The Alphaville Herald

53 Responses to “You Rule: Second Life Turns Into Tropico”

1. 

   Inigo Chamerberlin
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   What I find interesting is that all Chadrick actually says is that AR’s about your estate will be passed to the estate owner’s eMail, rather than LL.

   Now to me this simply means LL have discovered a way to reduce the burden of ignoring all those ARs – nothing more.

   There was no mention of according the estate owners any sort of power beyond that which they already possess – namely to exclude undesirables.

   So. What’s the big deal? I can see some point if estate owners could kick an undesirable off the grid for an hour or two… Or ban them from SL for a few days… But arguably the estate owners already have the ultimate sanction anyway – ‘You want to use my estate? Do as I say or be excluded’ – why SHOULD they have any extension of that power?

   And why on earth should they need, or want, AR’s forwarded to them? Anyone can currently issue a complaint to an estate owner or manager – and the owner/manager will do as they see fit…
   What’s changed? Besides stoking a few egos?

   I have to say what I’m seeing of Chadrick is NOT making a great impression on me. He seems to be doing little but engage in grandstanding… Maybe he’d be better employed elsewhere and someone with something positive to offer SL employed instead. Trouble is, I suspect he’s one of these people who have mastered the bullshit that seems to take people a long way in LL.
2. 

   Ryker Beck
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   Yeah, I’m really not surprised by this at all. It will either be complete lawlessness, or total dictatorship. Woe.
3. 

   Baba
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   I really want to play Tropico now. I have the disk somewhere…
4. 

   Cocoanut Koala
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   I would have commented about this on the Blog, but comments are down right now.

   But anyway, I can’t believe Chadrick actually said the sentence:

   “If he’s assaulting someone on his region, he has the right to do so, it’s his.”

   Any plan where sentences like that get said . . . indicates a very bad mindset.

   There should always be some crimes individuals must be held accountable for, whether they own an island or not.

   coco
5. 

   Frankie Antonioni
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   While I like the game Tropico, that is as a dictator. The way Linden Labs is going about it, what is to prevent somebody that owns an island from scamming somebody. Will LL go after scammers and griefers, if so how will they know if scamming or griefing is going on.

   I also have read that LL is doing away with rating, but instead of getting rid of rating, why not make it like ebay.
   If you buy something or have somebody create or build something, then you can give that person a good or bad rating, based upon whether that person has done a good job or not.
   If you are renting or have bought land on an island and you are paying tier, then you should be able to rate that person at the end of each month.

   When you check a person’s profile it will then tell you how many positive or negative feedbacks you got.
6. 

   Frankie Antonioni
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   Oops, that shoul be how many he or she got.
7. 

   Artemis Fate
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   Eeeeh not totally sure how I feel about this yet. In the one hand, it cuts down the work lindens have to put into dealing with abuse reports (which may just sound like it’s laziness, but hopefully they redirect these newly found powers to the whole “the lag, the teleporters not working, inventory lost for good” thing), which could be good, and besides, the Lindens pretty much outright ignored abuse reports as is unless they were particularly pressing, and even then it took a while.

   But on the other hand, it just kinda makes a hot potato sorta deal, since it seems no one will be banned from the grid in general, that one estate owner will just pass off the offending person to another estate owner.

   But really, it doesn’t seem to be modifying anything in terms of power, Estate owners are just better able to legislate their sim’s ban list, and Lindens get to take a breather from thousands of frivolous abuse reports daily.

   “Remember the person who designed this system in secret, without you and me, with only a select cadre of 10 people: Chadrick Linden, Chadrick, good friends with Phreak Radio, Lecktor Hannibal, and Taco Rubio since beta.”

   I don’t know much about any of these people, but it said 10 people with 200 sims, so it must have been 10 landbarons, are you ready to play the FIC card on the business and businesspeople you so covet and protect that it has yet to have been soiled in your articles? If you want to talk about true “FIC” in SL, it’s not the little in-crowds and groups of popular people, it’s those people paying the huge land bills to LL like Anshe Chung and all the other Land Barons.
8. 

   Artemis Fate
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   Also as Chadrick pointed out in the comments, this would allow for more attention to be put into each report. I find that most “griefers” are just newbies who don’t know any better (except for the griefers you get Prokofy, but that’s only because you paint a big red target on your face with your shout rants and verbal griefing), and if you IM them and tell them most people aren’t cool with you running around and blowing things up, they tend to go “okay, sorry, didn’t know”, which is something LL couldn’t do because they don’t have the time to get on that personal basis.
9. 

   The Libertine
   

   Apr 20th, 2007
   

   The server and logistical issues I can understand, but I can’t really disagree with dictatorial power on islands.

   Also, as presently implemented, it really just looks like LL is trying to pull a crowdsourcing move on AR work. I agree with that methodology in principle, but am dubious about its application here.
10. 

    BANS-HE
    

    Apr 20th, 2007
    

    MAUAHAHAHA I shall return after all. Thankyou Linden Labs! I’ve got Furrys to slay, Cho Seung Style Bitch!
11. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 20th, 2007
    

    Um, Artemis, you are so ill-informed. I have a personal set of griefers that range larger than just the garden-variety W-hat, I get mafia club owners who want to force me off sims and camp chair operation scammers and all kinds of stuff, you have no idea.

    Most of my existing ARs are on behalf of my tenants. And since the Lindens don’t do anything with them, and since in 3 years of doing this I have never once seen an offense go up on the police blotter (oh! there was that one time when there were all these anti-gay signs on our lawn, then Daniel Linden came personally to remove them and then that, being politically correct, went right up on the blotter — but if someone makes a bust of my RL head and defaces it and puts up obscenities, including racism and mysogenism and agism, well, that doesn’t count! Or if someone makes an anti-gay group just to harass me and threatens to buy all the land next to me forever and threatens to kill me if I complain, well, that just never sees the police blotter because it’s not *visible*.

    Most tenants have griefers from their own circle of acquaintances. As in real life, the most common problem is an angry boyfriend coming back on an alt to punish a girlfriend who left them, or visa versa. Or squalls of haters that hate this or that thing, either gays, furries, Gor, whatever. I’ve seen quite nasty anti-Gor stuff perpetrated by BDSM furries that is really ugly, whatever you may think about Gor, you wouldn’t wish that on people. No one should ever be harassed on their own land for minding their own business.

    I see mall shooters, scammers of newbies, prim littering, verbal harassment — and most of it is payment info on file or used, imagine. And there are concentric circles of griefing groups that aren’t merely just my personal v-5 harassers, but people who just continually harass others for the same few reasons: rivals in love, rivals in business, rivals for sim FPS. The scarcities in SL. And these types do not go away by merely telling them “it’s not cool”. I see a couple hired-gun type of assassin groups that repeatedly attack on behalf of their clients and the Lindens never remove them, I just don’t get why, I imagine they are infiltrating and watching the groups or something.

    Re: the abusive attitude of the “my property uber alles” type:

    Here’s a typical example:

    “Lex Neva Says:
    April 20th, 2007 at 3:46 PM PDT

    Let me make one thing clear: you have NO expectation of due process and NO right to be fairly treated when you’re on someone else’s land or in someone else’s sim. I can ban you at any time for absolutely any reason and you have NO recourse. There are no constitutional rights to free speech or getting to hang out in any given sim. If someone doesn’t like you and bans you, for whatever reason they choose, that’s their right. Remember, they’re paying for the land/island, and you’re no”

    Why? Aren’t there such things as “the basic norms of civilized life” or “the universal values of human rights” or any of that sort of thing? Guess not.

