Micro-Ode to Proko-Fly

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

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

My series of Tweets ran as follows.


The Tweets:

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

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

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

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

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

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


Commentary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

Danton goes Open Source

About a year and half ago I embarked on a voyage of discovery through Cyberspace. I had been just another average internet user until one winter day early in 2007, when I said to myself: "I'm finally going to create that website I've been talking about."

The creation of my first website became a long saga. A friend had advised me to use a software package for dynamic websites, which turned out to be way over my head. I spent weeks struggling to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of HTML, PHP, MySQL, DNS and
web hosting, when I could have had a free hosted blog up and running in a matter of minutes. But I wanted a "real website."

I finally got a few websites running, which lead me to branch out further. I began exploring the blogosphere in greater depth. Then I created my own user page on Wikipedia, under the name of Redeyed Treefrog. And in late November of 2007 I joined Second Life. A few weeks later I created this Second Life blog, which rapidly acquired a larger audience than all of my other websites taken together.

Through my involvement in Second Life, and in particular through reading Prokofy Neva, I began to investigate social software. I would have hesitated to join most social sites using my real name, but I found it easy to sign up as Danton Sideways. Thus Danton is now present on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, FriendFeed and several other such sites, where my "friends" are for the most part other Second Life avatars. I've become an Early Adopter. Now I'm taking what for me is the next logical step: I'm going Open Source. And I've created for the occasion a separate Open Source blog.

I've mentioned in a previous post on this blog my interest in the approaches to tools developed by counter-culture philosophers such as Ivan Illich and Stewart Brand. I've also stated that I consider free software guru Richard Stallman to be a saint, and Microsoft to be The Beast. So of course Prokofy Neva's continual diatribes against Open Source leave me unswayed. I am personally convinced that Open Source can stand up against the criticism that is directed against it on economic, legal or moral grounds. But I would prefer to leave the polemics to others. Instead of spending my time and energy arguing about Open Source, I'd rather just put Open Source to use.

I recently took a tour of several new grids that use OpenSim, which is the Open Source version of Second Life. OpenSim was created through reverse engineering of the Second Life software. At the risk of skirting the type of polemics I want to avoid, I might observe that reverse engineering is one of the grey areas of Open Source practice. In some cases it clearly involves infringement of Intellectual Property rights, but in other cases Open Source is more a matter of legitimate establishment of universal compatibility through open standards. Thus the IBM PC became the main international standard for PC computer hardware, because so many companies could easily make IBM clones. A rather different case is OpenOffice, the open source office suite released by Sun Microsystems, which provides a legitimate alternative to the detestable monopoly of Microsoft (the latter still uses every trick in the book to subvert the establishment of universal standards in this domain). And the benign, or at the least neutral, attitude of Second Life towards OpenSim has been explained as a form of enlightened self-interest: if the Second Life software becomes the basis of a new widely-used standard, this could reinforce the position of Second Life with respect to its competitors.

After taking my tour of the OpenSim grids, I wanted to learn more about the OpenSim software. I had to learn to use IRC, so that I could follow the discussions on the #opensim channel on freenode. I downloaded the IRC software program XCHAT, and on June 3d I connected to the #opensim channel as user "Danton." I got chatting with someone called "nebadon," and gave him the link to my blog post about the OpenSim grids.

That evening I learned from the #opensim channel that there was a meeting inworld on the OSGrid to discuss OpenSim. I logged into the Wright Plaza sim and found about 30 avatars standing around, talking about technical problems. Most of them appeared in the default Ruth avatar, but some had elaborate avatars, and a few were dancing wildly. Nebadon suggested I give everyone the link to my post, which several had already read and found well-written. After a few minutes the public chat went strangely silent, but the dancing avatars were still prancing madly about. I went back to the IRC chat, where I was informed that the sim had crashed. In Second Life I have had my viewer crash, but have never experienced the crash of a whole sim, so I failed to understand that the avatar dance scripts keep on going in one's viewer, long after the sim itself has crashed.

I started trying to fool around with the OpenSim software itself. I downloaded a binary version, and got it running in standalone mode on my home computer. Around that time I discovered that Ugo Trade has written a series of fascinating posts about OpenSim on her blog, including one that gives a list of OpenSim blogs, and another that introduced me to TribalNet.

As I tumbled further down the rabbit hole into the subterranean depths of OpenSim, I began to conceive of writing a series of blog posts describing what I found. But the present blog is devoted to the adventures of Danton Sideways in Second Life. I therefore reactivated an unused blog for Danton Sideways that I had created several months ago, as described here. I gave that blog a new name referring to "Open Source", and have already posted on it an article describing how I got OpenSim running in standalone mode on my PC.

