Valley-Meme and the Crashed Drawing-Room
by prokofy on 25/01/07 at 4:29 am
A pointy-eared polemic by Prokofy Neva
Robbie Dingo’s Whisper Box Near Magellan’s Crash
While it seems like a credible concept, the good professor’s “new media” concept reveals too much Chomsky-reading, and not enough McLuhan. Far from having a new streaming interactive pushme/pullyou immersivia to replace the old one-way pulp-and-electron media, we have something far more broken and dangerous nowadays: an unaccountable archipelago of amateur egos scattered across the budding Metaverse who are all playing a grand game of Gossip. They flash memes picked up from games forums and group IMs and speculative blogs and amateurish podcasts and mash them into approximations of news stories as fast as you can push Blackberry buttons. In the name of this indy corrective to another evil — concentrated media corporations — they scorn the basic methods of investigative journalism and editorial accountability. This isn’t just Wikiality; this is Wikiality 3-D, streaming, and with the power to fill your world with red ban lines and self-replicating prims as well as reiterating reputation-damaging falsehoods.
The little salons of 40 intelligent and sage conversants lovingly imagined by Urizenus would be a wonderful thing if they really existed in SL — but they are more likely to be replaced by griefers crashing the neo-18th century drawing rooms and making coherent discourse impossible. And these illegitimate claims of “trolling” and “spamming” in fact are about an often viciously rigid orthodoxy that brooks no dissent, and takes any kind of principled position as a “troll” and any kind of self-affirmation or consistency as a “spam”. Ever wonder why you can’t post comments on Valley Wag and can’t even find the button to register? They have a creepy Friendster or SLOG-like system of only inviting their special friends to post — and their special friends who are confirmed. Nice way to get an echo chamber!
We’ve seen a lot more lately of the fractured fairy-tales that serve for “media” and the cramped and filtered comments sections to this “media” that perform badly as drawing-rooms in something like Valleywag’s coverage of SL. Spurred by Clay Shirky’s cranky analysis, VW started the anti-SL train rolling big-time. All of us who have been rabid critics of LL’s various phony numbers and fake policies could only be puzzled at these dilettantes and the big opportunity they missed while in the 15-minute limelight.
A classic Chinese whispers game was the exaggerated story of Anshe Chung’s alleged call-girl career retreaded from SL into the grudge-bearing Sydney Morning Herald (in fact, it appears that Anshe had only a brief stint as an exotic companion before focusing on the much more lucrative areas of SL business involving content and real estate). Far from any “media digging” on the story as claimed, VW cites SMH…which cites VW — in a typical circular and mutually -admiring blogation. The hyping of the story seems largely of the old LL forums type of “let’s start a thread just about one person that Jeska won’t close and the target will get banned trying to answer” — over Guni’s gaff demanding take-downs of ugly pictures from SMH, which coupled his RL wife with obscenity. The slugging began in earnest on Second Citizen, a bawdy and disreputable no-holds-barred forums like anything but our Professor’s 18th century salon. There, Joshua Nightshade plotted how he was going to pay people for dirty stories about Anshe; crash her Wikipedia entry and amplify the claim of a sultry past; and get the story around (later, a bizarre but predictable SL twist to the Whispers game, after a many-hours convo with Anshe herself, he pulled an unpersuasive Damascan turnaround and began defending Anshe).
Valleywag, trawling for anti-Anshe scuttle picked up this kind of inworld recycled gossip from years ago (round two of the meme), it passed it around rapidly until even zefrank, usually a lot more witty and insightful, falsely implied in his vlog that Anshe had made her million through prostitution–ridiculous on the face of it. Anyone who has been in SL even for a day knows that the girls don’t charge RL prices, and have to turn over a lot to pimps and club owners or pay for rent. That didn’t stop the memia — as you might call this new media that flashes through a loose network of games, blogs, worlds, text-messages, podcasts and even old media — from reinforcing a meme that nobody ever, along this vast chain, disputed (and how could they, with blog comments closed, filtered, or policed for “trolls”).
Or take today’s Valleywag story of the alleged “pyramid scheme of SL”. At first, I eagerly looked forward to reading some sharp-eyed analysis of the whole land racket of SL, the way the Lindens make a good killing on land sales at auction or through island orders, but then devalue it by constantly flooding the market with new sims (one wonders if the 50 just put out yesterday will now lead to the bursting of the post-island-price-hike bubble).
