Micro-Ode to Proko-Fly

The other day I posted a series of messages on Twitter, in reply to a message posted by OpenSpime enthusiast David Orban.

Twitter, for anyone who has managed to avoid hearing about it, is the first, and still the foremost, micro-blogging service. Each micro-message, called a Tweet, is limited to a maximum of 140 characters, and is supposed to reply to the question "What are you doing now?" But as the following example shows, a Tweet may in fact be any sort of message at all.

My series of Tweets ran as follows.


The Tweets:

dantonsideways To @davidorban: Homer describes a certain warrior as being like a fly in perseverance, endlessly coming back to harass the enemy

dantonsideways My tweet about the fly got me thinking of another persistent gadfly: Proko-fly Neva

dantonsideways Proko-fly : a fly in the big stone soup!

dantonsideways Proko-fly : a fly in the unctuous ointment of the social software interwebz!

dantonsideways Proko-fly a hairdryer? A veritable FLAMETHROWER in the vanity feed of the l33t FIC Digerati!

dantonsideways Hey, I'm almost as much fun as Mitch Wagner! w00T!#@!


Commentary:

It is fitting that this string of Tweets should begin with a reference to Homer, the ancient Greek poet who gave us the heroic epics the Iliad and the Odyssey . Because this short series of Tweets forms in fact a micro-ode to someone I've called Proko-fly, considered here as an almost mythical hero.

Those familiar with Second Life will recognize that I am refering to the infamous Prokofy Neva. If you need to be briefed on Prokofy, you might see my blog post about Second Life Loudmouths. Prokofy is best known for his criticism of what he called the Feted Inner Core (FIC) in Second Life, which is a supposed group of privileged programmers and content creators given unfair advantages by Linden Lab. Prokofy vigorously carries out an odd one-man crusade in defense of the average Jane or Joe, and against what he calls the Bolshevism of internet communitarians, open source and the California Ideology that reigns in Silicon Valley

So why is Danton posting a micro-homage to Proko-fly, when Danton is a fan of open source and internet communitarians? Worse, Danton is a self-confessed "libertarian socialist," whereas Prokofy consistently decries techno-libertarianism and all forms of socialism. Rather than try to explain this mystery, let me at least try to explain the Tweets.

The first Tweet replies to an offhand (and for our purposes irrelevant) message posted by David Orban, about shooing a fly out of his house. Which brought to my mind that simile used by Homer, and then led my wandering thoughts to the number one gadfly in my personal blogosphere: Prokofy Neva.

The story of the stone soup is found in many cultures. Travelers arrive in a village with an empty pot, which they fill with water and place over a fire. They drop a large stone into it, and explain to the villagers that they are making "stone soup," which tastes wonderful, but just needs a bit of garnish. The curious villagers each add something, and the travelers end up with a nourishing meal.

Prokofy applies the stone soup analogy to the business models of open source and social software. He says that the idea that one can make money by giving something away for free is an illusion: creative effort must be paid for. Trying to make money by giving things away free will inevitably result in a pot that contains only hot water and a stone.

The hairdryer incident occurred on Twitter on April 28, 2008. Prokofy was engaged in a vigorous Twitter exchange with several a-list bloggers, including the renowned Robert Scoble. Scoble has over 28,000 followers on Twitter and over 5,000 friends on Facebook. Prokofy in fact likes Scoble, considering him one of the more sensible internet evangelists, but was nonetheless striving energetically to set Scoble straight about internet culture. Suddenly Scoble tweeted the following:


Scobleizer Ian Betteridge just posted on FriendFeed: "arguing with Prokofy is like arguing with a hairdryer."


The original Tweet can be seen here. Around the same time, TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington decided to shut Prokofy out of his twitter feed. As I remember, Scoble followed suit, though I'm now unable to find the links. (And somewhere Prokofy gave a detailed explanation of the different ways of shutting someone out of your twitter feed, which went over my head.)

Shortly after that, Prokofy had a similar falling-out with Steve Gillmore, as described here. All of these l33t (hacker slang for "elite") a-listers were successively shutting Prokofy out of their "vanity feed", which Prokofy defines as follows:


"His vanity feed (I learned this term just now through talking about this incident with many people) is his RSS of all the mentions of him on Twitter. Not just people he follows, not just keywords, but people who talk about him -- his name itself as a keyword, and people who type '@stevegillmor' to try to get him to hear, even if he isn't following them, in the knowledge that he might look himself up on Tweetscan, and find it interesting to see what someone wrote unsolicited."


