The History of the Board Ho
by Alphaville Herald on 08/05/04 at 11:49 pm
by humdog
“don’t get broke off for free.” –Evangeline
people who participate in chat boards like stratics often fail to realize that they are really part of a corporate data mining project in which their posts are scanned for personal information, preferences, buying habits etc. they are, by virtue of their contributions, giving away valuable information about themselves – valuable to corporations that build video games and other tech toys. by providing this personal information, they also provide a jerry-springeresque spectacle for the entertainment of others, hopefully drawing more eyes to the board, hence more posts, hence more data for the marketing data crunchers. the participants, by giving away valuable personal information about themselves have commodified their private lives – by giving it away they have become “board ho’s”. the social structure of these boards is highly controlled to maximize this effect, with certain types of elite posters encouraged and rewarded – these are the board ho divas. these posters play a pivotal role in ensuring that the product delivered to the marketing machine will be as useful as possible. in return the board ho divas receive a kind of social capital from the other board ho’s. this essay is a history of board ho-ing, its emergence, its economy, its effects. it is also a confession, as i have been on the other side of the glass – i used to work for the suits that run the ho’s.
i. wherein humdog presents a credential from the humdogian bouquet
for several months now i have given too many hours to the sims online (tso) and its accompanying message board, stratics. i have created sims in three cities, including the test center. i have built things and i have wrecked things. i have met some nice people and i have met some fiends.
i came to tso from a background in customer relationship management (crm) tool design, a trade i learned while in exile at a huge software/database company for a few years. i look at these events through the following eyes: i am the monster whose job it was to worry about site churn, registration metrics and other horrors. my colleagues will stay up nights trying to figure out ways to get you to trade your personal information for a t-shirt or some other object of small value. my job was also to try to figure out what we should know about you, and what you should know about the corporation. my job was about trying to figure out how to get you to engage in acts of self disclosure. i am one of the shadows behind the button that says: submit now.
ii. wherein we learn some of the ways in which the business community discovered online social relationships
once upon a time there was aol, prodigy, and compuserv. these were among the earliest sponsored and moderated message board and chat room services. they were highly monitored or supervised message services – certain types of communications were allegedly not allowed, although they did take place. the aura of these places was a little prissy and one of the interesting parts of this was that attaching yourself to an aol address was a good way to get flamed in most other places on the internet if you went there. people were reluctant to mention their aol accounts, or if they did mention them, the mention was predictably either preceded or followed by some verbiage about airplane and hotel schedules and discount rates.
usenet was mostly un-monitored and before it become the last refuge of the publicity hound spammer, it was a place where people left messages about things that interested them. usenet was huge. usenet was chaotic. we mourn its decline and passing.
all of these places were mostly pre-howard Rheingold, pre-Salon, and howard was in the san francisco bay area then, in california, which as everyone knows is a wild-life preserve for idealists and romantics and where the utopians went to die. howard had a high moment of inspiration one day and it happened in the moment that he strung two words together: virtual community. when howard did that it was beautiful and idealistic and doomed, and he was doomed, too. howard was doomed because he didn’t pay attention to what he himself had pointed to about the history of telephones and television (he had been quoting isola-poole). howard was doomed because he didn’t pay attention to the way that multinational global corporations like ibm and microsoft and oracle were beginning to act like small medieval kingdoms, sort of independently and in defiance of established nation-states like the govt of the usa. all that aside, though, you have to give howard credit for saying the words ‘virtual community’.
when howard said virtual community what he appears to have meant was a world in which people would find each other through the internet. i am hoping that i don’t need to define the internet and if you still don’t know what the internet is, please go buy a copy of lawrence lessig’s code as law. you should read that book anyway if you go online. but if you don’t know what the internet is, just remember that it was created by the defense department in order to protect the integrity of communications in case we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb. the defense department made the internet and they also made change of address cards so you could go to the post office after the world gets blown up and pick up your credit card bills. but i digress.
howard was an evangelist for virtual community and as far as i can tell, he still lives there. in virtual community people find each other, learn from each other, enjoy and help each other. in virtual community there are no spammers, no griefers, and certainly nobody exploits kids sexually or otherwise. the idea was noble and idealistic. there was beauty in it, and some irony in the position: in his own way, howard, along with his mentor stewart brand, were sticking flowers into gun barrels like hippies did during the vietnam war. it makes sense that they did that: it is sort of their time and place. everything is beautiful.
in 1996 or so, after web browsers came out, a consultant/pundit type named george gilder wrote some essays and in those essays he suggested that there was going to be a battle for the internet and for what was then called cyberspace. he said that the battle was about dominating and owning that world, and about who would determine its destiny. gilder said that on one hand you had people like howard who were hopeful and nave and on the other side you had people like bill gates and mr lawrence ellison who were thinking about revenue streams. “suits v birkenstocks” he called it, and he said that the suits would win. it was in 1996 or so that stewart brand appears to have received gilder’s message and signed up on the suit side by founding the global business network (gbn [1]). gbn is a kind of expensive members only semi-suit-credible consulting outfit that uses the word ‘scenario’ a lot. i mention gbn only because it tells you the times.
