Retarded Things on the Internet

Continuing on my study of Retarded Things on the Internet before I start my work day, I have to flag Robert Bloomfield's absolutely preposterous claim to MSNBC (anything to get in the news!) that the banking crisis in SL "foretold" the real-life banking crisis touched off by the sub-prime mortgages.

What a crock, no, what a bunch of outright lies! Beyers Sellers knows full well where the money for banks in SL largely came: casinos. And he knows full well why the banks crashed: the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.  In our little virtual world, this was a kind of "Act of God" -- the Lindens staved it off as long as they could, but the credit card companies got to them -- they simply wouldn't do business with LL if they harboured gambling on their servers and put gambling charges on the cards. So that was that. when the UIGEA began to go into force last summer, the banks and stock markets, all of which had unwisely and heavily invested in casinos, faced a crisis.

It's not the case that Ginko made its money by accepting deposits, promising absurd returns, and then loaning the money out at absurd rates. Oh, it might have had loans out, but loans were not really a product it offered. Ginko gave $100 free to everyone opening an account, which meant you and your 25 alts. It then did indeed pay out those high interest rates, which it warned you on a notecard upon joining that it was under no obligation to keep paying, and in fact your principle would not necessarily be guaranteed to be accessed, either. What Ginko then did was invest in various capers, on the Internet (some said this was Internet e-gold stuff, who knows) or inworld (their presence in the stock mark in various companies, and in gambling, was visible). Ginko had land, buildings, stocks and it paid people for nearly 3 years before unravelled. It's more of a risky High Yield Investment Plan with shakey ideas of investment than a pyramid scheme in that sense.

What Ginko didn't do was give out housing loans. There were some companies, including some on the stock market, that did sell land mortgages. This idea never caught on hugely in SL, because it was very risky to buy land for a stranger and hope they'd pay you back. Mortgagers would keep the land in their group and let you use it, so it was more like a high-priced rent-to-buy scheme. I saw some use of it, but there was nothing equivalent in SL of some bank making a huge amount of bad decisions and giving out NINJA loans (no income, no job applications) - they had to have the land as collateral and a huge down payment as a rule, and of coures could seize the land back very quickly, much faster and easier than in RL.

No, Ginko and other schemes like it collapsed due to the end of gambling, not do to anything related to the later banking and subprime mortgage mess. I don't think anyone has related the crackdown on Internet gambling to thecurrent financial crisis, that would be a stretch. So Beyers is talking out of his ass, of course.

What he tries to do is make a parallel between two "unregulated" or "self-regulated" markets. But again, the analogy is a terrible stretch, and it breaks, and is stupid. In fact, the harsh and sudden application of UIGEA *is* regulation; these casinos ran for about 3 years and were suddenly eliminated within two weeks. That's a short time period for both "unregulation" and sudden "regulation" --- which in this case is more like a force majeure. And the problem with finance in SL isn't that it is regulated -- in fact it is, by the Lindens who have various failsafes coded into the LindEx and various fraud controls which in fact make it annoying for people under 30 days of age to get any currency. The problem is that it is populated with anonymous avatars. RL doesn't have that problem to anywhere near the same extent, even with dummy corporations and multiple passports and such in the underworld. You can't walk into a bank and move $10,000 in the U.S. without showing ID and giving a Social Security number these days.

What's irksome, as usual with Beyers in that interview, is that he warbles enthusiastically about the user-generated economy:

""'World of Warcraft' is kind of like Disneyworld," Bloomfield explained. "You go to Disneyworld to pay your money to Disney, because they created all the attractions."

By contrast, Linden Lab, creator of "Second Life," treats players as entrepreneurs by giving them virtual tools to create their own buildings, products and services. That creates a system of supply and demand that more closely parallels a real-world economy.

"If you want to compete with Disneyworld, well here's the land and tools to build a rollercoaster," Bloomfield said while describing the "Second Life" approach. "If you can get people to ride it, go for it."

A condescending nit, like M, believing that what people do in SL is build rollercoasters. (There are a few; I understand Atom Burma has a new park opening).

