I’d also like to thank Dusan Writer for starting the contest, organising everything, and being a sweetheart all around, and also the judges, Keystone Bouchard, Vint Falken, Ordinal Malaprop and Eristic Strangelove. I’m still speechless and trying to get to grips with their decision.

Anyway.

Eric Reuters asked me yesterday what I was going to do with the prize money. In all honesty, I answered him I have no idea. Which is still true in a way, but I am thinking about it (or rather, thinking about what exactly to do besides blowing it on shoes, clothes, and hair). And one thing that has struck me since is that there is no need to sell my mainland plots any more. Until now, I have only had offers by land sharks, and have been loath to let go for the price offered. Now… I won’t either, but I will do this instead :

I will transfer the land, the total approximately 10.000 sqm located in Spinold’s Flats, as a whole or in parts, to any number of charities or artistic project(s) that can put it to good use.

This will take the form of a land sale for a symbolic price (I was thinking 1 L$ per plot). I can subdivide or merge plots if needed, too. Please contact me (in-world or through the contact form) if you think you’d like to take me up on the offer, and forgive me for announcing right away I’ll ask a lot of nosy questions when you do.

That’s all for now, I fear. See you on Plurk until RL relents.

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Thanks to Dusan Writer’s and his judges’ incredible sweetness in accommodating my RL schedule constraints, I will have the opportunity to present my entry to his Second Life UI Design Contest this Sunday, June 27th, at 4 p.m. SLT on Dusan’s sim. Although this is not a publicized event, it is open to the public, and I for one would welcome anybody interested enough to watch.

As to the rest,well, all I can say is :

Our programme will resume as soon as RL allows.

[Update : well, I went, saw, and bored everybody out of their minds with an erratic, decidedly too long presentation. Still, everybody was very sweet, or I would probably have crumbled into a nervous wreck (or more of a nervous wreck than I was already, actually). Ta an awful lot for being so supportive and accommodating, all of you !

The results of the contest will be announced in the opening segment of the next Metanomics show, if I understood a recent communication by Dusan correctly. I’m having a little wager with myself on the results (don’t ask : I won’t be sharing what I bet on, beyond letting on that it is definitely not myself winning ). I will be very interested to see how close my guess came to the actual decision by the judges.]

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Maybe some among you have been wondering where I have been — after all, it has been over a month since I last gave a sign of life on this blog. Now, I’m not going to treat you to one of these «  why I did not post lately » posts — the only thing less interesting than a blog that is never updated is a blog that tries to simulate activity with posts on why there is no activity. So, unless you want to follow me on new social media darling Plurk, where the bite size posting and short bouts of inane chatter better accomodate both my current RL schedule and my frame of mind, all I have to offer is an apology.

Or rather, something as an apology.

Without further ado (drum roll on cue), I give you what has kept me away from nearly everything the last two weeks, and up and awake the last two nights straight : Rheta Shan’s entry to Dusan Writer’s Viewer Interface Contest — a contest that, as detailed here and here, is aimed at developing proposals for a newbie friendly revision of the Second Life client UI.

Yes, I thought I ’d better put my hand where my mouth is, seeing I’m on record as a know all on Second life’s interface deficiencies, and as an official Dazzle hater. So, fans of the current viewer — here is your chance to turn the tables and tell me how stupidly impractical, frighteningly ugly and altogether badly designed my proposal is. In fact, I point out many of its weak points on the first and last pages myself, first and foremost among them that I have no talent whatsoever as a graphics designer, and that the whole thing is a lost twin brother to a Swiss cheese, as it has as many holes as it has substance (time, and the lack thereof, being the issue here).

But this sounds like I’m apologising. I am not, even if the entry itself starts with two apologies. In fact, and although I am certain my proposal will at best fare moderately well against what the many brilliant minds of Second Life will contribute to the contest, I am still happy enough with it to want to show it around.

Here it is.

[Update : To my great surprise, I made it into the final selection, among such illustrious names as Jacek Antonelli, Damien Fate, McCabe Maxsted and Rick van der Wal (aka Digado / Roy Cassini). I presume the rather low number of entries Dusan mentioned in a short exchange we had accounts for this, but I still feel oddly proud. And I want to express my heartfelt congratulations to all my co-finalists !

