Second Thoughts

Troy McLuhan Gets Religion

I must confess that I'm perplexed about what the right thing is to do here, so I open it up for public scrutiny.

Troy McLuhan is one of those strenuous Second-Lifers who is always busy with Science and Betterment of Humanity, but I guess it's gotten boring on his space sim, so he's decided to branch out.

After the meeting at the Sutherland Dam the other night, a meeting he sometimes attends but didn't that night, Troy McLuhan comes flying up and asks me if I would be interested in this idea he had.

It seems that he wants to lead tour groups to St. Paul's Cathedral in Grace, which is a replica of the real-life St. Paul's. (BTW, the nasties that IM me inworld and tell me this is not a true replica, or not a perfect replica, I can only say: so what? It's Second Life. Go away.) Recently, as I noted, this parcel was put in the Destination Guide (formerly known as the Showcase) and attracted lots more traffic than it has ever had, even as one of the top destinations in the SL Public Land Preserve). I continue to be highly troubled at just how casually and arbitrarily the Linden game gods hand out these traffic and sales windfalls, now that I've accidently gotten on the list myself. It's really annoying and highlights the woeful state of advertising and fairness in SL.

So that's how it came to the attention of the grasping Mr. McLuhan, and how he decided that what he needed to do to monetarize his SL experience was to grab this non-profit project of mine, which the Lindens arbitrarily happened to feature, and collect fees and/or tips as a tour guide to this location, explaining the history of the RL church using the SL replica.

These lands are open to the public to visit any time. So let's say if someone wanted to have a wedding, and the preacher or the wedding planner was paid, there wouldn't be anything I would do about it. They are welcome to have their wedding there, if they don't mind the fact that it's on the mainland and they could ask for minimal tools temporarily to ban people, but can't control how many people come on the sim, since there are multiple property owners on the sim. People coming to weddings often tip the SL Public Land Preserve jars on site, as I don't have a set fee for weddings (it's not practical given the conditions).

I also couldn't do anything about someone who photographed the site and others in the Preserve, put it into a book, and sold the book without providing any proceeds to the Preserve. That's just assholery, but the sort of assholery you can't really stop if you are dedicated to the proposition of buildings being open to the public. St. Patrick's Cathedral doesn't get any percentage of photography books of New York with its building in them, either. Still, in the community of SL, it would be something that "the community" might expect you to do, to donate some of the proceeds. You can't file a DMCA takedown on this (or it would be assholery to do so) since that would contribute to the idiocy around people misusing DMCA to control public use of SL.

Troy of course implied that bringing tour groups to this church would fill up the tip jars -- people would donate. I'd have to wonder how much they *would* donate if they had just got done tipping or paying a fee for a tour guide. So then Troy offered to somehow cut me in on a percentage of his tour guide fee or tips. And that sounded time-consuming and...I just wondered about the entire thing, anyway.

I can't stop someone from monetarizing a public space provided as a non-profit public project...can I? That is, sure, I could develop a policy saying that commercial activity is not allowed on these properties except in certain designated areas. For example, the TechHeaven free market in Thyris, which is free of rent after you join the group for $50, provides a space for people 2 years of age or younger to sell their wares. I constantly have to police this area to free it up of all the parasites on the commercial processes of SL -- all the hippie pays, gambling, "work at home" surveys, business-in-a-box, etc. etc. that people cook up to suck down the money of other people. I make this area available for people to sell their own creations, but I constantly have to police it as people either sell stolen goods or trademarked goods like Disney stuff or put up commission vendors. I'm all for commission vendors, but people then should rent their own land for this, not invade the free space designed to help newbie creators start a business. I've come close to just closing this site down, but because some people have gotten a good start there and appreciate it, I continue to maintain it. It's also revenue for the land preserve in the form of the memberships -- but of all the parcels, I have to say people tip the *least* there, even though they are in theory making some money off this free space. That lets me know not only something about human nature, but the efficacy of trying to get commercial spaces paid for by tips or the motivation of those in commerce to support the public interest.