about the same time, people began to go nuts typing words and uploading pictures onto the web. they would type extremely personal information into boards like the whole earth ‘lectronic link (the well) and usenet. on these boards people revealed absolutely amazing bits of information about themselves, including personal sexual preferences and behaviors and stories of their struggles with various substance addictions. they did this to some extent because it appears that at the moment they pushed the send button on some level they believed that nobody was actually listening or recording what they said: they were usually alone in a room & the audience was invisible to them. some people, who understood how information systems actually worked, were horrified when they witnessed these increasingly numerous acts of self-disclosure. they knew how hard it is to get rid of information. i remember talking to one of these horrified people, an engineer with a security clearance at the time. he said to me: “don’t you understand that the treasury department can get root access to anything whenever it feels like it??” in my mind, this became abbreviated as “treasury has root”. anyway i hope that the investigating arms of the us government appreciate what all these people have done to simplify the act of citizen surveillance.
other people saw these same increasingly numerous acts of self-disclosure and they were glad, because they also understood information systems and how hard it is to get rid of information. these people also knew that there was a tool called a relational database and they drew a line from the willingness of people to self-disclose to the ability of the relational database to receive, store, and play with, this information that people were so happily typing into their screens.
the business community is pretty good with language. they understand, and appreciate, the subtleties of doublespeak. consequently you will never hear anybody in the business community use the word “exploit” in a sentence. no. instead, the business community will talk about “leverage”. ok: “leverage” = “exploit”. leverage is an important word. it is a code word. it tells you where the revenue stream might be.
the business community began to understand that it could leverage online social interaction and online social relationships and this need-to-confess that seems to be such a big part of the web. the business community began to understand that it could make products that leveraged social interaction and online self-disclosure and so it began to make products.
this is how we get to datamining.
iii. wherein we learn some things you can do with personal information
in the mid 1990s after gilder wrote what i have told you that he wrote, our friend howard got his friends together and went after venture capital. this was a fashionable thing to do at that time and i do not blame him for doing it. he got a big pile of money from an asian financing outfit or kairetsu called softbank and created a project called eminds. eminds was a datamining venture dressed up in virtual community and for the most part the people who signed up for it, bought it. i signed up for it, too, but that is mostly because i like to watch. when speaking of eminds to his constituency, howard would stress social interaction and say “let’s be friends online” and things like that. he painted eminds, to his followers (who were mostly aspiring writers and such) as a place where people could be friends and be published and eventually make their reputations. when howard talked to the wall street journal, he described eminds as a place to collect early adopter demographics: it was a data warehouse.
howard’s followers on eminds either did not know or did not fully appreciate that they were being leveraged as both a content engine and as a demographics warehouse, and that they were perhaps more valuable to softbank for their ability to be a group of people that could be depended on to buy the latest version of whatever new electronic doodad in latest release that was out there in the world to buy, than they were as literati. eminds used cookies extensively to track user activity and behavior as the user moved through the site at a moment in time when cookies were still new and somewhat unexplored by the business community. at this same time, industry periodicals were running ads and articles rhapsodizing about how it was now becoming possible to narrowly target groups of consumers, or to create situations in which these narrowly defined demographics would self-identify and cluster together. leveraging this self-identified cluster is the grandmother of what we now call “mass customization”.
iv. wherein we are in babylon, weeping for zion
you may now ask my favorite questions which are: and? so?
after all if you are like me you know that there is nothing remarkable in what i have already said. if you are reading this on a screen perhaps you are yawning a little. i would be. but you must have patience with me because i have been giving you background.
if you are reading this on a screen, unless you have done some hard work and even purchased special software and/or hardware your information has been captured. you may not actually be sitting in babylon weeping for zion but you are captive and you did it to yourself. you did it when:
1. you registered to download a whitepaper
2. you bought a book or other retail/consumer object
3. participated in an auction
4. signed up to be a member of aol or another similar online service
5. you signed up for a virtual community or other similar blahblah board or game
you can not do any of these things without surrendering personal information to the database behind the application, and the marketing department monitors of the offering business community monitors all this stuff very carefully. and you know this already. think about it: explain to me why, if you are going to download a white paper, you need to give your address and phone number for any reason other than to solicit a cold call from a software sales ummmmm engineer. try to reason out why, if you want to engage in online self-disclosure you need to divulge your age or gender or approximate annual income level for any reason at all. explain spyware. explain doubleclick. i will explain it to you: social interaction online is a commodity. like bubblegum. like cheap ballpoint pens. it is also a huge illusion because it is a product that is telling you that if you use yahoo im that somehow your online social interaction will be shinier or hipper than if you use aol im when all of it is probably more or less the same technical functionality and the quality of the content is primarily affected by the quality of your head. aol and yahoo can’t do anything about your head. but you buy the illusion because you want to talk about that your mom hated you or that you love porsches or even that you want to do one-hand typing with a troll on the other side of the planet.
