of blue open-necked shirts and i-Phone ear buds, faceless behind their sprung-open Mac Pros in the airport lounge.

Dave decides to take the, uh, high road. Everybody in the Northeast is a racist. Why? Because Geraldine Ferraro belled the multi-culti cat and said that Obama got where he is because he is black. She had to fall on her sword and say she *is* a racist, even though in her entire career, nothing remotely like this charge had ever been laid at her door. She was payback time for Samantha Power having to bite the dust over the Hilary monster thing -- your quest raid took out one of our avatars, our quest raid takes out one of your avatars. That's all. But Dave sees it as an opportunity to explain what this is really all about -- a new entire swathe of racism, like southern racism, that he can throw up as a reason to culturally hate a part of the country that he hasn't been able to persuade that his own left-liberal viewpoints about.

It's hard to understand how the Northeast, the place to which freed slaves or runaway slaves historically ran, the places where African Americans found jobs, is the bastion of racism that Dave imagines. His post is the kind of flippant, thoughtless meme-drop that is supposed to lob its viral load into the Twitter stream and out into the blogs and minds and get people bonding not over the truth of racism in the Northeast, which they can't really prove, but the truth of *feeling like they are better people than any racists out there because they aren't racists*.

Hello? people are just looking at this practically. It's only wild-eyed California geeks who have to race-card and race-bait in this election to try to set the stage for public opinion if *once again* the technolibertarians don't get their way because *they are not persuasive to other people with their ideologies*. I can't emphasize this enough. Groups of tekkies with their sectarian beliefs do not win people over, do not get them to sign up, so they have to fight dirty. And that's what they are doing. Can't get somebody to sign up for extreme leftist politics? Call them racists. That should fix it!

I imagine most Northeasterners look at this question of "is Obama there because he's black?" issue pragmatically and say, yes, some of what Obama is about has to do with him being black -- but it's not a minority pity-party, it's more about a certain minority cachet and grooviness, and that's ok. That gives a Dave Winer a chance to run around bleating about evil racists in the Northeast -- suddenly, he can dine out -- and get lots of tribal hangers-on yessing him on his blog -- to portray themselves as not-racists.

To admit that Obama has some of what he has from being black is really about not blackness, not about set-sides or equal-opportunity or anything of the sort -- hey, we're past that. No, this is what it's about:
being able to benefit from West coast liberals (and plenty others in the flyover states!) trying to elbow each other aside to show they aren't racist, but it's all those other evil people in other places like "the South" or "the Northeast" who are. That puts a terrible chill, a hammerlock on the entire discussion. When someone is determined to appear virtuous by making you appear vicious, there's no stopping them. But...Most of what Obama is about is a liberal vision, youth (Hilary and McCain are just too old), good ideas well-expressed, and an apparently clean record -- this all knows no color. The tekkies becoming so incredibly vicious on Twitter about these imagined groups of "haters" everywhere aren't advocating the positive about Obama. They're evangelizing the negative about total straw men they've created.

You may have heard that in New Jersey the police have an offense which has jokingly been called "Driving-while-black". This is where they constantly stop cars with black drivers and search them just because they're black, hoping they'll turn up something. They don't do this to whites. So, as far as Obama goes, he has my vote -- and I'll bet a lot of other people -- not because he's black, but because he's driving-while-not-Hilary. That's all there is to it. We don't know him. Because we aren't in Silicon Valley and moveon.org and all the other enclaves creating the machine around him even though we are registered Democrats. That's because we are not in extremist political sects but just average voters.

The idea that Dave's Silicon Valley is a paradise of race relations is rather shown up for the fraud it is by all the black CEOs and mayors in California cities, right *cough*? Correct me on this if I'm wrong, of course.

Or take the Wright story. This made the rounds of all kinds of private email lists a few weeks ago, got into the Times, and then finally got a real thorough treatment on Huffington Post. By that time, it was like Obama was almost having to pass a loyalty oath that Puffington Host was going to make sure everyone saw as just that -- an evil arm-twisting by bad people, when in fact the arm-twisting was being done by the good tekkie liberal (only online obsessed blog freaks read this with regularity; remember what I said about the 20 percent)

Yet, Wright is a real problem. He is one of those Wrong Reverands like Al Sharpton -- far worse. It's ok to denounce his extremist beliefs, even if he's your pastor -- you can't elect your religious leaders, but you can, like John Kerry did, take the Communion, but let it be known what you think about a woman's right to chose. John Kerry did it. So can this candidate.