Further update : It seems the finalists will have a chance to present their entries to the judges before they decide on the results of the contest — go to Dusan Writer’s blog for an announcement of the panel. I am very grateful to Dusan, who has been an absolute sweetheart trying to afford me the opportunity to do so, too, despite my stupid RL schedule restrictions. Ta, Dusan, and apologies to your judges I have had jumping through hoops. Don’t hate me too much, please.]

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Please note this is a non smoking, non drama flight, and that our plane does not afford mobile internet facilities. Emails will not be answered and comments on posts might stay in the moderation queue until our return.

Unluckily, the on-board entertainment system has suffered from a slight technical setback we are diligently trying to repair. Until then, we kindly ask that you make you own entertainment ; in case you are stuck for ideas, we propose the following quiz :

1. Read the instruction manual carefully from end to end.
2. Answer the following question : it is widely considered bad style to escape from life. But if you consider escaping to instead, what is the place every escape leads to called ?
3. If you wish to try for bonus points, answer the following question too : how do you call a place you are not meant to escape from, and the people who are making sure you don’t ?

Also, please take note the correct terminology for the crew of this plane is not escapists — it is escape artists.

Have a pleasant flight.

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The funny thing about all these is that, much as I wanted to give feedback and tell the authors how much I enjoyed their posts, my own uneasy balance between First and Second Life has not let me do so until now. Consoling and supporting a friend much in the same situation as Dandellion’s unknown avatar, but also saying a chance good bye to another one who was leaving SL, as well as finally accepting some other friends and lovers will never come back, has made me painfully aware how ephemeral our second life can be — and how fragile whatever fleeting balance we find is.

It also made me think. Because while we often discuss how, and why we leave this world for good, we rarely dwell on the question that maybe should have been asked first : why bother with the effort of two lives at all ? Why come to Second Life, and stay ?

I have an answer to offer, though I’m not sure it will be all that popular : need.

One way or another, we are here because we seek something we miss in our First Life ; sure, mere curiosity may lead us here, but if nothing taps into our urges and needs, we won’t stay. And though it’s most certainly not as simplistic as Philip Rosedale’s bumbling quote implies, there is something in the notion that where there are no needs, no feelings of inadequacy or frustration, no restrained sexual urges and suppressed identities, no boredom or loneliness, no social handicaps, no unrealised pet projects and crazy ideas lurking in the back of our minds, there is nothing to push us into the virtual world. Need is what makes the virtual world attractive, and addictive. It is the reason why virtual worlds work (with immersion being the how).

What happens when we get there is another thing again. What starts as a mere avatar, a pixel puppet we direct with some detachment, soon develops a life of its own. As we design our shape, choose our looks and clothes, seek friendships and activities, we define what we want to be, and how we want to be perceived in this world. And behind all of it, we have a feedback line into our first world ; as our avatars ripen into personalities of their own, and despite the struggle of identity this brings, despite the lack of sleep and the strain leading two lives puts on us, despite the drama due to the volatile environment, we find solace, and contentment. No wonder those who do not manage this are insistent Second Life is nothing but a game — in a space where you can start afresh, your RL slate wiped blank, nothing hurts more than failing, because it is painfully obvious the failure is yours alone.

But for those of us who do not fail, what will grow on us is a second identity. It is complex and powerful, as befits the interplay of our needs and the complex and powerful world we seek to sate them in. And for many, that identity will grow more and more restive, refusing to stay boxed away as time and social constraints keep us from logging in. It will start to suffuse parts of the world outside. Hamlet Au noted that :

There are hundreds of blogs about Second Life; there are nearly 1000 Flickr groups devoted to SL; there’s a few SL Facebook widgets, an active SL-oriented Twitter community, and searching “Second Life” in YouTube returns over 21,000 videos. […] So a tremendous level of Second Life activity really takes place within Web 2.0 systems which weren’t made with the metaverse in mind.

Surprising ? I think not. Blogging, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube : these are the parts of the web « into which one can ‘write an identity’ into a public arena ». And writing our new, second identity is what we do all along, telling the story we have invented, and keep inventing for ourselves. Dusan Writer was right on the fact Second Life is a Story Box — maybe the greatest made yet. Where he was wrong was in thinking the storytelling experience is collective. It is not. It is individual, even where the multitude of residents interacts. They interact because a story without an audience might as well remain untold. But the essential thing about this is that it doesn’t make a community out of the multitude. It’s a cacophony, not a campfire group listening to the griot.

Our stories are ours alone.

