Philosophy in the New Metaverse ~ Where do you stand?

It's kind of like this anyway apart form all the learning curve when you arrive it is pretty fair & simple. Maybe more transparency would cool the worries down a bit. It'd be cool to spend money on making more groovy effects... and keeping up with the games that will take it over soon enough.

One I'd love to see is that the land isn't hollow underneath when you cam around, it kinda gets me giddy.

I have never considered myself either left or right. I think things through and find what works for me.

What I do on my land is my business, what my neighbor decides to do on their land is their business. The only time it becomes each others business is when it crosses property lines. Thats mainland of course. If you CHOOSE to live on an estate then the owner has the right to set the rules.

IP rights are a sticky point for me. I am content creator. I have at times put over 200 hours into just the textures for a build. I reserve the right to be totally pissed off if they are stolen and someone else is claiming authorship or selling them. IF I chose to sell the textures I expect the consumer to abide by my terms of use. (I dont sell my textures anymore as chasing down thieves became just too much work for 10L texture). But a consumer knows those terms of use before they buy they can choose not to if they dont like them. LL specifically grants us IP rights to our own creations. They could have said anything you upload becomes our property or free for all. They didnt. GIven that I feel within my rights to defend my IP.

One interesting sidenote: As one of the dusty oldbies I find that the longer I am around the less stuff bothers me. I just can't find it in myself to sweat the small stuff anymore and the definition of small stuff get broader all the time.

I could never place myself thoroughly on the left or right in SL any more than I could in RL. In real life, I consider myself a Green (though my current state doesn't allow that registration), but there are certainly issues where I lean more conservatively, and even issues where I rabidly disagree with the common Green stances. But those are issues that I feel reasonable people can reasonably disagree on, hence my loose affiliation with the party.

In SL, I'm left-leaning toward open source, but I don't think that's an entirely separate issue from IP and content creation. I feel strongly about issues of IP (and, no, I don't consider myself a content creator). Regardless of whether the content in question is a dress or a section of code, neither whether it's sold for cash or shared freely matters one whit to me as much as whether its disposition is determined by the creator and the creator alone. Content theft isn't the only threat to the creator's rights in that regard; peer pressure to open-source or give away your work and an insufficiently granular permissions system instituted top-down also interfere with the creator's rights. And I'm _all_ about the creator's rights.

And just as in RL, those issues are also closely tied to classism. It's all well and good to give your work and ideas away for free when you don't need the money anyway.

Re: Identity, I'm firmly in the middle. I want the ability to have my privacy, but I don't particularly use it. I don't approve of anonymice, but I believe the option should always be available for those few who have a justified reason for it and won't abuse it. I don't see the connection to IP rights, except in cases of bringing content back and forth between RL and SL.

On land and governance, I'm right-leaning. I manage my little bit of land as a benevolent dictatorship, and I expect Linden Lab to manage me the same way. I've no interest in micromanaging and want to see a participant community in my sim, so I'll encourage people to speak up and build a consensus. But if the consensus ends up being something I can't support, yeah, I'll use land-owner's fiat to obviate it. Because ultimately, I'm the content creator on my land -- where the content in question is an environment. I'm the one who has put more time and money and emotion into it than anyone else, and any time I put others' wishes above my own, I'm doing it as a kindness. I have an obligation to provide what I offered in the lease agreement, and no more than that.

(And hence, Desmond, I would say, no, you don't have any ethical obligation to represent your residents in ways that contradict your own leanings. They didn't elect you; they paid for a service, that you can stop offering at any time. You have an ethical obligation to give sufficient notice if you want to stop providing what they pay for, but that's all. No matter how many of them there are or how strongly they feel about whatever, you're not obligated to give them anything that wasn't part of the original business agreement. Anything you give people beyond that is just a matter of you being a nice guy, a good businessman, or both.)

And again this ties in to classism. Desmond, just as an example, can afford to be a nice guy. I can't afford to be anything but a dictator, because with my meager sixth-sim, if I give it over to a community vote that goes against me, I lose the security and self-determination that's so important to me and I can't afford to replace it with some other land elsewhere.

