A virtual trip report with the strongest insider activist biases. Probably if anyone wants a paper out of this, I'm a subject, not an author.
Perhaps a small thing in the larger world, where Tor has been in the headlines for Silk Road and amusing powerpoint presentations by the NSA this week, eh? But in the world of tiny virtual first-world-problems, I am also an art performance celebrity/Buckaroo Banzai type in virtual space. tldr links: http://quora.com/What-are-some-brain-hacks-that-neuroscientists-psychologists-know-but-most-people-dont/answer/Shava-Nerad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ukKCWRJudM (getting our act slotted on NBC's America's Got Talent) http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-02-14/so-i-married-an-avatarbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice http://npirl.blogspot.com/2008/02/tunas-trippy-textures.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiAG06k9m7o (one of a series of stealth edu machinima produced for German TV) http:oddfellowstudios.com We have a following of some reasonable thousands on SL, even though we've been in slack mode for a couple years, since this is, needless to say, not a money maker. But it is community. The Second Life community is notable for its to-me loveable and often neurotic population of fannish, high percentage (I'm not) transhumanist digital natives who make "digital native" an absolute in a way unheard of in most gaming or social media contexts. As such, this community is an interesting vanguard for social, legal, and other bubbling up phenomena before they hit more sociotypical online society. With a higher percentage of ASD, disabled, homebound, socially isolated folks, as well as a higher percentage of cultural creatives, intellectuals, educators, DIY/makerspace each-one-teach-one types, medical outreach groups, activists, self-help group facilitators and coaches, human rights advocates, (para)military trainers, wisdom teachers, and other engaged intellectuals (often meshing in Venn diagrams) -- whose silos sometimes interact or not with a vast majority of consumers who are just there to party and buy cool clothes, dance, and hook up -- it's a weird weird weird weird virtual world. When it came to light recently that Linden Lab, operator of Second Life, had made some incredibly draconic changes to their TOS, the community freaked. And LL went to New World Notes (the primary metagame media) and smoothed things out with PR, for the most part. Then I saw the TOS more recently through an individual blog article in the arts community (as I said, we're a bit behind and in slack mode) and freaked, myself, and posted here a couple weeks ago. As a result, in the intervening time, there's been a turnaround in community opinion the issue. We catalyzed a great deal of that. Oddfellow Studios (that being me and Fish Fishman, aka Shava Suntzu and Tuna Oddfellow in virtual space) pulled our stuff and moved to Inworldz, an open source grid (imagine a miniature version of Second Life with a thousands rather than millions of users -- a public private server, so to speak, still with a real-money economy, and with the same asset server type so you can import your own assets -- and violating license could conceivably rip other peoples' (c) but we don't, or could import certain FOSS licensed assets which we have). We were back up and running a rough equivalent to our show within a week, including our monthly collaboration with JaNa KyOmOoN (AKA Jan Pulsford, keyboardist to Cyndi Lauper) with whom we do two monthly dates cross continent, us in New England, her in England. Because we are art performance folks and our fans tend to early adopters even for SL, I think a lot of our fans weren't hesitant to "jump grids" and become metaversals -- this is to say, they just registered with Inworlds, created a new avatar, loaded up the very similar client, and came to enjoy the show. The shows in SL got press coverage too, showing how easy it was to move, and how people moved with us as our fan base. Through all this, I worked the metagame press, as well as blogging and discussing the issues in and out of game, as did Tuna. Language and backgrounders we crafted began to propagate, and went unopposed by any official pushback by the Lab, New World Notes did a dramatic turnaround on their position when I pointed out that a perpetual irrevocable license (including rights to reassign/sell/resell) means that if, say, the Lab goes tits up, all assets go into receivership and anything in the SL asset server is up for auction if it isn't marked by copyright -- hunting down your assets to defend them is up to the owner in that case (IANAL but I did used to work in entertainment licensing). By the time you straighten things out tracking and defending your copyrights, as I pointed out, your legal help better be free. NWN went to