White Noise

Will the real Metaverse please stand up? #SecondLife

 

Over the years I've continually heard how many different virtual environments are "a Metaverse" or (shudders) "the Metaverse". Recently I read the question "Is Minecraft the Metaverse?" on a random blog post somewhere.

 

From my point of view, this is a train of thought that makes me twitch every time I hear it. While I understand that virtual world participants have the best intentions, I have to admit that their notions of "Metaverse" are woefully misguided at best.

The Metaverse is a singular construct much in the same manner as The Internet or the World Wide Web. I cringe whenever I hear people refer to different virtual worlds as "a Metaverse" or "The Metaverse" because it reads/sounds to me in the same manner as if one were to say many things are many Internets. We don't state the Internet in plural form, nor should anyone state the Metaverse in plurality.

 

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Cyberpunk History

I get my notion of the Metaverse from many sources, but most importantly the genre which spawned it overall. To this end, we're talking about Cyberpunk culture.

The construct of a Metaverse within this genre was varied but held a common theme altogether. In the book Neuromancer by William Gibson, it was a matrix - an endless sort of digital void with blue grid lines extending forever. Things were constructed on this grid at varying points and complexity, programs ran on this grid, etc. Then came Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which for all intents and purposes is the cited inspiration for most virtual environments in the industry - at least if we look at systems like ActiveWorlds or Second Life.

In this same genre also existed systems like you would see in Shadowrun, and this is one of my favorite descriptions for a Metaverse construct. There were things like nodes, virtual FTP systems - a three dimensional free-space with ICE security and more.

 

 

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Shadowrun on Sega Genesis | Hope you brought a decent deck, chummer

 

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What I see in The Metaverse, a real one anyway, is not a singular construct but a contextual and decentralized construct which defines an overall system. While Neal Stephenson may have eloquently described The Street in Snow Crash, I believe that in a true Metaverse, The Street was simply a main gateway world (possibly the oldest and most popular). That being said, I don't believe the entire Metaverse was The Street. It wouldn't make any sense to assert that if we put it into context with its predecessors - The World Wide Web & Internet.

However large or popular a singular destination on the Internet is, no single destination comprises the entire Internet. When we put it into context with the genre of Cyberpunk, and not just a singular destination view of a particular novel, we see that the Metaverse is just a 3D Internet.

Existing in The Metaverse were many gateways of entry, many destinations, and many contexts, but they shared a common protocol and standard. In this context, then, places such as Second Life consist of similarly The Street context, but then other destinations in the Metaverse existed such as (in context) Open Simulator, and related spinoff systems utilizing similar variations. We also would say that maybe destinations such as Kaneva, There, and (at least minimally) Blue Mars were destinations in the overall Metaverse but not a single one was the Metaverse itself.

 

I have to momentarily pause and mention that even in The Street context, Second Life fails miserably. In order to have The Street, a virtual environment must be a contiguous virtual land mass which is traversable in circumference. As in, I could start walking from the entry and eventually travel around the virtual world to return to my starting point.

 

Google Earth I suppose lets you pull that off, at least the contiguous sphere of a planet, and with Sketchup I suppose you could place rudimentary models. However, that being said, Google Earth is a Paraverse at best. Minecraft, then gets a second look because it almost comes close to meeting the requirements. However, it’s a single destination among many possible destinations, and no manner by which to seamlessly traverse them all under a passport – yet.

 

I give Minecraft the “yet” because you do have a singular login, and with that login you can join many servers. So the passport is rudimentary implemented, and the planet twice the size of Earth is there as well, but I couldn’t walk around the virtual world and return to where I began. I couldn’t seamlessly transport from one space to another, and (to wit) the concurrency rate of any of these systems is still miserable. Even after all of this, I’d still dismiss Minecraft simply because it isn’t able to talk to any other system but its own.

The problem with virtual worlds and virtual reality is that there seems to be no clear differentiation as to what constitutes them - except in the minds of futurists like myself who make such distinctions and state merely:

 

 

 

The Metaverse is a decentralized construct of three dimensional virtual environments whereby the environments themselves are the product of the end-users which inhabit such spaces. Each virtual space may behave differently or be controlled by differing interests, but they share a standard methodology of ubiquitous access. Within these multiple contexts exists ubiquity of access and interoperability whereby a single means of access can traverse all spaces within the connected Metaverse.

