Philosophy in the New Metaverse ~ Where do you stand?

/me nods.

That is why I have come to value more and more the art that is done in SL: at its best, SL art transforms our perceptions of RL into something new, strange, and insightful. What's more, the very best SL art (in my view, anyway) tends to be the kind of thing that could NOT be produced in RL.


Hah. Well, maybe I'll look for the Masterplots version . . .

I am seeing less and less really provocative and thoughtful art being produced. Artists are leaving sl. We are starting to see a "monitored" art program and community: PG, Mature and Adult art venues and displays.

This is called the "death of art" in the real world.

Very interesting, thank you Isablan! I share your dismay.

But I suppose it makes sense. If things are going badly in RL, some people may crave a complete escape, but MORE people will crave just ... a better real life. And, for a lot of folks, things *are* going badly in RL. So the time has come for a new variety of estate, Reality Acres, the first world dream life. The town center you can walk to, the cute townhouses, the big 2nd home by a lake, the rented getaway cottage by the ocean, the jazz stylist who comes to your local coffeehouse, the fountain for the kids to play in ... all part of one estate. The "BIG CITY" a TP away, with wild clubs and hot sex - but still part of the same estate owner's holdings. Yessssss ... I see it. A boring vision, but for those whose imagination does not extend beyond next week's paycheck, an attractive vision.

What to do ... what to do ... I'm beginning to get the sense that all is not lost here ... if we ...

*thinks*
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"Monitored" by whom???

Hmm, I guess we'll get a better sense of this at Burning Life.

Any room for Old Labour?

Really I'm a lefty who realises that those who pay for a service deserve a service. I'm not into pigeon holing. People need to work for their creature comforts and whether that work is paid or unpaid it eventually leads to some financial reward.

Ahahahaha! And I just saw another part of LL's "vision". Good God, this is paltry but I am SO sure it is in their minds ... with a tight link to Facebook, you could throw parties for your FB friends in SL; there could be widgets to do SL invites, simple DJ kits so Facebook artists could easily perform live ... imports of media directly to SL from Facebook.

No wonder Robin kept asking about Facebook, right before she left.

Good God, to start out with the vision of a new world, and end up as Facebook's Habbo Hotel! Lame!

So... hmmmm. They will not be taking away any capability that now exists. So... how to preserve, articulate and market a different vision ... almost a different grid ... interesting ...
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I'm not sure those real people with real in-world income streams are so committed to the push toward Second Life Same As The First.

Some are. Some are handmaidens to the corporates and educational institutions that pay them to cons up sims and stuff with which to fill them, and that market is pretty far toward the "real world" side of the spectrum. And no doubt some would-be SL entrepreneurs suppose that profit is to be made from SL as the ultimate intimate/corporate Social Networking platform.

And there will be money to be made there, somewhere, between corporate virtual presence and teledildonics. (Much the same thing, but I digress.)

And yet I'll wager that after those steamy webcam conferences, enchantment, fantasy, and art will still hold appeal. Rather as in real life.

Ok, the convo seems to be drifting away from Des' original premise but it sounds interesting. There seems to be a bit of the old Euro Greens 'Realo vs Fundies' debate going as regards where SL is going. The Realos in this case are the people who want SL to mimic Real Life™ and the Fundies who want SL to be a Second Life™ a world of the imagination and experimentation. I see room for both...

Extrapolating ahead a few years....

SL, from what I gather, was envisgaged as 'The Future of The Internet' ie: 3D web. Think of sims as the 'web sites' of a 3D web and SL as the Geocities or The Well of its time. The natural outcome is a scenario where people would host their own 3D website / sim and then where we today pay a subscription / rent / tier to LL people would subscribe to one particular host or another to hook their 3D website / sim up to one particular host which in turn might be linked to other grids. That would go a long way to reducing the centralised nature. How IP rights and commercial transactions could be locked down is quite another matter.

Then the issue of content becomes moot as one would hook up to whichever provider catered to ones tastes or interests whether they be architecture, role play, gaming, business, recreation or whatever.

In others it's a communist utopia, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. No avatar in SL needs property, and it's infinitely easy to create compared to the physical world.

That's Marxism.

So long as you believe that, then so long will it hold for you.


All of the above, and more.

Alarzarian, I agree there is room for both. Nothing is to stop any of us renting, buying or cajoling space to play "Real Life" or "Second Life", which ever we choose.

So over all the best bet is to make room for both. Try and force one out and it'll only rebel and entrench itself in deeper, it's just human nature. SL may fall away but the concept of freedom won't, new ways to be free are always popping up.

I'd also rather the LL energy (money) went on techy stuff rather than keeping up with r/l issues.

That's what I said. That's what communism is all about.

