Back to Building a Country

The most famous of all of Philip Linden's pronouncements about Second Life is: "I'm not making a game, I'm building a country." This citation, which has been endlessly commented upon, in fact contains two separate parts.

The first part of the statement says that Second Life is not a game. While most 3D virtual worlds are combat games, Second Life is a simulation of the type of day-to-day activities we carry out in the real world, such as producing objects, selling them and socializing. There seems to be general acceptance of the truth of this statement that Second Life is not a game, at least not in the usual sense.

The second part of the statement says that Linden Lab is building a country. How this is to be interpreted - or whether it is valid at all - seems to be at the center of many of the past and present conflicts within the Second Life community.

Being new to Second Life, and ignorant of its history, I set out to review the evolution of this question of "building a country." Using Google I found so much relevant information on the blogs and forums that it made my head spin. But curiously I was unable to discover precisely when, where and why Philip Rosedale made the original declaration.

When did Philip Linden say he was "building a country"?

Gwyneth Llewelyn in a post from November 2005 says that Philip had repeatedly made the famous statement "early last year," which seems to mean early 2004, although with this wording she might have meant early 2005.

Prokofy Neva in a post from July 2005, mentioning Philip's vision of our "world-that's-not-supposed-to-be-a-game," refers back to the SL Herald's June 2004 interview with Philip Linden . In that interview Urizenus Sklar said to Philip: "It sounds like you aren't thinking of SL as a game at all but rather as a platform for different kinds of collaborative projects." But during the interview neither Urizenus nor Philip mentioned the word "country," which would be odd if Philip had already made the famous statement. This might suggest that the quote dates from early 2005, instead of early 2004. So the available evidence leaves the question open. It is strange that Google fails to turn up any precise information on the date and the circumstances of Philip's original declaration.

Robin Linden inspires Ulrika Zugzwang's Neualtenburg Democracy

However, in that June 2004 interview Philip did state the following:

"Also, I think that various structures for governance, etc can be tested here quite well. I think it is possible that as SL grows, we will learn better how future societies might best be governed."

Philip was therefore definitely thinking of "structures for governance" in June 2004. This obviously has something to do with the question that Robin Linden put to residents a short while later. In August 2004, when Ulrika Zugzwang and Darwin Appleby were competing for the title of "President of Second Life" in a mock forum-based election, Robin Linden asked publically if residents were interested in self-rule. The idea appealed to Ulrika Zugzwang, who promptly created the Social Democratic Faction (SDF), Second Life's first political organization. But the suggestion caused a near revolt among the general populace. As Hamlet Linden reported in a post from August 18, 2004 called Missing Conventions, the Second Life forums were flooded with debates on the desirability of representative self-governance in the world. While Ulrika did have supporters, the overwhelming response was opposition to any in-world government. A new group called Anarchism, which quickly gained over 240 members, stated in its charter: "We believe in maintaining freedom from all forms of resident governance … and a promotion of individual rights. Let those that wish to be governed, achieve this through Group membership-- we will walk our own path."

Hamlet Linden's post from that time gives links to Robin Linden's original statement and to some of the forum discussion threads. Unfortunately, all of the forum archives from this period now seem inaccessible, even to residents who are logged onto the forums.

Gwyneth Llewelyn shortly thereafter presented her analysis of the resident reactions. Gwyneth reported that an overwhelming majority of residents conceived of SL to be a sort of Utopia where they could "be whatever they want to be, without any interference," and where "no one has power over anyone else." In general, residents refused to trust their fellow Second Lifers with the exercise any kind of "authority" (they also tended to distrust all real-world governments), and preferred to let the Lindens manage their Utopia for them, which most felt the Lindens did pretty well most of the time.

So the idea of systematic in-world self-government was rejected by the residents. Ulrika Zugzwang however went ahead and initiated a small experiment in local democracy, her Neualtenburg Projekt (described in my Second Life Loudmouths post). On November 15th 2004 Ulrika opened a forum thread announcing "Government comes to SL." The forum thread, which is still accessible, begins as follows:

"On Sunday the 14th of November 2004 the city of Neualtenburg instituted a provisional government based on its first-draft constitution. That's right. Government has come to SL. It's time to dust off that 'no government' T-Shirt."

Ulrika's small local Neualternburg democracy took root and grew, surviving a painful transition about a year and a half later, which lead to the departure of Ulrika herself. Relocated and renamed Neufreistadt, and more recently expanded into the Confederation of Democratic Sims, this small democracy has hosted a succession of competing projects concerning in-world government. But let us return to the chronology.

Aimee Weber's Two-Axis Graph

More than a year after Robin Linden had raised the big self-government question, by late 2005 political discussion among Second Lifers had advanced to the point where Aimee Weber could produce her useful two-axis graph, charting the political tendencies that she observed in Second Life at that time. One axis ran from "SL is a country" to "SL is a company," and the other ran from "Less intervention" to "More intervention." Aimee Weber identified four separate parties, which she avoided distributing precisely to the four corners of her graph, the better to chart their relative positions. But for easy comprehension it will help to simplify the picture by placing one party in each of the four corners of the square, as follows:

* See SL as a company, want less intervention: Platform Party.
Believe that Second Life is a software platform privately owned by Linden Lab. The Lindens should intervene only to maintain order, not to influence economic conditions.

* See SL as a country, want less intervention: Freedom Party. Believe that Second Life should be a country, but with as little government as possible. The Lindens should stick to writing software and leave the community to us.

* See SL as a company, want more intervention: Gamer Party.
Believe that Linden Lab is a gaming company. The Lindens should exert any influence needed to make SL fun for all users, not just the high achievers.

* See SL as a country, want more intervention: Nation Party.
Believe that Second Life is a country and that Linden Lab is its government. The Lindens should intervene both to maintain order and to favor democratic economic conditions.

This four way split can be further simplified by collapsing it into a simple bipolar conflict. On one side, the "platformers" hold that SL just provides the platform, and should intervene as little as possible in what residents do with it. On the other side, those we might call "interventionists" hold that Linden Lab should intervene to regulate the in-world society.

Aimee Weber named Lordfly Digeridoo and Cubey Terra as example members of the Platform Party, and Ulrika Zugzwang and Prokofy Neva as example members of the Nation Party. Prokofy Neva had made a name for himself in mid-2005 with his denunciation of the Feted Inner Core, by which he denoted the Linden practice of giving business to an insider-group of favored content creators. Prokofy, who calls the platformers "tekki libertarians," has repeatedly called for Linden intervention to foster fair economic competition, to fight against griefing, to ban ad-farms and so on.

Within the Nation Party

In late 2005 the "interventionists" fought a losing battle to keep the telehubs, which were nodes which teleporting avatars were forced to land in. Linden Lab had introduced the telehubs in October 2003 under Version 1.1 of Second Life, as a constraint which aimed to structure the landscape (see my post about Funny Money for more details). Prokofy Neva thought that removing the telehubs would bring the Closing of an Open Society, and Gwyneth Llewelyn likewise suggested it would bring the demise of the It’s a Country epoch. Everyone soon got used to Point to Point Teleporting, but urban planning - or rather the lack thereof - remains a critical issue in Second Life.

In early 2006 the Neualtenberg democracy was racked by a conflict between founder Ulrika Zugzwang and a new majority. The upstarts accused Ulrika of being a cyber-terrorist, because she deleted Neualtenberg buildings which she now claimed to be her own intellectual property. The two groups split, the new democratically-elected majority creating Neufreistadt, and Ulrika going her own way, first to Port Neualtenberg, and then leaving Second Life for good.

