towards a stronger sl community

Cetainly - Individual freedom is a marxist myth attempted by communists all over the world.It's an ideal - a myth - it does not work in reality.

All animals are equal but some are more equal than others
George Orwell is not a half bad read - give it a shot.

um... um.... um... yeah.

You guys are weird.

That's a very interesting pair of propositions. They've probably been argued many times before, but I'm sure we could try to add something new in a virtual-world context. Let's take a look.

Individual freedom was a major topic of discussion back in the golden age of ancient Athens, indeed they're often creditted with inventing the concept, although they argued both for and against it. And in the century before Marx was born, Rousseau made a whole career out of writing about it, so I don't think you can pin that one on Marx, unless maybe he travelled back in time some 2000 years and planted the idea.

Oh, I certainly agree that it doesn't stand a cat's chance in hell of working in the current RL. Nor did it ever stand a chance in historical times, except maybe when primitive Man was a migratory animal, literally free to roam the land with his local group and limited only by the equal freedom of other similar individuals and groups to do likewise.

You mention that it was tried ... I'm surprised that anyone would bother, frankly, given the following.

The issue here is pretty simple: ever since mankind began grabbing land for himself on a permanent basis, the freedom of individuals became largely a myth, much as you say, for the obvious reason that being free only within your small patch is effectively not being free at all.

In fact it's even worse than that, as "being free within your own patch" fails to convey the fact that you are at the bottom of a whole hierarchical pyramid of overlords of various types, each of them exerting some kind of territorial claim over that patch of land that is allegedly yours. Your freedom is an utter myth, I couldn't agree more.

And sadly, that is true whatever the reigning political organization relevant to your territory happens to be, and there is no escape from it even if your patch happens to extend over 10,000 acres. With no land anywhere being outside of the control of others, you are not free in any real sense. (Owning your own island-nation almost qualifies, but it's not a particularly useful exception.)

However, that's merely now and in the past of RL. Look into the future of RL, and separately look into the future of virtual worlds, and the picture may be different, because the previous constraints don't necessarily hold any longer. Again, it's an issue of space and its ownership.

First RL. There are many online communities quite absorbed with the concept of Mankind's diaspora into space, planning ahead for the day when technology will allow us to leave this planet at relatively small cost. Even venture capitalists are getting in on the act, already trying to cash in at the very bottom rung of the ladder with suborbital flights and orbital restaurants being planned. It's worth extrapolating where it might all lead.

Well nobody is likely to contradict that there is quite enough real estate out there to satisfy every inhabitant of the planet's wildest territorial requirements a billion times over. In principle, space offers Man unlimited individual freedom, if he wants it. Most probably won't, but it will be there for those who do, one day. An RL myth now, yes, but definitely not forever.

The situation in virtual worlds is even simpler, and doesn't require distant future gazing. Virtual space is effectively unlimited in extent. We can create our own online worlds right now on privately owned shared servers if we wish, and we can decouple them cryptographically from outside access by anyone except selected individuals whom we wish to have in our communities. These worlds will have the structure and organization we want, or none at all, as we wish. Unlimited individual freedom will be quite trivial to implement ... indeed, in many respects it's harder to implement a system of curtailed individual freedoms.

That pretty much covers the yes/no's, although it doesn't even begin to explore how things would actually work under conditions of individual freedom. Fortunately, we don't need to figure them out ourselves --- if I'm not mistaken, the libertarian communities have explored more aspects of this subject than we could ourselves here in a thousand years.

Well, this has been an interesting thread to read for the past hour or so It somehow reminds me on many of the Thinkers' events - where everybody agrees to disagree, and we never reach any conclusions - with a slight difference: forums really foster ad hominem attacks, don't they? On in-world meetings and discussions, the arguments are usually as intense, but we manage to be polite about them. We hate the ideas, not the people behind them. And the next time we can still meet again without killing each other - and continue arguing peacefully. People certainly behave differently in-world than on the forums (although this is by far not an "universal rule" - every one of us reacts differently).