But Beyers himself never, ever features these inworld businesses, and like the Lindens, doesn't care about them. His weekly shows these days consist of people like Sibley Verbleck of the Electric Sheep, which left SL, scorns SL, and has nothing to do with inworld business. The week before he had Keystone from Wikitechture, who is unrelated to inworld business as well -- he works for RL clients who use SL as a platform to prototype things, and becomes involved in various projects like collective builds for poor Nepalese, but that's not inworld business; in fact, the Capitol Hill that Keystone's company helped build *is* built on the Disney model of creating an attraction and then waiting for people to come to gawk at it -- except there isn't any ticket price, which is why these projects are never sustainable.

And the week before *that* Metanomics featured the awful Rezzable guy, RightasRain, whom I have dubbed WrongasWrath just because he is so wrong and so grumpy all the time, whose career in SL consists of dumping on everything about it, and whose loose tie-in to the inworld economy is featuring lingerie in the Black Swan theme, which one of his privileged builders/designers gets to harvest for income. The Rezzable gang are a cul-de-sac in the economy, as mainly Rezoff pays them off-platform, they produce eye-candy, and they sell a few things to tourists -- but they don't go around buying from other people in any kind of interactive fashion, like the rest of the world.

And the weeks before *that* Metanomics had the World Bank (yes *that* world bank! that doesn't invest in casinos, but invests in big dams in the third world that wreck the environment and wash out little villages) and before THAT they had...World of Warcraft and other games and social research in them. Sigh. Metanomics! Yet another tourist in the world of SL.

Much of the substance and content of Metanomics comes from Roland Legrand, an energetic, prolific and thoughtful writer who has his own blog and articles in addition to his Metanomics works. Occasionally even Roland goes astray, however, and falls into visions of corporativist societies that are basically fascist in nature -- I am always fascinated to see the Europen mind stray to these utopias of the left or right that they should be better warned about from their history.

This week's fantasy from Roland is a world where there Secretary General and a bunch of NGOs run the planet. Roland's fault here is only in not being far, far more critical of a bad idea like this -- the real culprit comes from our American home-grown corporativists, in this case the National Intelligence Council.'

"The new secretary general of the United Nations is about to thank her or his election to various nonstate networks, a loose coalition of NGOs, religious groups, business leaders and local activists. This is only logical after those groups managed to set the international agenda on the environment.

This success was possible because of some terrible climate-related disasters (remember the hurricane destroying part of Wall Street?) and by the use of the ubiquitous internet. Observers saw the shift of power from states to nonstate groups coming when the annual Davos meeting was transformed several years ago. It brought in a host of activists from these networks and has since established virtual meetings where thousands more could participate.

I read all this in an article in the Financial Times of September 14, 2024 . The fictional article is published in Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (large pdf file), a very influential report by the National Intelligence Council."

Er, do I need to explain to you kids what's really bad about these ideas? When I say "corporativist" I'm not kidding. In that conception of society, various corporate entities, i.e. not necessarily "corporations" or "businesses" in the modern sense, but entities defined by trade or class or role in society, take on the functions of government, instead of the modern separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial. Instead of having democratic elections, and a Congress or parliament that serves as a check and balance on the other branches of power (and visa versa), we just have these "experts" who rule "just because they can".  A loose coalition of NGOs? Are you kidding? NGOs don't represent anything. They're all well and good, but they are creations of foundations, for the most part, as well as government grants, and they rarely, especially in the U.S., can exist solely on their grassroots membership fees, nor do they have governance structures that are made up of direct grassroots rule. Religious groups? Er, which ones? Are these going to be the God Boxers, or the jihadists? You don't always get to chose, once you decide society will be ruled "by non-state actors".

Local activists? Are these of the non-violent and non-criminal type, or exactly what are they? Now that we're conferring power on them, and folding up institutions of accountability like "the judiciary" or "the media", could we, uh, learn a little bit more about their provenance, their goals, their funding? How are we going to do that, with the judiciary and the media closed down!

Seriously, people who get to thinking goofily about having NGOs rule the world must never have worked in an NGO. NGOs and activists are a vital and great part of society, but they are only one element of a civil society, not coterminous with civil society, which is how some of the more utopian ones think.

And Roland *is* critical -- in a way many are not -- as we can see:

"Empowering nonstate actors using virtual environments and other internet technologies is a story with some (very) dark sides.

More in general we speak here about technology enabling individuals "to affiliate directly with identity-driven groups and networks that transcend geographic boundaries" and makes possible "ubiquitous and constant integration into identity networks."

