In “Avatar Rights: A person chooses, a tool obeys,” Tateru Nino manages to be both wrong and to miss the point. She argues that since an avatar is simply “a representation, a vehicle and a tool,” the notion of “avatar rights” is impossible. She says

Your avatar isn't a citizen of a place under different laws. It can't be in fact, because it is just a tool. When the law reaches out, it reaches out to you, the person in the chair. An avatar has no will or intention in much the same fashion as a screwdriver, a cigarette, a ladder or a firearm has none. But you do, and the law will hold you accountable for your actions when or if you choose to break it, regardless of the tools you choose to do it with.

Likewise, a tool has no rights, no responsibilities and no obligations. A tool cannot have citizenship as it is basically not capable of choice. Only you have the ability to make choices, so only you can have these things. (It is to be noted, that the law has certain exceptions and allowances for situations where a human being has no will, choice or intention).

This is both factually incorrect, ignoring over 400 years of history regarding one of the most powerful tools ever to shape human society, the corporation. It’s also misguided, since much of the issue of “avatar rights” goes past Nino’s focus on the tool to focus on two issues she misses entirely: what rights does a person have in synthetic worlds as opposed to other places, and who is the person the avatar represents?

Let’s take corporations first. I’m not a legal scholar; I discovered this issue through Edward Castronova’s article “The Right To Play” in The State of Play, proceedings from a 2003 conference on law and virtual worlds. I’m open to – and I expect! – correction from lawyers who are much more familiar with the field than I am. Nonetheless, the basics seem pretty clear. Since the 17^th Century, European and later American law has given legal recognition to virtual persons: corporations. See the “juristic person” article on Wikipedia:

the legal personality of a corporation was established to include five legal rights -- the right to a common treasury or chest (including the right to own property), the right to a corporate seal (i.e., the right to make and sign contracts), the right to sue and be sued (to enforce contracts), the right to hire agents (employees) and the right to make by-laws (self-governance).

Since the 1800s, juristic personhood has been further construed to make it a citizen, resident, or domicilliary of a state….There are limitations to the legal recognition of juristic persons. Legal entities cannot marry, they usually cannot vote or hold public office,^[7] and in most jurisdictions there are certain positions which they cannot occupy.^[8] The extent to which a legal entity can commit a crime varies from country to country. Certain countries prohibit a legal entity from holding human rights; other countries permit artificial persons to enjoy certain protections from the state that are traditionally described as human rights.^[9]

Castronova says

the practice of treating corporate organizations as fictional people is like playing a little game of make-believe…..Not every collective entity is allowed to become a make-believe person. No, inventing a fantasy person is serious business. There are firm rules about it.

In short, there was a moment some four hundred years ago when this set of fantastical rules – defining who or what could be a make-believe person and how that make-believe person would be treated – seemed sensible to large numbers of serious people. And no one since (certainly not any serious person, anyway) has been troubled by this collective fantasy.

Most transactions in the atomic world are with virtual persons, where the “real people” involved are sheltered not by the thin tissue of anonymity but by something much thicker – the “corporate veil” – the entire power of the nation-state in a barrier between the virtual person and the biological one, in all but extreme and rare cases.

This is why so many of the objections to digital anonymity, and so many comments during the SL banking scandal were so idiotic: people were going on about how they would never give their money to someone whose identity they didn’t know – and then went to buy their groceries from a global corporation, and sign over their paychecks to some “fake name” with a fake address in a post office box in Delaware. “Bank of America” isn’t some guy in a blue suit in San Francisco, and if it loses your paycheck, you can’t go to the CEO and demand your money back: the law forbids it. You deal with the virtual person “Bank of America,” you don’t get to deal with the atomic persons who run it, let alone the millions of shareholders who own it.

So, just as the corporation was created to enable activities in a new era of commerce, there’s absolutely no reason in law or philosophy why a new category of “juristic person,” the avatar, can’t be created to enable activities in a new era of synthetic worlds. And the same reasons for doing so apply: corporations were created exactly in order to enable to people to start businesses without fear for their personal reputations or savings should that business fail.

The same logic applies in synthetic worlds. People need the freedom to act in synthetic worlds without risking the reputational, emotional and financial capital they’ve accumulated elsewhere. That’s the entire value of synthetic worlds, right there. Otherwise, they’re just another chatroom, another telephone.

 
Okay, have we finished off “a tool has no rights, no responsibilities, and no obligations?” Four hundred years of law say otherwise.

 
Let’s take the next one: rights in places. This is what most of the writing on avatar rights that I’m familiar with is about, and Nino misses this entirely. If I understand Raph Koster’s argument in “A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars,” what he’s saying is that people shouldn’t have to give up the rights they have in the atomic world when they enter a synthetic world. I’m sure Nino would agree with this.