News about Danton Sideways in Second Life will continue to appear here on the present blog. Henceforth, news about Danton Sideways in OpenSim will be given on Danton's Open Source Blog. How many separate lives can one little avatar have?
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Alternate Second Life Viewers

After finishing my last post, about the open source grids operating under OpenSim software, I started studying alternate Second Life viewers. (The viewer, also called the "client," is the part of the Second Life software that you download onto your hard disk, and that enables your computer to communicate with the distant Second Life servers.)

Most, but not all, of the alternative viewers are open source, and some are still in early stages of development. All of them work with the Second Life grid, and many also work with the open source grids. This capacity of the same viewer to communicate indifferently with the Second Life grid or with the Open Sim grids is particularly interesting, since it prefigures the "3D web." Imagine a viewer that allows you to teleport from one virtual world to the next, almost easily as we now click from one webpage to another. Such a "3D web" may be just around the corner.


The official Second Life viewer

Before looking at the alternative viewers, it may be worth saying a word or two about the official viewer. The viewer must be downloaded and installed on your hard drive before you can connect to the Second Life servers, so the newbie experience generally starts at the official viewer download page . This download page also gives a definition of the various categories of Test Viewers (Release Candidate Viewers, First Look Viewers and Beta Viewers).

The current viewer is Version Number 1.19.1.4, which is what I have on my computer. The entire list of versions is given here. It can be seen that Linden Lab is currently up to Release Candidate 1.20.8.

I will definitely avoid using the latest Release Candidate myself, because my computer is a few years old, and is already stressed out by version 1.19.1.4. I would have willingly stayed with an older version but, one day a few months ago when I tried to log on to Second Life, the system forced me to switch to the new viewer. The new viewer produced weird and undesired visual effects, in the form of shifting triangles of colored light streaming from my avatar. Using Google I found a post on the JIRA which linked this problem to my graphics card, which is an ATI Radeon X300/X550. I followed the advice someone posted on the JIRA, and installed an older version of the driver for my graphics card, since the most recent driver is incompatible with the current viewer. Using the older graphics driver solved the problem of the colored-triangles. However, to adjust to my downgraded graphics driver, Second Life automatically set my draw distance to 64 meters, so my avatar is now myopic. A great many residents seem to be having similar problems, which shows how critical viewer issues can be.

As I told in my previous post, the official Second Life viewer has gone open source. You can even try to compile it yourself, if you want to. First you download the source code, and then you follow the elaborate instructions, which start here and, for windows users, continue here. I tried to follow these instructions, as told in a post on my other blog, but I got overwhelmed by all of the other programs that I had to install to make this work, and gave up about half-way through.


Alternative open source viewers

The official Second Life wiki has a long page on alternate viewers. This list includes several open source modifications of the official viewer (such the Able, Dale Glass and Nicholaz editions), one closed source modification (Onrez), one extensively rewritten open source viewer (RealXtend), and a number of miscellaneous other viewers. A curiosity is the Marine Edition, codename "RestrainedLife," which is a viewer designed to enhance the BDSM experience, in conjunction with simple scripts to make attached objects undetachable, prevent chat and otherwise restrain one's consenting BDSM partner.

The main open source modifications of the official viewer were described by Caleb Booker in a post from September 2007. The Able Edition, made by Able Whitman, works just like the main viewer but adds visual muting, thereby blocking out ad farms and other visual annoyances. The Dale Glass Edition (see also the Dale Glass blog) adds a number experimental features for dealing with griefers. These include a proximity detector which shows the names of other avatars in the area, as well as the avatar age and whether there is any payment information on file, and a detector indicating the source of particles and sounds.

The Nicholaz viewer was built by Nicholaz Beresford with a focus on stability, usability and performance. I've heard residents say that the Nicholaz viewer helps reduce frequent crashing and similar problems with the official viewer. The Nicholaz release called EyeCandy is to be used together with version 1.19.1.4 of the official viewer. Since I am using that official viewer, I installed EyeCandy, which involves simply copying the executable (".exe") file and three small XLM files into the same program directory where your Second Life viewer is already installed. Then instead of launching the Second Life viewer you simply launch the Nicholaz executable file (I put a shortcut to this on my desktop). It is easy to launch either the official viewer, or the Nicholaz viewer, as you wish. I found the Nicholaz viewer to be pretty much the same as the official viewer, the most noticeable difference being a button that says "release keys," to use when a script has taken control of your keys.