Around the same time, Prokofy Neva published a curious post entitled King Philip Abandons Throne; Betrays Motherland, reacting to statements made by Philip Linden in a podcast. Prokofy begins his defense of the "Country" interpretation of Second Life by invoking the support that he might have expected to receive – but didn't - from the crowd in Neualtenberg:

"If Justice Soothsayer were a Righteous Man, he would issue a warrant for the arrest of this failed King on charges of treason; yet Democracy Island is silent, its traffic fallen to the lower double digits."

Prokofy seems to have been upset because Philip suggested that the laws that will regulate Second Life will be those of the various groups in Second Life, rather than uniform rules clearly established by the Lindens. Philip notably said in the podcast that Second Life would probably become:

"A place with a lot of different countries in it. The web kind of identity but mostly a big set of differing communities. Not like a country but a place that has its own laws. …its character and its law will be driven more by the groups that are in it than we as the creator of the country could do."

Note that Philip explicitly said "not like a country." Prokofy, in top form, concludes: "The King, the Sovereign, abdicates his responsibility, ceding all power to … various FlashMobs, SmartMobs, and just plain LynchMobs."

Enter the Lawyers

Shortly thereafter, the legal experts come upon the stage. There had already been, in late 2005, a short-lived legal experiment called the Second Life Supreme Court (SLSC). An article in the SL Herald described this as follows:

"The idea is that residents may take disputes to the court to be settled according to The SL Community Standards, Ralph Koster's 'Declaration of the Rights of Avatars', and general 'real world' principles of law and dispute resolution (e.g. international law, trademark law, international decisions that involve gaming, etc). What we especially like is that residents may also bring suit against Lindens!"

This proposal, which fizzled, was lightweight compared to Ashcroft Burnham's ambitious scheme. Ashcroft was part of a group that wanted to enhance the legal system of the Neufreistadt democracy. But Neufreistadt being a tiny backwater, Ashcroft soon set his sights wider. In November 2006 he started a thread called Bringing law to SecondLife. (Why is this thread found on Second Life Home Page, rather than on the official SL forum?) Ashcroft's thread begins:

"Last Saturday, in a quaint little medieval Bavarian-themed island sim somewhere in the West of the grid, a group of people met to discuss, and then agreed upon, a proposal. It had been discussed and debated for the previous two months, and, although had caused some controversy, had garnered considerable support. It was a proposal which many hope will revolutionise parts of SecondLife, and bring law to a hitherto unruly world. The place was Neufreistadt (formally Neualtenburg), and the proposal was the creation of a professional judiciary, and, separately, a means of bringing that judiciary to the wider echelons of SecondLife."

This proposal immediately drew volleys of hostile criticism, worsened by the maladroit presentation of the project. For example, the original post sounds like a job announcement: "We will soon be accepting applications from landowners, or those who wish to become landowners, on the mainland and other private islands to join our Confederation." And an extract from the detailed proposal document (for which the link is unfortunately broken) seems to suggest that landowners joining the group would be putting themselves under *someone else's* jurisdiction:

"People who hold land on the mainland would put their land under the jurisdiction of our government and then have title to that land granted to them by our government."

Ashcroft's proposal was thus vigorously rejected on the forum. The very first resident to add a comment to Ashcroft's thread was Prokofy Neva, who stated: "This is one landowner who will definitely not be joining this strong-armed fake 'democracy'".

Prokofy's position was that the Lindens should provide the missing Second Life government. Around that time, in late 2006, Prokofy wrote a SL Herald article called Resident Government?, reacting to an announcement on the Official Linden Blog, about a planned overhaul of the Abuse Report system. Prokofy noted that rather than adding staff to review the 2,000 abuse reports coming in per day, the Lindens proposed to devolve responsibility for policing the world and adjudicating disputes to residents themselves. Up until then, Linden Lab's main response to griefing had been to add to the menu of grief-fighting tools, such as refining bans by name or payment status, enabling individual responses such as prevention of object creation, muting of unwanted sights and ejection of trespassing avatars, and enabling avatars to hide their online status. Since these technical solutions proved insufficient to stop the griefing, the Lindens again brought up the idea of resident self-management, to deal with the problem. Prokofy noted: "Responses have predictably expressed fears of a resident government coming down the pike." Prokofy obviously shared these fears.

Resident government advanced in the form of Ashcroft Burnham's Local Government Study Group (LGSG). Prokofy Neva attended one of the early LGSG meetings, held on February 17, 2007 in Neufreistadt. Prokofy, who posted the transcript on his blog, noted that the meeting was run by Ashcroft, with the help of "his sidekick Michel Manen, about who I think we have to begin worrying, too." Poor Ashcroft tried to keep the meeting on track despite endless interruptions from a hostile day-old alt, an anarchist who jumped onto the meeting table to hold a demonstration, and a particle attack half-way through. Ashcroft explained that his project was to develop a set of "tools" that could be used by various in-world governments, which might have a range of different configurations. Everyone at the meeting was very concerned about democracy, many objecting to the suggestion that only land-owners in certain governments would be able to vote. As a lawyer Ashcroft brought up the question of how to enforce contracts, proposing that land could be taken away as a punishment for offenses. Prokofy stated that they should all start instead by asking the Lindens for a Magna Carta and a federal government which would establish rule of law throughout Second Life. Prokofy however seemed primarily interested in repeatedly accusing Ashcroft of proceeding in an undemocratic manner. This tried Ashcroft's patience to the point where he threatened to mute Prokofy. But when the meeting finally got to the discussion of naming officers for the group, no one present actually volunteered for the job, showing just how isolated Ashcroft actually was.

Most trying of all for Ashcroft's group was that they even failed to sell their ideas to their own Neufreistadt community. The majority of the elected local government found the proposed legal system entirely too complicated for the little Neufreistadt city-state, the active membership of which hardly surpassed more than a few dozen avatars. So Ashcroft packed his bags and founded instead the Metaverse Republic group, which is still trying to establish an independent virtual-world legal system "with real powers of enforcement originating in user-created tools, and a democratic parliament."

The Full Circle

Meanwhile, what kind of government were the Lindens providing? Up until mid-2007 the general tendency was a long-term evolution towards *less intervention* than they had exercised in the early days. This was well described by Gwyneth Llewelyn in her post From Welfare State To Laissez-Faire Capitalism, written in June 2007. When Gwyneth joined Second Life in 2004, Linden Lab had a policy of subsidizing content. After the introduction of the Linden Dollar and the establishment of the Second Life economy, to promote more content Linden Lab introduced weekly stipends, subsidies for hosting events, and "ratings" whereby stipends were increased for parcels that attracted crowds. These practices were eventually abused and had to be stopped, but they were symptomatic of what Gwyneth calls the "welfare state" approach to stimulating the economy. This approach remained feasible even in the period of the telehubs, when Second Life still felt like one large community.

But Second Life continued to grow, and the extraordinary growth in the number of sims and avatars lead to "balkanisation": the single community split into a multitude of different communities. The "welfare state" approach became infeasible, and Linden Lab abandoned most "regulatory" activities, backing away from any role of intervening in Second Life. Technical support was "tiered," giving only paying customers access to privileged support, which is expensive to maintain. An attempt was made to transfer responsibility for Abuse Reports to the "local authorities" (owners of private islands), who would deal with abuse locally, and to have adult content flagged by residents themselves.