Instead, the story turned out not even to be about LL policies or SL as a whole, and not even about its entire economy, but just one case of what these “journalists” believed to be a pyramid scheme. Why “journalists” in scare quotes? Because they don’t cite a single name of an avatar; nor a single name of a business; or even any outside observers.
If the currency speculators they are hinting about involve Ginko, then we can only say: ho-hum. Even Adam Reuters covered that on Day One of his job, it was his maiden story. He remained undecided as to whether the operation was truly a classic Ponzi, or was more like an immigrant bank. But, hell, the Herald covered this story ages ago here, here, and while everybody has chewed over this fat a hundred times, the story — more than two years since the opening of Ginko — never gels into the kind of rollicking good drahma that SLers love, because the pyramid never collapses. People keep getting their payouts, the bank never closes, and the owners seem to play not so much the LinDex currency markets but RL gold or other markets to fuel the inworld operation.
Reuters, the Herald, and other SL blogs gives you tons more information than Valley-Wag about operations like Ginko — we never learn exactly which traders VW is talking about, nor do we get a glimpse about any actual inworld business — just the quick round-trip currency speculation of the author’s own “business” where — surprise, surprise! — in this little game-like world of SL he couldn’t make much more than the same 2 percent he’d make on regular US dollar deposits.
The story contains outright misleading statements:
One would have to take the Benchmark-backed economic ecosystem more seriously if some of the online sexchat workers and other Second Life entrepreneurs could show that their accumulated virtual earnings could truly be converted into real currency. But, as this financial consultant explains, anonymously, withdrawing money from the Benchmark-backed vitual world is about as hard as cashing out of a pyramid scheme.
This kind of gossipy chat is great for tabloids and the Herald, but geez, waving around the concepts of “numbers” and “economy” and “banking” got even Raph Koster hosed into thinking this was “the most scientific thing he had read about SL” (?!). Where’s the science?
The fact is, while sex work is very big as a business in SL, it’s probably third after real estate and gambling. And because of the great diversity in any SL business, it’s hard to even identify sectors in a world made up of people’s club-casino-brothel-mall-apartment-rental sims.
And in fact virtual earnings can easily be cashed out any time within a 0-5 day framework to PayPal for $1.00 fee, or by domestic or foreign check for larger fees. I and others in business in SL do it all the time. Just tonight as I typed this story, I sold $70,000 Linden and cashed out about $250 US which has already arrived in my PayPal account as I complete the story. While delays beyond the 5 days do occur, I find most cashouts take 1-3 days and in that sense is no worse than trying to move cash from PayPal itself into your regular banking account. There are thousands of people earning money and cashing it out of SL to pay RL bills; it’s just that they aren’t all millionaires and the figures are more likely in the hundreds, not the thousands of dollars each week. That’s really important. I’m always amazed when I pay for a RL cost with SL earnings — but then, the secret, as Valley Wag hints but never really explores, is that not only do I underprice my labour costs and pay myself a pittance per hour, Supply Linden, selling printed Lindens on the LindEx (which VW never mentions) is also helping to depress my labour’s value.
What Valleywag perhaps is trying to say is that if you take a MAJOR investment — $10,000 is the figure they give — and try to turn that even into $11,000 on the LindEx or with island or auction-land flipping, you would find obstacles in that Linden Lab itself has installed checks and circuit breakers to stop large and suspicious transactions; it is, after all, a synthetic world with micropayments a minimum wage more like US $1.50 a day for many people, not $80 or $100 US. Like any poor, third-world country in transition facing the ravages of dollarization, a remittance economy, and globalization, Second Life’s main industries are tourism, sex-trafficking, gambling and exporting of rare items like Walker Spaight’s fabulous fabbed avatar (exporting is *damn hard* from this world!)