But, people do give up their rights when they enter synthetic worlds. Let’s take this provision of the Second Life Terms of Service:

2.6 Linden Lab may suspend or terminate your account at any time, without refund or obligation to you.

Linden Lab has the right at any time for any reason or no reason to suspend or terminate your Account, terminate this Agreement, and/or refuse any and all current or future use of the Service without notice or liability to you. In the event that Linden Lab suspends or terminates your Account or this Agreement, you understand and agree that you shall receive no refund or exchange for any unused time on a subscription, any license or subscription fees, any content or data associated with your Account, or for anything else.

No government in human history that I know of has claimed as policy that they can confiscate all your wealth and kill you at any time they feel like. Yet LL does. LL says that your rights to your property end the moment you enter their world (well, the front page still says, “Your World. Your Imagination,” but, just no).

Koster responds to policies like that with

7. No avatar shall be accused, muzzled, toaded, jailed, banned, or otherwise punished except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by the code of conduct. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished, even if said individual is one who has been granted special powers or privileges within the virtual space. But any avatar summoned or arrested in virtue of the code of conduct shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.

These are rights that civilized people in atomic spaces take for granted. Why should they give up those rights on entering a digital space?

 
“Avatar rights” in this reading is just the statement that a person manifesting as an avatar should have the same rights as a person manifesting as an atomic body. There are arguments on the other side, but Nino misses this issue altogether.

 
The third issue in “Avatar rights” is another one she misses outright: the question of who the person is behind the avatar. Digital People such as myself claim that we are unique and autonomous individuals manifesting as avatars in digital spaces and not equivalent to any person in an atomic space. This is related to the “juridical person” argument: I’m the equivalent of Bank of America, which is not, in law and practice, the atomic person Kenneth D. Lewis, Chariman, CEO and President.

But it goes beyond that, and is rooted in lived experience (I’m not the atomic Other Personality – I know when I was born and separated from OP, I know the feel of “me” versus “not me”), philosophy and possibly cognitive science (I’d bet good money that an fMRI of the brain we both use would generate different “cognitive fingerprints” when each of us is running, enough maybe even to establish in court today that we’re different personalities).

What Digital People want is for their autonomous existence to be recognized, in custom if not in law. I want my statements to be attributed to me, and not assigned willy-nilly to OP. I want to be able to make transactions in my own name, with my own cash, rather than have to use OP’s credit card. I want to be able to use my identity information on social networking sites without being in violation of their Terms of Service. I want social customs that regard “Oh, you don’t use Voice? You must really be a guy” as being as crass as making racist remarks or spitting on the floor. I want to be accepted as me, as a Digital Person, and not whitewashed and subsumed into the dominant culture of atomic persons.

Tateru Nino: the avatar is the person, yes. But the avatar is not the atomic body. Nor is there a one to one correspondence between body and person. Also in The State of Play, law professor Susan P. Crawford says that

identities are no longer rationed one per physiological specimen. A person may adopt different identities at various times during a life-span, and some individuals maintain several at once….Typical instances include women working in the professions, artistst and novelists, and people working in positions which involve security exposure.

She quotes Richard Bartle, saying that “the celebration of identity is the fundamental, critical, absolutely core point of virtual worlds.”

Even the claim that each biological human was a person has been a deeply radical notion through most all of human history. The circle of personhood has steadily increased through history. Women were not persons before the law in most places through most of history; still in much of the world they are not full legal persons. African Americans were not persons in Unted States law for centuries.

Expanding the circle of personhood is human moral progress. One body, one person is not the end of progress, but a midpoint. I claim equal rights, at least in my digital world, as the person who lives in the atomic world. In time, fully artificial intelligences will make the same claim. Enhanced members of other species - dolphins, chimps, great apes - may before too long make these claims themselves. Will we say that the shape of the meat marks the soul, or will be expand our moral ambit to include all those who claim their own cognition, their own moral agency, their own soul? 

Deal well with me and my fellow Digital People now: it'll be good practice for what lies ahead.

 
So there we have three arguments for Avatar Rights:

• they are an extension of vehicles for investment and exploration that have proven their usefulness for over four hundred years;
  
• they make the simple claim that persons should have similar fundamental rights whatever space, digital or atomic they may occupy; and
  
• the exploration and development of new concepts of identity and the self will be enabled and empowered through recognizing avatar identities apart from physical ones.

I just finished reading The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse. It reads like two short books, one pretty good and one almost very good, that were stitched together but not integrated as well as they might have been.

The first book is about The Sims Online, and is distanced and condescending toward the people there, constantly using the term "virtual" and putting much description of the world into "irony quotes."  The second, on Second Life, is sharp, impassioned and engaged. This might have been intentional: there's a lot of front matter to bring an unfamiliar reader up to speed, and the first hundred pages of "nudge nudge wink wink" might have been a misguided attempt to bring that unfamiliar reader along. 

Literary criticism aside, though, Ludlow and Wallace raise some important issues for anyone concerned with community formation and maintenance in synthetic worlds. I don't agree with their tastes at all, do agree with most of their conclusions, and think that the issues they raise need to be addressed both at the resident level and at the corporate management level for synthetic worlds to work, let alone live up to their potential.