To justify shutting Prokofy out, the a-listers generally accuse Prokofy of being a Troll. Prokofy replies that he considers "Troll" to be an outdated concept:


"'Troll' is a concept I do not recognize, do not care about, and don't follow. It is a hangover of MMORPG and The Well culture. It's got to go if we are to have a free and normal Internet. I fail to find anything remotely scientific or objective about this concept, that insider geeks use as a flag or marker to mean 'people we hate who aren't like us and won't get in our tribe'."


Trolls are also said to incite flame wars. Thus I hesitated to use the word "flamethrower" in my Micro-Ode, but it was unavoidable. Hot flame is implicit in the "hairdryer" analogy, so the heroic dimension requires letting it all hang out. Danton stands in awed admiration before the magnitude of Proko-fly's achievement. He has fused the entire a-list together in one massive block of self defense against the truths they hate to hear.

But what brings Mitch Wagner into the last Tweet? Mitch writes for Information Week and also hangs out in Second Life under the name of Ziggy Figaro. I enjoy following Mitch on Twitter because of his laid-back humour, seen for example here, here, here or here.

Also, this makes a complete cycle, going from mild-mannered David Orban, through Prok's heroic struggles with the digerati, and back again to mild-mannered Mitch Wagner. As in Auden's poem about Icarus, the ship that had "seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on." READ MORE...

Blogger Beatitude

Following a recent problem I had with Blogger, I had planned to move this blog over to my usual web hosting service. I had already installed the WordPress software, and was just getting ready to configure it, when my website server suffered a massive service outage. I use a small French web service called Ouvaton, which is supposed to be cool because it is a cooperative. But when one of the hard disks in their RAID burned out, they screwed up the replacement process so badly that the service was out for more than 24 hours. Small is beautiful, but imposing an accidental Denial of Service on several hundred customers is ugly. Is it utopian to wish that cooperative endeavours could also actually be effective and efficient?

That outage made me reconsider my decision. At least I can count on Google to maintain Blogger in a permanent state of adequate service. And they fixed the bug that caused my firewall to give me intrusion messages each time I looked at my blog. So if they can manage to avoid getting into conflicts with my anti-virus software, I think I can put up with a small amount of snooping about my consumer behaviour patterns. I've suddenly transitioned from Blogger Blowout to Blogger Beatitude. In the rest of this post I think I'll leave aside the big issues for a while, and just tell about what I've been doing in Second Life lately.

I've been going in-world rather infrequently, and for relatively short periods. I did however manage to attend the first meeting of the recently-elected new Representative Assembly of the Confederation of Democratic Sims, held on February 3rd. The meeting room in Neufreistadt was packed with a large crowd of observers. The session began with the new RA members taking oath to serve the CDS, its Constitutions and Laws. The RA members taking the oath (with their party affiliations) were as follows:

* Patroklus Murakami (CSDF)
* ThePrincess Parisi (NuCARE)
* Brian Livingston (SP)
* Sonja Strom (DPU)
* Bjerkel Eerie (CSDF)
* MT Lundquist (NuCARE)
* Beathan Vale (SP)

The first task of the new RA members was then to select the next CDS Chancellor. The two candidates for this position, Alexicon Kurka and Jamie Palisades, each briefly presented their reasons for wanting to fill the function. The RA members then stated in turn their preferences. The votes were three for each, and the hinge vote was left to ThePrincess Parisi. She dramatically built up the suspense, chopping her announcement into slowly-posted chat fragments, as follows:

*The next Chancellor of CDS ....
*On behalf of the members of New United CARE I proudly
*cast my vote for
*Alexicon Kurka

So Alexicon became the new Chancellor of CSDF, and the meeting broke up. The avatars hurried off, some actually walking downstairs to fly somewhere, the majority just teleporting away or logging off. I teleported to my house in Colonia Nova, and found myself in a woman's body, and with only half of my hair. The condition seemed to last, so I finally just logged off.