    You see this particularly in the hate-spewing thread on the waterway rights. My God, some of those people on the forums, who used to hector on the old forums, are still whipping it up, like Banking Laws. He can’t envision a world where he makes even 16 m2 or 96 m2 to let a boat pass through on the water without mishap. I marvel at this lack of community spirit in what is supposed to be social media.
12. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 20th, 2007
    

    Frankie, you have a point. How can a you-rule system like this work without ratings? I go and plunk down $100 US for a private sim set-up — how do I know whether I’m getting a crazed tinpot dictator who returns my prims even before my box expires, or a benign grannie who lets me be late a day? Only ratings would do this, and we’ve lost even the rump of ratings left us by the old system, they’re removing that. So we can go try to use these clunk third-party site ratings, but they aren’t so easy to use, and don’t have a critical mass.

    I suppose word of mouth and viral marketing will work to some extent, where word will get out especially on forums about how people behave once they have the AR trigger. Of course, with this system as they’ve evoled it, they

    Re: “I have to say what I’m seeing of Chadrick is NOT making a great impression on me.”

    What Chadrick has been doing is working in secret and that’s what his bosses have tolerated or enabled him to do. And it’s typical of how they work now. I’m sure they actually have some tekkie wonky theory even that goes like this:

    “Why have all the static and negativity of the forums? When we put out an idea we’re going to try, we get 300 or 500 answers, some of them sycophantic, some of them negative, but we still get only the same “constructive 5 ideas” that we can use and “the 1 really negative expressed idea we’ll be forced to respond to” — so why publicize it when we can find 10 people we can work with and get the exact same percentage.”

    That breathtakingly Bolshevist logic of course serves them in the immediate revolutionary expediency of getting out the software. But in the long wrong, it builds discontent and ill will and will bite them in the ass.

    My sense with Chadrick is that the Lindens have found someone really passionate and zealous about Second Life, to the point of making it even a cult. Indeed, perhaps he is even IN some kind internal cult tacitly encouraged by the Lab (or maybe the entire Lab is a cult). That cult is made up of once-resident beta era people who feel very possessive and very special about SL, and feel only they have the answers for it, and only they are the smart people. They pride themselves on being “listeners” but in fact they are driven to do what they want, and only go through the superficiality of listening.

    The Lindens have taken an unappetizing thing like testing, coordinating, and launching what will likely be a really rocky and at times really hated sysetm, and they’ve taken advantage of a young man’s enthusiasm for SL to launch it. It’s like what they did with Torley or Strife on moderating and then shutting down the forums.

    If the program fails badly, they have one employee they’ve burned out, one heart they’ve broken, and that person is sheddable and they hire the next one and remove him from the people list. If it succeeds, even partially, they can keep pumping up his ego, give him power over other human beings in areas for which he has less and less competence and RL training and experience outside of SL and make him ruler of this domain.

    That’s one of the things that’s always been my biggest beef with the Lindens, is that they take people to manage social groups and community affairs and complex and political matters and put people on them without that experience in RL,whose only claim to fame is that they went through beta or they served 7 long years at the lab and know the servers like the back of their hands.

    How do you break up something like that which is a closed, brittle system and therefore doomed to failure, even with any temporary success gotten at great success?

    Open it up to multiple handlers and to the public at large, instead of making it a secret beta, have people opt-in, or be in discussion groups. Make everybody feel ownership and inclusion in the change.

    The brutal instrumentality with which the Lindens do things always makes me sad.
13. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 20th, 2007
    

    *with this system as they evolved it, they have schooled people in being police informants, ratting on each other, misusing the abuse system, and thinking they can sic the lindens on them.

    So like the Duke said in “Measure for Measure,”So now shall we see/if power change purpose/what our seemers be.”

    Suddenly, when the AR comes to YOU, you can’t run for cover, you have to act and do what? Ban. And you now have to think of the consequences of what you are doing because you are now known as the prosecutor!

    Before you could hide in blessed anonymity, ARing people and trying to get them banned on specious grounds like swearing in PG. Now, you will have to take such specious complaints and act — or not. And be known to have act.

    Bet we’ll see a lot of venue-shopping to the mainland for ongoing quarrels, with people even chasing or luring others to the mainland to “get them” because island justice will either be too harsh, or not harsh enough, to get them what they need — manipulation of the system.
14. 

    Kahni Poitier
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    I LIKE my landlords. I won’t have a problem with this at all.

    Oh, and BANS-HE: As an armed kitty, bring it on.
15. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    I don’t know much about any of these people, but it said 10 people with 200 sims, so it must have been 10 landbarons, are you ready to play the FIC card on the business and businesspeople you so covet and protect that it has yet to have been soiled in your articles?

    I’m frequently critical of land barons, I guess you just haven’t read my blog. The Herald has also been highly critical of scamming island barons and also I did the editorial criticizing Anshe Chung over the DMCA takedown.

    I’m quite positive those 10 island owners had to be Adam Zaius and D’Alliez and probably a few others that have been to SL Views and are among the Lindens’ beloved island owners they like to do business with, and possibly Anshe, too, just because she’s big. Adam is definitely FIC, always has been.

    But there’s a difference between the FIC, who are mainly the creative and technical intelligentsia, and the land barons, who are definitely not FIC, not at all, and those few among the land barons the Lindens co-opt for projects like this.

    Land barons as a class are not trusted or liked by LL, because a) their bottom line is dependent on them now so they are ambivalent; b) whoever gains private property in any system real or imagined has power separate from the state, so they are disliked by any authoritarian government; c) Lindens need to constantly break their back in order to keep their own revenue stream working, it’s a vicious little set-up when you think of it — the Lindens need barons to get 80 percent of their bottom line paid, but they also need lots of new people to show off nubmers to the media, investors, and corporations, so they need to keep land glutting to get more revenue, still having to do with barons that way, but keeping them off balance. It’s a symbiotic and I think fundamentally sick relationship. Sick, because no condominium is ever possible, as each must eternally distrust the others’ motives.

    The FIC relationship is much sweeter. The Lindens *made* the FIC. The Lindens are *made up of* the FIC. There is a lot more symbiosis and love. They are like minded in outlook being tekkies.

    Someone like Adam Zaius who can combine both scripting and tekkie power and beta FIC status *and* be a million-dollar land baron is the duke of SL for the Lindens. He’s probably one of the ones quietly suggesting stuff like this Tropico plan for ages and probably tickled pink they are doing it his way. It’s like Ceera Murikami has been writing on the thread, it creates a lot of isolated fiefdoms.

    Watch the media coverage over the last 3 years to understand what the FIC is. There are FIC leaders created by Linden steerage and setting up of the media; there are then the subsequent wave of metaversal sherpas fixed up by the Lindens; then there is really only one land baron that has gotten significant press coverage. Anshe Chung. And she made most of her press coverage without any Lindens. Do the math.

    >If you want to talk about true “FIC” in SL, it’s not the little in-crowds and groups of popular people, it’s those people paying the huge land bills to LL like Anshe Chung and all the other Land Barons

    No, they aren’t the FIC *because they do not determine the feature set nor the media coverage the creative/technical intelligentsia does*.
16. 

    Hazim Gazov
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Oh, dear God. As if there weren’t enough problems in Second Life, what with the communists, the griefers not working, grid destroyers lost for good, now Prokofy Neva has gone and announced the imposition of the resistance movement in the form of spamming lindens with textures containg people defecating, and cats being viciously mutilated — though she is already one of the powerful rulers of Second Life who will now gain even more ability to ruin your hair. If you’re concerned about where you will go now with abusiveness, forget about calling the furries: they will no longer accept unsolicited sex requests from island-dwellers and will re-route them all back to their mothers.

    Remember more than a year ago when I squawked about this, when I saw Daniel Linden nodding in approval over the demand of the FIC to have any abuse-reports by subs or rival doms filed to Prokofy to be turned over to the Master of the island? Now she will get her way, faster than she can spell “Bolshevicks”.
17. 

    Montana Corleone
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Well I hear a lot about griefers, I never seen ‘em on the mainland much, but I have been griefed, abused and mistreated by several Estate Owners.