Unfortunately, I don't have the time (and probably not the patience) to strip all the personal attacks from all the posts, but what I've learned today, in essence, is not much different from what I have been experiencing in SL for the last 9 months or so.

Almost all viewpoints follow a Gauss curve. Most people would agree with what goes on in the middle; nobody will agree with the extremists. I guess that's the way we humans are "wired". So, over 99% of the civilized people in the world love to watch TV (as an example); the 1% that don't (or, on the other extreme of the curve, that are terminally addicted to it) are such slight exceptions that you can rule them out.

In most of RL, most of what you're going ever to experience will neatly fall in the big, fat bulge of the Gauss curve. So, I'd say that over 90% of the people you consider your "friends" will think very much like you do; there will inevitably be the "oddball" that doesn't really fit in the "group" (but will be a good friend, in spite of that!). You won't follow his/her views, but still listen to his/her ideas, because you consider him/her as a friend. But you'll prefer people in the "bulge" of the Gauss curve.

What has always fascinated me in SL is how "flat" the curve is - and this, of course, reminds me of the early days of the Internet, which was populated mostly by the academic and technical types (nowadays, of course, they are still there, but they're towards the extremes of the Gauss curve and thus much less "impressive" as a group). We get to meet many more radicals from the extremes of the Gauss curve in SL than in RL.

So, if you're a liberal, and look around in RL, searching for any libertarians, you'll be hard pressed to find a very few. But when you jump into SL, they're the majority by far. Suddenly, you find out that the Gauss curve is completely skewed towards the extremes! And this was for me a big source of confusion, initially. After a few months, I have learned two things: first, that in SL I'm the extremist, if I claim to be on the side of the community planners; secondly, that as SL grows, the Gauss curve will slowly "bulge" at the centre again. SL, right now (and probably for a few years to come...), does appeal mostly to the non-conformists, to the anarchists and the libertarians, than it does to the "common rabble" out there. But since these are exceptions in RL, as SL grows, the "common rabble" will grow exponentially much more. However, this may take years, just like what happened in the Internet at its beginning.

What this means for me is that right now it's too early for SL to seriously consider a change towards planned communities. There simply aren't enough people interested in that. The groups that really are able to "get together" and self-organize are such tiny minorities - despite being vast majorities in RL! - that they're viewed as "SL heretics" - people wanting to "bring all the Evil from RL into SL". SL, right now, is not about organisation, planning, or community building - despite what the Lindens want it to be. It's about self-expression and "freedom" - at least, the "freedom" to ignore what goes on in RL and do whatever we want.

The fun part of it is that people in SL have an average higher education and intelligence than in RL (again, they're "exceptions" there, but here in SL, they are in the middle of the Gauss curve), and thus, argue much stronger and more effectively than would be expected, if this very same thread were posted on a "general" forum in RL, with a few billion readers. I think that's both fascinating and sad.

Now, I'm not trying to separate the extremes in "who is right" and "who is wrong". I must view SL as a rapidly changing environment. By proposing things like "organisation" or "community building" - something that comes naturally to me in RL, and is viewed by 99% of the people I know as being the most natural thing to happen to human beings everywhere - I'm a "dangerous, radical heretic" in SL. So is Prokofy, or Ulrika, or the officers of the Taber group (I sadly don't know their names), or many others that have been struggling to build up communities under the assumption that, since that's Mankind's natural way of dealing with things, it should be "natural" to do the same in SL.

I admit my surprise when I bought my first plot of land, completely lacking the understanding of the "skewedness" of "normality" in SL. The same week afterwards, I was meeting with most residents in my sim, handing out notecards, suggesting to build community projects, and delineating plans and strategies to do so. While my friendly neighbours were not exactly antagonistic, I failed to capture their enthusiasm, even after I managed to scrap a few thousand Lindens to start a "communal project" and wished to set the example. After eight months or so, there still isn't any "community project" there.