Other than that, I've been spending time teleporting around Second Life to see other regions. After reading Sleazy Writer's guest post on my blog, about what he calls "Sausage Land," I went to check out the Southern Continent. I can only agree with what Tony Walsh said, about the continents looking like God swallowed a yard sale, a Goth castle, a suburban mall, and a carnival, and barfed it all back up (as quoted by Prokofy). For comparison, I went to visit some Island regions reputed for better zoning, such as Anshe Chung's Dreamland and Adam Zaius' Azure Islands. Curiously, I found these to be rather barren stretches of boring "paradise." But perhaps I need to explore them a bit longer to discover their charm.

Then I read Prokofy's Tiny Reporters post, about Julian Dibbell's in-world interview with Prokofy, when Julian was researching his now-infamous Article on Griefing for Wired magazine. Prokofy starts by taking Julian to see the famous giant Refrigerator that mars the landscape in Ravenglass, facing the huge Celtic tower built by Foolish Frost. So I went over there, and found everything that Prokofy describes, including the Tatoo Parlour at the foot of the Celtic Tower.

I also read Prokofy's On Being Done With the Lindens post, in which he describes an extortionist "ad farm" put up by Umnik Hax in Highcastle, which contains a winking Happy Face with a Star of David for an eye. Prokofy maintains that this use of a Star of David is racist, in that it seeks to arouse anti-Semitic feelings. I wanted to go see that too, but when I tried to use Search to find Highcastle, Search told me there was nothing that corresponded! I've since been told that there is another way to search for sims, using the map, but I have yet to do that. In the meanwhile the Lindens have announced their new anti-ad-farm policy, so when I finally do get to Highcastle, the Unmik Hax horror may be gone.

And so it goes. Between a bit of touring in-world, and a lot of reading of Second Life blogs, I'm getting familiar with the place, with its populace and its particular culture. I imagined that one day I might proudly remind my children that I was an early pioneer of virtual worlds. But when I tested this idea out with them, their reaction was disappointing. They think I'm just a misguided fart making a fool of himself playing at a children's game. READ MORE...

Blogger Blowout

I created this blog one day last December, on a whim. I had noticed several Second Life blogs that use Blogger, so I thought I'd try it out. I created the blog in about ten minutes, and was pleased with the result.

Blogger is blog software created by Pyra Labs, and bought by Google in 2003. The software runs on a free web hosting service, which is also provided by Google. Thus both the software and the web hosting are totally free. You just create an account, configure the blog, spread your wings, and fly.

By and large I've been satisfied with Blogger. The software is easy to use, the default page format is simple and elegant, and the support systems are pretty good. But lately, when I try to look at the blog, my anti-virus program warns me that Blogger is trying to suck confidential information out of my computer. So it's time to move on.

Chalk up another freebie that was just too good to be true. Prokofy Neva would exult over this, and use it to prove once again that anything given freely is just NOT SUSTAINABLE. One might have hoped that Google was maintaining the huge Blogger service merely to build up its own good name in the cybersphere. Wishful thinking. Apparently they can't resist using it as an additional way to spy on us, and to load their databases with sellable information.

So it is time to implement plan B. I've been fooling around with creating my own websites for more than a year now. Thus I know how to purchase a domain name, how to rent server space from a web hosting service, and how to connect a dynamic website to a MySQL database on the web server. I have a rudimentary knowledge of HTML, and as for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), well, at least I know what they are. The big remaining question is: what blog software will I use?

In the first place, I want to use a free software package with open-source code. I know that Prokofy Neva thinks that open source is communistic, because it seems to go against capitalistic principles. But in Danton's world view, Richard Stallman is a saint, and Microsoft is the Beast. To quote Saint Richard, the philosophy behind free software implies: "free as in free speech, not as in free beer."

Open source is one of those divisive subjects that it would be best to avoid arguing about. People like Prokofy Neva will go on confusing open source with the theft of copyright, and insisting that free software is unsustainable. In the meanwhile, free and open source software will just keep developing. One day Linux will outstrip Microsoft Windows, and some open source simulator or other will evolve into a new standard for virtual worlds. Also, by the way, Linden Lab will be overtaken by competitors who provide better customer service, rational land-use planning and effective in-world government. In real life, free-market capitalism will continue to flourish within the framework of some kind of welfare-state socialism. The earth will keep turning. Next question.

