Elanso

Michael Linden, here manifested as a pink chibi, on one of his last days as head of the Governance Team, flanked by Zara Linden, at a Linden office hour with a scripted speakers' box. This reply to a comment on the post "Credibility Gap" from Tony Curzon Price got so long, I turned it into a post!Dear Tony,It's not about being a tourist. We're a nation of immigrants in Second Life. Everybody had to start as a tourist; some never take off their newbie outfit. That's ok. And publishing your tourist commentary is obviously encouraged. People do it all the time, with varying degrees of success which SLers are used to.But I hope you can grasp the point here, and it is one that you, of all people, can grasp, publishing as much human rights information as you do. I used the analogy of people parachuting into some country, let's say, Tanzania, and holding hifalutin seminars purporting to judge and comment on that country, but only with Africanists, also flown in from the U.S., and only with a member of the government. And no NGOs. No local journalists. Nobody. This is a classic union "nothing about us/without us" problem. Why do these people get to do this?!It's like when the World Bank or Chevron does some enormous project, hires international consultants, makes deals with some corrupt government flunkie, and the people of that country have no say in it, including those affected. Intellectual discourse about SL and around SL and virtual worlds and technology in general must belong to the people who live and work there *too*. There's a tendency for wonks and pundits to think that Second Life consists of a lot of losers going to strip bars, and therefore, it's no more worth paying attention to than some third-world country where the chief industries are sex trafficking, tourism, and drugs. They impatiently look past the people here now, seeing them as furries and elves and prostitutes, and think they are the "real" ones using SL as "augmentationists" while the rest are "immersionists" in a fantasy.Even people who should know better in large non-profits or foundations tend to think of SL not as a country or place they should become part of, but merely as a tool to reach an audience that they think should absorb some message that they want to put over on it.Try to understand that people take virtual worlds seriously, not merely as Etch-a-Sketch platforms were anybody can just write their dissertation or simulate their little experiment for their accounting class. That is, sure, do that all you want. But people also live here. It's not an economy simulated by the Lindens just for professors to play with; it's one in which people really make their living; one that people made from scratch.I don't know where I'd begin to explain to you what it is like raising $2500 US a month in little micropayments of $1 Linden from hundreds of people, Tony, but that's what I do.So this isn't a problem of tourism; it's a problem of power. When a foundation comes in here and drops a huge grant on a couple people who don't even bother to talk to anybody in any serious way that I can see, that don't have any kind of rigorous study or publications or blog, or two-way communication, but is just sucking down a grant in the typical way just because they can get away with it, dining out on the name "Annenberg" from the last century's wealth (see my point), then I protest. I'm happy to be shown I'm uninformed about this. But I have to sincerely report how I see it from my end. Other people ignore it, or try to see how they can get a piece of it. But I protest it.The original premise of Second Life, rather eroded now, is that people really could have a second life, that is, they could be a postal worker or a Wal-Mart clerk by day, but by night, they could be a DJ or a builder and earn a living. And people took that seriously, and really did that, and some of them even quit their day jobs. And that means that the lives of the people there and the institutions they make, like indigenous media, internal non-profits, movements, clubs -- the civil society, such as it is (and it is weak) truly matter. They aren't merely passive audience on to which a foundation or a university simply peddles their ideological wares. If they take this cavalier attitude, then they risk being ignored, irrelevant or even resisted. In fact, it's good for some of them to learn this lesson, because they haven't learned it in real life, where they remain irrelevant and out of touch and risk not getting elected again.It's like the people who made Democracy Island (a huge failure) and the professor who dropped a Supreme Court replica into it (also a failure). You can't just drop in democracy, Tony, this is something the US State Dept. believes and surely you can see that, too.It doesn't drop. It has to be made from the ground up. There is a big debate to be had about that, of course. Some people think you should make a separate, immersive society on its own terms to be that international civil society of another type to "make a better world"; others think that a virtual world is merely one of many forms of technology that you will use to make that international civil society. There are some people who think "civil society -- c'est moi" and even capitalize it (like Nobody Fugazi) and imagine they'll just get to run it as experts. I imagine you might lean to the second vision, if any, but you'd have to ask then why the power structures and credentialing of the old world would get to pertain in new cyber guise in the second vision. That is -- sure, if somebody wants to role-play Supreme Court and judge, in a vacuum without any other branches of power, on their island, that's fine, who could stop them? Your world/your imagination. But you can't then use your RL credentials to convince the Lindens to allow you to start adjudicating disputes about *my virtual property*. I didn't