It’s time to give voice to Extropia DaSilva again — and she’s back with an earlier topic, which she has expanded quite neatly on this latest essay of hers. Enjoy! — Gwyn

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID.

The ability to replicate the means of production themselves from cheaply available elements is what underlies most of the utopian expectations of a society with molecular nanotechnology. One commentator on an online forum asked ‘why the hell would anyone pay for something nano makes with no effort?’. Second Life, though, suggests such an argument holds no water. After all, this is a world whose content is built from resources instantly available wherever you happen to be at negligible cost, and which can be duplicated with no effort. But most reporting on Second Life does not describe a world where products are given away free. Instead, it’s all about the money. ‘Non-existant’ objects being bought and sold for real cash, land barons earning fortunes from virtual property. Also, Gwyneth Llewelyn wrote about the socio-political beliefs that SL residents subscribe to (‘Anarcho-syndicalists’, ‘Anarcho-capitalists’, ‘libertarian/neoliberalists’). Of these groups, only the first ‘idealise a SL where money, land and prim limits are unnecessary’. I don’t know how many residents consider themselves to be anarcho-syndicalists, but common sense dictates that the group believing money is unnecessary are in a minority compared to the many groups who consider it necessary, for the simple reason that the latter are many and the former is one. (more…)

Fashion shows have always been popular in Second Life, and with the current generation of highly talented fashion designers bringing a unique — and very realistic! — touch to high-quality clothes in SL, it’s interesting to see how, in a little less than a week, people have been talking about “rules of conduct” on a fashion show.

In fact, they’re much less “rules of conduct” but guidelines of what you’re allowed to wear or not when attending those shows. So far, so good (fashion shows in Maoist China weren’t a pleasure to attend…), but strangely enough, those “guidelines” are based on an incorrect perception of the hugest problem on those shows: lag.

While it’s undeniable that all highly attended events are laggy — it’s a limitation of the technology — I was surprised to see that almost all “rules” are based on very old limitations of the SL technology, which plagued us in 2003-2005, but that have since then be “fixed” by Linden Lab, as both the client and the server software have dramatically improved.

Improved, yes, but the lag is still with us. And, in a desperate attempt to fight down lag, people are coming up with ancient “recipes” for fixing lag — unaware that they’re not really helping out, but just repeating old myths, that simply don’t reflect the state-of-the art of LL’s technology these days. Lag will remain with us for many more years, but not for the same reasons we had it in 2003-2005.

Read Brace Coral’s, Hamlet Au’s or Ana Lutetia’s blog posts on fashion show lag… and then let’s take a look at those myths, why they are still popular enough to be part of the “rules of conduct”, and, well, what we can really do about fighting lag using the technology of 2008.

And let’s enjoy those fashion shows! (more…)

This is the actual title of a white paper released by Proximity London, a well-known creative marketing agency in the UK. Last September, they have concluded a research on virtual worlds, and the purpose of their lead in-house researcher, John Urpeth, was to dispel the myths spread around by the media about virtual worlds.

I came across John Urpeth’s paper, presented on a conference where Justin Bovington a.k.a. fizik Baskerville, CEO of Rivers Run Red, Britain’s (and probably Europe’s) largest Metaverse Development Company, also was a speaker. Sadly, this conference seemed to have been totally ignored by the media; I just happened across the actual paper presented by Urpeth today, through a marketing & advertising feed that I subscribe (and often ignore!).
(more…)

In a surprising and unexpected move, Linden Lab has just announced that they are going back to become a 3D content provider as before — after an almost two-year-long hiatus of zero content production.But… there is a twist! This time, under the name of “The Linden Department of Public Works”, Jack Linden encourages crowdsourcing again — getting a cartload of volunteers with a lot of spare time, spread them across the grid and… well, as he claims:

What will we work on? Good question; basically, we will consider anything and everything that we feel will make the mainland more attractive, fun, engaging and interesting for new or existing residents.

So what does this mean? Linden Lab is back with a zero-cost team of talented developers, eager to work 16-hours-a-day for a pat in the back, and are remodelling the mainland — again? Why? What for?What dramas will unfold, as residents-overseen-by-Lindens become grid-famous and start outsourcing their work to Big Corps? Will these people be hand-picked by Linden Lab? Is the Linden Lab Approved Builder Certification being beta-tested with this new effort? Will the Metaverse Development Companies cry foul, as Linden Lab steps back into the content creation business? Or is Linden Lab just getting ready to beautify the mainland, parcel it off, and send it off to the land barons to manage? Or, well, are they listening to the comments made back in 2003-5 when so many residents had volunteered to do exactly that, and, seeing how things worked with the Volunteer Teams (Mentors et al), they felt it was time to expand the model on the mainland with different sets of people?Oh, and perhaps you should attend the Linden Department of Public Works’ Office Hours soon. They promise to be… interesting.

Second Life grows slowly, and, as any new technology, it is prone to journalistic abuse to infuse terror and panic on the mainstream masses.

This time, the threat comes from the Washington Post. There is really just one paragraph worth reading there, which is the single drop of sanity in an ocean of absurdity:

Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan group that monitors privacy issues, said he heard the same worries from the government when cell phones became popular in the 1980s and again when mainstream American logged on to the Internet in the 1990s.

Of course, the rest of the article mostly ignores Jim Dempsey, travelling instead the whole road of how Second Life is being used by terrorist cells to communicate, plan, and organise their next attacks, and how the several agencies with three-letter acronyms in the US are all heading towards the virtual words to create “cyberterrorism counter-units”.

Ludicrous.

Also, this is “old news” and vastly discussed in previous years. It’s incredible how some journalists, in their eagerness to condemn virtual worlds and ruin the virtual economy and virtual societies, recycle “bad news” from the past, change the order of the paragraphs, add a few more quotes (often cited out of context), and republish exactly the same article that was written 10 or 20 years ago.

In my next incarnation, I wish I were reborn as a Luddite journalist. One could make a career out of it, just writing one single article for my whole life, and doing a search & replace on a few words every time a new paradigm-shifting technology is released…