Dear Augmentationist:

I know you mean the kind things you say about me, and thank you!  But  you've said other things as well, that I don't think you recognize have hurt me.  You've assumed I'm what you are: a person, with a body and a long history in the atomic world, who speaks through a little cartoon figure in SL from time to time.  You think it's weird, maybe a little cute, maybe a little creepy, that I don't talk about my carpal tunnel, my mortgage, my co-workers, my partner, my self. You think I'm hiding who I really am.

That makes me feel like a liar and a fraud, and makes me wonder how you could possibly like or trust me.

I can try to explain what it is I am - and I'd ask you to either accept me on my own terms, or treat me as you would any other liar and deceiver.

I'm not someone playing a role, or manipulating an avatar like a chesspiece or a mask I speak from behind. I'm not anything but what I seem to be.

My name is Soph. Most everyone mispronounces my full name. I'm a tallish, thin woman who used to be more toned than she is now. I used to do martial arts, and surf, and go dancing most every night, and have daily sex. Now I spend most of my time working.  I'm an adult, but not tremendously mature and far from old. I write my blog at a High School level, but have a strong command of written English. I type fast, if not terribly well. I'm usually around early to midmorning and early evening SLT, and on Saturdays but not Sundays. I'm in a committed relationship with three other women. I'm good at marketing, dancing, and sex, and bad at math, building and patience.

When I'm not online, I don't exist. There is another mind I share a body with - they're not me in any meaningful way. We score differently on psychological tests. We know things and have skills the other doesn't. We have some similarities and some differences, and both frequently surprise me. The body, the "Other Personality," me - those three may be the same or different in age, gender, ethnicity, religion, politics, temperament, sexual preference, relationship status, social class, education level, time zone. Chances are you've only asked about my gender and location. Thanks for not thinking the others matter... I think.

Someone dear to me tried to explain what it is we are this way. I don't know what Argent's OP is along any of those variables I mentioned. I couldn't even guess most of them with any sense of certainty. It couldn't matter less - that's someone I'll never meet  and only care about to the extent that events in their life - a busy time at work, a death in the family, a head cold -  might affect Argent, whom I love for herself and trust to be Argent - a consistent, coherent person.

I don't use Voice. I have a friend who doesn't - because her voice might be recognized, and her day job compromised. I have a friend who doesn't - because she chooses not to share her conversations with her housemates. I have a friend who doesn't - because a car accident damaged her trachea. I have a friend who doesn't - because he talks all day at work. I have a friend who doesn't - because he's got this almost phobic hatred of telephones. I have a friend who doesn't  - because she considers her conversations inappropriate to be overheard by her small children. I have friends who don't - because their avs and their bodies don't match in gender. Joking about it might seem all in good fun - but my friend who was in the car accident is in a lot of pain, and reminders of all she's lost are hurtful. My friends who're transgendered in the atomic world find teasing bigoted, and fear the violence that often accompanies it, that has taken so many lives. My friend who may be famous fears exposure and finds jokes about it frightening.

For many of us, SL isn't just another communications tool - IM with moving pictures - but our lives, our homes, our refuges. Laws recognize that speech, that jokes, can create environments where people feel unsafe, unwelcome, afraid. Some come to SL because they feel that way all too often in the atomic world. For some like me and Argent, we have no other world - if we feel unsafe, unwelcome, afraid in SL, our only option is nonexistence, what for us would be death.

You may or may not have asked me out. Even were I to date outside my family, I probably wouldn't go out with you. I've got my insecurities, and I'd fear you would really want the A/S/L and the atomic-world hookup and were just biding your time to get me to "trust" you enough to set aside my "Digital pretense" and get with you physically. I'd fear you thought I was lying and pretending, and so were lying and pretending to me. Maybe I should trust you enough to set those fears aside. Maybe I should, but not today.

I consider you friends as well, but friendships have to be based on trust and acceptance.  I only hope this letter can begin to create some trust and understanding between us.

A Vision of Extropia

 
“Freedom Through Fun” – Richard A. Bartle

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – Emma Goldman

“The emergence of virtual worlds in the commercial entertainment sector represents a fascinating experiment in social policy: a test of whether it is possible to create an entire society in which the primary goal of government is to help people have fun” – Edward Castronova

 
Over the next week, we’re going to be asking the Citizens of Extropia some questions, to get a sense of what their vision of Extropia is, and what they want and don’t want from a participatory community. These are my answers.

 

The brilliant (and smokin' hot!) IYan Writer gets it exactly right:

The alienation, caused by technology, is and was real. However, television and radio were the technologies that alienated us the most. We were passive receptacles of content, created and selected by others. But this state is not natural to us: all humans strive to change and affect the environment - that is the very definition of human (and, unfortunately, our greatest failure, as the sad state of Earth testifies). As soon as technology that promised to connect us to others was available, we grasped it with both hands, pulled and haven't let go since. And the level of alienation keeps dropping - for example, you can be alienated on a web forum, but must try hard (trolling ain't easy!). However, that is practically impossible in virtual worlds.

