Virtual Worlds 2007, Report #2: How the Hair Holds Up
by prokofy on 29/03/07 at 2:13 am
Prokofy Neva, Kremlindenologist
So I walk into the 55th floor of the Millenium Hotel and I see it…The Hair. Our Hero’s Hair is Holding Up. Relieved, I shake Philip Rosedale’s hand and ask him how he’s holding up, but the message has already been telegraphed to me: gelled, sturdy, stellar, architectural — thank you very much. Philip’s hair, if it could talk, would describe what it’s like being the Cat in the Hat holding up all those sims, a rake, a plate, a cake…So…how many sims is it now? He gives me a figure..it’s different than the figure Joe Miller gives later, you know, I don’t think they really know, it’s *almost organic* this stuff and out of control. 7800?
If you can imagine it’s possible — Philip’s hair is *even more amazing* than it was at SOP II and SLCC I, which is when I first was exposed to the construction. People in New York don’t do that kind of thing to their hair. I mean, you just never see it. Walk around, look. So this is So California. And…it’s like…so cool and perfectly constructed, with just the right amount of mix of “bedhead” and “tousled bad boy” and “mad scientist”. Gazing out over the sterilized wound of downtown, I couldn’t help thinking of that time Nikola Tesla shorted out lower Manhattan with some experiment on Houston St…Philip looks more than ever like he stuck his hand in the socket and still finds it interesting…
If I needed metrics about The Hair, there was always Spin…a very *glum* Spin as it turned out, when we reassembled at Cory Bridge’s behest in some lower floor restaurant. Spin, who — were in not for Philip — would have been put on the A-list for constructed hair. But with the competition being what it was, he was sitting, head in hands, lamenting. God know, his wife knows how much time he spends in the bathroom every morning trying to get That Perfect Look. And then Philip has to come along…He consoled himself by trading faux newscaster voice bits with Corey. Did you know that everybody on TV has a California accent? People in California are just so damn *happy*. I mean, I’m sure they have earthquakes and fires but they don’t seem to get stuff like 9/11…so they really cheer you to death. That’s why it’s so hard to talk to Philip. He is always on, upbeat, amped, positive.
I just find that I have to argue with him more and more. He tells me he went on a tour of the stock exchange and studied the FOREX for tips on the Lindex, and I had to scold him and remind him of my negrate, one of only 7 delivered by residents in the time that system was in place, in June 2005, when he GOM’d the GOM. I said until his LindEx went back up to $4.25/US $1.00 US $4.25/$L 1000 where it used to be under GOM’s exchange, I would leave the negrate on him. As it’s only back up to about US $3.70/L1000 today as we speak, after some severely lean times in those years, I can’t remove it. I’d settle for $4.00 — I’m reasonable. “Philip, try to imagine, I used to earn something resembling a minimum wage at $4.25 if I earned let’s say 1000 an hour, but now it’s down to $3.70,” I explained. So he starts arguing that no, it was only at $4.25 “for like 10 minutes”. That’s not true. I remember those heady days when we constantly cashed out certainly no lower than $4.00. “OK, put it back up to $4.00 then,” I say — because of course *they control it*.
“Stop depressing our wages — Supply Linden is printing millions of dollars and devaluing our work,” I complain. He disagrees. See, he’s the argumentative one, even though any College 101 student knows that if you print money, you get devaulation of the currency — and that’s devaluation of labour. “No,” he explains, fresh from his tour. “It’s all these new people coming in and buying.” But…if there are more buyers…then…it would have more value…except…Supply Linden is printing Lindens like Yelsin printed rubles before the krakh in ’93.
“OK, Philip,” I concede. “You have these new people that you don’t want to have expensive rubles Lindens when they come in, so you have to keep the price lower. It’s like demanding of immigrants they have to pay $10,000 US to emigrate and not $2,000. OK, I can see that.”
Then comes one of those bizarre Metaversal Moments where the Entropia guy comes up to pitch his world, Philip introduces me as “more famous than me,” I tell Philip he has the Google cred, then yammer about the $50,000 sale of Amsterdam to the Entropia dude (!) telling him we’re almost at their level.
Looking at my long-time townhall sparring partner, and one of the rare recipients of the Prokofy Trifecta Negrate Certificate with his absolutely metaversally architected hair, I had to realize we were now worlds apart. The Digital Divide.
