Grid Wide government is a straw man

I think the people who like talking about Grid Wide government like it is actually going to happen are people who simply want to disrupt discussion. Nobody with even a tenacious grip on reality expects this to happen.

Blaze, we could get a de facto grid-wide imposition of a system of government/governance.

All it takes is one power-hungry person or group with a lot of financial clout joining SL at a time when suitable local-scope government/governance features are in place. This hypothetical person or group could systematically gain power in one sim after another, replicating a control structure like a suffocating blanket over SL.

Based on RL historical precedent I would expect this hypothetical person to exploit the usual human motivations of anger, fear and desire for financial gain in order to induce individual residents to make decisions in their own best interest at the expense of their community. In SL these motivations are typically tied to land.

Sorry, don't see it. As has been pointed out in other threads, SL is not RL. There are critical differences that render such comparisons tricky at best. One example: Survival and security is not a critical part of the SL experience, and RL political movements and governments are energized by that issue more than any other. Another example: Unlike RL, anyone can opt out of SL at anytime for any reason, and have very, very few consequences. There are many more examples.

Personally, I think that both sides of the government debate have been too careless in making RL/SL comparisons. Not a criticism: I've made the same mistake.

I agree that it is very easy to replicate tyranny, often under the guise of utopian democracy.

All one person has to do is set up a replicable model that plays on people's fears of griefing and enormous desire for security.

They don't even have to deliver very well on their utopia, as we see from RL cases, but they can do enough of it for enough people to get traction.

We saw on TSO how the Sim Shadow Government spread rampantly and viciously throughout the game, taking over all the key skill and money houses and large tracts of land and networks of players. Yahoo-based networks of hundreds of loyal servants to the SSG were deployed to take over skill houses, rename them "Shadow" whatever, and either buy out, or scare out, or lure in scores of players. It was as easy as taking candy form a baby.

Maxis/EA.com did nothing whatsoever about this because the SSG were often able to skirt the TOS. They made some token arrests when people overdid it with trial accounts or cannons sales or whatever, but they couldn't really get rid of it. Finally, after getting plenty of heat on this issue, including from your humble servant, they went a long way to defeating its popularity in the masses' imagination by eliminating its balloon deflation based on fake friendships from alt trial accounts in a database wipe. And I'd like to think that we who struggled against it as partisans and publicly exoriated Das Kapitaan for his ballon friendship with SSG Overlord Mia Wallace also made a dent in it. Ultimately, the boredom of skilling and job-objects in TSO drove away even the most pernicious wannabee-tyrants, but that's another story LOL.

The point is, in the name of protecting people from mafias, in the name of providing things like lot points (dwell) or traffic or income or sales, any tyrant could succeed in SL all too easily. They could be a dressed-up, prettified cyber-tyrant who has the latest mod-looking vehicles and clothes and seem like they have the coolest lifestyles, but still be ruthlessly suppressing freedom and diversity.

The pockets of dissidents who would hold out on some sims would be held up by that tyranny and even by LL as proof there wasn't any tyranny, and yet there would be!

The hardest thing in the world I"ve found is to convince a game company that a pernicious tyrannical movement has taken place on their servers. Tyrannical movements hide their tracks very well. They try to leave no fingerprints on the necks they strangle because they wear gloves. They are deadly nonetheless.

If you think that the chaos and innovation and creativity of an online game provides it protection against tyranny, think again. The percent of the "intelligentsia" who bother with the forums to make these cases and to have these debates are like the tiny minority of columnists even in a free society. The masses are swayed by the can-doers who don't yammer on the forums and deliver security from griefers and security from ugly builds. That they might begin to adapt a few of the tactics of griefers themselves, and build kinda ugly themselves in the process, will be overlooked!

Already many sims have been taken over by large oligarchs who have taken away subscribers' freedoms to handle their land in exchange for providing them security from griefing and ugliness.

The benign nature of this "tyranny" and the beautiful nature of the projects so far shouldn't mask the fact that it is an erosion of freedom that came about because people could not learn how to govern themselves in the simplest manner, and looked for others to achieve this for them.

Paranoid much?

~Ulrika~