The Kirstens viewers are compiled for high end intel based machines for best performance or to fix specific problems, and have proved very stable. The instructions say to copy the executable file into your Second Life directory, as for the Nicholaz viewer. I did not try the Kirstens viewer, but it of special interest because the OpenLife website proposes a download of a modified Kirstens viewer (see below)


The realXtend viewer

The realXtend viewer is part of an open source virtual world platform that was discretely developed during several months by two companies, Admino and Ludocraft, before they suddenly revealed it to a group of OpenSim developers that they invited to Finland in January 2008. Sakai Openlife, of the OpenLife grid, who was among the guests, describes this event as follows:


"Friday morning we all met. Firstly wow, it was great to meet most of the others from the OpenSimulator project, I don't think it had been done before, and whilst things may have started quiet it didn't take long for us all to Gel together and get talking! And then we met the guys under the banner 'RealXtend', this was interesting why had I flown more than 14,000km across the planet? Who were they and what had they been doing? Questions were flying in everyone's minds and we started to get some information. 2 Companies Admino & Ludocraft had been working furiously in the background over the past 4 months, 'extending' the function of the OpenSimulator Project, they had done this with the afforded generosity of Juha Hulkko.

So what did they want global domination? No. Were they Anti-Linden? No (actually Chris Collins from Linden Labs was there too). Did they want to take over the OpenSimulator Project? No.

They wanted to move forward, extend as the name suggests features & methods for greater user function and versatility of the code & it's application."


After the participants in the Finnish meeting returned home, floods of information about realXtend starting showing up on various blogs. The realXtend platform is made up of two parts, which are:

* realXtend viewer, an open source browser for virtual worlds,
* realXtend server, an open source server based on OpenSim.

The realXtend viewer, based on the Ogre 3D engine, allows the use of meshes in place of primitives. As explained by Ugo Trade, a prim is a solid, while a mesh is a series of triangles in 3D which can make any arbitrary surface. Prims are more compact and lower cost to render, but most 3D programs build meshes by default, in order to support proper 3D models. And since one mesh can replace many prims, the difference in computing cost between meshes and prims is smaller than one would think.

On the server side, reports Adam Frisby of OpenSim, realXtend adds features such as Python scripting support, and a new server called the ‘Avatar Server,’ which allows transporting your avatar's appearance from one OpenSim simulator to a completely different one, without any shared grid infrastructure.

I downloaded version 0.21 of the realXtend viewer from the realXtend download page, and installed it with no problem. To my surprise it worked fine for connecting to Second Life, but not for OpenLife. When I type the OpenLife URI (http://logingrid.net:8002) into the "Connect to" box, realXtend first takes a very long time to get past "Initializing World", then hangs permanently on "Connecting to Region." However, the OpenLife website offers a download of a special RealXtend Openlife Edition Viewer v0.2. That might work better for OpenLife than the standard version of realXtend, but I would have to uninstall the version I currently have, so I've left it at that. The OpenLife website also offers a download of a special OpenLife version of the Kirstens viewer (see above), but I have not yet tried that either.


The Onrez Viewer

The Onrez Viewer is a closed-source viewer originally created by the Electric Sheep Company to be used with the CSI New York Virtual Experience. The viewer's name also recalls the Onrez website which provides online shopping for Second Life items.

When the Onrez viewer was introduced in October 2007, Hamlet Au noted that its main innovation was to allow in-world web browsing (supporting html, but not plugins such as Flash). I installed the Onrez viewer easily, and when I connected to Second Life I found a special window open in the middle of the Second Life view, displaying a website called The Loop . At first there was no browser line in this window, so I was stuck on that page, but I closed the special window and then opened it up again by clicking on the button saying "The Loop," at top right of the screen, , and the browser line appeared.

What I disliked about the Onrez viewer was that the menu layout is rather different from that of the official viewer, and is thus hard to find one's way around in. Also, every time I log out the viewer crashes and my system gives me an error message.


Lite viewers

In July 2007 a UK teen student called Katharine Berry announced on her blog that she was developing an ajax-based client for Second Life, which she called Ajaxlife. The story was picked up by Hamlet Au, who got the tip from Gwyneth Llewelyn.

This client only permits a limited set of functions, such as local chat, instant messages and a basic map, and thus removes the need for a powerful graphics card. But as noted by Hamlet, Ajaxlife also allows you to connect to Second Life without even downloading and installing the viewer. The user instead logs on to the Ajaxlife website, which in turn logs the user into Second Life. This allows users to get past corporate or academic firewalls, which may block access to heavily interactive websites. Hamlet reported that Katharine was thinking of making a version that can run on the user's own machine, but in that case the firewall problem remains.

As Katharine explained to Hamlet Au, Ajaxlife uses JavaScript to handle the User Interface. The connection to Second Life is handled by a C# program running on Katharine's server, which uses libsecondlife to deal with SL connections. AjaxLife handles maps with an entirely separate system: once a day a libsecondlife bot of Katherine's logs into Second Life, downloads all the map images, and saves a copy to her server, so that they can be called up as needed.

Katharine at first announced that Ajaxlife would be open source, but there are no currently available downloads of the source code. In March 2008 she released a version that added the ability to delete inventory items, which Hamlet Au called the Ajaxlife Killer Application. A few weeks ago, on May 18th, Katharine announced on the Ajaxlife blog implementation of version 0.3.3.