So, some people are not into "organised communities". That's all right. These are the majority in SL (unlike what happens in RL). Well, that takes some readjustment - different world, different rules. We should adapt to that instead of fighting the majority - that would be pointless. If you look up my earliest posts, you'll see I did try to promote some sort of "SL Government" in my early, naive days, when I expected people in SL to be the same as in RL. The anger and hate I encountered from most of the posters made me unerstand that I was really on a different world. Sensible and normal arguments for organisation were suddenly heresy - I remember a poll I took, where 97.5% of the SL residents back then were completely against any sort of "organisation". It was quite clear to me that the majority of the SL residents equate "organisation" with "restriction on liberty". Fortunately for the human species, these percentages in RL are quite reversed - 97,5% of all human beings in RL have the common sense to understand that "society" is someting to be desired, as an organised place.

Nowadays, I won't press the argument further - it's pointless. I have done it too many times to understand that there is a wall between SL thought and RL thought ("all that comes from RL is Evil, let's keep RL over the other side of the wall" which is hard to breach. The only solution seems to be what Linden Lab is doing: waiting for the SL population to grow. In the mean time, us pro-organisation defenders are quietly doing our planned communities on our own sims, using several different models. We can wait

Great post Gwyn. First time I'd read any sort of historical recap or retrospective on the actual experience of community building, good or bad. Much food for thought there.

Actually, you don't have to wait.

The great thing about SL and virtual worlds in general is that you can find like-minded souls and start building your community immediately. There are rather few community organizations already in existence to act as competition for membership, and certainly no legacy ones ... very different to RL where the legacy of hundreds or thousands of years of community structure has immense inertia and is captive to vested interests, keeping it somewhat static. In fact, it could be said that your best chance is now, sieze it!

The only point in waiting, afaics, is if the community you have in mind requires a minimum absolute number of people to support it before it becomes viable. In that situation, you would need a certain minimum area under your slice of the gaussian interests/population curve, so simply waiting for more SL subscribers to appear might indeed be the only option.

What kind of community is likely to require a minimum membership to succeed though?

What a cynically loaded question.

"Do you love your country AND do you flip off boxes of kittens prior to your ritual bloodletting sacrifice?"

Split the question in half, Prok, and he might actually answer without the guarantee of the verbal assault you will no doubt perpetuate upon our poor eyes.

LF

Aye, a poorly or even maliciously structured question, as you say Lordfly.

I don't think it matters now though, because he dug his own grave when he declared himself to be anti-logic, and then sealed himself in by dropping the nice camouflage of all-embracing liberalism and open community to reveal the group hatred and intolerance lying just beneath. He was doing just fine by himself.

Maybe it highlights two questions to ask yourselves though, since you are the Founding Fathers of your new virtual world communities:

1) How do you discover what lies beneath the nice-sounding surface rhetoric of the people who position themselves as leaders of those communities?

2) Does it matter at all if "bad" people get into positions of influence or power in virtual worlds? After all, since people can get out from under the clutches of bad community law very easily, such RL problems have far less impact in the new domain.

Consensual communities can't suffer from this problem anyway, so it may not be too great a concern. It only surfaces where there is non-consensual community law.

I thought the invasion of the SA Goon Squads did a pretty good job of uniting everyone - at least against them.

Morgaine,

You're not doing a very effective of job of dodging the question, whatever help you're getting in Lordfly in continuing to dodge it.

Do you or do you not subscribe to the TOS? The TOS is the kind of "universality" and "rule of law" that you scorn and dismiss within your worldview as an "illegitimate authority".
Yet Linden Labs believes it is a legitimate authority because it pays for and operates the servers, and 20,000 users in this world believe it is a legitimate authority because it signs the TOS.