If before, we were kind of on the same server — it was a small pond — now, he’s got the Fortune 500 in his pocket, so to speak, and I’m just a fanboy. I remember that very first heady day in Second Life in 2004, when in my first minutes in SL, I happened to hit on the town hall with Philip Linden, where he talked enthusiastically about “Buddy the real estate developer” — he had decided to encourage realtors despite the hate of capitalism in his inner core — who would pick up newbies in the Welcome Area and take them away in helicopters to see new real estate (!). Nobody in their right mind inworld in the business would try to sell real estate by flying people around in ‘copters, especially now, with the lag, the sim seam issues, the red lines. Of course, now Philip’s dream is ostensibly realized by Coldwell Banker, which promises to show people land from their copters…
What is this feeling like, I try to think? Remember when you’re like a junior in high school? And you have this boyfriend who’s a senior? And you went out with him in his senior year, but then he goes off to college? And he finds much more sophisticated Older Women. Then, he comes back home during the Christmas holidays, and earnestly tells you that he hopes you’ll always be the best of friends and he has the highest regard for you…And looking in that formerly innocent high school love’s eye, you realize he has Had Intercourse out in the world. It’s an unmistakeable look. That’s the look of the Lindens now…of course, they may be jilted by their new-found corporate Older Women and be back looking to go out next summer during the vacation, but for now, they hope we’ll always be the very best of friends…oh, and while you’re out? Can you pick up their dry-cleaning and drop it off Tuesday? Thanks!
Philip’s talk was pretty much as Uri reported it, but you have to picture the contrast: this sea of suits, and middle-aged guys who look pretty much middle-aged, who have really, really polished Power Points and such, and then Philip, who kinda just goofs on it all.
“How many here are the opposite gender in Second Life?” was his opening question (Uri may have missed this). I happened to be sitting right down in front in the second row, right under his gaze from the podium. I froze. I sure didn’t want to be the only one raising my hand…but as I looked out at the sea of suits, there weren’t any other hands. It was damn wierd to be asking this. I didn’t raise my hand. Was it really *appropriate*???
Then, all that stuff about the engineering. A really long childhood story about looking in a computer and realizing that the patterns on it, when you drilled down and expanded them in size, could cover the earth’s surface. It was another wierd computer story from Philip. Where was it going? When would it end? Could it get MORE wierd? It could not…And…he then said the bit about how they engineered all this stuff…then they realized, hey, they got all these people. NOW what? What to do with them?
I’ll say.
That burned, I have to tell you. First, the Intercourse. And now…this. It’s not even really the case, although it’s maybe a story they have begun to tell themselves now that they have to justify their exit from worlding and retreat into platforming. If you read all those miles of old townhall scripts, you see how engaged Philip was, in fact, in every little worldy thing, prim counts and taxes and lag and land costs…
Seeing him then standing by himself without even a soggy meatball, I said, “When you started out…did you ever imagine you would some day be on the 55th floor of the Millenium Hotel with all these people?” I asked Philip, gesturing to all the business types from corporations (the CEOS actually didn’t seem to come, it was middle managers, but the companies were big). “Well, of course, I imagined I could be on the 55th floor of the Hilton,” Philip began exasperatingly literally, explaining that he’d been in downtown Manhattan hotels before…but of course there was 9/11. I pointed out below the building where my job used to be before it was pulverized and…received one of those long California stares they must develop from driving out on the freeway so much.
“But did you think there’s be all these Fortune 500s?” I elaborated. Then Philip said something like “It’s not that I engineered for it…but I always wanted Second Life to be for everybody, and that would mean them, too.” He then earnestly embarked on an explanation of how avatars could be corporations…a corporation *was* an avatar in fact…a body…a group of bodies that formed something so very like an avatar…I was reaching for more of this boiled shrimp on a stick…but got only the limp Thai chicken on a stick…Help…
The first time I met Philip in the WA in Dore, long ago, I marched up to him, because I felt like I had spent a lot of money on his game already (hah!) and he and his Lindens didn’t really seem organized. “What qualifications do you have to do this job?” I asked. It was because I felt that he was a government official, but that we had no way of electing him or bringing him to an account. Boy, was I naive!” I remember saying even on the Herald ages ago that we could only have one attitude toward the Lindens — that they not get in the way, that the attitude toward somebody like Philip shouldn’t be any different than to the guy in the short red usher’s jacket who was taking the ticket at the movie theater…
“I have a degree in physics and I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve learned by doing,” he said. I didn’t feel it was the most sterling of recommendations, but I proceeded to buy another dozen or so sims over time, and put more investment in Philip’s pet rock in the sky than many of the big businesses have, when you think of it, at least in terms of numbers of sims. Some day I should put out a book in samizdat, “Letters to the Lindens,” with all my voluminous correspondence to them and their answers…
The feeling I always had about Philip and other Lindens and some of the other people I got to know in SL was something like my brother as a child. Hours and hours of almost-silent parallel play, in that childhood headspace where you build and create and devise and innovate and keep making something for hours at a time, feeling the presence of the other person there, close, but not intrusive. That lasted for a good long while; today it’s out of kilter, and I don’t know what would bring back its balance.
You know, I don’t even know if Philip makes a profit yet, and I bet it doesn’t even matter to him that much, personally. There’s a feeling of nearly cult-like zealotry still coming from him about how he has to get this thing out to as many people as possible. “It’s a great leveler, like TV was,” I commented. I was thinking of McLuhan who used to describe the blue box as a reducer, all the events, even the Vietnam War, became on the same level as a detergent ad spot…SL reduces yet it amplifies…I would even argue it’s an amplifier (hot medium, not cool medium).