And this, I think, is why phrasing it as a simple duality can't give an accurate picture. It's not a matter of corporates and estate owners on the one hand, freewilling don't-need-landers on the other. There's a whole lot of small landowners in between, whose needs Linden Lab isn't listening to. And I'm not convinced the "radical left" is listening to them either.

It did make sense. I hope you're feeling much better now - or very soon.



Have you read "Snow Crash?"



You're on to something here, Nika. We live in a "real" world where getting more and more money is the name of the game. The big winners are rewarded with lots of dazzling goodies and admiration; the big losers are punished with horrible deprivation and scorn; everyone else feels bad about not belonging to the first group and afraid of joining the second.

"We all want to change the world" but most of us are pretty preoccupied with getting to work on time, feeding our kids, making them do their homework, keeping up with the insurance payments etc. etc. etc.

I'm a little puzzled at this statement. IRL, Open Source code can serve as the foundation of proprietary products. There are subtleties, but for example, my copyrighted application server and Linux's GPL code coexist perfectly legally, so long as I use Linux as a self-contained component, using only exposed interfaces as per copyleft terms.

Now ... can I deduce why you may have said this ... hmmm.

Let me ask, do LL clients have any sort of "watermark" that one can detect programmatically, via either LSL or an API/widget provided by LL? If so, I guess one could enforce a ban of any client other than those provided by LL. Would that protect content providers? Not from intercepts ... nope, sorry, I just don't understand where you're going here. What is the link between open source and copyright?
.

I will *attempt* to respond to the gauntlet Des has lain down so eloquently. First off, I'll join in with the general observation as to how Des has framed the discussion as a solely 'Left-Right' phenomenon. So I popped over to The Political Compass and quickly took their test.

Rather than restricting analysis to a solely 1-dimensional Left-Right analysis (see: The One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse ISBN: 0-415-28977-7) they add a 2nd dimension of Authoritarian-Libertarian. It makes for a more interesting analysis. My personal score was: Economic Left/Right: -7.88 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.49. In other words, Left Libertarian. No doubt one could construct multidimensional political paradigms given enough time.

One thing I do see is that the political landscape in SL reflects the politics of people who have internet access which in this day and age is still largely the preserve of the affluent with sufficient material wealth so as to be able to indulge themselves in 'extracurricular activities' beyond those required for survival and basic recreation.

Inside SL you also have the constraints of the environment. Land is never free and unlike land IRL, land in SL is continuously taxed although I tend to see that side of things as no different than renting space and bandwidth in a server farm. So of the land owning class in SL you have those who pay for their land as recreation and those who run businesses either directly in the land business or else paying for their land out of their business profits.

The ability of the business class to cover their operating costs depends to a large extent on their ability to protect their IP rights [excluding service industries as they do not necessarily require IP-protected products]. Protecting IP rights and Open-Source are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For instance one might use open-source textures, images or code in your closed-source IP-protected product. Another person might release both open-source [aka the freebie version that you find at places like Yadni's Junkyard] and IP-protected products [the bright shiny version in the owner's spiffy store on Zindra] hoping the the users of the open-source product might migrate to the IP-protected version when they want more features / functionality / whatever.

Powers of governance: Whew! In SL? Mostly dictatorships of one sort or another. Everything from the hands-off landlord to the out-and-out control freaks and all stations in between. The basic rules of land ownership in SL tend to push things in that direction. For instance it's hard for a collective to own land in that land ownership has to be tied to a single avatar. No doubt there's some successful collectives and collective ventures in SL.

Identity: Well IRL we don't have to go around with an ID placard over our heads announcing who we are, where live we live, home phone number, bank account info, etc., etc. So why should people have to do so in SL? However there is a real need for accountability. IRL people have to be able to produce forms of ID at certain times: for instance when you withdraw money at a bank, buy a car or house, are stopped by a policeman or traveling across national borders.

