Rabble Dousing

In my last blog post Fixing Second Life I formulated a proposal concerning a Second Life Parliament.

I wanted to know Prokofy Neva's opinion about it, so I sent an email to the address given on his blog. Prokofy replied, and we exchanged views on the subject, from 16th to the 18th of March. Prokofy has given me permission to post the text of these emails. What follows is a verbatim transcript of the discussion.


Danton Sideways:

Prokofy -

If you get a chance I'd like to know what you think of two proposals I put in my latest blog post:

http://dantonsideways.blogspot.com/2008/03/fixing-second-life.html

One proposal takes your Magna Carta idea further by envisaging a Second Life Parliament. I'm serious! The other takes off from my recent proposal to CDS that they should privatise at least part of their collective property, and imagines using a similar contractual scheme (binding in-world only) for group rehabilitation of patches of mainland.

Just for the fun. - Danton


Prokofy Neva:

The only reasonable parliament in SL is a parliament of land-owners -- tier-payers. Socialists can't stomach that idea, so you can't have a parliament with them. But it is the only reasonable beginning in that synthetic setting.

Prokofy


Danton Sideways:

Prokofy Neva, renowned advocate of democracy and avatar rights, says that only land barons should have democratic representation in any SL parliament. Do you want to go on record with that?

Any geographically-based scheme would already give landlords crushing over-representation, since they could simply *appoint* the delegates for their sims. That should be enough of an advantage, I would think. Your view makes the landlords into a sort of aristocracy (thus you go for the Magna Carta, but no further), and all the other avatars into a "third estate."

Abbé Sièyes:
1° What is the third estate ? Everything.
2° What has it been until now in the political system ? Nothing.
3° What is it asking for ? To be something.


Prokofy Neva:

Absolutely. It's the only way to fairly get started, letting those who pay to tier land have a say in how that land is governed.

It's far from a perfect society; it's from from anything remotely like human rights and democracy. But unfortunately, it's a historical phase in a society without freedom and a constitution that you cannot skip. You cannot skip it in real life; you can't skip it here.

Try to distinguish between what's an idealistic fantasy, and what is reasonable and pragmatic.

I'm not obliged to allow no-payment-on-file anonymous alts to decide how my land is governed. No country automatically accords full civil and political -- and economic and social rights -- to a day-old immigrant -- especially illegal immigrant.

Most top creators with a stake in the world pay tier.

Tier-payers need not be disenfranchised by larger land-barons, the tools accord them ample opportunity to unite across sims as small-holders.

People who don't pay tier but are "creative" -- the people who whine the largest about any scheme that allows land-holders to decide...about how *their land* will be disposed -- are usually progammers, scripters, sandboxers, etc. So, yeah, they're the class enemy, given that they are a fifth column for the Overlord, the Lindens.

If some set of sandboxers wants to unite and put up a candidate, and they have some significant showing and stake in SL, they may get a seat in parliament. It would be proportionate to their actual ability to organize and their power.

The first task is to overthrow the Lindens, or co-opt them

The second task is to have land owners form a parliament and decide some basic rules among themselves of governance across sims of *their land* that *they pay for* -- they make up 80 percent or more of the revenue.

The third task is to decide what to do with script-kiddies in sandboxes, and see if there is anything other than a criminal code as a means of addressing the problems they create :)

You're welcome to go on playing socialism on one sim, if you like, sounds like a fun game. Grown-ups who pay tier and run businesses needs something more practical.

Prokofy


Danton Sideways:

Excuse me, Prokofy, actually I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying only *big* landowners (whole sims) could be represented. I fully agree that only avatars who own or rent land should have voting rights. That is how it works in CDS by the way.

But this brings up the point, as you note, that all of the landless avatars will howl. To calm them down, to circumvent their protests, how about a system with several "colleges" or "houses" (whatever you want to call them, the French called them Estates)? One would be for the big landowners, one for the small landowners and renters, and one for all of the landless rabble - recognizing that this could include all sorts of alts and rubbish. The goal is just to get people talking, so it really matters little how things are set up. You just have to set it up such that everyone will accept it.

- Danton


Prokofy Neva:

You're typical of all socialists who imagine that land owning is evil, and only big land owners counter.