    Well, news for Chadwick, Second Life ain’t no different from First Life anymore, run at the behest and lobbying of the rich and powerful, rich only because they happened to be in the thing early.

    So, they will break their own ToS disclosing info. An Estate Owner can do what they like, share info again against ToS, and wanna complain? Well that very same owner gets his own AR. ToS, well sorta no longer applies to Estate Owners and their friends does it?

    WTF are Lindens smoking? So now, instead of just booting me and two others off a sim, on New Year’s Eve, with no warning, and while we were offline, these guys can now keep our stuff, because hey presto, Linden ain’t gonna look at ARs for them.

    And yes, Chadwick’s statement about an Estate Owner can assault anyone if he likes, my God, he should be locked up in a secure unit for the criminally insane. This isn’t a new world, a community anymore, just a bunch of social failures flexing their muscles as dictators cos they can’t do it in RL.

    What we need now at the very least, is access to each sim’s rules, the ability to know if they are self governing or still ruled by Linden, preferably in the TP window so we know before we get there, and a subsantial increase in the size of the mainland for all the refugees.

    This will be a bunch of lawless chaotic and anarchistic fiefdoms.

    Huge legal action looms nearer every day with each insane decision by Linden.
18. 

    Kami Harbinger
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Well, I for one am extraordinarily happy with this. My personal policies on my land are not necessarily those of anyone else. I don’t like the whim of whatever Linden happens to be on call that day making decisions about what’s “legal” or not on my land.

    Think of each estate as a single state within the United States federal system. Every state has its own definitions of misdemeanors and felonies; “murder” is defined 50 times in our country, somewhat differently in each state depending on their own local culture. There are some Federal regulations, but they’re few and far between.

    Chadrick Linden said that some abuse report types would still be going direct to LL, not to the estate owners; those are “Federal” crimes. Everything else is up to you. Some estate owners don’t care about use of weapons, and they should be allowed to make that decision. Some estate owners like the filthy Gorean scum tolerate slavery and misogyny, and much as they repulse me and fill me with contempt, they should be allowed to do that on their own land. The filthy Goreans can expect no such fair treatment on my land, though. Prokofy is welcome to travel freely in his own land and say whatever he wants there, even though he has the unique talent of offending everyone at least 50% of the time.

    Do you like being abuse-reported on your own land, Prok? Wouldn’t you like to be able to control the griefers on your land instead of having to wait for Linden Lab to do nothing for you?

    “An it harm none, do what ye will.” Or less new-agey, the key principle of anarcho-capitalist philosophy is that you have the absolute right to do what you want with your own life and property, and you never have the right to tell or force anyone else what to do with their life and property. This principle produces the greatest freedom for everyone. It doesn’t grant you the right to impose your will on anyone, even so far as crossing their land if they don’t like you, and that comes as a shock to some people.
19. 

    Inigo Chamerberlin
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    REALITY CHECK!

    To be fair, let’s get one thing clear here. An estate owner, on their estate, IS untouchable – right now, regardless. An estate owner can be as benign, or as dictatorial as they please, on their estate. The vast majority of estate owners are, fortunately, reasonably decent people. The odd exception is generally avoided by experienced SL’ers. Yes, they are a problem for newbs – think of it as a learning experience in those cases.

    As an estate owner I can ban anyone I want. If someone displeases me and I’m feeling particularly nasty I can lockdown the sim they are in (no ingoing or outgoing TP), enable damage and kick their sorry ass all over the sim until they logout or crash. And LL will do nothing regarding any AR they might file. That’s how it is RIGHT NOW.

    If they were dumb enough to ‘buy’ land off me in my estate I can kick them out at any time, for any or no reason, and LL will do nothing about either my actions OR the money (L$ or US$) ‘lost’ by the AV in question. That’s how it is right now (BTW, I neither sell nor rent land).

    What puzzles me is that Chadrick comes up with this grandstanding (Hey!Look at ME! See what a powerful influential Linden I am!) Blog announcement when all it actually seems to offer is the prospect of, as an estate owner, being deluged in AR eMails…

    Um… So? What’s actually on offer?

    Is this a ‘solution’ to anything? No.
    Has anything, except the prospect of a flood of eMails for estate owners, changed? No.

    It’s not even a change as yet – Chadrick’s stated he’s no idea WHEN these awesome ‘changes that change nothing’ will come into force.

    So. What’s the POINT? Besides the previously mentioned ego-masturbation?
    Is THIS what the LL Blog has come to? Somewhere for individual Lindens to preen and crow?
20. 

    Economic Mip
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    I think banning in Second Life is so common that people forget how powerful it is. Imagine if you had the power to tell Google that a certain site is not up to your standards, and you do not want it in your search query. The result would be a much more user-friendly experience. The question however is what happens when over 300 avatars need to be banned. However, if you are having problems with that many individuals, perhaps they are not the problem.
21. 

    Panda
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Come ride with me,
    through metaversal history,
    and I’ll show you how,
    Phils asleep on the job.

    For how can we win,
    when fools can be Kings..

    (apologies to the original)
22. 

    Cocoanut Koala
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    It always WAS a place for individual Lindens to preen and crow.

    At first they were going to put the names on the blog entries on the front page of SL every time you log in.

    I objected to that as unnecessary egoism, and thankfully, they decided not to do that.

    coco
23. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Kami, I can see now that you must subscribe to one of these libertarian or anarcho-capitalist or whatever ideologies. And you’re going to argue in consistency with it no matter what, so there’s probably little persuading you. The problem with such an ideology at root is that it admits no universality. It says that anyone can make up universal rules on a whim. They can’t apply them to anyone else, but they can apply them on their own land. The problem with *that* seemingly libertarian and free philosophy is that in SL, in the synethetic virtual concept, one ego’s brutal universality-on-my-island rapidly spreads by viral meme and becomes a mindmeme promoted by aggressive and trucculent egos. How can this happen when each island is supposedly an isolated silo deciding its own affairs?

    Simple, because people aren’t silos deciding their own affairs. They constantly look for approval, seek favour, find ideas, want company. So they constantly get in groups, especially “security-minded” groups like Ban-Link to try to justify and codify what they are doing with “their consciences” which are, of course, broken and haphazard things in today’s usual collection of Internet avatars.

    It’s as if in this hectoring, aggressive zeal to ensure “rights” on my property I have to stamp on everybody else’s rights outside of it. And no system ever creates such monstrous totalitarianism. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has sections that say no one right can trump another’s effective implementation such as to nullify it. So that means religious freedom can’t be used to negate women’s rights, or free expression can’t be used to incite torture, and so on.

    Would it kill one of these selfish asses to make very shallow easements so boats could pass, making it possible for the whole community to have better sailing? The idea that no person can be called upon by the community even voluntarily to join such exercises in good will and common weal really strikes me as anaethema to the common good.

    >Well, I for one am extraordinarily happy with this. My personal policies on my land are not necessarily those of anyone else. I don’t like the whim of whatever Linden happens to be on call that day making decisions about what’s “legal” or not on my land.

    I totally agree about Linden whim, but at the end of the day, that’s a caricature. Lindens enforce against a set of principles called “The TOS”. They have overbroad or vague language or stupid concepts in them, but they are the rule of law. The Lindens enforcement is spotty and uneven, but what exactly of these general notions of “do unto others” would you be wanting to throw out? You plan to have an island where people can fly in the sky and spew hate speech and prim litter? Likely not. So why knock the universality of the Lindens’ TOS, such as it is?

    >Think of each estate as a single state within the United States federal system. Every state has its own definitions of misdemeanors and felonies; “murder” is defined 50 times in our country, somewhat differently in each state depending on their own local culture. There are some Federal regulations, but they’re few and far between.