 

 

To put it into better light, we continue to compare the Metaverse to the World Wide Web.
When you are online using the World Wide Web, you have a web browser program which follows standard protocols for communication and rendering the content. HTML5, PHP, Javascript, WebGL, and more. For proprietary functionality these web browsers accept "Plugins" which the end-user may install as they see fit much like modules installed on a Shadowrun Deck. No single website on the web constitutes the entire world wide web, and looking at the situation in the proper perspective, we obviously would think it's absolutely asinine to state a single website is the entire web.

Now you understand my frustration with the semantics of The Metaverse terminology and usage today. These virtual environments are destinations in a possible Metaverse in the same manner as Google and Yahoo are websites on the web.

 

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I state possible Metaverse because to this day nobody is talking to each other in a standardized fashion, and that bothers me for different reasons. For now, what we have is decidedly not a Metaverse but a lot of proprietary stand-alone virtual worlds. I hate to burst people's bubbles, but there is no Metaverse.

The distinction between Metaverse and Video Game is also fairly straight forward, in that a video game differentiation is a matter of contextual insight. World of Warcraft is not a Metaverse enabled system because the virtual environment itself is a closed construct whereby the participants are interacting on a linear model. The environment and media is predefined, with only the variation of interaction within that predefined space being the dynamic aspect. In the Metaverse - the context itself is open to interpretation by the participants, as well as the very construct itself which begins with a totally blank slate.

 

Therein is the major reason that Minecraft is not a Metaverse, let alone the Metaverse. By definition what you may create within the construct of Minecraft is limited by the recipes which are predefined. I’m sure you can build things there, but you are severely limited still compared to a virtual environment such a Second Life wherein you have LSL and Mono scripting. I call that a definite step up, but not quite total freedom.

 

 

As far as reaching for a true Metaverse designation, Linden Lab would first have to understand that the idea of “Shared Experience” is absolute bullshit. If you want to define yourself as the Metaverse, or at least the first major construct within the Metaverse, and set a precedent for others to join on, you have to take a hard look at the Web Browser itself. There is an underlying “shared experience” that is HTML5, much in the same manner that Second Life would have assets. After that, it’s up in the air as to how the end-user experience plays out. Plenty of customization options and contextual modifications make no two experiences totally the same – and in the Metaverse those plugins are the same as slots used on your deck, or third party additions which fundamentally change your viewer to add or remove features even if those changes differentiate the “shared experience”.

This differentiation is very important to understand because it's a metaphorical context understanding, and it is the underlying definition which drives social media altogether. A gaming context is predefined, and the experience is set up for you like an interactive choose your own adventure novel. There is a linear flow to the experience, and it is a controlled manner. In the Metaverse, there are no options other than to say that the participants are expected to define their own experience in totality. The company which controls the destination does not (or should not) be defining the in-world experience, but instead the participants should be.

 

If we look at Linden Lab policies, you can begin to understand that whenever that rule is broken when dealing with a Metaverse context, there is backlash for obvious reasons. When we really think about it, the Metaverse is a 3D Social Media outlet of experience. This however doesn’t insinuate that trying to redefine the rules of social ecosystem is a good idea – which is why the social media integration aspect of Second Life has largely failed. Not because integrating social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc into Second Life is a bad idea, but because the particular methodology and thinking behind that implementation particularly was poorly thought out and is a prime example of otherwise intelligent people acting incredibly stupid.

 

Twitter provides the platform, the participants provide the flood of content and experience for the ecosystem. Social media in general works like this as well, and it’s only when the service provider company decides to personally meddle in that ecosystem that the proverbial shit hits the fan. Hands-down, this has been the case time and again for Linden Lab, Active Worlds, and every company which started as a sandbox environment and later decided to start stepping on toes in their own ecosystem or other ecosystems by offering the same content options that their own participants where already handling. It’s sabotage at best.

 

 

Metaverse Checklist

 

I’m going to rattle off some prerequisites that should be met prior to anyone describing anything as The Metaverse or a construct within The Metaverse, just to set the record straight.

 

 

Decentralized

 

There is no central server for assets, or specifically for authentication. A virtual world within The Metaverse is akin to setting up a web server. Certain spaces may be gateways, but overall they are not the choking point of control no more than any single destination online in the world wide web would constitute a singular entry into the online world. Authentication may be centralized for your “passport” or you may have multiple “passports” which can be used within the virtual environment altogether. So when you log into the Metaverse, your credentials are universal across all participating constructs. The assets themselves also are decentralized, meaning no single datacenter houses them, and in fact the participants themselves are part of that asset storage and retrieval system.