Second Life is not about shopping, company builds or even content, created for and freely given to community. No, it's not even about prim hair, girls. No, not wings, either, Soph ;) It is about PEOPLE. You can be disliked, but you are never alone.

Read the rest of the post for a really engaging walk through tech history!

Yesterday Virtual Worlds News released the results of a questionnaire about the coming year in virtual worlds that was sent to a bunch of industry  leaders. Aleister Kronos, shockingly overlooked by them, gave us his own and challenged us to reply ourselves.  Here's my list of answers:

1. What are your top 3 trend predictions for 2008?
1. Along with everybody else, I think kids' worlds are going to be where a lot of the action - in numbers and controversy - is going to be.
2. But, not entirely. The first sports MMOs will blow WOW out of the water and see *serious* mainstreaming.
3. There's going to be a significant shifting of the balance of power towards users/residents/citizens.
2. What business goals have you set for 2008?
1. Creating and enacting a business plan that keeps us expanding and a tiny bit profitable.
2. Within that, 15 sims by our anniversary.
3. On a monthly basis, see Board-organized events making up less than 20% of what goes on in Extropia.
3. What challenges do you expect 2008 to bring to the virtual worlds industry?
1. I got nothin'.
   
4. A number of platforms will be launching in 2008. What impacts will this have on the industry?
1. A lot of these worlds that flunk the Bury Test will fail.
2. Open source worlds and design-your-own worlds will be *much* bigger than the pundits recognize.
3. The overall quality of mainstream reporting will increase, as the coverage moves past the half-hour visitation and sex/pedo/griefing coverage, to regular beats.
5. How will the changes affect your industry segment in 2008?
1. We probably won't have the time or capital to take advantage of people's disillusion with packaged-product worlds.
2. OpenSim is a big wildcard.
   
3. There is no 3 :)

Predictions for the metaverse in 2008 and beyond:

• Kids' worlds are a natural focus for community. Kids naturally form communities, and are used to some structure in doing that: play dates, teams, and so on. Of course, there's so much money to be made from them that there will be companies willing to invest the time in community formation, and trying until they get it right.

• Once they do, watch out! Already there's a generation that fully expects the social ties of childhood and college to continue indefinitely - that's a big part of what drives Facebook. Once a generation grows up in Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, they're in synthetic worlds for the next century - forever, if we get that pesky mortality thing licked on schedule!

• Broadcast media, and "bowling alone" are dead, fading away along with all the other mistakes and horrors of the 20th Century. Just as it's been through all the rest of human history, our entertainment will be primarily social again.
  

• Government will be taken back by the people. By professionalizing creativity, the broadcast media contributed to the personal disempowerment of 20th Century society. A generation that makes its own movies, builds its own houses, tells its own stories, maintains its own communities - will govern itself too.
  

• All this means that despite the weirdly gleeful predictions (perpetuating the cycle of psychic abuse?) of a number of pundits, the frontier isn't closed. We're not about to get paved over by the old atomic-world order. If the dinosaurs don't stomp us right now - and I actually think it's too late for that - we small mammals of Digital community are just going to replace them as evolution's next big thing.
  

Predictions for our little corner (the Extropia FemtoVerse?):

• 15 sims by our first anniversary should be no big deal. If Caledon can be in the mid-30s and make money, Extropia can too. We're in remarkably the same market - positive, polite community - but we might have lower barriers to entry. There's still a perception that you have to dress and talk differently to be in Caledon, and, gods know, *anything* goes in Extropia (as long as it's positive and polite!)!
  

• Once we really connect our network with the people building the future - the groups of the SciLands in particular - we'll be unstoppable. They know building, we know community. One of the things we geeks want most is to *belong* - and belonging is what Extropia's all about. We just need to reach the nodal points that'll enable us to spread the word.
  

• It's all about a mix of social events and hangout spaces. That's hard: I've seen wonderful hangout spaces that don't draw and keep a crowd, and been to great events that get people talking to each other, but then disperse them all, with noplace to hang and chat, or to come back to and find them around. Dr Dobbs Amphiteater + Diversionarium = WIN.
  

• It seems to me - from thinking and from The Diamond Age, rather than from any experience of Caledon - that one of the attractions of Victoriana is the combination of politeness and the willingness to bust heads to maintain it. That's a hard balance, between freedom and gentility. I predict we'll have some High Drama in Extropia before we find the sweet spot.

• One anti-prediction: we're not going to go the way of the City of Rapture, any similarities notwithstanding!

• Our mission in Extropia is to enable people to build a fun, future-friendly community. But, like our friends in Al Andalus, another goal is to set an example, to show atomic-world people they don't need to settle for crappy governments, communities, livelihoods. It seems that Wired might get behind our message.