you buy it. you let your identity get leveraged. it is all about leveraging traffic to web and revenue streams.
of course the marketeers will not say this. the marketers will take out an ad with a suit hottie and the suit hottie will smile in the picture and talk about grave responsibilities and we want to help you and we want to improve your productivity. the suit hottie will insist that maintaining a 96 terabyte datawarehouse that tracks you and your phone bills and your bank records and your favorite sites and your frequency patterns is the most wonderful thing that her company can do for you. in the old days the suit hottie would hold focus groups in order to drag in members of the demographic groups seen as possible consumers of whatever products she was selling, but now with the web, it is much easier. now with the web, all that is required is that someone build a blahblah board or area. the demographic group will self-identify by topic and they will bring their friends so that the friends, also, may become enchanted by the possibility of free t-shirts. the other day i learned a new word: fluffer. a fluffer is a person who maintains a erection for a porn star between takes. learn to think of marketeers as fluffers: learn to think of the web as a fluffer relative to the act of maintaining excitement for and interest in the act of consuming goods and services among members of the community.
vi: wherein humdog wonders about things
i wonder why people including me go to blahblah boards, because i go to them and i see things.
i wonder why people rhapsodize online about their latest visit to rehab over their latest adventures with vicodin or something like that.
i wonder why they spell out the details of their latest sportscar purchase when they know that their x old lady is trolling for more child support and is probably smart enough to hire a detective with an internet connection for which the former sportscar owner will eventually pay (you picked her, dahling).
i wonder why they evangelize buttplugs online and sign their names.
i wonder why people freely commit text to a not-secure medium where anybody with a subpoena can help themselves and download the text. it is after all more efficient to store text electronically.
i wonder why people reveal confidential information online. it is so easy to string things together online. ridiculously easy.
vii: wherein the boardho is revealed
people do amazing acts of self-disclosure online. they do it, and i think they do it for one reason only. there is a different economy online and the payout is in attention and in time, not money attention is the big payout online.
i learned a new name for people who participate in this economy from uri. the name is board ho and i like that name very much.
every blahblah board has its board ho. the board cannot exist without the board ho. the board ho drives traffic to web. the board cherishes its board hos, and it especially cherishes the diva or queen board ho. the diva or queen board ho is untouchable and can do anything. people know this, on the board, by intuition. the board and the board ho nurture and cherish each other because the board ho drives eyeballs to the board. i am not speaking of unique visits although those are nice. no. i am speaking of repeat traffic. because of the board ho the board can dream of growth and expansion. the board leverages whatever it is that drives the board ho, unto the board’s success and growth. in return, the board ho receives attention and a following. negative or positive does not have a value relative to attention. to the board ho, attention is all good.
viii. wherein the board ho star system is examined
one of the things i see on blah blah boards is that many of the people who frequent them regularly appear to be people whose lives are not working for one reason or another. voices on the boards seem to have challenges, for example, with health, addiction, or socializing, to name a few. they seem lonely. they seem conflicted. these are voices in pain. these voices don’t seem to have people in their lives with whom they can talk openly. gail williams, now community director for salon.com once observed that:
“the key people to bring into a community are people who are hungry for friends, who don’t have any email yet – not people who already have tons of stuff to deal with online…” (wired news, nov 18 1996)
the expressed feelings and ideas brought by these solitary voices to the blah blah boards also seem to be feelings and ideas coming from secret or hidden parts of their lives.
now here is how you identify a board-ho:
on some boards, there are places where voices can join with other voices that have passed some kind of personal litmus test and have been deemed similar and/or acceptable. these voices open password protected group areas that are invisible to the other members of the board. some of these private areas are segregated by gender, others by special interest. the voices go there because they do not wish to be troubled by diversity or opposing points of view. truthfully, some areas are opened by multi-year veteran users who are just sick of reading lots of posts. the private areas opened by veterans tend to be democratic: everyone is a host. nobody is “in charge”, or, if there is a specified host, that host has either been nominated by the group, or is a voice who takes the job for a specific amount of time as a service to the rest of the group.
but sometimes a queen or diva board ho will open one of these secret conferences to place courtiers around itself. in the private area the diva auditions courtiers and trains them, by dictating the terms of the discussion. the green/throne room private area is where the board ho is vetted.
in the private area green room, the diva board ho accomplishes the following tasks:
1. testing possible new courtiers
2. nurture of existing courtiers
3. vetting rules and styles by which the board ho will operate in the public board environment
4. discussion and commentary about existing threads in which the diva board ho is displaying herself
5. score-keeping relative to public engagements
6. discussion relative to future strategy for the diva
7. receipt of praise and adulation from courtiers
8. distribution of nurture to courtiers
a courtier found, throughout this process, to be wanting in those qualities needed or desired by the diva will be penalized and possibly thrown out of the private area. the process of excluding a courtier from the diva’s group seems to include at minimum these steps:
1. recognition by the diva that the offending voice has refused to limit itself to those topics deemed appropriate by the diva
2. acknowledgement that the voice has not adapted itself to the expressive style favored by the diva
3. unspoken acknowledgement that the offending voice has not permitted the diva to exercise control over it.
the voice offending in these ways will be notified most commonly in these ways:
1. the diva may make a post or comment consisting of a warning couched in a light-hearted way but containing the serious message that the courtier has offended the diva
2. deletion, scribbling, or otherwise performing an act that destroys the offending post thereby silencing the courtier on the offending subject.