 

 

Contextual Experience

 

A singular viewer which is extensible through third parties, and provides a standardized basis for interaction only, while additional functionality can be “plugged in” at the user’s discretion. In short the experience is modular and the interface is minimalistic by default. Just like I can access FTP, HTTP, etc through a web browser, and plugins by third parties extend the functionality for my web browser, and third parties are free to build their own web browsers with whatever abilities they choose – so would a Metaverse Viewer achieve. One viewer, modular, extensible, and very capable to meet the needs of many.

 

 

Standardized Protocols

 

They should all be a collective construct. Not just Second Life and OpenSim, but every virtual environment that wishes to call themselves “Metaverse Compliant” should be talking the same language and together be considered a contiguous space.

 

 

Concurrency

 

The centralized server methodology for glass ceiling concurrency is not acceptable. Lessons Learned from LucasFilm’s Habitat eloquently defines this issue and states the solution since 1991. It is an absolute travesty that not a single company in twenty years has actually implemented it, and more so that their concurrency issues directly stem from that blatant ignorance of the subject.

 

Dynamic Content Creation/Consumption

 

There are no preset goals, no predefined recipes. You are given a toolset and encouraged to define all aspects of your virtual world from the ground up. The experience is asynchronous and fluid, with little if anything to hinder this ecosystem. Even the viewer/program is up for interpretation by the ecosystem – with only some base definitions of standards to work from in order to maintain a minimal expectation of ubiquity. In this context “shared experience” is far too broad of a term to invoke.

 

There is no such thing as a producer or consumer in this ecosystem, but instead only the new social media breed known as Prosumers.

 

 

Epilogue | Final Thoughts

 

 

That’s not to say the Metaverse will never exist. Far from it, actually. What we’re seeing today are the beginnings of that Metaverse construct forming, gaining ground, and experiencing growing pains through every phase in this evolution.

 

I understand that the population really wants to see the Metaverse, and they are at least partially right for identifying at least the base components of what will make up the actual Metaverse when it exists. That being said, we must not confuse the sum of the parts for the whole.

 

Systems like Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Kaneva, There, and even (possibly) Minecraft are merely individual parts of a greater whole that is the eventual Metaverse. They are one of many modes of context, experience and immersion in a sea of many which are interconnected under a single ubiquitous access and protocol of interoperability.

 

Since that doesn’t exist yet, it is safe to say there is no Metaverse – but we’ve at least begun to correctly identify what will comprise it when somebody decides to actually go ahead and build it.

 

What we have today is simply the inkling of the many things that the Metaverse ultimately would be, but spread out among countless systems and never all in one spot. What the Metaverse would be, is all of those things in one program, wherein the “companies” provide service access points and facilitate content creation under the premise that each company is a “Burbclave” in the digital world. No single entity has yet to put the puzzle together, and such far I have seen only many years of companies snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The program would be built as a modular expansion system inherently, the interface would be minimalistic and intuitive, contextual for everything. The Metaverse will seamlessly integrate into your real life as well through Augmented Reality, creating a hybrid of the two and blurring the lines between real and virtual.

 

The Metaverse will be many things to many people, but what it is not is what we have today.

 

 

Y.T. (Yours Truly) Picture courtesy of

Shelby Rasmuson in Second Life

 

 

 

 

I thought today’s post deserved a soundtrack :)

Unconventional Conventions

When chaos theory applies, only those who seek heretics win out. #SecondLife @Rodvik |

 

Years ago when I was the CTO of VR5 Online, my boss at the time came to me with an interesting and possibly impossible challenge. At the time, I answered to the CEO of the company who was Mr. Clark, and he was an interesting and sly individual. One of the major purposes of VR5 Online was to explore and research methods in virtual environments while taking extensive notes on the outcomes for future applications. During that time we were engaged with ActiveWorlds as a technology, running our own world called VR5 | City of Nidus for which this blog is originally named (cityofnidus.blogspot.com).

 

 

 

 

There is a deeper story behind the name City of Nidus, in that the original project was run by @AdamFrisby (who went by the name Gwala). As far as I can remember, it was originally a world owned by ActiveWorlds called Flagg007, named after the AWI employee who provided the world for experimentation – Flagg (the community leader of AW). Now, Gwala at the time was experimenting with different ideas in AW with the Flagg007 world such as ideas for design and lighting, and a little bit of modeling too. There were a handful of people in that project, specifically hand-selected to participate purely for the ability to innovate ideas in a virtual sense. At that time, I remember I was invited to work in Nidus with Gwala and I brought along a friend Wesley Seay (whom to this day I call Capri).

