Many dear friends have chosen not to blog this week, striking in protest against Linden Lab's foolish and overreaching brand-protection policies. I've given quite a bit of thought to the issue over the past few days: it would be easy enough to join them by default: I don't have the time to blog this week anyway. Friendship and laziness could reinforce each other; easy enough to stay away.

But I can't do that. I'm taking the time to post, to cross the virtual picket line, for a principle that I think is of overwhelming importance.

Silence is *always* complicity in oppression. The one obligation of the dissident, the sole moral response in the face of oppression, is to SPEAK OUT. To never relent, to never be silent, to never allow the oppressor a single moment's peace, to make the case for freedom and justice to anyone who can listen, at any time, anywhere Passivity enables oppression.

Seeing a wrong and refusing to speak out is not a tactic, it's a moral failing - and one I've been guilty of, in focusing on building something positive in Extropia to the complete exclusion of criticizing Linden Lab's increasing demonstrations of contempt for its Residents.

A generation of AIDS activists pioneered the slogan, SILENCE  = DEATH. Imagine if their response to official discrimination, to neglect by researchers and pharmaceutical companies, had been to *remain silent* until the world changed around them!

The rationale behind the blog strike seems to be that blogging about Second Life (no, I'm not conforming to Linden Lab's demands that I forgo nominative fair use. Let them come after me if they want) legitimizes or promotes Linden Lab's actions in some way.

Let's have a little realism about the nature of power, please? The commercial blogs - New World Notes, Massively and their ilk - aren't striking. The rest of them - fashionistas, SLebrities, microbusiness promotional blogs and personal journals - don't contribute any measurable amount to Linden Lab's revenues or to its ever more tattered reputation.

Linden Lab has been overreaching, deaf to its customers at best and actively hostile to them (Robin Linden and identity "trust," anyone?). They deserve to be called out, to be pressed to change. Second Life Residents and users should be informed of Linden Lab's actions and encouraged to take action. Our grievances are legitimate, and we should do something about them.

Like what?

• Education and outreach. The bloggers who've chosen to remain silent this week have done a wonderful job until now.  I've learned a tremendous amount from Gwyneth Llewellyn and Kit Meredith about my rights, and how Linden Lab's actions have threatened them. Those of us without the knowledge base and skills to analyze the situation in the first instance can spread the word - speak out, link, post a supportive comment.
  

• Collective action, not collective incation. Organize and join in mass attendance at Linden's office hours. Organize educational events, speakers, and mass protests inworld, where they can be seen, and where our numbers can be counted.
  

• Escalation. The frontline Lindens are deaf, inept, destructive? Write and petition the Board of Directors individually. Write to Linden Lab's investors, explaining how Linden Lab's actions are damaging the value of their investment. Call out Mitch Kapor inworld and at atomic world events. Hold him accountable for corporate actions.
  

• Cashing out. If you're upset enough - and I confess I'm not - cash out. Dump your Premium account, the three or four of you who still have one. Dump your landholdings. Stay out of the world. Make an impact that shows up on the concurrency and economic statistics. Linden Lab is using economic and legal tools against you? Use them back.
  

Okay, big talk for someone who hasn't stood up against Linden Lab's actions in months. It's easy to complain from the cheap seats, something I've seriously not appreciated when it's been directed at me. Do I have money to put where my mouth is (and if that isn't one of the more disgusting images in English figures of speech, I don't know what is)?

Here's what I've got.

• Once a week, here, or where this blog may end up moving to, I'm going to post a "for dummies" analysis of Linden Lab's problematic policies - and give them credit for whatever they may get right. I'll link to all the first-line smart commentary and analysis I'll be drawing from - and hopefully our intellectual leaders will come off strike and supply me with some material to work from!

• I'm going to offer Extropia's facilities: an expanded set of conference rooms, lecture halls, media displays and our mighty marketing engine, for an Anti Silence Day.
  
• You striking bloggers: I'll give you a stage and an audience.
  
• You Lindens: I'll issue you an invitation to show up and explain yourselves - or *you* can stand silent and ineffectual while *we* take control of the message.
  
• You concerned Residents: I'll give you a chance to show up, be counted, get informed, and get inspired.
  
• You veteran activists: I'll call on you to teach us, lead us, politicize and empower us.  Show us how to be effective agents for change. Give us the tools that have been proven to work in worlds like ours.
  

I'm not an intellectual analyst, not a veteran activist, not an influential heavyweight. I'm a pretty good marketer and events organizer with a blog. Those of you who *are* leaders - there's my contribution. 

