Yes, Good Idea, Lindens Should Go First

This epic thread -- epic not because of its length or eloquence but because of the sordid sell-out involved on both sides -- lurches along.

Wallace Linden -- Mark Wallace or Walker Spaight, as his old resident avatar was named -- is still manfully trying to perform his unseemly "conversation-management' duties -- I wonder if he has started to drink as heavily as some other Lindens.

Just as I must call Hamlet Linden who is now Hamlet Au "Hamlet nee Linden Au", I have to call Wallace Linden "Wallace nee Walker Linden" I guess...or something. So Wallace Wallace or "Wally" as some have started to call him was persuaded, by the protests of me and others, to "rearrange" the way he is portrayed on the Herald, with dates now closing in the year 2008 signifying his *past* involvement. He even says he has not been involved for two years. Hmmm. That's not enough of a gesture of separation given the issues at stake, as I point out -- the incitement to crime. Vryl, of course, is weeping and gnashing her teeth still about a voice tape the Herald published which portrays her in an unfavourable light and is therefore "libelous" in her view. Over the years she seems to keep consulting lawyers on this Herald "libel," and also tried to implicate me in "libel" for criticizing her and defending the Herald, but she never "takes it to court". Well, she has no case, not even in very libel-venue-shopping countries where she might try to mount this preposterous gambit because....a) nobody knows her real name and only her avatar's name is used and b) she is a public figure in the world of SL and its surrounding blogosphere, that can't be denied; c) she hasn't lost any livlihood or income from her notoriety in connection with the destruction of a protest group -- if anything, one can demonstrate she has benefited. So I'm glad Wallace isn't biting on that, although he's very gun-shy about libel cases, and he sure jumped high when his then-employer, the Electric Sheep were criticized by me on the Herald.

The main topic of that thread for most people, who tuned into Second Life long after the Herald, Walker's and Uri's book, the Sims Online, etc. etc. were relevant, is this new creepy Linden insistence that everybody hook up to social media and out their real life, and connect SL and RL on their profiles on the first life or web tabs.

And Ceeri Murakami summed it up when he noted in response that this would create a "red letter of shame" for those who did *not* wish to make that hook-up.

And somewhere in this thread somebody says, ok, great idea. You go first then, Lindens. Very few of the Lindens listed on the wiki have their real-life name listed.

Capital idea!

And one that the Lindens would instantly start whining and whinging, depending on whether they are American or British, about, saying they would have to keep their RL identify secret due to griefing.

Whereupon quite a few of us could say, uh, yeah. We get that. Those of us who have been griefed in RL and even threatened in RL by loons in SL and in social media in general totally get this. And really, the issues isn't even so much about the right to remain anonymous, as it is to gain real protections from assholes even if your SL and RL names *are* linked. The Lindens are sooooooo dilatory and depressingly capricious about stopping griefers that they can't be trusted in this exercise. There are so many unexplained issues in SL, why repeat sexual harassment offenders never get any discipline; why griefing groups go on being allowed to make alt after alt; why certain serial offenders never get any time out, etc. etc. What does it take?

To be sure, I know some Lindens who have been nastily harassed at home on their real-life phone numbers by the PN/Woodbury goons (they are inseparable) -- and that's just creepy and police-worthy. They shouldn't have to suffer that, merely for having the executive or governance job titles or have the outward-looking personas. Note that quite a few executive Lindens these days stay deeply hidden. They make deep decisions that profoundly affect our Second Lives, but remain completely in the dark. Like Judy Linden. They never post or come inworld or appear at conferences. Or you hear of a Linden speaking at some social media conference, and you can't put the name together with the inworld Linden name. Some Lindens have Facebook accounts with their Linden avatar names, like "Jack Linden," which somehow gets a pass despite the FB rule against having fake personas or avatars, that supposedly led to FB deleting hundreds of SL avatars (I'm still not buying this story from the Herald because I didn't see a single avatar removed from my FB list).

Another excuse I've heard for not linking names is the harassment that transgendered persons can get if their alternate gender avatar is linked up with a person of the opposite gender. I recall the whole saga of Meta Linden who tried to silence any criticism or caricature of the m2f transvestites in the SL fashion world leery of voice when it came into SL, on the theory that this could lead to RL beatings. My God, it was like the Danish cartoons. Meta was way out of her ambit trying to silence third-party blogs using her Linden powers back then, but her argument was also strangely lacking in any rationality. San Francisco is the most tolerant city on the planet for GLBT. It was hard to accept that connecting an avatar and a real life name would somehow lead directly to a beating in that city. It *might* and of course one would not want to do anything to make that easier. But it also seemed like one of those emotional gambits that Lindens try on you, misusing their power over you in this "any reason or no reason" world to force you to accept an argument you don't find persuasive.