Obviously there are matters that can be dealt with internally but there are bound to be those where the matters under investigation are of a more serious or criminal nature. However there is also the question how and who gets access to how much data about each avatar and under what circumstances? My own gut feeling is that as virtual worlds evolve and become a ubiquitous part of the background in people's lives the thorny issues of who polices the internet and virtual worlds and how it's done will have to be tackled. So long as virtual worlds remain little walled gardens such issues will be dealt with in-house by the operators. The day those walls come down and it evolves into a contigugous cyberspace is when that discussion will be in earnest.

Yes, I know I've only scratched the surface here and largely avoided answering any of Des' questions It's the weekend and my attention is starting to wander. I'll have to respond to each point another time.

TTFN

I think Nika had it right -- the real world is encroaching on SL, we're not going to be able to stop it, and many of us aren't happy about that. But there isn't a clear alternative for us yet (and if there were, many of us couldn't afford to just pick up roots and head out for the colonies).

I like the augmentationist aspects of SL. I like being able to go to virtual conferences on issues that are important to my RL, and since I live in an isolated small town, SL has some real potential for helping my career, if I could just figure out how to wrangle it. BUT that's not why I came to SL.

I came to SL because for 20 years I've been envisioning a virtual game 'verse (not world, but 'verse) where multiple planetary grids are linked by an interstellar grid, where I can run my little medieval fantasy empire on one planet, others can run their furry or sci-fi or even mundane worlds on other planets, where as a player I can visit those other planets for fun without having to learn a whole new system, and where as a character and a player I get to see the stories that develop when those widely different planetary cultures begin to meet through the interstellar grid. SL, when I joined, was the latest of a long line of media I've worked in hoping to build at least a small part of that. But I arrived a couple years too late, and every month SL becomes less and less amenable to my immersive game 'verse.

It also becomes less and less like a place I want to spend my personal time. As an add-on to my RL, it's a million times better than Linked-In or Facebook or, god forbid, real-life networking. But as a place for my creative energy or to really meet my potential instead of just other people's expectations... well, if I were just discovering SL today, looking at that web site? I'd never have signed up.

So, no, I'd say it's not sensible to try to be all things to all people. The best you can do is find the things that make you happy, that you excel at, then try to find the other people who will be happy with the same things, most of the time. And then build channels to direct them towards the other things they need, for those times that you can't provide them.

In my happy theoretical little game 'verse, characters on my world would be expected to stay IC in public and to dress medievally. But if their player wants to wear an aluminium jumpsuit and have OOC chat, they can always go visit some other planet, and then come home when they're done. No individual planetary governor would have to be all things to all people, but people would still be able to find all things if they look.

There were a number of things I wanted to comment on in your post, but this one stood out. At SLCC, there was a point (and I'm paraphrasing heavily) where M Linden said that it was clear that new users and potential new users wanted SL to mimic RL as much as possible. Now, none of us are party to departing resident survey results and data that LL has access to, but that moment was kind of frozen in time for me because it crushed all the things that I love about SL. Zindra was just the first of many policies that I think we will see come down the pike that favor mimicking of RL morality and zoning. I don't think it will be the last. One of the unfortunate things is that "normal" people shy away from the unfamiliar. In the real world, creativity is hammered down like an out of place nail. The thing that drew me to SL in the first place was that it felt like landing on an island of artists colony. Don't care for post-apocalyptic? There's steampunk over on the next sim. Don't care for furries? There's medieval role play on the next sim. SL has always been for me like walking through the largest art show in earth.

Sadly, the art continues to be pushed away and replaced by oceans of tidy pre-fabs that look starkly real with their shaded edges on the textures. The wildness of SL is being gentrified into monotone reality. But this is also the way it must be, as M pointed out. Without new sign-ups, nothing else matters.

It's all very well talking about what we the people should do about on-line society.
We the peoples - of whatever persuasion - don't have bases. We don't have solid ground that we can stand on and defend. We have the right to make/bear arms but we don't have a place to make them real and keep them.
Our existence as identifiable structured social groups is dependant on the business models of service providers.

SL has always been a feudal setup. The High King is changing religion. That's going to affect all of us.




There's something more visceral involved.

