A person showed up and attempted to engage the crowd. The more experienced people were ignoring this person, so I did too.

After a few minutes the person began repeatedly screaming, “LOOK AT ME”. Eventually everyone stopped talking. The dog and pony show that had been prepared was executed and, predictably, resulted in an ejection and a ban.

In the end, “Look At Me” may be the complete extent of any griefer’s motivation.

“Lastly, I want to point out the supreme irony in all this “this is a form of protest” stuff. If this is indeed a protest, then it strikes me that it is the griefers who are taking the net too seriously.”

Excellent point, Sunspot!

As to their motivation, why do they think that the internet, in particular, is too serious? Why do they tolerate seriousness in everything but one particular mode of communication? Why are they not setting off stink bombs in offices or standing outside funeral parlours with water pistols? The answer, no doubt, is because it would be far easier to catch them doing that, and that they would see people’s distress first hand and might feel uncomfortable about it.

Yeah, I wonder about this too, it’s an excellent point, and thank you for making it. Especially the part of why they focus on just the internet mode of interaction. I think you hit it on the head – it’s because they can get away with it online. All the other stuff is just a smokescreen, in my opinion.

That’s OK though, because some day, sooner than later, the rest of the world is going to catch up to the net, and they won’t be tolerated anymore, not anymore than juvenile delinquent vandals are in first life.

I want to address Lem for a moment.

Lem, I completely disagree with your assessment of these griefers, but I will humour you, for the sake of debate.

So, let’s say it IS a protest. Great. In life, (and the internet is part of life, despite the bizarre desire many people have to cordon it off as “not real life” – do they do that with telephones and while at sporting events too, one wonders?), if you want to have a protest, you inform the city you want to protest in, or you end up in jail, and even then – if you hold an approved protest, if things get out of hand, people still end up going to jail, and they get criticised.

Simply labeling an event as a protest doesn’t afford it some sort of immunity from law, criticism, nor widely accepted societal norms. Most of the time, these kids do their dirty work on other people’s property – not the hallmark of a true protest. I would entertain your point more, if most of the antics these kiddies pull were done mostly on Linden owned land, but that’s far from the case.

My goodness, if I used your definition for protest, my little cousins who were caught vandalising their neighbourhood (and their school) last summer could be viewed as protestors. I’ll think I will just stick to my thoughts that my uncle and his wife are terrible parents. And they are.

As far as you going on about “listening to them”, meh – I am not here to, nor am I obliged to, nor should anyone EXPECT me to listen to the “protests” other people’s failures at parenting; I am here to entertain myself and make some money. I get enough of dealing with other people’s parenting disasters in my first life, thank you. Further, I really doubt that simply listening to them will get them to stop.

We already heard…

… and we got the message – we’re too serious about the internet, and many of us disagree.

I’m not going to change because of teh opinions of some kids on teh internet.

Lastly, I want to point out the supreme irony in all this “this is a form of protest” stuff. If this is indeed a protest, then it strikes me that it is the griefers who are taking the net too seriously.

Onto the original topic – the article. I am a subscriber to Wired and just got around to reading that article yesterday. While I appreciated Dibbel’s info about the history of SA, et al, (I knew quite a bit already, but he filled in some gaps for me), I really did not appreciate his kid gloves portrayal of griefers.

But the vast majority of the griefers you meet on online platforms are just adolescent boys (of any age) shouting for some attention with the only means they can imagine: annoying or attacking others. Their methods are rarely creative. My 8yr old son behaves like this, too, especially when he is tired or bored. Most children do so during certain phases in their development. It is especially widespread among groups of boys where griefing (bullying, destroying stuff, clowning around, disturbing other groups who do “serious” stuff etc.) is an easier way, often, to get attention/ acknowledgment/ reputation than creative accomplishments. It is annoying but nothing to worry about, too much.

But it is rather sad, when the boys get stuck with these behavioral patterns. And there is not need to glorify this behavior.

Indeed, if it has a message and the message is understood, it is a protest.