You would think that politics isn't the art of compromise, however, but is the art of viral loading and tech-meming. to hear the Twittering and the tech blogs and the General Jesus hogwash. All this screeching about an America that incites "fear" and is afraid of the "other" just because they...don't want to endorse a candidate who goes to a church where the preacher spews conspiracy theories about Zionists? Where's the fear in *that* picture?! Or asks some hard questions about the commies that the good senator used to hang out with. It's merely "fear" to be one degree of separation from Harry Bridges lol? Doesn't anybody take history seriously?

So much is what is coming out of all these micro-blogs, virtual water-cooler convos, corridor convos at game conferences, etc. etc. is about visceral *hate*. It's about male bonding, and *hate*. It's about making other Americans the objects of that *hate*. It's about projecting their own *cultural hatred* on to people by claiming they are the haters when they aren't engaged in the hate imagined.

What is this really about? Reach. Market share. The breakdown of old media -- which didn't break down enough to suit the new-media evangelists. I told you about the political blogs. But you have to think of what makes the i-Phone Twitterers mad: Rush Limbaugh, 13 million, George Will, 26 million. They don't have these many people downloading their APIs and widgets. Even Faceberg, with his 60 million, has 60 million like the Lindens have 6,926 in their big Concierge Party group -- it's a group that is only a group to to a grasping, scraping, controlling coder -- but it's not a group for people to each other, and from which millions will bolt the minute you try to make it be a group run from the top-down. But Dave Winer is merely doing in his patch what Sean Hannity is doing in his on Fox, trying to drum up anti-Clinton rhetoric playing the race card where it can usefully be played.

Yes, politics is a nasty business, and part of what the tech set does is tell you how evil representational democracy is. It's "top-down" says Zuckerberg, declaring in the keynote at SXSW that "his" 60-million "organization" is "grassroots". As if it bypasses the electoral system. As if those people don't vote all differently. As if he can get them to switch their vote the same way he forces them to invite 20 of their friends to make every API work.

The loathing, smearing, and distrust of politicians (except for Obama, of course) is appalling to watch among the geeks, as they fail to see how unappetizing it is to the rest of us to contemplate a future of "no no vote" and struggling with the JIRA.

This may be the last election in history that tekkies *can't* control because not everything is online *yet*. So fight back. Read a book. Open up your newspaper. More importantly, *talk to the person next to you face to face* in the meat-world, not the meta-world, and see what they think, see if you can persuade them about what you think, not by a tech-meme, a Twitter, a Wordpress blog, but by the spoken human voice of logic, reason, and common sense.

Comments

[Fromthe Inside]

I'ma geek. A programmer, even. I get to go to the club meetings (the ones that are general invitation, anyway), and sometimes I even pay dues (the cool people table within geekdom likes to run conventions), so I see this from the inside. The intolerance of these people is disturbing. In their world view it's intolerance of stupid, gullible, evil people, so it's not really intolerance. In fact, it's called intellectualism. When you don't allow outsiders an opinion you can call it anything you like.

I never thought of their blogging to each other as much of a threat to the real world. As long as they aren't willing to put on pants they only have each other as an audience.

Around here they think they have power, but who are they talking to? They've been hostile to anyone who doesn't agree with them, so there's nobody left to convince. Any potential friends on the other side of the political spectrum (or in any of the world's major religions) have been called stupid, gullible and evil and chased away.

I wonder what imarealjounalist.com has them stirred into a tizzy about this morning...

[Maklin Deckard]

"That means...even those 20 percent don't read your little microblogs published on Wordpress with huge white expanses and little black letters; and they don't play games. They don't go on game forums. They don't know what "troll" means. And they think South By South West is a movie with Humphrey Bogart. So there." - Proofy

Oh god, thank you Prok! I am still laughing...both at the not-so subtle truth and the wording. And I agree....