 

Capri was a name I came up with because when he was a kid (he started using virtual environments when he was around 13 or so) his nickname was Liquid Cool, and my first impression was to say “You mean like Capri Sun drinks?”. Well, the nickname stuck and over the years he just kept it which is in many way how I came to use the Darian Knight nickname – I originally chose Aeonix as a nickname back in 1996 but I became known among my friends in real life for watching way too much Sailor Moon (and to be fair, it was the only thing remotely interesting on television when I was getting ready for school) so I ended up with my nickname being Darian out of habit, versus Aeonix.

 

This is still related to the post, by the way… it’s just a bit of context and backstory.

 

But I Digress

 

When my boss at the time, Mr. Clark, proposed some research at VR5 Online, he came to the conclusion that I should run a virtual world in ActiveWorlds by which he would give me a list of things I had to accomplish and research each year in order to validate another year renewal for that project. That went on for a few years before it was decided to close the project, but in the beginning of it, I was to find the best ways to do certain things on that list.

 

 

 

 

Now, as a professional you would normally see things in a manner which excludes all of your options. This is your scope and vision, more or less.  Some of us have a wider scope than others, while in many cases we become specialized and thus myopic in our scope. There is a place for both types of thinking and scope but we first have to understand that a limited scope and ability can be detrimental to a project or endeavor if we aren’t careful to identify that ahead of time.

 

I remember one of the points on the list for Nidus was simply to launch a behavioral study and utilize it toward marketing in virtual environments. The “impossible” aspect that he threw in was that I had to do so in a manner in which nobody would ever realize they were being studied, in effect I had to blend it all together as if it was perfectly natural.

 

What I came up with was pretty ingenious, even to this day.

 

It was a small town, and it had lots of different stores and aspects. But then on a more minute detail there were other studies and aspects underlying and they all worked together. The important part about this is the team that put it together.

 

It was a motley crew of individuals, and I’m proud of them to this day – many of them went on to become successful media designers, while others remained rogues and unconventional assets to projects. The most interesting part was that many of them were teenagers, or recent high school graduates who had simply accumulated years of experience in a virtual environment and how to create within them. I intentionally saw the merit of experience versus traditional education and decided that the experience of the individuals far surpassed the qualitative assets they could have brought to the project if they were simply of traditional education. It was a voluntary basis, and its own little community, and those teens ran circles around even ActiveWorlds Inc as a company.

 

 

 

 

Now, when I say they ran circles around AWI, I’m talking to a point where they put ActiveWorlds to shame as a company with the things they could do versus what the company itself was doing with their own technology. To this day I’m proud of their accomplishments, and I learned quite a lot over those years as to the best manner to work within a virtual environment setting. Years later, the things that were discovered and innovated in VR5 | Nidus continue to shape the direction of ActiveWorlds and even contribute to virtual environments as an industry.

 

This is what I like to call “Unconventional Conventions” in that the best approach, and the best way to get deeper insight and progress is often times (in virtual environments and elsewhere) to abandon our preconceived notions of scope and ability. I could have put in a budget request to my boss in order to hire a staff related to the project, but I wouldn’t have progressed anything. The band of rogues did things that to this day are extraordinary and pretty amazing, and they did so because they wanted the challenge, and furthermore knew that I was a hard-ass that would push them above and beyond to do better. In the end, they did things that to this day have yet to be replicated in an open ended virtual environment like SecondLife or ActiveWorlds in any official capacity.

 

 

 

 

Oh, they often hated me when I was telling them they could do better, or when I pointed out flaws. But they learned over time that the best compliment for a job well done is when somebody like me says “This is fantastic!” or when the rest of the community looked up to them as innovators, however much a set of rogues they were. Nothing said that more than when we put together a live concert, not once but twice in ActiveWorlds with the band Aztech Rising.

 

The first concert pushed the limits of conventional ideas for “events” in ActiveWorlds by introducing the idea that a live concert could be played in a virtual environment on a large scale, while on the second concert a year later we revamped the entire stadium with particle effects and a custom arena, complete with a fireworks show and lasers. The latter concert took it a step further by introducing the idea that a virtual event can be linked to real life merchandise, and as a result, a shop was available at the stadium during the concert to allow the concert goers to get real life swag such as concert t-shirts, hats and more. Remember, this is an innovation that came out of the minds of wild card prosumers and not traditional education.