    Well that’s rather ignorant, Kami, and I’m sure you must know more about federalism than *that*. States’ rights work because of the concept of fedeal constitutionalism and the Supreme Court to rule as the law of the land. Each individual state has reserved to it a set of rights — it can decide about guns, punishment for murder, abortion policy, schooling, etc. But there are LIMITS. You wouldn’t have the National Guard accompanying black children into schools in Alabama in the 1960s to enforce the end of segregation otherwise. You wouldn’t have federal power to hunt for terrorists in Oklahama or kidnappers in California across state lines otherwise.

    Each state has its collection of rights, but it has its collectin of federal responsibilities as well, which make up the common good. Surely you can concede that. And while there may be disagreement among these really nasty and grumpy forums asses demanding to bounce boats and airplanes off their land forever in spite and jealous guarding of their property, surely some can see that to create nice boating for all, a bit of easement around the edges would be in order.

    >Chadrick Linden said that some abuse report types would still be going direct to LL, not to the estate owners; those are “Federal” crimes.

    Well, that’s exactly my challenge to him, and has been for months and months. I want a list. I want it very well defined. I want to know what states’ rights and federal rights are and what can be counted on, and since I think that actually might be a harder job than even he imagines, I want a bit of flexibility and promise to review the emerging situation.

    I’ve outlined exactly some of the severe problems involved in the states’ rights/federal rights analogy here. Our current lovely federaly government can read all our chat logs; if we attempt to make chat logs to assert our justice and distribute them so as to name and shame others, we are sanctioned. So EITHER the Lindens need to grant all their new overlords the right to read chat logs OR (since I’m *quite* sure everyone will HATE that idea) cease their prosecution of the copying and analysis and distribution of chat logs. It’s an anachronism now especially, and with voice, will be harder to prosecute.

    >Everything else is up to you. Some estate owners don’t care about use of weapons, and they should be allowed to make that decision. Some estate owners like the filthy Gorean scum tolerate slavery and misogyny, and much as they repulse me and fill me with contempt, they should be allowed to do that on their own land. The filthy Goreans can expect no such fair treatment on my land, though. Prokofy is welcome to travel freely in his own land and say whatever he wants there, even though he has the unique talent of offending everyone at least 50% of the time.

    I’m sure I’m going to see lots more red lines than ever before, but that’s a commentary on the failure of the society and the idiocy of the Lindens, not me, if people think a gadfly on the forums should be treated like a common cage-bomber.

    As for the Goreans, I’m really not liking the idea of every sub in thrall to their dom there not as their “consent” but as some concept warped and welded into the New Rule. I find it really, really scary that someone who “consents” to crap like that now has no backdrop of universality to undo it, leaving their “consent” with some sort of effective meaning. It leaves only real life, and frankly, real life isn’t enough. It means that people who try to escape from a Gorean dominion, and try to go to another one or even to the mainland, may find themselves hounded and persecuted with Linden indifference.

    Again, I want crystal-clear definition on RL disclosure. The favourite vindictive sport of every forums and every community is RL disclosure. The Lindens could curb that menace by making it a punishable crime, to put on an avatar description, land description, object, forums, etc. in their domain any RL disclosure. They were pretty piss-poor in enforcing that, I have to say, but they enforced it *good enough* like most Linden stuff. Losing that is a horror. It means that any Gorean can plunder the Internet to come up with stuff to torture his subs. The only recourse is that people are supposed to sit around in alleged intellectual freedom and say, hmm, my, that Gorean is too restrictive, let’s take our “yes votes” and our “crowd wisdom” and our “shopping dollars” and go over to that *other* Gorean.

    It’s like the school voucher concept gone mad. Every right-winger and conservative froths over the school voucher system. They think, great, stop pouring money into these abysmally bad public schools where the principals are lazy and incompetent and the personnel indifferent or even criminalized. No child left behind! Except…what do you do with the kids who don’t get in the best schools then? What do you do with *the school left behind*? There will always be a core group of kids that will have lousy grades and behaviour that can’t get in the good schools; another larger group of kids who perform sub-optimally, etc. Where are they to go, after all the best and brightest are creamed off by mommy and daddy to go to Best Voucher Buy School? SOME universality has to be maintained SOMEWHERE at a MINIMUM. What will it be?

    School vouchers can function in an environment where lazy and selfish libertarians and conservatives don’t have to think about the social problem of *everybody else* after the’ve relocated their best and brightest little darlings. Even they don’t conceive of a system ONLY run as “school voucherism”.

    >Do you like being abuse-reported on your own land, Prok? Wouldn’t you like to be able to control the griefers on your land instead of having to wait for Linden Lab to do nothing for you?

    I don’t oppose the idea of islands or mainland controlling their own griefers *because I already do*. While I go through the motions of filing ARs just to create the paper trail and alert Lindens to patterns (silly me, I thought they already watched patterns before now, oh well), I have my own internal police blotter system now, and always have — I just made it more formal in the last 6 months or so.

    I believe in documenting the offense locally, naming, and shaming. Ideally, I’d like all parties named: prosecutor, petitioner, respondant. But we’re far from that ideal for lots of reasons, so I just publish the name of the offender. Once a person stops griefing and reforms, they are unbanned. If they are a permanent problem, they stay banned. Boycotts of businesses are also used. It’s about as effective as the Lindens stuff, and the main purpose of it anyway is to give people a mirror: to make them realize that griefing is not the overwhelming problem they imagine; that they are not helpless to deal with it (they can use ban powers themselves in my rentals); that together we can make concerted efforts against it, and at least put up enough of a fence of publicity that some groups will be deterred. Just because it’s not perfect, doesn’t mean you give it up as a lost cause.

    I’m with the people asking pointedly on Chadrick’s thread: soooooo what’s so different about this? Somebody shoots on my island, I ban them. I get a notice of a squall of prim litterers going around SL, I ban them if I think they’re really a big problem. Next? What value add did I get? If my tenant has another tenant who rezzed some log in his bedroom he can a) call that person to get them to remove it b) call me. If it was done so as to offend deliberately, I can have a talk with the offender and might even end up breaking his lease and expelling him. I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever had to do that despite having thousands of customers. It just doesn’t happen that way, that one tenant starts harassing another between parcels.

    It can happen that one crazy-jealous boyfriend comes back and shoots at the new boyfriend of his old girlfriend, in which case I ban him. Often in the course of an evening, all 3 parties will tell me to ban each other, then unban each other, in different configurations. I’m so glad I can give tenants the right to do that on their own now but of course they still have recourse sometimes and I can only assess a situation like this against…some universal norm like the TOS.

    >”An it harm none, do what ye will.”

    This is wiccan or pagan philosophy, and I reject it soundly. It undermines the basis of Judeo-Christian civilization, and I frankly see no reason to undermine those tenets with new or rewarmed old tenets that in fact cause harm and havoc. It places the judgement for what harms people on the fuck-you hedonist. Sorry, I’m not willing to accord *him* the right to figure out what harms me. It sets up endless chains of secular humanist driven licentiousness with no universality that in fact can protect the freedoms of *all*. I’m sure the guy rezzing the submarine and stealing all the FPS in Whittaker thinks “an harm none” and does “what he will”. But he’s a raging fucktard, because he’s stolen all the FPS.

    Once you accept this idiotic “an it harm none” uber alles, you have a recipe for legions of selfish assholes determining what harm is by their own licentiousness. That’s why “Do unto others” is the better moral system, because it means you must exercise restraint, not look for blank cheques as you do in the wiccan set up. It means you must empathize with others, not demand endless support for your own hedonism by the entire community. I find it deeply suspect as a premise, and always will.

    >Or less new-agey, the key principle of anarcho-capitalist philosophy is that you have the absolute right to do what you want with your own life and property, and you never have the right to tell or force anyone else what to do with their life and property. This principle produces the greatest freedom for everyone.