The really sad part of it is, most non-techies are going to get the Bogart reference, but the majority of techies won't. I have found, over the years in IT, that most folks who define themselves as 'techie' have NO real grasp of history - both popular cultural refernces and true 'great events' history. This is part of their downfall, IMO. They make grandiose plans and then recite them to other culturally-illiterate techies and never vet them against past history and how the 'masses' will react. And most I have known seem PROUD of their ignorance.

I rather like your references to the soviet-bloc era, I am (from a layman's point) familiar with them. Most here? Look at how many complain about it as old-news, history, etc... These persons lack both the critical thinking skills to draw historical parallels AND the historical knowledge to understand analogies...and dismiss them out of hand due to their own ignorance.

Here's a game I sometimes play in SL to amuse myself. In groups, if the subject turns to anything but modern music or today, I ask what historical things people recall. I recall (blurrily) Nixon's resignation, The Reagan shooting, Challenger and the fall of the wall. I get blank stares from most the techie types.... From them, I get shite like when Linus created the Linux Kernel, Facebook, ebay....nothing which will be more than a historical footnote.

They have a narrow viewpoint because that is ALL they can have, fixated in the here-and-now, unwilling to look back or admit there is anything there to see.

[Stroker Serpentine]

I look at all the technorati as a "bag of poorly debugged device drivers" anyways.

Technology is merely a tool. It will never make a formidable weapon. One could could present the argument that the algorithms of trajectory guide the missles of destruction. My response would be...no man (or machine) is impervious to the Ides of March.

/me goes back to reading with his daughter.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ides indeed...

Nobody is more surprised than I am that this thread has three positive comments on it...

[John Lopez]

In other words, people who are clever in one arena think they are know-it-alls. IT people are only the latest in a long line of such people. Any field that requires above average ability in a specialized area produces know-it-alls.

Doctors, lawyers, scientist (of all flavors), and yes, IT workers... they all get very used to being right regarding their subjects. Frequently. Those who aren't don't survive in their fields long, so those who aren't right often go do something else with less objective measures of "correctness".

It doesn't take much for that sense of correctness to spill over into all other subjects; it just is how someone who is normally right (in a narrow area) thinks about everything.

The best antidote is to work outside one's area for a while. Having clients in many industries helps: every new client is a new learning experience and by definition while one is learning one is often wrong.

Sadly, not everyone gets to be wrong often enough to understand that when they speak outside their domain that they are taking a risk of being very, very wrong.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ciaran,

Just because Silicon Valley produces these larger-than-life examples like "Bill Gates" doesn't meet it is "not uncommon".

Most normal businesses do not keep a "stepping-down" CEO around as a board chair. It's nuts. We all realize that. Philip Rosedale also isn't any Bill Gates. That isn't to knock him. It's just that he's at a different place in his career and his company is different.

[Taemojitsu]

Just out of curiosity, have you ever read the Jargon File?

I am not a tekkie person, and I keep forgetting that I was going to finish reading Eric S Raymond's 'world domination of the desktop by 2008' plan, but I do have familiarity with some of the culture's roots. So, have you read it? (the jargon file not the world domination thingy)

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes.

[Prokofy Neva]

I discovered it not so longer in my quest to study the Geek Religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File

Stallman has infected so many minds...

This entire saga is actually a great morality tale. These tekkies were all paid for and subsidized in their sandbox by MIT. In time, for pragmatic and commercial reasons, their beloved thingies were no longer needed or wanted. Some of them broke off into start-ups and began selling stuff to the parent company. I'm compressing what offers itself as a very complex technical story to its obvious bare bones. So now the tekkies no longer had their beloved hackery open-source thingie that they had envisioned the whole world running on, and then they were dealt further blows by further defunding and retirement of their code as "the" thing to have.

The ultimate expression of this nihilist and cynical hackers' culture is the Patriotic Nigras. Stuff like the slang terms "/fail" or "tl;dr" all grow out of this Stallmanitism at MIT and illustrate a common thesis of mine, which is how open source=closed society and socialism=crime.