I don't care of people scream. Let them. They don't pay the bills. They use the resources -- FPS, attention, programming of Lindens -- to make a profit out of their own content creation, or they suck it down for free. So, let them organize into Script Kiddies United and lobby to get into parliament. Let them organize guerilla warfare and try to shoot their way to power, let the central government squash them, and let UN peace negotiators urge that they be given a seat in parliament. Do whatever. But don't give people without land a seat in the initial parliament. They do not pay for this place.

>Excuse me, Prokofy, actually I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying only *big* landowners (whole sims) could be represented. I fully agree that only avatars who own or rent land should have voting rights. That is how it works in CDS by the way.

The French estates, like Russian estates, are a form of corporativism, and that leads to German fascism and French and Russian Bolshevism. No thank you. No chattering classes, please. People who pay.

Renters can opt to form blocs with their landlords, or lobby against them, but maybe risk losing their rent.

I'm not for creator blocs. Anshe tried this stunt before, first bussing in all her tenants as her "voting bloc" and then trying to buy out some of the content creators to vote for her in the Metaverse Justice Watch, which was the first attempt at a civic movement and rudimentary elections. I'm not for tenants being automatically bussed (signed up) to the polls. So there really is a problem of saying renters are voters. Renters are bussed landlord PACs.

Look, you folks on these silly government sims spend years what people already found out in SL with a few meetings among land barons 2 years ago. It cannot be done because people don't care enough to put in the time, or they are essentially beholden/loyal to the Lindens. Anyone attempting democracy would be screeched down in the forums or on blogs now as a populist, a Hitler, blah blah. That leaves the vacuum to unhinged types like Duranske or worse, Ashcroft, who is a horror.

Having land OWNERS is clean, simple, normal. Let it make a senate, and let it not come up with Ashcroftian schemes like "give me all your land and I'll provide justice". It will be about cooperation and collaboration, not dependency. And I'm not for putting in renters/deeded island parcel holders because they will be bussed. Have a constituent assembly, have that debate, and people will conclude the same thing: land owners only, because others will be bussed.

I really don't care about people screaming. You can't. People will always scream. Let them form their own party/parliament/whatever. The point is to get started with a rudimentary assembly that takes up one or three key issues to address to the Lindens to wrest power from them, and one or three issues to make life on the grid more orderly (pacts, agreements, whatever -- a symbol that signifies that all landowners abide by some basic agreement: no ad farms, no spinning signs, no clubs or whatever is of value in reality to people.

The problem with things like the CDS is that they become horribly bogged down in abstractions mixing RL and SL and posturing for political office and playing at the trappings of democracy. One grid-wide agreement among land-owners not to ad farm is worth a million CDS experiments in terms of people power, value, forming a hedge against the Lindens.

Prokofy


Danton Sideways:

Prokofy - Okay, you think that we should set up one single assembly, with voting rights for land owners only, and deny voting rights to those who only rent, as well as to all the "nomads." Then let them scream murder and disrupt the assembly with their protests.

I personally can accept restricting the vote to landowners. But for this Parliament really to happen, compromises would be appropriate. I see good arguments for a three-chambered parliament, as follows:

* house of the big landowners (having the equivalent of one sim or more) - they have special needs and deserve to sit in their own separate assembly
* house of the small landowners - this is like the house of commons
* house of the non landowners - this is a political concession to "everybody else," giving them some sort of representation to buy them off, but maintaining them in a sort of "quarantine" so they cannot disrupt the serious work of the other two houses

What about that? - Danton


Prokofy Neva:

No, I don't like your houses idea, it's unnecessary. And stop worrying about screamers. Ban them, you are landowners. The first constituent assembly and parliament has to sort out landowners, and after that decide if they wish others who don't own land to have a say in its disposition. It's pretty easy stuff. The screechy sandboxers can make their own parliament and rule over, oh, autoreturn times in sandboxes and put it on the JIRA.

Seriously, I don't have much time for screaming, and that's why I don't play government in SL.

You should put all of this conversation on a public blog and let people scream there, you'll see, few will. Most won't bother.

Prokofy
READ MORE...

Fixing Second Life

Is Second Life broken? If it is, can we as residents do anything to fix it? If we can, should we bother?