Which might be why my very first reaction to Grace McDunnough’s brilliant essay on Upholding Social Norms was dismissive (good for me Grace does not currently read me. Balance again, I guess). There was too much of the longing for the campfire in it for my taste at first reading. I am distrustful of communities, whose flip-side always seems to be exclusion. Some of the comments and followup posts listed here do indeed little more than sing the melancholy tune of « once, my son, all of this was green and pleasant land, and man was not a wolf unto his fellow man » ; but then, telling us the world will end because youngsters do not respect their elders’ ways hasn’t lost its novelty value in the last 2500 years, so what did I expect ?

But in Grace’s essay, that tune is only a faint echo in the background. First and foremost, she raises the question if the recent newcomer’s unrestrained approach to the watershed between First and Second Life identity does not mean the stories we can invent for ourselves will soon be much, much poorer — because in a universe where avatar identity is firmly linked to RL identity, your second life becomes just another facet of your first. Without true pseudonimity, without alts, in this age of weblogs and social networks, you will soon find out that, in the metaverse, too, people know you are a dog.

Looking back at her own SL childhood, Grace points out the existence of a community of residents that was able to channel and collect the trickle of newcomers, teaching them the ways and norms of the world they entered, respect for the divide between identities coming first. But that community is no more. If Grace’s story starts with « When Grace entered Second Life in Feb. 2006… », mine could start simply with « 52 weeks later, Second Life was a very different place… ». It was indeed.

In the SL of early 2007, there was nobody to teach me beyond what I taught myself ; nobody expecting me to mend my ways ; no one to enforce limits and rules. Seeing how allergic I am to patronising hints and the review of self appointed peers, that might even have been a good thing. I probably wouldn’t be here if somebody had told me « we don’t do it like that around here » in my first weeks. « Welcome to Second Life » would have been nice, though.

Still, I learned. And if you keep in mind that I am neither brighter, nor more creative or more social than the average newcomer, you can be sure there are more, many more who did, and who will do. The transition from avatar to person still works the same way. What has become impossible, now that the original community has dwindled into a minority, is to socially enforce rules that favour it. Giving your avatar the chance to evolve into a person, by disconnecting it from RL you, has become a personal choice instead of a norm. How obvious a choice is it when you come from a world where the notion of a second, semiautonomous identity is preposterous ? Paradoxically, and in spite of some old time residents thinking most everybody having entered SL after 2006 is a barely social attention-getter, or a sociopath even, we have been spared the full impact of the question yet by SL’s sheer inadequacy.

Right now, the frustrating newbie experience, confusing interface and lack of reliability of the service still ensure that those who stay have a certain level of need, curiosity, or sheer bloody-mindedness which makes them conductive to learning the ways of the world they entered. Safe to say that as the 3D metaverse gets more accessible, the share of people willing to accept it on its own terms, instead of terms they bring from RL, will further dwindle. You were complaining about the brook the trickle has turned into ? Just wait for the flood, friend, just wait for it.

Because 3D avatars make sense even if they are no more disconnected from RL identities than Facebook profiles are — the immersive sense of a place to be in, the intuitive simplicity of walking up to a person to strike up a conversation, the option to do things together nicely balance the disorientation and bewilderment its sheer size and lack of structure beget — and there are other advantages as well. As technical deficiencies become less, we can be sure to see this kind of social metaverse attract a larger audience, an audience to which the idea of disconnecting identities might be utterly outlandish.

So does that mean we are doomed to lose the world we have made ? Are we a civilisation on the brink of extinction ? Maybe. But against the angst, I would like to set the hope we can make a difference, and that when history will label our generation, it will be by the word avantgarde, not fluke.

Granted : history does not teach trying to make a difference ever made one. But it does teach that not trying is the best way not to make one. Let’s stop pining for drier days, and start learning to swim while we’re still ahead of the flood.

First step, breathing regularly and taking our bearings :