I’m reminded of this goofy interview he did where he talked about Second Life as truth serum, which got him a Valley Wag of course:
THR: What is it about Second Life that lends itself to community building?Rosedale: The reason it’s interesting is the nature of the conversation you have, the debate — it’s different. It’s a different way of communicating. It’s not like chat because there’s an extremely strong sense of personal presence. Chat and forums have a certain laws of physics to them that encourage a certain form of discourse. Blogs and comments on blogs are subtly different. Second Life is really much closer to how we’re talking right now, but where we’re both on truth serum basically. It’s like Burning Man, it’s like taking a drug. Both of us are here, but we’re much more comfortable with each other. Technology temporarily made us insular in the way we consume media. But rapidly it’s going to go the other way. With Second Life, you go to a drive-in theater, and there are 40-50 people. Half of them are not from the U.S., a quarter of them don’t speak English. And they’re all watching a movie or TV or whatever someone wants to present.
We’ve all heard Philip’s by-now well-hackneyed story about how SL is “better” because you’re on amazon.com browsing a book, and you’re with 27 other people, but you can’t see them or know them. But with SL, especially once they get HTML on a prim cooking, why, you can all fall through a trap door on the Internet and land in a kind of glorified chat room together, ostensibly to form a “community”. That 6 of the people are there by mistake because they clicked on the wrong link and wanted the toaster (paging Pella Tully! help!) or that 12 of them may be all wrong for you anyway, or that 6 of them may be griefers and hackers or that 2 might be interesting but…how long can you talk about a book you meant to browse for about 45 seconds??? all of that somehow falls away, with the magic of the Truth Serum… (We already had this discussion down in the piece about Pella’s talk at CNET).
Philip made much of saying, as Uri very astutely captured, that if he could be anything in the world, he’d be himself. Well, who wouldn’t want to be a CEO of a multi-million dollar amazing software company famous all over the world and with hair like that lol? But he didn’t even mean that. He meant the mad scientist and truth serum boy.
The question *I* wanted to ask at Philip’s talk as this: who is the most important person in the room right now?
Here we had 600 of the most important media people in the world, old and new. I mean, sure, Rupert Murdoch wasn’t there and all of that, but line staff and middle managers are more important for how stuff gets done anyway, and there were *enough* of the higher ranking ones that we could accept the premise for rhetoric’s sake.
I tried to think who *was*. I wasn’t even sure of all the people there.
I don’t think the most important person in the room was Philip Rosedale — I mean in terms of what will come next — and I think he’d be the first to say so. Because what comes next isn’t like “about” Second Life even if it happens to *occur in* Second Life.
Then who is the most important person?
Jeffrey Yapp? Matt Boswick? Steve Youngwood? Betsy Book? Colin Parris? Reuben Steiger? Jerry Paffendorf? Eric Rice? (not unless he works on that hair!)? Sibley Verbleck? Justin Bovington? James Bower?
“Somebody will make everything.”
Nacon
Mar 29th, 2007
Talking about his hair and 9/11? What the god damn is wrong with you?
ren reynolds
Mar 29th, 2007
I hope someone has a pic of the hair. I should have taken one but I was snapping the view from the nose bleed 55th floor. It truly was staggering. The hair that is.
Curious Rousellot
Mar 29th, 2007
The LindeX Market Data page is showing the exchange rate at L$270 / US$1 at the moment and pretty steady for the last little while, not the L$370 as suggested in the article. So, Prok is getting paid even less per hour than the article says.
Other than that I loved the article but I do have to go with Nacon; either 9/11 or Philip’s hair but not both please.
MSGiro Grosso
Mar 29th, 2007
Thanks Prof and Uri for your insight. Although I may disagree with your tone it at least makes me laugh quite a bit and I tend to find more honesty through laughter than mean spiritedness anyway. I hedged a bet and avoided this conference for a few reasons mainly which were 1.) The price of admission was riduckuloose and 2.) The price of sponsoring it didn’t guarantee us much more than a logo on a website. The entrepreneur in me said “Just go and make sure people know there are more agencies than the Sheep and the (Omega) Moos” but the trade-off wasn’t worth it for us.
One part of me regrets not going. The part that definitely would not have been in a suit. That part shocked me. I guess only parts of the mid-90′s spirit are back. Suits? Those are what I wear to weddings…or court.
Marc
Inigo Chamerberlin
Mar 29th, 2007
Could it be that our beloved leader had nothing of interest to say? Nothing we haven’t all heard far too many times? Thus nothing really worth reporting on?
Pretty funny when you think about it. Not one, but TWO hotshot reporters attending the conference and neither able to find sufficient meaningful content in our beloved leader’s address to actually be worth remarking on… Say it all really, doesn’t it?
Onder Skall
Mar 29th, 2007
Ok … I’m completely confused about exchange rates. I think I must be seeing them backwards.
If the exchange is L$450 / US$1, that means that L$1000 = US$2.20.
If the exchange is L$270 / US$1, that means that L$1000 = US$3.70.
So… isn’t lower better? Doesn’t a lower rate mean a bigger payday? What am I doing wrong? Or am I correct in my math but totally missing the point?