In a few other spots, I have my own or licensed or commissioned goods given to sell for the upkeep of the preserve. I was very adamant in allowing both tips and sales in the Preserve because I think one of the things that made certain oldbie preserve projects fail is their religious zealotry about not allowing commerce in "nature" or in "art builds". This is ridiculous. Tier has to get paid for. I don't have a non-profit tier rate. Half the costs of the preserve are met by tier donors and tips -- but that leaves the other half to be borne by me. And I'm lucky I've got this much of the cost upheld because I have a variety of means to get money in the door -- tips, content sales, membership fees, and the occasional rental fee if someone takes up a whole area for two days for a wedding or photo shoot or something.

I see Troy's move here as predatory. He should make his own sim. He's done that. So...he should do it again. Going around and picking up other people's builds to make his tips off of seems crass.  On the other hand, I'm devoted to keeping spaces open. I don't want to lard up the organization with policies that need policing, especially policies that have blanket concepts like "no commercial activity".

Why don't I make my own tours? or hire tour guides? Because I don't have the time, and I don't believe this is the money-maker that Troy seems to think it is. Perhaps he'll have time and talent to get lots of people to pay him money to tour this site.  But it sounds time-consuming. I've never heard of anybody paying a fee to go on a tour in SL when they can just click on the links all by themselves and read notecards. Trying to put entrance fees on land is a showstopper -- no one will pay even $5, they hate it. Trying to get the notoriously tacky and low-tipping SL public to tip is also not a revenue manager. That is, I'm always surprised each week when at least one visitor puts in a tip of at least $1000 at one of the sites in the Preserve -- there are such decent souls who understand that a US $3.72 tip in fact isn't covering the tier of the place they've just visited. But most people treat their SL dollar like a US dollar and leave $1 or $2. A few leave $100 and feel as if they are big spenders. I'm glad for them because that's how we've come this far. The psychology of the Linden being what it is, I can't expect more. I'm also entitled to close the project if I feel I don't like paying tier anymore rather than whining.

What do you think?

California Business Model #Fail

A cautionary tale -- Veoh, which I've noticed more and more is the destination I'm driven to as I click on various videos on YouTube -- is going out of business.

It's driven out of business not only because it was weakened by a lawsuit with Universal Music, but because it didn't have a business model to monetarize all that mindless clicking, including even my own. When my kids tell me to listen to some cool song on Youtube, the reason for most of my visits there, I can't always tell what is "approved" or "not approved". More and more, I see videos described as "the Official Video" of so-and-so musician, with an ad pasted on top of it that partially blocks the bottom as you watch it, and I can't tell -- has this been licensed? If it says "official" and has an ad, surely it would have to be. If it is in the official "channel" it may be -- but not always. Lately, I've clicked through some of the most popular tunes to Veoh, where I have to first sit through a disruptive, interruptive ad before I can watch the video, and I can't slide through. And that's ok. I was just thinking "finally, they've gotten some sense, like TV". But it didn't work well enough and fast enough, apparently.

Universal tried to take Veoh to court for knowingly and deliberately letting users upload copyrighted material. Of course they do that. More and more on Youtube, you do see more evidence of videos blocked, and messages about copyrighted material removed -- and that's a good thing. Sooner or later, they'll figure out how to enable people to buy a subscription to Youtube, that will entitle X number of videos or Y number of viewing hours or something, and the industry will normalize and come out of its technocommunist era. People like me would pay for those subscriptions because we aren't communists and don't have illusions that websites, musicians, and companies can live on air.

Meanwhile, I don't know what Veoh was thinking, not having a way to get paid. Oh, I know what they were thinking, they were using the California business model, as cube3 first explained it to me, which is let lots of copyrighted material on to the system, then let people flounder with DMCA notices, all the while hoping you can sell lots of ads (and maybe CDs? Does anyone buy them?).

The Veoh case was one that the copyleftists pointed to triumphantly as a "win" because the judge threw Universal's claim out of court. But...Veoh, even stealing Universal's music by standing by and letting customers upload it ("safe harbour," "common carrier" and all that), couldn't make a dime. How about that. You would think, the California Business Model would work! But it doesn't, not even that, because the law catches up with them, but even more, the reality of profit and loss. No revenue to cover even expenses.

