Second Thoughts

The Right to Wright and the Life Expectancy of Sea Monkeys

Here we've gone over the issue of the rights to Wright and the merchandising and non-profit issues discussed in this thread -- although not as thoroughly as I would have liked because we were still on last week's topic of copying in general raised in Angela's JIRA (please vote and help keep this topic open).

I still continue to contemplate the systemic problem in positing a regime where you active embrace and celebrate Free because you need to ensure that work tools are free for you, in order to have zero or less business costs, and your product is free so your customer is attracted to you -- indeed must be free because if you charge supposedly someone else will make it free anyway -- but you can only then sell on top of that with consulting and customization or...some other secret sauce. I think that ultimately, this is short-sighted and infantile even while its practitioners style themselves as pragmatic and hard-nosed "reality-based" digital business people -- because it posits that the world that values paid content somehow continues to exist around you as you set up your freebie opensource sandbox, heedless of your undermining of this very notion with your copyleftism.

It's like all the blogs that exist on the feeds from the AP and real newspapers, and demand they be free and see this as a "fair use" issue or a Free "information wants to be free" issue, and yet then don't count the costs of production of that content, as if we're all supposed to be having a barn-raiser or holding up Lenin's log in a "Wealth of Networks" where somebody *else* is always paying for the network costs, not me or you.

And I think it's irresponsible because ultimately, why would I pay for knowledge how to work a free thing, or a jingle, or a movie soundtrack, a different colour of a dress, or a widget with my name engraved on it, when the cost of that is driven down to $0, too? Why would the cost of those consulting gigs and customization orders not drive down to $0 like the original content, too? So that means that each area then can have very few consultants, or very few customizers because many people will then start to get it for free and as business is scarce, those with the most connections and resources will grab what paying business is left in this rapidly devaluating sphere. The Wealth of Networks pretty soon starts to look like the Confiscation of Value From Everyone Else by the Strongest. There's something about this world model that is ultimately bankrupt. Like communism. Because it's technocommunism.

Is the Summer Slump in SL Upon Us?

I don't know about you -- I can only report on my own experience, but it seems like the annual SL summer slump, which usually kicks in earlier by the 4th of July, is now biting hard. But there's hope of the economy picking up in a few weeks with the fall, more Germans coming in (and aren't they the wealthiest per capita country in Europe at least?), Zindra business owners getting up and running and recovering from the shock of the move and...and...the boom in Finnish sauna robe sales...

Here are the signs, in general:

o Type in "infohub" to search/places and you can get a general sense of what's happening with newbie signups, a good portion of whom still arrive at mainland infohubs after completing or opting out of Orientation Island/Help Island. The traffic at these sites is about a third of what it is generally, so it's fallen off a bit. But...here's what I can't tell. It may be that the Lindens are finally load-balancing somewhat better; at any rate, the 60,000 traffic that Moose Beach has now gone down to less than 20,000 most days. It's shifted to another Bay City hub constructed to relieve the congestion (instead of just rotating newbies better through the system, which exasperates me, but...what can you do). Hau Koda now is the overcrowded hub with today's traffic at 57,000. So I don't know if it means *more* people now that instead of Moose having 60,000 every day or more, it now has 19,000 and Hau Koda has 57,000.

Still, looking at the other popular hubs, they seem to have half to a third of their usual traffic. It simply means less sign-ups coming in at least as far as the hubs -- unless, of course, Desmond has captured them all and lassoed them to Oxbridge -- but I don't think so, and his traffic seems lighter than usual, too, at 800 today. There's a new Benelux infohub and I hear more German being spoken at the hubs and from some new tenants so many those countries are having a bit of a comeback after bad press for SL.

BTW, unless you thought they were discussing Goethe and Heidegger, here's the convo:

[22:52]  Ichbinein Newbie: Weisst du wo man hier geil campen kann?
[22:52]  Friend2 Germans i want to see what u look like.ill show u mine
[22:52]  Friend2 Germans: Ich möchte sehen, was u suchen like.ill zeigen U Mine

I wonder how they'll do, as I hear the first one say, "weisst du was cool ist in SL? Man braucht nicht duschen und stinkt trotzdem nicht ..."   -- does that means something like "Everybody in SL looks like a douche to me and they stink, isn't there anything cool here?" but as I said, I suck at German...