3. an email may also be sent to the offender, detailing the offense in plain language.
this offense is not generally fatal, especially if the courtier makes a display of contrition.
if the voice nonetheless chooses to disregard the diva board ho’s warning, the diva will begin the expulsion ritual. the expulsion ritual begins with the publication of a long-ish essay that generally contains the following:
1. a chronicle of the history of the private area, from its founding
2. a statement of the diva’s purposes in creating the private area, none of which will include a statement of the private area’s founding for use as a green/throne room for the diva
3. an exposition and justification of the rules of the private area, making heavy use of the diva’s world view, and diva-logic.
4. it is important to note that the diva’s world view and logic are grounded in an unconscious ideology that is totalitarian in outlook.
5. an explanation of how, in the diva’s point of view, the offender has run afoul of the diva and the diva’s worldview, and thereby offended the diva
at this point the offender has three choices:
1. the offender may make a display of contrition
2. the offender may choose to do nothing
3. the offender may choose to dispute the charges with the diva
the offender wishing to remain part of the diva’s entourage must make a display of contrition, or be expelled from the private area. expulsion from the private area is equal to expulsion from the entourage.
a person coming to a board for the first time will notice after several visits that there appear to be groups of voice that appear to be consisting surrounding, agreeing with, and defending a particular stronger voice. this stronger voice is the diva board ho. the surrounding lesser voices are the entourage or courtiers. i think of them as boardho’s in waiting.
occasionally an imperial board ho is seen on a board. an imperial board ho is a voice of such power and originality that it overshadows all but the strongest diva boardho’s on a board. these voices are rare and should be savored. in one case i saw an imperial boardho of such confidence that the voice hosted a public space that satirized the boardho system.
ix: wherein we conclude
people who participate in chat boards like stratics often fail to realize that they are really part of a corporate data mining project in which their posts are scanned for personal information, preferences, buying habits etc. they are, by virtue of their contributions, giving away valuable information about themselves – valuable to corporations that build video games and other tech toys. by providing this personal information, they also provide a jerry-springeresque spectacle for the entertainment of others, hopefully drawing more eyes to the board, hence more posts, hence more data for the marketing data crunchers. the participants, by giving away valuable personal information about themselves have commodified their private lives – they have become “board ho’s”. the social structure of these boards is highly controlled to maximize this effect, with certain types of elite posters encouraged and rewarded – these are the board ho divas. these posters play a pivotal role in ensuring that the product delivered to the marketing machine will be as useful as possible. in return the board ho divas receive a kind of social capital from the other board ho’s. At least they get something. The rest of us are getting broke off for free.
Hyper
May 9th, 2004
COOL I am a Diva Board Ho! Hehehe Thanks for the chuckle
Zerg
May 9th, 2004
Ummmmm …what?
Mr Hugs'
May 9th, 2004
Nice article. All true. I have a program which tells me whats watching me if i ever download some thing and i get a few extra friends in the back ground of my internet. It’s called Search Bot and Destroy..pretty sure its free look it up.
Mr Hugs'
May 9th, 2004
sorry its called SpyBot- Search and Destroy
toy
May 9th, 2004
yup its a freeware proggy that toy has used a long time
but it everyone was to worry about what people are searching for about them on the internet its gonna verge on paranoia toy just protects her puter from harmful things that some think is cute by trying to infect puters.
toy isnt gonna worry about what others find out about her, this girl has been on the internet since she was 8 and has picked up maybe 3 virus in that time so toy for one isnt going to get paranoid over some innocuous information that is gathered
falara kajira toy
Mr-President
May 9th, 2004
SpyBot S&D
http://www.safer-networking.org
Fans II
May 9th, 2004
Really.. Getting information on someone is illegal. They only have a right to get your information if you signed an agreement saying that they can get information from you. But, hijacking your computer and sending spam is clearly not ethical.
Fans II
May 9th, 2004
I also encourage you downloading this..
http://download.com.com/3000-7786-10287678.html
Becca
May 9th, 2004
Shut up honestly,you all take this game way to serious.i guess its because you all have such bad Reallives you are worried that these companies will find out.Geeks
-Becca
i have the first Pink Poodle in Alphaville,the price:Your soul and body
humdog
May 9th, 2004
gee whiz becca don’t you ever wonder where junk mail comes from?
humdog
May 9th, 2004
gee whiz becca don’t you ever wonder where junk mail comes from?