The moral of the story isn't that you can't stop copyright theft -- you can. It's good there was a lawsuit; and it's good Veoh got a come-uppance in being unable to monetarize even their loot, so to speak. But, all this means that these companies have to grow up and make a workable model where it really is easier for us to make micropayments and get subscriptions to content. There are all sorts of reasons this is a good thing -- revenue to cover costs and get musicians paid. A system to tip musicians, say, each time you listen to their song. Buy a song -- but maybe also be able to tip a musician when/as you wish. A cost for you to upload -- even just a tiny cost. All these lovely payment companies that were displayed at Engage! Expo could be making Youtubebux that people buy and virtually spend "inworld" with paying for songs, uploads, tipping, even paying somebody who aggregates tunes into a nice channel, like a DJ. If you had to pay even a small amount to make a comment -- think of what that would do to the wasteland of youtube comments! Yes, it might be gamed, but isn't everything? And the task now is to make the communist wasteland that the tech giants are bequeathing the next generation become something that can get people paid, rather than teach them communism.

It all has to get a lot simpler and faster and easier:

Recently, I went on Myspace to see a singer and then bought her CD. Or tried to. It's damn hard. I had to go through bunches of pages with different companies offered, some of them simply not working. Finally, I got to one that seemed promising, but it asked for my social security number on the form. While "not required," that struck me as a red flag, so I dropped it and wrote directly to the musician -- couldn't I pay her on PayPal or something? She forwarded my concern to the company, and some snotty asshole tekkie who was running the page lectured me, telling me that I was supposed to figure out that I could ignore that, because it was just a request for companies making bulk orders. But it said Tax ID number, and that was of concern -- that shouldn't be sought -- and it wasn't clear why it even had to be sought for another business (b2b forms could have been a separate link in any event).

Here's what Noel Ramos of Indiegate wrote to me (I'm deleting the musician's name, as she is irrelevant to this transaction and was only embarrassed at what a nit Noel was):

What Makes a Virtual World?

My response to Raph Koster's post today on casual browser and Facebook games and virtual worlds, which was a response to Daniel Terdimen's blog, where I also commented:

I speak as someone who loaded my Island Life game up in Second Life last night on the wall of the Sutherland Dam Club (you can do that now with 2.0), and who makes choices in my Island Life decor that come from some of my rocky Second Life parcels. These are not either-or propositions. The Habbo Hotel inventor and some others at Engage! Expo call these worlds “destination worlds” because you have to download and “go to” them. But Island Life is a place that feels as if you have to “go to it” to — being in a browser doesn’t rescue it from that status — the dirty little secret of browser games is that they load and reload just as much as downloadable worlds have to load and then lag.

This is a very neat set of classifications you’ve made, Raph, but it is still too “gamey” and not “worldy” enough and you’ve really limited the menu for what a virtual world is.

You seem to forget what is key to the virtual world of Second Life that even to some extent holds in Island Life: user generated content. The ability to *create* in the virtual world is paramount; and in IL, it’s the ability to lay out stuff and pick stuff, as you could in the Sims Online, that makes it a world. Farmville, which doesn’t have real-time presence chat in it, feels less worldy, even tho it is a world in the sense of a place — I don’t know if you realize that some of the other FB games have more driving gameplay forcing you to do things (like Cafe World) that have no leisure of choice, decoration, *not* watering, etc. as an option — and it’s that *choice* that gives IL more heft.

The Prokofy definition of virtual worlds is:

1. Has a sense of place.
2. Has drama

Drama is key to world-sense — the narration of people’s stories is drama. And I mean not just the drama of people squabbling — although that’s important, because if you begin to care enough about the politics of the platform, you inevitably have drama, and that means that the Twitfights that can be not about the Health Care Summit but about he-said, she-said on Twitter’s functioning itself, make it a *world*. Twitter is definitely a virtual world where ties are weakest and where sense of place is weakest, but it is still a virtual world. It’s more of a virtual world than AIM precisely because it affords more opportunity — or has a greater culture of — making a profile, collecting points (followers), having a visible reputation, etc. You can’t see the rest of an AIM chatter’s list when you are talking to them; you can on Twitter. That little piece of reflexivity makes Twitter a world.