    Hardly, and while the pages of the Herald and the limitation of the minds that can be drawn to it, myself included, are not going to overturn these flawed and sinister premises of “anarcho-capitalism” (whatever the hell that is in our context — warmed over Rand? Half-remembered Snowcrash?!), I think it’s fairly obvious to the untrained eye what’s wrong with this concept.

    Let’s take an alcoholic or wife beater. You’ve given him the absolute right to do WTF he feels like on his property in the name of your new religion (and religion it is, yes indeed, with these kind of belief precepts brooking no revision or dissent). So he drinks himself into a coma, after being his wife senseless and lets the kids run wild and the house burns down, and then your house catches fire. These silly anarcho principles are taken to absurd extremes. The fact that people if left to their own devices tend toward absolute evil, not absolute good, is why you place restraints on them in the name of a common good including the freedom of everybody.

    >It doesn’t grant you the right to impose your will on anyone, even so far as crossing their land if they don’t like you, and that comes as a shock to some people.

    In real life, air space, easements, and shoreline boundaries all make up a public space that people travel to for the common good.

    I was always fascinated to see how this worked in Brooklyn versus Cape Cod. In Cape Cod, it’s understood that the end of the beach, next to the shoreland, is a place you can walk through. You avoid the person’s private property, but you can still walk through the end of their beach. Most people arrange their property so that the deck chairs and whatnot aren’t down at the very shoreline. They might put a sign on their immediate yard “PRIVATE KEEP OUT” but they don’t have chain link fences or anything to block the beach itself which has a right of way.

    In Brooklyn, people keep attack dogs, even illegal pit bulls, in their yards to bound out and savage anyone trying to walk down through the edge of the shoreline, even though technically they *can* do that legally, as those 10 feet or whatever aren’t private property. The people are obsessive properarians and paranoid assholes living in an urban setting where others pursuing their absolute designs have taken away the freedoms of others, too.

    Societies don’t work this way, and those that attempt them fail. I don’t know any successful communist societies; I don’t know any successful anarcho-capitailst societies, either.

    I’m also troubled by the idea that people bringing this anarcho-capitalist dreck to SL are doing it anonymously often, aggressively, furiously, and hatefully. If they were true to their theories, they would just take their anarcho-capitalist impluses and keep them on their own land. But instead, they are constantly trying to infect the entire tool set, just like the socialists and other sectarians. They are constantly indeed trying to impose the idea that we can’t have a common good, and constantly trying to discourage groups of people interested in a simple thing like a boat ride from creating common waterways. That’s deeply fucked, I’m sorry.
24. 

    Mudkips
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    so… i herd u liek me?
25. 

    Inigo Chamerberlin
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Well yes CoCo… But, ‘always WAS’?

    Seems to me it’s a comparatively recent development.
    I mean, they’ve had the Blog a lot less time than they had the forums (I mean real forums, where people could speak their mind), and I don’t recall the forums being full of such unbridled Linden egotism.

    Come to think of it, it seems to me the Lindens that used to show up in the forums were rather nicer people too, with a couple of notable exceptions. Like Jeska, who recently deleted my perfectly reasonable Blog enquiry about which independent rating system they were planning on GOMing first.
    Makes one wonder what the parameters for hiring Lindens are these days?
26. 

    Kami Harbinger
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Prokofy wrote:
    It’s as if in this hectoring, aggressive zeal to ensure “rights” on my property I have to stamp on everybody else’s rights outside of it. And no system ever creates such monstrous totalitarianism.
    —

    No, that’s exactly what it’s *not*. In anarcho-capitalism, you never, ever have the right to infringe on anyone else’s rights off your property. My revulsion for Gorean scum doesn’t spread telepathically and force them off their land. Their fear of women doesn’t spread like a virus to force me to enslave women. We just respectfully loathe each other from a distance. “Good fences make good neighbors”.

    Nobody ever guaranteed you that you wouldn’t see or hear something that will offend you; on the contrary, I guarantee that I will offend some people, some of the time. You certainly live on a principle of offending people, and yet oppose the very principles of freedom that allow you to live your life that way.

    You want a totalitarian state? Look no further than this “community” bollocks of yours. “Community” is a bunch of Goreans moving in next door and then “voting” that you have to return their slave women if they leave. Freedom is being able to tell them to fuck off, and stay off your lawn. Any Gorean slave who gets tired of men so ballless they can only get it up for subservient women, can type “shelter” into Search Places, teleport there, and take up a new life. If she needs protection from Gorean scum following her around, she can stick to libertarian sims for a while, where the estate owner will ignore ARs from Goreans and ban anyone who attempts to re-collar her.

    Equality of races is a Federal issue, because we fought the Civil War over it (and I think we lost by taking the retarded South back in). If one state objects to another state executing murderers or allowing gay marriage, there’s little or nothing they can do about it. This is a great and wonderful thing, because it allows us to decide for our local culture what’s appropriate and what isn’t. New Yorkers believe that honest subjects can’t be trusted with firearms, only criminals and corrupt cops can; people in the West know that honest citizens with firearms are best able to defend themselves and their liberty. Nothing you can do about it, and nothing we can do to liberate you; neither of us should *want* to change the other against their will.

    You should be running through the streets shouting Hellefuja, because you would no longer be subject to the policing whims of someone who quite certainly does not share your political and religious views.

    If you want public spaces and throughways, you can buy and opeate them yourself, or get the Lindens to do it on the mainland; they operate roads and empty sims and Governor Linden-owned water there for just this purpose. In estates, make your own. Anywhere you go, you can fly above the ban lines (probably it’s a good idea to do it high enough that security systems won’t see you and boot you, and fast enough that you aren’t loitering). I am annoyed that not all my neighbors in my private estate have left a clear sim border waterway as the covenant demands, but that’s something I can take up with the estate manager. You do not get to force others to do things on their own land, period.

    And now, the on-topic portion concluded, I’ll address your raving off-topic nonsense in the next post.
27. 

    Kami Harbinger
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    You know what? I won’t bother. I could go on at length about how it’s an offense against manners in our society to rant about your religion in public, but really, it’s not like Prok is mentally capable of understanding, and wouldn’t care anyway; Prok’s whole game is throwing tantrums in public looking for attention, and I ain’t gonna play.

    Anyway, Prok, you should stop using the Internet. Like all technology, it was built by atheists, and exists solely for atheists to discuss Star Trek and polyamory (no, really, go read the early history of the Internet; sf-lovers is what it’s for). The only communications medium you need is praying to your fairy tale god in church. I suggest you get to it.
28. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    A wise idea Kami, attempting to engage Prokofy in logical discussion is an exercise in futility.
29. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 21st, 2007
    

    Actually, your security orb that teleports me home is violating my rights. It’s a weapon, shooting me, forcing me to return home, even crashing my game, using overkill, merely to keep me off your land. Access-only would do on the parcel, for a group. I wouldn’t recommend it, but the use of the security orb not only to keep out, but to aggressively push away and return home is an example of how “I get to do what the fuck I want on my land” begins to harm others outside.

    Or take these fucking ridiculous spinning signs, that your little friends Chrischun Fassbinder has all over with the moronic Mr. Lee’s Hongkong. They are on tiny 16 m2 and he aggressively puts them to prices like $9345. That’s preposterous. He doesn’t own but a smidgeon of the land. Yet he gets blight the entire sim’s view and make the land devalued because of that fucking ridiculous moronic Mr. Lee gaping at everybody (and now, Coldwell Banker billboards that are truly obnoxious — hey, so much for Philip’s claim that big business will never blight the mainland will billboards — they just did, having Chrischun pave the way for them. Ugh.

    I don’t see why some schmuck who is greedy and aggressive with the ad farms has the right to devalue my land, to make the entire sim ugly, to make people move out so they won’t live there, or make them never move in, never rent or buy due to the ugliness. Sorry, but that’s totally fucked.

