The Chicken Wars of the Old and New Internet

It's been fascinating to follow the chicken wars of SL, and now I see what this is about: the war of the old and new Internet, the old Internet that geeks made to be run only by themselves with everyone else prostrate before them and everything devalued and made free to hide the cost of their own coding and hardware, and the new Internet where ordinary people can fend for themselves and make money for themselves -- if the geeks don't forcibly get in the way by devaluing property and inserting themselves as dogs in the manger.

I didn't see this right away, particularly because I was caught up in the Linden paradigm which runs a double-edged sword -- on the one hand, they never met a script they didn't like; on the other hand, they hate it when somebody who is not one of their own run scripts they don't benefit from.  In studying this, I've come to see more about the politics of physics and the politics of user-generated commerce and its killers, worse than any deadly chicken-rustler in the night.

Like any landlord, I resented the sionChickens when I found out about them because usually when I found out about them, there were 50 of them on one tiny 448 m2 cabin parcel on an infohub sim like Ross already lagging to death. They would keep moving and colliding and breeding so they had to go -- pronto. They also made noise and caused people to build big open pens flush on the property line and that was unsightly and annoying, so I had to ban them out of close quarters like various newbie and low-income villages in Columbia and Patagonia. But when I made a policy about them, I discovered some people were hiding them up in the air --- and they had never made a single dent in the sim performance.

There was a mysterious lag spike every 15-20 minutes in Iris for a time that bedevilled me and Lindens because we couldn't find it. I kept trying to get a reading on what was wrong on my end, as we have most of that sim in the land preserve with Clubville, and finally it was determined that a neighbour had an infestation of them and they were removed and the problems went away.

I put them on the menu at the Moth Temple as a "statement" and did a brisk business for awhile in the Kosher Sion Soup (thanks to Beth Odets) and the Today's Special! Stewed Sion Chicken sign thanks to Jessica Ornitz, pick them up here.

I saw lots of drama go on about the chickenverse, but I began to pry deeper when I saw some of my tenants and friends start to put up egg vendors and put out boxed live chickens in stalls and I went to visit the major chicken breeding establishments like The Farm and Fairy Dust.

Then I saw what this was about: a killer app that makes one scripter boatloads of money with some Wild-West customer service performance issues at the start, and thousands of people committed to the community because it enabled them to also get in on the game and make money, too, and also have a lot of fun designing, creating, and socializing at the farms and in the groups dedicated to chicken chat.

In other words, Sion Zaius and all the many farming organizers did something this summer Linden Lab couldn't do with its Tilt o'Whirl land policies and land gluts: it saved the economy and showed what is possible when people are allowed to organize commerce and creativity themselves. Business is sagging in many areas of SL, crushed in some areas by the casual laissez-faire attitude LL has taken to copybotting and builderbotting, smothered in other areas by these ridiculously-expensive elite enclaves the Lindens have fostered with their special friends among the land barons. People feel listeless and disaffected and bruised.

Meanwhile, people in small business just keep going like the Energizer Bunny, walking around the bots and doing business. The scene is for me like one of my emblematic memories of the old Soviet Union, in the days when perestroika, which got off to a rocky start with the Mineral Secretary's ban on alcohol and demand for a labour speed-up, finally saw a relaxation of the dead hand of the state on private business. There was a tiny bit of freedom allowed for some markets to start and some state-approved cooperative enterprises  -- but of course, under heavy regulation and control and corrupt bribery. Still, the atmosphere of a bit more market and a bit more press freedom made people start to come out on the weekends with their tattered cardboard boxes and shabby knocked-together wooden boxes and sell their wilting cucumbers dragged into the city from their little plots out in the country, their kittens, their used radios. These flea markets would appear in a park and do a very brisk business on a Saturday or Sunday morning until the cops would start to appear -- or not stay paid off -- and then suddenly everyone would scatter, melting into the subways and underground passages and funky Soviet public toilets, leaving only a few trampled and muddy pieces of cardboard. The image of those people coming out and thriving, then being beaten back, then thriving again is impressed in my mind, and is so much like Second Life.

The first problem with this grassroots scripted chicken empire is that it was laggy -- not really that expertly scripted by someone who is anonymous, not famous in RL or SL, and apparently *not* Adam Zaius despite the same last name (he's someone who is a non-native English speaker). He looks like an oldbie alt to me, and I wondered at first if he is a Linden, but apparently not -- a recluse, so it's hard to tell.

The Lindens got so many complaints from people like me whose sims were brought to their knees that they told the guy to make a less laggy version -- and he did. But in the course of trying to update and fix the past products and issue new ones, he ended up wiping out both for some people.

The reaction was predictable SL drama.