 

 

 

 

Later on in places like SecondLife, we take these sorts of ideas for granted. We have events and giveaways, and there are plenty of live performers on a nightly basis. But in those early days, this was totally unconventional, let alone the idea of selling real life merchandise in conjunction with a virtual concert. In an unofficial capacity, this idea continued to blossom, but in a conventional and official capacity that is Linden Lab themselves, the idea has yet to catch on. If anything, the wild cards are still innovating despite Linden Lab constantly trying to put on the brakes.

 

Full footage of the first concert can be watched here on the Aztech Rising archive. 

 

The idea here is that even to this day, the rule of unconventional conventions continues to work with the same brilliant results as they did in the late 1990s and through to 2007 when Nidus reached its end goal and shut down.

 

Recently with IEEE Virtual World Standards  there has been an ongoing project among the group to create demonstrations for the public in order to show the ideas of interoperability. The original idea for this demonstration was to build a multi-universe game of PONG where you’d hit a ball in maybe SecondLife and have it go down the play area, and at the halfway point, disappear and show up in say, ActiveWorlds for instance to be hit back to SecondLife.

 

Now, the people in IEEE Virtual World Standards are some extremely talented and brilliant men and women. However the case may be, I still had an inkling ahead of time that a game of PONG between multiple virtual universes may be entirely outside of their scope. Initially, it should come as no surprise that I asked Jon Bee to contribute on my team in the IEEE group to make this happen, after all he was also one of the people in Nidus and even today he contributes in Andromeda Media Group. I knew this man would be the unconventional convention that was needed.

 

After a number of weeks (maybe a month or two) the group wholly decided it really was outside of their ability to create a PONG game across universes, but luckily for myself and Jon, neither of us attended that meeting to hear a collective defeat. Instead, on a random day the following week, he spent a few hours doing what some of the brightest men and women in virtual environments just recently washed their hands of out of frustration. In a few hours, Jon Bee, the rogue aspect to the high professional aspects of the group, sped through and had a working demonstration of PONG, and later that night he began the link-up between SecondLife and ActiveWorlds.

 

When the early demonstration was given to Tom Starai to show the initial stride in progress, I remember that he was impressed but also assumed that such a stride in progress must have taken a lot more time to accomplish than it did. In his scope of understanding, and based on the efforts prior by the rest of the group, he was under the impression that such an advancement must have interfered with real life endeavors and projects over a longer period that the rest of the group simply could not afford to give attention to, but in the scope of Jon Bee and our unconventional conventions approach what seemed like it should take a few weeks of constant work actually took a few hours in one night.

 

By choosing an unconventional convention, or wild card, the promise of an inter-universe game of PONG was given life in a short amount of time, thus advancing the group as a whole forward where they previously had given up on the idea.

 

Why is this unconventional convention idea so important? Well, by widening the scope and being willing to look for unconventional solutions and people who may not fit our preconceived notions to solve our problems, we often find a wealth of untapped talent and insight. What would seem like an insurmountable challenge becomes trivial, and often with wildly successful outcomes.

 

We find determination, drive and persistence but most of all we find people who aren’t blinded by preconceived notions, training or scope. This is crucial, and ultimately so when we deal with virtual environments like SecondLife or ActiveWorlds.

 

Unconventional SecondLife

 

The reason I’m writing all of this is to lead up to a current conversation I had with one of the Phoenix Team developers recently about why what Linden Lab has been doing all these years actually makes perfect sense when you understand the limited scope of operations they are restricted to.

 

For instance, it seemingly makes no sense to fire Philip Rosedale and replace him with Mark Kingdon, only to fire Mark Kingdon and put Philip back in place, only to replace Philip again with Rod Humble. All of the interim maneuvers that Linden Lab has taken during this constant changeup seems like a company without a clear understanding of virtual environments, and this is ultimately true but for reasons many don’t realize.

 

For instance, Philip Rosedale was more of a visionary than a business leader. He had the charisma and cult of personality aspect down pat, but in business he likely did not speak the same language as those which Linden Lab are indebted to. He looked at things in a manner which would say “This is good for people” but likely had little to say in describing how it was good for the bottom line or how a long tail approach would balance the scales of business versus community.

 

In that frustration, and lack of communication, we saw the introduction of Mark Kingdon who is arguably of a high business pedigree – and his scope for business was shown immediately as he began to shift Linden Lab away from a community aspect and into an Enterprise aspect. I don’t fault Mark Kingdon, because he was merely working within the constraints of his scope, and he really didn’t know the intricacies of a virtual environment ecosystem, nowhere near as well as Philip Rosedale.