    I have Goreans as tenants because my rentals are open to the public. I’ve never had any trouble from any Gorean tenant, odd as that may seem. They just follow the rules. Some of them have attracted griefing, which is in part their own doing, but mostly they are trouble-free. Contrast that with that dickless wonder Scout Detritus who griefed up the sim of Ravenglass, a Gorean arms dealer who scorns the people he sells to, who put up a big REFRIGERATOR on the beautiful coast of Ravenglass. Hello? That’s ok? He gets to devalue the view and the entier sim with that crap, althoug he only bought 4096 m2 of the sim?

    Your notions seems like a caricature of what somebody who’s thought about this much more than you have has devised, and written about, and it seems to me as if you are grabbing the usual Internet flotsam and jetsam of it and trying to embody it in a way that is zealous and uninformed, not unlike the way the Goreans take the novels of this character in Queens who wrote them lol. You’re perfect for each other.

    Gosh, most people adapt even rigid ideologies to the exigencies of real life. Guess SL gives you the chance never to restrain the worst excesses of any ideology.

    Even anarcho capitalists might be persuaded for their shared desire to go yachting, let’s say, with all their riches which their men and women of commerce have garnered, to prize out of their clutchy greedy hands just 16 m2 along a parcel to ease a boat’s passing. But, hey, offa ma lawn!

    Re: “People in the West know that honest citizens with firearms are best able to defend themselves and their liberty.”

    Well, the Virginia Tech shooter took away a lot of people’s liberty that day, didn’t he? There were armed cops who even came to the scene who might have legitimately gunned him down. If each one of the victims had been carrying a gun, it’s more likely one of them would have shot each other, or the gun would have been used by a toddler or something than that it would help at a time like that. What’s clear is that you have extreme views on this, and there’s little that can be done to appeal to reason.

    I don’t think the Lindens, if they are the anarcho-somethings that people think they are, can go on engaging in this socialist exercise of leaving entire swathes of sims open with Governor Linden land rotting away not yielding them tier money. I suspect in time that stuff will start going on the block. It already did in places.

    Isn’t that like the typical anarcho-capitalist, eh? Let’s have a common good, but let’s make the government pay for it ROFL. You are more like socialists sometimes than socialists.

    I truly marvel at the concept that asking people to cooperate is called “forcing other people to do things on their land”.

    It’s not much of an example, perhaps but for a long time, the people who bought into Ravenglass in the first few rounds didn’t have a problem trying to keep a commons free of junk and just keep trees and benches, and people bought chunks for prim land but kept it free while they built on their own parcel. I don’t pretend that this idea would scale but it worked for a good long time for completely strangers who didn’t even socialize, but just agreed about keeping the paths clear. I mean, most modern society does succeed on those grounds, people voluntarily coming together over some common good that they achieve by just a modicum of self-restraint, not by some heavy state intervention.

    As for the rest of your post, it’s stupid. I don’t care about Star Trek, I never liked it. If the people who made the Internet made it because they were inspired by Star Trek, great, but surely even they as Trekkies knew that it would grow beyond them for other uses.
30. 

    Cocoanut Koala
    

    Apr 22nd, 2007
    

    Prok: “Often in the course of an evening, all 3 parties will tell me to ban each other, then unban each other, in different configurations.”

    Haha! Too funny!

    Inigo, I meant the blog itself was always a place for individual Lindens to preen – as well, of course, as a place to post vital information. I meant, it started that way, and was going to be more that way with us looking at individual names on the sign-in screen every time we logged on.

    As for what will be different with this new AR plan, one thing definitely will:

    Your AR will no longer be a confidential matter between you and the Lindens, and likely there will be many who won’t realize this, even when it says so on the screen.

    (And that is because we are all steeped in the idea that when we appeal to the owners of a game or a website, it will be between us and them.)

    Now, the AR’s will go instead to ANOTHER RESIDENT. Who is empowered by LL to share them with his managers or anyone he wants to.

    It is not hard to imagine that the contents of an AR would often contain information a person might not want spread around, due to embarassment, disclosure, or any number of reasons.

    This is a huge difference, and will confer a differential of power. Those who own estates will be privy to AR’s; those who don’t, won’t.

    There are other issues to worry about as well:

    1. Will Lindens even bother to look at these AR’s? Or will they ignore them all, whether their own TOS is being broken or not? I think the default is to no longer look at them unless they have to.

    2. An estate owner may be immune to being AR’d for what he does in his own fiefdom, regardless of what he does. And what he does can do lasting harm that choosing “not to hang around there” won’t redress.

    3. Chadrick has said that when several estates ban someone, it will raise a red flag and the Lindens will look at it more closely.

    In light of the (atrocious) banlink systems we have now, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Lindens could decide to ban someone from SL on the basis that a number of estates have banned the person, and in the absence of true good reason for doing so. I wouldn’t expect them to do that, but it is a worry.

    4. It signals an absense of overriding TOS, the weakness of the TOS, and the disinclination of LL to uphold TOS, as long as TOS infraction occurs on one’s private island. This could well include hate crimes and all kinds of things a civil society would not permit.

    Thus, an individual can purchase immunity for himself that others don’t enjoy for the mere price of an island.

    Finally, I understand that the Lindens – who were in the process of a formal separation when I joined SL two years ago, and who formally announced the serving of the divorce papers with the closing of portions of the forums, are now basically at the stage of serving the restraining orders, trying to get as far away from us as possible.

    And I understand – in theory – how it would be okay to have many little islands and archipelagos of all sorts of hideous travesties of personal justice, and how that shouldn’t affect us if we are not on the island.

    But – doesn’t seem to me that it can possibly work very well. Seems to me there should always be something, someone you can appeal to, and real life courts just do not quite cut it yet for virtual life problems.

    coco
31. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 22nd, 2007
    

    Coco,

    Re: your part about “between you and the Lindens,” well that will end quick, precisely for the reason you say. People will simply not send them to the Lindens. Or…they might, just as a kind of CC. I know I’d be likely to do that, but at some point the Lindens will probably make it so that it never goes to them at all.

    I totally agree that Chadrick’s bullying comment, so typical of FIC and that certain kind of macho Linden we’ve seen before, is very worrisome. The idea that some inner tribal council is going to decide — in secret, without due process — that, hey, this person has been banned so many times from so many islands that he must be bad — well, that’s just what’s at the heart of evil of the system.

    It’s like the ageplay card that Chadrick did. He barred the advertising of ageplay not because he could affirm a Higher Law, like “thou shalt not harm children, even as a simulated virtual act”, but because “the community finds it broadly offensive.”

    Oh, it does, does it? Well, first of all, I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Secondly, who the hell is Chadrick to decide? I have no problem with Chadrick, as a game company rep, saying, hey, we draw the line of offensiveness here because we find this to be broadly offensive, and generally our public finds it offense. That second part is an add-on, unfortunately, given that they are the ultimately Tropico.

    But for him to put the onus on the community, as if “communitarian rule” is somehow something progressive and democratic, is truly sick. It’s not. It’s Lord of the Flies. It’s Ralph with the conch. It’s breaking Piggy’s glasses.

    Communities are the new gods of these godless people, Coco, it’s sickening. The Collective, as in the Soviet Union. The Party.

    Your point no. 4 is what has always alarmed me about the very fragile wall of sand of the Lindens’ TOS, which isn’t any protection of civil society from this awful state that won’t function as a state, and turns rules over to its pets, who are thugs.

    The fact is, quite a good share of people would concede the TOS. They’d say you know, the TOS Big 6 is about as good as it gets. No hate speech. No shooting. Etc. whatever, tweaking it hear and there, but picking out the very basic we can all agree on. That would help affirm a rule of law that even the Lindens would be forced to subject themselves to. That, after all, should be the goal here, ultimately creating a Metaverse with citizens under the rule of law that is democratically and openly arrived at.