[Khamon Fate]

This is sad because I teach networking students that working with the hardware is the fun easy third of the job, if they've an inclination for it, and the other two-thirds is working with the users which requires a practicing knowledge of history, general psych, plus speech and writing skills e.g. learning to not construct run-on sentences when discussing important points.

I also warn them against the presumption of field knowledge based on technical support work. Half of the database construction toolset serves the purpose of relaying the schema to the users for their understanding and approval or correction. The process occurs at several stages of development so that the final product serves their needs as well as possible. The methodology shatters when the analyst assumes they know the purpose and relation of data elements sans end user confirmation.

In all fairness, Linden Lab have responded positively to most of their users' software-related input over the years, implementing the tier model, providing P2P, integrating multimedia (although never a whiteboard feature), expanding the group tools, upgrading the graphics and physics engines, et al. But they very early fell into the trap of believing that their development of a collaborative building and 3D communication platform magically bestowed upon them the inherent ability to build and support communities.

Interestingly, a small set of communities did form among the avid participants in the projects. Over that past several years, however, many communities have adopted the software to facilitate their own devices. Those groups, that now form the bulk of our wora'uld's population, are not rooted in Second Life, they're rooted in themselves and using the software to facilitate their own devices. Never will they consider merging into the mythical commuuuuunity base Linden Lab pretends to foster and support.

[Prokofy Neva]

Khamon,

This is so interesting. You're saying that normally, the technical productio process should include a conscious element called "user correction"? Well, you would think it does, software always has its alpha and beta stages (you never hear about it having a delta phase, maybe it should?). And it is tested, and bugs found, and users try it out too, not just tekkies, but normal people. Correct?

But I wonder if there is something about a software product online that works differently, because the makers assume that the bug-testers and users are just people like them, who didn't get their jobs yet. I think that's at the core of a lot of it. It's people who are in a tribe. Philip himself always uses this expression "you guys" in many of his earlier townhalls and even some of the later ones, speaking as if he is relating to a group of people *just like himself,* wonky software engineers.

I noticed Mark Zuckerberg adopted that same, familiar "you guys" confident tone of voice in his Dev Garage with Scoble and the questions coming all from his peers, whereas in the Business Week interview, he was tongue-tied and arrogant.

I find a lot of Lindens do this to you too (especially Torley). They fall mutinously silent and become terribly passive/aggressive if you aren't in the "you guys" AV club with them, and point out some political or meta thing about their beloved tech.

This idea that "their development of a collaborative building and 3D communication platform magically bestowed upon them the inherent ability to build and support communities" is very big. Very big! Because they obviously believe they are sitting on top of a social media empire.

Remember that really creepy Fora.TV show with Robin and Zuckerberg and the rest of them? Zuckerberg smirks and talks in a kind of arch snarky way about how Facebook is for "friends". Robin smirks about how they don't have big numbers but they have older users and longer hours and it must be because people need "a second life" (Philip does this smirk on some of his interviews, too). The meta way in which the game gods discuss this stuff is very, very creepy, and it makes you want to back right out of their technology and go play a pencil came on your dining room table.

And you are so right about the communities developing a kind of film of organic use above the software which is so wonky.

They develop all kinds of adaptations, expressions to convey information, modes of behaviour to try to make it work.

Crap Mariner has a very interesting essay responding to this guy who dumped on SL as boring, which I replay to by saying, yes, but you know, not everyone is up for playing Victorian parlour games. (Crap, where is that page of yours? It's not at http://secondlife.isfullofcrap.com/)

I remember in the Sims Online, when Alphaville became overrun with the Sim Shadow Government, which was a griefing enterprise supposedly fighting little mafias that itself was worse than the mafias, and took over every single lot, my tactic was to take the SSG on directly by doing partisan raids on it, using extra-game blogs to denounce it and track its evil cunning takeovers, publishing testimony from its victims anonymously to prevent further reprisals, etc. etc. So naturally I became a bigger and bigger target, to the point that they were buying all the land around me and using the tiles to spell out things like DEATH TO DYERBROOK or making little death cafes with skeleton avatars with names like "Ima Killu" etc.