At the recent Game Developer's Conference held in February 2008, Jane McGonigal made the following surprising statement (as reported by Terra Nova and blogged about by Prokofy Neva):

"Reality is broken, and we're not fixing it…"

She goes on to explain: "If reality is broken, why aren't game designers trying to fix it?" Let us withhold for a moment any judgement about this statement (the judgement follows just after the fold). Consider instead the following hypotheses. Assume that reality is, as stated, "broken," and that Second Life is a mirror of reality. In that case, could trying to fix Second Life teach us anything about how to "fix" reality?

McGonigal's idea is of course preposterous. Reality is not "broken," it is simply whatever it is. In everyday usage, reality means "the state of things as they actually exist." Who ever promised us a rose garden? (Karl Marx did propose a "scientific" method for making a rose garden, and other less dangerous thinkers have envisaged a variety of utopias, but they've all gone out of fashion.) Following Voltaire, however, we have all hoped that increased knowledge - "enlightenment" - might make the world a better place. But there will always be tragedies. Even if the extropians succeed in making everyone live forever (and that might be the ultimate tragedy), there will always be cases of "A loves B but B loves C," and similar heart-rending imbroglios. Growing children even *need* a good dose of frustration in order to develop, so that they can create themselves in the struggle against the "resistance" that life (or parents) can put up. So reality will always be hard to take.

But let us be charitable towards McGonigal, and assume that she just means that we should try to improve the world, rather than to "fix" it (this recalls something one does to cats). At the same Game Developer's Conference, Raph Koster delivered a similar message, saying: "Why do we build theme parks instead of parks?" In other words, why are we spending time building theme parks in virtual worlds, such as in Second Life, instead of building real parks in the physical world? (Added note: Raph actually meant something different. See his comment below.)

Are these game developers suffering from spasms of rich white "game-god" guilt, as Prokofy Neva would have it? Whatever their motivation, they are trying to bridge what is perceived as a gap between the virtual world and the real world. More than that, they seem to think that games can somehow help us to find real-world solutions. Thus the question: can Second Life help us to develop solutions to real-world problems?

Of course, as a platform Second Life can be used for organising and educating around real-world problems, but so can any internet program or platform. The question is more whether Second Life, as a virtual world, can teach us about solving real-world problems, due to the way it *models* the real world. (Added note: someone will probably object that virtual reality is a new part of reality, with its own characteristics and validity, rather than just a "model" of something else.)

At the risk of writing another of those long posts that no one reads all the way through (unless they are written by Prokofy Neva or Gwyneth Llewelyn), I propose to investigate the questions set out at the beginning of this post: is Second Life broken, can we fix it, should we bother? But I'm going to take them up, rather illogically, in reverse order. Before looking at whether there is a problem, or whether we can do anything about it, I'm going to ask whether we should even bother.

Why Bother about Second Life?

Part of the hypothesis stated above is that Second Life could help us to solve real-world problems. But if the goal is to improve real life, why take a time-consuming detour through the nether-realm of virtual worlds? Just roll up your sleeves, and deal with real life directly.

This is the message coming at me from my real-world environment. My wife hates to see me on the computer - she thinks I'm totally wasting my time. She would rather see me reading books, or better yet, writing them. I explain that I'm reading and writing things on the Internet. But to her, it is all just stupid geek stuff. And my shrink suggests that I should limit the number of hours per day that I spend on the computer. (I started seeing him a few years back when I had serious workplace problems, all of which disappeared the day I moved to another company - but the habit of seeing the shrink remained.) He seems afraid that I've become "addicted" to Second Life, to which I reply that I in fact spend most of my online time reading blogs. Are those around me just expressing an old-fashioned bias against digital culture, or is it true that I'm fleeing from real life?

Between real-world demands on my time, and the social pressure to stay off the computer, the time I can devote to Second Life is rather limited. I would be part of the group that Prokofy snidely suggests forming, called "Too Busy in Real Life" (added note: Prokofy apparently *has* created this group):

"There ought to be a group, like Not Possible in Real Life called Too Busy in Real Life with a very lite SL browser and readers' digests of blogs and rapid-fire tours of interesting sims that they take only 15 minutes a day to consume."