You're different? You're deliberately failing to answer this question because you can't admit that you've temporarily, merely for reasons of tactics, signed this TOS, but you don't really believe in it.

That's why I'm asking the further question of whether your signature is a "worthless scrip". The reason is that in the world of sectarian politics, where Bolshevik tactics reign supreme, it's often a well-worn tactic to subsribe to beliefs or groups as a feint or maneuver, to "bore from within," to use Trotsky's term, and then overthrow from within.

So these are legitimate questions, seeing all the earmarks of sectarian ideologies and habits in all your expressions and methods of dodging discussion now.

As for the "group hate" and "minorities" thing, in my world, minorities like Bolsheviks and Communists are certainly tolerated as any minority that has a belief. There is freedom to believe or not believe in my world and in the world of universality -- freedom even for minorities whose belief systems undermine the very freedoms established to protect minorities.

However, I'm also free to hate Bolsheviks and Communinists as enemies of freedom because they have engaged in mass murder, including of those close to me, and they have engaged in manipulative and lying propaganda, destruction of the social fabric, and destruction of the economy and the environment. Their international record around the world amply displays this.

If you do not want to disassociate yourself from these pernicious beliefs, responsible for the deaths of millions, in the name of "liberalism," or alternately, claim the right to express the same or similar beliefs without being labeled as such, that's of course you're right, but it's also my right to come up and say, "Listen people, this is the same-old, same-old."

I can and do go on labeling Bolshevik and commmunist viewpoints for what they are, an incite awareness of them, precisely because I'm well aware of the tactics they use in groups, which is to hide their own full agenda, and also accuse others of being "wreckers and splitters". You've handily fallen into that Bolshevik cliche behaviour by trying now to incite everyone else against me as a "wrecker and splitter". These tactics need to be exposed as what they are. They are learned, full-fledged, conscious tactics that go with sectarian ideologies, and they get real careful scrutiny, analysis, and push-back from me.

Wry comments to gather people round you to the effect of "See, comrades, how he discredits himself" can't help you evade responsibility for answering this question about your ideology: do you or do you not recognize the legitimacy of the TOS.

It's always on this question where a Bolshevik or other tyranny-of-the-minority type can stumble on the issue of a higher authority with conferred legitimacy by the community.

If you cannot defer to the higher authority and the legitimacy conferred on it by the community, as in the Linden Labs, TOS, then I've realized that you are merely *your own* authority. And I didn't sign up to be on an open grid all alone against *your own* authority, however enlightened it may feign to be.

Let's take a look at your marvelous land plan when you take the game open source. I haven't addressed that yet, nor have you in any detail. Rather, you just airily dismiss all the land rights and ownership rights that everyone has acquired in the game so far. You've talked airily about how all the land is just going to be"given out" or "available" when it goes open source. There will just be squares and squares of it, and whoever can handle it can take it. Yeesh, sounds like the anti-kulak campaign.

When you go open-source, are you going to seize everyone's land?

Maybe you can elaborate on how you are going to make available all the new land, but with no one paying for the servers and labour under it.

And were you planning on grabbing all the land already owned on the old closed source server if the code is made open source? If you attempt that, you might face a lynch mob on your hands, and not by me, but by thousands of ordinary 512 and 1024 owners whose land you have either seized or made utterly worthless.

I'd like you to face the music on the TOS question. Either you believe in a world under the rule of law as established in a universal way, or you don't. If you're going to decry the forms of law established by people traditionally as suspect because they merely reflect class interests, or suspect because they merely reflect some tyrannical authority, then let's hear that sooner rather than later. Because to join this club, you had to at least nominally subscribe to a TOS.

I think you're right, Gwyn, that most people in the game are not "ready" for organized communities, or rather, they just don't want organized communities because there's always someone tiresome who is "organizing" it all *for them* instead of allowing them to naturally appear or evolve.