Which brings me to this:

# Formal group identity is taken to a level well beyond that of the typical virtual world on social networks. (We’ve been saying for years that we should support multiple guild membership in MMORPGs… check out the typical number of groups a Facebook user belongs to…)
# Points and quantified reputation are rampant. Arguably, excessive.
# Similarly, publicly visible profile data

This is all very worrisome, of course, because it means that with MMORPGs, casual Facebook games, Second Life, Blue Mars, whatever, there is the same horrid, driving, medieval culture of collectivization(guilds), suppression of the individual, control of the individual through group judgement (reputation systems), exposure of the individual in a distilled format creating quick judgements (profile) — these are all horrible totalitarian tools, at the end of the day paving the way for a really nasty hive mind run by a few game coders, as more and more supplanting not only what our time online is all about, but what our time offline is dictated by as well (lots of pious indignant types are proclaiming as biased the old media coverage of the new-media-style Health Care Summit dissecting some of Obama’s claims and putting in their own leftist pro-Obama spin as “just the facts m’am).

I don’t want to live in a world dictated by some guildmaster, who may be a 14 year old kid with a Napoleon complex. I don’t want to live in a world where reputations can be ganked by those same griefer kids. I don’t want to live in a world where I am judged not by my links and my writings but by two lines that happen to fit in the profile template that you coded. And yet I do live in those worlds and try to make them better — and it is damn hard, because despite all your talk about making games that will make the world better, you keep on coding guilds, profiles, and reputation systems out the wazoo. Island Life is no different. Unless I have 8 neighbours, I can’t build out my island — I’d have to pay protection money in real-life cash to get that feature! Unless I work on the collective farm and water everybody else’s plants, I can’t earn money — my own plants count for nothing, and I have to hope I’ll get reciprocity. It’s a brutal and ugly business, not allowing the individual to grow and develop and shine — except as a function of the collective, in the hive’s judgement, with points meted out by the hive.

I realize you’re trying to say that social media has “taken your concepts and done them better” — more “guilds” on Facebook, more “profile space” on Facebook but at the end of the day, it’s still the idiotic system of “friends” or “followers” or “reputation points”. Everyone knows you are judged on Twitter by how many followers you have — and hated if you get “too many” like Scoble.

My best three friends in real life are not on Facebook or any of that social media and I see them in real life weekly. My three best friends in Second Life are people whose real names I don’t know, or if I happen to know, because they’re forced not to out themselves on Facebook with SL, it’s meaningless because I know little else about them and will never see them. Between these two experiences of full-face presence and online anonymity lies numerous fake Farmville friends, false friends like Urizenus who fertilizes my plants today, but allow me to be pilloried in the Herald the next day.

Pain Point on SL 2.0

Good Lord, the viewer is a hassle. In a 100 ways. This outlines some of the pain.

Awesome Sauce

Awesome Sauce Eureka! A boring Powerpoint comes to SL. Visit Sutherland (194, 13, 26)

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Hopping Mad Chicken

Hopping Mad Chicken Hates the new viewer Visit Sutherland (199, 7, 23)

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Linden 3rd Party Viewer Policy: A Thing of Beauty and a Joy Forever

 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci -- Sir Frank Dicksee 1885

If you thought there was to be howling about the viewer in 2.0, that's actually nothing compared to the howling going on in SL Dev and Tatero's Massively and all the other water-coolers of the script-kiddy enclaves over the new Linden Lab opensource viewer policy.

In fact, the new viewer policy is a Thing of Beauty and a Joy Forever. It has crystaline, clear goals that the nay-sayers are forgetting are absolutely laudable and vitally necessary -- they would shirk those civic duties merely to indulge their yen for endless sandboxing at the public expense. The fact is, the rule of law over the production of code in a shared social media environment is long overdue as a social construct and as a civic duty.

The goals of the policy and program are to:

• Prevent Residents' passwords from being stolen
• Protect Residents from griefing and other harmful conduct
• Guard against intellectual property infringement
• Preserve our ability to provide you with high-quality service
• Involve the community in evaluating third-party viewers
• Create a visible repository for alternative viewers with novel and interesting applications
  

It really is a marvel to see what this hippie company, with its techno-utopian tekkies and opensource sandboxers and IRC channelers and Singularity suckers can do once it grows up, pulls up its socks, and have the suits from marketing and the bottom-line-oriented grownups get it to *stop giving away the store*.

It has at least articulated the typical crimes committed by script kiddies and has explained *that they are wrong*.

That's so refreshing.