***scarcasm check: no, I’m not being sarcastic, I’m genuinely confused. I’m obviously not a money guy…
EnCore Mayne
Mar 29th, 2007
your reporting content and writing style are in full stride on this conference prok. thanks for keeping us informed.
Economic Mip
Mar 29th, 2007
Not to be rude, but the fact that the increased printing of money causes devaluation is typically covered at the Economics 030 level (translation: if you do not know this you have no common sense whatsoever). However, When Philip eventually has this epiphany, perhaps he could clue in Gideon Gono and the rest of the Zimbabwean clowns? It would be nice for my friends and relations to not be paying $25,000 ZWD for a loaf of bread.
Curious Rousselot
Mar 29th, 2007
Onder, I believe you are right. I may have misinterpreted Prok’s wrongly written phrase, “I said until his LindEx went back up to $4.25/US $1.00 where it used to be”. as saying the Lindex was at L$425 per US$1. I guessed that the decimal was missing. Either way, the way Prok wrote it was definitely not a proper expression of an exchange rate.
Prokofy Neva
Mar 29th, 2007
Sorry but as someone who lived 9/11 up front, personal, and close, and lost many neighbours and fellow parishioners to 9/11 — and one of my jobs –I get to talk about 9/11 any goddamn way I want. And if Philip’s hair happens to be in my view of 9/11, well, that’s just how the flotsam and jetsam of the metaverse works, you can’t shape it.
55 floors doesn’t at all seem like a nosebleed to me, Ren. I guess because the old World Trade Center had more than 100 floors : (
Curious, you’re not getting the way I was trying to express the rates, that’s all — because I’m remembering GOM and contrasting it to Lindex. I should have typed “$4.25 per 1000 Lindens” — my mistake. The packets were sold by 1000 on GOM, otherwise it didn’t make much sense as a purchase or sale, I guess, not sure why. So my mistake, and I’ll correct it — but $4.25 is exactly what I meant *per 1000* which is then more like 250 per $1.00.
We don’t talk about the rate of Lindens to $1.00 US dollar because it’s just not helpful when you are constantly calculating pricing inworld — at least I don’t find it helpful. I have to constantly calibrate my rental fees and costs and the income and how it will relate to tier, so I use the figures of what I can actually cash out money for in US dollars at any time.
People who have to work with micropayments and cash out Lindens tend to talk about them by the rate of how many US dollars you can get per 1000 Lindens. So that rate tends nowadays to be $3.70 per 1000 Lindens. Perhaps other business people will step up and argue furiously with me, but maybe they just didn’t get their habits from the old GOM, that’s all.
It makes no sense to figure out how many Lindens to go into one measly US dollar. It makes more sense to figure out how many Lindens it will take to make more than a buck.
Look on the Lindex, and see how it is reflected. When you go to cash out Lindens, you type in the amount, say 1000 Lindens, and it will tell you how many dollars to expect to cash out. Type in “1000″ and see what it says in the box.
Yes, that means you can see a figure like “266″ or “270″ per $1.00 US. But for me, I just find it easier to always conceive of how many real dollars I’m getting per 1000 Linden dollar, not how many Lindens I’ll get for spending $1.00 US dollar. The GOM taught us to think in those terms, I guess.
Prokofy Neva
Mar 29th, 2007
>So… isn’t lower better? Doesn’t a lower rate mean a bigger payday? What am I doing wrong? Or am I correct in my math but totally missing the point?
If they could bring the exchange rate back down around 250, the rate would be back at what it used to be for GOM, the independently-run exchange that was “GOM’d” by LL — it became a verb precisely because the Lindens took the idea and cannibalized it.
They keep it artificially HIGHER by PRINTING MONEY. That means it gets a larger pool of money for buyers, and Supply Linden sells money directly printed out of thin air, instead of those wishing to cash out selling Lindens to those who want to buy them. The idea that you “need” Supply Linden to sell *one million US dollars* to “keep it stable” is bullshit, IMHO. If you allowed it to float, and it was worth more, there’d be more people getting on it to sell more, and plenty of newbies. It’s not like you’ll “run out”.
This is done merely to keep Lindens cheap, because if they start costing $5.00 per 1000, i.e. the cost of a skin or a whore for an hour or something, people will feel too much like they’re paying real money for this game, and can’t justify the cost.
HowDidIGetHere
Mar 31st, 2007
“If before, we were kind of on the same server — it was a small pond — now, he’s got the Fortune 500 in his pocket, so to speak, and I’m just a fanboy.”
Did you at one point really expect to be anything else but a fanboy? After all Philip and friends created “Second Life”, doesnt that put them in another position automatically at least for the forseeable future? He definitely made a much bigger financial investment in it as well. Funny how you always scream about bolsheviks yet fail to grasp that fact. Sometimes I wonder who is the “socialist”. You seem upset he is trying to recoup his investment in time and money by courting bigger customers. Too a critic of Communism, the concept of investment and getting return should be easy to understand.