the Lab for comment a couple weeks ago. Got none presumably. I think Hamlet/NWN felt somewhat played by the previous PR response he'd gotten. He's solidly on the dissent side of the question now, perhaps feeling like he was likely responsible for people making bad decisions in the first round, although I haven't directly asked him that -- seems like bad form. Though the Lab hasn't officially responded, an interesting, quite erudite comment that opened "Well, I'm not a creator in SL and I don't have a horse in this race but..." on New World Notes signed "imho" supported the Lab's position with expert legal language -- conflating several points masterfully. I refuted it, and postulated "This might not be a very humble opinion, but might even be Humble's [the Linden Lab current CEO's] opinion." "imho?" lol. While I've been ill, one of my sidelines for income has been working as a ghost writer because I have a great ear for different writers' cadence and style. 'nuff said... Now the "bug" is spreading from the arts community to educators and many other communities that have been long time conservative land holder blocs (this is to say, income producers and also PR anchors that are not pr0n) in SL. Intellectual foment is taking over, as is often the case in RL governmental stonewalls of this sort. Movement momentum is reaching, if it hasn't reached, a tipping point, and the brain drain is likely unstoppable. Several major vendors of intellectual property (textures, art assets) have pulled their relationship with SL, stopped selling and forbidden creation of new assets with their assets in SL. Creators are leaving SL in droves for alternate open source grids. The mothership is emptying out, at least experiencing a brain drain of a vibrant population that characterized it's first generation, the generation that made it "Second Life," the dream of its own mad (social) scientist creator, founding CEO Philip Rosedale. Every week that LL withholds action and further comment, they are heading further toward a future more like There.com (an authoritarian barbie-and-ken-and-einstein-on-the-beach dead virtual world that was entirely company authored content) and less like the Burning Man inspired "Your World, Your Imagination" user-created economy envisioned a decade ago. So my assumptions are: They have to know what's going on. They aren't STOOPID. They are either constrained in action. Or they want us out. Or they find the cost acceptable. Or some amalgam thereof. It seems to me that the company is too small for them to be slow to act, which is another possibility in a very large company or bureaucracy. But I'll include that as a gridlock staff/board conflict, say, as a low possibility. Never underestimate the paralysis potentiality of politics. Look at DC. Another interesting aspect becomes the influence of the government crackdown on the Linden Dollar as a "bitcoin" like currency exchange. Several Linden Lab independent linden dollar currency exchanges were shut down in dramatic style earlier this year with the loving interference of the US government, and only two were reopened after undisclosed negotiations having to do with PII, it seems (although more have opened since) -- so this does have some legit overlap with interests on this list...heh... I've even entertained for a fleeting moment that they have some sort of weird NSL thing going on...NAH... C'mon Shava... Not every uncommunicative stonewall from an internet company you like has an NSL behind it... These are just odd times. http://slnewser.blogspot.com/2013/05/most-third-party-linden-exchange.html But interference in the exchanges could also lead to FUD within the investors, a new strength to the internal political clout of the legal department, and many other destabilizing issues (the PR department explanation for the new TOS is that Legal wants "a unified TOS across all the Linden Lab businesses," which include game companies with no user created content. My refutation to this was that if they were running a truck fleet and an airline fleet for shipping businesses, their legal department would be fools to use the same liability and shipping guarantees for both companies. What are other pressures on a company like LL, their board/investors, and the future of Internet culture that leads to moves like this these days? What will it mean to the diaspora of creators to move into a cloud of small grids and how will that be a model for systems like Diaspora and more traditional forms of social networking? Seems to me this is a mesh of issues that bears watching for some folks here. I understand Second Life has been so "over" for at least a half dozen years, but we've been ahead of the game(s) (and distinctly off center) for at least a decade, so we make up for it. ;) yrs, -- Shava Nerad shav...@gmail.com
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