Valleywag seems to be unencumbered, like Shirky and others, with any study of the economics page where they could analyze not just a vaporous currency market which involves a lot of mirrored or duplicative transactions, but also analyze how inworld businesses are doing. To be sure, there’s lots to criticize in the way this information is presented — Lindens fastidiously don’t count land deals as “business” and leave those vast amounts out of the statistics (!), then turn around and don’t count tier payments as business costs before “profit” — which they call with a new-fangled term “Positive Linden Flow”. I’d welcome Valleywag or any serious students of microeconomies in synthetic worlds to come and really give this a look-see — I tend to agree with Walker that we are dealing with a kind of tiny, recently-liberated Soviet-style Trashkanistan sort of place, not a pyramid scheme. Wild horses, old Westerns, and women…
In short, the experience of VW’s Randolph Harrison is more like the Westerners who came to Russia in the ’90s hoping to make a quick buck through association with the loans-for-shares auctions and came away feeling suckered with heavy taxation, broken dilapidated plants, and a system without personal checks, when they could have had a completely different experience investing in say, a children’s clothing cooperative that both provided local employment and created 100 percent cotton products for export to Europe and the U.S. where there were eager buyers — just not on the grand scale of profit that you’d get if you bought the USSR’s largest nickel company for peanuts.
Walker Spaight
Jan 25th, 2007
“Trashkanistan”
love it.
budka Groshomme
Jan 25th, 2007
Although I admire how you managed to squeeze at least four (I might have missed one or two) articles (salons, prostituion, economics, and boggerspam) into this screed, you did so without stating a cohesive conclusion, or even making a cogent, constructive point.
Focus, Prok, focus.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 25th, 2007
It’s focused, Budka, you just don’t want to think very hard. It’s all there, it’s not a screed, and the logic runs very clearly. It’s just not spoon fed. Uri claims that we now have ditched concentrated evil corporate media in favour of a pastoral 19th century idyllic salon. I’m saying that idiots crash the salon with big penises — and I linked to Hiro’s article about “lessons learned” on security and anonymity and such.
I very coherently outlined the anatomy of a particular nasty meme that got legs: that Anshe made her first millions in prostitution. False. SL gossipers tongue-wagged, Valley-Wag picks it up or is HELPED to pick it actually, then before you know it, zefrank is getting all thinky about it and everybody’s praising him. Read the paragraph.
Then I trace the anatomy of another mindless meme story, that “SL is a pyramid scheme” although the unaccountable “journalist” didn’t name names or cite sources or even clarify that he meant that HIS OWN CAPER was the pyramid scheme, not one that he could actually document in world.
Bloggerspam, mind-memes, Wikialities — these are the things that invade our Balkanized salon-world that Uri is so high on. These little atomized enclaves with their 40 tribal members all singing from the same hymn sheet get a new sheet a music and all sing again — even though they were all supposed to be oh-so-unique and oh-so-innovative.
Not a single blogster or journalist tries to think beyond their facile memes and inquire about remedies for the very real problem of the Fuckwad Theory of the Internet now going 3-D and in your home. It’s not a salon. It’s hell-is-other-people, 3-D, streaming. If you can pull a salon out of this mob of hysterics, you’re hallucinating.
The ultimate art performance for this awful world is the Whisper Box, which grabs snippets of everybody’s conversation and echoes them randomly in a meaningless chorus that is supposed to amplify key words in a code-is-law routine.
Think, Budka, think.
marilyn murphy
Jan 25th, 2007
i think you are mistaken placing sex work at 3rd place behind land and casinos as a money maker.
frankly very few of the “escorts” make enough money to cash out and pay for land tier even. maybe 5%.
i think the real money makers are layered in this sequence.
1)land
2)casinos
3)clothing/hair/skins-av appearance business
4)retail sales, pose balls, furniture,weapons and other items.
5)rental property
6)sex workers/dancers/escorts
i have no figures to back this up. just it seems the sex industry is to crowded. the available customer dollar is stretched to thinly to pay any but the elite very well.
i realize that this is not a central issue to your discussion here, just thought about who is actually making money and where it gets distributed when i read that. maybe rental property should be over retail, im not sure about that.
Urizenus
Jan 25th, 2007
prok, many problems only seems to come in when push media outlets like Valleywag pick up some forum chatter and start pushing it like a sourced and researched story. Why not blame push media for that?
*My* point was not that networks of little salons generate information with greater fidelity, but rather that they are incubators for new and interesting ideas. Often there is noise in the signal. We know that, and we deal with it. Perhaps someday Valleywag will learn that too.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 25th, 2007
Oh, I don’t think so, Uri. Push-media has a mindset that predisposes it to forums-memes. Valley Wag was definitely pulling on this one — they wanted to be contrarian to all the hype. And who can blame them? So do we. I just want them to work harder at getting it right so it’s a credible critique.