Will you take me up on it, put it to use, and ACT UP? 

This just in from Reuters:

Poll: Most adults don’t want fantasy avatars

I clicked on the link, expecting something that heralded an assault on identity freedom, pointed to the virulence of bigotry against furries and transsexuals - the usual bitter news from the atomic world that looks all too much like a War on Imagination.

But that's not what I found in the data, despite the desperate spin from Eric Reuters that played on all those elements of my expectation. What did the data actually say? Only 44% of a general audience - *not* users of synthetic worlds, but Atomic folks on the street - said they *wouldn't* experiment with identity and appearance in a synthetic world, given the chance. Only 44% were so grounded in their atomic identity, so incurious or unimaginative, to not even want the option of trying.

Maybe they're not the problem, those ordinary people out there. Maybe the problem, the people who actually assault imagination and creative freedom, are the ones in positions of power in the media. And maybe, just maybe, this implausible spin on a survey is a sign of desperation, of an attempted "surge" in their War on Imagination.

Look at what Eric Reuters did. Let's start with that headline. "Most adults don't want fantasy avatars.' First, the natural converse of that statement is, "people who want fantasy avatars are mostly children." Yes, demean and belittle us from word one. Also, "fantasy avatars?" To me a "fantasy avatar" is *any* avatar in WoW, or drows and mermaids in SL. How many millions of people are *using* fantasy avatars in MMOs already, all over the world? 

The question actually asked was,


Is it "fantasy" to dramatically alter one's appearance?  To be taller, or a different race, or to reclaim youth, or healthy limbs? Fifty-six percent of ordinary Americans at least wouldn't say no to the choice to do so.

The article also goes on to refer to "the chance to roleplay a furry, robot, or the opposite gender."  "Play" and "fantasy" on the one hand, "adults" and "real world" on the other. And, transgender expression equated to "roleplaying a robot."  Gods, the condescending bigotry in that statement!

I call shenanigans, Eric Reuters.

Creative freedom, freedom of the *individual* to define herself, rather than the state, the bank, the employer - that's not childishness. That's empowerment.

And maybe that's what's behind the War on Imagination.  Imagination is power, imagination is freedom. Imagination is the refusal of packaged reality, the rejection of stories imposed upon us from outside.  The imposition of stories is the exercise of the power of the state, the financial institution, the media conglomerate. Our elites are too sophisticated to resort to power in its crudest form of physical coercion: they exercise power through belief. Belief in their creation myths, belief in their endless wars on "terror," of all things, belief that we are our credit reports, our census data, belief that we are "consumers" rather than creators.

If we lack the freedom to create our own identities, we have no creative freedom at all. If we are not allowed - by the government, by Reuters, by the brownshirted PN street thugs of the ruling orthodoxy - to use our very selves as a medium of expression, then no canvas, no keyboard, no screen can matter as a medium of expression. If we cannot own ourselves, if our very existence is not recognized as *our* intellectual property, then we only have what the powers that be allow us to have, and which they make take from us tomorrow in the next click-through "agreement."

Maybe I am childish. Maybe I am playful.

Maybe those aren't bad things.

But one thing I know for certain?  I *own* the right to create myself, to define myself. And not all the thrones and powers, not all the media lackeys and barbarian goons, will *ever* get me to accept their stories in place of my own.

"Most People Want Identity Choice" - *there's* the truth behind your desperate spin, Eric Reuters. We will not be denied.

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 read pretty much everything related to synthetic worlds. Lately, my RSS feed (click on my Profile for a list, or my Friends page to view it all - I use LJ as my RSS reader) had a load of interesting and ridiculously diverse stuff. Here are some quick links and comments:

• The best article on the SL banking brouhaha: Virtually Blind delivers an exceptional interview with SL Bank's Teufel Hauptmann. It's clear, coherent and moderate, and highlights the problem of LL's having thrown out the baby with the bathwater. I've stayed out of commenting on this - it's not my field, and there's plenty of both knowledge and passion (though not always both at once) expressed by others on the subject. But, this is good stuff.

• Thanks to Alanagh Recreant for the link, an excellent blog post on Metaverse Development Companies' apparent departure from SL. The comments are intelligent and incisive - there's a lot of food for thought here.
  

