Second Thoughts

Why Geeks Should Not Be Allowed to Take Power

I was startled to see a headline in the Industry Standard, "Nightmare on Main Street: If Silicon Valley ran the country":

Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and Steve Poizner are just the beginning: The merchant princes and princesses of Silicon Valley are sure they could do a better job running the country.

Says tech writer Bill Snyder:

Whether they're Republicans, Democrats, or Tea Partiers, Silicon Valley execs should stay out of politics. Sure, most of them are plenty smart, but the skill sets, temperament, and -- yes -- empathy needed to govern are beyond them.

He believes that executives in Silicon Valley don't have the understanding of ordinary people to emphathize, and he's right.

But if that were a reason to bar people from elections, it would be hard to find any candidate who could qualify.

I was just reading an old 2002 article by Comrade Larry Lessig about the war between the North of California, the bastion of the technocommunists with their big IT corporations and boostering of "Free Culture", and the South of California, with Hollywood and the promotion of capitalism and protection of intellectual property. It's a funny way to put it, North and South, like North and South Korea or something. Larry's back making ahistorical and false comparisons of other "disruptive technology" like the player piano and sheet music (sigh) to the modern day problem of rapacious technocommunist business schemes disrupting entire industries and millions of people's livlihoods in ways that the Luddites couldn't imagine in their worst nightmares and which no sheet-music composer ever had to address on anything like this scale and velocity.

When there really is a revolution of "disruptive technology" that appeals more to the masses and ordinary people, who aren't harmed by it by having it lose their jobs but whose lives are enhanced, when there is something like the Apple i-pad, the geek enclave screeches with anger that their power base is disrupted, and people may no longer have to depend on them so much as gatekeepers and gurus and fixers on the Internet. The New Class of API engineers endlessly rants if they don't have maximum access to every big platform that comes along like the i-phone or Facebook (or for that matter, Second Life, with its third-party viewer debate)

In that respect the recent rant by a tekkie against Steve Jobs for not being "revolutionary" enough (the comrades are never happy!) was SO instructive. The guy accused Jobs of making a product with no freedom, i.e. no freedom for him to hook in with his opensource loveliness or his APIs on an accessible platform, something the techosphere is ranting about everywhere. Says Jobs:

Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

Go, Steve! Honestly, it is SO refreshing to read this coming from Jobs.

Of course, he can point to 200,000 APIs in the API store and rightly point out "they must be doing something right". The guy persists with his QQing. Jobs retorts:

Gosh, why are you so bitter over a technical issue such as this? Its not about freedom, its about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users. Users, developers and publishers can do whatever they like -- they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to.

Yes! You don't have to be a prude to appreciate getting porn taking out of your field of vision where it intrudes constantly. You don't have to be "against freedom" if you appreciate ease of use for the common user. All of this is applicable to SL, of course.

Or let's take this OUTRAGEOUS government-funded study of BDSM photographs in SL, found by this researcher as a "source of innovation". Um, I guess he missed how this sub-culture is a source of coercion, violence, and slavery that is setting back the achievements of women's rights for the last 50 years -- and for that matter, all human rights.  I really loathe researchers that go into virtuality with this faux meta stance that acts as if it is "neutral" and merely "observers emergent phenomena" blah blah but in fact is a stealth-march with a very decided extremist agenda, trying to legitimize collectivism and coercion, and trying to undermine and natural revulsion to such totalitarianism as "puritanical". It's downright creepy.

Or how about this whopping grant of $378,644 given to study why virtual communities fail, but World of Warcraft and Wikipedia don't -- without the slightest relevant value judgement about insidious collectivism -- again, from that faux meta stance of supposedly scholarly "objectivity" and with a built-in bias that groupism is a positive phenomenon, and when groups "fail" this is a "bad thing".

A fan wrote in last night and said he loved my blog, said I had helped clarify his thinking about the Open University and what he found wrong with it, too, and noted that all this was reminiscent of "God and Man at Yale" by William F. Buckley. It's been ages since I've picked up that book and I probably didn't understand it back then and would appreciate it more now, so I'l get it to read.