I tried AjaxLife for the first time a few weeks ago, as way to connect to Second Life using my newly-purchased Asus eee, which is a tiny, low-cost netbook, with a low-performance graphics card. Logging on to Ajaxlife, I was able to use IM, to open inventory directories, and to edit saved notecards, but the group functions only allowed me to IM the entire group, without giving me the list of members. I was also able to log on with no problem through my firewall at work. But the last few times I tried to log in, I got error messages.

In October 2008, a few months after Katharine's initial announcement, a Japanese company called 3Di introduced the MovableLife website, which likewise promised access to Second Life "using only a web browser." I logged in to MovableLife and tried to IM a friend, but while the friend could read everything I wrote (as I learned later), all I could see was their first reply repeating endlessly. My reaction, besides finding the site useless, was to think "OMG I've just entered my Second Life password onto this site." The MovableLife page says somewhere in small print: "We do not store your Second Life account information on our servers, it is transferred directly to the Second Life servers." I sure hope that is true.

Web-based access through a third party site remains an interesting solution for those who want to connect to Second Life through firewalls. But in order to overcome the worry about password theft, the easiest solution would be for Linden Lab to provide such an interface themselves.

Similar in many ways to Ajaxlife is the Sleek viewer, which was released in July 2007, just after Katharine Berry's initial announcement. According to a comment by Oz Spade, Sleek had actually been around since 2006, and was developed using libsecondlife not by a company, but by one person.

The Sleek viewer is a light-weight viewer that allows access to Second Life for a reduced set of functions such as sending IMs. Reasons for using it include having a low-power graphics card or wanting to multi-task on older machines, as mentioned by this user, who compares it to an old-fashioned multi-user dungeon.

The Sleek download is a zip file, from which you extract 12 files into one directory. To launch the viewer you just click on the executable file. After logging in to Second Life, I was able to see which of my friends were online, send IMs and see resident profiles. I was even able to use search to find residents by name. However, the inventory function did nothing more than show me inventory directories: when I tried to open them they appeared empty. And when I tried to use Sleek at work, the firewall blocked it.

On April 1st 2008 the Sleek blog announced that Sleek had been bought by Microsoft, but the date would make one somewhat skeptical of that announcement.
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Touring the Open Source Grids

After about 6 months in Second Life I mustered the courage to try one of the alternative open source grids. Having seen the term OpenSim on various Second Life blogs, I Googled that, and found the OpenSim website. At the top of the page was a link to the Grid List, which names a surprising number of public grids, listed in order of their initial appearance. The oldest was DeepGrid, which began operations in June 2007, followed by Open Source Grid (OSGrid) which began in July 2007, and OpenLife which began in October 2007.

I decided to start with OpenLife. I connected to the OpenLife website, and after a bit of searching found the OpenLife Wiki and a page that tells how to get started.

The wiki says that you can use either the RealXtend Viewer or the SecondLife Viewer, but the RealXtend Viewer failed to start for me. So I followed the instructions on how to create a shortcut to OpenLife for the SecondLife Viewer. I opened an account with the avatar name Danton Sideways, and launched the viewer.

I found myself on a rather barren island, in the default female avatar called "Ruth." I tried to edit my appearance, but nothing happened. I looked into my inventory, and found it to be completely empty. I then flew over a few adjoining sims, which were vast stretches of terraformed land with nothing on them. I also tried to use Search to find people, but the Search function gave no results whatsoever. My initial reaction was: "Is this a joke?"

I came away from that initial OpenSim experience thinking that all I could do was fly over an empty terraformed wasteland in the Ruth avatar, looking for other avatars who were not there. On the next try, however, things got better. But before I go on with my story, let us take a glance backwards, to survey the origins of the open source alternatives to Second Life.


How Second Life went Open Source

Back in 2005 Gwyneth Llewelyn presented in her blog post on Expanding Second Life an early vision of how Second Life could be spread across a system of decentralized servers. Gwyneth suggested that Linden Lab could set up a system whereby anyone could run their own sim with their own asset server (which implied making the software open source), but would need to pay Linden Lab for an encrypted certificate in order to connect to the main grid. Gwyneth envisaged a system with many sim operators, each having their own users, as follows:

"When 'your' user logs in at your own sim, the UUID which is generated is encrypted with a key which has been provided by LL. If you don’t use that key, well, you may register with an 'isolated sim' and have your fun there. But you won’t be able to access any content on the main grid, nor be able to export your content there."

Gwyneth thus proposed a way for Linden Labs to go open source but still remain profitable by using encrypted keys. Linden Labs was slow to respond to this challenge. Meanwhile, a low-profile group of non-Linden programmers had already begun reverse engineering the Second Life protocol.