As the population and economy developed, so did cases of fraud. In Second Life business had always been unregulated: there were no central regulatory authorities or abuse reports for fraud. With the growth of Second Life, the frequency and gravity of cases of fraud became alarming. The frequency and gravity of griefing attacks grew at the same pace. Just at the time when Linden Lab was withdrawing from "governmental" intervention, the need for such intervention was becoming more and more obvious. So eventually the balance began to swing back the other way, towards greater intervention.

The past year has seen a steady stream of new measures implemented by Linden Lab to regulate in-world activities. These different measures were recently summed up by Hamlet Au in a blog post entitled Lindens Limit Libertarianism. The first step was a ban on age play (avatars simulating pedophilic sex) and other "broadly offensive" behavior, in May 2007. Then in July 2007 gambling was prohibited (this was primarily for legal reasons, since Linden Lab is located in California, where such gambling is illegal). The biggest step in terms of economic intervention was the banning of unregulated banks in January of this year, in response to widespread fraud related to pyramid schemes with unsustainable interest rates. Then on February 8th of this year Jack Linden announced the creation of a Department of Public Works, aimed at "improving the experience for residents living on or visiting the Linden mainland." This constituted a public admission that the lack of zoning has created ugly urban blight throughout the continental land masses. And on February 13th, in response to an energetic campaign of protest on the part of Ordinal Malaprop, Prokofy Neva and others, the Lindens issued a measure banning flagrant ad farms.

Echoing Gwyneth's analysis, Hamlet proffers: "The Lindens are restructuring the mainland into a communitarian society it once was in 2003." And he predicts that more prohibitions will go into effect soon, such as measures concerning bot farms or camping chairs.

Linden Lab thus seems to have come full circle. After an early period of deliberate invention to stimulate and to structure the Second Life economy, in the spirit of Philip Linden's "building a country," they gradually pulled back from in-world intervention, as the number of avatars and sims exploded beyond their ability to cope. But the spectacular growth in Second Life was accompanied by a corresponding growth in fraud, griefing and other forms of abuse. So Linden Lab has been obliged to resuscitate the policy of active intervention - including in areas where they have never intervened before.

The Lindens seem to have finally realised that they are indeed "building a country." 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....

READ MORE...

Linden Help Needs Help

Second Life journalist Wagner James Au recently wrote a blog post asking: Is Second Life's User Interface Cursed by Knowledge? He was referring to an inevitable Curse of Knowledge which affects experts in any field, preventing them from imagining what it is like to be a newcomer to that field. Wagner James Au suggests that the main reason Second Life loses so many new users is that the user interface is overly complex and confusing. But he doubts that either Linden Labs, or any developers working for them, will be able to improve the interface, because the curse of knowledge prevents them from understanding why the interface is hard for beginners to use.

As a beginner in Second Life, my initial reaction was somewhat different from what Wagner James Au describes. The interface struck me as being on a par with most software interfaces, neither better nor worse. What intimidated me more was to find myself suddenly immersed in a new public space, inhabited by other avatars, before I knew how to use the interface. I found Orientation Island poorly conceived, and struggled much longer than necessary "to get even minimally proficient," as Au puts it. But by far the greatest obstacle that I experienced had nothing to do with either the user interface or Orientation Island. What horrified me the most was to discover how useless the official Second Life tutorials and support systems are.

Consider the typical path a beginner might take in searching for written help. The natural place to start is the Second Life website. At the top of the main page are five headings, one of which is "support." The beginner thus clicks on "support" to open the Support Page.

This link takes a long time to open. When the support page finally comes up, one finds a central heading called "Locations for Support Information," under which is a promising link called "Knowledge Base and Solution Finder." Clicking on this link merely expands a paragraph that begins "We've created an extensive (and frequently updated) set of articles about Second Life," and ends with "You can log into this system by visiting the login form at the bottom of this page."

Wipe-out! Nothing drives a web surfer away like the requirement to login before you can read a page. Most surfers have to really, really want to read a page before they will take the time to fill out a login form. So you've lost most of them already.

Let us suppose that the user is sufficiently motivated to fill out this login form. Submitting the form opens a page which contains a number of links, including one called "Knowledge Base." Clicking on "Knowledge Base" opens a new window which is a marvel of poor design. I had to study this window for a long time before I discovered the drop-down menu hiding at the far left of the screen. When I finally got the knowledge base open, I found a sub-heading called "Controls and Getting Around," which seems aimed at beginners. Opening this sub-heading gives a three-page list of questions, of which the first ten questions are:

*Animation Guide
*Are you with CSI?
*Assorted Tips & Tricks - Video Tutorial
*How can I find a combat region?
*How do I change the time of day to something like sundown? It's a little too bright.
*How do I fly higher? I want to see what's on top of this building.
*How do I get the Near Me tab in the Communicate window to reappear if I delete it accidentally?
*How do I look at something from a different angle?
*How do I make it brighter? It's so dark I can't see anything.
*How do I open the Client (or Server) menu?

This is just a disorganized grab-bag of miscellaneous questions assembled in a haphazard fashion. I glanced at a few of them, and decided I was wasting my time. I moved off of the page in disgust, in search of something that might resemble a real tutorial.

Let's go back to the Second Life main page. At the bottom of this page there are numerous additional links. Those which seem possibly helpful to a beginner include: "FAQ," "Second Life Wiki," and "Tutorials." The FAQ are too short, and the Tutorials link goes to a set of videos. These videos may be of interest, but I skipped them as too time consuming. I'm looking for text I can navigate through quickly. So I went to the wiki.

The Main Page of the Official Second Life Wiki says nothing about tutorials. In boxes on the right-hand side of the page, however, the following two links caught my eye:

*LSL Portal - A (soon-to-be) complete reference guide to the LSL language.
*Creation Portal - Information about building and designing in Second Life.

It was too early for me to start building and designing: I just wanted basic information on using the interface. So I tried clicking on the LSL Portal. Fortunately I already knew that LSL means Linden Scripting Language - the LSL Portal page nowhere says what LSL means! The second paragraph on the LSL Portal page says:

"Want to learn LSL? Try one of the LSL Tutorials."

On the off-chance that I might find a beginner's guide there, I clicked on the link to open the LSL Tutorials page. On this page, at the top of the list of LSL tutorials, I finally found what seems to be a tutorial for beginning Second Life users, called Getting Ready to learn LSL. However, a quick glance reveals how inadequate this strange document is. Consider for example the text of section 3, "Learn how to really move around," which goes as follows:

"Learn how to really move around. We next learned how to 'walk', to 'sit', to 'stand up', to 'fly'. We learned how to 'search' for 'places' and how to 'teleport'. That was learning enough to begin exploring. We also learned how to use vehicles and drive around."

The above paragraph apparently describes the training that the new avatar goes through on Orientation Island. It thus makes no pretence to serve as an actual tutorial.

Let's go back once more to the Main Page of the Second Life Website. Looking again at the links at the top of the page, this time we will select the link called "Community." On the Community Page, in the vertical menu running down the left side of the page, is a link to the forum. The beginner clicks on the link to open the forum page, and finds this message: "You must log in to view the Second Life forums."

You must log in just to read the forums! Why is this? I can understand having to log in to contribute to the forums. But what sensitive confidential information do the forums contain that must be hidden from the public eye?