 

The problem was that Philip spoke as a visionary but not as a business person. Mark Kingdon spoke as a business person but not as a visionary. When Mark took a lateral step aside and Philip resumed where he left off, we had a visionary at the helm again – but those who Linden Lab are indebted to wanted faster ROI and expansion, even if that meant cannibalizing the ecosystem to make it happen. Philip likely had a crisis of conscience which led him to leave again, being replaced by Rod Humble, who speaks the business of Video Games.

 

Rod is the closest we get to a hybrid of business and visionary, but there is still a lack of ecosystem understanding, and that is very dangerous for Linden Lab in the long run. His scope is video games, and while video games are close to what virtual environments like Second Life are, it isn’t a good enough match to apply the same methodologies, because ultimately the things that work for a video game scope will backfire if applied to a virtual environment scope like Second Life.

 

 

Subtractive Value

 

An excellent example is the recent announcement of the new benefits for Premium membership in SecondLife where you get a free “exclusive” gift and access to Premium Sandboxes to build in. The problem is that the “exclusive” gifts have no added value when free users have access to a plethora of content from the community both free and paid for, and likely those in a free membership would have half a dozen similar sets in their inventory by the time they decided to upgrade to Premium.

 

The other issue is the Sandboxes because this is yet another indication that @Rodvik and those in the marketing group are clearly outside of their scope of understanding. One of the reasons people upgrade to Premium accounts is for the ability to purchase land of their own, which immediately negates the usefulness of a Premium Sandbox. Even as a free user, the private sandbox idea is all but a moot offering in that even free users can rent land, and that again negates the private sandbox idea if even free users can rent their own land, effectively eliminating most of the need for a sandbox up front.

 

The same issue applies to giving Premium Members their own premade “Linden Homes”, in that whatever Linden Lab is offering in that aspect is a pale shadow to what a free or premium user could get on their own. Prefab houses and skyboxes are plentiful on Marketplace, making the selection that Linden Lab offers for Linden Homes look like a joke to the community.

 

 

 

 

Again, if the major added value to a Premium membership is the ability to purchase and sell land, then Linden Homes become a moot offering. Even as a free member you can rent more land and have more options than Linden Lab gives you as an added incentive to become a Premium user. What makes this worse is that leveraging access to legitimate support as a Premium user “added value” tells each and every new user with a free account that you simply don’t give a toss about them, and the last time I checked, that’s a horrendous first impression to be making.

 

So we have Linden Homes being an attempt at relevancy in the already existing homes, land and accessories markets maintained by the userbase ecosystem of prosumers. Sandboxes that miss the underlying understanding that Premium accounts can buy and sell land, making premium sandboxes an error in judgment. Even free users can rent land, and nearly eliminate the need to use sandboxes. Giving “exclusive” gifts is also a moot point since nobody really cares about an exclusive furniture set when they have a mountain of options otherwise, free user or premium.

 

More importantly, however, is that while this does show that their scope is extremely myopic at best, and their understanding is lacking, the worst part about all of this is that these seemingly innocent mistakes in succession have lasting and long term negative effects on the ecosystem that is Second Life. At every step of the way, Linden Lab continually turns in on itself to cannibalize the ecosystem and that’s a very bad thing for not just you and I, but for Linden Lab itself.

 

What we have here, is failure to communicate.

 

I don’t mean that @Rodvik isn’t listening to the community. No, he’s doing an excellent job on that front. However, there is a difference between listening to the community and actually knowing how to interpret what you are hearing into actionable outcomes that foster a balance of understanding for the ecosystem that is Second Life.

 

I do not suspect that even @Rodvik is in a position to be effective at that part, and it’s not a negative thing. Of course it’s not necessarily a positive thing either. What it is, is a lack of proper context in overall fashion of this system.

 

@Rodvik has a lot of business insight pertaining to video games. He’s not a virtual worlds visionary like Philip was, and he’s surely no Chip Morningstar, F. Randal Farmer, or Jaron Lanier.

 

However, that’s what is missing from the equation. This is precisely why Linden Lab continues to falter. You need balance… you need a sound business mind who at least partially understands virtual environments running the place, but you also need a visionary to guide that leader.