Anyway, money is only one part of it……. next you question his qualifications to run a company, when he answers:
“I have a degree in physics and I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve learned by doing,”
That doesn’t seem good enough for you.
Yet when he goes into a long technical discussion :
“Then, all that stuff about the engineering. A really long childhood story about looking in a computer and realizing that the patterns on it, when you drilled down and expanded them in size, could cover the earth’s surface. It was another wierd computer story from Philip. Where was it going? When would it end? Could it get MORE wierd? It could not…And…he then said the bit about how they engineered all this stuff…then they realized, hey, they got all these people. NOW what? What to do with them?”
You seem bored.
You reject the simple answer and don’t want a complex one (and couldnt understand it even if you heard it), yet you say it in a way that makes you sound as if you think you yourself would be better qualified to run the company. Almost as if you were entitled to do so. Seems very much like an attitude a real Bolshevik would have. Have the most technically competent people step aside, give them no credit for their investment of labor and capital and make the political appointee the head of the operation.
Is there some other reason you feel this way? Did Linden Labs turn you down for a job at some point in time?
Do you really think someone could just have the creators of of a constantly changing and evolving world like Second Life and a tech company like Linden Labs just step aside and be replaced by a customer service rep CEO and crew? From your posts it almost seems as if you envision yourself as this person, secretly thinking “If I was running LL, things would be so much better.” You so completely discount and denigrate the tech aspects of all of this that you arguments lose their grounding in reality.
Phil and company are not “government officials”, that is what you would be if your secret fantasy was fulfilled and they turned the whole world over to you (or your nominee). A purely incompetent bureaucrat with no clue on how to run things or the mechanics of what makes the enterprise go round. Very much like a real Bolshevik.
Prokofy Neva
Mar 31st, 2007
You have a limited understanding of human communities and civil society and how it gets formed, and so you reach for facile and quick understandings and labels like “Bolshevik”. We know one thing about you already — you are an anonymous poster, too cowardly to post with a Second Life or real life name. So any conversation with you already takes place in a cloud of bad faith, where you get to snipe from the safety of anonymity, and I don’t, especialy with an avatar linked to a RL name.
“If before, we were kind of on the same server — it was a small pond — now, he’s got the Fortune 500 in his pocket, so to speak, and I’m just a fanboy.”
>Did you at one point really expect to be anything else but a fanboy? After all Philip and friends created “Second Life”, doesnt that put them in another position automatically at least for the forseeable future?
Actually, I didn’t. We were so sick of the fanboyz thing at the Sims Online that SL seemed (at first) refreshingly free and open and creative and free of all that awful game culture with wizards and mods that we HATED. And that’s why the disappointment at finding it even MORE the case was all the more penetrating.
>He definitely made a much bigger financial investment in it as well. Funny how you always scream about bolsheviks yet fail to grasp that fact. Sometimes I wonder who is the “socialist”. You seem upset he is trying to recoup his investment in time and money by courting bigger customers.
I think if you read all the articles that Uri and I have posted you will see that mere raw and greedy concern about ROI is not going to cut it if you want to make a Metaversal-worthy flying machine. Yet it’s important, too, because somebody has to pay for this stuff. I don’t want a thing for free; I want the conditions to make money and create without interference. If the Lindens are hiding the fact that making the metaverse and communities cost way more than they thought and they are essentially subsidizing me by keeping costs lower or keeping themselves centralized and still managing sims that I only partially manage, then they need to either charge more, or open source, or sell out to somebody else who will bring costs down and peformance up. The truth has to be told about these things. Not being a tekkie, I had not understood at first the complexities and costs in making the universe. I don’t think even they understand it. There’s a lot more that has to be explored about it.
Bolshevism is expecting to smash things, pretend you’re the avante garde of the people, and steal either their labour or product or get outsiders to pay. It’s pretty evil. I’m not interested in “leading the people” or getting others to pay.
Too a critic of Communism, the concept of investment and getting return should be easy to understand.
Um, yeah. And your critique of me is then stupid. Because you are merely engaging in cheap forums tactics to try to bully and harass someone you don’t like or don’t agree with not by citing argumentations, but trying to pick something close to their heart where you think you can bully and shame them, and “show them up” or “play gotcha”. Once someone gets busy zealously trying to show someone up or play gotcha, it’s over, as far as an interesting dialogue or thought-provoking discussion.
You seem to be encumbered with the false view that I don’t get what ROI is and don’t attempt to get it myself from SL. So disabuse yourself of that notion. But ROI isn’t even what these guys making the Metaverse want. I’ll have more on that later.
>Anyway, money is only one part of it……. next you question his qualifications to run a company, when he answers:
“I have a degree in physics and I’m an entrepreneur and I’ve learned by doing,”
I sure as hell do. Hell, yeah. It’s not enough to make a world, being a physicist and an entrepreneur. More kinds of people and people with more broader perspectives are needed. An engineer who can get up in a front of the room and say that he engineered a thing and then only afterward noticed there were people on it, and what do we do know, has pronounced his failure personally as a Metaversician.
>That doesn’t seem good enough for you.