Oh well, the beginner says, let me log in so I can read the forums. But when I logged in to Second Life, and tried again to look at the forums, I still got the page with the following message:

"If you receive this error after successfully logging in to other parts of the Second Life website, please make sure that:
*You have logged in to Second Life at least once with your account.
*You have valid payment info on file for your account, if your account was created after August 20, 2006. You can update your payment information here. You don't need to have a Premium account."

In fact, to get permission to look at the forum, I had to send an email to the support team. I received from them a special password to open my access. A few days after launching the request, I was finally able to search the forums. But a forum is probably the least efficient of all possible ways to find a useful response to a specific question. People search through forums when all else has failed, because sometimes, after great expenditure of time and effort, you may finally find what you were looking for. But anyone who has ever searched for help on a forum knows that a forum is no substitute for a tutorial or an on-line help.

There remains In-World Help. The user interface includes a drop-down Help menu. The first item on this menu, "Second Life Help/F1," only sends you to the support website mentioned above. The second item, "In-World Help," opens a little window that says "For instant help on dozens of topics, simply press the F1 key!" It also suggests visiting Orientation Island and Help Island. But whenever you touch the F1 key, you just get sent back to the hopeless support website.

There is however a nifty feature in the In-World Help window. If you click on the "Home" button, you get - Google in an in-world window! I was thrilled to discover this way of consulting internet from within Second Life. But by sending us to Google, the Linden Labs Help function seems to be admitting that, to find help with Second Life, the best bet is - to look elsewhere.
READ MORE...

Fools for Tools

What project will Danton Sideways develop in Second Life? I thought I might go into business, or get involved in CDS politics. But a bit of soul searching has revealed that the Real Danton is above all interested in putting into practice Ivan Illich's theory of convivial tools.

In Tekki-Wiki Social Club I touched briefly on the subject of tools, in a discussion about wikis, drawing a pertinent comment from Prokofy Neva. Prokofy has presented his own take on the use of the word "tools" by Linden Labs in his Life Among the Lindens post, as follows:

"Tools! My God, I should have realized long ago that they picked up this rhetoric from Stewart Brand *slaps head* -- the old Whole Earth Catalogue had tools for living, as they called it, and we used to spend hours poring over its pages, reading about old-fashioned ice picks that were actually the perfect thing to use on stubborn weeds in your garden - or whatever. It was even more dorky than the LL Bean Catalogue. It was always about drying and grinding millet seeds and making millet loafs (whenever I think of that era of the 1960s and all that Whole Earth stuff, I think of millet loafs, and how goddamn hard they were to eat, with like 92 different grains and raw vegetables in them, and how we used to force them down anyway; in fact, what they did was make food taste like a tool...)"

Good old Prok – always ready to pop your balloon for you. Prokofy's role, as I see it, is to challenge our habitual ways of thinking, to act as a gadfly to force us to reflect more deeply. Prokofy is the sort of opponent who, if properly listened to, teaches you more than your friends ever will.

Because of course the Whole Earth Catalog was mother's milk to Danton Sideways. The Whole Earth Catalog came first, and Ivan Illich only became important to me later, in the nineteen-eighties, when I learned how Illich's theory of convivial tools had influenced personal computer pioneer Lee Felsenstein.

Why do I now refer to Ivan Illich more than to Stewart Brand? One reason is that Illich provides a specific theory about tools, while Brand has always focused on practice (albeit a practice of spreading new theories). But there are also basic differences between the approach theorized by Illich, and the approach put into practice by Brand. I will try to show that these two approaches are complementary.

The key difference is that Brandian practice is implicitly elitist, while Illichian theory is explicitly anti-elitist. The Brandian approach has always relied on a new Promethean elite, supposedly wiser than the traditional unenlightened elite, which is to bring "alternative" tools to the citizen. Thus the Whole Earth Catalog was produced by a team of specialists (and even those who contributed simply by writing letters to the editor formed a sort of elite), the CoEvolution Quarterly presented articles written by experts, the participants at the first Hackers Conference were hand-picked, and the Global Business Network assembles a stellar cast.

Illich, on the contrary, persistently criticized professional elites. The recurring theme throughout his books is that the professionalization of knowledge tends to disempower the average citizen. In Deschooling Society he demonstrates how professional teachers can prevent learning, in Tools for Conviviality he demonstrates how professional technologists can prevent community appropriation of tools, and in Medical Nemesis he demonstrates how professional doctors can prevent self-healing. The basic thrust of Illich's thought is to encourage individuals and communities to take back the control of knowledge which has been monopolized by professionals.

Thus, with respect to tools, Illich's proposed solution is community appropriation of technology. Stewart Brand has of course always been concerned with community. But Brand tends to see the tools coming to the community from the outside. The right tools are supposed to empower the citizen, without there being a need for citizens themselves to be involved in tool development. For Illich, the community only really appropriates the tool when the community itself participates in developing the tool.

A case study of the Illichian model of community tool development is found in the history of the personal computer. In the early nineteen-seventies Lee Felsenstein was working in San Francisco as chief engineer for the non-profit organisation Resource One, which had obtained the donation of an obsolete XDS 940 time-sharing computer. At a time when the Internet was no more than a research network linking a handful of campuses, Resource One set up a few public terminals at community gathering places around the SF Bay Area, to serve as electronic bulletin boards. In 1974 they installed a showcase connection at the Whole Earth Access store on Shattuck Avenue, using a fancy Hazeltine 1500 CRT terminal, which they leased with a service contract. One day the service technician working on it dropped the circuit board for the keyboard, breaking the ceramic pack on one of the chips. That experience started Felsenstein thinking about how to make such a system survive in a public access environment.

Felsenstein had just read Ivan Illich’s book "Tools for Conviviality," and was impressed by Illich's description of how radios were repaired in the jungles of Central America. The radio technology was sufficiently accessible to peasant users and brought out their inherent tendencies to learn. If you tried to fool with a radio, the tube might overheat, but it would survive and give you some warning that you had done something wrong. The radio could thus be used in the jungle environment because it "grew up" a cohort of people around it who knew how to maintain it.

To transpose such a model to computers, which require perfect reliability at every clock cycle, was particularly challenging. Felsenstein nonetheless convened a discussion group around the concept of a convivial computer, on the hypothesis that a new type of computer could only survive if it grew a computer club around itself. Among the subjects discussed by the small group (which soon fizzled out) was Don Lancaster's article in Radio Electronics magazine, telling how to build a "TV Typewriter," which did nothing more than print characters on a home TV screen. Felsenstein was interested in this possibility of constructing a little box, for about a hundred dollars worth of parts, which you could connect to a TV set to make a rudimentary terminal. He worked on developing an improved version that used random access memory chips. Felsenstein realised that if you installed the random access memory in a simple computer, you could then use that same memory to run the terminal. He therefore defined a terminal that used a three card set: a memory card, a card to put data into the memory, and a card to get information out of the memory and put it to the screen. To connect the three cards he defined a 44-pin bus structure that used cheap Vector connectors. He has suggested that this was the genesis of the architecture of the personal computer.