So while I'm circling around the topic of "Why Geeks Are Unfit to Rule," let me note another immoral creature in the news now, the founder of Limewire. I do wonder how this Harvard-trained man made his fortune. Probably on all of clicking on ads or trying software or diet powders for 30 days and getting recurring billing (like the MySpace fortunes were made). I think of Limewire as a total pestilence. I kept trying to remove it every time I caught my kids with it, and one time I found that it had caused a virus. Before I saw the effects of the virus, a funny thing happened. I clicked on a song mp3 that had some popular song title on it. But what popped up instead was a chorus of adults in suits singing a sort of operatic song about copyright theft -- I guess this was something that record companies seeded into Limewire. But then my browser was hijacked and nothing I could do would fix it -- maybe those companies seed the viruses, too? In any event, the attempts to get rid of it only got my computer into worse trouble and finally I took it to a geek guru who pronounced it DOA. So I really don't like Limewire.

But more than a destructive virus caused by this service, I loathe the "California business model" at play here -- first make your fortune off the undermining of musicians' rights, by enabling the sharing and attracting the ad clickers, and then coyly suggest that you are "working with" record companies to get licenses and selling some legitimate products but still enabling a vast system of illegitimate copying.  I hope this guy gets the book thrown at him. And his funding of bicycle paths or whatever other happy do-good stuff he does to throw up smokescreens about his essentially criminal behaviour rooted in technocommunist "expropriation of the expropriators" just doesn't impress me.

The New York Times gave Mark Gorton loving treatment, praise for his "innovation" and and exhibited penis-envy for his degrees, his income, his fancy apartment, his lifestyle. A judge ruled that he had violated copyright and must pay a $450 million judgement, yet the Times is "troubled", trying to "see his side" of it.

All along, Mr. Gorton said, he thought he was following the law, despite a series of earlier lawsuits that ended badly for file-sharing services like Napster and Grokster. And where there were doubts about the legality, he said, he tried to remove them.

I mean, look at how the Times unwittingly reveals how he made his fortune:

The Recording Industry Association of America, the industry group that managed the lawsuit on behalf of 13 record companies, said it thought he had willfully skirted the law, motivated by the money generated by the millions of users of LimeWire. Total revenue increased to an estimated $20 million in 2006 from $6 million two years earlier, according to the court ruling, much of it from a paid service that allowed for faster downloads.

I'll bet! I hope that he has to pay the fine, and that he is unable to go on green-washing himself by donating some of his millions to environmental causes. And again, *people like this can't be allowed to govern*. Not because they have "no empathy" -- although they don't, for people's property rights -- but because they are criminal-minded, and apologetic about being so.

There are two other big reasons why geeks shouldn't be allowed to rule:

1. They hate representative democracy. Nothing undoes the cabal of power that geeks represent like the election and the running of candidates. They try to manipulate it, as they have done in the last election, but the fix doesn't stay in (they didn't anticipate the Tea Party and now they can't stop it). Time and again, I read ill-informed, even outright retarded rants on blogs and forums about "evil corrupt politicans" and how they need to be "removed" and the people need to "vote directly" -- or not at all (they can just hum, like they do in ITEF). These kinds of statements are spoken by people who have likely never tried to lobby government, or work with government officials, or known people who have gone into government. Government inevitably involves compromises, and inevitably requires a positive and "constructive" approach that has to ignore obvious negatives and at some point flatten criticism -- but if goes too far off balance, people rebel. And that will be happening. Even so, the problem isn't representative democracy, or less-than-perfect democratic politicians. The problem is that the extreme left, and the geekocracy, which can just as often consist of extreme right loonies loving up Ron Paul or brands of Libertarianism or Extropianism, are not able to persuade *their fellow Americans* that they are right. They hate that. They want to do an end run around those people they believe are "blighted" by "guns and religion". They think that if only they were directly in power, without any checks and balances, they would "do good". They are truly selfish and pig-headed about realizing that they themselves are only one ideology, one constituency, one interest group or a cluster of interest groups that have no special right to power than any other -- and they don't have a notion of how to forget compromises and forge policies across ideological lines.

2. This brings me to my second point, which is the curious belief that geeks have that the facts of all issues are knowable, that they possess tools to know them, that they have the critical intellectual faculties to know them, and that those who disagree are "in error" or "incorrect" or "need to be tutored" or are "ignorant", etc. This arrogant certitude is very well exemplified by the figure of Jon Stewart, who has grown more and more rabid, intense and vengeful as time goes on and he faces not direct and instant power, as perhaps he dreamed he had if Obama, his chosen candidate came to power, but sees a country filled with a lot of static against Obama-mania.

