can sl ever be a country? can we ever be citizens of sl?...

... and what will the passport look like?

Maybe if LL did something like Sealand

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i'm actually going to tackle this seriously.. because i've pondered some of the same basic ideas myself and it could end up being relelvant someday.

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Can SL ever be a country?

maybe. if it continues to evolve along it's current path/s, why not? Neualtenburg sure acts like one, even if it's not recognized as one. the main problem we run into is, with how open-ended it is, it would be a new frontier as a country and would break some current notions of what that means.

ok, i'm not sure exactly what one needs to declare a "place" a country, but even then, it's hard to say how it would/could be handled in relevance to a digital representation of a world. would the servers themselves be declared a country? with a provision for additional states/provinces/sims/servers, of course.

so, in short.. i wouldn't be surprised if it happens.. just not anytime soon. long after there's an established Second Life (especially if the main continents ever get their own name as well. perhaps the main continent as Esselle and the northern as something else altogether?) either way, it would be cool.


Can we ever be citizens of SL?

this is even hairier than if SL can become a country!

first of all, we would need to be able to declare dual-citizenship.. whichever country we're citizens of now and then as citizens of SL. but, how could we declare ourselves as citizens of a place we only inhabit digitally? would this require a much more immersive playing field? or maybe decades down the line when we can just download our minds into an online existance, then declaring our "home" as our "Home" in SL?


What will the passport look like?

well, with passports having the particular use of leaving one country to visit another, this would infer there were other digital countries to visit. unless we're talking about uploading our previously downloaded minds into a receptacle of some sort.. possibly empty robot "shells" that reside at a designated digital-to-physical immigration office.

but i digress.. back to using a passport to visit another country besides SL. this could be used within SL for visits to private islands/continents.. but beyond that, it would mean SL had indeed helped to pioneer the metaverse, as well as to take a position of co-existance with other massively mutli-user online digital world platforms. basically, where open-source becomes the name of the game and SL becomes "the old country".

as far as what they would look like.. hmm.. same as any other, with the appropriate replacement "graphics" i would imagine.

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ok, i probably went way over-board with the length of my answer/s, but hey.. like i said, i wouldn't be surprised if some form of this rears it's head sometime in the distant future.

That's great, Cybin, not overboard at all. Big trees grow from tiny seeds planted!

Thanks for that interesting link, Satchmo.

As an old libertarian anarchistist I have read about some other attempts to escape from statist oppression by starting island countries. They don't seem to have done too well.

Sealand sounds like it worked ok. Good for Roy.

For us to be a country requires there be another one. I'd like to know what would make Country No. 2 any different, and would it be cheaper to move there? (As long as nobody declares war on it...)

Uncle Cecil knows all.

Short answer:
No, and no.

Longer answer:
Being a country requires that other countries acknowledge you as such. My bathtub is a sovereign nation with its own anthem, currency (soap slivers), and Olympic team (swimming), but so far no other nation, not even Qatar which is so crap they can't afford a "u", will establish diplomatic relations. I imagine it would be even harder to get established nations to recognize a video game country.

SL will never be recognized as a sovereign nation, though some form of Metaverse probably will someday. It will depend on how the Internet itself develops and changes current definitions of information jurisdiction, location, and residence.

If I live in a meatspace country, but I am present in some form elsewhere in the world, conducting my businesses and interacting with people the majority of the time, it might be said that I "live" elsewhere. However, I expect it will still be tied to some real nation with real world holdings, even if it's a datahaven like Sealand. If you "live" in a simulation running in Sealand you might be judged a citizen of Sealand, or more likely a dual citizenship. This is sci-fi stuff still but I can see it going this way eventually, and I can see sovereign micronations springing up for the sole purpose of establishing sovereign metaverses. By this time SL will be ancient history.

As far as passports, for meatspace travel you will have the physical passport of your meatspace nation and the physical passport of your datahaven micronation. Passports between metaverses will probably look like a TOS window with "Accept" and "Cancel" buttons at the bottom.

Is this thread performance art?

Yes.

I don't want to belong to a 'country' SL is better(and bigger) than that...

No, No, and as close to a real one as possible without being real.

Citizen? Ptui. I am satisfied with being a junk-yard dog forum jackal.

I love Cybin's response!

I think though, that SL as a *whole* could never be a "country". I think it is more like a "world" where countries can develop within it. And of course there can also always be "free range" (would that be the phrase?) areas that are not countries, but just developed land by individuals.

metaphor

n : a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity

Vat eese diss "veeedeeeoh game" you speak of?

No...no...and nothing, as one would not be required.

Yes. Yes. Passports are an unnecessary in a virtual world.

~Ulrika~

Instead of a citizen can I be an illegal immigrant?

The passport will not have a fixed appearance, as it will be a heavily encrypted unique identifier for that particular avatar. It might be worn as a necklace, for instance. (Preen brand "Passport Panties" will be very popular, and as a result the job position of Customs Official will be highly coveted.)

The passport will allow free travel to and from worlds that Second Life has friendly relations with, such as Worlds of Warcraft, City of Heroes, and Sanrio Town. The passport will not only store your identification, but will also be a central repository for your attributes (level, health, etc.) for each world that required them, and a master catalog of your inventory for each world.

The passport will be able to store 15,000 songs, and its official product name will be iPod micromini™.

haha yes! all of it, why do you think there is sooo much drama!!! *hugs*

I knew there would be a job i could handle and love in SL!!!

This is an interesting subject and Cybin has addressed a lot of the issues very well already. I'll try and focus on the one above in particular just for fun.
By the very definition of the word:

Citizenship:
~The country in which a person is born (and has not renounced or lost citizenship) or naturalized and to which that person owes allegiance and by which he or she is entitled to be protected.

One could easily argue that having created your avatar in the environment of Second Life that you were in fact "born into it".

~Status of being a member of a political society; one who owes allegiance to the government and is entitled to its protection and to political rights.

This is where it gets really interesting. It would require the virtual world of SL to have some kind of "stable" government with it's own political and justice system. Given some of the instability with which some individuals try and push their agendas on people already, and the resistance they meet from the masses, this would be one of the, if not THE most challenging aspects of trying to establish any single part of Second Life as a legitimate "country” in my opinion.

Interesting you should mention this. I invite you to read my column in the 9/13 Metaverse Messenger for a discussion of this same topic.

http://www.metaversemessenger.com/PDF/MM-2005-09-13.pdf (It begins on page 2.)

P2