In all fairness to my wife, children, shrink and others around me who find I spend too much time on the computer, I *have* been totally absorbed in Internet for over a year now. This is new. Up until the end of 2006, I was just a casual user of Google, like everyone else. What sent me over the edge was my desire to create my own website. I'd wanted for years to make a real website, rather than a blog, but I kept getting hung up on the initial difficulties. I finally decided to make a big push no matter how much time it took – and disappeared down the rabbit hole.

After figuring out how to use the space I had rented on a distant server, I went through successive stages of learning about: FTP, domain names, HTML, PHP, MySQL databases and various software packages. Then I settled down to creating content for my new sites. But I discovered with horror that most of my pages weren't even getting picked up by Google. So I dove into learning about Search Engine Optimization (before finally deciding that it was pretty much a waste of time). My increased involvement on Internet also led me to activities such as reading blogs, contributing to Wikipedia, and – signing on to Second Life. And I'm only getting started: I have yet to use RSS feeds, Digg, Facebook or Twitter.

But here is the point: the personal returns are spectacular. After years of suffering from an inability to communicate about the ideas that interest me most, I'm suddenly sharing them with the entire cybersphere. A classical exercise when using any new software program is to try to print out "Hello World." I feel I've managed to put a big "Hello World" out on the Internet – and the world is talking back!

Which is why I conclude that it is worth bothering about Second Life. Those around me fail to understand that Internet has become the new agora. Online communication is now as valid a means of expression as going to a meeting, writing an article or talking on the radio. When I participate in a meeting in Second Life, I exchange ideas about significant topics with real human beings, even though to casual observers I may just seem to be sitting alone in front of a screen. The other participants in the Second Life meeting take for granted what has been said above, but many of us have to deal with resistance from our real world environments. And that resistance limits how much time we can put in. We might find that improving Second Life is worth it, and yet be Too Busy in Real Life to do much about it.

If it is worth the bother, what then can we do to improve Second Life? I recognise the limits of my own first-hand knowledge, due to my newbie status, and to my being Too Busy in Real Life. But I've gleaned some information reading the blogs, and I'd like to throw out a few informal ideas. The following are just random reflexions, rather than systematic study.

The Political Dimension

In my recent post Back to Building a Country I presented a brief overview of the history of Second Life politics. There seem to be two basic attitudes among residents. The "platformers" hold that Linden Lab just provides the platform, and should intervene as little as possible in what residents do with it. The
"interventionists" hold that Linden Lab should regulate the in-world society.

In my post I payed considerable attention to Prokofy Neva's advocacy of interventionism. (This may be why he has graced me with a place on his list of smart Second Life blogs!) It should be obvious that I personally think Prokofy is on the right track in his long struggle to get the Lindens to regulate abuse such as griefing and ad-farms. But just at a time when the Lindens have finally begun intervening as never before, as told by Hamlet Au, Prokofy declares that he is "done with the Lindens". It is not just that they are always doing "too little too late," it is also that their way of implementing the new Department of Public Works resembles the worst of their favouritism towards what Prokofy has called the Feted Inner Core.

Recent events confirm that the Lindens are basically platformers. They did intervene massively at the beginning of Second Life, in order to ensure its success, as Gwyneth Llewelyn has described. But now that Second Life has grown beyond what anyone expected, intervention is expensive, and the Lindens try to avoid it, for economic reasons if nothing else. They recently introduced new regulatory measures which they felt to be strictly necessary, but the enforcement turns out to be weak, and their attention is clearly turned elsewhere. So Prokofy says he's "through" with them.

Yet Prokofy was the foremost advocate of government by the Lindens, by "King Philip" as he called Philip Rosedale. Prokofy repeatedly said that the residents should ask King Philip for a Magna Carta to establish a government and rule of law throughout Second Life. However, in 2004 Robin Linden did ask if residents wanted self-government (as I mentioned in my last post) and the answer on the forums was a resounding "no." And Prokofy himself has been opposed to various proposals for a resident-based government, such as those made by Ashcroft Burnham.