BTW, let me tell you who has been cleaning up in SL, by the looks of it, the guy whose store is right smack next to this high-trafficked new hub at the Bay City Municipal airport, named "Aviator Kidd". Location, location. The store sells land rentals. Also Cubey's blimps are for sale there. I wonder if they can make any money, given that newbies don't have much cash, and that the land for sale in Bay City cost a young fortune, so it takes awhile to make your investment back. The Java Island Shop just down from the airport has a lot more cheap clothes and sex stuff, the volume might do better for those newbies that somehow have at least some money from somewhere, maybe from capen and ill zeigen U Mine, I don't know.

I've always wanted to expand my German vocab to move from something like "Ich kann strumpfe strichen" or something like that which means "I can sew stockings," which is all I seem to recall from my year of German, to "hier geil campen kann". Could come in handy...

I had not had a chance to see the art deco style airport at Hau Koda (whatever that name means) built by Naughty Mole.

o Less posts to the forums. Yes, oddly enough, that's a marker of engagement. There's been some controversial topics, and some that are more generic, and they aren't attracting the hundreds that they often do. People care enough about SL even to log on to a forums during their lunch hour and post -- that's not happening.

o Except for a HUGE rush on my Finnish sauna robe (thanks, Simone! lol) from a Concierge Group ad (in response to someone else hustling an ad), my sales have slowed. Well, my items are ridiculous and my sales consist of like...$20 a week. But, if they are down to $5 a week, well it's a metric of sorts.

o People leaving their rentals or not paying their rentals and you see on their profile that they have gone on vacation. I had a few leave for openspaces of their own, but not as much as I'd actually expected, so that does make me wonder how many of those things the Lindens did sell.
I have an openspace myself which I'm noodling around with, doing a project I can't take the time to finish now, and I've put out 2/3 of it to rent on 2 parcels -- no bites, despite a lower cost than everyone else. Usually, I can get stuff like that to snap up.

o Suddenly, one of my newbie villages empties out nearly completely. Of course, the construction of a giant city next door caused some to skedaddle, but even when that came down later and the land went up to sale, and even with some new inquiries, they didn't bite. I'm going to lower prices there to $100/150 prims, that should fill it up again.

o People moving out of stores they rented, complaining they didn't make a sale. If they are new and depending on "traffic," I chalk that up to being unable to show up in search or create friends/customers networks and ads and such, it's hard.

But...this entire subject continues to baffle me because other people just starting out with stores are making sales and staying. I also have long-term customers that keep making sales. I've got a few I have to ferry to Zindra, and we're all going to suffer losses, but I'm giving them the two weeks of free rent that the Lindens are giving us -- but I just haven't had time to go and set up the new stuff. Some parts of Zindra are looking nice. They are sort of space age rural shiny roads with grass. Weird, but...ok. The city parts I don't like as much. As I've noted, other parts are already gritty and blighty. Zindra just still seems...damn weird because of it's name, the future stuff, the weird Seurat-like trees. Perhaps things will normalize. Today, I saw a gigantic Starax-type statue of a naked shemale with that Starax red-devil statue crowling up to it. I guess it will be a Zindra land mark. You have to admire the pluck of something like this. It will likely help sell...whatever it is exactly they're selling there.

o Now, this is disconcerting. The pages on the economic statistics have been down or late or stalled for ages. Now, they are simply taken out of the main directory on the web site (scroll down below). The economy is no longer listed as a feature of this product as it used to on the front page in this directory. It was deliberately excised.

Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home First time I've seen a picket fence in Ravenglass in ages, they're actually very rare. This Cocoanut's Sunshine cottage. Visit Patagonia (175, 167, 43)

Posted via email from Prokofy's posterous

"Twitter makes the noise. Second Life makes the money."

"Twitter makes the noise. Second Life makes the money."

Best quote ever. Thank you, Victor Keegan of the Guardian. 

I can't help wondering if tech thug Charles Arthur was on vacation and that piece slipped by, because I suspect he would have brought the usual geek snark and hate to SL if he had to write about it (although he did turn out a piece lauding augmented reality recently).

And it's interesting that it's the socialist Guardian delivering the message, and not the Economist, which snarks about Second Life this last week that only 84,000 people are on line at any given time.

Keegan says quoting kzero.com, "membership of virtual worlds grew by 39% in the second quarter of 2009 to an estimated 579 million." Well, a lot of them were kids' worlds, but our little world of 1.5 million uniques generated a whopping $350 million in real dollar content sales this year, and that's not trivial, compared to the figures for Facebook or Twitter, given SL's relatively tiny user base by contrast with those social media behemoths (wasn't Twitter set to make $140 million...somehow? By selling...what was it again?)