To select my new blog software, I started by looking at the list of free and open source packages listed in the Wikipedia article about blog software. I also did a bit of searching on Google, using key-words like "best blog software." My choice narrowed down to a duel between Movable Type and WordPress. I read the following in the Wikipedia article on WordPress:

"In 2004 the licensing terms for the competing Movable Type package was changed by Six Apart, and many of its users migrated to WordPress – causing a marked, and continuing, growth in WordPress's popularity."

In addition, I notice that Gwyneth Llewelyn uses WordPress for her blog. So WordPress it will be.

It will take me a while to implement the necessary steps. I have to purchase a domain name, create the directory on my web hosting service, create the database on the web server, install the software, configure the site, and transfer the blog contents. This is all going to take me a while.

In the meantime, whenever I connect to this blog from my home computer, I get distressing messages from my anti-virus firewall. I "authorize" the connection - and Blogger spies on me. Yuck.

____
Note added on February 12, 2008:
Blogger seems to have corrected the problem. I'm not getting messages from my firewall any more. But it's too late, the process of changing to WordPress is already underway....

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Sausage of Unity

by Sleazy Writer

Danton has invited fellow CDS resident Sleazy Writer to write a guest post. Sleazy addresses one of his favorite subjects: sausage. It might also be noted that during the recent CDS election debate, while the candidates were warming up for their speeches, Sleazy amused the crowd by flying around the Colonia arena disguised as a hot dog.

One of the most basic and defining aspects that makes SL a world is its geography. And the geography of the 'mainland' continents is what this short article is about. Apparently, the new SL technology was initially used to show off and apply its versatility. Flexible simulators could be shaped into anything, small lakes and seas were attached. Rivers, waterfalls, rapids, peninsulas, mountain ridges, coastline and even geographical puns or logos were added to the small but growing world that SL was. A volcano towered over exotic Hawaiian lands. Forested northern lands and great lakes appeared and a breathtaking snow region full of possibilities grew to the first continent. A strange but original atoll was discovered -- coral reefs rising from the sea, changing into grassland and into mountains. It could be travelled by railroad like the continent before it could be explored by rivers or by road. A cool experience for immersionist users and many others.

But then it was over with the fun. Someone decided, probably with good reason, that it was time to make some money. And money was made by churning out thousands of boring, identical [insert unflattering adjective] grassy lumps of Lebensraum (3, 4, 5 and 6 at the left), a truckload of McSausages to be consumed by the masses.

SausageLand, the last time I checked, comprises four continents, about two-thirds of the main landmass of virtual Eden that the company has created for us. Plot after plot used as sandbox and then abandoned as a slum of plywood. The geography algorithm that was used is nice but also useless to the experience since there are no distinguishing features on the sim level. The unpaved roads it generated do not encourage exploration but are a road through a hell of twirling ads, strippers, Giulianis and unsolicited biblical advice (A bit like that good old Klingon initiation rite involving pain sticks). It's understandable and it's fine. But isn't this a sad state for a new world that is shaped by imagination? READ MORE...

Second Life Loudmouths

In my first week on Second Life all I did was fly around the mainland, taking in the sights. I would connect to the SLURL website and teleport to the default entry point, which is the Ahern welcome area. Arriving there, I would leap up into the sky, zoom away from the crowd, and drop back down to explore nearby builds that looked interesting. I did this for about a week, gradually going farther and farther afield, across the continent.

I might have gone on touring aimlessly for a long while. But in the meantime I discovered another dimension of the Second Life experience, which is the world of blogs, forums and websites that have grown up around Second Life. I was using Google to search for maps of the places I had been visiting. I did find a few highly informative old maps of the grid at the website of Bino Arbuckle. But at Bino’s site I also found a link to the Second Life History Wiki, and that changed everything.