1. The days of unquestioning community norms enshrined in the ToS and Community Standards which Chestnut Rau recurs to are gone. They will not come again, not in the guise of the tacit governance Grace puzzles over, nor in any other. That kind of social homogeneity, stemming from a common background — as Washu Zebrastripe jokingly put it, « reading [Neal Stephenson’s SF novel] Snow Crash was pretty much a prerequisite to joining SL in beta days! » — is no more.
2. This means enforcing norms — either by fear of retribution or by community regulation — is out, because that only works if the norms enforced are based on a large consensus (when they are not, you get, respectively, a reign of terror, and a clique). But there is another way, not to enforce, but to spread a minority’s norms beyond its original scope : making people want to be like the minority. Let us show the newcomers to our world, through our example, what gift they might find here if they surrender to its workings. Let us make them understand how rich and compelling the cacophony, how beautiful the chaos is out of which our second personalities emerge. Let us make them understand that what they get, here, if they can stand it, is the one thing mankind has always wanted : the freedom to live your dreams. It works, believe me. It did on me.
3. To be able to do this, however, we have to accept what and who we are, and get rid of one misunderstanding : whatever Philip Rosedale may think, the 3D metaverse is not the future of the internet, but something else entirely. Powerful as its applications in teaching, social research and conferencing, in architecture, engineering and other areas where real-time, collaborative manipulation of 3D models is a real plus might be — or rather : turn out to be — this is not the future of information publication, retrieval and exchange. The fact that early adopters of technology regularly focus on the communication aspect (as was the case for early internet adopters) only muddles the waters. The flat, 2D internet is far better at what it does than the 3D metaverse will ever be. You wouldn’t be reading a blog post if it wasn’t.

So Second Life won’t supplant the internet. In fact, it needs it to exist, and probably always will, as the identities created there seek a wider field of expression. As Botgirl Questi remarked, it is very much possible to have a network of residents you have never met in-world. The greatest potential of Second Life lies elsewhere than its use as a 3D internet : it lies in our dreams, in our needs and aspirations, and in the freedom to give them a shape we find there. Second Life is the great escape.

All right, I’ve said it, now hit me. No, better yet, repeat after me : Second Life is the great escape. What we are is the vanguard of tomorrow’s escapists.

There is nothing wrong about being an escapist. There never has been anything wrong about escapism, for that matter. From the first caveman gazing at the stars, wondering if there was something else and better there, escaping from the daily plight has been one of mankind’s overriding urges. We have built civilisations and religions on it. Even today, without existential plight, we need to escape from our reality, once in a while. And we do : every daydream, every scrap of entertainment, every bit of culture or leisure we create or assimilate is an escape from the needs of life. Dreaming, and escaping into dreams is part of what makes us human.

Self styled pragmatists have, at all times, missed the significance of the escapist dream, and not the moral or ideal significance either, but the very tangible power, economic and cultural. Even when they stood at the core of it, when they created the means for it, they often missed its essence. Take the Frenchman who, when asked in 1895 to commercialise a novelty he had invented said : « My invention can be exploited… as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever. » He was called Auguste Lumière. His novelty was the motion picture camera.

Today, once more, we confront a novelty whose potential is beyond conventional wisdom, and once more the pragmatists’ tell us there is little application beyond what they can see — their visions are of the same, just more so. They are wrong, as wrong as Lumière was. Let us not play their game, on their terms. Let us be proud of what we are.

For the first time in mankind’s history, we have a world to escape to as complete as the one we live in, but without most of its limitations. We have a place where what we are, and are not, in our atomic life is not important ; a canvas we can re-invent ourselves on, again and again, every day. We have, in short, a place where we can make our dreams come true — the birthplace of our second (and sometimes third, fourth, fifth) selves.

We have just begun exploring its possibilities. One thing, however, I know for sure : for the right to live there, going schizo is a very small price to pay.

Welcome to the new world.

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The item I removed was a pretty inconspicuous link to the aideRSS ranking of my blog’s feed items. I you missed Kit Meredith’s post extolling its virtues, aideRSS is a free web service that will swallow your blog’s feed (any feed, really, it doesn’t need any kind of subscription) and, after some rumination, spit out a ranking of your posts, which it calls PostRank. The FAQ tersely states that « PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction [my emphasis]. ». The idea is to define sub feeds of, say, the top 10 % posts, so people can subscribe to these instead of the whole feed. Which sounds rather neat.

So what’s wrong with it ?

Nothing at first sight, which is exactly why I included the link in the sidebar (the much more informative widget provided is unavailable for wordpress.com hosted blogs, as it requires JavaScript to work). After all, if it helps my readers, it’s a good thing.

What made me wonder if that was the thing to do was what I discovered when I had a look at what aideRSS considers my « top 20 » posts (click on the screenshot for a larger picture) :

I mean, I can more or less agree on the inclusion of four posts among the top five. The reaction numbers (which aideRSS computes from the number of comments, Google blog search hits, Diggs and del.icio.us bookmarks linking to your post — although oddly enough, its count is slightly off from the ones the services themselves provide) are mostly corroborated by the reader statistics of wordpress.com. The fifth one, my interface rant, is the odd man out. Obviously, that is one case where aideRSS does its magic computing relevance. Independently from any feedback numbers.

