Lords and Peasants

Being the advernturer I am, tonight I decided to hit some of the far-flung areas of SL I've never seen. The goal? A little fun, a little sun, and a little socializing. What I found was quite different from what I expected.

After attending some events for L$, some clubs, the sandbox, a couple boutique shops, and some very cool homesteads, it seems to me there are two classes of people in SL: The Lords and the Peasants.

The Lords
-These citizens are SL's royalty. Most of them possess some intrinsic building/scripting skills and have distinguished themselves in the products they offer and the name they've built for themselves. L$ aren't so much an issue for them as much as reaching actualization through their [new] endeavors.


The Peasants
-This is probably 95% of SL. Dumpy, frumpy, and piss as* broke. While many nOObs also fall into this category, I find by and large this group is comprised of those who have no building or scripting skills. SL's promise of a new life and the ability to do anything they want seems a cruel joke. Some of them take up arms as insurgents [many who are labelled as 'griefers' by the Lords] to make a statement against the almost crushing monolithic mechanisms which keep them in a state of near total oppression. Some of them whore themselves out in camping chairs for hours on end for as little as L$50. Others attend an endless array of Tringo, SLingo, Bingo, and Dingo in a thankless quest to earn a couple bucks.

As one of the fellows I talked to so aptly put it, most of the citizens of SL are "nothing more than bums [in an economic sense]".

What are these findings intended to do? Probably nothing. The Lords don't want things to change and the Peasants have no power. The divisions between classes was larger than I would have expected and it was sad to see so many in abject poverty.

I guess its just a commentary on the economic state of SL at this time.

There is a middle class. People who make money but arnt the 'big names' but they arnt hurting for money either.

If you believe that, and classify yourself as a peasant, you never will have any power. You have too much of a defeatist attitude. Do you think good designers, scripters, or builders popped out of the womb with fully formed skills? Nope. They taught themselves rather than felt sorry for themselves. If you work hard enough you can be as good as you think you can be. If you think you suck, well then you probably always will. Life is like that.

Precisely.

I started with no skills relevant to SL beyond some tinkering background in Photoshop and some dabbling in 3D apps years and years before. In short, I came here with an empty toolbox, save for a rusted broken tape measure and some bent nails.

Today my toolbox overflows with stuff I've picked up and collected in my year of being in SL. Much of stuff I never expected to grasp as fully as I do now. There's still plenty more left for me to learn, and I look forward to that. I never close my mind to the possibility of further growth and I still pick up something new at least every week.

If you want to learn, it's incredibly easy. The most arcane of SL knowledge, LSL, has all known data on the subject collected in the scripting wiki, from which I learned most of what I know today. It's right there, but you have to be willing to work for it.

Moreover, I made myself a citizen of Second Life, not just a resident. I made it a point to understand as much as possible how things here worked on a social, technical and business level. I educated myself on SL's history and origins, spending time in Oz Spade's most excellent museum. I keep up to date on important policy decisions, feature planning and implementation and longterm goals for the platform.

In short, you get what you put into SL. I've put in a whole heck of a lot, because it's been a whole lot of fun for me to do so. I really love SL and the folks who make it what it is. I've made myself expert on as many things as I can grasp, and I settle for familiarity on all else. In return I've gotten some serious cashflow when I needed it pretty badly and I've made some great friends.

But I'd never would have gotten anywhere without deciding to invest myself in the possibilities.

It's funny cause you say the peasants are all depressed and what not, but it seems like the "lords" are always more depressed about what SL is becoming and the "peasants" seem quite happy with their mafias and clubs.

But really that's far too black and white of a view of SL, 2 classes of people is far too general. What about the content creators who make stuff but don't care about money? Or the people who make nothing but get money from land sales/rentals etc.?

Really if I were to be pointing out classes in SL, I think this would be more likely it:

Royalty
Artists
Businessmen
Entrepeneurs
Managers
Clubbers
Mafia
Griefers
Socializers
Bums
Fantasy Real Lifers
Furries
Fetish people

Royalty are as described the "lords", but more specific, they're on the top, they know they're on the top, and they exploit that fact. They make a lot of money through designs and prim creations, but they don't take it to the extra edge of full out Anshe-style business in SL because they still like to socialize through it.