Environmentalism is a noble cause, but can we be sure that the "revitalization of the reach of tribes, clans, and other fealty-driven communities" is always a benefit for society?

Looking to the broader context of explosive urbanization, it might very well be that the spread of these identities will increase the likelihood of clashes between groups."

Roland should have seen the jihad video we were shown the other day with nutcases talking about shooting us in the head. That's the Internet and empowerment, too, and yes, it has a dark side.

There's more to argue about here, but let me just press on to the last Retarded Thing on the Internet for the day. I forgot to pay attention to Dave Winer for oh, about six months, and I never missed him. Somehow I "stumbled on" his latest idiocy that I can't pass by without savage exposure.

Dave Winer thinks that we are now going to see the End of Advertising. We're going to see an end to all these flashing ads, pushed ads, ads on TVs, ads on magazines, because they are all dying, the revenue is shrinking, blah blah blah. Why? "No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products." Advertising is just "targeted information".

So in advertising's place, we're going to see a sort of souped-up commercial information. So in Dave Winer's little world, people who are affluent enough to buy i-Phones and netbooks and Seagate hard drievs and whatever else they push out in Silicon Valley will find out the information they need to buy their products from their Facebook friends, fellow Twitterers, and Friendfeeders, supplemented by Plurk and all those other clunkily named gadgets out there. Why, Dave himself, when his expenso Cuisinart coffeemaker broke, turned it over, saw the brand name, went on amazon.com and press a button and bought a new one, without any advertising every touching his eye ROFL. Guess he managed to remind blindfolded when he landed on the first page.

In this way, social media will "spoon-fed your commerce circle," in the inimitable words of Mulch Ennui, and create closed little Tupperware parties and Avon ladies who bring products directly to your virtual home, so to speak.

This is retarded because, of course, this sort of high-end niche buying is only for the rich and connected. The average person, while doing some of their shopping by emailing or surfing the web or chatting with friends is still going to be relating to ads. Ads will especially be targeted to the young, who are just getting started finding out what is cool, unlike Dave Winer, who no longer needs memos on this subject *cough*.

Ads are pushed all over now, on bus shelters, inside elevators, inside cabs, on neon billboards, precisely because the ad men know they don't have you riveted to your TV as much anymore. But it's not as if TV died, or will die overnight, either. It may become more on-demand and niched or whatever, but it will always have ads.

Of course, there's the enormous hubris of Winer imagining that the news industry is collapsing (within 6 months lol?) and goading news corporations to "pass the baton" to bloggers like him. Bleh. People who block  you on twitter, erase your comments, and have no social accountability merely because they "invented the RSS feed".

Dave Winer, of course, is objectively evil. He is an apologist for Ayers, the Weatherman. He claims to have a nuanced and "you have to listen to all this first" sort of apology for all this, but what it boils down to is Bolshevist relativism. He imagines that John McCain, say, "killed more people," so that Ayers, in supporting a terrorist movement that killed people, is "less bad". This exposes his lack of understanding of terrorism versus legitimate state power, but for someone as far out on the left as Dave, there isn't any form of legitimate state power of the U.S. that he can be comfortable with, unless of course, Obama asks him to serve on some tech commission lol. Imagine telling everyone that you "definitely sympathize" with Ayers. That means violence and terror are ok as methods, even if you might personally find them "extreme". Ugh.

Winer, of course, famously said that "everyone in the Northeast" is racist, which is why...we ended up electing Obama. Oh, well.

I hate it when these aggressive, Bolshevik, arrogant middle-aged males of Silicon Valley decide, because they have an epiphany about some little facet of their little hothouse coddled technified lives, that "we all" are going to experience this, if not this minute, then in six months or six years.

I don't have a coffee maker. They always break. I just buy it from the deli or I make the instant. How do I know which instan to buy? I remember what was advertised to me -- if not on TV, which I don't watch, then in a magazine or on a bus shelter. Me, and millions of other people who live in a world without Dave Winer.

Comments

[IYan Writer]

I think the claim in the first paragraph was made by the reporter - it's at least silly, I agree. However, Robert's quotes are much more resonable.

