Philosophy in the New Metaverse ~ Where do you stand?

Neither are really relevant to the immersionists, because both are treating the society in SL, itself, as irrelevant. They're both slightly different variants of the "it's just a game", whether they're into "making money from the game" or "getting lulz from the game".

That's the Blue Mars vision. When you're in someone's city, all you get to do is what they want you to do. SL doesn't support that model very well at all, thank god.

Bit of a sidebar to the discussion:




Two questions about this:

1) "the news, the advertising was all about fear"---Did the friends you mention assume that the news and advertising are synonymous with the attitude of most Americans (meaning those who don't work for news or advertising organizations)?

I would argue that these are not synonymous; that both news and advertising rely on alarming people so that people will pay attention to them.

Since the creators of the news and of advertising don't get paid unless their products are shown (by research and ratings firms' work) to have attracted large numbers of viewers and listeners and/or to be memorable, then those creators are highly motivated to GRAB attention. And to say 'pay attention to this/buy this OR ELSE' is to grab attention effectively.

What I'm curious about is the extent to which your friends based their judgment on the news and ads, as opposed to conversations with people they met.


2) Do most nations well-represented here in the Forums have six (or so) 24-hour television news stations apiece? I ask this because the intense competion in the US market leads to more sensationalism and fear-mongering, for the aforementioned purpose of goosing up ratings.

If Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany etc. DO each have several 24-hour TV news stations, and yet most reporting is free of anything that could inspire anxiety (and consequently engender a 'need' to watch!), then I have no answer, really, to what seems to be an allegation that Americans are unusually fearful people.

No, but I'm wondering about the extent to which the current LL leadership hopes that the SL of today can be sort of swept into a corner, with most of the grid devoted to the passive 'websites'.

Actually if that corner were big enough (and heck, it could be 20 times the size SL is now and yet still be a fraction of the whole), this might not necessarily be bad for those of us who love the current freedom to create and be UNpassive. If we had a stable platform and plenty of resources, we'd be happy. If 95% of the grid were the Ford and Siemens and Wal-Mart islands(!), LL could even afford to lower our tier payments. They might look on us as a source of ideas from which they could make money.

We'd be lab rats, but we'd be happy lab rats.

Just added for fun while you are right in your analysis: Marx himself was a big fan of bastardisation. There was a small and from nearly no one noticed mini-essay from J. G. Fichte (in year 1800), written as an utopia of a socialistic society developed as closed system, which was maybe Marx's first "inspiration" to bastardise it and pimping it up to his more political than philosophical "system" and also he was riding on some Feuerbach spleens.

Back to SL:

Marx Kingdon, sorry, Mark Kingdon is even a fan of deconstructive bastardisation, because he is on his knees all day in front of a piece of time-wasting mumbling-by-typing-software made by Marx Zu.., sorry Mark Zuckerberg.

2Marks - so to speak - or: too much Marks...

In a biological way I am somehow a fan of any possible bastardisation, but since merging (other word for: bastardisation) of so called platforms becomes a hype, it makes just all former interesting and unique things to any, it makes them replaceable, it makes them mainstream, boring and as soon SL is finally sunken into this mud of globewide mumbling-and nonsense-twittering-sphere of blablabla on all channels, as a kind of second globe of endless gossip-blabla and/or classroom-silence in front of blabla corporations and teachers, drawen around the original globe, it will become a forgotten, characterless, worthless piece of boredom, which was called by M Linden (in his SLCC-keynote) "Second Life 2.0"

While I would call it (SL): a bastard, in a negative way, from now on. It will be like sitting in a classroom (well dressed as obligation and no kissing on campus) while yawning and watching the flies circling around the neon-lamps while paying in worst case 295 dollars plus VAT for that "thrill".

I would be really surprised if it becomes more interesting than before.

Does it look like it would become more interesting? No!

Scanning the different threads along the months I have the impression that more and more people have a feeling that the thrill is definitely gone and boredom sneaks in like fog in late autumn. Every new announcement and every new "change" by LL has the effect to be a written sleeping-pill overdose.

This can have to do with the board and the CEO. Meanwhile I have the impression that it is more thrill to have a good lag and login failures and missing inventory, just to have at least *some* thrill for the money.

Especially since the creating of thrill is not longer in our hands. LL started to play Second Life (which is as thrilling like observing color drying at a wall) and started to rule it (the color and the drying process). Their definition of thrill is very different to ours, I think?! From my view the thing is dead, but for some necrophile reasons I am still in, maybe just for watching it going rotten.

To answer Desmond's question:




I was grateful for this link as I'd been meaning to take their test for ages. (I ended up with Economic Left/Right: -5.12 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.56 ---very near the Dalai Lama, as it happens.)