Let us step back from this puzzle a bit, and try to put the pieces together. Apparently nobody wants the Lindens to initiate resident self-government. Prokofy no longer has much hope in asking King Linden for a Magna Carta. And there is widespread hostility to Ashcroft Burnham's scheme, because Ashcroft picked up the question at the wrong end. He started with the idea of enforcing the law, and thus asked residents to turn over their land to a central authority, which would have the power to confiscate the land as punishment for breaking the law. But no one wants to turn over their land to a central authority which would have the power to confiscate it, and understandably so!

The Magna Carta would immediately make one think of the English Parliament, which the Magna Carta helped to institutionalize. But living in France, I thought instead of the Estates-General, and of their role in the French revolution. Both the English Parliaments and the French Estates-General were called by the King, generally to get consent to impose new taxes. In a few instances, such bodies turned upon their Kings, and cut off their heads (Charles 1 of England, Louis XVI of France). But such an outcome was rare, and King Linden - or his successor - should be able to keep his throne in a Constitutional Monarchy.

What is important to note is that these bodies were only called together for *discussion*. The participants were bound by no other obligation than that of verbally representing their constituencies. Thus Ashcroft's land-donation scheme is totally unnecessary. Before going to Metaverse Republic, Ashcroft operated within the Confederation of Democratic Sims (CDS), which may be where he got the idea of collective land holdings. And as a current participant in CDS, I have postulated that the holding of collective property is the basic cause of some of the repeated conflicts within that small realm. Thus neither CDS nor Ashcroft has the proper model for Second Life democracy.

A Second Life Parliament should begin just as a place to talk, nothing more. (I use the word "begin" because there may a wider range of alternatives to be considered in the future.) It should also begin as a totally voluntary exercise. And it should probably also be geographically-based, as are all real-life representative democracies.

All we have to do is to define a procedure for representation of each sim (or group of sims, since there are 16,000 of them) by a locally-elected (or even locally-appointed) delegate. Then set the time and place for the big meeting, establish the procedures for the discussion, and issue a call for participation. Those who want to send delegates will; the others are free to abstain. Is anyone interested in forming a group to get this rolling? I'm tempted to offer my services, and to participate, as did my namesake Georges Danton in France. But I'll probably be Too Busy in Real Life.

The Economic Dimension

The economic aspects of Second Life are complicated. One undeniable success of Second Life is its amazing in-world economy. I made an initial study of it for my Funny Money post, in which I concluded that Second Life has something less than a real economy, since the currency lacks strict exchangeability. I may have been wrong. Since then I've read a paper by Cory Ondrejka, in which he suggests that even playing at business in Second Life is true economic activity, based on exchange between real individuals linked into networks.

By and large, the Second Life economy seems to work, despite problems such as fraud and Intellectual Property theft. One major worry was fraudulent banking schemes, which Linden Lab removed by banning unregulated in-world banking, although that also removes potential resources for in-world economic growth. Since the economy generally works, I will leave most of the in-world economic issues to specialists, and will focus on one particular economic problem: land use planning.

The problem of land use planning, or rather the lack therefore in Second Life, has often been discussed, as in a post from 2005 by Gwyneth Llewelyn. This problem seems to be directly related to the Linden Lab business model. I've seen it said on the blogs that the Lindens depend on the auction of new sims as a major source of revenue. Someone stated recently, for instance, that the Lindens introduced ad-farm restrictions only after seeing Umnik Hax devalue a set of brand new sims by putting an ad-farm right at the corner where four of them met.

It therefore seems that their business model requires the Lindens to keeping cranking out new sims, like sausage for the masses, as Sleazy Writer put it. To impose restrictions on what people can do with their land would be unpopular. Prokofy has repeatedly denounced the prevalent attitude of "I will do what the fuck I want on my land." But above all, to impose such restrictions might slow down sales.

And sales have been good: there are now some 16,000 sims! I've explored only a tiny percentage of the existing regions, but as I fly around I ask myself in wonder: "Who the hell MADE all of this stuff?" This is certainly a prime example of the power of massively distributed collaboration. But on the mainland these creators are all stepping on each others' toes, doing the exact opposite of what their neighbours are setting up, destroying whatever "ambiance" the next guy has made. Many of the islands of course are well planned, which is why Anshe Chung and other "land barons" have made fortunes. But the mainland is just one solid mess.