But to carry our story forward, a few months later, in January 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 hobby kit was advertised in Popular Electronics magazine. That advertisement catalyzed a meeting of computer enthusiasts grouped around the People’s Computer Center in Menlo Park. The meeting was attended by Lee Felsenstein, Steve Wozniak and many others who went on to play key roles in the development of the personal computer. The Altair is considered to have been the first "microcomputer," but it was in fact little more than a microcomputer chip inside a box. Those at the meeting soon realized that they, as a group, probably possessed more computer knowledge than the team that had thrown together the Altair. This group, which later called itself the Homebrew Computer Club, met regularly over the next year or so to carry on informal discussions of how to construct personal computing devices, in a collegial atmosphere of shared enthusiasm, rather than commercial interest. The very name suggests the extent to which this group embodied Felsenstein's original Illichian idea of a "computer club" to "grow up" a new type of computer – which is precisely what the Homebrew group did.

The Homebrew Computer Club was in fact a cross between the Brandian Promethean approach and the Illichian participatory approach, since it brought together an elite, but working on a participatory model. This is one way that the two approaches can be complementary. Another way is for a Promethean elite to bring new tools to a community, and for the community to then appropriate the tools and participate in their further development. This is essentially how things happen with free and open source software. Highly specialised programmers develop a software package, and then turn the source code over to a community of users, who participate in further development by finding bugs and adding new functionalities. Going a step further, when the Promethean elite deliberately sets out to design tools that can be easily modified and appropriated by the users, the two approaches fuse together into a new paradigm.

Another of Illich's key contributions is his use of the word "tool" to refer to all sorts of human constructs, rather than just physical instruments. The Whole Earth Catalog had already used the word "tool" in a very wide sense – more than half of the items in the Catalog were in fact books. But Illich makes this extension of meaning explicit, building on a tradition exemplified by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, who in the early nineteen-fifties used the word "technique" to include all of the various administrative methods used by modern state bureaucracies. Illich for example specifically calls legal mechanisms "tools." Certain other thinkers even refer to ideas as a type of tools: see for example Daniel Dennett's paper on Making Tools for Thinking.

Which brings us back to Prokofy Neva. If the word "tool" referred only to physical instruments, it would be hard to refute this argument from his Life Among the Lindens post:

"The tool thing is loosely based on that old idea of 'give a man a fish, and you have fed him for one day; teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime'. The problem with this facile adage of Western do-goodism is that people in civil war in Africa have a different problem. My God, they know how to fish, if they even have fish (a lot of them are in the desert). The problem is their kleptocratic governments steal their poles or poison the waters or chase them off their land with fratricidal wars. A man in Darfur needs a fish, not a pole, and somebody should attend to the larger problem of all the well-poisoning and cattle-slaughtering and compensate the villages for that destruction."

Prokofy's point is conclusive if by tools we mean only physical instruments such as fishing poles. The first need of poor people in many countries is not for material tools, but to be liberated from the corruption and repression of their own governments. But the question is how to achieve that. The international community can play a role, on the Promethean model of bringing help from without. But it remains critically important for such communities to develop their own internal capacity to struggle for democracy. Thus the pertinence of the Illichian model of development by the community of its own "tools" in the largest sense, including the types of associations, organisations and thought-models that can enhance empowerment in the local context.

How does all of this apply to Second Life? For more on that, tune in next week, same time, same URL…
READ MORE...

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...

Tekkie-Wiki Social Club

The "tekkie-wiki" (also written "tekki-wiki" or "tekki-wikinista") is another Second Life concept invented by Prokofy Neva. As he explained in an interview with Hamlet Au, Prokofy sees the tekkie-wiki as a "collective expert technical brainstorm to collaborate on projects outside of uninitiated scrutiny." Prokofy holds that tekkie-wiki is part of the ideology of the Feted Inner Core, which is a supposed group of talented content-creators, encouraged and subsidized by the Lindens, and forming the established and recognized elite at the world’s center.

Prokofy’s August 2005 post What is the Tekkie-Wiki? reproduces his original definition of the term on the SL forum, which can be summarized as follows: "Tekkie wiki is the technically elite subculture of SL that gets jazzed on showing off their skills in prim building and scripting, but doesn't get excited in delighting joe average user." The post then goes on to criticize the more general culture of wiki websites, among which the best known is Wikipedia.

A wiki is a website with pages that can be freely created and edited by anyone. The wiki principle probably inspired Linden Labs when they first decided to let residents create their own objects. Second Life is in fact a sort of wiki in three dimensions. There is however a key difference, in that Linden Labs also established individual ownership over objects, and residents can only edit objects that belong to them.

Prokofy's criticism of wiki websites, taking Wikipedia as a case in point, centers on lack of accountability, and on hidden control by an inside elite. Old-fashioned media had an educated editorial board and a director who was a tangible figure with social accountability. The accountability of a wiki is supposedly provided by its self-corrective nature: anyone can see and correct false information. But this mechanism has shortcomings, and wikis are notoriously unreliable. Wikis do however remove traditional obstacles that prevented all kinds of smart or helpful people from sharing their knowledge with others. But rather than being open and democratic, as they are touted to be, wikis tend to be dominated by insider groups, characterized by secrecy, apprenticing, hazing, and arrogance. For Prokofy, the basic problem is that a wiki is a collective, and that any collective tends to evolve towards the type of closed group-think that characterized the Soviet Union.

But what exactly does Prokofy mean by a "collective." Human society is by definition a collective endeavour, so the term needs honing down. I suggest that Prokofy is referring to a particular type of collective organisation, one which steamrollers over the individual and the individual's rights, in the name of the "common good."

Before I came to Second Life as Danton Sideways, I spent a few months contributing to Wikipedia, under the name of Redeyed Treefrog. I notably created a long article on the History of Wikis. I also created a number of shorter articles, some of which were deleted because the only sources they cited were web-based. One of these articles, on the subject of Sunir Shah - who is discussed further below - was deleted after minimal discussion by a self-appointed committee, assembled during the Christmas break, at a time when my attention was on other things. I logged on one day to find the debate closed, because the 5 day time limit set for the deletion discussion was over, and the article gone, without my having even had a chance to participate in the debate. With some difficulty I identified the administrator who had initiated the deletion, and left a message on his page saying I would like to discuss the matter by email, but there was no reply.

This whole proceeding reeks of "secrecy, apprenticing, hazing, and arrogance," to use Prokofy's words. Being relatively new to Wikipedia, I have neither expert knowledge of the arcane system, nor a social network of other contributors to turn to for help. The administrator in question is an anonymous contributor, with no visible hierarchical superior. I find myself in the position of a powerless individual crushed by a faceless bureaucracy, like the hero of a Kafka novel.

I nonetheless remain an enthusiastic fan of the wiki format. Danton Sideways is a self-proclaimed disciple of Ivan Illich, whose philosophy involved returning to people the control over knowledge and techniques. Wikis are a prime example of how this can be done. Of course Wikipedia is unreliable, and it is at present completely gangrened by an elitist inner core, but it is still an amazing repository of collective knowledge, and one that could only have been constructed through massively distributed collaboration.

My diagnosis is that the problem has relatively little to do with the wiki format per se, and everything to do with a deficiency of internal democracy and a lack of safeguards to protect individual rights. New technology engenders new social structures, which at first take haphazard, and typically elitist, forms. Specific efforts must be made to improve emerging social systems, and to make them more democratic. It took European culture some two thousand years to develop the forms of mass democracy we have today, and in view of their poor present performance in the matter of human rights, we can only hope that the job is still far from finished.

What can be done to improve the way wikis function? I might give an example taken from the bit of research I did on the subject. It seems to me that there are three key people in the history of wikis: Ward Cunningham, Sunir Shah and Jumbo Wales. Ward Cunningham invented the first wiki, called WikiWikiWeb, and Jimbo Wales founded Wikipedia . But who, you may ask, is Sunir Shah?