Victor turns skeptical about SL, however, when he looks around and feels like other like OpenSim are going to "take over". "But Second Life may not end up as the preferred platform as new business models take advantage of the rapidly improving technological developments elsewhere." (Maybe Arthur *did* tamper with this piece lol.)

This is where we, as experts of these worlds, will of course differ, because even though we are the critical chattering classes of SL on the blogs, we know it is, like democracy, 'the worst world -- except for all the others".

So the next big thing for the Lindens is the workspaces thing, and appealing to business again, only this time, not to their lusty PR people and marketing firm gurus who said size mattered and put up $15,000 or $30,000 big-ass islands that then sat empty and untrafficked, but to the people in the back office whose job it is to organize meetings and cut travel costs. Unglamorous stuff, but the stuff of which the workaday world is made of, and that could become meat & potatoes for Linden Lab and at least the gold solutions provider class in SL.

The Lindens have a new site up for all this.

Rezzable has predictably dumped on it, and stupidly, with an infomercial from this Maria who I guess is paid for by IBM or something.

Dusan has a very long and thoughtful piece that is still an infomercial and hard to read through, but I put a comment there, in part about all this driving of business to the Linden favourites again. Yecth will  you STOP IT, LL!

Don't forget to keep watching this discussion which is still lurching along despite Amanda "I Will Delete You" Linden. (After her intervention in that thread, I'm having trouble visualizing Amanda as anything other than the "God Warrior! Darksiders!" loony lady on Youtube. Must see...)

Here's the big mistake I think all these things are making, which is once again, trying to segregate "enterprise" and "work" away from the rest of real life and human activity, something you would think they had been taught to let go of, with all the social media stuff. Maybe this backlash or retrenching or revanchism has to happen for awhile, and "work" has to virtualize and hide away and beat back all the roleplayers and fantasizers for awhile -- but more to the point -- beat back the protesters, critics, new media citizen journalists, etc. too. That's in part what it's about -- the man is joining them to beat them.

I still think we're poised on the tipping point of all this still. That it's not quite there yet. That it's really rocking precariously on the precipice and is going to either flop and crash and be a backwater or worse, a much-cited "lesson learned" like the nauseatingly-oft-repeated "AOL walled garden" lesson of the Internet. OR it will take off, slowly but surely and make its own way, but with a rocky ride and a ways to go before "the liquidity event" as Mitch Kapor delicately calls it.

I see that it is on that rocky precipice when I look at the face of Mark Kingdon the human being in this video, and see how really aged, tired, and stressed he looks compared to his arrival more than a year ago (the problem is that I don't think we ever had a live real-life picture of him back then, but had like a studio headshot and a fabulous avatar screenshot, so maybe he hasn't aged). Still, he looks a lot more worried than I've seen him in other TV shows and interviews, and while he's describing something totally cool and fun and killer-appy he, he looks like he's sitting on a bed of nails in very thin polyester pants. Maybe they need to put Philip back on TV, because no matter how awful things are or what jabs he takes he's able to look absolutely goofily enthusiastic and charismatic under any circumstances, and keep his hair looking good, too.

But maybe he does have real stuff to worry about. I'm betting that stuff isn't Builderbot or SVC-444, somehow, which is what we see as the weak points of SL. And I can't help thinking that he'd worried less if he didn't go chasing waterfalls among the enterprises exclusively, but stuck to the rivers that he's used to, which are the people who pay most of the tier and make most of the content, and for that, he needs a quippie (Quick Impact Project) and he needs a very symbolic CBM (confidence-building measure) -- to use the UN and OSCE terms.

For example, if I were him, I'd literally log on to SVC-444 and VWR-14478 and say, "Hi, guys, we hear you and we're working on it." I don't expect that will happen.

When the Lindens do what they perceive as a "nice" thing, like grandfather the openspaces, they only get the junk-yard dogs snarling a bit less but no wagging of tails. They didn't sell that many of them, regardless, I'll bet.

We live in a world where yes, Twitter makes the noise and so far hasn't shown us really how it will pull a rabbit out of the hat to make money (nor has YouTube or Facebook) and that's what I look at, and that's why the constant snotty triumphalism of Clay Shirky or Jay Rozen about the death of newspapers and the birth of the socialist "wealth of networks" doesn't impress me (it's doomed to death like all socialist stuff always is; it doesn't work better just because it's ported to online).