Nope, and not just me, hundreds of thousands of other people, too, and a lot of them smart, and smarter than me or you.
>Yet when he goes into a long technical discussion :
“Then, all that stuff about the engineering. A really long childhood story about looking in a computer and realizing that the patterns on it, when you drilled down and expanded them in size, could cover the earth’s surface. It was another wierd computer story from Philip. Where was it going? When would it end? Could it get MORE wierd? It could not…And…he then said the bit about how they engineered all this stuff…then they realized, hey, they got all these people. NOW what? What to do with them?”
>You seem bored.
No. I followed it. Hey, I got it about the picture diminishing in size and the fascination with they physicist who thought there were a lot of hidden spaces to work in and all of that. But that’s just being seized with an obession about structure and not content. People are content. A builder who can’t think about the content, the people, is incomplete and second-rate.
To his credit, Philip does think an awful lot about people and time and humanity and all those things but in an abstract way — too abstract.
>You reject the simple answer and don’t want a complex one (and couldnt understand it even if you heard it), yet you say it in a way that makes you sound as if you think you yourself would be better qualified to run the company.
No, not at all. I reject the idea I can’t understand something that is complex merely because I’m trained in another field; let the people in that field, explain in a way that other smart people in other fields, can understand something, that’s all, force them to explain themselves, it’s good for them.
For this audience, to go off into a story about childhood again and physics to me merely meant one thing: Philip himself is scared, or at least at sea, or at least unsure of what to do next. So he grabs what is familiar to him and close, like a security blanket. When he was at SLCC II he did a lot of that, going on and on about his childhood stories, oft-told, and now iconic like George Washington cutting down the cherry-tree. We need iconic stories from our game-gods. I’m glad Philip has a seemingly endless and cool supply of them. That doesn’t mitigate the fact that we need more than engineers and physicists to build the Metaverse. It is not just theirs. We don’t WANT a thing that is built but then they think of people as an afterthought. We don’t WANT them to run it with THEIR political worldview which they indeed have — they are busy welding all kinds of bad political stuff into their tools and it will be almost impossible to undo it later once they mind-meme it around. Lots and lots of people have to have a say in this.
In fact, the commercialization of the Metaverse is a good thing. The Metaverse is a big enough concept and world-changing phenomenon that it can stand somebody making a buck off it, trust me. And that helps asshole tekkies understand that there needs to be ROI for those who pay for them to play — and there needs to be accountability and transparency on the part of the builders for those who live and work there.
>Almost as if you were entitled to do so. Seems very much like an attitude a real Bolshevik would have.
Of course I’m entitled. Not only have I made a not-insignificant monetary investment in SL with my purchase of sims, I live and work there. Of course I’m entitled. That’s not Bolshevism. It’s democracy. Of course the dirty little lie of the tekkies is often to claim democracy is bolshevism just so that they can remain in charge and go on *being* bolsheviks.
> Have the most technically competent people step aside, give them no credit for their investment of labor and capital and make the political appointee the head of the operation.
That’s an exaggerated and hysterical rendition of what needs to be done, said tendentiously to get emotional points. Technically competent people can be really fucking stupid about people and processes. They invest labour? Hey, you haven’t counted the years of hours I’ve worked in SL, too. Capital? The tekkies are often the freebie accounts or the hired hands in the company, and the capital that the VCs put in is often put in not even for ROI but for vanity and for the ability to shape humanity. Greed for influence can be just as horrible as greed for money, which is really only a form of greed for influence.
Systems in RL of political appointee exist for a reason. I find these systems often to be atrocious to watch, especially at the UN. Yet I’m very keen to the fact that they are necessary so that technicians don’t get out of syn in their thiking and actions with other equally smart people in other fields and ordinary people without expertise.
That’s what’s so awful about tekkies. They really do imagine they can do everything, not just make the stuff, that they get to govern it and decide everything too, merely because so many fields of knowledge have become dependent on IT.
>Is there some other reason you feel this way? Did Linden Labs turn you down for a job at some point in time?
Huh? I’m not interested in working for Linden Lab, which is its correct name. I’ve never applied to work there and I can’t imagine any circumstance that would develop where both I and they would be comfortable with me being on the payroll. I can’t imagine I’d be free. I don’t mind applying to a job and working in a place where I’m not free or less free, but at least in a field where I know something and have a resume.
>Do you really think someone could just have the creators of of a constantly changing and evolving world like Second Life and a tech company like Linden Labs just step aside and be replaced by a customer service rep CEO and crew?
Unfortunately, it’s not whether I think this is good or not, it’s merely what’s happening and I’m reporting on it. If it doesn’t happen for LL it will for There or some other company prepared to take care of customers. LL is not prepared to take care of them and just leaves them to fend for themselves, or drives them into chutes and ladders that fit their own needs for scripters and builders. I’m glad LL exists, but they aren’t a game company or a virtual world maintenance company and that means they aren’t taking care of communities.
>From your posts it almost seems as if you envision yourself as this person, secretly thinking “If I was running LL, things would be so much better.”