So why remove the link ? Was I miffed by some patent pending, trademarked Google-ish algorithm showing me it knows more about my posts’ relevance than I, as the author, do ?

Wish it was that.

I removed the link because I was frightened — frightened to death by seeing what aideRSS considers the seventh most relevant post on my blog. Ever. See for yourself :

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Here I am, minding my own business in SL after a nice afternoon spent, well, actually, this is neither here nor there — minding my own business as I said, when this AV IMs me out of the blue. The conversation, if you want to call it that (and you will have to forgive the dazzling display of esprit that makes up my side ; I was a tad surprised) went like this :

[Name of avatar deleted for privacy reasons]
[15:14] Anonymous: don’t mute me plz don’t mute me
[15:14] Anonymous: their after me
[15:14] Anonymous: just listen to me just 1 min
[15:15] Anonymous: PLZE!
[15:15] Anonymous: their after me
[15:15] Rheta Shan: Err…
[15:15] Anonymous: thye will get me any min now
[15:15] Anonymous: u hav to let the world know
[15:16] Anonymous: SHIT
[15:16] Rheta Shan: Is this some kind of joke ?
[15:17] Rheta Shan: Hey ?
[15:19] Rheta Shan: Right, very funny, really…
[15:19] Second Life: User not online – message will be stored and delivered later.

Oh great, I thought, more to file under « another day in Second Life ». Shee-eesh.

Which would pretty much have concluded the whole episode (and made for a very poor blog post, if at all) if my subsequent spring cleaning hadn’t uprooted a notecard in my inventory I’m sure I never put there. Yes, I know there’s no way it could have gotten there without me agreeing to it. In fact, it should not be there, at all. But it is. Which, all things considered, is only half as weird as its content. If not less.

But read for yourself :

From: Community Management Task Force
Attn.: All Task Force personnel
Re: Assessment of current community management effort

EYES ONLY

I am aware of a certain level of worry as to the continuation of the community management effort directed by our Task Force now that Linden Research faces the advent of a new CEO. Although Mark Kingdon’s choice of avatar name seems to denote a particular propensity for intelligence type operations, the new CEO is an unknown quantity. A measure of worry in an operation as sensitive as ours is understandable.

To state it up front: I have received the most reliable assurances that operations of the Task Force will be continued independently of the change of regime. The Task Force is considered a success, and its operation will not be at the disposal of the new CEO.

Looking back at past operations, this is the logical thing to do: from its inception, the Task Force has been both resourceful and effective in exploring shadow community management strategies with a minimum of in-house personnel. Despite not faring well under financial review, our very first operation, codenamed Pravda, is still considered a tremendous success, firmly establishing a body of criticism that has been shied by most community members for being unacceptable, whatever factual truth it might contain.

With newer concepts in place, the Task Force is currently in a position to play on the natural dynamics of the fractured user community in a way that is far more cost effective. This has been duly noted and, far from suspending operations for the transition, continuation of codename Pitchfork has been greenlighted.

A first assessment of the preliminary phase of codename Pitchfork shows great promise. Injecting the ARC “feature” into the viewer code and making this public through the developper channels (SL Dev mailing list and early RC releases) has surpassed all our expectations. Without adding much on our side (though codename Pravda does contribute), the community has fractured over the signification of the measure, with prominent bloggers both hailing and damning the new “feature”. The superb effectiveness of the channel also is proven by the fact that of the technical articles maximising coverage of the “feature”, not one has even touched on its peculiar implementation.

The main deployment phase will include :

• getting Torley to do a video tutorial: “render cost lag explained, and how to get rid of it in 11 easy ways”, possibly with a cheering theme song;
• implementing client side visual muting features; these do not actually have to be functional – it’s the availability that counts as far as we are concerned. Please coordinate with the Dazzle team for best integration into the new UI;
• distributing updated welcome packs on one or more orientation areas containing a quest HUD and sword to new users before sending them off to kill as many red ARCs as possible (budget for “kill” bounties has been approved; sword and HUD still in testing). This will be declared as a new user experience program. Should “M” ask, we are trying to make inroads into the MMORPG market.

Later phases are still sketchy, although the parallel launch of several other “features” is planned. Further updates will be given on a need-to-know basis.