Dyerbrook
May 9th, 2004
humdog, you really need to get out more, and to stop reading just Chomsky. In your stark Hegelian/Marxist universe, evil capitalists in hottie suits exploit slavishly typing 24/7 online communities, shaking them down for personal information to then use to create products to keep them addicted to unnecessary things, including itself. We are all supposed to be victims, they are supposed to be all powerful, and you are supposed to be worldly-wise and all-knowing for seeing all this. (Your cramped essay about Whole Earth Catalogue and the Well and community management has been done and re-done even within the Sims community and you haven’t brought anything new to it). Well, baloney. It’s hard to see what information Maxis/EA/AV Herald has really mined from me such as to turn me into a simpering, desperate consumer without rights or reason, and without the *the ability to exercise the same kind of leverage and power over THEM with the same kinds of methods, duh*. It’s not a static, system of the vertikal, with top-down management and helpless workers below. It’s interactive, moving, changing, at different levels, diverse, and not yours.
The same Viagra advertisements that filled my mailbox before I played the Sims still come in. I buy more Sims games, but I didn’t buy Earth and Beyond. I didn’t even buy a Real Sims Online t-shirt. Did they figure out that I’m online from 9-11 p.m. or Sunday afternoons, so that they can push me amazon ads during those hours and get me to order more books since they’ve learned that I like to read books? Well, OK, but what, I’m stupid and can’t hit the delete button? This idea of the totally naked, rightless victim of corporate evil is such a caricature that it really makes me worry about how such a seemingly intelligent person could believe this seriously unless they just spent way too much time online.
The game companies are made up of people not so different from yourself — indeed, you said you were once with them — who produce — through time, talent, treasure — a product that we and they consume. That doesn’t make them evil. They produce that product — all the features of the Internet — because they are free and in a market system. They didn’t produce this product in Russia or North Korea or South Korea but in America. Your love/hate reaction to that reality is like V.S. Naipaul’s story about the fundamentalist Muslim scholar who railed against the West all his life and counseled war on the infidels, but as soon as he was dying of cancer, he hopped on a Western-made Boeing and flew to Boston for medical treatment. He reached Paradise via Boeing and the best medical treatment that America could provide.
What you fail to see is that your very leftist ideology itself has kept you a coddled baby, always able to denounce something that you depend on as if corporate America were the source of your problems, like the West is the source of all Islamic problems (or the Islamic world is the source of all Western problems), hence making you less aware and more dependent instead of taking to heart our dear corporation’s motto: Challenge Everything.
Try to look at it from another dimension. Each time a corporation grabs something about me, some group of people somewhere are also grabbing information about that corporation, be they bloggers, news groups, Yahoo groups or establishment online newspapers and television. Enron can’t go on succeeding. Parmalat goes down. This company fails of that company fails for all kinds of reasons of the corrective powers of the market. Martha Stewart mines your computer and makes you buy a pretty tablecloth, but then she goes to the Big House. I don’t have to be some yahoo flaming conservative as you think I am to point out these really obvious factual matters. I gather information about John Kerry or George Bush. I can pull up on the Internet how many times they did or didn’t go to a doctor or how they performed their military service. I know their drunk driving records and the deepest privacies of their marriages. And I can pick one or the other, and your belief that Disney and Bush’s friends in companies like Haliburton or Sinclair are going to so influence and distort that power is proof that the Howard Dean people never, never understood that the power of the Internet wasn’t just *theirs* but all of ours.
Any individual, in or out of government, can be scrutinized using all this information. People in office, people in positions of authority, not just helpless addicted online game players like yourself. Just look at how the monstrous torture practices of our troops in Iraq could not stay hidden and will be punished.
Whatever validity is contained in your points is hopelessly muddled by total lack of concrete examples in the real world, and only the reiteration of Marxist jargon. Where’s an example of how a company mined my personal preferences or yours and then used them to sell more things or gain power over us? If TSO were quite so successful at creating such new, addictive, controlling products, er, how come the subscriptions *even for itself* are down to 50,000? Um…they aren’t such good miners and developers of personal information??? Where are the concrete examples? I haven’t bought any new shampoos or dog food or soft drinks that I didn’t buy before I played the Sims. Maybe it has invaded my computer, captured my whole life with key-stroke-capturing programs, but so what? My entire life doesn’t transpire online and they can’t ever have all of me lol.
It’s a shame your interesting discussion of the board divos is so wrapped up in the evil-capitalist drama that you can’t just take it on its own terms. We all see these patterns you describe, but once again, we aren’t the helpless victims you seem to think. If a company creates a fascistic diva-driven board like Maxis, then we all migrate over to Alphaville Herald. If AVH fails us, we go over to our smaller yahoo groups. If they fail us, heck, we might even meet for a cup of coffee in Real Life or even go into a demonstration down Fifth Avenue.