Are there solutions? Prokofy Neva has set himself up as a one-man urban renewal committee for the mainland. His answer to Sleazy's complaints was:

"No. If you don't like the weather, change it. In SL, you can do that. Buy land, fix it up. Or, support others who buy land and fix it up -- which I know you do with our SL Public Land preserve."

Prokofy's Ravenglass Rentals is a small empire of residential and commercial rentals scattered across mainland territory. In managing his rentals Prokofy simultaneously tries to upgrade the value of the mainland environment, which is one reason for his struggle against ad-farms. And this is part of why Prokofy is so exasperated with the Lindens' ludicrous attempt to improve the mainland with their new Department of Public Works. Fixing a few roads and adding a bit of other infrastructure will hardly put a dent in the land use chaos.

A real solution would be for Linden Lab to institute land use planning and zoning on the mainland, as is done in any real-life urban or sub-urban area. But we will probably have to wait a long time before they do so. Another solution would be to follow Prokofy's lead, and to do something like what he has undertaken as a rugged (grins) individualist, but in groups.

There is again something to be learned here from the Confederation of Democratic Sims (CDS). As I pointed out in a recent thread on the CDS forum, the CDS community is currently set up both as a political democracy, and as an *economic* democracy, because all CDS is essentially collectively owned. Since Linden Lab recognizes only one official owner for an island sim, each of the three CDS sims is currently owned by one person acting as caretaker for the group. Individual members "buy" plots, as on any island, but such individual ownership remains as much a fiction as in the case of a sim owned by a land baron. The real owner is the CDS group as a whole. And this is a curse, because CDS is un-gated, meaning that anyone can join. A cooperative business can work if it is gated, with a selective recruitment process. But collective property in an un-gated environment belongs to everyone, and hence to no one. As per the principle known as the tragedy of the commons, such a situation easily leads to collective disasters such as those seen under soviet communism.

I have therefore proposed that, in order to remain un-gated without provoking endless conflict, CDS should transform most of its collective property into private property. This drew puzzled comments from CDS members who thought that the property was already private, since each member "buys" one or more plots. But to understand the real situation it suffices to look at the cash reserves, which steadily accumulate because rental payments from members outstrip the tier payments, and which are clearly the *collective* property of the entire CDS group.

In order for the property to be private, in other words clearly divided up among the members, some sort of contract is required, spelling out exactly who owns what. There is of course the risk that members will default on the contract, but if the group is large enough, this risk is shared and thus reduced. And this brings us back to the possibility of forming economic groups to develop the mainland.

This could work as follows. A group forms with the goal of rehabilitating some part of the mainland. They should do this for the fun or for public service, because the profits accruing to each member would most likely be insignificant. The different members of the group would then buy adjacent individual plots, and set up a *contractual relationship* between themselves to develop the region in a harmonious way, and to divide up any possible profits according to the some predefined scheme. The CDS experience suggests that this last point is crucial. Even if in the end there are no profits at all, the contractual relationship must still define how to divide up any *possible* accumulated wealth, for example on the basis of the initial investment, plus some measure of each individual's contribution (for example, m2 of build). Some such scheme might evolve into a successful model whereby resident groups could rehabilitate portions of the mainland. Any takers?

Other Dimensions

There are many other dimensions to consider when talking of improving Second Life. But this post is already long, and I lack expertise, so I'll just list a few of the better-known dimensions and issues:

*Technical Dimension: libsecondlife, Copybot, User Interface, rolling restarts
*Service Dimension: customer service, online help
*Social Dimension: griefing, ad-farms, bot-farms, newbie experience, avatar rights

I could have linked each of the above issues to some blog post or other, but that would have been a lot of work. And what important dimensions or issues have I forgotten?

I've failed to address one of the key questions above, which was: how we can learn from Second Life as a *model* of reality. Perhaps that will be the subject of a future post. But it is time to move along...

Is Second Life Broken?

Now for the very first question of all, which I have deliberately left for the last. Is Second Life "broken"?

Of course not. Second Life is no more broken than "reality is broken." As long as we are able to log on, to find our avatar, inventory and sims, to use the software, and so on, Second Life works. But we could always make Second Life better – and we could always do the same for reality. READ MORE...

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...