Sunir Shah is a young internet enthusiast and forum moderator who showed up one day on WikiWikiWeb and started writing on the subject of WikiOnWiki, which means thinking about wikis, what they are, how they work. But Ward Cunningham and his associates wanted to restrict WikiWikiWeb to specialized discussion of computer programming. So Sunir left in 2001 and created MeatballWiki, the first wiki devoted to thinking about wikis. Sunir and his friends at MeatballWiki developed a range of concepts that have become fundamental to wiki culture. The first is that a wiki is a community.

The idea of on-line communities is nothing new. As noted by Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, one of the seven design goals underlying the creation of the WELL in 1985 was that "it would be a community," and WELL participant Howard Rheingold first coined the term "virtual community" in 1987. But Sunir and friends were the first to apply the idea of community to wikis. To see what this produced, the best is simply to read the pages of MeatballWiki. One spin-off was the concept of barnraising, which is a concerted group effort to help an individual implement a project, which could even be the creation of a new wiki. Another innovation was the practice of awarding virtual barnstars in recognition of outstanding efforts on the part of individual contributors. The MeatballWiki team also extensively contributed to developing Interwiki, which denotes various methods for linking together existing wikis.

Wikipedia did take a number of ideas from MeatballWiki, such as Barnstars and Interwiki. But as my personal experience indicates, Wikipedia seems to have evolved more into a soul-less collective machine, instead of into a self-conscious community concerned about its individual members. The Wikipedia social system thus appears to be still in its infancy, and characterized by the type of elitist, insider manipulation that Prokofy denounces on Second Life.

The emergence of elites is natural, and there is nothing to gain from trying to prevent individuals or groups from achieving excellence. As suggested above, the solution to tekkie-wiki elitism may instead have something to do with developing community and democracy.

Do we foster community then by asking the elites to think more of the well-being of others, to be more concerned for "joe average user," as Prokofy puts it? That approach might move things a bit in the right direction, but creators and entrepreneurs are notorious for looking out for number one, and in general only seek to serve their customers to the extent that doing so increases their own business.

Another possible approach, and one which is in line with the philosophy of Ivan Illich, would be to focus one's efforts on increasing the tekkie-wiki capacities of all of the other users. This could be done for example by developing better user support systems, such as tutorials and on-line help, and by promoting the formation of social self-help groups for the uninitiated, throughout the many different virtual communities flourishing within Second Life. The possible implementation of this approach is a vast subject. To sum it all up in a simple formula: let’s create some Tekkie-Wiki Social Clubs for the rest of us.
READ MORE...

Spammed by Prok

When Prokofy Neva adds his two cents to someone’s blog, the result can resemble a spam attack. Out of the ten posts existing yesterday on Danton’s blog, six have been hit with long comments by Prokofy, signing in as Dyerbrookme. On three of the posts, he made two comments rather than one. And several of Prok’s comments are longer than the original posts.

Danton Sideways is flattered to have received this attention from Second Life’s foremost pundit. As I indicated in my post about Second Life Loudmouths, I find Prokofy to be consistently interesting and informative. Moreover, his incisive critical analyses help me to understand this scene I recently joined in creating my avatar on Second Life. As is his general wont, however, Prokofy has gone into exhaustive detail in responding to my posts. It may therefore be helpful if I provide a brief summary of Prokofy’s comments, for those who lack the time to read through them all.

It could be noted in passing that Prokofy suggests that there is room for a Second Life newspaper giving "news, satire, cartoons, classifieds that was not tied to the land baron business, or banks, or to a TV station," and that he offers additional explanations for the phenomenon that I have called Second Life Blues. But the main gist of his comments concern Second Life economics and politics, so let us turn to those subjects without further ado.

Prokofy reacts strongly to my question about whether he is a member of the Second Life oligarchy, up at the top of the economic pyramid, alongside the likes of Anshe Chung. Harrison Randolfe had already mentioned in a note added to his famous pyramid scheme article: "I thank Prokofy for enlightening me to some of the bitter realities experienced by those on top of Second Life's economic order." In his comment on the present blog, however, Prokofy denies being "on top" of the pyramid, stating: "the land barons, while famous for having Anshe Chung supposedly making a real-life million, are collectively, much lower wage-earners than the content creators" such as animation wizards Craig Altman, Owen Khan or Cristiano Midnight, or dress designer Simone Stern. Prokofy observes that land barons have far greater costs (tier, prefabs) and spend more hours doing customer service, and claims that he personally is quite low on the pyramid because he deals in mainland rentals: "any island dealer with 20-30 islands probably makes double what I do, because islands simply sell better and are more fully occupied." He concludes that if most of the Second Life business people, including himself, billed for their hours, they would break even or lose. (Note that this was the main thesis of my post anyway - one which Prokofy seems to confirm.)

Prokofy then gets more positive and corroborates Gwyneth Llewelyn's encouragements, suggesting that there still exist many possibilities for opening up new businesses in Second Life. He points to the many newcomers from outside the Anglo-Saxon countries (Brazilians, Dutch, Russians) who have lowered the prices in rentals, services, and widget businesses, and added better service, notably by avoiding the tendency to over-script everything. The most successful are those who log on and stand behind their store counter day and night. Prokofy also notes that there are many content creators making money from prefabs, furniture, animations, clothing and inventions to do various things.

Prokofy’s reaction to Madame Irma’s pronouncements is of a different sort. Here what he objects to is Madame Irma’s insistence that "nobody shops in malls anymore," seeing in it an echo of the snobbish disdain that the Feted Inner Core had expressed for Anshe's "tacky" malls, before economic logic obliged many of them to join the mall scene. Prokofy claims on the contrary that people do still shop in malls: currently popular shopping sims such as Tableau are essentially higher-end malls on private islands. He does however agree with Madame that the overwhelming majority of sales in Second Life are currently made through search ads, despite the tiny minority that still make their fortunes through word of mouth (which is undeniably important), and that loudly insist on the forums that "nobody" uses search and that it is "broken". Prokofy concludes that people with little boutiques and a special clientele refuse to believe in malls, but in studying Second Life economy one must set aside blinders of class taste and go to see what is happening in the field. (Danton did try to do that, but his first excursion took him no further than Madame Irma’s world-view.)

Prokofy’s reactions to Danton’s political musings are mostly concentrated in his comments on my Troubled Sleep post. He says the leftists in CDS don’t need to create a separate leftist city, because CDS is already leftist, in that the land is not for sale on the open market. What does he mean by that? I bought a total of three plots in Colonia Nova, and last week I sold one of them by putting it up for sale "to anyone." It was purchased during my absence by a complete stranger who simply clicked on "pay." Prokofy must be referring to something else, because he tells about how he opened Ravenglass to the general public for sale, and everyone said he would be flash-mobbed by land barons, but he wasn’t. He holds this up as a model for CDS to follow, claiming that the fear of right-wing plotters buying it all up is what prevents the Frieswiththat (his play on the name Neufreistadt) gang from letting the sim become a truly open democracy. According to Prokofy, decent prices and a covenant would be sufficient to prevent that from happening.