Some friends are recently returned from the USA, where they travelled some and then lived in New York for 6 months.
The thing that struck them most about the culture was ‘Insecurity’. The news, the advertising was all about fear.
People appeared to counterbalance this with another feature that struck them – ‘Bragging’. People would bang on about what they had done, what they were doing and what they had. It was wall-to-wall insecurity.


There's your real "left" and "right" in the planet-wide on-line society.
The extreme "left" are open to ideas even if that takes them to ideas that challenge everything they had believed up to then.
The extreme "right" desperately wants certainty, security, practicability to the extent that anything that might challenge them must be suppressed.
That doesn't line up with "left" and "right" politics in RL, but that's what I think it is in the non-physical world of ideas and imagination.


In SL, Zindra and AC is a patch-up job. It may not last.
The problem that LL have is that all of the content of SL is basically open to all. The AC project was primarily aimed at cleaning up Search - to make it inoffensive to the "right" wing. I think they are fighting a losing battle. The more they expand their user base into mainstream society, the more of a problem the "challenging" content will become.


BM (for instance) may have a structure that would allow challenging content to flourish.
( Disclaimer: NO!! I'm not pumping that primitive-ish Beta. I'm just looking at the potential sustainablilty of the structure.)
They will be primarily a service provider, in much the same way that umpteen organisations the world over are service providers for web hosting. They don't host a unified world on a map in the way that LL do. They do host a set of identities and will host a currency/token system, but it is very much a platform and not a world. The cute "terraformed Mars" world idea isn't evident at all in the implementation and it is the one thing that may come back to be used against them by someone who has objections to something hosted on one of their servers.
If the excrement were to hit the fan over a particular content, they have plausibly deniability to an extent that the PR drones of LL would kill for.


Even then, I'm getting a whiff of wholesomeness from some comments I see from BM employees. That's not to disparage the idea of "wholesome". I just see it as a potential issue for challenging content.
If the service provider is based in a jurisdiction that is basically anal-retentive, then "we the on-line people" had better exercise some caution.

In the long run, only an open-source system based on distributed resources could sustain a "far-left" philosophy. We can do "right" philosophy no problem.


Where do I stand?
Not on the extreme "right" anyway.

Well, of course. Because at this stage they're targeting the mainstream. They began by targeting the visionaries, the folks who want to build a new world, but now they're targeting the people who by definition aren't visionaries. If you choose to market TVP to meat-lovers, of course they're going to want it to taste like real meat -- but that's not going to make it any less TVP. And there's a good chance you'll lose some of your vegetarian customers in the process.

Me, I want it to have verisimilitude, to be _a_ real world, but not to be _the_ real world.

And I think the "nothing matters but new signups" mindset is a very limited way of looking at things -- including profits. Any product has only so many potential customers it can reach before it has to start changing its identity. And if you lose your focus, uniqueness, and excellence in the process of changing...

Somewhere that contradicts all of this.

People can have opinions and stake out positions, positions they hold strongly, that can not be classified on any one-dimensional line. No matter how you slice things, you will find people who are strongly, passionately committed to positions not just one both sides of the line, but far from the line. They are not "fence sitters", they are simply people who do not slice up the world the same way you do.

Even the attempts of people to create "two dimensional" matrices, with axes like "libertarian vs authoritarian", run into problems.

Some people see "open source" as a political statement, others see it as nothing more than an effective business model. Some people consider intellectual property something to man the barricades for, others see it as nothing more than a business model whose time is fading, others see it as a collection of unrelated concepts and wish people wouldn't combine trademarks, copyrights, and patents in the same box. Some see privacy as critical, others see it as a tool to protect criminals, and others see it as something it would be nice to have but trying to preserve it would cause more damage than simply giving it up. And every possible combination of these positions is held fiercely by someone.

To be fair, 2009 was supposed to be all about the new user experience. 2010 was supposed to be about new tools and content. But the point remains, getting new customers in the door is the lifeblood of any business that wants to grow. Most sane businesses try to hold on to their existing customers at the same time, but there will still always be churn. Apple doesn't seem to be content with having sold 173,000,000 iPods, they keep putting out new products and looking for new customers and new revenue streams.