They can never own us all, humdog. Never. You’ve never spent 5 minutes in a country where they have much, much, greater ownership and seen its ramifications, or you wouldn’t be able to go on posturing so much as a coddled victim of Repression from American Capitalism.
Ian
May 9th, 2004
Took me a long time to read Dyerbrook, but you hit the dart in the bulls eye
Cocoanut
May 9th, 2004
What Dyer said.
To humdog: Capital letters at the beginning of each sentence will increase the readability of your message.
coco
Urizenus
May 9th, 2004
Fans says: “Really.. Getting information on someone is illegal. They only have a right to get your information if you signed an agreement saying that they can get information from you.”
I guess you didn’t read the stratics user agreement: “Stratics will use any information obtained from the user as a part of our own private database, which may be used at any time by Stratics in order to gather or provide information specifically pertaining to the topics provided within our set of message forums. ”
Stratic’s private data base a figment of humdog’s imagination? Doesn’t look like it based on that little paragraph.
Urizenus
May 9th, 2004
This one from the TSO user agreement is worth thinking about too:
“When you connect to the Game, you consent to EA’s routine retrieval of information about your use of the Game from the computer you use to log into The Sims Online. This may include information about your computer’s hardware, IP address, and any data related to use of the Game’s software. This information may or may not be associated with your account identification number (the unique number given to your account when you use EA.com). We do not collect other personal information in this manner, but we may record your in-game chat and messaging. We use this information for two purposes. First, we use the information from all users, in the aggregate, to determine usage patterns in the Game. This helps us improve the Game. Second, we use this information to enforce our Terms of Service and provide you with Customer Support when you need it.”
Urizenus
May 9th, 2004
Although I now spam, all of this is worth reviewing. This is from the EA Privacy Policy:
“What about cookies?
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humdog
May 10th, 2004
humdog replies to dyerbrook
dear dyerbrook:
first of all i am glad that my writing has such an invigorating effect on you and i thank you for taking the time to make the attempt towards a coherent reply.
a person with work experience making web apps for multi-national corporations (not mom and pop type outfits) would describe the same tactics that i have described. also if you would be willing to put your out-dated community college humanities textbooks back on the shelf and read contemporary writers, you’d learn that concern about datamining, decreasing choice relative to online behavior and a whole host of other things are big questions that trouble people working on the web, especially those working in the area of intellectual property and freedom of expression. since you are not likely to ever have personal experience with creating such things may i recommend the following books:
1. database nation
2. code as law
3. free culture
the last two are by prof lawrence lessig of the stanford university school of law. i am sure that even you will admit that he is qualified to speak to his subject. anyway when you finish these books, please come back and we will talk.
urizenus has kindly taken the time to post sections of the user agreements. by signing those user agreements you have surrendered the rights to keep your personal information and your conversations and emails in game private. you have signed a permission that allows maxis/ea to leverage your activity in the game as information stored to a data warehouse. most probably they will use this information at some point in a requirements elicitation exercise for functionality enhancements if and when ea decides not to kill tso.
your argument about your ability to bring up information about bush et all is silly: these guys are running for public office. they have an expectation that they will be dissected. they signed up to be dissected. they are running under a different contract: in many cases, these people are considered public figures and do not even have the right to sue for libel. you on the other hand are a private citizen. you have not intentionally yielded your right to privacy. the consent you sign to have your information harvested is at best muddy, hidden as it is in a document that is carefully placed in a location that at best could be called a barrier to entry. most people do not read the user agreements. most people click yes, agreeing to the things that urizenus posted, merely to get the agreement out of the way in order to access the desired site.
when you drag vs naipaul into a discussion of islam well you should think before you do that. naipaul is a controversial writer in the area of islam, as he is known to have certain biases. you would of course know this if you had, like, actually read his books on that subject.
i don’t find your chest/breast beating about capitalism v leftism credible. i am not anti-american enough to want to just accept crap simply because some headcase paints an american flag on it. i don’t think that the good parts of the american system are enhanced by a defense of the crap.
now please go read the books, and try not to sputter when you write.
love,
humdog
Dyerbrook
May 10th, 2004
I didn’t go to “community college” but to university. If I haven’t read all your precious jargonistic books in YOUR community college list, so what? You can stop waving your book lists around and answer my point about concrete cases. I’ve read lots on the Internet about data mining. But everybody is data mining, not just your evil bosses.
Of course you can’t sue for libel if you are a public figure. My point is that if evil corporations are mining data to take power, they still have to do it through elected officials. And other elements of society also mining data will counteract that phony “helplessness” you want us all have and empower us. It isn’t so cut and dry.
I’ve actually just finished reading all of Naipaul’s works on Islam, and of course they’re controversial because he’s Hindu and Westernized and the people he writes about are Muslim, but you can’t question his very vivid point about reliance on the West even as they denounce it.