I was trying to put my finger on why Stewart isn't funny, and why he always comes across to me as leering, nasty, even sinister. And that is because he relentlessly goes after finding the facts about this or that perceived idiocy on the right or by the Tea Party people, and then maybe finds a fact, but then mercilessly pillories these people on some smaller point, without seeing the larger issue.

Example: some conservatives believed some staging in a conference where the president spoke had a "Muslim symbol" or something in it. And it turned out it was just some design or something. So Jon Stewart portrays these critics as the same ilk as those obsessing about whether Obama is Muslim or not, rather seeing the larger issues -- that many people feel Obama is soft on Iran, Egypt and other Muslim regimes and doesn't have a plan for how to counter the ideology of terrorism effectively. Stewart simply brushes that all aside. You can watch episode after episode. And he just rants on and on, making all those cunning facial expressions of exasperation and malicious glee, and you can't really find fault with the "facts," you can't really say anything is wrong, but it's just context and tone and omission.

So he'll say about Palin that she has a "little box of crazy" she keeps under her bed. That gets a lot of laughs, but I can only say in the same spirit -- like the little box of socialism he keeps under his bed. See, that would be "wrong," but impugning actual "crazyiness" to a politician whose views and persona he just doesn't like

Every day, the left comes up with some zealous obsession like this, screeching with more and more indignation about some perceive or actual factual error. Like today on Twitter, you see many outraged geeks sarcastically bashing Palin for reading a poem of a veteran, but not crediting the poem to him -- like you can see in this series of parrots all mining the same meme. But, why would it matter? It doesn't. That is, sure, people should be credited for their work. But since when are geeks such gatekeepers of copyright?! These are the same people giving Limewire a pass and telling us we must all share and mashup. This meme is repeated on and on all over the blogosphere. And...what is the point? To show *error*. To show *incorrectness*. To show *a crime*, even. But...is it relevant to any substantive issues?

This is the sort of cul-de-sac that most political debate finds itself in on the wars. It's like the rabid -- and rigid -- obsessiveness about many online arguers with the meme of "Bush lied, people died," and the declaration of the fact that gosh, there were no weapons of mass destruction. And so? Yeah, that was already trounced a zillion times as a bad thing. Sooooooo what's your plan for ending outrageous terrorist attacks, sponsored by Iran and other bad actors, on civilians in Iraq? Did you have one?

And then there is the still, small voice that keeps coming up in these cases and saying, but wait. In fact, Sarah Palin didn't claim she wrote this poem. It was a tweet, for God's sake, without room for a full text and twitter. How many people have written "the road not taken" or "ours is not to wonder why" on Twitter, but not credited the poems and the authors from which these phrases, part of the idiom, have been taken? It's just an insane level of hypercritical nastiness to go on about this "plagiarizing' in a twitter *fair use* (remember...fair use? 140 characters is fair use!) and to hyperventilate about the lack of a credit, when...the sentiments expressed aren't in fact addressed by the legion of geek correctionists.

I often get the feeling that there is just a small cadre of people who sit around coming up with these memes every day, and then disseminating them (on either the right or left). Every leftwinger is dutifully ranting about this in person, on Twitter, or in the blog. But...do they realize that veterans fighting wars that protect freedom in fact really do protect freedom? Do they draw any conclusions from this, after they get done piously denouncing Palin's "plagiariasm"?

See, this is why such trolls and Fiskers can't be allowed to rule. They're not able to see the essence of the issue, and speak the larger truths, but are willing to carp and cavil about non-essentials merely to bully and silence and discredit. Here are people willing to call Palin a "lying cunt" for "plagiarizing" when...hello people, all she did was paraphrase a poem that she'd hear on Twitter. Who's the lying cunt, the person who does *that* on Twitter, or the freaks that think such bullying on a minor issue at best is a good substitute for authentic politics?

Honestly, we have legions of these kinds of smug, arrogant, bitter -- and often insecure and looserish -- geeks unleashed on the public discourse these days, and they invade every discussion and prevent the articulation of more substantive and real issues.