The efforts to organize communities fall into various categories -- those interested in having clubs, malls, businesses of various types like rentals, those interested in having artists' enclaves, and those interested in having various social experiments. So the tools should evolve and change to make all that experimentation possible.

But they shouldn't be dominating the whole grid because most people want the sanity and safety of private property that confers on them protection from organizers, especially organizers whose first premise of ideology is to take their land or land's value away form them. You've got your answer about "social democracy" -- 99 percent of the people don't want it imposed on them.

I think even the planned, residential communities becoming available now are not going to sell like hotcakes. I think some people really tired of griefing and ugliness, looking for a more organized landscape and experience, as well as a good buy, will opt into them. I think a number of people will rent. But what I see is that many people opt for rentals as a temporary solution of 2-8 weeks or however long it takes them to save stipends in order to buy their own land. I find some people would rather put their newbie box down on backend 1024 without a view than rent in a custom architectural gem with a breathtaking vista for less money LOL. Why? Because pride of ownership and creativity and flexibility to do your own thing is very, very highly prized, especially from the American individualistic culture that tends to dominate the game. Those with more European or Asian notions of the good of the community and the collective are going to be very put off by that American way and it makes for clashes in the game, but it's not going to go away -- there are reasons why those Americans fled the wars and pogroms of Europe and Asia to establish a different kind of society.

I think most of the hooting and hollering about communities and group tools will be ignored by most of the players who won't have a stake in them. On the other hand, some of them will begin to notice pernicious effects in their landscape if Anshe Chung or the top clubs and malls owners are not free to go on providing the services and opportunities they do in the game.

Haha. indeed. And there's even a community angle to that ....

Comedy can unite a people too, including off-beat cultural heritages and common reasons for laughter. It's not unusual for citizens of the "Olden World" to joke lightheartedly about their quaint customs handed down through the generations, no matter how ridiculous it makes them look to outsiders. It just adds to the social glue that holds communities together.

I must agree with that. Most people in SL are not "ready" for organized communities, yes. I also must admit that my first reaction was "why not?". And my first answer to that was simply: "most people in SL are mostly paranoid and see SL as an 'escape' from what they believe is a tyrannical, oppressive world in RL".

Well, since I personally am not paranoid, and do not think either of these things, and all the people around me in RL are neither paranoids or "oppressed by governments", I can only conclude that SL does not reflect the society I grew up with
Thus my apparent difficulty of dealing with the lack of organization in SL has nothing to do with myself - but rather with the current demographics in this world.

But that's all right. After a few months, I gravitate towards the planners and the community organizers - whilst never forgetting the ones that prefer SL to be a libertarian world. For me, that's not surprising, and isn't a cause of worry. Despite living in what I usually call an "organized society" (although a few of my countrymen and countrywomen would probably disagree... ), my RL friends range from all spectrums and colours of political awareness - from members of the Communist Party to members of the Nationalist Party (yes, both exist around here and are able to run for elections - neither with any chance of winning them, of course), from liberals, capitalists and conservatives, through social-democrats, trotskists, and, yes, quite a number of libertarians as well. My own mother, despite usually voting for the right-wing conservatives, always told everybody she was an anarchist. Perhaps surprising to some of you, all go along pretty well, and I'm always fascinated to see the die-hard communists and the radical nationalists to agree on common things while dining at the same table or going out to the local association (common things being mostly the need for proper education, higher cultural standards, and a better way to organize things).

But that's my own political experience in RL. One thing that all have in common is the ability to join forces together and organize their own "communities". They can be organized around common hobbies or tastes, or working in the same company. This is something that does not bother most of them, even if they have conflicting views. The point is, none of them envision a society where there is no organization at all. Surprisingly, not even the self-proclaimed libertarians claim that - they all promote a society model where organization comes from the bottom-up, and not top-down. But they want that organization nevertheless (ok, so they're perhaps a special case of libertarians... I don't know).