I think it would be entirely appropriate for Lindens to list their real-life names, and also their former resident names. I think like politicians leaving business or non-profits, they need to recuse themselves and the public needs to know of their past activities. If they wave the flag of privacy, they can make a third account entirely unknown for down time after they become Lindens. But if they had accounts with prominence inworld with business, nonprofit or blog work, that should become known. Wallace shouldn't have been so coy about the Herald, and should have changed his masthead description *before* announcing his debut at the Lab, and should have connected his name to his SL resident avatar himself. These Lindens just don't seem to grasp the concept of "conflict of interest".

If the Lindens can keep coming up with compelling reasons why they shouldn't have to out their real names, then good! Let them apply those same compelling reasons to *us*.

For me, the richness of the world does in part consist in the personas that people have fashioned in it. And I don't mean manipulative fakes like Rheta Shan and all the other obvious abusive manginas out there.  And I don't mean bothersome social media socialists like Botgirl Questi who is just *tiresome* blathering about his girlish identity all the time and fashioning various collectivist ideological memes for us all -- acting as if the most dirt-common phenomenon of a man making a female avatar now entitles him to serve as the oracle of gender. Someone like Ceera Murakami, a furry builder and frequent critical poster on the forums, is the kind of person I mean. Why can't a person have an avatar identity like that, and be done with it. For that matter, why can't I? Alternative identities aren't only about gender or only about sexualized losing of inhibitions and all that, they are about literature and questing for meaning in more sublime ways, and we have the richness of such characters in the world because we don't have to learn of their ordinary first lives.

As they always do, the Lindens are probably going to make this social media hole-punching a FIC thing. Those who give their real life names will be considered more cool, more trustworthy. I imagine they'll get the "verified merchant status" and just sell more on Xstreet because they will simply get higher placement and higher liklihood of selection for all kinds of special programs. What we're *not* likely to see from these Lindens, who themselves cooked up the idea of the free no-payment on file accounts to pump up their metrics on the fateful 6/6/06, is to see a crackdown on griefing. Will the Lindens someday have a checkoff box that says "real-life name on first-life tab" connected to an avatar as a means of making access-only sims? I hope not.

Ultimately, if the Lindens are going to be really a nuisance with this Facebook stuff, they should start by forcing all employees on Facebook to put up accounts under their real names, and ditto all twitterers. And those of us who have been trying to engineer a citizen's arrest of Torley Linden for his constant idiot spamming of planet.worldofsl.com with his broken blogHUD will finally be able to restore the peace.

Comments

[Brinda Allen]

One of the things I enjoy about my age is the ability to learn from the experiences of others.

I saw one of my residents get emotionally harrassed real life by another because she had opted to open her real life ID.

I believe you Prok when I read that you have been real life harrassed because of RL/SL connections.

I understand that not everyone wishes me well in any world...
And while I love the experience of Secondlife...I would pull the plug before I would choose to connect RL/SL.

As for Lindens *outing* themselves.
I see why that could be a potentialy dangerous thing given the popularity of some of their decisions So, yes...you first Lindens.

We seldom get to know who we are dealing with in an on-line environment...I'll not take that chance.

[melponeme_k]

I'm interested in the reason why this sudden push to connect RL.

Is it the lab furiously chasing after FB and the Farmville crowd? Or is a requirement from one of their new corporate customers?

What this is, is turning this world into a commercial testbed 24/7 365. Its as if people who agree to test corporate products for a 25 dollar check suddenly found themselves living in a corporate product neighborhood for life.

Of course they need our real identities.

"And those of us who have been trying to engineer a citizen's arrest of Torley Linden for his constant idiot spamming of planet.worldofsl.com with his broken blogHUD will finally be able to restore the peace."

I was wondering what was going on about that. At one point the feed turned into Torley all the Time and I couldn't figure out what the problem was. lol.

[Kyle]

I agree that linden’s should make their former resident names known, it should be mandatory. I do wonder about conflict of interest and who these Linden’s once were, do they carry any personal issues over to their Lindenness, therefore are they able to remain impartial on all things.

[Ciaran Laval]

"Is it the lab furiously chasing after FB and the Farmville crowd? "

Seems to be the case, I wonder how Facebook users would react to a proposal to allow them to use nicknames rather than their real names and to hide their personal info about their location, I'd wager quite a few would be in favour of it.

This is all getting very silly, Mark Zuckerberg is wrong on this issue and why is everyone following his lead anyway? So facebook has a lot of users, their users don't stump up cold hard cash like Second Life users do.