On May 12, 2006 John Hurliman registered, on the Gna! free software development platform, a new open source project called libsecondlife. The registration post defined libsecondlife as "an open source library to allow software to access the Second Life world." Hurliman announced that "we have a complete protocol description", and explained:

"Our goal is to create a multi-threaded, object-oriented library to write a Second Life client of any complexity. We currently do not have any source code, as it's still in the design and planning phase."

Libsecondlife has been described as "a BSD open source library for creating custom clients that could connect to Second Life". A technical description of the libsecondlife project is given on the Second Life Wikia. Development of libsecondlife is still ongoing, as can be seen on the libsecondlife wiki, where most of the articles are signed by Baba Yamamoto.

Libsecondlife however soon generated a major scandal with its derivative CopyBot programme. CopyBot was originally created as a debugging tool by the libsecondlife development team, who had in mind using it to be able to backup one's own created content on one's own hard drive, or to be able to export one's own intellectual property to other environments. But since it was open source, CopyBot was quickly modified by unscrupulous hackers who recompiled it as a tool to replicate objects and avatar appearances without permission. Angry Second Life residents met with Linden Lab on November 13, 2006 to discuss the Copybot problem, and then organized a series of virtual protests, as described by Reuters and Hamlet Au. The outcry led Linden Lab on 14 November 2007 to declare that the use of CopyBot was a TOS violation.

Less than two months after the CopyBot scandal, on 8 January 2007, Phoenix Linden announced on the official Second Life Blog that the source code would be released for the Second Life viewer. It thus seems that libsecondlife and CopyBot were the catalysts for prompting Linden Lab to go open source themselves, in order to maintain control over a development which appeared inevitable.

However, in January 2007 Linden Lab only released the source code for the Second Life viewer, also called the "client," which is the software that the user installs on their own computer in order to access Second Life. There remained the software that runs Second Life itself on the Linden Lab servers, storing and retrieving all of the data about the sims and the users' assets, and implementing the virtual world in real time.

Various attempts had already been made to create an open source virtual world server, but had floundered in face of the massive task of writing both the server and the client at the same time. It was now no longer necessary to write the client, since Linden Lab had released the source code for the official Second Life viewer, and the libsecondlife library was available for creating other custom clients that could connect to Second Life. So in that same month of January 2007, Darren Guard (also known as MV) founded the OpenSim project, to concentrate on developing on open source virtual world server that the Second Life client could connect to. As explained in the Wikipedia OpenSim article, OpenSim uses libsecondlife to handle communication between the client and the server.

Then in April 2007 Linden Lab announced that they planned to release the Second Life server source code (or at least parts of it). But while Linden Lab was still just thinking of releasing parts of the server source code, the first public open source grids, based on OpenSim, started operating. DeepGrid began in June 2007, followed by OSGrid in July. One of the participants gives this description of the first day of DeepGrid:

"There was a sim, its name was "Mortville" and a half-dozen crazed programmers were jumping around on a little island, flying into the ground, all chat was showing up twice, IM crashed the sim, all objects were phantom, no trees, no nothing, but it was wondrous. Within a couple of weeks there were a dozen sims on Deepgrid."

Linden Lab struggled to keep up. On 13 September 2007, as explained in a page on the Second Life Grid website, Linden Lab kicked off a public planning process for "designing protocols for virtual world software interoperability," which led to the formation of the Architecture Working Group (AWG). One of the stated goals of the AWG is to "enable third parties to run servers that connect to the Second Life Grid platform." In other words, since the development of open source grids is inevitable, Linden Lab wants to enable third parties to connect their own sims to Second Life, for a fee. Which is pretty much what Gwyneth Llewelyn was talking about back in 2005.

The latest development in this direction is an announced plan for IBM to hold Second Life grid servers on their private corporate network, behind the firewall, but with enough network access to communicate with the central services on the Second Life grid. This project is further described on the blog of Zha Ewry (David Levine) of IBM. Zha Ewry is also the head of the Linden-sponsored Architecture Working Group, and IBM runs its own private sims using OpenSim software. One of these is the Shengri La sim, built by Shenlei Winkler of the Fashion Research Institute, as can be seen here.


My Further Adventures on the Open Source Grids

As I've told above, my initial experience in OpenLife was a total disappointment. I did nothing but fly over barren terraformed sims in the Ruth avatar, with no inventory and no search function. So I decided to try CentralGrid to see if that was any better.

On the CentralGrid website I found a link to the CentralGrid forum, with a page that tells how to log on. Following these instructions, I created a shortcut to the Second Life viewer, in exactly the same way as for OpenLife. Once logged in, I found myself in an identical Ruth avatar with an identically empty inventory. The only difference was that the entry sim was somewhat more built up, with a few blocks of empty streets and wide-spaced, sterile buildings all in the same modern style. And my feet didn't sink a few inches into the earth, as they tended to do in OpenLife. But the search function was equally unusable. What I understood later is that all of these open source grids are just picking up the latest version of the OpenSim software, and tweaking it, so they can only offer the functions which have already been developed for OpenSim.