[Prokofy Neva]

No, Robert set him up to buy it, and he himself flogs this idea of SL as "incubator" or forecaster and always has. In some ways, it is, but since he doesn't really bother to pay attention to the inworld economy, but just obsesses about all the headline-grabbing epiphenomena around SL, he is ignorant of this economy and can't use it for forecasting really, his take is very superficial.

[Desmond Shang]

If a second life scam collapsing fortells the global financial collapse, I suppose someone setting off a toy nuke in the Cordova Sandbox will foretell world war three.

[Clubside Granville]

What bothers me about Matanomics is its softball approach. I can look past the "umms" and "aaahs" and "y'knows" but not the almost sycophantic questioning of the guests. This latest one with the Electric Sheep dude was laughable. Here he has a company founded on badly stealing another successful idea (OnRez formerly SLBoutique which ripped off SLExchange poorly), creating unsuccessful real-world tie-ins and now a moronic Flash-chat-room that he dares to claim is a "virtual world", but doesn't get called to the carpet for any of it. It plays like an infomercial. I really didn't know that was Metanomics' plan, a weekly shill... is that what it always was?

[Prokofy Neva]

Clubside, SLBoutique.com was sold to the Sheep, and I'm not sure it would be fair to say it ripped off the idea of having an online shopping site for SL from Slexchange.com, because online shopping sites aren't an idea you can "rip off" -- they're all over the place.

[mary]

just don't get why you need to call it retarded things on the internet. people living with special needs can not only read but have feelings. it would be nice to consider that before using that word. thanks for listening.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, the reason I get to call things retarded on the Internet, is because they *are retarded*. And that's ok, and I will be continuing to call retarded things "retarded", just like I call certain situations "tar babies" and use other supposedly politically-incorrect phrases.

I absolute REFUSE to be browbeaten by people who have children or relatives who are "retarded" in the sense of suffering from a mental or physical disability and who insist on still using the old-fashioned word "retarded" for these relatives' conditions. If they're going to be politically-correct, hey, they should get with the real PC program, which uses the term "disabled" or even "challenged" now instead of "retarded".

If they *do* insist on using this word "retarded" they don't get to force on others what words we chose to use for stupid things on the Internet.

I will ABSOLUTELY NOT LISTEN to this kind of politically correct -- and misguided harassment. It's bullshit. People with special needs and their defenders will just have to get over themselves, sorry, but there it is. Half the time the people raging about this have no interest in protecting vulnerable people, they only have an interest in trying to be superior to other people and make them feel bad or guilty. So I call them on that bullshit.

I definitely get to say this, because I have relatives in this category myself, and I simply refuse to be harassed.

Modern slang uses the word "retarded". It's too bad that you find it offensive. I will not be changing anything about my use of this word.

[Tammy Nowotny]

I thought Beyers's remarks were reasonable. Of course, I work for him... or at least, I help out with his show by counting green dots at the various mirror sites. Ginko and their ilk were a cartoon version of the RL hedge funds: they made extravagant promises they couldn't keep and eventually they collapsed.

The article was slightly wrong when it said banking was banned: RL banking institutions are still allowed on SL if they wish to operate under RL banking regulations, and non-banks can offer non-interest-bearing deposit accounts (e.g., Sibley's OnRez accounts).

But what I REALLY wanted to respond to was: "I don't have a coffee maker. They always break. I just buy it from the deli or I make the instant." I say, get a French press. The coffee snobs say you have grind your beans if you use a French press but the cheap preground coffee works just fine. And this is an easier as well as better way to make coffee: just put the coffee in the glass, pour boiling water over it from a teapot, wait for 5 or more minutes, and then depress the plunger to push the grounds to the bottom of the glass. You don't even need to mess around with filters: a filter is an integral part of the plunger. You can get a pretty nice French press for about 25 bucks (or L$6.5k) at Starbucks or at most upscale kitchen stores.

[Sean Williams]

"I don't have a coffee maker. They always break. I just buy it from the deli or I make the instant. How do I know which instant to buy? I remember what was advertised to me"

Actually, most people try different brands of coffee and figure out what tastes better to them.

To rely on an advertisement to tell you what to buy simply shows how easily some can be led around: There is no substitute for good, old fashioned trial and error when it comes to what people like to eat, drink, read, etc.

Instead of listening to advertisements ... shop around and actually choose for yourself.