"Ankle-biters" is what I believe Crap Mariner calls them.

Another example of this "just the facts m'am" literalism is this interchange I had on Twitter, which I think is self-explanatory. It starts with a retweet from Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List, one of the great card-carrying technocommunist leaders of the Creative Communism:

RT @p2173: We make vast assumptions based on flawed indicators and crummy data. #nafevents

(this is some conference he's retweeting).

So I say:

@craignewmark geeks assume falsely that all information is knowable and rational decisions can always be made on its basis. 4:20 PM May 21st via web in reply to craignewmark

craignewmark

  

sometimes ... RT @catfitz: geeks assume falsely that all information is knowable and rational decisions can always be made on its basis.

strategy_samba

  

@craignewmark hey @catfitz is the assumption here that geeks = Vulcans?otherwise no human decision is or should be 100% rational. 

@craignewmark @strategy_samba exactly. And yet geeks assume falsely that all information is knowable. Singularists. Dataminers. etc.strategy_samba

 
@strategy_samba I don't either. And that's why I push back when someone tells me we make assumptions merely due to lack of data. 5:14 PM May 21st via web in reply to strategy_samba

@catfitz You are being obsessive, generalistic and condescending. There's not a factory in Los Gatos stamping out geeks. cc @craignewmark

strategy_samba yes there is. You're one. And the orig statement claiming assumptions are "wrong" is what is condescending & generalistic.kevinpacheco

@strategy_samba say, could that be an assumption based on lack of data?

  

@craignewmark @catfitz Some geeks actually pay attention to @nntaleb

1. craignewmark
     
   folks, be nice! RT @strategy_samba: @catfitz ... ... 4:54 PM May 21st via TweetDeck

@craignewmark fortunately, we're not required to be "nice" under the First Amendment, at least, not yet, you don't run it all yet!

strategy_samba

  

@craignewmark @catfitz ok we'll take it offline. I just don't like categorizing.

craignewmark

  

@catfitz i'll see what I can do... 5:21 PM May 21st via TweetDeck in reply to catfitz

I wish there were better tools for capturing Twitter convos than are out there (and yes, I've seen some and they are disappointing). These tweets don't come in the right order, necessarily, but you get the gist, Craig Newmark, in response to me telling him that he doesn't run the Internet yet, says "I'll see what I can do.."

Sigh.

But it's a very *typical* exchange in the absolute, 100 percent overconfident assertion that people "make wrong decisions" or "have bad ideas" because they "don't have the facts". They have "wrong data". Why, if only collect all the data, we can "set them straight". This pervaded in the health care debate, where every speculative and incomplete Congressional Research Service computation based on putative costs would be seized as "the facts" and if anyone criticized anything they would be witheringly told they hadn't read some 432-page document. (The right is using this technique on the Arizona law, telling anyone who complains, like little parrot soldiers, that "they must not have read it".)

When a reader on Twitter retweets concern of a lawmaker about Craigslist facilitating child porn, @craignewmark has to say "check the facts first!". It's always about *other people being wrong*. It's always about their "lack of facts".

I have no idea what is the case in that particular story, but I highlight it to show a method, a pattern, a technique:

"You're wrong"

"You dont' have the facts"

"We geeks can possess all the facts."

"Facts can all be found by machines online now".

"You need to be corrected by the facts from our machines."

And ultimately, whatever facts someone might actually present about a story like this, say, two underage girls claiming they got clients for prostitution via Craigslist, there are more "server truths" to be had, as a spokesman from Craig's list tells us, with typical geek overkill:

"With 50 million Americans engaging in billions of human interactions each month, the overwhelming majority of which are well-intentioned, the incidence of crime on Craigslist is exceptionally low. However, our tolerance for crime is zero, and we welcome suggestions from US Attorney Russoneillo, and any other concerned party, for further preventing misuse."

All of a sudden, the concerns of the reader, the Democratic congresswoman, the newspaper, anybody are *dwarfed* by the *sheer weight of 50 million people making billions of transactions*. How can anything withstand such *factual* weight! But...could we just get to care about *just those two* that really were worrisome? And there were more than two. That's ok!

And...it's this sort of literalism and Fisking that is what I mean when I say *these people can't be allowed to govern*.