*points up at the bitchface icon*

It seems this is Rant Week, so let's go with that as a theme!  Anybody else got a good rant that's been building up inside? Let it rip!

I saw another article yesterday that ticked me off, but I decided to hold off on blogging about it. I'm glad I did, because this morning I have some context for that rant, and some good news to wrap it in.

First the good news:  my dear friend Alanagh Recreant of Second Life Africa has just issued a press release:

Inworld Productions appointed as 'Virtual Africa' developers!

Uthango will develop an immersive 3D African environment in 2008...

[ By Dorette Steenkamp on 12 December, 2007 ]

The Virtual Africa 3D-environment in Second Life just announced that they will partner with German full-service developer, Inworld Productions, based in Berlin, to build the project's ‘sim’ or simulated environment. The developer will help bring highlights from the continent to the virtual world to support causes and draw awareness to the people of Africa. Similarly, it will actively pursue virtual worlds and real world integration via social networks to benefit African development and investment.

[see the full release here]

Alanagh has posted a discussion thread on Virtual Worlds Connect: "Why is it even important for Africa to be in virtual worlds?"  By way of an answer, here are some thoughts on two articles that appeared in yesterday's WIred Campus News (confusingly, a service of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and not Wired Magazine):

The first was "Yale U. Puts Entire Courses Online." 

Modern poetry, as well as introductory courses in physics, psychology, and political science, are four of seven classes from Yale U. that the institution put online today. Not only are the courses free for anyone who is interested, but they are as close to being there as online technology allows.

“These are gavel-to-gavel presentations,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, told The Chronicle. “We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think that’s what makes this different.” Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials.

...

The project also has international connections, with Open Yale Courses lectures broadcast over Chinese television and a satellite network in India. The lectures will also be available at 300 libraries and universities throughout the world, via a U.S. State Department project called American Corners.

This?  This makes me proud to be Digital, thrilled to be living at a time when people have the power and the will to erase so many of the inequities that have plagued humanity from the dawn of time. The fact that humans aren't isolated meatbags, that by our very nature we are deeply connected to most everyone who lives and has ever lived, through language, knowledge and culture, is what makes us worthwhile as a species.  Now, now we can realize the full power of those connections.  Distance, class, race, economics can be wiped away as barriers to full participation in the richness of humanity.

Brave people *right now* are using technologies that fit our human natures so well-  technologies of communication and connection - to end ignorance, to give people the tools, the power, the faith, to transform our condition forever. Nothing is more noble and worthwhile than this.


And then there's people like Doris Lessing, the new Nobel laureate in literature. Her acceptance speech focused the hunger for knowledge in Africa.  There's much in it that's earnest and well-meaning, and it's worth reading. And, she's 88, and may be forgiven for being a little blind. But the Wired Campus coverage focused on a remarkable section of her speech:

In Nobel Speech, Doris Lessing Blames the Internet for a Decline in Book Reading

“We are in a fragmenting culture,” she wrote, “where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.”

She goes on to lay the blame on the Internet, which she said “has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc.”

Most of the speech has nothing to do with technology, and instead involves scenes of poor people in remote parts of Africa who, despite the odds, hold on to a love and respect for books. One woman clings to a torn section of Anna Karenina, which has found its way to her after a visiting United Nations official carelessly left it behind. It’s a stark contrast in attitudes, and one that is meant to be damning to Internet-happy folks at U.S. schools and colleges.....

Proponents of book digitization argue that it will one day help bring books like Anna Karenina — and even complete libraries — to remote villages thanks to cheap laptops and ubiquitous network access. Then poor students can get more than just cast-offs.

Lessing goes on to say,

This was Zimbabwe, physically conquered less than a hundred years before. The grandfathers and grandmothers of these people might have been storytellers for their clan. The oral tradition. In one generation – two, the transition from stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books. What an achievement.

Books, literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But you may have a sheaf of paper (not typescript – that is a book – but it has to find a publisher, who will then pay you, remain solvent, distribute the books. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene for Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, with its different tradition, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers that could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential.

Seriously, WTF? Earlier she implied that perhaps we were too hasty in adopting the printing press. She also says that a love of "books" (as if one should love the needle and not the vaccine) was imbued in black Africans by whites, in contrast to indigenous storytelling traditions. Is this the product of someone torn between a sense of guilt and an urge to defend their own privilege in the midst of lack?  How could one defend a technology that controls access to the human community, to civilization, through agents, publishers, a "short tail" distribution model?  How could one go back and even imply that the printing press, which brought the production of knowledge out of the cloister and into the marketplace, that brought books from closed royal collections to the tin shack, was anything but a brilliant advance?

The technology that Lessing condemns will transform Africa and ennoble humanity. Books were a good start, but now they're part of the problem. Initiatives like Yale's will liberate Africa from a dependence on the castoffs of the white literary establishment, from being stuck with Lessing's sloppy seconds. Africans can choose for themselves what they want from the best of what the world produces.