First, the sneering Herald kicked in, ranting and raving about the broken products as if...as if...Croquet worked and anybody ever went on it *cough*.

The Herald then rose up indignantly with various alts of Mark McCahill/Pixeleen Mistral raging about the EULA, which was no different than a zillion other EULAs in tech town that the geeks never whine about because they must own stock in those companies. Yes, a bad EULA, and an overly noisy EULA, but these things seem to be fixable. The owner might consider making people subscribe for a one-time license for ALL products so that they don't have to keep getting all those annoying notices and clickthroughs on those products. He could make a Gold Circle of high volume buyers and release new products to them first to quell the noisiest and most influential complainers (although that FIC recipe hasn't worked so great for LL).

The next thing that happened was that all kinds of badly-spelling Internet mediocrities began to threaten to "sic real life" on this guy. So we had the usual anonymous gaggle of people claiming to be insurance adjusters in RL (wheeew scary and formidable lol!) and lawyers (do they all not spell?) who were going to lay a RL lawsuit on this chicken dude's ass. All because...um...some eggs got broken and some pluckers got offed in inventory.

Sion held his own and said that until he got an apology for the blackmail attempt, he was ceasing all sales. You know, I have to hand it to the guy - that's how you have to roll in a frontier town where some people try to use the currency of RL on your ass. A judge can decide whether or not this was malfeasance, bait-and-switch, and then blackmail or harassment, but the bottom line is that it was unnecessary overkill to threaten legal action for mistakes in a business that in fact appears to be trying to rectify problems, unlike the legions of opensource goofs who put out badly working shit and never come back (Freeview TV, anyone?)

The drama gets more twisted as Sion Lab answers some of the charges, and it turns out some of the angst is caused by some big-time rare breeders bitching because they discovered that as more farmers came on -- and more rare eggs -- to the markets, their rares got lower in price.The maker then felt this needed adjusting via deletion.

This sounds like what happens often to my son, who is flabbergasted and flatfooted some days to discover that some trinket that he's worked his ass off for months to acquire and is worth zillions is suddenly devalued in the game because the game gods decide to make it easier to get because people have bitched a lot about how hard it is to get and how expensive it is.

I'm not sure how you play game-god *well*. Deleting eggs to manipulate markets? Well, it depends on whether people signing up for chicken farming feel they are in real-life versimilitude or in a game.  Now they have a game-god like EULA telling them they may be ejected for "any reason or no reason" and that anything may change without warning. Er, sort of the way the RL God runs RL.

As one commenter on the Chicken Drama noted, the maker couldn't give out advance notices of what actions he was taking because it would have enabled some unscrupulous people to corner markets again.

Now, instead of lawsuits over such trivial issues involving such relatively low amounts of cash, one could look into how various compensations (and that's apparently what led to the final settlement). It's understood that a massive complex scripted object business like this is going to have its ups and down, it can only mirror-image the Lindens' own Tilt O' Whirl.

Given that not much time elapsed, and that the guy didn't disappear from the scene like Ginko's, the threat of lawsuits seemed WAY over the top.

And then of course, the big guns had to be rolled out because any scripting empire that isn't under control of Doug and Aaron at the Linden Code Cave and the AWGroupies could be The Enemy. Now Big IT IBM heavy Zha Ewry's sim wifie Chestnau Rau had to have a blog denouncing the chicken czar and accusing him of lacking Personal Integrity. Sigh.

Bleh, Zha Ewry in her interoperability group with IETF and Birds of a Feather is the real chicken drama, people. They are busy linking up SL to other grids with nary a thought of how to operationalize IP protection and engineer the securing of economic value even at the level of the Content Roadmap, which is about as viable a the Middle East Peace Roadmap given its too-many moving parts and lack of good will (when they can tame the Code Cave and knock them out of the loop on these business issues, then we might be convinced).

I do have to laugh at the idea of people suing the Chicken King of Second Life and raging about Personal Integrity when the entirety of SL is in jeopardy in the interop group and no one is watching or looking because it's all done off-campus sub-rosa in arcane working groups.

But what's amazing about this business, which spawned many other small business and fun groups, is that even the griefer-supporting snarky Herald, which is sort of the wannabee Valleywag of Second Life, even the veiled fist of Big IT, even the threat of Real Life Actionable Action could not stop people's commerce. They want to make a buck -- and have fun -- that bad. And in their masses, you cannot stop them. You can try to corral them, force them into freebies, force them on to commerce-free bland sims like Greenies to gawk, etc. but they can't be kept down.

So within two weeks of all these scandals, the chicken biz was back bigger and better than ever, with many more products developed to keep the items from breaking in inventory, to show their age, to help spread the lore of how to work with the products, etc. So I'm happy to be a part of this with my homestead chicken farm of Belarus, which is a little project I started to see if I could get support and attention to the independent media of Belarus and support a website in that country under an authoritarian dictatorship.