    I love your analogy of the Lindens serving restraining orders, brilliant!
32. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 22nd, 2007
    

    Ahem – Linden Lab is a company – Second Life, a product.

    There is no such thing as ‘democracy’ when dealing with a product like second Life: None. It is AOL and all other Service providers with the added benefit of having a 3D graphics engine. It is nothing more and nothing less.

    No matter how many times you say otherwise, it does not change what is.

    Want a Democracy? Make a company and a product to compete with Second Life: You do not get a voice otherwise except to make suggestions.
33. 

    Inigo Chamerberlin
    

    Apr 22nd, 2007
    

    Yes CoCo, I waded though the comments in the Blog and from Chadrick’s self satisfied replies did glean that there was this concept that if you got banned by enough estates – regardless of the circumstances – you would come to the attentions of LL (probably none other than Chadrick, who seems to be carving a ‘Judge Dread’ niche – ‘I AM the LAW!’ – for himself).

    There then exists the very real possibility that someone could be banned from SL on nothing more than the say so of a number of residents (Estate owners) – and of course, Judge Dread.

    While some might compare that process to RL trial by jury, I can’t help but find it somewhat disturbing…

    I fear Judge Dread is going to bear watching.

    You’d think LL would learn from the ResMod fiasco wouldn’t you? Apparently not. Unless they want the rest of SL to go the way of the old forums?
34. 

    Kami Harbinger
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    There is a way to get democracy in SL: voluntary groups. Not that Neualtenburg (née Neufreistadt) has been a fantastic success or is anyplace I’d want to live, but it’s still running and survived a civil war. Everyone in N’burg is there of their own free will, and while they do have a financial commitment, they could pack up and leave anytime. So they submit to the majority’s rule out of choice.

    The level of freedom of a society is the ratio of the number of people who can make decisions to the number of people affected by those decisions. Consider a nation with 1 million residents; in an autocratic dictatorship, the ratio is 1:1000000; in a republic with 100 elected leaders, it’s 1:10000; in a true democracy, it’s 1:2 (50.1% of the population can make decisions for 49.9%); in anarcho-capitalism, it’s 1:1.

    Right now, SL is effectively an autocratic dictatorship; what Philip says, goes. Demands for a resident board representative are an attempt to make a republic, but why bother? Republics were invented to resolve slow travel and communications speeds before the 19th century, they allowed something very vaguely like democracy to happen even though the actual citizens wouldn’t hear about it for months. The entire premise of a republic is obsolete, even aside from the ubiquitious corruption it leads to. True democracies have the problem of mob justice and the incredibly low IQ of a mob, especially as they get larger; if there’s noplace to run to, one heavy voting bloc manipulated by a few persuasive sociopaths can run roughshod over everyone else.

    That leaves us with anarcho-capitalism as the last bastion of freedom. Voluntary organizations let you work with others, for instance to make easements for travel. You can even join together in communities with their own internal rules; if you break the rules, exile is just over to the next sim. To make that work in SL currently takes considerable effort and training of your citizens, and additional effort handling disputes and visitors who’ve outstayed their welcome, but presumably as better tools are added to estates, it will get easier to make these voluntary organizations.
35. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    >Ahem – Linden Lab is a company – Second Life, a product.
    >There is no such thing as ‘democracy’ when dealing with a product like second Life: None.

    Ahem. Their product is *a world*. And they know that. And that’s why they struggle to come up with governance schemes, duh.

    I wonder when we’ll be done with this kind of simplistic and dumbass argumentation “Let me inform you from my vast vapid pseudo-intelligence that NEWS FLASH SL is just software and LL is just a company”. We’re all SO past that, and it is SO childish for these sectarians to keep banging away on this particular gong. Nobody buys it. You don’t get all these companies coming to SL because it’s software and a company, you get them coming because it’s a world with people in it doing stuff.

    >(probably none other than Chadrick, who seems to be carving a ‘Judge Dread’ niche – ‘I AM the LAW!’ – for himself).

    You never said a truer word. I used to be for having an Ombudsman Linden, back when I believed in the Lindens more. I didn’t think it would be this kind of Linden though. God spare us.

    Chadrick needs to understand that the same system he’s gleefully applying to all these island overlords — that if people being to AR them, or they begin to AR their own tenants and get them shunned and isolated — will come for him, too. And then this concept of “there’s always another guy to buy the island won’t prevail.

    I’m sure the Lindens like Chadrick and Jeska who were on — or friends of — the orgkomitet of SLCC imagined that they could say, “Oh, the community has ruled, they’ve banned Prok, and even though we’re not happy with it and pretend to wring our hands about it, well, what can you do, that’s what the community wants.”

    That sort of shit works in a parochial school, but as soon as you get out of the hothouse and try to make the case even to one person or 10 person levels outside or above this little girls’ clique, people begin to say, well, wait: what is your criteria for banning? And wait. You’re welcoming W-hats who grief people but you can’t allow in a critical blogster? What’s wrong? And then where are our Lindens who five minutes ago were saying, “Oh, the commuuunity has ruled.” They go silent. Because now they see, oh, we are out in the air, exposed, and our logic is fault and our pets’ rationales are thin. And ultimately, reluctantly, though they don’t like it, they have to backtrack and say, well, it’s open to everyone.

    People who keep behaving in secret in groups and tribes like this and making up rules as they go along and arbitrarily ruling against others eventually will fail. Real life shows us that time and again; even simulated life shows us this. You can’t rule by misrule, it just never lasts.

    >The entire premise of a republic is obsolete, even aside from the ubiquitious corruption it leads to. True democracies have the problem of mob justice and the incredibly low IQ of a mob, especially as they get larger; if there’s noplace to run to, one heavy voting bloc manipulated by a few persuasive sociopaths can run roughshod over everyone else.

    This sort of facile claptrap is why fascism always gets a bad name, and corporativism one step from fascism gets a bad name, and doesn’t work.

    Mob justice works when the Lindens enable it to work and bow to it, as they did with the banning of me on the forums. Mob justice doesn’t work when they don’t enable it, and don’t enable little cabals to get started. There are actually plenty of checks and balances in SL against not only mob justice, but cabal justice of the kind Kami is advocating.

    It’s scary the way the all-or-nothing tekkie mentality melts into the anarcho-capitalist shtick, or maybe they are symbiotic. The idea that just because some politicians are corrupt, we have to scrap the entire system of representative democracy.

    These sorts of extremist ideologies can never get started in RL. They get a start online due to anonymity, viral spread of memes, and low level of education, especial any kind of Socratic method of teaching.
36. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    “Ahem. Their product is *a world*. And they know that. And that’s why they struggle to come up with governance schemes, duh.”

    Wrong. Their product is not a world and they know that. Please, return to whatever deluded fantasy land you came from – Linden Lab owns Second Life. They are the ultimate in what goes on. There can never be such a thing as a ‘government’ when it comes to a product owned by a single company. Full Stop. There is nothing to debate on this unless you can present proof that Linden Lab is not the sole owner of the product Second Life.
37. 

    Cocoanut Koala
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    OK. Their product is Kleenex!

    coco
38. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    >There is nothing to debate on this unless you can present proof that Linden Lab is not the sole owner of the product Second Life.

    Look at my tier bill. And the bills of thousands of other people. We provide 80 percent of their revenue. They’re making a world, full stop. They don’t especially *like* that they’re making a world, mind you, they’d rather make software with assholes like you, but they’re unfortunately compelled to make a world, at least for now.
39. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    “Look at my tier bill. And the bills of thousands of other people. We provide 80 percent of their revenue. They’re making a world, full stop. They don’t especially *like* that they’re making a world, mind you, they’d rather make software with assholes like you, but they’re unfortunately compelled to make a world, at least for now.”