And Prokofy repeatedly points to Danton’s unfamiliarity with all of these issues. In one comment he states directly: "Danton, you have to study SL history and economics way more than you have." I’m painfully aware of this. I break out in a cold sweat wondering how I am going to keep up with all the new posts of the main Second Life bloggers - let alone read the past ones! I claim to have clinically identified a condition of in-world avatar anguish, for which I modestly propose the name Danton’s Syndrome. What then will we call this out-of-world obsession with trying to keep up with the Second Life blogs and forums? Since the name "Danton" has already been used, perhaps this separate but related disease, which I again claim to be the first to have clinically identified, could be called the "Sideways Syndrome."
READ MORE...

Benchmarking the Boutiques

With her long comment on my virtual money blog post, Gwyneth Llewelyn started me back on my search for in-world business possibilities.

I thought I should begin by talking to someone with hands-on experience of virtual shopkeeping. I discretely asked friends for the name of an avatar I might interview, and was introduced to a businesswoman who runs a small shop in a distant sim. She willingly answered my questions, but for reasons which will soon be apparent, she desires to remain anonymous. I will just call her Madame Irma.

I met Madame Irma in her boutique, and started off asking questions about shops and shopping in Second Life. She wondered at my curiosity. I told her that I wanted to benchmark Second Life business practices, and was in search of the best stores in Second Life. In my Funny Money post I had summarized Prokofy Neva's history of Anshe Chung's shopping malls, so I asked Madame Irma where to find the best shopping malls on Second Life.

"Malls?" replied Madame Irma, nonplussed. "Nobody needs to shop in malls any more. Only a newbie would travel to go shopping. You just open Search, go to the All tab, and type what you're looking for. When you find the name of a shop that interests you, you can teleport there. But you can also shop on the SL Exchange Marketplace or at the Onrez site."

My personal experience of shopping had started in my own neighbourhood, with the purchase of a roman chair at Torin Golding's Roma outlet in Colonia Nova. I had clicked on a picture of the chair to pay for it, and received the chair into inventory, with no shopkeeper present. I had then gone to the large Emporio Romani store in Colonia, which is full of panel pictures of clothing, but had wondered how to try something on before buying. Madame Irma explained that some shops let you try samples. To demonstrate, she put on a sample of hair that she had in her inventory. The hair sat neatly in place, but above her head there hovered a box, which could only be removed by buying the sample. She took the hair sample off and put it back into her inventory.

I realised how little experience I have with Second Life shopping. I should get out of CDS more often and see the (virtual) world. But my education was only beginning. Madame Irma started talking about speciality shops. "RAC is the best for skin," she explained. "For sexbeds it used to be Strokerz, but now there are many shops. And XCITE corners the market on, well, penises and such." I already knew something about this, having read the Wired Guide to Second Life. Madame Irma went on: "All newbies get taken to XCITE at some point. And there are nice themed malls, like the BDSM malls."

It was my turn to be flabbergasted: "You said nobody goes to malls anymore. But now you say there are whole malls just for bondage, dominance and sado-masochism." Madame Irma could only confirm: "OMG yes," she assured me, "BDSM is very big on Second Life."

Talking about skins reminded me of a web page that I had seen, about a sim with a shop that sells dragon avatars. I mentioned to Madame Irma that I fancied the idea of being a dragon for a while. "You are so bored," Madame Irma replied. I was afraid that she had said I was "boring," but I checked the chat history, and she had indeed said "bored." However, on Second Life "bored" appears to be a derogatory term. After about a quarter of an hour in-world, some 50% of newbies announce: "I'm bored." Those are the ones who never come back. Myself I've been endlessly fascinated since the first moment, so my reptilian fantasies are not from boredom. I just think it would be great fun to fly around as a huge dragon. I could scare little children…. I could eat newbies! Second Life tends to bring out the hidden side of everyone's nature. For some it is BDSM. Apparently my hidden nature is to be a fire-breathing griefer.

Talking with Madame Irma made me realise that it is much too early for me to do benchmarking about Second Life businesses. I've got to do more serious Second Life shopping myself, before I can start thinking of selling anything to anyone else.
READ MORE...

Second Life Blues (Danton's Syndrome)

Second Life can be a euphoric experience. It offers seemingly unlimited possibilities for identity, for creation and for friendship. Land can be bought quite cheaply, and one can either make or buy the house of one's dreams, as well as everything needed to get comfortably installed. By joining a multitude of groups one can build an ever-growing personal network of friends and associates. Thus one's avatar moves into the virtual world, invests time and energy, and develops a life.

But there seems to be a down side. Sometimes when I log off, I am filled with a vague sadness, a sort of anguish. After a particularly severe bout of such feelings, I logged back in, and found someone to chat with. "I've got the Second Life blues," I said. "Does that exist? Does anyone talk about it?" But my friend changed the subject.

I thought about this anguish, and found a number of plausible explanations. The virtual world is a place in a very literal sense, and behind the avatars are real people. But the virtuality gives this place and these people a set of highly specific attributes, some of which are, to say the least, inconvenient. One major attribute of places and people on Second Life is that they are impermanent. Builds can disappear from one day to the next, and whole sims can drop out of the virtual world. Avatars in the best of cases tend to be intermittent, and in the worst cases just disappear, either for extended periods, or permanently. How many times have I logged in to find my sim completely empty, because the avatars are off-line? And in my short Second Life I've already seen a number of avatars take their leave, the consequences of which can be exacerbated by the anonymity of their real-world identities. After one of these departures I asked a friend if there were any known reasons for the sudden withdrawal. The friend only said: "Oh, you get used to that here. The key word in Second Life is 'Second.' Avatars come and go, and that one will probably be back sooner or later." But some never come back. To the extent that there is a second life, there can also be a second death, and cases of virtual suicide.

Anonymity is another attribute that can have social side-effects. It is well known that the anonymity of on-line forums tends to transform certain participants into trolls, those Internet monsters who procure vicarious pleasure by triggering flame-wars with other forum users. Relationships with other avatars can be similarly brutal, unpredictable and emotionally dangerous. Anonymity can bring out the worst in people, because the lack of social constraints allows them to behave in ways they would avoid in real life.

Has this phenomenon of "Second Life Blues," and its causes, already been scientifically described by others? If not, I claim the invention of the term. Medical syndromes are often named for the doctor that first clinically observed them. If Doctor Danton is the first to write a blog post that gives a precise clinical description of avatar malaise, it would be fitting to call the described set of symptoms "Danton's Syndrome." READ MORE...

Going into Buzz-ness

During the past few weeks the Confederation of Democratic Sims has been in the throes of election campaigns. This election period has been the occasion for the Real Danton to stand up and reveal himself as a "left-libertarian." Ruminating about Second Life politics has also lead me to spin out a paranoid rant about flash-mobbing as a political gambit. But now that I've voted, my attention has already turned back to more serious matters.

I’m still looking for a line of business to go into on Second Life. I've been toying with a few ideas, such as for example creating an in-world travel agency. But what does it mean, in fact, to "create a business" on Second Life? In my rather pessimistic post about virtual money, I suggested that it only means playing at business, since the real-life gains seem to be generally paltry. That post was graced with a long comment by renowned Second Life blogger (and CDS's own) Gwyneth Llewelyn, in which she promotes a more positive point of view.

Gwyneth points out for one thing that there are many other large land barons, in addition to the notorious Anshe Chung with her Dreamland. For example, the Azure Islands, owned and operated by the Australian company DeepThink, directed by Second Life residents Adam Zaius and Nexus Nash, now have a larger landmass than Dreamland. Even smaller barons such as Prokofy Neva and Desmond Shang of Caledon have at least a thousand paying customers each.