I’m not aware of putting any American flags on anything, but you need to take a step back away from your rhetoric and prove your grim prognosis with some hard facts. Where are the examples?
Your assumptions about me not having any experience in web creation or freedom of expression is quite hilarious, you can’t imagine how wrong you are.
Go and read Paul Berman’s “Terrorism and Liberalism” and Lee Harris’ “Civilization and Its Enemies”. Your worldview must be challenged. It’s a straitjacket, and a lot of noise on the line in this discussion. You’ve picked it up from all the pretentious profs around you. There isn’t any reason you can’t be free.
Dyerbrook
May 10th, 2004
I didn’t go to “community college” but to university. If I haven’t read all your precious jargonistic books in YOUR community college list, so what? You can stop waving your book lists around and answer my point about concrete cases. I’ve read lots on the Internet about data mining. But everybody is data mining, not just your evil bosses.
Of course you can’t sue for libel if you are a public figure. My point is that if evil corporations are mining data to take power, they still have to do it through elected officials. And other elements of society also mining data will counteract that phony “helplessness” you want us all have and empower us. It isn’t so cut and dry.
I’ve actually just finished reading all of Naipaul’s works on Islam, and of course they’re controversial because he’s Hindu and Westernized and the people he writes about are Muslim, but you can’t question his very vivid point about reliance on the West even as they denounce it.
I’m not aware of putting any American flags on anything, but you need to take a step back away from your rhetoric and prove your grim prognosis with some hard facts. Where are the examples?
Your assumptions about me not having any experience in web creation or freedom of expression is quite hilarious, you can’t imagine how wrong you are.
Go and read Paul Berman’s “Terrorism and Liberalism” and Lee Harris’ “Civilization and Its Enemies”. Your worldview must be challenged. It’s a straitjacket, and a lot of noise on the line in this discussion. You’ve picked it up from all the pretentious profs around you. There isn’t any reason you can’t be free.
Urizenus
May 10th, 2004
Ah, so there you go hummie, stick with DB and DB will free your mind! woot!
I don’t get what any of this has to do with marxism or anthing political. Isn’t this really just a simple point to the effect that chat boards are supported by companies like EA because they provide valuable repositories of consumer data that can be mined, sold, and basically used for whatever purpose they want? And isn’t it also the case that the management of these boards has become a kind of art/science where certain kinds of personalities are cultivated because they bring more eyeballs to the screens and fingers to keyboards? Who would dispute this?
Think about this blog: Dyer Brook and Coco are pure gold, both as content providers and in terms of their ability to drive others to the blog (and they do it for free!). That’s how I think of them. Why would Stratics think of them any differently?
Dyerbrook
May 10th, 2004
I’m so glad you could admit this: “I don’t get what any of this has to do with marxism or anthing political”. Then tell your student/groupie/board ho that she doesn’t have to see everything in terms of the “exploitation of man by man” (capitalism) or “the opposite” (socialism) lol.
I won’t speak for Coco, but while a free content-provider, it’s hard to see myself as a board ho for Uri. Where’s my private room with all my rules and courtesans and sycophants? Jeez, when do I get to that part??? And don’t forget that I gave up AVH for Lent, Uri. You were panting. All the BDSM people fled to other games, you were reduced to writing the same story about the 14 year old money house scammer over and over and over.
Dyerbrook
May 10th, 2004
P.S. Free your mind, and the rest will follow. Also, make only smalls…the rest will follow LOL.
Urizenus
May 10th, 2004
When you stopped posting those were lean times indeed, Dyerbrook, but isn’t that what lent is all about?
And don’t worry, you’ll get your ride in the AVH jet as promised! About the Cristal and groupies… well, you gotta go to Stratics for that.
Anyway, back to humdog’s actual essay, I have to confess that I didn’t recall seeing anything about Marx or Marxism or capitalism or capitalist exploitation in it. Now I am not the most careful reader so I searched for all those words and didn’t find them. So given that humdog didn’t mention Marx or capitalist exploitation, and I don’t recall it being the point of the article, what, precisely, are you going on about? Honestly, DB, you do love to tilt at windmills.
humdog
May 11th, 2004
uri:
thanks
guys please remember that dyerbrook is an apprentice board ho. he/she/it has not yet earned his/her/its diva rights yet.
coco is a little more developed as a boardho than is dyerbrook. coco has a few followers.
dyerbrook, however, exhibits classic boardho obsessive posting behavior. eventually he/she/it may become an accomplished boardho. dyerbrook’s multi-page screaming is indeed one of the identifying marks of potential boardho-ness and points to all kinds of helpful pathologies, one of which is projection.
because you are right, uri. i never mentioned anything about marx.
Dyerbrook
May 11th, 2004
I’m not it, I’m he. And when you talk about evil capitalist corporations evily data mining hapless exploited worker “customers” and talk about the expose of your most private inner life online as a commodification and as an alienation of the worker from his product, that *is* the Marxism, duh.