Artists are the people who just want to make the pretty stuff in SL and don't much care about the money and fame, usually they end up getting the fame anyways as a side effect, but sometimes they can remain pretty well hidden and unknown from most of SL.

Businessmen care about nothing else but money. They just want to make money in whatever way they can and often times don't really even show up in the game, just log on to do transactions and business deals, but not much of socializers.

Entrepeneurs want to take SL as far as they can and worry about making new stuff and taking SL to the edge. After they make a groundbreaking new project they abandon it and move on to other things. Not a lot of people like this in SL anymore.

Managers want to make money in SL, but don't want to learn a trade or devote RL time and energy to it, so they generally partake in successful well-trodden businesses like clubs and casinos.

Clubbers just jump around in the aforementioned with the idea of wanting money or socializing but not wanting to do anything major, sometimes they become managers afterwards.

Mafia are kinda hard to describe and aren't too different from clubbers except that they take a more violent and drama-induced approach to the whole thing.

Griefers like getting reactions out of people via push weapon attacks or simply griefing sort of behaviour, they want attention like that, but that's about it.

Socializers just wander around talking to people, not many pure of that type but still enough to get mention (like Torley)

Bums are people who want money but don't want to put any skill or time investment into it, so they frequent clubs, casinos, and camp places that give money, and complain about how they're always broke.

Fantasy Real Lifers are the ones who buy prefab mansions, and pretty furniture, find a place out in the middle of nowhere and carve their own little perfect RL in SL, they generally keep to themselves and don't do much besides get married and have fake kids.

Furries I think deserve their own group because they're a big mix of all these groups.

Fetish People just care about making their fetish real in SL and not much else, sometimes they get money out of it as a side effect.

Anyways that's what I think in a moment of 10 minutes or so. Not to mention that there's probably a lot of people who're a mix of a few groups in there. So really even that's not enough to classify people in SL.

Thats a good diagnoses. But Still, you're either a Lord or a Peasant.

I am quite clearly a middle class artist.

I disagree. Take me for example. Most people dont know me or my store/products. But I make enough money to cover my teir (8192m) and have shopping money and money to sell at times. There is nothing super about the stuff I make. I do make a few nice things but they are things anyone could make if they took the time. And the difficult things for me, like scripts, I used public domain ones. The only thing I did do was buy Poser and bang my head against it for a longgg time. I even had to learn Photoshop, well the basics, like layers. But nothing about the poses/animations nor Photoshop work is 'elite' by any stretch. And I probably only spend 5% of my time either helping customers or building something.

What Im trying to say is, if Im a Lord then the real talented people in SL are MEGA-MONDO SUPA-DUPA LAWDS!

Our avs are said to be 4-8 feet tall; but in reality they are 3-6 inches in size, depending on your monitor.

Similar goes for achieving 'lordhood' on SL.

We have all been king of the hill at one time or another. In SL, royalty and celebrity only exists at HO-scale.

HO Lords? Pimps?

Total nonsense.

Weren't we calling this the FIC a year ago?

You seem so eager to divide and define people Jamie. It's kind of like people who tell themselves "I'm a punk rocker" and then go about trying to fulfill what their idea of who a "punk rocker" is.

I guess I would be what you would call "middle class" or lower middle class.. I make money off of my avs, they're pricey, but I put lots of work into them (you try texturing 50 prims on one avatar and trying to eyeball align them?). I may not make enough to really establish a steady cash flow, but I do have enough money so that if ever I need money, I think that I can easily afford to upkeep my vendor rental expenses and land rental expenses without really putting myself into debt.

As for whether or not I'm one of those big name types, I'm not too sure. I seem to know a LOT of furries though, and a few non-furries have bought my mecha avs, so I'm pleased that I have breeched the genre gap.

Profound

The Star Chamber is a lot better picture of what the so-called FIC is, and its still going very very very strong too.

In any group of people, 80% of the work will always be done by 20% of the people. It's called, creatively enough, the 80/20 rule, and it's a phenomenon that's been noted since the dawn of business. No one really knows why. It's just what happens. Take any 10 people in a common environment, and you'll find that two of them are producing 4 times as much as the other eight combined.