Gwyneth also gives numerous examples of promising sectors of economic activity on Second Life, including fashion, education, art, music, lawyers and environmental groups. She even mentions finance, regretting that Linden Labs has made it difficult for the finance subculture to survive in Second Life. In the fashion sector, Gwyneth mentions Ana Lutetia, whose website review of the Second Life fashion scene has become a reference. Gwyneth also refers to the giant education sector on Second Life, noting that "they organise huge venues, sponsor thousands of projects, do RL conferences all the time, and write hundreds of papers." She specifically points to the New Media Corporation as an example of an in-world business that provides services to this education sector.

My initial reaction to Gwyneth's comment was to reiterate my earlier objections about the generally low real-dollar profitability of Second Life economic activity. What do the earnings of the land barons represent in terms of real dollars? Moreover, the big land barons, sitting at the top of the Second Life economic pyramid, hardly represent the average Second Life business owner. In the other sectors, what are the real economic gains of individual entrepreneurs, when translated into US Dollars? The SL fashion sector, including clothing, hair, skins and so on, is undoubtedly enormous, even in real life dollars. But since each separate transaction is for only a tiny amount, one wonders about the net earnings of the individual small creators and entrepreneurs. And for all the size of the Second Life education sector, how many large in-world service providers can it actually support?

My objections undoubtedly contain an element of truth. But I've recently come across additional information which corroborates Gwyneth's point of view. Studying the SL History Wiki in more depth, I've been realising how big Second Life and its economy actually are. And I've been reading a fantastic paper by Cory Ondrejka, which has helped me better understand the Second Life "market." Prokofy Neva in a recent post credits the telehubs and Anshe Chung with stimulating in-world creativity, but Cory shows that the key insight in fact came earlier, from Stanford Law professor Laurence Lessig. Cory describes Lessig's contribution as follows: "Specifically, he made the comment that it was a mistake to ask users to create a world but not allow them to own what they had made." The in-world economy and the explosion of resident creativity both spring from this initial decision to allow individual ownership of created objects. Cory goes on to suggest that the in-world economy breaks down the dichotomy between play and profession. In other words, playing at business in Second Life is true economic activity, based on exchange between real individuals linked into networks.

The intensive networking that goes on in Second Life is one of the aspects that drew me here in the first place. In this context, where the boundary between work and play washes away, the definition of "economic activity" also expands beyond mere in-world exchange. For me personally it has little to do with Linden Dollars, and everything to do with audience and notoriety.

Let us say, for example, that I create an in-world travel agency as my Second Life business. This would mean concretely that I would create in-world links to a plain old website, full of pages about possible in-world travel destinations. (Such websites already exist of course, and I may discuss them in a future post). I could then contact landowners to see if they would give me commissions on travellers or buyers that I send their way. But the net profits would probably be rather meagre when exchanged into US Dollars. I might however want to create such a "company" in order to procure something other than Linden Dollar commissions. If the website succeeded, my payoff would be notoriety: I would have captured an audience. And I have in mind a number of ways to profit from that buzz.
READ MORE...

Troubled Sleep

What do you do if your socialist theme park gets flash-mobbed by right-wing trolls disguised as fairies?

Now that the Real Danton has stood up, he can let it all hang out. I've been sleeping fitfully lately. One night as I nodded off, I was seized with the vision that my real life had always been virtual, and that only my Second Life was real. The following morning I awoke out of a frightful nightmare, in which an army of cyborgs was trying to destroy Neufreistadt and the Confederation of Democratic Sims.

The term "socialist theme park" is a pearl from Prokofy Neva, who dropped it into a discussion dealing with the conflict between Ulrika Zugzwang and the democratically-elected Neualternberg usurpers. When I find time I will study this whole story in greater depth, but it does seem that Neualternberg and its successor Neufreistadt were originally of leftist inspiration.

In more recent ages (that is, over about the past year or two), the Confederation of Democratic Sims (CDS) has opened up to a wider population. This is only natural for a democratic country. Any true democracy will have a left, a right and a center, and the litmus test is to see what happens when the elections replace a leftist government by a rightist one, or vice-versa. So the label "socialist" no longer applies to CDS as a whole, and should be reserved for parties such as the Citizen's Social-Democratic Faction, which is just one among the four active political parties.

But I've already expressed the opinion that Second Life is a mirror of reality. This potential of the virtual world to model, perchance to influence, the real world has undoubtedly struck others as well. So let us take that intuition a step further, and imagine a worst-case scenario.

What if a hidden group of right-wing Second Lifers decided that CDS was a hot-bed of subversive ideology that should be smothered, and systematically set about to flash-mob the fledgling democracy, buying hundreds of tiny plots in order to elect an overwhelmingly rightist government? In such a case, the progressive group that had built the sims in the first place, and whose avatars actually spent most of their time there, would find themselves dispossessed by a mob of hostile strangers who only stopped by to vote, before teleporting back to their virtual condominiums.

Be at ease, gentle reader. The Real Danton has been assailed by a paranoid fantasy. But remember the title of Andy Grove's book: Only The Paranoid Survive. Looking ahead to the merely possible cataclysm, I have come up with a proposal for preventive measures to protect the progressive element within this fragile experiment in virtual democracy.

One is tempted to look for solutions in various mechanical devices that might limit the country's "mobbability." One could try to set stringent barriers to citizenship (as do real world countries). One could implement identity verification in order to limit election fraud (this has been discussed on the CDS forum). I think that such measures are important, in order to guarantee that CDS functions as a true democracy. But they fail to reach the core issue.

The central question from my personal point of view is how to maintain a leftist enclave in the midst of this burgeoning democracy. We leftists must let the democratic majority go its own way. If CDS truly succeeds as a democracy, the little group of leftists will be swept aside, submerged beneath waves of avatars of all political tendancies, averaging out to a middle-of-the-road common denominator. But those whose political vision extends beyond formal political democracy to the active promotion of a more just society should still somehow band together. Doing so simply as a minority party of quixotic leftists squeezed to the edges of a consensual crowd that supports the status-quo hardly seems satisfactory.

What I propose is the creation of an explicitly leftist sim, which would take its place within a highly decentralised Confederation of Democratic Sims. In other words, let us create our own leftist city-state, with an explicitly leftist constitution and government, and simultaneously change the CDS constitution to a truly federal model. Each democratic sim would thus become a separate mini-state, with its own local government, and would send elected representatives to the central CDS government. One could imagine that the right-wingers would create their own city-state, the center-of-the-roaders would create theirs, and the Federal Government would become a free-for-all where everyone argues wildly about everything all of the time (and more reasonably about some of the things some of the time). In real life such a geographical separation of the political clans is unthinkable, but in virtual reality it somehow seems to make a lot of sense. This is another illustration of the difference between real life and virtual life, as is the fundamental lack of exchangeability between real money and virtual money. To tell the truth, I find these clear dividing lines between the real and the virtual to be rather comforting.

Of course, if this proposal for a politically-oriented sim did find supporters, the battle would probably then be fought over whether or how to modify the existing CDS constitution in order to allow a more decentralised federal structure. In the last resort, if no agreement were reached on changing the constitution to a truly federal model, the leftist group would have to go off and create its own little island by itself. But that would be unfortunate, because it would diminish the Confederation of Democratic Sims, and remove from it one part of the full democratic spectrum of opinion.
READ MORE...