From all of them I have learned motivations, models of community building, interrelationships, hierarchical rule-following or flat-based organizations. The full range of possible models is certainly not exhausted by what I've learned so far - there are probably more. The truth is, I have participated in several projects, associations, organizations and companies, where a bit of all those possible models have been tried out. Some were successful. Some were not. I learned from both successes and failures.

When I was taking my first steps in SL, I thought: "hey great - here we have a 'world' where different models can be tried out, and the worse that can happen, is losing my time and virtual money!" I naively thought that this amazing opportunity would be grabbed by most residents, since it's so easy to get people together, put up things, build things, organize things, and throw up the whole model and start from scratch when things don't work properly - and don't lose your money, your family, your reputation by doing so.

Why wasn't this happening all around SL?

Why did we have thousands (yes, thousands!) of residents crucifying Robin Linden in public when she gave a few ideas for discussion about SL Government? (making the Lindens hastily remove the proposal and issue a disclaimer that they weren't really thinking about any such thing, to appease the rabble)

Now this was a completely different world to me. Suddenly, I saw SL's opportunities in terms of community building dwindle to almost nothing, just because the residents simply couldn't care less about that. They happily preferred to become social hermits (or restrict themselves to a smallish group of friends).

This was completely beyond my own experience, and I didn't handle it very well. I'm used to open-mindedness, tolerance, and discussing/arguing points of view - but not fundamentalism (of any sort). I'm also used by people experimenting and trying things out for themselves to see if they work or not. So many people in SL have a technical/scientific/academic background, so I thought they would be very willing to question everything, but put it to the trial - and see if they succeed. But nothing of the sort was happening.

The only "amazing projects" I saw were done by tiny groups of individuals - either for fun or for profit. If for fun, they were mostly for artistic reasons - aesthetics playing a big part in their project - and ephemeral in nature. The projects done "for profit" usually even have smaller groups. However, they certainly are long-lasting! Although not really loved by the majority of the residents, even those that "tolerate" an amount of liberalism or capitalism in SL.

Well, as I said before, I can wait. If I can't create communities with the current population, the trick is, bring in more population This time, the ones that are similarly aligned to my own ideas of organization as being "the Good Thing" (I would even go a step further and claim it to be "the Only Thing" - mainly on the basis that homo sapiens is a gregarious animal, no matter how much we loath our genetic heritage).

In the mean time, there are appearing a tiny minority of community projects, that I gladly join and - I hope - help to shape.

Prokofy, your last sentence above tends to imply that there is no organization without a leader (or a tiny group of members who provide leadership), and thus, a completely bottom-up approach is impossible (ie. communities self-emerging). I would agree to that, but not by defending the "tyrannical rule" by implying that you cannot have "communities" without someone grabbing the steering wheel and forcing the rest to submit to someone's will. In my own experience, things are much softer than that. We all have our own skills and abilities. On a group of people sharing the same interests - be they the "founders" of a company, or the beginnings of a non-profit organization - there will always be the ones who plan and the ones who execute. It's so very hard to pinpoint the moment in time where similar-minded individuals "band together" and start to create something in common. Afterwards it's easy to say: "oh, yes, they succeeded because X lead them and Y submitted to the rule" (be it the majority rule, or a hierarchical rule). But so many times that is not so easy to find out. Sometimes you have a strong leader right at the beginning and are able to pinpoint him/her as the "person behind it all". Most times, it's more fuzzy, and you'd say that it was "one of the group, not sure which one". Organizations with strong leaders tend to be hierarchical in nature, but not always. Organizations with a degree of fuzzyness are usually more "flat" in terms of hierarchy (but, then again, there are exceptions). I see the genesis of a new organization, a new community, as something much more dynamic than the classical "follow the leader" example. Trust me, I have seen quite a few RL organizations/companies start from "nothing", using so many different models, that there is no definite rule on how they have started.

And this is what I understand by "having communities evolve by themselves".