But...we live in a world where the fact that Second Life making the money isn't really quite there yet for even the people it claims to be there for. You know who you are! You are packing your bags for Blue Mars. You are selling your land or polishing your Linden resume.

Again, I live in hope that M Linden will come to understand that the things making him have gray hair could be solved by understanding and acting better on the things that give us gray hair and parting the waters against the Red Sea of opensource.

 

"I Will Delete You Immediately"

I've been generally a big supporter of the "Working in Second Life" concept, and also a supporter of "mixed reality events," coming to their defense when hordes of blingtards gripe that real life is a buzz-kill to their SL fantasy role-play. I took on swashbuckling pirate-role-player Burnham Bedlam in this thread where I also tried to address the alarming dimensions of Beth Noveck with her collectivist ideologies in the White House.

Of course as usual, this particular Linden on the job, Amanda Linden, wants to press loyal residents into service having a happy little discussion about their joy joy technology and its fabulous guests gracing it, not really deal with the substance of the issue.

So when people argue about whether mixed reality projects work at all (some people think they are huge failures and LL's technology is simply not yet up to the job) or whether immersive virtual worlds shouldnt' be disrupted by real-life stuff that is boring and stupid -- and they argue (at least I argue) that this particular U.S. government official is scarily already making use of new technologies in very disturbing ways, Amanda Linden watches with growing exasperation as people walk on her nicely-waxed floor and upset the shine. Finally, she intervenes:

"I've been watching this string for a week--quietly reading and interested in where it was going. No, I have not deleted any comments--so much for Linden sensorship. Enough. This string has wandered far from my initial intention around the benefits and challenges re: mixed reality events. This is not a place to sound off on personal rants of any kind. Period.

 If anyone would like to continue the conversation re: the intended topic, then please go ahead--positive, negative, constuctive, or musing. Otherwise, do not comment on my posts. I will delete you immediately as now, you have been forewarned.

 Thanks for understanding."

Anyway, my attempt to keep questioning the "inevitability of technocommunism":

Amanda,

Let me see if I can conceptualize this in a way that will help you see that this discussion is not about off-topic rants or people's personal agendas.

Any discussion of mixed reality cannot exclude by definition that reality's content. By definition, mixed reality is, well, mixed reality. It mixes into virtuality -- in our case a human community of social media -- the real life issues of real life using the virtual platform. You can't say that just because an event with real-life controversial political content in it, with a real-life U.S. government official and one-time SL resident in it, is funnelled through the blender of virtual reality it then becomes off-limits, or off-topic, or verboten in some way that isn't acceptable. It is acceptable because mixing reality means mixing the real issues of real life into a virtual setting with its own laws and culture and enabling them to clash, to one extent or another.

While it might be nice in theory to have a more abstract discussion about the outward technical wrappings of mixed reality events in general, events are accelerating far too fast for this -- we now see that the cultures and mechanisms of technology are inserting themselves into real-life government in what many will find are disturbing and challenging ways. The abstract discussion of the theory of "benefit of mixed events" is already overtaken by those very events; the technologies of social media and new media are *already* being used in government in accelerated ways, and virtuality is not far behind; indeed, already at the door. Are we supposed to wait for the virtualization of government to be completed before we can talk about it on the blog of a virtual reality manufacturing company?

By the same token, any discussion of mixed reality cannot exclude a discussion of the exigencies and culture and technical trappings of virtual reality. People trying to function in real life at a meeting are going to want virtual reality technology not to get in the way or call attention to itself, but instead, to enhance the meeting. People who have hitherto used virtual reality for one purpose are going to resent what they see as invalidation of that purpose in the course of adapting that technology to other purposes and this needs to be managed with sensitivity and rules of the road.

Marshal McCluhan talked about the medium of television as the great reducer. On the blue screen in the box, the Vietnam War could be reduced to a news show, in which "the bad news of the war helped sell the good news of commercials".

Reducing the first such massively viewable war in this way in one sense enabled it; in another sense, it ultimately fostered a movement to end it. How will virtuality and the Metaverse do these things?

Virtual reality technology might be some kind of reducer in the same way (and for some, a trivializer), but I think it's more -- I think virtual reality is prototyping, simulating and launching models that will be used in real life -- so that far from reality being squeezed into a box but still retaining somewhere its own autonomy, virtuality will squeeze into reality and become indistinguishable. Whether that is a good of bad thing needs to be strenuously and freely debated -- unless, of course, we're being directed to sit back and let technologists (aided by Linden "sensor-ship") take their course and let coded
nanobots decide.