 

The visionary, or advisor, shouldn’t be the CEO in this case. No, that job is taken and should be held by somebody who knows business scope. The advisor or visionary position, guides and acts as a mediator between the chaos that is a virtual environment system like Second Life, and the business sense that is traditional thinking and scope. They are the person who can read the tea leaves and explain to the CEO. It’s also the sort of person that is comfortable doing that in reverse as well, as in interpreting the business scope into the ecosystem of the virtual environment.

 

It’s a complimentary sort of role, and nobody needs to be fired to make that happen.

 

I could argue that Philip Rosedale holds some sort of advisory position on the board for Linden Lab, but I doubt it’s an active involvement. If anything, it’s simply a courtesy sort of thing and Philip is likely wanting to put SecondLife behind him and concentrate on his other projects, like Coffee & Power.

 

So what we are left with is the understanding that what is needed to bring balance and healthy expansion back to Second Life is an unconventional convention. There are often times when conventional scopes have little impact, or even negative outcomes when applied, and these are the times when it is prudent to start looking for a rogue to guide you.

 

When we broaden the scope and start looking at unconventional conventions, we eliminate the artificial narrowing of scope we apply out of preconceived bias, and we find solutions that would normally be outright rejected under conventional means, but suddenly offer wildly successful outcomes as a result.

 

Just like a rag-tag group of teenagers can run circles around a corporation using their own technology, and how a wild card user can do what some some of the best in technology collectively wash their hands of in defeat, the solution of introducing a wild card into the mix is our unconventional convention for Linden Lab.

 

You’re not likely to find those wild cards through traditional methods, either. Looking through resumes that dictate traditional education instead of hands-on experience and real-world application will get you people who are classically trained to be blind to the proper solutions. They are trained to think inside the box, so to speak – and there is really nothing wrong with that when in proper context, just like there is nothing wrong with Rodvik, Mark Kingdon, and Philip Rosedale all having a narrow scope which excludes seeing the bigger picture. Those scopes are specialized and have a very important purpose, but without balance – without our wild cards, those narrow scopes change from being an asset to a dangerous destructive force.

 

The day Linden Lab effectively fills an advisory position with a true wildcard that isn’t traditionally educated, but brings a wealth of insight and hands-on experience with virtual environments (not video games) is the day that you’ll see the balance return, and Linden Lab surge ahead in to a second golden age.

 

A second life, for Second Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Be Stupid.

Amending #Google’s motto into something more realistic.

 

I believe Google should be amending their slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be stupid". They've essentially thumbed their noses up at the very nature of the Internet and the roots of what makes it great. Pseudonyms are a part of the very fabric of what make the Internet what it is, and the culture that has given rise to what we know as Cyberspace. While this has brought both good and bad as a result, I believe the very existence of the Internet as we have today is ongoing proof that the good far outweighs the bad.

In a digital culture such as we have today, everybody is famous in their own way, and pseudonyms comprise an irrevocable part of that culture. To make any attempt to deny that history and legacy is to do so at their own risk.

 

 

 

We live in an era of multiplicity of identity, each having proper context and just as much weight as any other name we may use. In that Google wants only a wallet name shows only willful ignorance on their part in failing to understand that they are dealing with people who are represented by multiple identities, interests, and behaviors, all which are a part of a greater whole of the individual.

In a court of law, individuals are innocent until proven guilty. So too should pseudonyms be addressed - they are acceptable until proven otherwise. It is the individual's right to choose what name they use, not a corporation. This is why there are laws in nearly every country on Earth defining the very legality of using a pseudonym at will for a myriad of purposes farther reaching than a simple social network.

While the Electronic Frontier Foundation states in a recent write-up “A Case For Pseudonyms” that companies like Google and Facebook are entirely within their right to forbid pseudonym usage, they also point out that it is horribly short-sighted and often times damaging and even life-threatening to do so. I'd like to believe that Google is not so blinded by short-sighted goals and profits that they are willing to jeopardize the well-being and even lives of others in the process.

If the purpose of Google is stated as being the intention of bringing all the world's knowledge and information together, as well as the people, then they must understand that they simply cannot exclude a majority of the people or outright deny the culture that gave them this opportunity. If it wasn't for a world full of pseudonyms, Google would have no Internet to dominate. For every person, there are multiple identities, each with distinct metrics and differentiation of personality in context of the virtual space in which they inhabit as their domain. In the eyes of Google, this should account for much more opportunity than they currently seem to grasp.