[Updated at 1:05am Pacific] It has come to our attention that this memo has been distributed to unauthorised persons, at least three of which are not Linden Research personnel. A redesign of our distribution system is considered in the near future to prevent incidents of this kind; as a stop gap measure, memos will only be provided in unique hardcopy form from now on, to be read under supervision in the Task Force’s office (HTML on a prim under consideration).

[Resolved at 2:10am Pacific] We have identified three accounts to which this memo has been transmitted by error and have terminated them. We are still working on resolving the account owner issues and expect to post a progress report soon.

I’ll admit reading this rattled me somewhat. After all, the ARC feature really exists. And the community’s range of reactions does oddly conform to the description, ranging from technical explanations (by Vint Falken, twice, and Tateru Nino) to the usual contradictory comments on the official blog and to opinion pieces as diverse as Lillie Yifu’s and Ciaran Laval’s. Also, despite the fact that the logical flaw in the whole ARC concept is glaringly obvious, it seems to have gone nearly unnoticed.

Maybe I’m just seeing things, but consider the following for a minute : according to Pastrami Linden’s blog post, ARC is aiming to quantify the workload that rendering avatars puts on your graphics hardware (which it calls costs) by adding up token values for typical GPU operations. The idea behind this is « educating Residents about how 3D art should be made » so as to reduce client side lag. To that aim, the ARC rates the value it has calculated by displaying it in traffic light colours (i.e. red is bad, yellow is so so, green is good). Now comes the bit where it stops making sense, at least to me : it rates them on an absolute scale.

Yes, you read that right — the ARC colour rating is entirely independent of the power of your graphics hardware. How well your GPU would handle the workload never goes into the equation. So we have costs all right, and bugger relative purchasing power, let’s just all yell « this is too expensive ! » together. I feel better already.

Admittedly, the blog does a brilliant job stepping around the issue altogether, blabbering about carbon footprints instead (of 150 commenters, exactly one asked about the scale). It’s such a neat piece of spin you could believe for one fleeting moment there really is an invisible hand pulling the strings. Especially as the original release notes dangle the option of not only rating, but actually visually muting people, before our noses. Some people drool over the option to blot others out of their world already, wishing for individual or estate based muting levels. Maybe that is what Pastrami meant by the hope for « community » regulation : render vigilantism à la « if your ARC is over X, I’ll mute you » notices.

But then again, distasteful as it is, why should it be a conspiracy ? There is nothing substantiating the authenticity of the notecard I found. The disappearance of the avatar that gave it to me, and the subsequent disappearance of the card itself in a freak asset server failure are probably nothing but the usual random SL madness. A much saner theory would be to consider ARC as one particularly enlightening example of LL’s development processes. Coders thinking « wouldn’t that be neat » in a corporate culture encouraging them to work on whatever they like is all that is needed. The proposed new rating system for search items, as published by Massively and commented upon by Jacek Antonelli (a dream come true to anybody wishing for an efficient way to mob SL entrepreneurs — protection racket, anyone ?), fits that bill quite nicely too. Bright ideas probably account for a much higher quota of human disasters than conspiracies.

Which is why I have decided I will not let my train of thought run further along the tracks of paranoia. No software service provider would ever go to this length to influence its own user base. Not even one where the founder believes he is building a country. He didn’t mean « including an intelligence service » by that, I’m sure.

As to the pizza delivery van with California plates that has been sitting on my street since yesterday, I am perfectly sure there is an innocuous reason for its presence in Paris. A Dodge 90’s models collector maybe.

See ? It all makes sense.

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That, and the fact that I am a hopelessly shallow person of course, have been enough to keep me away from the nitty gritty of political work. Oh, I might cheer and wave, I might even run that first, glorious mile when events are still fast paced and exciting ; but don’t look for me when the going gets slow — unless it is in the boutiques we passed on that first mile. It has always been that way. I have always been that way. 

But life moves in strange ways, especially when you have two of them, and in one of mine at least things have been… different, lately.

Not entirely surprisingly, this has to do with trademarks ; trademarks as made into policy by Linden Lab, and as protested against by so many in the blogosphere. And then again, more surprisingly maybe, it has not. It has not because when all is said and done, what the issue really boils down to is not a silly set of writing rules for bloggers, nor even the presumption to enforce these by brute force if need be, but one simple and far more general question :

What kind of world do we want to live in ?

Yes, yes, I know how that sounds. Don’t call the orderlies yet (later, maybe : being put in a straightjacket and manhandled by burly men, then locked into a cell, only ever to get out for an ice bath or some electric shock therapy … but I digress).