elect you or you weren't appointed by a legitimate democratic government. See how it works?I disagree that the 20th (or 19th century) ethic of journalism is "flawed". That sounds like some sort of extreme Marxist notion of "critical theory" about imperialist structures and I don't buy it. I'd like to hear more of what you mean.Journalistic ethics involves answering the 5 Ws, getting at least 2 sources, checking rumours and finding facts, interviewing sources, trying to get as many sides of the story, and triangulate. What part of those features of journalistic ethics do you find flawed, Tony?! They're fine. What on earth is your point there? That advertisers control media? OK. But what is your plan for making media free then?These thousands of niches have two problems: one, they risk being ignored in the sea of noise even when they have something of value to say; two, they risk distorting the news with sectarian ideologies. Indymedia.org was a prime example of that. If you want to seriously report on the Middle East, you can't send Indymedia reporters, as they are completely pro-Palestinian, and will film themselves jumping in front of bulldozers, not report on the news without bias. Perhaps you don't feel that way about them, but you'd have to concede that they are not effective, and don't change policy.Independence and objectivity need not be 100 percent to be *good enough*. Am I to accept the infinite multiplicity of the "independence" of the insolent Internet hackers writing from hugely sectarian belief systems (like the Extropians) in lieu of say, a mainstream tech journalist such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal might bring to bear on the subject? If I have to chose multiplicities, I'd rather chose the multiplicity of reading, each day, as I do, The Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Kommersant, Moscow News, etc. etc. We now have that privilege with the Internet. I'd rather have a dozen of those "flawed-model" reporters to look at covering a story about oil in Europe, say, than a kid scrambling after some demonstrators chaining themselves to an oil company gate. It's great he exists, all power to him. He's no substitute for everything else.I'm a big believer in community journalism and advocacy reporting inside Second Life. I think when you face a closed society where the "government" rarely talks or shows its hand, you simply are required to use these methods of reporting, and also use the tools of parody and satire, traditionally used in all closed societies. I don't think you can leave the field to tech bloggers and the powerful tech company funded media that plays favourites.I have to think about the concept of "news cubism" (I've always just called it triangulation, though of course realizing that "three" isn't going to be enough). I'm not sure news cubism resolves into something even as clear as a David Hockney art work. When you don't share their ideology, it's easy to see how 1,000 people all singing from the same ideological hymn sheet that may appear as if they have their subtle differences, are not going to produce that meaningful collage.All of those sources you mention on sub-prime and the medley of views are good. But obviously you have to tell the sub-prime story with a lot more field reporting of the sort the author of "Deer Hunting With Jesus" did. Some of his best work (I don't agree with all of it) comes from going into small towns in America and finding out the ecology of the local economy. The story not of big corporations, which always fascinates leftists as a locus of evil, but small companies, Chambers of Commerce, local factories, banks, real estate businesses all create a kind of club, and a club that is suffering from sub-prime *too*, but which also makes those below them on the rung suffer worse.How could you have those NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets)? Well, partly some guy in a local bank, or some gal in a local real estate firm, has to live *too*. Their customers are getting poorer with the erosion of the middle class. They know somebody from high school. Maybe that person lost their job and their car was repo'd. But they give them a loan because they think they might pay it back. Then they can't. Obviously reporting those local angles are important too. You can't just blame the Fed and say it's only Washington, and only evil Bush. To do so is not only infantile, but incorrect. I realize in the UK, people orient more to the government, and policy is formed by intellectuals dropping concepts into the minds of those people they know or went to school with (Ren Reynolds and I have had this conversation repeatedly in SL and at VW07 in San Jose there was a workshop on it). I think in the US it really is more complex to make policy, through local and national institutions that do have a stake and a say.Russia is something I know about as it's my field. The Soviet Union was atomized -- and kept deliberately atomized, with the killing and then syntheticism of civil society (the fake "Soviet Peace Commitee" etc). It's not surprising Russia is like that. Indeed, the marvel to me is that in the last 17 years, in fact something like 50,000 or more NGOs exist and take on all kinds of causes, often at great risk to themselves. The media has been decimated; my colleagues with whom I worked for years literally killed, jailed, forced to leave the country. Yet the marvel is that there are still people willing to go to Chechnya and report the truth about it; still willing to risk investigative journalism; still commenting if nowhere else on their Live Journal blog.The public space is all around you in Second Life. The MacArthur Foundation and the USC people just didn't bother to engage it (or they have Global Kids, a grantee, engage only one kind of it, as you will see). The audience, which actually was rather sparse for those