So little of that ever happen on the Internet, where every single one of these problems is shifted to be a user problem ("keep changing your password, dummies!") or a technical impossibility ("if you can see it you can copy it") or the user's lack of lock-down ("turn off non-group scripts and opject creation or it's your own fault if you are griefed!"). It shifts the entire paradigm to say: devs are morally responsible to the larger community beyond their own snarky and snivelling ranks and cannot justify wrong-doing as a "technical imperative" anymore. It doesn't literalize some lack of GLP indemnity to their *code of code*; it make them accountability to *a code of behaviour*.

It really is quite a revolutionary document in this regard. It codifies the more grown-up and trustworthy behaviour of some of the best companies in America that are now represented on the higher ranks of Linden Lab. All this is a good thing.

Every single one of those purposes is one that has to become paramount -- the purpose of viewers is *NOT* as the skiddies think , to enable them to push the limits of technology and the platform with their personal whims, load up on special features that indulge their fuck-you hedonism without any view to the public interest, and give them a venue to posture and pirouette to make their 3D resumes and suck up to Linden coders. That era is over.

Two out of Ten Ain't Bad

I'm still in such shock at the Search bork in the new 2.0 viewer, with my little avatar feet cut to ribbons walking over the broken glass trying to re-do all my info cards at the Memory Bazaar, that it's hard to speak of what's good about the new viewer.

But duty calls, and I must acknowledge that 2 out of 10 removals of my 10 annoyances I didn't think they would change ain't bad -- in fact, it's probably a record.

It's interesting how easily -- when they put their minds to it -- the Lindens got the edit screen out of the way. Why did it take so long? Why did I suffer five long years? Why did anybody?

But no. 3 in my list of annoyances, "The Need to Keep Batting Edit Boxes Away" is now simply gone. The boxes open automatically to the side of the thing you are editing. Peace!

And now for the real kicker -- no. 5, "The Drop-Down Blue Screen" is also now retired to Blue Heaven or Blue Mars, or wherever virtual world code goes when it dies, and there's now a leaner, flatter, sleeker brown screen. I wouldn't say that they're at the point where they have that comfy cloud with the pink hearts and the angel choirs whispering in celestial choirs that I think they should have -- but it's very far along to Purgatory and away from Hell.

The bad news is that some of the things I identified as annoyances got even WORSE.

"Non-findability of search" is now worse as there is no second button on the panel, only that awful search-all box in the upper right hand corner. You'd be surprised at how many people are not finding it.

And the cluster-fuck  of communications is now even more clustered and more fucked. The stuff all seems to be wadded up in a box, made confusing by all these people's pictures, so that you can no longer see a nice neat scroll of text lines and focus on chat.

It's like being jammed on the Internet view of Facebook or Twitter all day -- and that's why it is like it is.

The Lindens still can't seem to grasp -- the tools they developed *were* the revolutionary ones for 3.0, and they aren't progressing by making SL like 2.0, but regressing.

Now that I've seen Google Buzz, for example, I can see that all it is, is a big SL group with scrolling chat and the ability to have picture on the side. Groups in SL have that too. At least they did, before the Front (as the team is called) tweaked it all and made it harder to use.

Russia Invents the Telescreen: ChatRoulette

Chatroulette is the biggest thing lately attracting the greed of money-makers. Andrew Keen has even chastised Fred Wilson for seeming to lust after this creepy service that involves accessing a web interface whereby you randomly and serially flip through strangers' cams, stopping if one interests you, and then moving on, with of course your "partners" as the system calls them, doing the same thing.

Let me give a few comments on all this. I first saw this concept with Omegle, another creepy service that does the random stranger dance with total strangers, all of whom seem to be pervs, and I first saw the Chatroulette thing done with another service called I think Stikcam which the kids liked because they would dress up in tuxedos, put stacks of poker chips out, and tell strangers they were big money ballers until I caught them and shut it off.

The Chatroulette kid is 17, and claims he is doing all of this himself.

I do not believe that for one Moscow minute. Chush' sobachaya. Of course dad, who is some nomenklaturshchik or somebody's crony communist somewhere in the mix fixed the kid up with servers in Germany. You don't just "pick up" servers in Germany. And you don't just code complexities like this at the age of 17, either, as much as that myth is one of the things that makes the VCs salivate more than ever (remember how Hamlet nee Linden Au was enthusing about the 15-year-old AJAX coder who was making thin clients to chat with SL? There's something about the idea of baby script kiddies that makes otherwise prudent adults get completely goofy.)