I'll be the first to say that chicken farming may be a wealthy gentleman's pastime, or the pin money risk of a desperate housewife, because you have to sink a fair amount of cash in it to get started before you can start taking cash out -- and I'm not sure it's viable. Perhaps it isn't. It seems viable only for those who have figured out how to make larger and more organized businesses with economies of scale -- and likely questionable tactics of market manipulation. Other people at a tinier level just keep breeding, killing off eggs or selling them for $25 until they hit the big time with a rare, which fetches $3000 or $3500 on the chicken markets, thereby covering all that food expense.

Now comes the politics of physics. Early on in SL, Phoenix Linden used to insist that every time a sim lagged and avatars crawled and we complained on the old Help line where they came live in person faster that it was a "physics" issue and that something was "colliding". He simply defaulted to believing then that every incident should first suspect collisions viewable easily on the "top colliders" and "top scripts" view of the estate menu, and that was that. Once he even found something colliding in Louise, and that sealed the diagnosis. So many times did Lindens answer complaints with this mantra that people began to perceive that they could NEVER have anything collide. That ANYTHING colliding even ONCE was TERRIBLE. People really became paralyzed from having moving animals, vehicles, rocks rolling AT ALL etc. because of this horrid lag fear.

Gradually, this subsided, especially when people got their own estates, could look at the same menus only Lindens looked at originally for the most part, and see that the issue wasn't ANY collisions but just TOO MANY, and even there, it was hard to put a number on it.

I've had Lindens tell me with solemn authority that anything over 8 chickens will lag any sim, and I've seen the eternal blowhard Intlibber bloviating that you can have 50-60 per sim and that landlords must limit them per unit of meters. Probably the truth is somewhere in between -- but there are so many variables.

For example, if you put out a clean sim and only chicken farm on it, you may get more performance. If you have a sim with scripted rocking chairs, poseballs, boats, pets, etc. already, and add the chickens, it may be the tipping point. Adding 20 avatars to a homestead with half a dozen chickens will definitely rock the "spare time" to a freeze and the performance will go in the toilet.

Right now, I have 15 chickens on a homestead with 2 people present and it seems no different than when I didn't have them. The "colliders" are in fact objects not even on physics -- the coops they are in or the structures they are in like a barn -- that can be reported as "top colliders". I got rid of some of that by free-ranging my rooster and hen, although there's a danger of stepping on them, I'm told, which can kill them.

Many people put out physics-enabled toys for the chickens in the belief, very widespread, that they are "required" to keep 'angry" chickens from fighting others and killing them. But apparently only a certain type of "fighting male," if paired with another such fighting cock, will kill in this manner, so it's a lot of wasted physics space for nothing. The toys are free and part of the inventive culture of the chicken world so it may be hard to get people off them.

I asked a Linden point blank officially on Concierge if they could give me a chicken number for a homestead. They could not. They hate to appear to be curbing residents' products or commenting on them -- of course, unless they feel like it, and then they put them in blogs, picks, news articles, etc.

Physics are a wild card given the Linden system of putting sims on to "share" -- if you are matching two chicken-laden sims together on a server, they could both be dying; someone paired with a chicken infestation could be suffering unfairly.

Meanwhile, the markets are thriving, people hustling, designing selling. There is a huge outpouring of hundreds of little businesses, not only with the obvious chicken jokes as names like "Chicken Shit" or "What the Cluck", but more innovatives ones like Attila the Hen and Zen Chicken. People find little niches for themselves in this very intensively competitive market, specializing only in a certain kind, i.e. the rares, the ancients, etc.

I had only been farming for 2 days when I set up a tenants' area both for my tenants to have overflow from their many chickens clogging sims and also to see if I could get some of the tier paid for as nobody was much interested in renting 1/3 of a rocky marshy forest sim designed after the land-locked flat post-Soviet bleakness of Belarus (they want flat white sand) and named simply Belarus.

Within 12 hours of posting an ad, a chicken magnate visited me and without IMing me first in greeting he began flying around perusing my sim. I had a hunch what this was about: ambitious types who own the market checking out competition that they might crush in whatever way they had available. (I remember Blue Burke the landbaron used to IM me and tell me to stop bidding on the auction, as I was only affecting prices and only experienced large bidders should bid. When I failed to grasp this economics lesson, he began to do things like put up ugly signs smack on my property or tell me if I didn't buy land of his for sale he couldn't vouch that it might not spring a big laggy mall, etc.)