kinds of affairs, is often made up half of staff and consultants looking for gigs, a crowd of bloggers and corporations and tech start-ups interested in the potential of SL. SL is atomized too, and also deliberately kept that way. Whatever metaphors the Lindens are using to sell simulated land about "countries," they have told us flatly in negotiation after negotiation that they do not want a democracy. Catch up on my blog for the last 3 years if you want to understand the battle here to wrest a public space away from a group of well-meaning but ruthlessly authoritarian game-god/California Silicon valley tekkies. It's been hard work. Read "Finding the Lawn-Mower: The Legal Nihilism of Second Life" if you want to understand what we are up against and why I bother is not only for the sake of a little second life, but for the larger project of the Metaverse write large, because its origins and social systems matter. Philip Rosedale believes "code is law". He doesn't believe in representative democracy. His ideology is a funny unconscious amalgam of anarchocapitalism of the Snowcrash variant and hippie socialism. It's fine to have all kinds of groups doing their thing and making money. But they cannot be part of the decision-making process at Linden Lab.I look at it differently and demand that residents have a seat on the corporate board. Taken as a whole, our tier is estimated to be 80 percent of the Lindens' annual revenue. So, gosh, it's some 40 million dollars a year or more, I'd have to sit and work the numbers again. It's a boatload of cash we pay for land and services here, and yet we have taxation and no representation. It is a modern King George problem, if you will, where there can't ever be a Boston Tea party because King George can simply click and delete not only the ships and tea; he can ban the rebels from the harbour forever.That's because not only the Lindens, but a sycophantic toadying class of coders say that only code is law, only privileged technicians can run the society, and a private company -- even one open sourcing its products!!! -- can't be a democracy. This is a serious, serious problem for the Internet, that few are paying attention to other than say, Jared Lanier and he hasn't grappled with it in Second Life.I guess I would say there are at least three kinds of public spaces, no four. I'll start with the most fake, the Linden-induced space with its Governor Linden land ampitheaters, bridges, roads. This space is now the subject of a debate -- even a civil war some would say -- over the Dept. of Public Works and its works.1. Governor Linden Commons. The Lindens used to hold town halls; they stopped, when they got too antagonistic and people griefed them. Their history on the SL Wiki is fascinating to read, but of course, only for the obsessed, it's a lot of inside baseball.The forums were part of this, but basically, the Lindens shut them down when people got too antagonistic with each other, even more than with the company itself. They circled the wagons. Now they have "office hours" and sometimes a few private meetings with select people. They periodically bring 8 special people they select for merit to their offices in San Francisco, all-expense paid. It's called "SL Views" and it makes up a kind of elite council, not unlike the Central Committee, I suppose, but with less power. They get to preview features, comment on them, and from their area of expertise (building, real estate, whatever) they participate in a kind of "democratic centralism" if you will -- but that's overstating it.That public space, with its cossetted and privileged elite, and Linden Lab (whose staff is at least half culled from the ranks of those people, who work their way into jobs)is a kind of ersatz thing. I would often laugh at the fake microphones deployed in front of the town hall that in fact didn't connect up to anything -- they were props to make the picture look like a press conference, but there was no independent media.Now, the Lindens hold very choreographed "press conferences" where we are vetted and cleared to come, and can ask questions. Some, like the Herald, boycott them as too staged. I go to them mainly to ask questions. That is, I did. But I've been forced now to concede that to continue to go would be to be part of the problem, and not part of the solution to an issue like the Dept. of Public Works.2. Blog Nation. Of course the The Second Life Herald began the struggle for independent media in 2003, started by Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar). And that's the other public space, the space of people in independent press and various autonomous societies or sim governments like the Independent State of Caledon and Neufreistadt, and even to some extent Ravenglass Rentals (my communit). The Herald has at times been dismissed or harangued at by LL ("why can't they be more positive and *help*; it has waxed and waned, with currently, the VP of LL leaving comments on there just to stay relevant on the huge texture theft issue which has a huge movement of protest against the Lab behind it). So this 2nd space is a loose community of bloggers, people who hold discussion groups, people who create independent societies like The Thinkers or (as I once jokingly made, The Doers), all kinds of affinity, lobbying, etc. groups. These array along a political continuum very much like groups in the Soviet Union or Russia might do, closer or farther from power, more sympathetic to the agenda of LL or less, etc.3. Tier Nation. The third kind of public space is the most atomized but also the largest. That is made up of all kinds of people actually living second life as an immersion who pay tier, either directly to Linden Lab, or to a land baron. They make clubs, live music halls, tropical cabanas, mass culture of all kinds that is scorned by the elites who look down on these folks as merely