In both OpenLife and CentralGrid, the main activity seems to be selling entire sims. Some of the open source grids allow users to connect their own servers, but these two seem to require you to rent the servers from them. There is no official way to rent just a plot of land (though one could always rent a plot by making a private deal with a sim owner). Few of the grids have any plans to create an in-world currency, though CentralGrid is reportedly working on it. People buy these sims knowing that the software is still under development, and that there is no in-world economy, thus no possible return-on-investment, so of course the prices are lower than for sims on Second Life.

Some days later I decided to try again. I went back to the OpenLife website and logged onto the chatroom. One nifty feature of OpenLife is this chatroom, which can be joined easily by anyone, without having to know how to use IRC channels. There is nearly always someone on line to whom you can ask questions. I found online Sakai OpenLife himself, the founder of OpenLife, and asked why I was unable to edit my appearance. He replied that it was explained on the wiki. So I went back to the wiki and found that there was indeed a page about editing appearance. You must go into your inventory, click on Body Parts, right click to get "create new," and then wear the new object to edit it. I thus created and edited four body parts (body, skin, hair, eyes) and three pieces of clothing (shirt, trousers and shoes). I tried to get the same look as for Danton Sideways in Second Life, but the result was rather far from the mark. And I was unable to grow a beard, because while my chin puffed out into a beard shape, I had no appropriate texture colour to add, so I reverted to a clean-shaven look.

Remaining in-world on the dreary welcome island, I changed windows to go to the chat room, and asked where I might find a more lively sim. Someone suggested I try Electron, which is the sim of Gobi Greenwood (correction: Electron is actually owned by Gumby Roffo). Electron is rather nicely built up, including a stage and screen that streams a video clip. On my next visit I went to Quartz, another of Gobi's sims, where he is setting up a freebie store. It is a several story building which for the moment is totally empty. I also went to the Renegade sim, where I met Josh Noonan inside a fancy temple build. He proposed to rent me a plot via an external payment using paypall. I said I was interested, but I have to go back to discuss this further.

I then returned to CentralGrid. I set the destination sim to CentralGrid Home, but had a problem logging in. The error message said something about waiting for a handshake, and the forum instructions for dealing with this were rather complicated. So I just tried a different destination (Central Grid Sandbox), and that worked. I edited my avatar exactly as on OpenLife – the underlying OpenSim software is identical – but the result was again disappointing. You would have trouble recognizing that it is supposed to the same Danton Sideways as is in Second Life.

I tried teleporting in CentralGrid, and arrived in the Moonbeam sim, where I was surprised to actually see another avatar on line, hanging in the air. Then I crashed. When I logged back in I was Ruth again, and had to open my inventory and put on all of my edited body parts and clothing items one by one. When I was dressed I looked for the avatar I had seen, and found Happi Homewood, working on his multi-story shopping center in the Moonbeam sim. He explained that he was getting ready for when CentralGrid would implement an in-world currency. I sent him a friend request, so that I could find him easily in-world, and he accepted it. That was my last act so far in CentralGrid.

And last but not least, I made one in-world visit to the Open Source Grid. I found the OS Grid website, and a link on the site to the OS Grid forum, which is obviously used by a fairly large and active community. Creating as usual a new shortcut for the Second Life viewer, I logged in as Danton Sideways, and landed in Wright Plaza. I took a moment to quickly run through the habitual OpenSim avatar editing process, putting on my standard 4 body parts and 3 pieces of clothing, and then explored the sim

I was pleased to find a fairly intricate, colorful build, with lots of vegetation, typical of what one finds in Second Life. And there were several avatars roaming around in just that one sim. I went up to a certain Paulie Femto, and chatted a while. He said I could use the sandbox if I wanted to on his Cameo Beach sim, which is actually run from his home computer, connected to OS Grid. He said he tried to keep it operating 24/7. He also told me about the freenode IRC channel for OS Grid. That definitely got my interest. After all these years of hearing about them, I've never actually had the occasion to use an IRC channel. This may be my big chance! READ MORE...

Yet Another Business Model

A couple of weeks ago, Prokofy Neva wrote a blog post about the relationship between IBM and Second Life, entitled I Be Am. This fascinating post was followed by a series of equaling interesting comments, including notably a few statements by Adam "Frisbee" Zaius about the OpenSim project. The ensuing debate between Prokofy Neva and Adam Zaius focused on the general subject of the role of capitalism in virtual worlds, and on the particular subject of why OpenSim is being implemented without data encryption to protect intellectual property, and without payment protocols to support an in-world currency.