Unlike the Dalai Lama, I am engaged in commerce (in an attempt to pay my tier). I started out with selling land, which worked well for nearly a year, but now is borked; content creation is getting better as an income source. As my skills improve, my income improves. (It's an ongoing process. ^_^) But due to this status as a seller I, too, fall into that class of SLers who would like to see SL grow.

This engagement in commerce puts me a bit to the right, no doubt, in my SL philosophy.

However, my belief that many people are willing and even eager to exploit other people leads me away from rightist libertarianism, and toward a belief that good, well-thought out rules can create a level playing field that encourages prosperity and enhances the quality of life.

So, yeah: a lefty.

The Dalai Lama is selling books like warm bread. In thousand languages. If that is not commerce I would not know what is commerce.

He is a business-man (as bestseller-author)



ETA: I hope he can remember his bank account when he will be born again, to start rich from day one on

This is what I'm beginning to think. I used to say that companies could think of SL as just another convention town - they could have conventions, shows, meetings on their own islands, and visit the rest of the grid the same way one visits the French Quarter when you go to a conference in New Orleans.

But the "old" SL would also need to grow, in order to survive. And therein lies the rub. If LL positions SL as "Real, only nice. REAL nice!"* ... then how will people find the bizarre explosion of sheer oddity that is what I most love about the grid?


* dear LL: yes you have to pay me if you use that!

They won't. It will disappear soon enough.The "old" SL's days are numbered. LL is distancing themselves from it, and as they do, more people will distance themeselves from SL. My tin foil hat gives it a year, two at most. All the fantastst and immersionsist will be gone.

Most people I know, myself included, don't believe much of what is said from our news outlets or advertisers. They are merely regurgiating the bullshit dispensed by politicans and corporations.

Just musing on all this...



This view, and similar ones expressed by others, comes closest to my own. SL is, on a small scale, already truly a 3-D immersive World-Wide Web. LL may not be able to overcome the technical problems involved in making it as big as that other Web--but they may not have to. Probably the solution to that lies, simply enough, in the same decentralized model the Web uses--that, and lots more bandwidth, which will come eventually.

That being the case, there is room for everything. Most people are not artists, or particularly creative in any sense, and so, inevitably, most of the place is going to seem very ordinary. I don't quite get the claim that there is something really new about the ability of "anyone" to create "anything" in SL. To me, it's just another iteration of freedom of the press, where those who own the press have the freedom. In SL, yes, you can go to a sandbox and build something--but you can't establish a presence that way. In real life I can go to a public park and hold up a sign--until I get tired, or hungry, or cold, or rained on--then I have to leave, and cease being a presence. On the web, I can actually have a permanent presence for free--yeah, Facebook and MyPage are ugly, nasty places, but I can, if I wish, become a permanent fixture there, and people even use those places to do business without spending a dime. In SL, though, I can only create in a meaningful way if I spend some money.



Just because some hotshot had a great idea that made a lot of money, and then that hotshot formed a corporation to promote and expand that idea, and that corporation got really big and famous and made a lot of money, does not mean that that hotshot's next idea--or the next idea of somebody whom the hotshot hired, or of the person who replaced the hotshot in corporate governance--won't be a huge mistake that sucks up the corporation's wealth and goodwilll and sends it to the trashheap of history. LL is certainly quite capable of adopting a strategy that destroys SL.

So technical problems dictate that expansion of an SL-type environment can only continue if it follows a decentralized model like that of the Web. If it is an idea whose time truly has come, then it will become ubiquitous, not able to be killed by one idiot pointy-haired boss. And due to its very size and ubiquity, it will contain every shade of every thing, and yet most of it will be ordinary and mundane.

What it won't be is a "new world". Humans who spend more and more of their time in an immersive 3-D network will still have to eat. Information may want to be free, but humans want--and need--to get paid. Either new ways will be found to get paid for information, or the information will cease to be made available. Probably the only way to handle this equitably and reliably is to make people pay for access to the information gateway, and distribute the resulting income to the creators of the content that lies beyond the gateway--royalties, in other words, like those that have been in place in the music industry for decades. Nothing new there.

As for social organization: humans are social animals, with emphasis on the "animal" part. They have a broader range of behaviors available to them than other social animals, but that range is still hard-wired. Every form of social organization that humans are capable of coming up with has already been tried. There won't be any new ones. A major aspect of human social organization is how we separate "us" from "them". New forms of communication have created a familiarity with different ways of doing and being that didn't exist among human societies in the past. This has allowed us to expand the circle that includes "us", but it hasn't changed--can't change--how we treat those whom we still regard as "them". And as most humans see it, there will always be some of "them" out there. Voluntary communities, in particular, are nothing new. They don't last indefinitely. Where power vacumns exist, those interested in wielding power arrive to fill them. When the wielding becomes oppressive, the oppressed join hands and fight back. Eventually, the back-and-forth struggling and destruction tires everybody out, and they agree on rules, which henceforth will be enforced. It's inevitable. There won't be a "brave new world" where people sit in drumming circles and act on consensus--at least, not for longer than it takes the membership to develop the inevitable interpersonal conflicts and break up the commune.