Let me explain what I mean.

To do this, we’ll have to wade through the whole sorry mess one last time. Nothing that follows will makes sense without it. Take my hand ; it’s quite a tour.

On March 24th, Linden Research, Inc. as the operator of the Second Life grid we know and love know, disclosed a new policy regarding the use of their brand names. Immediately noticeable was that this policy voided the previously lenient guidelines for the usage of LL brand names on fan sites, community forums and similar. Suddenly, LL expected anybody whose site title or main URL contained a Linden Research brand name such as Second Life or SL to either change those, or to shut down. A grace period of 90 days was decreed ; no provision was made for grandfathering long established sites created in good faith. In essence, LL said goodbye to the crowdsource marketeers who helped make them what they are today without so much as a « thank you ».

Another part of the new policy was not quite as obvious at first. Under the label « Proper Reference to Linden Lab’s Brand Names in Text », it sported the stock clause of « put the appropriate trademark symbols after the first mention of our brand names if you are under US jurisdiction », only worth of note for the tremendous fun some got out of the judicious use of ™ and ® symbols — and a stinker : a series of rules stating how anybody who wanted to name the trademarked products of LL in writing had to mention them, be it in a research paper, on a non commercial blog, or even on a calling card.

These rules, and it bears exploring them because they are so absurdly detailed, state that « generic nouns » have to be appended to brand names on the first and / or most prominent mention, and as often as possible afterwards, and that most other combinations of words containing brand names are as unacceptable as any textual modification of said names. They forbid not only the much quoted « my Second Life » (you’re meant to write something along the lines of « my life in the Second Life world » instead), but also terms like « Second Lives », « second living », « 2nd Life » « SLife » and many, many more. Presumptuous silliness, probably unenforceable under most jurisdictions and as such easily dismissed — were it not for one fact.

A fact that was crammed down everybody’s throat when LL amended clause 4.4 of the ToS, making quite clear that a breach of the trademark policy amounts to a breach of the ToS. Which meant banning was on the table as a way to circumvent whatever protection against the guidelines local jurisdiction might provide. As residents had to nod off the ToS change when logging on, this chilling fact percolated though the user community, press and blogosphere until early April.

The result was the birth of a motley, informal coalition of protesters. People wanting to keep their domains and names, and people thinking free speech was at stake joined forces, their first action being to help Gwyneth Llewelyn draft her petition to LL. Later came a common agenda for Robin Linden’s office hour on April 8th, which was discussed there at length, mainly by the ever eloquent Gwyn herself as the designated spokesperson of the group. Its core demands were for LL

1. to make sure nobody is banned without warning for perceived trademark infringements happening in-world
2. to make sure nobody is banned at all for perceived trademark infringements off-world (there are courts for that) and finally
3. to find a lenient grandfathering agreement for established community sites.

Robin promised clarification was forthcoming and then … nothing much happened. Now the supporters of the original demand for clarification had said they would go on strike in precisely such a case. And so strike they did, starting August 15th on the dot, for three days.

Nothing much be said of the strike here, except maybe for the irony that its proponents seldom had so much to write about, albeit not on their own blog, and that among the most efficient publicists of the strike were many who opposed it on the grounds that silence is not the right way to attract attention. Suffice to say that it was one of the most controversial things going on in the SL blogosphere for some time, and that besides both strengthening and weakening the assumption that the natural unit of bloggerdom is one blogger, it was as unmitigated a success as it was unmitigated a disaster.

Unmitigated a success because LL actually acknowledged the blogosphere and its worries, which must be a historical first (as my darling Codie put it « Bloggers 1, Lindens 0 ») ; and unmitigated a disaster because what they actually said was « yes, we will ban you ». Of the demands put before them, LL only acceded to one : not banning without notice. Beyond that, they stated clearly that they consider the ToS to apply to out-of-world activities too, and would indeed ban for these, and they reiterated there would be no grandfathering for existing sites.

One out of three is… bad.

But I did say this would only tangentially be about trademarks. I apologise for having taken so long to revisit the situation ; believe me, I have cut and chopped so much already the bloody remains of history are piling up high under my desk.

Look back with me : see the bunch of kids frolicking on the barricades, kitted out in Les Miz costumes to play revolution, exhilarated at their own daring, merrily singing songs of defiance, safe in the trust LL would never touch a hair of the head of its own children ? Nothing had prepared them, nothing had prepared us for the chill that reached our hearts when, on turning around on the very last day, smiles of victory still on our faces, we looked into the mouth of cannons lined up before the barricade. And though the commanding officer called out to us in a friendly voice, it took but a moment to notice her eyes were cold, and that her men never left their post.