The ChatRoulette concept actually comes out of a very long-established Soviet tradition that one could call MovieRoulette perhaps. In the Soviet Union in the old days, people didn't have cars, or at least, most people didn't, especially teenagers and young people, and so they couldn't drive somewhere to make out on dates. Nor did they have anywhere to go -- many people lived in communal apartments with their parents or strangers all around -- nowhere to go. Dorm rooms were hugely crowded with 6-8 people to a room. It's cold in Russia and sitting on a park bench unless you want to wake up dead of exposure next to a broken bottle of vodka isn't so advisable for partiers.

Hence, people went to hang out at movie theaters and shows at the many Palaces of Culture, where the tickets were really dirt cheap (like 10 cents or 25 percents) and where the masses could spend the day...playing MovieRoulette and moving from seat to seat seeing if they could find a groping partner.

The first time we Americans discovered this nasty practice, which in the U.S. would be limited only to some kinds of very specific gay porn theaters, let's say, we would be shocked, outraged, we'd complain to the manager, etc. -- all to no avail. Shrugs all around. We would learn to sit together in bunches to avoid the creeps. But soon, it became clear why the creeps could get away with doing this -- they found willing other creeps to play along. I don't have any scientific or sociological study to explain how widespread it was, but anyone who lived through that era knew that this occurred fairly often (a variation on it was called "Girls' Locker Room Roulette" where the Russian males would turn off the light in the girl's shower, then invade the shower stalls--a game we were treated to on the very first day of our stay). In fact, I guess Jerzy Kosinski's "Blind Date" describes this better for what it is -- not roulette, and not a date.

That's the spirit you feel behind Chatroulette. Sure, there are likely poignant moments of Chinese people showing you flowers and reciting poetry, but basically, it's a group grope.

Already you can see the Zindra-fication of CR. There's the proviso that just went up today or the other day that you "must be 16 or older" to use it, and that abuses can be reported and porn promoters will be blocked. Naturally, if two 10 year old access it and don't report each other, or worse, it's unlikely never to get on the radar because the system has too many millions of transactions occuring as people shuffle through "Random Stranger" visitors.

Predictably, ethics-challenged Danah Boyd sets the tone low by declaring that there's a "moral panic" about Chatroulette. Whenever I see the term "moral panic" I know I am about to see an ethics-free remark of the extreme secular humanist/transhumanist sort so familiar to us from the works of IBM's Dale Innis who loves that phrase. Danah is always burbling about teens "finding themselves" and "expressing themselves" and all that dreck and never asking how you *uplift* teens in their *up*bringing. She's one of those descriptive and not prescriptive researchers in the name of "science" without any sense of moral accountability for the public policies then being made on the basis of such research.

I wonder also when I see all these novels and movies and class assignments on the endless politically-correct sagas of the dysfunctional and victimized black female on the high school curriculum -- is there never to be any nobler interior life for young people to contemplate?

So it's good @ajkeen has stepped up on this.

I think it's fitting -- don't you? -- that Russia's Silicon Valley launch, about which we heard so much from #rustechdel should start with a device that is basically like Orwell's telescreen that people could never quite get away from. Of course, you can "opt in" to having your cam on and your microphone accessible to that Random Stranger, but I notice when flipping through it how many people simply leave it on and aren't even necessarily sitting in front of the screen. So the hacksters can pan people's houses and computers before long, and the Russian state will enjoy that capacity as well. So much more fun to build out the telescreen when it is done as an API project at a Barcamp with widgeteers to fall all over each other coding then to impose it top-down, eh?

Anywhere there is energy and concurrency and hockey stick growth those adsters and grabbers will show up. But...then what? What is their monetarization model? Hoping to interrupt the grope with a disruptive ad? Or an ad on the side? Or, um, premium content somewhere? A t-shirt? Say, maybe Second Life could Shared Media TM the ChatRoulette experience into SL for some real, um, synergy. Any APIs on that yet script kiddies?

Waiting

Waiting Aside from everything else, 2.0 never rezzes you or any of the stuff on the sim. Visit Baileya (125, 24, 23)

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