Or they will be here, carving out their own enclave amongst the prudish and mundane. The only way they will be gone is if LL make imagination against the TOS. We'll see if that day comes.

Thanks for the link. I took it too.





Nice point, Ponsonby.

This.

How would a http://www.politicalcompass.org work for our world?

Would it work?

Could we have Rosedale and Kingdon and SL people on it?

Would just X and Y be enough?


Edit: I just tried that silly test, ended up baaaarely left of center, and clearly more libertarian than authoritarian (sorta centered left/right but not centered vertically, a bit low).

Here's my score on that test

Well, I certainly didnt AR myself when I had nudes up on my PG land - and I wasnt the one who sent them back to my lost and found. So who did do it? A vigilante? Thinking on that, how could anyone other than a Linden do that. So, yes, monitored is the right word to use. I apologized and now the case is closed. But we are undoubtedly monitored - if not all the time, then certainly some of the time. I certainly would monitor "my" creation and "my" society if I owned this place. We have CCTV everywhere in real - how many times does the average Londoner get her / his pic taken on way to work? Isn't it at least 70 times. I think I read that on BBC news item. So we are monitored here and there.

You know, it IS quite good! (It made me laugh out loud, anyway. ^_^)

Yes...not to mention, desperately trying to get to Number 1 in the ratings (or in the case of the advertisers, trying to sell more widgits.)

The Dalai Lama is continually asked whether he remembers any of his past lives.

Pep (He answers that he can't usually remember what he had for breakfast that morning.)

PS Lots of news channels? In the UK we have the BBC. Why would we need more?

PPS I took the Political Compass Test. Instead of giving me a graphical result it took me to a page that said either I should stop taking the piss or I would be picked up and sent to Guantanamo Bay without explanation in the near future.

Since we're sharing test results (and in case Prok should ever need confirmation ), I scored far Left and almost as Libertarian (-7.0, -6.1).

Again on the risk Realists pose to Fantasists: As others have said, I think the problem isn't the invasion of the Real, but the survival of the platform. I disagree with the claim that in-world Fantasy has diminished as in-world Reality grows; it's just, for the moment, harder to find. As a proportion of total content, yeah, it's less, but that doesn't have to be a serious problem, as long as it remains, and can be found. It's the finding that's tricky at the moment, and why Fantasist institutions like NPIRL are so important.

The threat is that LL will squander its capital (and our tier) in a doomed effort to peddle SL to Realist markets that have much better options. It will always be a niche player in corporate communication and social networking applications. It will always be a niche player in "video gaming" Fantasist applications, too, and for similar technical reasons.

It has the potential to be something quite different, to define and own a market unto itself. That's an opportunity not to be missed, but it requires more vision than the average Marketing department (and apparently the current Board) can muster.

I appear to be rubbing shoulders with Gandhi - ec=-4.38&soc=-2.26

Either I misinterpreted deeper meanings of some questions, or Gandhi secretly wanted to throw the odd rock at someone.

Economic Left/Right: -7.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.33

was anybody else surprised at their results? I knew I was a bit of a lefty and a bit of an anarchist but I was surprised just how far towards the bottom left corner I was. Oh well, there's worse company to keep than the Dalai Lama.

I believe that the saw the fear reflected in the lives of people in general. It was by no means universal, but that was the vibe that they picked up.
One of the ways they saw it coming out was in rudeness lurking under a very thin veneer of 'Have a nice day' sort of thing.


"....that both news and advertising rely on alarming people so that people will pay attention to them. "
The tactic appeared to be working. People (like emergency exit doors) are permanently alarmed.
If the vast majority of people actually disbelieved the outpourings of news and advertising, why would they pay attention to it?


Getting back to SL specifically -
If LL are pursuing sheer numbers, then they have to tailor the offering to be acceptable to the lowest common denominator. That can be quite low.
Challenging content can still exist, but not in a way that its presence is obvious to those who crave security and predictability.

Prokofy definitely was a factor in my musings, relating much of what goes on in this world to larger political issues, but seeing as how Prokofy cannot respond here it's kind of hard to have any kind of fair discussion about it. So whatever I might think, that would be a subject for a venue where Prok can respond.

* * * * *

Clearly my left/right oversimplification is flawed; this bothers some of you more than others.

I would put out this challenge: if someone were to make an slpoliticalcompass.org, would it read left/right and authoritarian/libertarian too? What would the questions look like?

Am I off base on the left/rightness of say, anonymity? Or what of what I call 'scam banking' and 'stock exchanges' ~ would a strict libertarian see those as 'freedoms' for those who wished to participate?

I challenge someone to cook up a short list of maybe 10 questions and weight them somehow ~ any takers?