I not only agree with that, but I have been yelling for those tools to evolve as well


You're mixing up two things, Prokofy. Yes, I agree that "organization" and "communities"
(no matter how they're organized) should never be imposed upon residents, but let them voluntarily choose to join them, according to the benefits they see in those communities. I think that over a decade or so of SL (let's hope that it still exists in 2015!) almost all residents will "gravitate" towards one or other model of "community" - thus, replicating precisely what people do in RL as well: only a tiny minority of extremists will remain on the "wilderness" of non-organized land.

The other thing you mentioned is that "organization" in SL comes mostly from "social democrats" that use ideology to take people's land from them...? Ah well. First, I'd like you to briefly take a look what social democracy means these days (the Wikipedia also mantains a few paragraphs of what it was used to be some decades ago). As to "99% of the people don't want it imposed on them", that's a slight fallacy - all democracies in Europe are social democracies or "welfare states" (except perhaps for some tiny states like Monaco...), and the surprising bit is that the Eastern European countries also became social democracies to join the EU, thus, amounting to roughly half a billion people, or about 9% of the world population Yes, I know that liberal democracies surpass that number by far - India, with over 1 billion people, is by far the largest liberal democracy in the world - but my point is, social democracies are a system chosen by its own population, as well as liberal democracies. 500 million people can't be all wrong

But this dangerously becomes off-topic (and more related to the Poly-Sci forum!).


I fully agree with all of that. And yes, planned communities right now don't "sell like hotcakes". That's very true. Skip the comments about the alleged "American way" vs. "the rest of the world's way" and I can agree with everything you say, Prokofy

most people in SL are mostly paranoid and see SL as an 'escape' from what they believe is a tyrannical, oppressive world in RL".

Yes, and the first they do in here is to recreate the tyrannies LOL

My RL experience, too, is that people organize themselves in all sorts of ways. And people in SL organize themselves a lot more than they let on!


I wondered that too, but I wondered why there weren't groups of people pooling tier doing making liveable places free of griefing and ugliness, and working on projects together -- without a full-blown government.

Why did we have thousands (yes, thousands!) of residents crucifying Robin Linden in public when she gave a few ideas for discussion about SL Government? (making the Lindens hastily remove the proposal and issue a disclaimer that they weren't really thinking about any such thing, to appease the rabble)

Well given Robin's role in borking the events calender system, I tend to think it might have had to do with *the kind of* government Robin would have liked to see here, that I personally would rally against -- but I wasn't there so I don't know.




Well that's because they don't like full-blown Marxian ideologies that involve advance guards with superstructures in searches of bases LOL. Let the grow into grassroots movements when they are ready and when they need to. Or not. Let them be free!



Yes, this tekkie bunch is extremely conventional and really never takes risk when it involves things like non-techical business or social organizations -- they have creative ideas for designs or inventions but they fall flat on social organization, I agree, but the fact is, their retreating into grouplets of fierce bondings among friends and a shared sense of quest adventure in the face of a common enemy -- well, that IS a government and it is called "The Middle Ages" and "The Age of Endarkenment" LOL.



Well, that's because most people are passive, and you need a highly organized and refined society to fit them in. Still, I think you'd get a lot more activity if the group tools were better.



I don't kow what you are talking about. Lindens believe they have a recipe they've discovered, that communities emerge from strong leadership. And in SL, their belief has only been born out, because they look at communities like Taber or Stillman or Boardman (the latter incarnation) or Meins or even Ravenglass and say "those all become possible by strong leaders".

I'm saying that if you have community associations and grassroots responses to core issues that resonate with people (prim sharing, use of commons land, telehub placement, club placement, etc) you will have more evolution of organizations. This will be in part achieved by "strong leaders" but more likely achieved by just ordinary people rallying a few around them without any big visibility or "strongness".