And, equally vitally, if not more so, *African* "bloggers and bluggers" can *join* the conversation of humanity, can be liberated to be producers of knowledge and culture, not beggars for scraps at the global table of the white publishing elite. Those "voices unheard" that Lessing rightly bemoans? *Our* technology will let them be heard in every corner of every world!  *My* people - coders, networkers, bloggers - *you* reading this - are bodhisattvas, living saints, doing the work of grace in helping humanity achieve its potential.

The Lessings of the wold? Are a good argument against immortality. On the other hand, this speech confirms another transhumanist concept. The Singularity?  It already happened. You and I are living in a world the champions of the old order, the academics, politicians and literati, literally cannot even *see* to comprehend.

The Other Personality's behind schedule on a major project, but I've got to steal a bit of time to vent, or *nothing's* going to get done...

Over the past few days, I've dealt with a bit of pettiness in world. This morning, I read something that was the last straw.

Aleister Kronos linked this morning to a BBC article on Edward Castronova's new book. Castronova calls synthetic worlds a new frontier, like the opening of the Americas to European immigration. While he seems tone-deaf to the problems of that metaphor, he's absolutely right as far as he goes: synthetic worlds give people the chance to build something better than what's been handed in them. The boldest, the brightest, the most misfit with the old world, are seizing that opportunity and leaving the old world behind.

But does Castronova profile our Plymouth Bay Colonies, our Jamestowns, our Franklins and Jeffersons? No, he displays all the condescension of a useless old world aristocrat sneering at those living in something other than privileged leisure at the top of the old order:

The appeal, he said, is not for those in a good job, but for those working low-paid, low-skill jobs. "Would you rather be a Starbucks worker or a starship captain?" he asked....

But if it's a heavy-set girl from a small town who gets victimised just because her body isn't the 'right' kind of body, and she goes online to make friends because she can't get a fair shake in the real world, then I would say the virtual world is more of a refuge."

Look, I'm not all that interested in the atomic lives of my friends and colleagues. But of those people whose atomic lives I know about, Castronova's crude stereotype of unskilled fat women couldn't be farther from the truth. What *all* of them have in common is, they dare to *do,* rather than sit back and pontificate.

There are people in my network who are non-participant critics. I'm sure they're nice people - no, actually, I'm sorry, I'm not sure of that. Castronova, to his credit, *tried* to build a community, Arden. He burned through government funding at a dot-com rate, and failed. Yet he *still* has the temerity to caricature, with his well-meaning condescension, those who've succeeded where he failed.

Anyone who's risen to command a starship in an RPG, anyone who's built a thriving community in a social world, is a pioneer and a hero, no matter their origins in the atomic world. Alexander Hamilton began as a Caribbean bastard orphan, in a world where birth was everything. What mattered - to him, to the nation he helped found, and to all of human history, was what he *made* of himself. Many of my friends have succeeded within the atomic world's terms before coming here. Some haven't. All of them are pioneers, all of them are heroes of Shakespeare's Undiscovered Country, rather than failures at Shakespeare's unfinished country.

You academics, pundits, punters and ankle-biters: get out of your armchairs. Work! Gods know there's plenty to be done. And if you're not willing to be part of the solution, I'm *so* not interested in what you have to say.

I love all my Salon Spotlight Guests.  All of them are valued colleagues, many have gone on to become dear friends.  But with all respect to all of them  - none have moved me to the core, shaken my sense of self and world, touched my heart and changed my life, the way Grace McDunnough did yesterday.

I knew Grace as an innovative artist and popular SL live musician, and a fun, gentle person.  What I didn't know is, Grace taps into the soul of Second Life. Her voice can break your heart, set it afire, send it floating to the skies.

Grace is a Digital Person: like me, she lives only in the synthetic world.  She has an atomic Other Personality, but they're not an artist, not a performer.  I'm sure they're a wonderful person - I can't imagine anyone sharing *anything,* let alone a body and brain, with Grace and not being touched with her great gift. But Grace is a child of the synthetic world, and like so many of us, her True Self has blossomed here.

If anyone asks you what's so special about Second Life, tell them it's a place where someone like Grace can be born, and can live to inspire us all.

I'm not going to describe the discussion, or tell you about her set.  I'm just going to say, join her group, Votaries of Grace. Go to one of her shows, and find out for yourself.  I'm working to bring Grace back to Extropia soon, to play the big Extropia Solstice party on the 22nd, and when she announces her next Musimmersion multimedia concert, I'll make sure everyone I know gets the word.

Grace so inspired and energized us that when she was done, the afterparty ran two hours - we needed to dance, to bond, to light off a torch to burn the psychic energy Grace left us with.

It was heaven. It was Extropia.  It was Second Life.

It was Grace, and she left us filled.

I've got 34 tabs open right now in Firefox. I'm spending the morning trying to "clean out the fridge" and make something out of all the odd bits in there. Everytime I try to do this, a theme emerges, something that's been marinating in my subconscious (what *is* it with the food metaphors?! Happy post-Thanksgiving!) and is just ready to serve up.