Reflecting on this debate led me to formulate a mixed-economy business model for a new virtual world. I described this business model in a late comment on Prokofy's post. The short exchange of comments between myself and Prokofy on this subject is reproduced below. (A few irrelevant sentences about the configuration of Prokofy's blog have been deleted from this otherwise verbatim transcript.)

Danton Sideways:

I finally read "The California Ideology" as you suggested, and probably agree with it even more than you do. Because the solution proposed by the authors is a *mixed economy* for digital development, with state funding to help the disadvantaged participate in the internet revolution. For example, that the state should help provide every citizen with a computer and cheap broadband access - which is of course socialistic.

As an advocate of mixed solutions, I see interesting possibilities for combining open source with protection of intellectual property. I may write a post on my blog about this, but to sum up, one possibility would be to organize a virtual world as a consumer cooperative. All residents would pay a fee to be members of the cooperative, and the cooperative then hires a management team to run the hardware and software, including data encryption to protect IP. And the software could be developed on the basis of the OpenSim platform, but as a forked private system incorporating Paypal and other modules. Structuring the company as a consumer coop would permit running it as a representative democracy both in-world AND in real life.

Prokofy Neva:

Whenever I hear the words "co-op" I think of my many years in Toronto or Rochester joining various food co-ops or living in communes or whatever, and eating millet loaves and all that kind of organic stuff. Co-ops are good for certain small things among like-minded people. They are terrible ideas for how to organize entire societies.

That's what's wrong with all this opensim stuff -- it's constantly predicating its model on an assumed and often unconscious belief that a sturdy foundation of capitalism will underpin its notions, ready to pay lots of money that it has gained from proprietary code lol. I find it hilarious at how unconscious all
this is.

Capitalist free markets are more efficient and serve more people.

Socialism doesn't work.

Danton Sideways:

I agree with you that a society that leans too far towards socialism will fail, as did soviet communism. But so will a society that leans too far towards unregulated capitalism, which is why Keynes introduced national economic regulation and the welfare state. All really-existing national economies are mixed systems.

As for cooperatives, either of producers or consumers, they *do* work on a large scale. Large examples of the former are farmer's cooperatives, and an example of the latter is my bank, the Credit Mutuel, which is one of the largest banks in France. Any cooperative must however be managed in a sufficiently professional way.

In the virtual world business model that I propose, the "nation" would be set up as a a democracy of paying citizens (consider the payments to be the equivalent of taxes), and the "government" would be the corporate structure to which implementation is delegated. Note that some or even the major part of the implementation could be outsourced, such as in the form of a management contract, to a separate company which would be required to meet specific performance criteria. The outsourcing could even be done with an open competitive bidding process.

This model could provide a way to mix together social cooperation and market capitalism for successful implementation of a virtual world.

Prokofy Neva:

[At the time of first posting of this article, the above dialogue is still on-going on Prokofy's blog. Prokofy's expected reply will therefore be inserted here.]

[Note added on July 3rd 2008: the dialogue on Prokofy's blog in fact ended there. And this post went pretty much unnoticed until today, when RightasRain made the comment shown below.]
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On Strike

Danton supports the Second Life blog strike.

See:

http://rhetasworld.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/strike

(And ignore the following "Read More" prompt which I must learn how to get rid of when it's not needed.)

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Swept Away

Help! I've been sucked into the maelstrom of brutal politics within the Confederation of Democratic Sims (CDS).

A few short months ago I discovered what seemed to be the sleepy little virtual democracy of CDS, and took up residence in a corner of the Colonia Nova sim. I was attracted to CDS because it is a democratically-run region, which appeals to my leftist leanings towards all things cooperative. I promptly joined the moderate leftist party within CDS, which is called the Citizen's Social Democratic Faction (CSDF), and settled in for what I expected to be a gentle game of virtual democracy. In fact, I was hoping that others would do most of the democratizing for me, because my main interest was in promoting Ivan Illich's philosophy of convivial tools.

Alas, fate has decided otherwise. At first I watched from the sidelines as the political climate within CDS deteriorated. Then I found myself getting pulled into the conflicts as a participant. And now I find myself in the position of single-handedly trying to create a new political party within CDS. How did this all come about?

The first sign I saw of the troubles to come appeared on Christmas Day of 2007. I logged in to find a number of buildings missing in Colonia Nova. I ran across a small group of CDS residents standing on a bare patch of snow, discussing the sudden departure from CDS of Michel Manen, who had deleted all of his builds. I found some explanation for this behaviour only some days later, reading a thread on the CDS forum, which contained a rather bitter debate between Michel, founder of the CARE faction, and certain members of CSDF. In the middle of the thread, Michel posted the following comment, dated December 25th:

"On second thought, who really needs this?! Y'all have fun! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and best of luck with your project."