Amanda, if you want these events in Second Life to serve merely as corporate press releases, then put them on lindenlab.com and don't have comments open. If you want them to be part of a vibrant and interactive community, you will have to accept how people view and comment on them. No one in this discussion has violated the TOS in any way, nor have they even gone "off-topic".To sling a " I will delete you immediately as now, you have been forewarned" sort of comment at people taking part generally in good faith in a difficult discussion is to open up -- again -- the scary prospect of this technological culture invading real-life governance when real-life government begins to use this technology.

Wrights and Wrongs

This is apparently the future gift shop, though not marked as such, nor are there any cards here explaining *this* part. The sign says MUSEUM; it is part of the museum. The Breeze replicate appears to be fully part of the museum complex and has a display in the wing opposite this room from FLW's life. These items by Frey Bravin are for sale.

Below the fold, I'm parking a copy of the latest replies on the thread about the new Frank Lloyd Wright museum, because the Lindens are likely to remove them. Here we have Troy Vogel screaming, accusing me of defamation, and threatening legal action. Sigh. Why? Because...I asked why this museum looked like a museum of his furniture to sell his furniture in his store because....the museum is filled with his furniture and his store is right next to it. I also asked about Frey Bravin selling his furniture in the museum, and not making it clear where the proceeds are going.

It's right to ask these questions about a project that the Lindens have advertised on their "Eduscape" blog about "Education," which claims to be an "educational" project. It's normal, and just. That it would turn into this sort of raging and screeching isn't about me, but is about the recurring problem of Linden favouritism, lack of due diligence and awareness of basic ethical issues, and a culture of unaccountability among some creators who get Linden favouritism. That's all. It's always been about that, and continues to be. It never gets better. Each time an incident like this comes up, instead of seeing the Lindens answering questions simply and swiftly, we see threats, bans, and thugs. We see some residents getting their businesses favourited at expense of others. Why is this necessary? They could achieve their same goals of fronting some particularly talented people they like and feel help their world just as easily by making sure to attend to the optics and ethics.

When asked whether any of these builds involved unauthorized copying, we get a vague, incomplete, defensive and even beligerent response. I'm actually not the one who raised the issue of the designs and the copyrights -- others did, and the Lindens let it stand without comment so far. Here's all we've been given on the rights question:

Pathfinder Linden: Have you reached out to the real life estate of Frank Lloyd Wright?  What do they think about this project in Second Life?

Frey Bravin: Yes, we have established contact with members of The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust and The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, they are very supportive in our goal of exposing the works of Mr. Wright to people worldwide.

Kamael Khevious says then:

I hate to be a downer, but FLW's works are all copyrighted by  various organizations, so support from the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation doesn't mean much. For example, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy holds the rights to the Kaufman house.  While I don't know whether the people in question have cleared the permissions for use of things like floorplans and photos, I'd strongly suggest LL pay more attention to possible (and I emphasize "possible" because I am NOT making accusations here) DMCA violations before publicizing builds like this one.

Cincia Singh says:

Kamael that's not being a downer, it's due diligence. With all the drama about DMCA in SL you would think something like this would have been thoroughly vetted.The sign at the front entrance acknowledges two copyright holders out of the many who have rights to FLW's materials. Do either of them hold copyright to the structures or their likenesses. The text in the notecard would seem to cover only the use of the name Frank Lloyd Wright and "his" likeness ... not the likeness of the structures.

As for the quality of the build ... not bad. It's not what I would call "intricately detailed" though.

Frey then says:

Let me assure you, before this project was started I went out of my way to ensure that there would be no potential copyright and /or licence issue.

Well, do you have the rights to the *buildings replicated with prims in SL* or not? Or just to the pictures of FLW and his buildings in RL? I agree with Cincia that what is given out on site isn't sufficient to clarify this matter.

Frey tried to TP me and wrangle me into an argument inworld and demanded to give me a tour, but I'm not interested in getting harangued. I went back later and confirmed: inside the museum there is a store with the sign Frank Lloyd Wright with four pieces of his furniture for sale. For sale. With proceeds to go to him. And no notecard that says anything different.