Socialism and socialist collectivism are not communism.

Marxism doesn't equal communism, Marx vision was bastardised.

Something that works, whether people call it left, right, center, socialist, capitalist, or turnip.

Without copyright Stallman's world wouldn't exist. Stallman HATES the BSD and MIT licenses for repudiating authorial control, and doesn't see the fundamental conflict between the FSF and the LPF... both organizations he founded... as a result.

You mean, people started calling socialist collectivism "communism". I agree. That doesn't mean Marxism isn't communism, it means the Former Soviet Union was never Communist.

The former Soviet Union was State capitalism but you have a point that marxism is Communism, nobody had done Marxism and the words communism and Socialism are oft misused.

Well. I think it is possible that this sort of thing can get bigger than ourselves.

In the sense that I would *love* to cease believing in Democrats and Republicans and thus make them both go away.

Perhaps if *enough* of us did that...


No! None!! laughs... just kidding Ciaran. The idea here was to see what people thought and where they felt they stood. Perhaps provoke some thought but not tell anyone they were 'wrong' about anything (kind of a pointless exercise in a "what do you think?" thread).

There are clearly problems with the way I framed this discussion, just as there are problems with our Left / Right debates in the real world.

We may face fairly stark A/B choices in the future, leading this way or that.

One choice made long ago, was to open the grid to utterly anonymous residents in great number. I feel that took us 'overall' sharply to the left, as a world, but one might interpret that event also as a veeeery strict "who I am is none of government's business" (conservative) move.

That distillation has been philosophically bankrupt for decades. People with power and followers will no doubt shore up all kinds of philosophical taxidermies, even convincing people their goats are unicorns and their mermaids were born in the sea instead of a tailor's shop. That doesn't mean we need to consider their lines as valid, now will they find their supposed allies loyal... the green/union alliance (the core of the US left) and the libertarian/fundamentalist alliance (the core of the US right) are both fragile, and at least half of the people in them are getting a royal reaming at any time.

As for Eon, I never found the politics convincing, or even credible.

I'm not sure what the relevance of those parties to this discussion is, since they're both on the right.

1 user agreed.

Chaos theory wise, with the potential for a thread to veer wildly off topic I think you've done well here Desmond. This thread is certainly thought provoking, it's certainly provocative too but you seem to have hit on a formula that has so far at least (and touch wood it continues) avoided name calling and the neener neeners.

A few random points in no particular order:

Many real-life controversies are irrelevant in SL, in part because the economy operates on a very different basis. No one starves, no one is destitute, no one endures physical suffering, no one needs health care, no one needs food or shelter, no one needs to keep valuables under lock and key. Real-life distinctions between left and right, which are as much economic as political, will blur and be replaced by some entirely different kind of spectrum that we may as yet only dimly imagine.

For instance, a more interesting distinction is between the "PvP" mindset and the "serious business" mindset. Some people with a background in combat-oriented worlds come to SL and become griefers who engage in player-vs-player mischief for the lulz, insisting that it's all just a game and mocking anybody who takes their own online activities too seriously. Ironically, these same people sometimes become extraordinarily upset at gold farmers and real-money transactions back in their home world, where, in effect, the "serious business" folks grief them back.

The question is, which side will prevail? I suspect it will be the "serious business" crowd, because historically, black markets have thrived even in the most hostile real-world environments, even in countries where such economic activity was punishable by death.

Historically, wild frontiers always become more tame over time, as more settlers move in. Log cabins in the woods are eventually replaced by gated communities where the homeowner's association regulates right down to what color of paint chips you can use.

Virtual worlds, in principle, are surveillance societies. The technological capability exists to track every single financial transaction, follow every single movement, eavesdrop on every text or voice conversation. Anonymity, in the long run, is an illusion. Mind you, real life is moving in that direction too. That mobile phone in your pocket? It's a tracking device. It's also a microphone that can be turned on without your knowledge, even if you think the phone is off.

From what I've read, this does sound like a pretty accurate account of the future SL envisioned by the creators.

What stands out to me about this vision is how passive a world it would be, in comparison to the SL we actually have today.

Today, you register and get some basic instructions at the first place in which you materialize. After that, you are very literally on your own.

Contrast that to the envisioned experience of logging into the Apple SL site or the Toyota SL site or the SL sites of WebMD or Amazon or the New York Times. Sure, each island (or spaceship or whatever form the SL space takes) might have activities for its visitors. But basically you will just do whatever the makers of that site have prepared for you to do.

This is completely and utterly different from the experience of today's SL users.

Now, it could well be, as has often been alleged, that LL considers today's SL users to be merely beta testers for the glorious future of Facebook Island and Fox Interactive Media island (and so on).

I guess one good question might be: how are they going to get rid of us?