Yet...they are governing, and increasingly, are in power. I think we are going to see a HUGE backlash against them, and their situating of themselves around the Obama administration will ultimately be a reason for Obama's failure to get a second term.

Belarus By-the-Sea LOL

Belarus By-the-Sea LOL Well, what can you do, it's SL. Visit Belarus (254, 153, 48)

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Governor's Peninsula

Governor's Peninsula 25,648 meters now belonging to Governor Linden. For a time it had this really ugly glowing modern experimental build that fried retinas for 16 sims, I'm not kidding. Then somehow Pathfinder owned it. Now it's "reclaimed". And there it sits. Can't complain. Visit Kelham (105, 187, 44)

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Turtle Spawning

Turtle Spawning I put in some turtles Visit Iris (230, 193, 24)

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Jump in!

Jump in! I also added Ordinal's COWER script to make a photo opp Visit Iris (122, 175, 23)

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Fish Story

Fish Story New tip jar at the Moth Temple custom made by Keanu Kharg When you tip it, it generates fish particles and starts filling the tuna can with fish. Come fill it! Visit Iris (122, 155, 24)

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It's OK, It's Only Virtual

It's OK, It's Only Virtual With apologies to Damien Hirst Visit Sutherland (198, 4, 25)

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Carp I mean Crap is getting out in a hurry

Carp I mean Crap is getting out in a hurry Check this out! Visit Sutherland (200, 5, 25)

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Facebook and Other Social Media Will Inevitably Be Government Regulated

I have a front-page article up today on "Facebook's Free-Speech Identity Crisis" at Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe -- "Facebook Caught Between Roles as Civility Cop, First-Amendment Facilitator".

This is of course sparked by the move by Pakistan to shut down the Facebook group called "Draw Mohammed as a Dog Day" and related groups -- a group that was in fact ultimately deleted by a panicked cartoonist who didn't realize it was going to turn into such a big deal.

In fact, a lot of Facebook controversies end that way, but we can't verify it or know what really happened because the groups disappear sometimes because FB deletes them, and sometimes because the creators delete them under peer pressure.

It's long been clear to me that concerted LGBT abuse-reporting can get the anti-gay groups removed quickly with this California-based secular liberal executives -- far faster than anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim groups that sometimes get even more outcry, and sometimes don't, because of the prevailing wish to have Facebook approximate a First-Amendment facilitator (a feat that FB executives claim facetiously that they perform, and that some users want them to perform).

But it isn't really what they do, as FB pretends to go by First Amendment values sometimes on some issues, and on others isn't as progressive (banning breast-feeding photos) and being incredibly dilatory about removing antisemitic groups, even after Michael Arrington stepped up and gave his hugely visible bully pulpit to the issue and numerous bloggers spoke out -- it finally took Mark Cuban's brother, a lawyer, to litigate, to get two of the groups removed -- but gosh, we wouldn't want to put a chill on all that frenzied hatred piled up everywhere calling Israel a "baby killer" and "child starver" now, would we.

Most of the time when people discuss government regulation of social media, it's with the hysterical outrage and shrill tones of the Second Life forums, where currently there is a panic screech about Australia's possible plans to filter some adult Internet content that might affect downloadable games and worlds -- but likely won't.

Usually, the screeching in SL around this issue has to do with an ardent belief (similar to the ardent belief of some British in my comments here that the BNP, which got less than one percent of the vote in the recent UK elections was going to "take over") that some right-wing yahoo Congressmen in the American South will somehow prevail in getting a law passed to turn social media of all kinds into Disneyland.

Ain't going to happen. And what I do with this constant frenzied and paranoid refrain, which makes discussion of reform of the autocratic, arbitrary, and unconscionable Terms of Service of Silicon Valley's creations usually impossible, is to turn this around into a man-bites-dog story.

I think government regulation is required in order to free up these game-god platforms for the oppressive hands of their makers, and enforce First Amendment protections everywhere throughout cyberspace, in social media, games, and worlds, just as you would with a mall (as in Marsh v. Alabama and the Mall of America case) and not as in the Sony case where a judge concluded that PS3 wasn't like a muncipality.