What he is literalizing about, evidently, is his concept that the Breeze replication is "not the museum". Huh? That's a strange thing to be claiming about a room off the foyer that has a big sign FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT MUSEUM on it. Hello? And...the entire area is a museum, of both pictures and history posters on the wall and the builds themselves. Suddenly, the Breeze replica 'isn't part of the museum"? but that's not how it is presented or described.

And once again: it's *OK* to sell content in this museum, or in the replicas of the buildings adjacent to what Frey might somehow formally call only "the museum," but...it's not clear that the proceeds go to him personally, or the tier. And once again, I confirmed that Troy Vogel's store is just a few meters away from the entrance.

Here's another aspect of all this: if you follow the link in the Linden blog, you land here at the main entrance of the museum:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/DiLemma%20City/60/241/22

That's where I landed the first time, and remembered the name of the sim, "Dilemma".

The next time I came, I typed Dilemma into the map, so as not to have to go looking for the blog SLURL again, and now I landed here, in front of the main entrance *to Breeze*, which is behind the large main building of the museum:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/DiLemma%20City/128/128/21

which is right in front of the Breeze, and the furniture for sale, and kitty-korner to Troy's store.

Looking at the sim's entire layout, I would have to say it defies the imagination not to call the Breeze building part of the Museum. After all, as you walk into this building, it has displays of FLW's buildings and cards about his life and a guestbook on the one wing. Hello! That's a museum! Right across the foyer there is what perhaps will be a "gift shop" but isn't labelled as such and has signs that say, as I've reiterated, "FLW Museum". All of this is in the same complex, with the same FLW designs on the roof as the rest of the build.

In any event, if they'd like to take lessons on literalism and distraction, they can go see Dale Innis, I think it's obvious to anyone who visits the sim: it's a furniture store mall connected to a museum, and the relationship of the stores and their creators and the sales and the museum upkeep *are not clear*.They see it differently -- as a museum with some furniture stores connected to it perfectly legitimately and a gift shop that they have in their mind that didn't open yet or get built -- because they are inside the project, and they don't care how they look to the outside. They have their little coterie of friends; they have their Lindens; apparently they even have the real FLW trust. This is Second Life.

I'll be interested -- but in a weary sort of way -- to see what happens next. No doubt Blue will simply erase all the comments because Troy threatens criminal action and I answer his threats. And he'll lock the thread. He may or may not ban me; it's immaterial. If Blue attempts to give me a little talk inworld, I will mute him. Wait, you can't do that to Lindens. Well, I simply will log off.

I couldn'lt help thinking of how this was somewhat of a replay of four years ago, when I was banned also for speaking out about favouritism, and also about a Pathfinder thread. Back then, Pathfinder was smarmily touting a scholarly journal with an article mentioning several SL residents, the usual favourites, Aimee Weber, FlipperPA Peregrine, and Cubey Terra. The whole reason those particular much-feted and much-displayed FIC, constantly on the website front page and pitched in the news constantly by the Lindens, could end up in this article, was because they were...fronted by the Lindens. This scholar, Betsy Book, who happened to go on and become the VP of There.com, didn't just happen to notice them -- they were pitched. As if this was favouritism enough, Pathfinder flogged it *some more* by exclaiming about the piece on the forums in the sort of boosting for the Lindens have become famous.

The article was about how to succeed in business in Second Life. So I responded in another thread (because the first one was hopelessly sidetracked) by noting that if you wanted to succeed, getting the Lindens to pitch you to their friends, and then after the article comes out, boost it on the forums, would ensure maximum success for your business. I was savaged with hateful posts by all the FIC of the day who were pals with the Lindens and the feted ones, and I noted, in passing, that Aimee's name was "like" "every prom queen you love to hate", and that was part of her brand. I made one more post about the danger of monopolies in SL (some of which went on to become in fact monopolies, and one key one, Slexchange.com, was bought out by the Lindens and became the Lindens' own shopping site XStreetsl.com). (BTW, I also uncovered this gem of Torley flogging Aimee's panties.)

I'd like to think that in five years, the Lindens have grown up. That they can no longer cave to screeching bullying over-entitled children that they've spoiled rotten. That they are capable of mature moderation, and differentiating between somebody screeching about "libel" and the actual state of affairs, which is the optics of this sim aren't good and they need to make it right as they've linked their brand to it. You would *hope* that Blue, as beaten down as he is in the Linden setting, will be able to come on and say something like "We've determined that the materials used from FLW are done with permission, and we're inquiring about the replicas of the builds" -- because frankly, Frey nor the Lindens have answered that adequately --there's a different between pictures from the Trust about FLW's life and his RL buildings, and replicas in SL -- we can't be sure the FLW Trust understands that - it's not been explicated. In fact, the defensiveness of Frey and curtness of the answer only raises more questions.