• My LJ friend circuit_four  has been flying on afterburners of brilliance! Here's two long quotes that are well worth pondering:

"I think this must be what such moral teachers as Socrates, Jesus, and the Buddha mean when they advise us to wish our enemies well. Obviously we should not wish success to our enemies’ projects; for those projects are evil, and they could not cease to be evil without ceasing to be the projects they are. Hence hatred for those projects is quite in order. But people can always cease to be evil without ceasing to be. If they refuse to cease being evil, we may find it necessary, in self-defense, to make them cease to be; but we should always prefer that our enemies cease being evil. But what is that, but to prefer that our enemies become better people—that they live better, more worthwhile, less destructive, hate-filled lives? And if that is what we ought to prefer, then we ought to wish our enemies well. And while that is compatible with being angry at them, and with killing them if necessary, it is not compatible with hating them."

- Roderick Long

******

The "politically correct" and "politically incorrect" mentalities polarize against each other. One side set up taboos against intolerant speech; the other side backlashes with the same dumb age-old prejudices, but now they're proud of them because they can convince themselves it's heroic.

The antidote is to PIERCE those boundaries with real, honest, good-natured satire. Hip-throw them out of their most comfortable assumptions. Embrace your opponent's right to say whatever they want, 'cause it'll give you more dumb ideas to make fun of later. :) Be more interesting than your oppressor. Pull their assumptions right down to their ankles, with everybody watching.

• Via dandellion Kimban, some wonderful technofetish (NSFW) - Dita Von Teese dripping wet in silver...

• On Your Toes is a great new shoe-focused fashion blog.  Today, something almost as hot as Dita - Barcelona Slingbacks from Armida. Mmmm, want.....

• I need some time to craft a detailed reply to this: Avatar Rights: A Person Chooses, A Tool Obeys. I'll do a long post tomorrow in response.  The short answer?  400 years of law and custom say otherwise. I'm frustrated with this to the point of fury - writing a long quasi-academic response will hopefully get me past wanting to punch babies, and let me keep my paid-up membership in the Cult of Civility.
  

 

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.

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.

 

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.

It's so hard to know what if anything actually happened, but apparently a photo of an FL woman crushing a cat's skull was found in a sandbox. Somebody reported it to LL, who determined that the image isn't "broadly offensive," and permissible under the TOS.

There's a good summary at Second Life Insider, who got the news from a friend of mine, Industria Dowler.

I'm not going to say anything more, I'm just not.  But, the Other Personality signed the petition that the article links to.

Identity Verification and Flagging Parcels for Restricted Content

What is defined as Restricted Content?
As a general rule, Restricted Content is any content that is explicitly sexual or excessively violent in nature. For guidance, consider AO-Rated (Adults Only) video games or R-rated movies.

("An R-rated motion picture may include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements")

What is the meaning of “flagged as having restricted content”?
Estate and parcel owners will be asked to flag the presence of restricted content on their land. This flag restricts access to verified Residents only, and provides notice to adults that content within may be objectionable to them.
.....

If Residents and businesses choose not to do this, land containing adult content that is not clearly marked will be easily identifiable by the community. Resident can raise concerns directly with the landowner or with Linden Lab via the Abuse channel.

As has always been the case, Residents are morally, socially and legally responsible for their actions and content in Second Life. Clearly, any illegal activity or content will be investigated and appropriate action will be taken.

After Robin Linden's first statement, some of you, who I respect and love dearly, told me this was no big deal. That my conclusion that I would be banned from my own home if I chose not to Verify was clearly mistaken.

Um, nope. If I don't flag my parcel, my estate owner will have to flag it, and all other occupied parcels, or face an Abuse report.

At which point I won't be allowed in my own home unless I provide information that does nothing to "verify" my age or identity, but does open me up to the prospect of identity fraud.  And, why should my verification status be of any concern to another Resident?  Yet LL will be displaying that on my profile. Why?


Needless to say, I cannot bring myself to invest in or build any place where Residents will be forced to disclose sensitive personal data to an unreliable third party in order to enter. I want to build a nightclub, build a sim for those who share my vision of a positive future. But I'm reluctant to see my investment lost, my account suspended, myself banned from my only world, the first time a Resident "trust vigilante" files an abuse report at the sight of "adult activity" in my home or club.

I'll stay and fight, even if I have to go back to sleeping on a park bench the way I did my first week of life. But I don't know if I'm willing to throw away a large amount of $USD to do so.

There are so many other things wrong with Everett Linden's statement ("illegal activity"?? How did we get from nudity to criminal behavior?), but I'll leave those to people much more talented at analysis than I am.

For myself... I read this loud and clear as "Your kind isn't wanted here... but we'll tolerate you in a ghetto." And I do not like that message, not at all.