I think the solution to the bad speech of a hate-Muslims or hate-Jews group is more First Amendment freedom, not less, and freedom to expose the groups, create alternatives, and successfully challenge the company in lawsuits if they reach a critical threshold.  Just like Skokie -- where the ACLU lost droves of members for defending the KKK when they wished to demonstrate in a Jewish neighbourhood in Illinois with Holocaust survivors. It's different today, because the beneficiaries of the First Amendment aren't the violent demonstrators with a hateful ideology like the KKK, but liberal secular FB groups who want to be protected from the violent reaction to their spoofs by angry jihadists who will kill them. Even so, the challenges must be met by *law* and *not corporate policy* to be fair, transparent, credible, and effective.

Of course Facebook is just like a municipality, and not only because you farm with your tractor in it. It's because it's where you go to speak openly about politics and other public issues -- you don't go to the town square, the town hall, the town meeting, the town anything anymore, because that's just some traffic circle with perhaps an ACLU-contested manger in it at Christmas time these days.

The real action is all online, we all know that, and it's time to concede it, and time to push through the First Amendment into its dark alleys and oppressive byways, even though the Electric Frontier Foundation, which only cares about liberating property, and the ACLU, which these days cares only about Facebook privacy as a tandem to their campaign against government wire-tapping, are not going to be allies in this struggle. They simply aren't, because they are both too pro-Obama, too pro-Silicon Valley (and funded by the big companies there), and too insistent on "freedom of speech for me and not for thee" when it comes to California companies. We need to walk around them.

Eventually, this campaign will get going, lawyers will be found, foundations will fund it, even just individuals will fund it out of an urgent need to stop the suppression of speech online in a thousand ways. And Raph Koster's concern that this will prevent him from creativite freedom to make Meeps that can't be saved from mass murder will be misplaced, because it will not be about proactive enforcement, but about response to valid lawsuits, of which there will not be that many, as the tests will have to reach all the thresholds of truth, etc.

What we will look forward to is not only a day where people like me cannot be thrown off Linden Lab's forums for criticizing their indulgent special relationships with a favoured group of residents I call the Feted Inner Core (FIC), but when people launch abuse reports to get groups removed from Facebook, we can get more transparency about it -- if Facebook had to face First Amendment suits in court, it would have to develop a more robust police blotter policy in keeping with the police-informant society it creates by having anonymous fucktards be able to AR you all day if they don't like you -- including, say, the Chinese government being able to blow in the Hong Kong opposition groups and get them removed "for cause". Facebook will no longer facilitate oppression, but really facilitate the First Amendment in the country where they are located, and if Pakistan or China don't like it and block it, Facebook will not care and not worry about it as the Net will route around it eventually. They will not build business plans contingent on placating oppressive governments and murderous non-state violent actors who threaten death to cartoonists.

I don't expect this to be an easy fight, but the day will come. As I said, I'd rather have the Constitution and the Supreme Court enforce the First Amendment, not Mark Zuckerberg coyly pretending to on some days, and other days pulling "unprogressive" groups.

I really don't think we will see, especially under Obama, but even post-Obama, any sort of legislative action that will go in the other direction, making "hate speech" that is uncoupled from "incitement of imminent lawless action" be something that the government will now start prosecuting.

I think the way we prevent that from happening is by insisting in fact on government regulation to enforce not only the First Amendment, but law concerning harassment and stalking, what even the ACLU is stumping now for, against bullying. Bullying, when it reaches the threshold of a crime with imminent violent and imminent lawlessness, is something the ACLU will stand up for, as it gives them a way to support all kinds of racial, religious and other minorities, LGBT, terrorism suspects, etc. whom they can't support by advocating the suppression of free speech or they'd go against their historical mandate.

I want a new First Amendment crusade to get going online, led not by the aging attorneys of the Pentagon Papers era, and not by Fred or Cory Doctorow at the EFF who are incredibly selective in his defense of free speech (even falsely invoking it as an issue in the phony "net neutrality" gambit). I hope that a new generation of attorneys who really fight for real free speech while respecting the rights of the private corporation and freedom of association, not hobbled by politically correct canons from university campuses, will get this going. Every time a group is culled in Facebook, it must be publicized, and it must be shown that there was a court order resulting from a successful court case in which "incitement t imminent lawless action" -- and "true threats" in subsequent more modern court cases -- are demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.