Next, you'd hope Blue would say something like "We want to assure everyone that the tip jars go to supporting the museum, which is a non-profit venture, and that residents who have donated their furniture and time to the work of the museum have also put their stores on this sim, so if you want to shop for furniture inspired by FLW, you can help support SL's craftsmen as well". But that sort of finesse and maturity is likey beyond the Lindens, and they are likely to use far cruder methods of simply removing everything, and evening using ban sticks.

FLW FTW -- and What's Wright for My Store

Museum of...FLW-inspired Stores Next to FLW Museum

Whenever the Lindens whine that "This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things," and say they can't feature residents' builds or businesses or non-profits because there is always a backlash of 'jealousy" and cries of "FIC," and this is why they can't have *regular* features like that, I wonder what compels them to *keep* doing it for the friends, and then never seeming to get it right.

Maybe the Lindens really imagine that their plan to morph the old "Your World/Your Imagination" into "You Only Imagine It's Your World" and "What We Imagine Should be Your World" is something that is demonstrably excellent and people will simply fall into line. Or maybe they count on their ban powers to keep it so on the forums. Or maybe they are as surprised as anyone each time they try to feature something of the residents and it ends in tears and recriminations.

I was trying to put my finger on why this post felt so wrong as I reflected on these things. I read it over several times. Of course, the cutesy title "Eduscape" and "Pathfinder Linden" were red flags, but I discarded those because I genuinely like Frank Lloyd Wright (doesn't everybody who is of aspiring middle class SLintelligentsia status lol) and thought it was cool that somebody was making a museum -- I thought at first it might be linked to a show in New York (it's not).

As I got into it, I began to furrow my brow a bit, however. Pathfinder's post featured what was described as a "new museum" in Second Life, which he described as "ground-breaking". That got my back up, because, of course, for six years in Second Life before now, there have been quite a few people who have paid tribute to FLW. Chiefly, I remember Juro Kothari who made a replicate of Annie's House -- but I didn't put the link on the blog for concern that one of the fanboyz might go and AR it and DMCA it -- and perhaps rightly so, I don't know. Sad, because it is a kind of early SL heritage. And there were lots of FLW imitations in SL, and chief among them, I might note *cough* was the Lindens' own beloved FLW prefab, which was one of the houses-in-a-box they offered at every telehub in the early days, and every freebie board (ask me for it inworld if you haven't found it at Stillman or one of the other freebie bazaars). I remember literally spending days trying to fit that headbanger together -- and it was unrentable. It was pretty, but you couldn't live in it -- too many prims, no scaling for avatar usage as to ceilings, etc. -- it was a sculpture to look at, only. Fallingwater replicas have come and gone, and today, there are probably literally hundreds of prefab makers making FLW knockoffs, all using the same texture which seems to be in the public domain (or just widely copied illegally, I can't tell) of the crumbling wedgy slabs of grey-coloured rock.

Some didn't realize in this thread that you can copyright architectural designs. Of course you can! And FLW's were jealousy guarded by his wife and later widow Olgivanna Wright. (You can Google the story of Wright and find all the tales of Olgivanna, a Gurdjieff devotee, ruling the roost and maintaining a household of many young males who worked for slave wages or just room & board and actually did a lot of the FLW architectural work but not for credit, or so the stories go. The life of Wright is filled with drama, as with any great genius, but the work survives as a great part of American and world heritage).

Naturally, the issue of copyright in the RL carries over to SL, but then the question opens up: are tiny renditions of this in the dollhouse world we live in "copies" or "tributes" or "inspired by"? And here, in this thread of the Pathfinder's, the museum owners tell us that they've reached out to the trust, and gotten permission to put in pictures.

I don't know, however, the status of the designs they use in their own works for sale. Perhaps these fall in the "inspired" by category -- when I saw Troy Vogel's name there, I began to ask myself. Hey, is this an FLW museum, or is this a museum of Troy's mission furniture helping him selling it?

And when I flew out there, I saw, yes, it's a museum of Troy's mission furniture helping him sell it lol.

