I knew the core of the story - how a muckraking journalist was expelled from The Sims Online for depicting a world that had grown into something very different from what its corporate creators had intended, and came to SL. I hadn't known much about TSO, other than it seemed to rely even more on tedious, repetitive behavior than a lot of game MMOs. From the authors' description, it sounds like if you sat down and *tried* to design a terrible non-game MMO (notice I didn't say "synthetic world"), you'd get TSO.  The authors do a great job of arguing that a lot of the pathological behavior in TSO came from the insane, paternalistic restrictions built into the world (you couldn't take your *underwear off*?? WTF?, and, eew!).

My core disagreement with the authors is - political? temperamental? aesthetic?  They repeatedly glorify things I find really awful. Let's start with a group in TSO called the Sim Shadow Government: the authors spend chapters on it, extolling it as an emergent government and "more than just an in-world posse," but they don't make their case. It looks like just another one of the countless mafias that apparently controlled TSO, engaged in endless rounds of protecting its turf and getting retribution for being dissed.

In a concluding chapter on how world owners should govern, they hold up as their shining example EVE Online, saying "they get the balance just right," and that they handled a major conflict "by laying down the law and sticking to it."  What was this bold stance of governance? Their FAQ explicitly allows fraud. Mm, bold.

And, of course, they glorify - though not entirely uncritically  - Pr*k, who they hired, typically refusing to see a distinction between content and expression, a theme running through the book.  The authors - appropriate for the owners of a tabloid! - delight in the sordid and the vicious - as long as it's not sexual: their attitude towards sexuality ranges from coyness to snickering to outright objection.

These are aesthetic, temperamental and cultural choices, yes, granted. But the book is out to assert an important principle: that synthetic worlds deserve good governance, and that that governance has to emerge organically from the citizens. But by making the common equation of political liberty and social license, they play into the false choices they complain about.

TSO was a world of license: there were *no* tools for community creation and maintenance. Even chat largely took place on third-party clients. Fraud, griefing and hate speech were rampant. Mafias are a natural response to that kind of law of the jungle: protect your own, an eye for an eye. Primitive reputational systems are maintained by violence. Most of the time, the big ones eat the little ones, get old and respectable, and call themselves governments. The rules of the warlord, made to keep order, harden into laws, with the same goal. The authors sort of seem to glorify this process and hold up the outcome as the best we can do. Sort of, because they're not really as clear as they should be.

SL's done an okay job at a different approach. Historically, in Western Europe, even as mafias like William The Conqueror's grew into kingdoms and nations with the king as lawgiver, another system arose beside it: commercial law, developed among equals through trust, to enable the free flow of goods and ideas. TSO belonged to the warlords; SL belongs to the merchants.

The authors rightly criticize Linden Lab for the same kind of capricious meddling that EO, TSO's corporate owner, practiced. But I think their not seeing a difference between the emergent law of order and the emergent law of commerce leads to their missing the point with LL's banning of Pr*k from its official forums.

With the authors' preferred warlord model, banning a dissident is grounded in power, and it's the corporate owner usurping the power of the people (which would otherwise be expressed by their warlord).  In a commercial model, a ban is the removal of an obstacle to the free flow of ideas, goods and people, and *who* acts to remove the impedance from the network is largely irrelevant. The Alphaville Herald's editor was banned from TSO as a power challenge; Pr*k was banned from the LL forums for being an impedance to free discourse (though there may have been a power component to it as well). They're not the same thing.

The power model is zero -sum: either I have the power to be an asshole, or you have the power to stop me. And I can't be sure I still have my political mojo unless I'm being an asshole *right now* - you may have stolen it when I wasn't looking. That's why power-based societies tend to be sordid: bad behavior is a claim to freedom.

The commercial model isn't zero-sum: the downside to that is, the reward for removing a blockage accrues to everyone, so there's less individual incentive to act (the tragedy of the commons). In that model, bad behavior is just... bad behavior.

OTOH, the authors' overall point is incredibly valid: so far, synthetic worlds have been governed by engineers, who (a) don't recognize there *is* such a thing as community, (b) if they do, don't care, and (c) if they do care, think the problem can be solved by unilateral action through code. That's a *terrible* problem for anyone who lives or works in a synthetic world. But, the authors aren't big on solutions, other than to glorify the kind of corporate anarchy that leads to the Lebanon and Somalia-like politics of TSO or EVE-Online.

I don't want to live in those worlds, Bury Test or no. We've *done* better than the law of the jungle. If the 20th Century teaches anything, it's that commerce-based systems are better than power-based systems in every way, except maybe in taking that very first step out of the jungle of murder and chaos. We don't start with murder and chaos in synthetic worlds, and we start *way* higher on the Maslow needs hierarchy (is that why TSO had such crappy politics, because it coded in the need to eat, sleep, and, um, crap?), so there's absolutely no justification for power-based systems in our worlds (other than, a lot of people find them fun. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist. I'm saying that to the extent the goal is to have a nice place to live, they're a failure. If the goal is to have fun in combat, then the criteria are completely different). We can start with the very best the atomic world managed to invent, and without any scarcities but time, develop much better political and economic systems than that world has seen.

Would a solution be something like the way new communities are built and run in the atomic?  A developer with engineering and architecture skills builds the infrastructure, then sells it to a management company that runs it, with a lot of the day to day community cohesion ensured by a resident board.  We've seen Metaverse Development Companies - why not Metaverse Community Management Companies?