This is the kind of thing anonymous stupid people say on forums and I’ll just ignore it.
>You so completely discount and denigrate the tech aspects of all of this that you arguments lose their grounding in reality.
I don’t at all. But they need to learn their place. They in turn so denigrate and discount the social side and the side involving other human fields of knowledge that THEIR arguments lose their grounding in reality.
>Phil and company are not “government officials”, that is what you would be if your secret fantasy was fulfilled and they turned the whole world over to you (or your nominee).
People who make slamming personal insults like that aren’t thinking or understanding. I’m not interested in being a world leader. I have enough trouble just to run my little company. I’m interested in participating in the conditions that go into making leadership, however, and I have ever right to do that.
For want of any better analogy at this point, I have always had to treat LL as a government of our world, because they control it. Constantly yammering on and on about how it’s “software” and it’s “just for tekkies and their feted little communities” and how I “need to learn they are just a company” blah blah is entirely boring and stupid. It shows a lack of awareness of the key strains of the debate underway already that are identifying different schools of thought, about augmentationists and immersionists and all the rest.
All this is by way of saying game companies and virtual world companies are going to have more power over people and their lives than governments, and how can we make them behave responsible as in fact most governments do.
> A purely incompetent bureaucrat with no clue on how to run things or the mechanics of what makes the enterprise go round. Very much like a real Bolshevik.
No, you’re just revealing the idiocy of your own limited tekkie ideology, in which you imagine that people from other fields of human knowledge are “incompetent” or that they are “bureaucrats” if they control some of the wild excesses of sandboxing assholes who think making things and taking them apart is all that matters.
HowDidIGetHere
Apr 1st, 2007
Tekkie ideology? That one contradictory comment alone shows how way off you are.
Technology isn’t an ideology. Technology is most of the time a product of science or some other experimental process of trial and error (sometimes happenstance) that proves its use reliably over and over again. Its grounded in reality. You are trying to impose your “social” constructs on a world that is still constantly changing and evolving. Your whole post again was just another long drawn out denigration of “tekkies” and why the people who created the world are incompetent at running it.
The problem with so severely criticizing the leading edge is they are ones giving you something to talk to about, not the other way around. LL will come up with another feature and you’ll just start bloviating about this or that aspect of Feature X and then they’ll roll out Feature Y and you’ start bloviating about that, and while you are ranting and raving they’ll be creating Feature Z which will supplement/complement/improve everything that came before it and transform the world in some unforseen way and throw all the previous “social” constructs out the window because there will be some new dynamic that redefines the world. They created and are recreating it and you probably dont know what is going on their heads enough to criticize it or put it in on some particularly constructive path (over another)
Progress is messy and you seem to want everything to proceed in a perfectly ordered bureaucratic way.
Your jealous of the techs and that is why you are trying so hard to attain “social” power over them. Problem is most social constructs dont last, they come and go because people can modify them on a whim. Every once and a while a good social thinker pops up, usually though its people who need an ego boost or want societal influence “on the cheap”
At this point I guess we simply do not agree….. you view tech people as social idiots and not caring for people…. which may have been true of some people in previous generations but the last crop of PC and Internet in particular (in many ways it can be said of many “techs/scientists” going back hundreds of years) engineers, programmers, scientists, etc, I think have shown a deep understanding of human processes and have been more “socially” conscious in many ways. Even Bill Gates (who many people love to hate) has shown almost unprecedented generosity and an ability to direct his great resources to overlooked and neglected social concerns (in a much more practical way than many “social” theorists and bureaucrats out there). This generation of “techs” isnt behind the “social” curve, they are setting the new standards. Thank god for that. While all you social theorists are sitting back ranting, whining and complaining, the “techs” are actually creating a better world
If we were talking about something other than Second life or the metaverse I may lean more towards your position. If real food, real clothing, real housing were involved, most techs maybe should concentrate on creating and innovating, while others worry about distribution, taxation and all the other “social” aspects. When real lives are involved I understand people being much more concerned and all you “social” theorists who have too much time on your hands may actually come up with a good idea every once and a while.
That basically leads in to the second problem which is, this whole thing is just a game (or platform for fooling around and having some fun), which you and a lot of others, just take too seriously, plain and simple.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 1st, 2007
>Tekkie ideology? That one contradictory comment alone shows how way off you are.
>Technology isn’t an ideology. Technology is most of the time a product of science or some other experimental process of trial and error (sometimes happenstance) that proves its use reliably over and over again. Its grounded in reality.
Um, I guess you have never read C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures” and have no awareness of this debate and the plane above it. I can see you suffer from exactly the problem that C.P. Snow thought the humanitarians used to suffer from, and which he helped to correct, but now we can see from the typical dumbass forums post that your type makes that the tables are turned. We really are in trouble.
>You are trying to impose your “social” constructs on a world that is still constantly changing and evolving. Your whole post again was just another long drawn out denigration of “tekkies” and why the people who created the world are incompetent at running it.