It doesn’t always have to spell out “Marxism” to BE Marxism, a 19-century ideology feigning revolutionary power which was actually profoundly conservative and thought up by a few elites to give to the peasant class as they made their painful struggle from rural to urban life, hmmm, MT? Would you know something about that?
As for AVH jets and Cristal and groupies and earning the status of diva, what you haven’t grasped yet MT is that I already *am* in the inner circle in the inner room with the courtesans in AFK idle poses, grovel, and worship interactions all around my feet as I sit on the Moroccan couch in my silk pajamas. You just haven’t been told about this yet, and just can’t see it yet. When you find out, you’ll be…pathological.
Urizenus
May 11th, 2004
yeah but DB, courtesans don’t count if they are self-run trial accounts. Not that I have anything against self-run trial accts. Some of my best friends are self-run trial accts.
And back to hummie’s essay, nothing in there is specific to exploitation by running dogs of capitalism. Speaking purely hypothetically now, one might be a board ho giving it up to an 3l337ist left wing Chomsky-loving free thinking newspaper/blog, for data mining by left wing pinko academics. On the other hand, there is the reward of knowing that you are giving it up for science, or at least some good chuckles in the grad student offices. That’s gotta be worth something.
Dyerbrook
May 11th, 2004
Uri, go back and read her article. It talks about helpless players being stripped down for the personal data by evil corporations which use it to sell stuff. Nobody is buying. She has yet to explain why this evil capitalist company exploiting players can’t even hang on to more than 50,000 of them.
As for self-run trial accounts, wait until you pay for them every month, then the pleasure will increase, I promise you muahahahahaha. And if you only knew what went on with your self-run trial accounts you leave to time out after you log off muhahahahahaa..
Urizenus
May 11th, 2004
“She has yet to explain why this evil capitalist company exploiting players can’t even hang on to more than 50,000 of them.”
Are you talking about EA? — company whose stock doubled in value over the last year or so? or are you talking about stratics? Which seems to be doing just fine too. Capitalist, evil, good, or whatever, the data in those boards is gold, and someone will be mining it.
Oh and about the self-run trial account thing; Now how do you know that they are left unattended to time out? Maybe they ::cough:: you ::cough:: are being watched the WHOLE time. Muahahahahaha.
Dyerbrook
May 12th, 2004
Oh come on Uri maybe their stock doubled but go look up the whole business report. They have hemorrhaged money on R&D then had to pull back and dumped it into advertising and churned these expansion kits out one after another and even though up this silly Urbz thing to keep the whole latte froth frothing. But…if they have any value, it’s not from TSO. And data…? On what? On how many idiots are willing to stay online and chat for hours a day? what exactly are they mining? Could we please get something PRECISE, an EXAMPLE.
All of us are being watched, Uri. They even take movies. They laugh at us, and they goose our stories along every once in awhile by sending us secret sims.
Urizenus
May 13th, 2004
Is a secret sim like a secret santa? When do I get mine?
ajdown@jp
May 16th, 2004
And here’s me thinking that a Board Ho is actually a french wine.
aj
Urizenus
May 16th, 2004
well a region actually, aj. Bord Ho France is the home of many fine wines, bloggers, chat room denizens, and of course some nice cheese too.
humdog
May 18th, 2004
i like that boardho is french wine. great comment.
dyerbrook. i hope that the irony is not lost on your struggling intellect that you are, by your gurgling and sputtering, showing people that my analysis is correct.
1. you will not shut up. this is good for the av herald because some people visit your comments often, to see what insane thing you will say next.
2. uri strings you along, because of 1.
3. because you are an apprentice boardho, not a diva, you have few if any followers. work hard and that may change.
4. your babbling repetitiously circles one or two self-created ironies, from which you never waver. you are humorless, clueless, and rant repetitively. this is baby boardho behavior. in time, with practice, you will grow.
Dyerbrook
May 20th, 2004
It is not my intellect that struggles, but your engagement. Maybe in your whole life no one ever hit the pingpong ball back. Maybe if you played on the table instead of off the wall, they would.
1. Some people need to crane their necks back and keep looking at the road wreck. It hurts their necks, not mine.
2. It’s awful to think who Uri might string along if he didn’t have me to string along.
3. I don’t care if I have followers. I like to delete my new little friends until I find the rares : ). I’m certainly not going to work hard at anything that isn’t enjoyable. ; )
4. Your failure to see the main flaw of your arguments lets us know you circle above only one self-created irony. At least I have at least two.
Urizenus
May 20th, 2004
In fairness to DB, he’s hardly an *apprentice* board ho. (You can be a full on board ho without being a diva, I should think.) I would call DB a master board ho, were it not for the BDSM overtones. Come to think of it, I *will* call him a master board ho!
All this gives me an idea for a new in game TV show. In addition to her Game Show Channel, Coco could have a show called “The Apprentice”, and the premise would be…
hippie
Jun 2nd, 2004
hello
hippie
Jun 2nd, 2004
hello