It is a funny and sad spectacle both, but it is not all I see, not by a long stretch. In fact, I see far more than kids playing revolution on that barricade (and not only so because the RL counterparts of these kids have passed their fourth decade more often than not). I see people who dared to assert Second Life is a society, and that what happens to that society is theirs to be heard about. And as I watch the doubt grow in their eyes, I hope and pray the resolve they carried in their hearts will grow with it.

Second Life, a society ? Oh yes.

To get one fallacy out of the way right away : yes, of course Second Life is a software service provided by a company based in San Francisco, renting out bandwidth, data storage capacities, and API access to subscribers worldwide. There is absolutely no doubt about that. There is absolutely no doubt either that atomic us are all semi-random accretions of carbon derived molecules temporarily held together by enzymatic activity, in a time frame utterly negligible on a cosmic scale. Both are big, meta type truths we have to accommodate. And in both cases, they do nothing to invalidate what life we have there day for day.

And yes, of course, too, Linden Lab is a company operating within the limits of the global economy and its place of jurisdiction, the State of California, US of A. It has employees and investors. It has to make a profit to stay in business. But this does not change the fact that what from the business’ point of view is the product it offers, oddly looks like the new country Philip Rosedale once stated he was building when taken on its own terms. It’s all a matter of what you are looking at.

Because what the market analyst will call the user base of the Second Life, the user base itself calls residents for a good reason. Look at this service that feels so much like a place  with unclouded eyes for one moment : it has a freely convertible currency pegged to the US $, a thriving economy, a large domestic consumer goods industry covering both base plagiarism and genuine creation ; artists, entrepreneurs, artisans, speculators ; a social stratification ranging right from the Linden aristocracy through the landed gentry, industrious burghers and rentiers to the paupers, prostitutes and thieves ; a varied press comprising news agencies, broadsheets, one man publications and tabloids, even a TV channel ; anything from consumist glossies to high brow discussions by its very own brand of intellectuals. It has fashions and subcultures. It has a frontier of sort, and immigration, as badly managed as its RL counterparts were throughout most of history, too, and often accompanied by the same inimical noises from those who came earlier. And it has a government, a power that reigns supreme over the land and its residents.

It would gain much from accepting what it is — an uneasy hybrid between a business venture and a new world —, but even more from getting what has made modern society what it is today : civil rights, accountability of those in office, justice. None of these exist in here. Laissez-faire does not amount to civil rights ; holding office hours is not accountability of those in office ; an anonymous system of complaints often having no result at all, and sometimes ending with the offending resident being dragged behind the shed to be shot, is most certainly not justice.

All of this is not so by oversight. It is by necessity. To the business, the country has to be, and to remain, its very own private domain, indefinitely. Privi lege (ever wonder about the etymology of the word ?) has to rule supreme. This sits badly with a society growing both in size and complexity, by its very nature becoming more restive as the need for government intervention grows. Between the residents of SL and their government, Linden Lab, the balance is uneasy : to let the powers that be push their agenda and throw ourselves at their mercy, though by that very act we ensure that they will respond to us less and less, eventually turning us into nothing but subjects ; or to push back, adding a factor of our own to the mix they have to take into account. A frightening option, because it literally means risking our existence in this world, but the only one to hold hope for becoming citizens one day. For in the virtual world like in the atomic, freedom is not granted. Freedom has to be won.

So when asked why I cannot stop griping about trademarks, and why I won’t make the oh so small adjustments needed to conform to the new regime, all I can say is : it’s not about trademarks. It’s about how I will not live in the growing shadow of Linden Lab the business, however comfortably, and watch my Second Life being taken away from me, little bit by little bit. Yes, the point I choose to make my stand is arbitrary, though I’d argue that censorship (and what else is it but censorship when a power decrees that only those writing the way it wants will still be allowed on its territory ?) is always worth fighting against. But in the end, I will simply not be boiled like the proverbial frog, just because the water temperature currently still happens to be bearable.

Here I stand. I might be shaking in fear and anger, but my decision is taken : I will see this through to the very end.

Believe me, nobody is more surprised than me.

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Thank you for having been such a wonderful audience, ladies and gentlemen, and please give the performers a big hand.

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