What I felt was especially lazy was to have the circle-jerk of pretending that “real media” was covering the Anshe flap, when all that had happened was the Valley Wag cited the Sydney Morning Herald…which had cited Valley Wag itself originally anyway. I mean, really, that’s bogus.
*My* point is that little salons that seem to be incubators of new ideas at first, and seem to promise great interaction of minds and a variety of sources and perceptions, rapidly become mind-memed and mind-mapped and controlled. There’s a kind of arc to these groups or meetings — they start up very lively and engaged and then get argumentative and repetitive and people drift apart. Precisely because they are little Balkanized enclaves, they get no fresh input — and are terribly vulnerable to the info virus (the Nam-shub?).
So SL coupled with the blogsphere and podosphere and whatnot comes together, and a big hate campaign gets roiling and rolling and pretty soon you have this huge ugly echo chamber claiming that SL is a sex game and Anshe made a million in the sex biz — which is a distorted claim about SL, and a blatantly false clame about Anshe (shame on zefrank for that insulting innuendo, he’s better than that). In fact, Marilyn just persuasively told us that sex workers are down on the bottom of the food chain in SL. That’s my impression, too.
I guess the reason I could put the sex biz up at the top even at 3 is that I’m thinking not of the lowly workers, but of the sex club *owners* and what they make, but again, they combine, as I explained, casino/vending/rentals, etc. so it’s hard to tease apart the sectors. Basically, I agree with her list.
Uri — where are these salons of which you speak? I mean, I hold them myself several times a week but you yourself are put to sleep by them sometimes, it can get old. I often find these thinkers’ scroll-your-own type of meetings to be rather disjointed and unfocused and filled with people putting out little set pieces in one-line entries.
I think the best communication in SL actually happens in the group IM, even in large groups. The daily debates and comments in the Concierge Group or in those impromptu calling card lists or things like the law groups are all very interesting — people don’t actually even park their avatars to lag on one sim to have these conversations. And I think for the actual f2f avatar experience, when the groups are smaller, say 6-8, it works better.
Artemis Fate
Jan 25th, 2007
And thank you Prok for your tinfoil hate-filled “rebuttal”, I didn’t imagine that you could sit by while someone was saying something _positive_ about SL and online communities for once. It was about as incoherent as usual, but i’m sure to your deranged mind it made perfect sense and weaved an accurate map of the conspiracies, inaccuracies, and inadequacies, of everyone that you hate (and of course a bit of pro-anshe wankery to cover your ass lest you be construed as a hypocrit for ignoring her massive power structure as you target small “in crowds” like Aimee)
And somehow without actually saying anything cohesive or coherent, you managed to type more than Urizenus. Congratulations you are the MASTER of the bullshit conspiracy and the irrelevant ranting. You may give your acceptance speech, I recommend giving a bit of a mention to your very real mental disorder, which has guided every action you take.
*applause*
Prokofy Neva
Jan 25th, 2007
I feel it’s important not to let Uri hypervent about imagined salons that don’t really exist in SL, just as much as it’s important not to let, I dunno, Sears or Crayon or IBM hypervent. Uri has memed up the concept of “salon” now and sprinkled it with holy water replete with lavish Old Master reproductions, and by this time tomorrow, Terra Nova will be nodding their heads sagely and Eric Rice will be tap-dancing with it. I think it’s important to intervene and just ask pretty basic questions: where’s the Salon?
No Herald reporter is immune. Look how Buddka savaged me here, like I was flunking his sleepy 4 pm Friday afternoon tutorials at university.
I don’t need to cover for Anshe whatsoever; I’ve always give credit where it is due and criticism where it is due when it comes to Anshe who has no influence over me. I don’t see why I should sit still for memes to be mindlessly circulated. What are the topics of the salons, such as they are? They are the days’ headlines. And I question the pre-fabbed templates that come at this news and and the way they are tweaked.
When you have to tell someone in a debate that they have a “mental disorder” you usually have conceded defeat and lack of argumentation.