Second Life is a Crystal Ball

I've always bothered with Second Life, which is for some, nothing more than a kind of goofy and exasperating wonky 3-D chat room, because I always felt instinctively that it has inside it, coiled like a kind of spring, the future. Or futures. Scenarios of what will happen with technology and people down the line. Not in some kind of mystical woo-woo fashion, but merely because Second Life is an emergent-behaviour panopticon. I don't think necessarily it is planned this way -- I'm not sure even the clever Lindens are smart enough and grounded enough to be effective conspirators -- but it *is* that way simply because it is a cocktail of people and technology and online management of crowds.

Many things are prefigured in Second Life. Long before anyone knew what Twitter was or tweet gurus, we saw the desperate marketing firms barrel into Second Life trying to find some advertising capacity for their lumbering, failing corporate clients, we saw the hype, the ecstasy, the fantasy, the search for the guily parties, and then...the islands with the big cement stadiums and the tumbleweeds. All of this is coming and going now on Twitter, to the point that you even find articles asking if Twitter is in fact like Second Life (it isn't, because Second Life isn't even like Second Life, the way it is portrayed, yet by and large, we can accurately talk about a bubble and a hype leading to numerous "try-mes" and "bye-mes".)

The current 4chan rebellion against AT&T, which may have temporarily blocked its image sites for cause, i.e. child pornography or other unlawful material, or due to evil corporate censorship, depending on whom you believe, was prefigured a long ago in 2006 when the b/tards spinning off from under the W-hat overcoat (like Russian literature out from Gogol's overcoat) were crashing the grid, and Philip banned some 30 ringleaders permanently, and people like me who documented their griefing and proved that it wasn't just all just high-spirited pranks and "art", were then mercilessly targeted. Yes, maybe history first appears as tragedy and then as comedy, or maybe it repeats over and over again as comedy and finally absurdity, but while many people are wondering what the hell a "4chan" is, people in SL knew what it was 4 years ago.

If you wanted to get a glimpse up into the future of how newspapers would be destroyed, or other businesses unable to transition online and keep value, you could watch the Copybot controversy of 2006. One could argue, in having this debate, whether in fact SL merely mirrored in concentrated form what was happening in RL in those same years in the music industry with song downloads and piracy, and speeded it up then, or whether SL still can be viewed as an incubator of future events that has its own useful trajectory that you can watch to see how something like digital value pans out.

Even the University of Michigan has now studied the birth of memes (in this case the giving of gestures) and seen how it traverses along social networks.

There are a thousand things you could be studying in Second Life, whether it is how disputes are resolved, how protest emerges and dissipates, how corporations manage people online, how people communicate and adjust their goals and compromise -- and lots of other separate tributaries of things like prototyping a car engine or a medical procedure, and they're all happening in SL -- yet largely unstudied.

Of course, you wouldn't have missed the trajectory from Beth Noveck's "Democracy Island" and Creative Commons kiosks and articles with questionable collectivist ideas nurtured at least in some part in SL and State of Play, which originally captivated the Lindens (and then lost them), and then her rise to the White House (although arguably most of this activity occurred in other settings). Let's just say that you don't have to have a perfect "fit" for everything you want to say about the SL prototyping machine to acknowledge that SL is useful for prototyping. (And may even do things like...that scary time Angela Talamasca's 3-D scene changer, Jessica Ornitz's terraforming, and then a real-life pictures on a news site...all came about sequentially in time as if interrelated. But they weren't *causally* related...right? Right?! lol)

The point isn't that SL synthesizes and *causes* these events, merely that because it is an accelerated virtual community with people immersed in changing technology, it prefigures them successfully. Basically it's a kind of barium chamber or accelerator or something which enables speeded-up enactment of future stuff so you can see it better. Philip Linden always used to talk about SL as this machine to prototype and accelerate your business, and enable you to flop hard and learn while remaining anonymous so as not to suffer, but it's bigger than that, because it prefigures and runs through simulations of wider trends and adaptations to technology than just somebody's one business.

Naturally, it's kind of nauseating to think that the JIRA isn't just some silly fanboyz passtime with simulated Linden concern for bug-hunting, but a 5-alarm accident going somewhere to happen in real life -- like, of course, Beth's and the other goverati's methodologies for moderating website, which are insidiously controlling and an alarming signal about the vulnerability of the First Amendment.

So what other things are unfolding in Second Life that we will see...somewhere? on or off the Internet?

Are people going to be wearing goggles with HUDS and translations and image overlays inside them?

Serious Customer

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How it is now

How it is now Orwood. Looking pretty good today. Visit Orwood (15, 149, 79)

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