Following his departure, Michel's group was re-organized as NuCARE, under the leadership of ThePrincess Parisi. The elections for the new term of the Representative Assembly were carried out during the week of January 14th to 21st, 2008. The CSDF faction received the most votes, followed by NuCARE, but the CDS electoral system is set up such that candidates were elected from all of the four participating parties. The new Representative Assembly was sworn in on February 3rd, as I've told on one of my blog posts. Patroklus Murakami, as leader of the faction having received the most votes, automatically took the role of Leader of the Representative Assembly (LRA).

The first meeting of the RA on February 3rd was good-humoured and consensual, but things began to go sour at the very next meeting. The conflict centred around procedural questions. In order to understand the positions of both sides, one must know something about the way the CDS political system was initially set up. The voting system tends to favour small parties, which means that the party that gains the most votes will generally have only a minority of representatives. To compensate for this, the LRA is given the authority to set the agenda for the RA meetings. The idea was that the majority party sets the agenda, but the other parties can easily vote down any motion they dislike.

In the new assembly, however, members of the minority parties, lead by ThePrincess Parisi of NuCARE and Beathan Vale of the Simplicity Party, immediately began challenging this traditional role of the LRA, and proposing procedural changes. In addition, ThePrincess spiced up these procedural debates with a liberal dose of name-calling and personal attacks on the LRA, Patroklus Murakami.

To make a long story short, Patroklus decided that an appropriate response to the minority party attacks would be for the CSDF representatives to resign from the Representative Assembly in protest. This drastic step was debated at a meeting of the CSDF faction on March 5th. I was present at this meeting and voted against the resignations, though I understood Pat's point of view. He announced the resignations the next day on the CDS forum, giving the following explanation:

"It has become clear since the recent elections that there's a minority in the RA that is determined to prevent me from chairing meetings as LRA. I have not always responded well to the challenges of chairing meetings under these circumstances and I apologise to the CDS community for my faults in this regard."

The withdrawal of the CSDF representatives from the RA had two immediate consequences. One was to give the voting majority to the alliance between NuCARE lead by ThePrincess and the Simplicity Party lead by Beathan (Brian Livingston, the leading candidate of the Simplicity Party, unexpectedly resigned from the RA himself, shortly after Pat did). The second consequence was to provoke an interim by-election to replace the CSDF representatives. CSDF has decided to present candidates for this by-election, with the hopes of gaining back one of the two seats they had given up.

It was Pat's resignation that caused me to become involved in the disputes. First, I got to thinking about how it was that this region, which had been so painstakingly built up by the voluntary contributions of one group, could now so easily be taken over by a new hostile group. This lead me to start a forum thread called Collective Property vs Un-Gated Community, in which I argued that having collective property in an un-gated community inevitably leads to the tragedy of the commons. And secondly, I was irritated to see ThePrincess, whose attacks had caused my friend Pat to withdraw from his seat on the RA, crowing about how rosy the situation was in CDS. So I said as much on the thread she had started, and that she had called WHATS UP WITH CDS? I'LL TELL YOU WHAT!.

The conflict escalated. Profiting from the absence of CSDF, the new majority passed a series of highly controversial measures, as Patroklus describes on his blog, in a post entitled Virtual Zimbabwe. Patroklus also opened a thread on the CDS forum, called Catalogue of Abuse, in which he reminded everyone that the main factor that had prompted his resignation was the treatment he had received from ThePrincess. I found Pat to be far too mild in his own defence, so I jumped into the fray. I wrote a comment on this thread saying that in my opinion the behaviour of ThePrincess is that of a troll and a griefer. And when all of her associates jumped up to defend her, I replied that those who defend a notorious griefer become griefers themselves. And to think that only a few months ago I posted a cheerful account of the in-world marriage of ThePrincess and MT.

I found myself suddenly in the very thick of the fray. And I realized that I had forgotten to check with anyone from CSDF about my outburst on the forum. But I had for some time been toying with the possibility of creating a new leftist faction within CDS, one that might be less bound by the weight of tradition than CSDF, which is made up of many of the historical pillars of CDS. So I announced in a post on the CDS forum my plans to create a new faction. My announcement received one reply, from Dnate Mars, who said only: "I wish you the best of luck!"

Since I perceive Dnate to be closer to the alliance between ThePrincess and Beathan, than to CSDF, I get the impression that his comment may have been a bit sardonic. But I replied good-naturedly: "Thanks. I'll need it!"

So here I am condemned to try to build a new political party within CDS. My other Second Life projects, such as the promotion of Ivan Illich's philosophy, or the organisation of a Second Life Parliament, are pushed to the back burners.

I've begun to make the rounds of all of the various "progressive" regions of Second Life, such as Commonwealth Island, Better World Island, Cedar Island, and so on, in search of possible new members for my new party. I'll tell more about that on my next post. But one little piece of information will give you a foretaste of how my search is going. How many possible new members have I found so far, you may ask? The answer is quite simple: zero.
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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
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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...