If I’m guilty of mushing two stories into one, or mushing a story and what could have been comments under Uri’s article, what of it? This is the Herald, not a Pullitzer-Prize Winning newspaper. It’s a blog, with give and take. I just don’t think Uri should get to pontificate about old media disintegrating — with its editorial wisdom and credible editorial line and journalistic integrity — and breathlessly start ushering in new media being the matrix from which fascinating new salons are brewed — when the salons with the 40 people are merely fed the pap from the half-assed blogs and are repetitive and often just griefed in one way or another. This has to be said.
I’m waiting for Uri to explain what his salons are, unless of course he’s talking about some elf confab on his RP sim. SL has a half dozen thinky, ethical, philosopher, blah blah sorts of groups. Sitting in these meetings, you feel like you are in the dorm room commons again in college. That’s because a lot of the people ARE in college I guess.
marilyn murphy
Jan 25th, 2007
i went to one of those think type meetings once. a cute guy avatar flirted with me and i dont remember what was said. i had fun tho.
(fluffs her hair and smiles sappily)
actually, i think all this high minded talk and comparitive innovative thinking is lost on the majority. this is really the realm of a small, very small, group of people that find such things useful. i have engaged in conversations where we are trying to expose the holes in each others logic and get others to share our views. in the end, we all log off and eat dinner. the next time i log in i still think the way i think. so do they.
salons or no, this is how most differing views end up.
Artemis Fate
Jan 25th, 2007
“When you have to tell someone in a debate that they have a “mental disorder” you usually have conceded defeat and lack of argumentation.”
What about when you tell someone in a debate that they’re pig headed or whatever other slew of insults you’ve used? I just point this out because a.) I seriously think you are mentally ill and need to see a therapist, that’s not an insult at all and b.) I know it gets to you and since meaningful debate with you is impossible because of said mental illness, It’s funnier just to poke you and see how you react, although I recognize it’s cruel to taunt the Special Ed people.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 25th, 2007
See what I mean, Uri? You call this a salon???
Artemis Fate
Jan 25th, 2007
“See what I mean, Uri? You call this a salon???”
Try, in debate or conversation, to talk to someone with an opposing viewpoint without automatically resorting to fallacious personal attacks, hasty generalizations, linking them to conspiracy theories you’ve developed on SL Shadow governments, or socialist entities. I know you can’t, but try instead using logic and reason with less emotion and instinct, and I think you might be surprised how people would be more willing to give a polite and reasonable debate, and would seem less like “the enemy” and more like another person with an idea.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 25th, 2007
Try, in your remarks, to refrain from personal attacks and claims that someone is mentally ill. Try using logic and mounting arguments based on reason, not “I hate you just because” — it’s always the IRC channel tekkies I find who are the most emotional of all, precisely because they think they are exempt from this problem. They sure aren’t. If think you’d be surprised that if you stopped lobbying such hostile attacks every time I say “the sky is blue” you’d find that there is in fact a lot of company for saying “the sky is blue”. I *am* merely a person with an idea, who won’t stand down from it. What you are is a person with only a blind desire to make people comform, utteraly lacking in any respect for dissent.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 26th, 2007
push media outlets like Valleywag
I’ve been thinking this over and wonder what you think, Uri. At one level, Valleywag *is* push media. It puts up a precious, precocious sort of college-newspaper humour take on the whole Silicon Valley scene, and it represents a group of people with that take on things — which is representative only of itself, though it might speak for a class of 20-somethings trying to get jobs in Silicon Valley or sitting in jobs they don’t like with a lot of animosity toward big IT firms or whatever.
And I’d put it in the push-media category because of this ridiculous SLOG-like policy of only taking contributors through the friendster system of friends recommending and confirming friends in a “trust circle” (I’m finding the idea of “trust cirlce” to be really insidious). So you might spend your days trying to impress the snarks at VW to take your copy your comment, but they’ll likely make you suffer.
On the other hand, at least for that chain of people who can get past the Friend Nazi checkgates, they are now ushered into the world of push/pull. Their content has been attracted by the original pushers, and now they can interactive and even get to post anonymously. This ensures the old “line” that the editorial boards used to maintain, and maintain assiduously through all kinds of cultural and institutional cues, whether through “the right schools” or “the right social set”. What used to be more complex and have more checks and balances on it — the old editorial board and its line — is now substituted by the code-as-law rough-and-ready concept of “allowed to register/not allowed to register” and “friend/not friend”.