I saw numerous chicken groups in the guy's profile but no landed farm, which was odd (could be an alt). I decided to pretend to give the benefit of the doubt and just went over and struck up a friendly conversation, but the vibes were clear: there are big chicken farms that do not want competition, and they want to make sure others stay small.

The problem is they are overflowing with no room on them, some of them are poorly organized, and there is room for a few more for sure. A few landlords have already created chicken farms for tenants and more will come as people try to get even these grandfathered openspaces paid for.

Several chicken groups have a rule that you cannot discuss prices. So there's clearly a cartel already in operation, making sure that prices for rares stay high and that they aren't undercut by newbies or opportunists.  Job one is to get the news about prices around more both for wholesalers and end users. This can be done without lagging out at the markets in person by pulling up all their search/all descriptions and seeing the long lists of items for sale, if you have the patience.

I hope to do a little bit more reporting on the chicken scene and my own accounts in my occasional magazine Little Chicken, which you can pick up along with my other delightful chicken products in Belarus.

Ultimately, I see this as yet another chapter in the long-drawn-out war between technocommunism and free enterprise. Tom Hale/T Linden bragged at the SLCC that SL is now becoming "more part of the Internet" with various hooks into it now with the Media APIs. Ho-hum, if the ordinary person can't buy it freely on an accessible market, and it becomes the exotic toy only of special friends of the Lab who don't even have to sign ethics statements for APIs as they do at Facebook, and who dole it out for huge prices to high-flying clients. Why is that "opening up the Internet"? It's not. It's "opening up opportunities for Linden's special friends to get more consulting jobs".

The discussion here has a critique of plug-ins as a solution in development which is worth contemplating.

Meanwhile, as always, Second Life is proving to be a resilient and interesting incubator and prototyper with all kinds of fascinating things to watch, like how market information gets around, how lore about product use is disseminatd, how emergent behaviour works. Many people have developed ideas about how the chickens work that are false, yet they become part of the market, proving the Soros "reflexivity" hypothesis time and again.

People have innovated auctions, games, contests, grab-bags etc. and sometimes just stand-around the old fashioned-way with shouts like this, rattling off colours and types expertly:

shouts: 2 SCARCE + 1 ANCIENT v12 EGGS: 1) NWS - Purple & Jewel (truly gorgeous rich jewel colours of purple & green) <0.408700, 0.038661, 0.571807> <0.081356, 0.477653, 0.230510> ...... 2) OS - Buccaneer (reddish purple, a GREAT breeding colour!) <.37, .18, .24> .... 3) OA - Amethyst (such a pretty soft purple) <0.655227, 0.417911, 0.822095>.... see them at prices you will LOVE!... at: YE OLDE EGG SHOPPE @ The Farm: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Chickens/123/163/21

I wonder what it takes to get a seat on the main chicken exchange. I bet these days, to get a nominal rental spot probably requires paying somebody with a seat there an addition incentive to vacate their seat -- or some other "informal" arrangement similar to getting a permit to vend food on E. 34th St lol.

Meanwhile, I'm off to study the breeding guide.

Comments

[Desmond Shang]

I rather like the chickens too.

Great idea! No major problems from them either.

[chestnut]

If anyone is interested in what I actually wrote about Sion and the chicken drama, please read the post on my blog. The words Prok has attributed to me are not accurate. Thank you.

[Prokofy Neva]

chesnut, don't be ridiculous. Your words are reported accurately as anyone can see from your blog linked here -- you accused the guy of lack of personal integrity.

If you don't like my commentary about your hubbie, understood, but that's my commentary, and you'll just have to deal with it.

It seems to be a common tactic of you people to accuse others of "inaccuracy" when you mean "I disagree with you" -- so that you not only attempt to prevail in an argument using institutional powers, you try to undermine your opponent and declare them as invalid.

[Prokofy Neva]

BTW, here's Chestnut's link if you don't have it:

http://slofdreams.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-personal-responsibility-and-second.html

If anything, she's the one engaging in questionable tabloid commentary.

1. She claims sionChicken is a pyramid scheme. I don't think that's a claim you can make. You buy a product, it performs, and it makes no promises of a secondary market.

2. She makes other claims that seem outdated and not credible which you can easily ascertain just by reading all the chicken blogs and going inworld.

3. She claims the chicken business is over, cluck cluck. That's because she needs and wants it to be over because it doesn't fit with her culture/ideology/connection/whatever.

I hate it when people of this visibility and connection use their perch to make claims of malfeasance of other people's business.

If I attack a business, I show chat logs, I show research. I have grounds for my claims. Some people may not like what I say and then start up the chorus of "inaccuracy," or, as Intblubber now describes our ACCURATE reports on the VANDALISM of Linden Lab's building (even by Lindens themselves), "plagiarism and intellectual property theft". Sigh.