Of course, that also means that the top 20% receive 80% of the rewards. In RL and in SL, the biggest difference between those who earn those rewards ("lords" as you put it) and those who don't ("peasents" is that the earners choose to work for what they want while others choose to be bystanders. It's as simple as that. Everyone has 168 hours every week, everyone. It's what we choose to do with each of those hours that makes the difference.

To paraphrase what Chip said, those who are the producers in SL weren't born with silver copies of Photoshop in their hands. Every single one of them made the decision to become what they are, as did everyone else, whether they realize it or not.

Some of the best advice I ever got in my life was from one of my mentors when I was just starting out in my RL business. He said your subconscious will never let you become anything other than what you tell it you are. People who constantly bump into things always say, "I'm sucha klutz." People who can't seem to hold a job typically say things like, "I hate rich people," or, "The man is always keeping me down". What these people fail to realize is that it's their own attitude that's to blame for their woes, not anything else.

In psychology, it's called self-fulfilling prophesy, and it's one of the most powerful forces in the universe. The subconscious works 24 hours a day to ensure that the mind functions within a set of established parameters. Those parameters are what define an individual's personality. By saying, "I'm such a klutz," the person is supplying his or her subconscious with a definition of a certain personality trait. Once given that definition, the subconscious will work to ensure it remains acurate. Thus, the person will bump into things. Consciously, it's interpreted as a never-ending series of accidents, but subconsciously, it's all very delieberate.

People who say, "I hate rich people," will never be rich. People who say, "The man is keeping me down," will always be down. People who say, "I'm just a 'peasent' in SL," will always be peasents. Theat's just how our brains are wired, and there's no getting around it. We are all just machines, and as such we are slaves to our programming. Give us a good program, and we accomplish a lot. Give us a bad one, and we don't accomplish much.

The good news is there's an easy and obvious fix. Write a new program. It's pretty simple to do. If you're tired of seeing other people get the rewards, make the conscious decision to become a part of that top 20%. All it takes is a little proactive thinking, followed by continual effort. That mentor I mentioned earlier (self-made multi-millionaire, by the way), well, another jewel of wisdom I once heard him say was "It's never too late to be what you might have been."

So, to anyone who feels like a "peasent", my advice is stop, right now. Stop feeling like the "lords" are some external group to which you do not belong. Stop any and all thoughts that can give your subconscious a low definition of you to affirm. Stop writing bad programs. Start giving it high definitions and good programs to run. Decide that you are from this point doing what it takes to get what you want.

If you don't think you can do that, then so be it, but at the very least, accept and understand that you are where you are by your own choice, just like everyone else. Don't fall into the trap of resenting people who have made different choices. It's not healthy for you, and it's not fair to them.

Gee. Vapor social strata in SL. Imagine that.

Lots of good words here Enbram, Artemis, Annah, Chip, Chosen.

I also came to SL with zero useful skills (unless you count Ferran). I painfully acquired those skills that I have and there is lots of room for improvement. Poser still makes me want to fling my computer against the wall.

It's always easier to complain than to work.

That's because it has the single worst dogshit UI ever shipped in a commercial app. And it's as stable as a pile of marbles.

You're not alone there.

How does me (or other creative people) spending countless hours to learn how to do things keep someone who spends countless hours not learning how to do things in a "state of near total oppression"? This logic is a flaming bag of poo. Stinky poo.

There is no one holding you down. You make your own fate. Here and in real life.

if i may qoute one of my own songs (yes i spent years learning guitar and recording too because no one could stop me from doing so).....

...if your life is shit then check your ass.

I suck and it's your fault just doesn't fly.

I am Newfie. If you feel the need to stick a label on me and lump me into some arbitrary category, go right ahead. However I dont care one hoot either way. I'm myself, and that's all I'm interested in being.


- Newfie

Great post.

-Ghoti

I'm not being oppressed, so I must be a lord. Perhaps I shall make myself a splendiferous palace from which to lord over my peasants. Wait, which peasants are mine? Can I just seize the ones nearest me and have them do my bidding? Wait again! Apparently these peasants aren't good for anything but tringo and thong modeling. What they heck do I need them for? This is so confusing. Can I use my peasants as currency to pay other lords to do useful things for me? (Like build a splendiferous palace)