When you log on and find stuff like that, boy is it creepy! A lot creepier than extortionist ad farms ROFL which spring from the same spiteful desire to rain retaliation down on someone who is outspoken about bad behaviour.

Other people tried a different method, which was to try to segregate off a neighbourhood called something like Happy Times. Cocoanut will remember this. They decided to try to run the game "normally," not accepting cheating, not trying to take over top lots, de-emphasizing the skill grind and money grab and making fun contests, etc.

They tried to provide an alternative to the corrupted gold-faming cheaters and intimidators by creating 'nicer' contests with payouts that they created by pooling their own (presumably not ill-gotten) cash and making a sort of ingame economy outside the game-god's messed-up tools and policies.

I remember being sort of touched at the earnest way in which these people tried really really hard to make interesting games and jobs that would somehow replace the game-gods stupid job objects that were now hacked and corrupted. Human ingenuity is always a marvel. For example, they made a job called "DJ" outside the game system, and got people to subscribe or go to Internt radio stations they made themselves with shoutcast servers so that you could listen to a customized live DJ performing on your Sims lot. Soon these DJs became in demand, and people were willing to pay for their skills or they had judge's contests to pick them.

However, what happened is the SSG infiltrated the DJ judging contests. I was able to catch them at it once and document it. They found various ways to infiltrate even this 'Happy Times" part of the game where people tried to "play honest".

This is just a very compressed and visible analogy meant to be a metaphor for the Second Life problem. And that is that sure, people devised all sorts of creative ways not only to go around the game-god tools that were inadequate, but to go around the immature game-gods' unwillingness to incorporate user feedback and also devise extra-tool social policies -- or at least make sure the game tools didn't thwart the natural social polices people themselves make.

I tried to make this argument to Zha here:
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2008/03/industry-reacts.html#comments

[Peter Haik]

Thank you for this post Prokofy.

[Crap Mariner]

Checking in... agreeing that many bloggers (and journalists) reporting and commenting and digesting events all too often get delusions of expertise or proficiency in the field they cover.

I do my best not to delude myself into thinking I'm an expert in anything I cover or ponder. Even in podcasting, I just write stories, record them slap-dash, edit a few things together, grind out the notes, done. Unless it's a special competition (Pickle Tales), I try to keep both the writing and the production brief.

When folks ask me something, if I know it, I let 'em know what I know and point out folks to get a second opinion from. If I don't know it, I send them in the right direction (after making some kind of Match Game style joke, of course)

*shrug* Maybe that's why I tend to hide behind the clown makeup more often than not. It's not just easier that way, but safer for all's sake.

What I think I *do* excel in is beating the tar out of tourist-journalists when they really miss the mark... let's see... are you referring to the Stone Soup one as taking Paul out to the woodshed for a beating?

http://secondlife.isfullofcrap.com/2008/03/anklebiters_trying_to_piss_in.html

I really wish these journotourists would go a little deeper into the rabbit hole instead of bitching about spraining their ankle in a pothole and having bunny bites all over their toes.

[Taemojitsu]

"...a common thesis of mine, which is how open source=closed society..."

wait wait... so by running Ubuntu as a total clueless newb, I'm supporting socialism?!? >.<

Must... cleanse this vile operating system from my hard drive....

sorry, carry on :P

[Prokofy Neva]

Thanks for that link, I'm now mystified -- do you have two sites? or a main site with a side blog site?

[Prokofy Neva]

>by running Ubuntu as a total clueless newb, I'm supporting socialism?

Yes.

[John Lopez]

"by running Ubuntu as a total clueless newb, I'm supporting socialism?"

"Yes."

So the many corporations that run Firefox on desktops, or Apache for websites, or Linux on firewalls... the are SOCIALIST corporations.

Or; perhaps they realize that for some tasks that haven't had innovation in decade(s) that open source tools are a cost savings. Like good capitalists, they choose to optimize profits when they don't need the features of a closed product.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, they are, John.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

It's funny how you always talk about how horrible and corrupt MMOG's become, but how you're always the first to hate the Basement Pirate model of friends, family, etc. running their own grids. It's like you advocate beating your head against a wall until there's a hole to walk through, instead of realizing the wall is only four feet wide and you can just walk around it.