losers going to strip joints. But when you have 50,000 of them logged on at any one time, I'm sorry, you have what I call Tier Nation. They have interests, they have politics, they have lives. These are the socializers, and those who serve them with various things ranging from sex work to prefab building. It's a $1.2 million a day business, if we believe the numbers on the official website.The Feted Inner Core, the FIC, or group of elite designers, programmers, etc. are part of this group, but often think of themselves as very separate and maintain a special relationship with the Lab and its chosen partners.When stepped on too hard by the Lindens, i.e. in something like the Copybot saga, Tier Nation does rise up and show themselves to be hugely organized, especially as some of them are dressmakers, storeowners, rental agents and they make real money and they have something to lose. So they will do stuff like shutter all their stores and log off Second Life until the Lindens declare Copybot a TOS offense. When I broke the story about the Linden's insider dealing on islands for the Herald, the Lindens were forced to change their policy, but not because of me, whom they long ago permabanned from their forums. They could easily kick me out from SL with the TOS "any reason or no reason" clause. But they couldn't do that to hundreds of island nation owners who would feel shafted, harmed, lied to. Those people show up at meetings; they organize themselves into groups like Save Our Sims really fast using the technology, and they *are* the public space that ultimately matters because they pay the Lindens' bottom line. Naturally, the Lindens at root are eager to shed them some day when they open-source, move to a grid-level of services, and deal with corporations or universities or governments and not these individual proprietor customers.Your cultural idea of a public space may run to earnest people debating topics like carbon footprints and Obama -- drinking free trade coffee and wearing khakis, I don't know. It may not be visible to you when it takes the form of a 50 year old call center employee from Atlanta in real life, in SL dressed as a 20-year-old in a bikini organizing a party poolside for people from 26 countries and 6 continent (truly, that's what "Costa Rica" is in Second Life: do you see the potential??)4. Consulting Nation. The fourth kind of public space is one I personally am rather ambivalent about calling a public space, but perhaps it's the droid you are looking for. Of course, foundations and universities and the Lab itself are most excited about this part, and really don't care if the other three are eradicated, because they are objectively speaking, in the way, and unnecessary.Consulting Nation is made up first of all of various Silicon Valley start-ups, tekkies who used to be furries but now got a job with IBM or Cisco, university administrators with pots of Digital Arts or Communications Dept. cash to spend, etc. Glenn Linden even keeps figures on these people and laments that they still make up only 15 percent of the island purchases, let's say. It's funny to think that I might own more sims than, say, an IBM, or that Desmond Shang or Anshe Chung can make lots more money than IBM in this world now, but it can work that way for now. Consulting Nation also consists of various progressives and leftists like yourself, who want to use SL as a tool to organize, mixed in with some mainstream university researchers, corporations with ad budgets to build something in SL, a few dinosaur media bureaus, and so on.So, these people can range from corporate flaks who just drop down a $50,000 build on an island and visit it only a few times a year to show their bosses, after they get their first big media hit for being "the first widget maker to come into SL" -- to somebody who starts a progressive talk show and talks about the war in Iraq, let's say, and has a simulation of Guantanamo to try to campaign for Amnesty Internation's effort to close down Gitmo.So they can consist of somebody trying to put on the Daily Kos (a popular Democrat blog) convention in SL along with real life. Or somebody who is a communist sectarian who imagines he is organizing "the people" to demonstrate when he gets 17 of his friends to put an action on the Capitol Hill, which, if I could just brutally shorthand it for a second, is a vanity project that Sun Microsystems financed for a congressman friend of theirs in California.This sector is everything literally from soup to nuts, but it represents the kind of urban technoprogressive elite that isn't "the world" or "the planet" that they imagine. And that's not because "people of colour" aren't here. They are. They just don't fit the progressive stereotypes lol.People have taken this 4th space mainly to do real-life things so they tend to be augmentationists. Obviously, the purpose of Daily Kos now is to get Obama elected. The purpose of the communists is to stop evil real-life corporations. The purpose of, say, the American Cancer Society, is just to use this space to raise money as they would in Debuque.But taken together, the educated elite, the professionals from all these real-life-centered groups inevitably make up a kind of crowd that starts to make up more of an immersive SL space than even they realize. They buy plants from the plant lady. They go to the clubs the tropical cabana gal runs. They mix more with the locals.Some of them, like Prof. Robert Bloomfield of Cornell, might start merely by looking for some business simulation for a class for a semester, but as they get into, they are fascinated, then they end up running a kind of weekly talk show with experts, and being on the most famous local TV talk show host's program. Yes, there is SL-based TV, that can have I believe 50,000 or more views on it (slcn.tv). Some people inhabit several of these spaces at once. But at