Through the SL History Wiki, I discovered the Confederation of Democratic Sims, which is now my home. I also discovered the story of how Ulrika Zugzwang created the first democratic sim, and then later attacked the fledging democracy that she herself had initiated. In search of more details about Ulrika’s story, I discovered the Second Life bloggers, such as Prokofy Neva, Hamlet Au, Gwyneth Llewelyn and Tateru Nino. These are the Second Life "loudmouths," as Gwyneth calls herself. Some of these loudmouths are obnoxious, pushing provocation to the limits. Prokofy has been banned from the official Second Life forums, and Ulrika was banned from the sim she helped create. The others are more diplomatic, but they are all consistently interesting. One could call them the intellectuals of Second Life.

The biggest loudmouth of them all is Prokofy Neva. Before Prokofy showed up on Second Life, he made waves on The Sims Online (TSO), under the name of Dyerbrook. Dyerbrook campaigned against the Sim Shadow Government (SSG), which was a group of TSO users acting as an informal police force, in response to articles about the sims underworld appearing on the Alphaville Herald blog. The articles were written by a user called Urizenus Sklar, in real life the philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, who interviewed TSO users to study the sociology of the online community. Urizenius found evidence suggesting that an adolescent was paying underage girls to participate in on-line sex chats. Dyerbook supported Urizenus but nonetheless set him a trap, leading Urizenus to publish a totally fake interview of a 16-year-old girl supposedly wooed into witchcraft by adults, thereby showing the dangers of “virtual” journalism. Dyerbrook claimed that the Sim Shadow Government was as much a mafia as the underworld it purported to combat, and he whimsically delivered lamps to SSG property in Alphaville in order to "disperse the shadows."

Urizenus later founded the Second Life Herald, and was thus on hand to salute the arrival of Prokofy in Second Life in December, 2004. Prokofy promptly began aggressively posting on the official Second Life forum, and also created a blog called Second Thoughts.

Prokofy criticized what he called the Feted Inner Core (FIC) on Second Life, which is reminiscent of Dyerbrook’s criticism of the Sims Shadow Government. As Prokofy explained in an interview, he saw the FIC as a group of highly-visible content-creators that is deliberately favoured by the Lindens, thereby establishing an elite, which then tends to oppose anyone seeking a more democratic and open process. Prokofy has also accused Linden Labs of favouring selected land barons with inside information.

Another aggressive loudmouth was Ulrika Zugzwang, who was born into Second Life in June 2004. Within a month, she had won first prize in a Second Life video contest, with a dance video of Michael Jackson’s "Thriller." From Prokofy’s point of view, Ulrika was part of the Feted Inner Core. However, like Prokofy, Ulrika purported to defend the smaller users against a privileged elite. She created a leftist Second Life group called the Social Democratic Faction (SDF), and protested against Linden Lab's regressive land-use fee, which she claimed unfairly placed the cost burden on small land owners.

In August 2004, when Haney Linden called for proposals to preserve the Snow Sims, Ulrika submitted a proposal for a Bavarian mountain town called Neualtenburg. The project was approved and construction began in September. In December Ulrika published the Neualtenburg Constitution and created an in-world voting machine, in time for the first Neualtenburg democratic elections to be successfully held in January 2005. The Neualternburg democracy thus got off to a good start, but participation declined rapidly thereafter. To attract new participants, it was proposed to move the city to a private sim, and to set it up as a nonprofit cooperative. The sim was moved in March 2005, and the first plots of land were put up for sale in June 2005.

The democratic process that Ulrika set up for Neualtenburg, with an elected Representative Assembly meeting once a week, proved to be an effective mechanism for self-government, tolerating political disputes and even political parties. But when Ulrika at one point found herself at odds with the elected government, she termed this upset a “coup”, and in January 2006 she announced her intention of abandoning SL. The established group therefore settled the pending accounts with her, as she requested, selling her land and electing a new official to replace her. But a few months later Ulrika reappeared, and claimed the rights to the name and concept of Neualtenburg, which she wanted to move to another place in Second Life. The existing city-state therefore entered into negotiations with her to purchase the rights to the name “Neualtenburg.” During the negotiations, however, Ulrika claimed that the negotiating group did not include the democratically elected officials of the city-state. She therefore banned certain members of the group from the Neualtenburg forum, which she still had control of, and filed with Linden Labs a rights infringement claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

In response, the group officially banned Ulrika from the Neualtenburg sim. With his typical brazen crudeness, Prokofy Neva openly rejoiced in Ulrika’s problems, and concluded that they only proved the dangers of socialism. In a comment to an article in the Second Life Herald, Prokofy stated:

"Ulrika of course is a loathsome creature. I wouldn't elect her as dog-catcher, let alone as head of my socialist theme park. Still, it's indicative of how socialism always breeds these closed societies that get brittle and can't cope with dissent."