I think the situation is blurred by the fact that people can be who they like not just in virtual worlds but on RL message boards. You can pose as a fascist of communist even if you aren't really one, just to be an agent-provocateur.

You don't need to spend much time looking at RL message boards, forums etc on many topics to see that a significant number of users adopt extreme viewpoints and intolerant attitudes. Trolling I suppose is equivalent to griefing in SL.

I think the internet will become a lot more controlled in the future. At the moment freedom of speech allows people to post offensive material, extreme arguments, utter nonsense and perhaps most dangerously, misinformation.

Perfect example. I've had three iPods in my life, all of which I bought after having been a Mac user for decades. They're known for making their own markets in niches where conventional wisdom said no market existed. They created a killer mp3 player that would make their existing customer base happy, and then they showed that killer device to the masses and were able to convince the masses they wanted it because it was so fabulous. They didn't check what the masses wanted first and then rearrange their product lines accordingly. The companies who did that are the ones who are now struggling to keep up with the iPod's popularity. Apple created a market based on creativity and excellence (and good business planning). Linden Lab seems to be abandoning creativity and excellence in favor of winning over FaceBook's market. In other words, they're emulating Zune instead of iPod.

Pardon the wikipedia reference; though I doubt that anyone would dispute the veracity of the following, however:

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"Stallman rejects a common alternative term "open source software" because it does not call to mind what Stallman sees as the value of the software: freedom.[53] Thus it will not inform people of the freedom issues, and will not lead to people valuing and defending their freedom.[54] Two alternatives which Stallman does accept are "software libre" and "unfettered software", but "free software" is the term he asks people to use in English. For similar reasons, he argues for the term "proprietary software" rather than "closed source software", when referring to software that is not free software."

and,

"Stallman argues that the term "intellectual property" is designed to confuse people, and is used to prevent intelligent discussion on the specifics of copyright, patent, trademark and other laws by lumping together areas of law that are more dissimilar than similar.[56] He also argues that by referring to these laws as "property" laws, the term biases the discussion when thinking about how to treat these issues."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

=============================================

This is in reference to Richard Stallman, who largely rejects the notion of property as the basis for framing thought when it comes to software.

This has profound implications for licencing, copyright, piracy, and so forth. In a purely Stallmanite world, would there be any "permissions" on assets whatsoever?

Instead, would the value of any initial creation be quite high, while recurring sales of that creation be essentially impossible?

I would see such a world as possible, but radically left~leaning, so far left that it would be to the detriment of society as a whole. But that's just me.

At some point though, the reality of instantly copyable mp3's and textures takes over and we end up living in a somewhat Stallmanite world, like it or not. Some (including myself) feel that things have already gone too far in that direction already.

The western world has faced major paradigm shifts like this before. Modern capitalism itself is *quite* outside sensibilities that were held true for millenia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_price

* * * * *

So there we have it ~ is the online world headed toward a day of Stallmanite reckoning, where nothing we create escapes the analog hole, and there is little point even trying to fight it?

Or will there be a backlash, to the far right of 'trusted computing' and applications that scan our hard drives and verify us against our bank accounts, as a condition of participation?

* * * * *

Reading what Argent just had to say ~ it's obviously true, a one dimensional line doesn't properly capture things at all. It doesn't in real politics either.

And yet so often, the characterisation is made anyway, for real world issues thousands of times more complex than anything applicable here. Are we heading for such a distillation, like it or not, much like the Royalists and the Montagnards of France?

I'm going to veer into crazyland just for a moment.

And recall a novel called "Eon." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eon_%28novel%29

In that futuristic world, one group, the Naderites, stuck very closely to ancient human values. Another group, the Geshels, let go of any and all human constraints whatsoever. Together they formed a society, of sorts.

Perhaps Naderite and Geshel would be just as appropriate as Right and Left... but whatever it is we are doing, it is something new.