a deep level, there is a war between some of these spaces. The people in the 4th space don't care if the first 3 spaces live or die. They scorn the Herald as a tabloid. They're not interested in whether the Goreans or the furries have sims that crash or not. Ad farms aren't their issue -- they think trying to run a rentals business is insane. Some of them pontificate policies avidly without any concern about their impact. To understand the battle between me and Benjamin Duranske, for example, you'd have to see what it means to pit a drop-in pundit just using the platform to polish his resume and gather book material, advocating that "all the Ponzi schemes should be shut down and locked up" against a mall manager (me) who has watched these banks start and seen how they serve customers and who wants to keep the space open for immigrant banking and Grameen banking without it being prematurely closed by litigators looking for lucrative cases for clients.The antagonisms within Second Life port from real life. The tekkies who still often predominate in Second Life range from libertarians or leftists to anarchocapitalists. They share certain concepts in common, but you will get Obama and Ron Paul voters on the same sims, and not all these Obama voters mean the same thing.As for your simple question about organizing meetings -- I've had a few "best practices" blogs you can go through, but again:I really think smaller scale events work better. I'm tired of this Soviet gigantism, frankly, where the objective of a corporation or foundation is to claim they reached 400 people on a sim and 50,000 in the revent machinima. It's not effective. A tiny percentage of the people stare at the talking heads, who often can't even hear each other and talk in silos.Voice works well only when you have about 20-30 people maximum, it just doesn't work in practice much more than that. People push the limits, but the reality is, it always crashes, doesn't work for at least some of the people, is frustrating, etc.IRC culture isn't one I share or encourage. It's insolent, stupid, distractive. Some of the worst features of SL are drawn from infantile mindless tekkie IRC culture. No thanks.But people who have been in SL for a while have adapted to the rolling conversation in text. It's understood that anyone can type at any time, you put up chat history, and you can't respond to every thread. People surprisingly stay on topic more than you imagine. I've been amazed to have conversations myself in groups with thousands of members when they are very concentrated on a single issue.I run a dozen groups with a total of anywhere from 1200-1500 people in them on any given day and it can be a challenge. Unfortunately, the trend by the Lindens has been to first institute draconian rules to prevent chat within their own volunteer "V-team" groups, and second to listen to all these security-state controlling BDSM types who want groups where the owner can shut off any member and make them listen, and not talk -- all in the name of avoiding what you rightly say is "confusing".I think the formulas worked out at Dr. Dobbs, Metanomics, Thinkers, office hours, basically work, though they need a lot of tweaking:o panel of no more than 3 with moderator o group that everyone joins to have backchat so that those who can't get on the overcrowded sim can participate o a shareable URL stream that everyone can share, that is consciously planned to hold X number of log-ins (outside of SL, i.e. shoutcast) o a definitive pro-backchat policy, where people constantly react to, comment on, ask questions of the speaker -- the moderator can pick or chose what's important o if the issues are contentious, a moderator to prevent griefing and harassment, and a "Robert's Rules" device which is a soapbox that you click on to queue up to speak, which keeps telling you to shut up if you speak out of turn, and which you exit from by typing "done". I don't find those work so well, in part because they prevent people from answering the speaker who asks them questions by its stupid spamming, but you can live with it.At one level, a busy person yourself who has real life issues to cover couldn't justify much time spent on the internal issues, so to speak, of Second Life and its various nascent public spaces and its embryonic civil society. In time, you might come to embrace the fourth public space with some vision, but I'd urge you not to dismiss the 2rd or 3rd, or even 1st, because these issues matter in the larger scheme, and they represent the capacity for Second Life to reach more diverse kinds of people than just technoprogressives who can't get elected. What the civil society cannot expect to become, however, is just a tool of those with only one agenda, be it left or right -- and both of these extreme forces are naturally very strong and very interested around SL. It has to be kept open for genuine pluralism and debate. It's not a tool whose feature set must all be tweaked to get Obama elected, though that might be a use of the tool. It's not a tool that should remain only in the hands of Snowcrashers.I once asked Philip Rosedale, the maker of Second Life, the CEO of Linden Lab, why he let in all these corporations and advertisers, and did he understand that they didn't just remain on their islands (which is what he kept saying to earlier civilizations of SL that objected to them and the commercialization of Second Life that they represented). And he replied "I wanted it to be for everybody; corporations are everybody, too." And that's what Eric Rice (podcaster and new media expert) says, too: "We can't have different drinking fountains."So that's a very long-winded post, but a very short course in SL civil society history. I'm sure some will violently disagree with it; history is often written by the victors. I hope you will become a serious participant in this conversation.Prokofy