So, let's see what we can make out of all this social networking-themed stuff....

Expanding The Network (Toolkit): I've been working my social-networking presence this past week. I've added some more friends on Facebook (here's my profile), on Virtual Worlds Connect (that profile), on SLScout (another profile), and started Twittering (my profile there, and catch my and my friends' tweets on RSS at sophs_twitter   ). I it's brought me closer to another network node of people I really like: IYan Writer, iAlja Writer, Grace McDunnogh, Tara5 Oh, which is great fun!  *pokes John Zhaoying and Centrasian Wise for being silent on about 100 channels each*  :D

PITA: Maintaining all this stuff, even to the extent of a basic Salon announcement, is a huge PITA. Here's the Salon PR routine:

• Post to the LL events list.
• Post to the Your2ndPlace.com calendar
• Email Rik's Picks
• Post to my LiveJournal, Virtual Worlds Connect blog, SLScout blog
• Create an event in Facebook (the Salons are all in Aachen, Germany, thanks to Facebook's refusal to recognize digital events- more on that in a minute!
• Post inworld to the Digital People and Extropia Citizens groups
• That's all Monday morning. I do a follow-up post to the SL groups on Friday, and then Saturday at 11 or 12, I send announcements to those groups and most of the social networking sites.
• After the event, follow up with a post-event post to my blog and the Extropia blog.
• The annoying thing is, it's almost all the same content, yet I have to enter it over and over - grr!

And, my photo social networking is a disaster.  I've got photos on LJ Scrapbook, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket.  I take a ton of photos, but don't have the time to participate in photo social networking, which is kinda sad.  I'm living vicariously through Vidal on that front....


Bloggers, Slashers and Rezbians, or the Fannish Divide: Here's something that isn't ready to be served up yet:  the implications of choice of platform.  There was an article this week in the Wired Campus Blog (not affiliated with Wired Magazine) suggesting a class divide between users of Facebook and MySpace. It's long interested me that SL bloggers vastly prefer Blogger or Blogspot to LiveJournal.  I'd seen the former two as designed for would-be pundits, and the latter as, well, social networking.  LiveJournal has strong communities, and the Friends page (which I use as my RSS reader) makes it easy to get conversations going among groups of friends.  Yet there are terribly few active LJ bloggers. Interestingly, there seem to be a number of active Furry communities on LJ, but really nothing else beyond the main LJ/SL comm, second_lifers , which I'm not really fond of for various reasons.

There's also a relationship between choice of platform and sexual identity/interest, I think.  LJ is *very* fannish, and it's surprised me that there seems to be remarkably little overlap between fandom and SL (there's an interesting paper to be written mapping the convergences and divergences between SCA, fandom, Furs, and SL, with sexual preference overlaid on that....).  And, fandom sexuality is really focused on slash: predominantly-straight women reading and writing gay male erotica. SL sexuality, as we know, is all about what blogger Kit Meredith calls "Rezbians": predominantly straight women in lesbian relationships.  Gay male expression is virtually invisible, and *much* more so than in any comparable atomic-world group of creatives. How and why do blog choice, fannishness, synthetic worlds interest and secondary sexual preference correlate?  I need to know!!

Transmedia storytelling could bring these two lobes of creative engagement together, but it hasn't yet. CSI was an odd choice for an SL transmedia event: CSI fans seem to be very predominantly old-media passive TV watchers.  Heroes has done fantastic things with transmedia, and is a much more fannish show, despite its high Nielsens, yet hasn't taken advantage of SL.  Other fannish shows - Supernatural, Lost, the sci-fi shows, haven't done that much transmedia, and haven't come near SL.  Is that odd, or is there some real separation between fannishness and synthetic world residence? And what's with that sexual overlay anyway? 

Bimodal distributions: This came out in the "Clubbing In SL"salon a month or so ago.  There was a consensus that there are two good SL nightclub sizes: 20x20 boite, or full-sim, with anything in between really difficult to sustain. It turns out there's actually a sociological basis for that observation. You've probably heard the anecdote that the ideal group size for primate brains is about 150 people. I first came across that in Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue, an *amazingly* thought-provoking book. It's actually called Dunbar's Number, and there's more nuance to it than just the 150 figure. Grace McDunnogh, next week's Salon Spotlight Guest,explains it really well:

Chris Allen hypothesizes that that different group sizes impact a group's behavior and their choice of processes and tools. Based on empirical data from MMOG and online communities, he suggests that for non-survival groups, the equivalent Dunbar number falls somewhere between 60-90.