At which point will emerge some other dimension on which sexual expression is differentiated, categorized, polarized, perhaps demonized. And human sexuality itself will adapt to that new dimension by redefining itself as a constellation of behaviors that are either "in" or "out" of the differentiated class. What it means to be "gay" or "straight" now is a product of historical cultural definitions and stereotypes, now fading, much more than it is a biological phenomenon.

Then I suppose the "left" will be those accepting of the "out" class. For those of us on the left of current sexual politics, it's natural to assume we are equipped to be on the left in the future. That may not be as easy as we suppose.

But to the broader question:In aggregate, center-right, it seems--which is in stark contrast to my leftist RL views.

Because one outspoken blogger has made quite a huge issue of it, I want to particularly address Open Source as a political subject--or, rather, its inappropriateness as a political subject. This is one topic on which it's only possible to hold either extreme view by not really understanding the question. That seems to be a prerequisite for being noticed in this debate, on either side.

Open Source is a business decision, period. It's not a philanthropic good, nor a Communist evil. It is recognizing a reality about some markets for which the ubiquity of a platform adds overwhelming value in the form of other goods and services based on that platform. It is a way of promoting a "network effect" around that open source platform, to the benefit of all that is built on it.

As a business decision, open source doesn't always work very well. In fact, it's very difficult to do it right and get the desired outcomes, even if it's the "right" decision for a technology. But when it works, it can be spectacularly effective. In-world, we have ZHAO and MLP as examples of open source scripts that make animations and products that use animations immensely more valuable and accessible because the enabling platforms are in near-universal use.

Well, there's a lot more to say about the business meaning of open source that's even less on point to the thread, It's just a dimension where "left" and "right" are both simply wrong.

U c: since god is dead (latest since Nietzsche deconstructed this "wish-container" or to be exact: he analyzed the believers...) people started to trust and believe in brands and trademarks.

Agreed. And every day as RL encroaches more, SL becomes a bit less enjoyable, for me. I find myself venturing out less, preferring to stay in comfort zones with like minded people. I just don't see the point in repeating RL in a virtual setting.The more real LL becomes, the less time I want to spend in it.

No, sadly, I haven't, although I know enough about it to get the allusion.

Something ELSE to add to my summ . . . uh, autumn reading list.

Don't waste your time....*Yawn

when are they going to fix second life it is running shitty this weekend?

Point taken. However, the other side of the story is that all Apple did was take a look at how people were hauling around CD cases full of their favorite tunes, making custom compilations to share with friends and it wasn't hard to see the future was in fully portable music libraries. The iPod is a sexy piece of hardware that is merely a conveyance for iTunes. Apple didn't create a market for a portable music library - they just put it into a device the size of a cell phone and made it more portable, the market was already there and built up by the Walkman and portable CD players in the 80's and 90's. Apple looked at what people were already doing and delivered a compelling product way ahead of the competition, they didn't create the market.

Excellent point. To be honest, I see something rather similar happening in SL right now.


I am speaking with very incomplete knowledge, but my sense was that BM was VERY corporate, in the sense of being carefully preconceived and preplanned, and not "organic" in the sense that the growth of SL was. I tend to see the content from RL providers -- NASA, National Geographic, etc. -- as a kind of "anchor" that will keep BM from wandering too far into the weirdness that is sometimes SL. I DO hope, however that I am wrong.


Again, I suspect you are right. Which is another reason why LL is worrying me right now.

Why do people go "extreme" and become almost demented by doing this. I know what frontal lobe dementia entails - a close family member died of it (brain calcification) - and this intolerance and accompanying extreme viewpoint is common to that illness.

Does the opportunity to say what one likes wake up a primitive need to hurt or insult in a relatively normal person?

Could a doctor use forum postings as a tool to disgnose or project a need for early intervention in a patient by reading forums?

Further to this - are we NATURALLY cruel?

Which is the very essence of Queer Theory. You can't be "in" unless there is an "out" against which to measure your success; you can't be "normal" unless the aberrant exists somewhere else to demonize.

As LGBT is absorbed, it will become conservative for the simple reason that it will suddenly feelt that it has somthing to lose by not being so.