I wouldn’t bet that message is understood. Nor I would bet that they tried to get understood. And let’s stop pretending that there is a message at all.
That story about seriousness was just made up to make a bit of publicity. What is so bloody serious about furry community? What is so serious about help islands and sandboxes? Nothing, they are just high traffic areas.

And Dibbell is not one who is trying to understand the fenomenon. Or he missed to share that in his article.

Lem, when you protest you say why you protest and you do that loud, clear and often. I’ve spent too many of my days on the streets not to know how those things work. If you talking about soft protests in the form of cultural movements (very common to XX century) even those have signs, symbols and manifestos. If you talk about a teenage that do a crazy haircut to protest against society (though that kid is protesting just because of hormonal shock and a bit of adolescent frustration)… well, go to your parents and protest, they are the only who need to listen. And when that kind of protest go out of the family and start damaging other people’s property, then it is not protest anymore, it is deliquency.

Sure, Mario heads proliferating throughout my virtual tea party is not really a big deal, but let’s not legitmize and mythologize what are essentially online fascists with nothing to contribute except grief and destructive power struggles. These people aren’t working for your liberty folks, despite what they’ll say in public.

It’s a simple rule for a free, open society: you are free to do as you wish, have fun any way you want, as long as you are not interfering with the basic rights of others. Griefers get their jollies by trampling the rights of others, and as such they are fascist shit.

As to their motivation, why do they think that the internet, in particular, is too serious? Why do they tolerate seriousness in everything but one particular mode of communication? Why are they not setting off stink bombs in offices or standing outside funeral parlours with water pistols? The answer, no doubt, is because it would be far easier to catch them doing that, and that they would see people’s distress first hand and might feel uncomfortable about it.

It is extremely probable that the real reason that these people focus their attention on the internet is not because they have any set of beliefs about how seriously that the internet, in particular, ought be taken, but because it is easier to get away with things like that on the internet (and especially in virtual worlds and multilayer games) than it is in person-to-person situations, and because the human effects are more distant, and therefore those who perpetrate the immature acts are less likely to be made to feel uncomfortable.

These people are not “psychopaths”, as the person interviewed suggested: if they were, they would draw no distinction between standing outside the funeral parlour with water pistols and griefing in online environments. They are just little boys who haven’t grown up and want to have their immature fun without feeling bad about it or getting caught. They are the online equivalents of people who spray graffiti on trains or set off fire alarms for fun, except that the latter tend to grow out of it by the time that they reach about eighteen years of age.

When a mob runs in the streets, burning and looting, it is still a form of protest because you know what triggered it, even if they don’t carry signs and publish a list of demands. I admit that the griefer groups are not very communicative about their motivations, but they occasionally get involved in the debates and you can hear their voices if you listen. More importantly, there have been plenty of people from outside of the groups discussing this, the Wired article is not the first, maybe only the clearest and the more authoritative. And this is what bugs me, that there is so much explained there about what there is in terms of motivation and culture of the organized griefers, and yet people hear only what they want to hear. Dandellion, for instance, picks on one instance (the destruction of the EVE ship) that Wired presents as an exception and that is even technically impossible in SL and she focuses on that.

Yes, their protest is against the “serious” Internet and against the people who take it seriously at the other end of the spectrum. Businesses, extropians, role-players (no offence, some of my best friends are in those categories). And yes, they do bring something to our culture. You may laugh, but I consider flying penises to be indeed a contribution to the SL culture. It brings balance and it keeps most of us somewhere in the middle of the seriousness spectrum.

What makes you otherwise think that you understand what motivates these organized griefers? There are all these comments spreading like memes that griefers are bullies, they must be doing it because they enjoy hurting people, what other reason could there be? But how do you know that? It is really a meme, carried on by enough people saying the same thing. I doubt that you have directly interacted with any organized griefers (I can’t say I have either beyond reading some of their public comments, but I ended up seeing something true in all of the arguments). For once, someone like Dibbell comes along and shows there is more behind this and yet that doesn’t get through to most people. I cannot do it better than Dibbell and I’ll just give up. Nobody even really has to understand, I only think it is interesting and useful if you do.