My Wikipedia Entry

I have to laugh that someone has created a Wikipedia page about me (and not for the first time -- one was created before about "Prokofy Neva" and then later deleted). The anonymous troll named "Jason O'Brian" who doesn't even have a Wikipedia user page who created this is probably some Woodbury type, or 4channer, or b-tard, or Urizenus himself, or somebody related with a WU beef, because while cloaked in the appearance of a normal biographical entry, it appears to exist mainly for the point of saying that this person is an enemy of Woodbury University students in Second Life, and this person is anti-communist, and a big critic of the opensource movement.

What's even more hilarious is that after the creation of this tendentious, outdated, misleading, and inaccurate profile, Huns Valen took a huge fit and decided to go on a jihad to get the page deleted.

I don't care about the one or the other event lol.

Huns' main tendentious and trolling argument for deletion is that I am on the record as saying that I don't like my real life outed -- and he quotes a statement from the forums that is accurate as said by me then and now.

Of course, he's putting these quotes into his own skewed and tendentious agenda-filled griefer-apology context, and not noting the important context of the quote itself, which is *I don't want my RL mentioned in the SL context*.

Obviously, as a person whose biography has been included on a number of organizations and news sites over the years, my RL biography is indeed "outed". And so what? Who could care? If you work as a public figure in an organization or a news site, your biography is placed there. Again, so what?

And of course, I myself, in articles for the mainstream media, and on this blog itself, and on my other RL blogs at 3dblogger.typepad.com link my avatar name Prokofy Neva and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick as Google, which "knows where to point" -- this is not news and nothing special.

And again, I merely state my preference: I don't care to be called by my RL name on this blog or in the Second Life context; and indeed, it is my right, as an SL avatar inworld, where I don't chose to put this information on my first-life profile, not to have my RL name used. That's all. My TOS right, the jurisprudence which I can claim and do claim in SL. It's been my repeated, vast, deep experience that people linking my RL and SL names do so for only one purpose (unless they are the less than half dozen RL journalists who have interviewed me for RL press LOL): to grief me, harass me, stalk me, and bully me.

And let me go over the facts again:

1. I did not wish to have my avatar and RL name linked 6 years ago in The Sims Online, when I gave my first interview to the New York Times in 2004 about The Sims Online. There I did *NOT* link my name Dyerbrook and my RL name -- that was done later by the Herald, against my will.

2. In coming to SL in 2004, I didn't wish to have my RL and SL names linked. This was done in 2005 against my will on the Linden forums by Nolan Nash with Linden collusion, specifically Pathfinder Linden. Again, I had *not given any interviews at that time linking my names*.

3. AFTER my names were linked, i.e. after 2005, I didn't attempt to keep them unlinked, and in giving interviews to NYT, Wired, Fortune, and other publications I gave my RL and SL names, as you have to do with professional journalists in most cases. And so what? Just because I link my names for a professional journalist in a bona-fide newspaper or magazine doesn't mean I want to be harassed and griefed inworld with my RL name, my RL pictures, RL caricatures, RL puppets, giant RL head busts, and all the other things that Huns Valens criminal organization W-hat, with which he is affiliated and for which he is responsible, engaged in for years against me.

4. I continue to wish not to link my names simply because this is my blog on certain topics that I simply wish to keep in this channel. That doesn't mean that I'm retarded and don't understand that the Internet links things via Google and that Google witch-hunters and Google bombers like Vint Falken and Benjamin Duranske try to silence me, shame me, and harass me by linking my names. Duh. I get all that. I simply like to have a blog name, write under a blog name, and that's my right.

5. I personally don't think I'm famous enough in real life or Second Life to warrant a Wikipedia entry, but I can hardly object to any free press about myself as a public figure, and I don't object. If there's a Wikipedia entry about me, great! Perhaps some day I will feel self-important enough to pay an editor to fix it up and make it more accurate and less tendentious. Right now, I don't care enough and don't feel self-important enough. I think Wikipedia has tightened up their rules recently on biographies of people, having faced a number of lawsuits and public outcry about the Wikipedia fucktards that skew the entries on this evil machine according to their political views. Yes, I continue to maintain that Wikipedia is evil -- in so many ways. This is one more indication of it.