    Wrong again. Your tier is not ownership of the company or of the product. Thank you for playing, next time you think you have evidence … please, make certain it is the name of a real company or that you can provide proof that you bought rights to the company and make certain that it is on Linden Lab stationary, with the signatures of the CEO, VP, as well as all the shareholders.
40. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    >please, make certain it is the name of a real company or that you can provide proof that you bought rights to the company and make certain that it is on Linden Lab stationary, with the signatures of the CEO, VP, as well as all the shareholders.

    Not a problem. Went in my game, looked at the top of the screen, saw “About Second Life”, pulled down the menu, read…the names of all the Lindens. I’m granted the right to use this software by my payment for the subscription and the land access fees and my signing of the TOS. I’m co-creator and co-owner of this world. Without me, there is no software production.

    I realize it’s hard, going into the future, Web 1.0 tekkies and literalists are dragged kicking and screaming. They can’t understand the social media stuff, the Web 2.0, the participatory media, it’s all opaque to them. They sit in the corner, hooked up to plastic telephones that aren’t plugged in anymore, ranting that it’s not a world, that this company owns everything, that we are pawns, etc, that ownership is only about stock, etc. etc.

    Fortunately these people take up increasingly less space in the widening world.
41. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    “I’m granted the right to use this software by my payment for the subscription”

    right to use is not ownership – please try again, provide proof of ownership as stated in above post.
42. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    Oh – and in case you actually think you do have any ownership rights at all to Second Life: contact Linden Lab and request your cut of their profits, access to all of their data … indeed any and everything they would be required to share with a true partner ….
43. 

    tim leary
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    wtf…who let prok out of her cage and into the crack cupboard again? I told you to keep that deluded piece of shit out of the goodies…next thing you know she will be twittering it out to everyone that she’s a mover and a shaker [well, she is sort of but only one cheek at a time!]
44. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    >Oh – and in case you actually think you do have any ownership rights at all to Second Life: contact Linden Lab and request your cut of their profits, access to all of their data … indeed any and everything they would be required to share with a true partner ….

    I make profits in SL. Do you? Is that what’s troubling you? The lack of anything interesting and compelling for yourself in RL or SL?

    I’m getting ready to do a blog on the evils of tekkie mentality, and I’ll just keep it on my forums answering machine tape to answer posts like this from now on.
45. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    “I make profits in SL.”

    Sorry, not the correct answer – yet again. Your ‘profits’ are not a share of Linden Lab’s profits.

    “Do you? Is that what’s troubling you? The lack of anything interesting and compelling for yourself in RL or SL?”"

    Hmm? What was that I read? The rambling and unrelated questions of someone so lost, so small, such a literal nothing that requires said person to live with the delusion that they own something that they do not and therefore must make up reasons to justify in their own little mind why they still cling to such delusions which move in the face of business and reality?

    “I’m getting ready to do a blog on the evils of tekkie mentality, and I’ll just keep it on my forums answering machine tape to answer posts like this from now on.”

    I have a better one for you – How about responses to the ‘evils’ of being a deluded twit such as yourself?
46. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    >I have a better one for you – How about responses to the ‘evils’ of being a deluded twit such as yourself?

    Hi, I’m not able to come to the forums right now, but please leave a message with your RL phone number and I will call you back as soon as possible. I’m working on a blog on the evils of the tekkie mind right now and it’s likely to answer many of your questions and address some of your concerns. We’re continuing to work to make the Second Life experience an enjoyable one for everyone!
47. 

    Reality
    

    Apr 23rd, 2007
    

    “Hi, I’m not able to come to the forums right now, but please leave a message with your RL phone number and I will call you back as soon as possible. I’m working on a blog on the evils of the tekkie mind right now and it’s likely to answer many of your questions and address some of your concerns. We’re continuing to work to make the Second Life experience an enjoyable one for everyone!”

    Above text translated from Prok-speak: “Hi, I’ve run out of clever things to say at this time and cannot be bothered to find new material for continued responses. Instead I shall prove just how delusional I am about my place in the world and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt just how deranged I am by typing up a long diatribe aimed at a group of people I was scorned by. In addition I will further prove my lack of sanity by calling such people who have this knowledge that I do not ‘evil’ in the hope that others like myself rally to my call.”

    Please: Try something new and exciting. I know, act like you actually do have a grip on reality!
48. 

    Anonymous
    

    Apr 24th, 2007
    

    :: Security Orbs violating rights

    Oh please. Placing an orb near my private quarters, giving you a warning to leave and then moving you away if you don’t leave is hardly violating your rights. Land and who is and isn’t allowed onto it is a private property issue. Whoever pays the bills gets to decide what happens there. I can surround the place with red banlines, I can leave everything completely open, or I can allow visitors to all but a small area. I choose the latter because it is more in keeping with the openness and free spirit of SL without completely giving up all concept of personal area.

    Those who don’t like it should just stay away from my VR bedroom, because I’m fussy about who is admitted to my inner sanctum. I don’t mind people looking around but a couple of places are restricted to my group and my friends.
49. 

    Prokofy Neva
    

    Apr 24th, 2007
    

    The orb scripts should be deprecated or at the very list, declared unlawful and a violation of the TOS, as they shoot people merely because they fly by a parcel that has them deployed, regardless of whether they are merely passing by, or whether they are in fact “griefing”.

    Just because you have a hysterical paranoia about making sure nobody goes on your sex balls doesn’t mean you get to use what amounts to a weapon to push people half way around the world home, and even crash their games. It’s overkill.

    The script doesn’t operate “on your VR bedroom” but throughout your entire property, so that someone could be many meters from your “VR bedroom” and be dinged, barked at like they came to the Soviet Gulag and told they’ll be shot if they don’t move, then pushed and shoved and TP’d home.

    Put a script around your VR bedroom if it’s so important to protect, don’t put it around the entire land, making the landscape a menace not only to fly or walk near or through, but even to merely live next door to. I’m not at all interested in my neighbours’ bedrooms, but if they deploy scripts like this, merely because I wish to have a room next door to them, I’m subjected to constant bouncing, warning, and harassment. It needs to get gone. It has no place in a civilized world.
50. 

    shockwave yareach
    

    Apr 24th, 2007
    

    “The script doesn’t operate “on your VR bedroom” but throughout your entire property, so that someone could be many meters from your “VR bedroom” and be dinged, barked at like they came to the Soviet Gulag and told they’ll be shot if they don’t move, then pushed and shoved and TP’d home.”

    Prok, I have to wonder at this moment just how little you know about what you speak of. My defenses cover just my room and a little outside of it (all within the ship so no exterior is affected). The owner of an orb can set it to whatever radius they want to protect but can only detect out to 96m radius – a limit brought about by the max range of llSensor(). It cannot cover the entire land. People wanting to cover entire areas turn on their Ban Lines, not Orbs. Orbs cost money whereas bans are free.

    Some orbs Push the trespasser (and yes, intentional or not, they are trespassing) away. Some teleport them home. Some open fire with weaponry, though not many because that’s rather pointless. Almost all I’ve encountered give a warning first. The only issues I have with people using orbs is when they set them to cover public areas inadvertantly, which is a violation of the TOS (and considered a type of griefing).

    My bed and its (lack of) sexballs isn’t the issue. The fact that I can have one place in RL and SL that I can retreat to and no one else can follow without my permission is appealing. Hey, I pay the bills, so I can have a private retreat if I wish. I don’t abuse it, I carefully use it just as I would any potentially hazardous item (I dont wanna get AR’d), and I don’t leave its controls unlocked so passersby can cause mischief with it. Until you start splitting the cost of the game with me, you have no say in what I do with the area I possess. And likewise, I have no say in what you do in yours. If you don’t want to be TP’d home then leave an area when the ball says to because it’s not going to debate with you.

    If you believe that uninvited bots are an invasion in some places, then you understand that uninvited people off the street are just as much an invasion in the same locales.

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