Every community I've seen so far touted as a "community" in SL has those features (as in real life). And I don't see any that have those "all animals are equal" really working out. And I also see a lot of informal groups, that don't fall on your radar screen at all, that contain all kinds of clubs and neighbourhoods and people getting together outside of the FIC who have a completely different existence than you can perceive, and trust me, they don't have to pay taxes, have Ulrika as a senator, and cede wealth to a vague social justice just to accomplish this!


And this is what I understand by "having communities evolve by themselves".

I mean something more mundane, which is if you sell or rent land to people they come, they do stuff, and that makes a neighbourhood. They might ignore each other, they might all chat around the barbeque. Unless you've also given them a theme or a menu of activities, they may never have much more to do with each other.

"Community" in your notion of it is more like "commune". It has an ideology, an idea, an idealism. I'm willing to exand the idea of "community" into something not so precious and more mundane -- just people who want to live in a nice area with a nice view without ugliness and griefing.



If they don't change the group tools, they will engineer socialism as a default and prevent land valuation and investment, and that will eventually kill the society.



Heheheh. You have no idea that I'm the last person to be lecturing on about Europe and social democracy in Eastern Europe, etc. What I mean is Ulrika, and the social democrats that manifest in our world, not Joshka Fischer. What I mean are the issues du jour in our world, not cheese importantion in the EU. I mean Ulrika's idea that land buyers should not get the bulk discount, etc. etc. as she articulated them -- which are not the more business-and land oriented social democracy of the real world today. Indeed, Ulrika's "social democracy" is really more of a classic Leninsim.

I thought I read a post by a mod a couple of days ago telling you not to name names.

Maybe someone doesn't follow rules too well, all the while demanding that others do.

Maybe someone doesn't follow their own rules either.

Maybe I am mistaken.

It's actually an area with well over a decade of online history, so you won't be surprised to hear that there are an awful lot more alternatives than just that.

If you take a look at any of the futurist communities like the transhumanists or extropians, you'll find a very wide range of societal relationships and organizations being explored within all three of the usual contexts: in RL futures, in virtual world futures, and in online/digital RL world futures which are non-virtual.

The top-down vs bottom-up notion applies mainly to the hierarchical forms of organization, and applies only weakly to consensual societal models which almost never adopt tiering beyond (for example) appointing a chairperson for the current session.

You're totally right though that everyone wants organization, because even two people getting together for a consensual interaction entails organization. After all, without interaction and hence minimal organization, one wouldn't have society at all.

It is, but not in the way you expected. People are choosing the loose, almost flat, and above all impermanent associations which are automatically provided by the SL group structure, in preference to the rigid, hierarchical, and relatively static associations which dominate RL.

Why is this? Maybe we should examine the possible reasons. The given explanation that "It's just an aberration of the current demographic" has some serious flaws, not the least of which is that it suggests that something that is not good enough for us might be good enough for others.

Be that as it may, let me offer you an alternative explanation by way of an RL thought experiment:

If you could be a diving instructor in the Seychelles, a social sciences professor at Harvard, an astronaut at Mankind's first permanent base on Mars, and the lead vocalist of the protest rock band Major Laaag Sucks, all at the same time in virtual space .... would you instead choose to be a virtual homesteader within the rigid structure of a planned SL community?

I reckon that the broad gaussian that you're seeing doesn't stem from SL atttracting a wierd demographic of people at this time, but from the fact that a fairly normal spectrum of people realize that SL offers huge potential for diversity, and the vast majority simply don't want to nail themselves into a corner.

Lurking under people feigning to do something non-hierarchical with lateral and multilateral rather than vertical relationships is often the same-old, same-old, of some strong intolerant personality lording it over people, this time to convince them that lateral rather than hierarchical is the way to go.

"Individual freedom" and "marxist" in the same sentence? Come on. Marxism is about collectivism, and individual responsibility if individual anything. Not freedom.

"Freedom from ____ " is not the same thing as "Freedom", its an alternate use of the word.