>They are? I don’t think I need to work to hard at proving that. Their technology doesn’t even work, for Christ’s sake. Hey, I have a secret. Fix more of the social stuff, pay attention to the world and the society, more of the technology will fall into place and work better. Imagine that! These people are constantly building a pyramid for people to look at 2000 years from now as a wonder of the world, and breaking the backs of the people having to make it now.
>The problem with so severely criticizing the leading edge is they are ones giving you something to talk to about, not the other way around. LL will come up with another feature and you’ll just start bloviating about this or that aspect of Feature X and then they’ll roll out Feature Y and you’ start bloviating about that, and while you are ranting and raving they’ll be creating Feature Z which will supplement/complement/improve everything that came before it and transform the world in some unforseen way and throw all the previous “social” constructs out the window because there will be some new dynamic that redefines the world.
Oh? They wouldn’t *have* a social construct if it weren’t for me and everybody else. And they even have a conscious plan of making something they know is unpopular and hateful, waiting to see how many people squawk and what they’ll settle for, and then fixing that thing. It’s the most horrible method I’ve ever seen in an environment with human beings in it. I’m trying to think of a name for this awful stuff. “Experimental resistance measurement”.
>They created and are recreating it and you probably dont know what is going on their heads enough to criticize it or put it in on some particularly constructive path (over another)
That’s not my fault. They’re a secretative cult. We need to force them to come clean about what they are doing because we pay for it.
>Progress is messy and you seem to want everything to proceed in a perfectly ordered bureaucratic way.
Rolls eyes.
>Your jealous of the techs and that is why you are trying so hard to attain “social” power over them.
This is a good indicator of how techs think. They are always secure and jealous and that’s how they think others are, they project. I can’t imagine why I’d like to sit and parse database tables all day. I *do* have a life.
>Problem is most social constructs dont last, they come and go because people can modify them on a whim.
Uh…like technology remained unchanged in the last 2000 years? ROFL.
>Every once and a while a good social thinker pops up, usually though its people who need an ego boost or want societal influence “on the cheap”
Someone like you shows their lack of education with comments like this. Hey, there’s a great Russian saying: keep your mouth shut, people might take your for intelligent.
>At this point I guess we simply do not agree….. you view tech people as social idiots and not caring for people…. which may have been true of some people in previous generations but the last crop of PC and Internet in particular (in many ways it can be said of many “techs/scientists” going back hundreds of years) engineers, programmers, scientists, etc, I think have shown a deep understanding of human processes and have been more “socially” conscious in many ways.
This is such deep delusion that we need to work extra hard to blow it up. Hell, no.
>Even Bill Gates (who many people love to hate) has shown almost unprecedented generosity and an ability to direct his great resources to overlooked and neglected social concerns (in a much more practical way than many “social” theorists and bureaucrats out there).
I couldn’t disagree more. Bill Gates philanthrophy is among the more stupider and facile out there. He looks for things that he think are going to show massive human healing so that he can look good. Yes, he may save many of the starfish on the waterfront left after the tide goes out. That matters to the starfish! He has no program for how to really incrementally change human institutions and thinking. I’m sorry, but you’ve chosen a really bad example there.
>This generation of “techs” isnt behind the “social” curve, they are setting the new standards. Thank god for that. While all you social theorists are sitting back ranting, whining and complaining, the “techs” are actually creating a better world
Actually, there couldn’t be anything more farther head-up-ass than this kind of statement. Tekkies imagine that with their paganistic/arrogant/leftoid/utopianist point of view that they are changing the world. They are changing the paper in the Xeroc machine, that’s all, printing out their manifestos. They don’t affect masses of people except negatively and unpredictably. They don’t have a framework to understand the processes they unleash. The disaster of virtual worlds is a very good example, they are helping to spread virtally things like violent BDSM culture and ageplay and facile and shallow internationalism based on illusions about the world order and they aren’t really changing things on the ground.
>If we were talking about something other than Second life or the metaverse I may lean more towards your position. If real food, real clothing, real housing were involved, most techs maybe should concentrate on creating and innovating, while others worry about distribution, taxation and all the other “social” aspects. When real lives are involved I understand people being much more concerned and all you “social” theorists who have too much time on your hands may actually come up with a good idea every once and a while.
That basically leads in to the second problem which is, this whole thing is just a game (or platform for fooling around and having some fun), which you and a lot of others, just take too seriously, plain and simple.
You just don’t get to dictate the level of seriousness that people take it at. You don’t control them. Merely making technology doesn’t entitle you to judge or control how people use it. That sort of mindset is the criminal mindset of Plastic Duck and the Patriotic Nigras. You don’t get to decide what is serious or not-serious, it’s not yours to decide. You aren’t in control, plain and simple.
In closing, I can only say: fuck you. There’s erally nothing more to be said. You aren’t interested in a conversation because you are an aggressive and arrogant but anonymous and cowardly fucktard.
Panda
Apr 2nd, 2007
“You aren’t in control, plain and simple.”
Eh, and that’s the thing that bothers you so much isn’t it? You don’t control us, you “don’t get to decide what is serious or not-serious”, and it drives you completely up the wall.