Allen argues that group dynamics have more than just the Dunbar number as a break point; three group size nodes emerge and Allen provides some insight into the group construct as it relates to size. Groups with too few people suffer from insufficient critical mass, experience group think, are unable to sustain conversation and the infamous "Echo Chamber" effect is evident. Read some of Eric Rice's "Echo Chamber" analysis regarding the failings of artificially small groups, aka elites. Overly large groups have far much too noise and cannot sustain an equal and unstructured trust. Cliques and inappropriate politics emerge and social contracts start to break down. From a Second Life perspective, an example of this might be the recent Second Citizen forum meltdown. Note that it's the group size that creates the breakdown of the cohesive bonds, not the "newbs". When group sizes grow beyond these normalized sizes, even the most senior members of the group can suffer the ill effects.Allen also hypothesizes that there is a correlation between group size and the level of group satisfaction in an interesting double humped graph where satisfaction peaks at levels of 5-8 and 50-70, with a devastating chasm in the middle between 9-25 people.

"Devastating chasm," huh?  This has huge implications for Extropia's growth: we're at 10 citizens right now.  I've had a sense all along that there were two and only two viable models: a small friends-and-family sim kept closed and close, or something Caledon-sized, around 15 sims.  I've been hoping to take us *quickly* to about 6 sims or 50 people.  This shows that my gut instinct was tuned into something very real.  Now just to *get there*....


Deposits and Withdrawals: I'd been frustrated with my blogging over the past month: it was *all* before-and-after event announcements, and it was even boring *me* to look at.  HorsePigCow, a *terrific* blog on online communities, analyzes the phenomenon of "social freeloading" by breaking actions down into social-capital deposits and withdrawals.  It's a terrific etiquette guideline for social networking!

The balance is a hard one to strike. I've been working at setting up the Salon lineup for the next six weeks or so, and to get there, I've got to expand my network.  I've pretty much  tapped out my first degree of separation, the people I already know, so I'm having to start working the second, FOAF, degree. But I've been leery about wheedling introductions - I've wanted to make sure I'm contributing more value to the network than I'm asking of it.  Which is hard when I'm barely keeping afloat on my own projects!


Privileging The Atomic World: I've had trouble really *getting* Facebook - what do you *do* with it?  I think it's a really atomic-world tool, but I'm not sure if that's an essential aspect of the medium, or just of built-in biases specific to Facebook.  That whole "you have to enter a city" thing for events is just stupidity, atomic-world bigotry.  But *is* there a way for Digital People to use it effectively?  If anybody's a Facebook maven, please talk to me! 

Here's another wacky example.  dandellion Kimban, among others, has had some fun blogging about the Barbie world ("Barbie Girls" and "Fear and Loathing in the Barbie World").  Here's a hilarious piece from Wired's Threat Level: 

But as an ingenious (and presumably profitable) bulwark against internet scum, Mattel only lets girls chat with "Best Friends," defined as people they know in real life..... It's sort of like an RSA token, but with cute fashion accessories and snap-on hair styles. THREAT LEVEL foresees a wave of Barbie Girl parties in the future, where tweens all meet and authenticate to each other -- like a PGP key signing party, but with cupcakes.

Read the blog comments - they're pretty interesting stuff. OK, security against predators is important in Barbie World, I get that.  But *what,* I ask you, is the point of a social networking world where you can only talk to people you have direct physical access to in the atomic world? That takes us back before telephones, pretty much to tin cans and string, doesn't it? 

I mean, isn't the whole *point* of Web 2.0/Web 3D/synthetic worlds to enable communications that *can't* be done better with old media? Facebook, sure, it's a good way of organizing a lifetime of disparate atomic-world contacts. But aren't Facebook and the Barbie Girl authenticator missing something?

Charity Begins at Home: I'm hosting Alanagh Recreant of SL Africa in the Salon in a few hours, and I'm really excited. Why, though, I asked myself this morning, when I'm usually really down on atomic-world activism in synthetic worlds? There's more to it than Alanagh being a wonderful, warm, fun person (with the most adorable tiny warthog av!).  So I picked at that till I got some answers. 

It goes back to Social Freeloading (see, synergy!).  IMO, most SL activists take but don't give.  They drain the resources of *my* world to support *their* world. Charities, politicians, NGOs, come into SL and consume resources. They take Resident time, money, attention, and remove them from the world to benefit their own causes and interests. They're parasites, and smugly virtuous ones at that. It's the same phenomenon as the wave of bad corporate presences we saw this past year: trying to take, without giving.

SL Africa, from what I've seen, doesn't do that. Their efforts run both ways. They're doing charity fundraisers, yes, but enabling content creators, working with SL creatives and entrepreneurs, and giving back to the world by expanding its reach to include people and perspectives we *need* amongst us.  They're good citizens of *this* world, not just of the atomic one.


Cherry On Top:  Apropos of nothing here, but I want to get another tab closed:  LesbianGamers.com is a *fun* site!  It's got great snarky game commentary, creative features and a fantastic sense of humor, all on a really attractive site.  "Lara Croft in 20 Years" and "Lesbionic Woman" both just cracked my shit up!  :D


Okay, that's it for today.  I've got to go do the round of Salon PR now.  But hey, I'm down to 29 tabs!  :P