MenuBar Memorial
Jan 26th, 2007
Prok, I love how you write and back up your stories against the critics of your work. I may not agree with what you say sometimes, but it’s always a great read. Big hugs, and keep up the quality jounalism – regardless of where it takes you.
We truly live in interesting times.
Urizenus
Jan 26th, 2007
Prok you are now officially a Chomskian re the media. The thesis is just this: push media tends to hire people that have internalized certain values. Some clues are things like where people went to school, but there is also the “I like the cut of your jib” assessment, which in effect is a way of say “s/he is philosophically compatible with us. Sometimes the gatekeepers filter to only allow people with the right corporate think, or sometimes they filter to get people with the right techi-wiki think, and sometimes they filter to get that valleywagish cynical hypster doofus think.
If you control the philosophical values at the entry point, you don’t need to do any censoring or organize conspiracies to advance a point of view — the point of view will automatically dominate your publication.
Prokofy Neva
Jan 26th, 2007
Oh, but I don’t have anything near the Chomskyist hysteria and extremist about this thesis. The New York Times might tend to hire people who went to Harvard. But they’ve now done all kinds of equal-opportunity work on themselves and even hire people who went to Brown now har har. Seriously, they are more diverse, and while the tendency is there, the false caricature that Chomsky puts up isn’t like RL and is not grounded in real field experience.
Well, it would be one thing if they hired or invited as writers those who have the “Valleywagish cynical hypster doofus think”. That’s all good. But to also turn what is the equivalent of the Letters to the Editor section as also “Valleywagish cynical hypster doofus think” is unjustifiable. That’s why the new media will make us have more concentration and more funnelling than the old media. I don’t know if you saw the New York Press article on Amy Goodman and NPR and so on. I don’t find Amy Goodman to have anything in common with actual and real democracy or actual and real public broadcasting service the real diverse public. She’s an extremist who is willing to get into bed with Allende and other dubious types with blood on their hands just to poke a stick in the eye of “Amerika”. And if the Bushies maneuvered their pals on to CPC, don’t think the Obamies or whatever won’t do exactly the same thing and did in the past. What’s her solution, having her and her cronies on?
There is a war for the soul of public broadcasting and even concentrated commercial media. It’s really a widening gulf. And it’s no wonder that the political struggles have sharpened now that the dying dinosaurs are vying for the remaining scraps of advertising dollars and political influence. I just want to make sure that the Amy Goodman “democrats” don’t invade the entire structure of something like Second Life because somebody thinks that’s a “better world”. It’s no more of a better world than having Karl Rove or Clear Channel run everything.
Artemis Fate
Jan 26th, 2007
“Try, in your remarks, to refrain from personal attacks and claims that someone is mentally ill. Try using logic and mounting arguments based on reason, not “I hate you just because” — it’s always the IRC channel tekkies I find who are the most emotional of all, precisely because they think they are exempt from this problem. They sure aren’t. If think you’d be surprised that if you stopped lobbying such hostile attacks every time I say “the sky is blue” you’d find that there is in fact a lot of company for saying “the sky is blue”. I *am* merely a person with an idea, who won’t stand down from it. What you are is a person with only a blind desire to make people comform, utteraly lacking in any respect for dissent.”
Yeah, I didn’t think your grip on reality would be strong enough to be able to make such a concession, but it was worth a try. It’s funny that you are so blinded by your own rage and screaming that you don’t even realize how much of what you condemn others for applies greatly to you. In fact, very funny apparently because you’ve made yourself something of a Second Life attraction, famous for being the crazy old lady who everyone comes to marvel at what insane hate-filled conspiracy theory is sputtered out of your mouth today. Speaking of that “sky is blue” mentality of everyone agrees so it must be how it is, have you ever noticed that everyone tends to agree that you’re nuts? Of course not, they’re a part of some tekki-wikki w-hat socialist IRC conspiracy to defame and disrepresent you.
That makes much more sense.
Rumgoat Pugilist
Jan 28th, 2007
Bravo, Prok. I finally get where you’re coming from. I’ve trolled before, but you, you’re the super troll. People toss you some troll feed, and you write a TLDR thesis on it. On behalf of the Billy Goat Gruff Society I would like to say that you warm our bridge lurking hearts.