Yet, while Google and Facebook are entirely within their right to deny the use of pseudonyms and demand a wallet name, the price they pay for doing so may, in turn, be far too high for even them to accept. This fiasco is reaching mainstream media, and even celebrities such as William Shatner are lamenting over their profiles being suspended, while others such as @Skud are continuing with interviews in mainstream media railing against these policies, all for the world to read. Twitter is alight with similar discontent from users who have had their profiles suspended for pseudonymous usage, and as these personal accounts continue to mount in public view, the future of Google+ does not look as bright as it once did. While Google+ may, indeed, enjoy a fair amount of success, it will have willingly sabotaged its own growth and success from what could have been a true game changer.

While Google and Facebook are within their rights to deny pseudonyms and even anonymous usages, surely they are not so ignorant as to fail to understand the maelstrom of bad PR and ill-will they create worldwide in doing so. 

 

While it has been claimed that I somehow believe that avatars are real people, I must contest the oversimplification and misstatement of such. Avatars to me are merely digital representations of a person which bare the context of a virtual environment space pseudonym. As I believe that pseudonyms are just as legitimate as a wallet name in all but the most well defined cases, and are protected and sanctioned by nearly every country on Earth through law, I make my claim that I believe that the context of the pseudonym matters little while the actual usage of the pseudonym matters most. In a digital world, we carry many pseudonyms or possibly just one that is well known or chosen, and each usage of such is entirely dependent on the use context – that being the scenario by which the individual decides what personality best suits the digital arena by which they will participate, while retaining the right to manage their multiple personality order as they see fit.

 

In the context of social media, such as Facebook or Google+, the right of the individual to freely choose their forward facing personality and context of immersion is a cherished right and not a privilege. As such, an avatar to me constitutes as much of a real person as I would attribute to that of Mark Twain and the works and actions thereof. Simply using a pseudonym in context does not invalidate any part of the person using it, nor does it make the person behind the pseudonym any less real. By association, therefore, an avatar is the representation of a real person and fueled by the actions of the very real person behind it (excluding the actions of an artificial intelligence bot at this time). However, just like anything having to do with digital representations, an avatar on it’s own does not constitute a real person, but instead constitutes the forward facing chosen identity of a real person in proper context to the digital environment space they are currently participating in. Whether that space is a virtual reality or a social media hub is inconsequential as our multiplicity of identity will eventually become cross-domain and interchangeable, and indeed already has despite efforts by companies to the contrary.

 

This, in and of itself, offers a very profound glimpse into the future of our digital multiplicity, or multiple personality order, in that the concept of “True Names” takes on an entirely different meaning in today’s society than it did prior to the digital age. As a result of this profound paradigm shift, we see today that even large corporate entities such as Google and Facebook somehow are unable to understand the importance of multiplicity of identity, and continue with their attempts to reshape the entire fabric and legacy of what made the Internet and digital culture what it is today.

The final question remains - At what point does the price of their policies become too much to continue? From a perspective of simple common sense, I'd say they've already reached that point, causing more harm to their reputation and social media product than may be reversed before they've managed to make it to an actual launch.

In the end, the point remains: What people are angry about is that their common names are not recognized by Google, and simply offering those people the chance to comply with practices that they already are against is not an answer, in the same light as this "solution" is really further proof that Google is willfully ignoring the very premise of the debate and in doing so, are blatantly insulting the world. If a common name happens to be a Pseudonym, then so be it. There should be no obligation to fill in a field with a wallet name, and a pseudonym should be just as acceptable - if not more acceptable since in many cases, the world is more likely to know the pseudonym than the wallet name.

 

While I’ve heard the opposite take on this subject, being that we are not “forced” to use Google+ or any of Google’s services, that is much like asserting that a near monopoly of services aren’t forcing you to use them. Simply because a company offers great things, and arguably better than competition, does not constitute a right to demand things from your users that can be dangerous. Yes, as users, we are the commodity not the customer, however I challenge that notion since we are willingly trading mountains of information about ourselves on a daily basis for access to a service, which in turn make these companies a lot of money. We are, indeed, customers in that we are paying for these services with something vastly more valuable than money – our own privacy and identity. The very least we can do is draw a line in the sand for one crucial piece of information that we alone should have control over – and that is our own identity and how it is presented.

Because of this, I have chosen to refer to Google as a company whose motto should be changed to "Don't be stupid." It is far more fitting given the current situation, and bares repeating when a company such as Google seems to have entirely missed the obvious.

Signed,
Will Burns
Object Interoperability Lead | IEEE Virtual World Standards
Aeonix Aeon in SecondLife

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow
Co-Founder Electronic Frontier Foundation

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.