Entry tags:

digital people

Digital Colonialism
Once again, I've been simmering a stew of other people's ideas for a couple days. It's not quite ready to be served up, but since I'm about to go silent for a long weekend, I'm going to go ahead and dish it now.

First into the pot was Al Kronos's post from last weekend, Dutch banks depart Second Life...some thoughts. Al says,

What has prompted me to write now is news, reported at Mindblizzard, that Dutch banks ING and ABN Amro are pulling the plug on Second Life. To grossly paraphrase Lady Bracknell, in The Importance of Being Earnest: "To lose one bank from SL, Mr. Rosedale, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness."

Both banks took an "innovative" and "creative" approach to Second Life. They didn't just set out their stall and hope people would wander by. They actively sought to build genuine communities here, offering something distinct and unique at a time when most corporates were treating Second Life as a 3D billboard. I am therefore deeply concerned about their departure, and deeply concerned about the long-term viability of Second Life as "the Virtual World of choice" for the future. I still firmly believe that web3D will be an important part of the digital experience for all of us in years to come. But this turn of events is worrying me, a fan of Second Life. I have to wonder whether Linden Lab are simply too detached from both the world they created and the physical world in which they are running a business.

Al's right, looking at Linden Lab as a business attempting to cater to large corporations. Now, I'm pretty pro-business: I spend a lot of time traveling in business circles, especially for a Digital Person with no atomic-world affiliations or design skills. But, with all respect to Al, I couldn't escape my reaction on reading this, that the departure of those banks and what it might signify could be a good thing - for *my* world, the synthetic world that is and is not Linden Lab, the business.

This morning saw a flurry of excellent articles, all diced and dropped into the pot:

First off, Hamlet Au in Second Life Economy: In Recession, Or Cultural Inflection? observes that the high-volume, high-price economy of SL that draws so much critical attention might not be as large a force in the world as generally believed. He notes that Brazilians and Japanese in SL largely interact within their own free or low-cost environments, and comments added that many newbies are seeking socializing without spending.

Gwyneth Llewellyn has a brilliant new post analyzing a white paper which debunks the mainstream media myths about synthetic worlds. Following Tateru Ninu's analysis of why the old push media seem to fear and hate social networking media and synthetic worlds, she concludes that synthetic worlds really could be dangerous to the status quo and their corporate media supporters:


Finally, Raph Koster just echoed the Digital Person's lament from the other side: I Am Not My Avatar!  He protests efforts to link him to his digital identities, asserting his right to be separate from them, and their right to privacy.


So, what does all this end up tasting like?

I've had the notion for a while that SL at least can be looked at as a colony of US/European culture and finance, with all that implies socially  and politically. I haven't had time to immerse myself in the post-colonial literature the way I'd like to, so please bear in mind that these are early and unsupported thoughts.

Much of the debate about what SL "is" comes down to two perspectives: it's a colony of the atomic world, subject to the same rules, but a place to be exploited, and whose natives are - well, all the images Edward Said describes in Orientalism: untrustworthy (and haven't we heard *that* so much from our rulers!), inferior ("freaks and geeks"), eroticized (all genderbending pornographers, every one of us)  - wogs, to put it crudely. Digital People are regarded like, and often treated like, Thai sex workers, Tijuana barmaids, sweatshop laborers: disposable amusements and income generators for the tourists and bankers of the colonial powers.

The other side sees SL as a separate space, but equal in rights and dignity. We are Kosovo, East Timor, the West Bank: to some, a part of the greater nation, peopled with ungrateful separatists, and to others separate nations deserving of self-governance and recognition as an autonomous space. We have our own culture, our own legends, celebrities, heroes. We are finding our own way, apart from the culture and economy of our US/European visitors, investors and exploiters.

So, if foreign capital is leaving, and we are developing our own culture and economy apart from US/European commercial power and culture?  To be sure, foreign capital enables growth, development, advancement. But it also enables domination.  As a Digital Person, I find myself becoming a Digital nationalist, eager to see our world grow into its own cultural and economic nationhood.