The conflict was nonetheless resolved with help from Linden Labs, who changed the name of the sim from Neualtenburg to Neufreistadt. Ulrika kept the original name and created Port Neualtenburg, a small seaside village and artisans' cooperative, which still exists, although Ulrika herself seems to have completely disappeared from Second Life.

Both Prokofy and Ulrika were interviewed numerous times by the official loudmouth of Linden Labs, an in-world journalist called Hamlet Linden. As Hamlet explained in one of his blogs, he was hired by Linden Lab from April 2003 to February 2006 to cover the emerging Second Life society as an embedded journalist. Hamlet claimed that: “All published stories were chosen by me, without any oversight by Linden Lab, based only on my editorial judgement as being relevant to this mission.” When his contract ended, he changed his in-world name to Hamlet Au, and carried on his blog New World Notes under his real life name, Wagner James Au. His articles are the source of much of the information presented in this present post. He has also recently written a book called The Making of Second Life.

Another Second Life resident often interviewed by Hamlet Au is Gwyneth Llewelyn, whom Hamlet describes as "The Visionary." Since her birth in Second Life in July 2004, Gwyneth has played a major role in several in-world projects, notably steering the democratic sim through the transition from Neualtenburg to Neufreistadt, and driving the Thinkers Group, the foremost in-world intellectual salon. But as Gwyneth herself explains, her renown is primarily due to her blog. In early 2005 she already noted that: "google-wise, my SL pseudonym is more ‘famous’ than my RL self, which is weird, since my RL email address has been on the spammers’ lists since 1995." She recently expanded this reflection on the changing relationship between real-life celebrity and virtual-life celebrity into a guest post on Hamlet’s blog, comparing the emerging virtual celebrity to the "Idoru" concept of cyberpunk author William Gibson.

The articles on Gwyneth’s blog explore in depth many of the major tendencies underlying the evolution of Second Life, such as the drawbacks of the general absence of urban planning on Second Life, the possible future configuration of an Open Source Second Life, and the use of crowdsourcing by Linden Labs.

Recently her blog has hosted several guest posts by another Second Lifer called Extropia Dasilva, on subjects such as post-humanism. Some readers seem to have assumed that Extropia Dasilva is an alt of Gwyneth Llewelyn, but Extropia is British, whereas Gwyneth is Portuguese. Extropia was a fellow participant with Gwyneth in the Second Life Thinkers Group.

Another prominent Second Life blogger is Tateru Nino. She is the most discrete of the "loudmouths," as befits someone who started actively mentoring on her first day in-world in August 2005, and who devoted much time to improving the organisation of the volunteer teams. Tateru’s role in the creation and development of Help Island was such that a group of her fans placed shrines to her around the island, giving birth to the term Cult of Tateru, the symbol of which is a red rose inside the red outline of a heart.

For all of her low-keyed approached, however, Tateru is a highly influential blogger. In addition to running her own blog, called Dwell On It, Tateru writes a monthly column for Hamlet Au’s New World Notes, and was a staff writer on the Second Life Insider website. However, Tateru’s input to Second Life Insider has recently been shifted to the Massively website, where her Second Life material continues to appear alongside of articles by other contributors concerning the many other on-line worlds in the Metaverse. Tateru specialises in presenting detailed analyses of Second Life’s day-to-day activities, including use statistics, grid outage reports and bug issues. However, she also presents news about prominent residents. In addition to all the rest, Tateru produces a webcomic made with Second Life photos.

There are many other fascinating Second Life bloggers that deserve a mention here, such as Torley Linden. There is even a website that lists the top Second Life blogs, though many of those listed seem to have climbed high using all-too-familiar web marketing and search engine optimization strategies. And most of them lack a certain something when compared to the blogs mentioned in this post. The critical element would seem to be a clearly identifiable individual persona, however virtual that may be, with a wilful character and strongly vocalised opinions.

The most interesting Second Life blogs seem to be the work of loudmouths.
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