Soph, if we did learn something from recent history, is that human experiences (extending to society and politics) are contagious. In the currently wired world — covering around a third of this planet’s overall population, which is amazing to say the least — ideas and concepts spread like wildfire and they are almost impossible to contain (even China is dropping their firewalls!).

Although I understand your point between “colonialism” and “settlement”, I think that we’re past an age where the concept still applies. The digital era makes everything smoothly uniform, as concepts spill over all barriers — distance, culture, national borders. It’s unavoidable, like so many autocratic RL governments have found out. The more connected a population is, the more it is exposed to all different kinds of ideas. If you wish, you can call it a “cultural colonialism” of a sorts, in the sense that everyone who is online gets affected by it.

We can still artificially raise barriers, like the RIAA still tries, but ultimately these will all fail. Thus, as time goes by, the clear division of what “colonialism” and “settlement” is will definitely blend and merge — and specially so on virtual worlds, which are inhabited by human beings who are used to live in the digital age.

Just look at what the major influences were on Second Life when it started: it absorbed the leftist culture of the young Internet, used by the early adopters — the “share everything” and “information ought to be free” attitude, and the “I wish recognition, not payment” reward methodology. Not many years afterwards, Second Life was immediately “infected” by the second wave of Internet adopters (the mainstream pragmatists): rampant capitalism. Both were attitudes developed outside virtual worlds, but quickly adopted and implemented in Second Life; of course, having a far larger number of people, the second wave was predominant. But we’re certainly living in a Second Life which is the result of a “colonised” environment that adopted the prevalent attitudes in the digital era. They were even little changed; things like spam and scams became commonplace in SL as they are on the Internet. Not surprisingly, “mature content” also has a similar degree of adoption in SL (about a fifth of all content is mature) as it has on the Internet.

I would be very surprised that we will consistently encounter “a synthetic culture taking into account local circumstances, consciously choosing the best among available alternatives, tried and untried, and creating a new place apart from the parent society”. In fact, what is happening is rather the contrary: the “parent society” (our planet, Earth) influences directly what the culture looks like, with just a few exceptions here and there (which obviously also exist in the physical world: we still have pockets of counter-culture on Earth, and these will not disappear). I’m hardly shocked: after all, the people are the same. We don’t leave our brains out of the door when we log in to SL. Well, at least most of us don’t

However, that doesn’t mean that the emerging culture in SL is an exact copy of the one in the “parent society”. Just like democracy in Europe changed subtly when it was “adopted” in the US — but both kinds are still democracies! — several things will be slightly changed inside virtual worlds. A good example is something as simple as the basis of enforcement: in the physical world, we can die violently, so governments enact a monopoly on violence (this basically means that acting violently on your own is illegal). But avatars don’t die. Instead, they own land. Thus, enforcement in SL is done not by violence, but by withholding the rights to land. Nevertheless, a democracy based on land will be fundamentally similar than one based on the monopoly of violence. Both will allow people (“citizens”) to self-rule themselves through electing members of government via a popular vote, and apply laws that affect their common lives. Just the method of enforcement will be different.

This naturally will extend to almost all areas of human culture and society inside a synthetic, digital world. We have SL-specific art inside SL, too, but that does not mean we have gotten rid of art critics: they do exist and fullfill the same role as in the atomic world. We learn and teach SL-related skills just like in the atomic world we learn about acountancy or computer software or common law. We gravitate towards personalities; we lobby for things we deem important; we assert our intellectual property rights, but instead of filing our creations with a Trademark Office or the RIAA, we just click on checkboxes to disallow transfer. And we even pay taxes! (it’s just called “tier” )

I’m afraid I have to side with Aliasi on this. We can, indeed, isolate ourselves from the “mainstream SL culture” and create our own pocket of utopia, and refuse to be “contaminated” by either our parent society or even by the mainstream SL culture. This happens all the time, and there are quite a lot of examples of those (proportionally speaking, far more than in the atomic world). But ultimately these will be tiny exceptions in the vast ocean of what virtual worlds are going to be.

What I also believe is that there will be “cross-contamination”. Things done well in SL (or any other digital, synthetic world) will influence the atomic world in a slight degree. I take an example which is dear to Linden Lab: education/training and in-world meetings (including seminars, workshops, presentations…). SL residents, in both cases, have successfully demonstrated that things like “physical presence” (e.g. face-to-face discussion in the physical world) are of little importance — even less in SL than, say, on the Web (and eBay and Amazon certainly are the best examples on how the lack of a physical presence does not affect commerce in any way!). Just right now we’re experimenting with new tools and methods that allow marketeers to do consumer profiling in ways that are simply not possible in the physical world (inside SL, you don’t only know how many people visited your location — you know their names, too!). Good or bad, virtual worlds will allow a certain degree of experimentation which will also transform the atomic world — whether right now people accept that or not. But in 1900 nobody would imagine that City Halls would be regulating car traffic in the future or force architecture to take into account the need to park cars on streets and garages. Or that homes would be redesigned to allow some space for the family to watch TV together.

I’m quite sceptical myself that virtual worlds will really show us that “alternative” ways of building societies are possible. These will be swallowed up, as always, by the mainstream, which is ruthless and unforgiving. The best I can hope for is that a few good ideas escape back to the physical world, and, through these few good examples, fullfill Linden Lab’s mission of “improving human condition through virtual worlds”.

It’s a bold aim, but I gather that the impact will be larger than we all might think. After all, nobody predicted how quick the change was once 2 billion human beings had access to computers, and 3 billions have mobile phones in their purses (or pockets). There was a change. We just absorbed it into our mainstream culture and never thought twice about it any more.

Unless we change the way humans think and react to other humans, exploring virtual worlds will just be like exploring anything else where humans have gone: after settlement will come contamination by the mainstream. I cannot think that virtual worlds are “safe” from that contamination, although I certainly think that new ideas that will shape our society — blending the virtual and the physical so that there is no real difference between both — will definitely pop up and grow more than we currently believe.

So I have to agree the barrier is wishful thinking, at best, and yet not wholly impractical. There are already such things existent, after all. BDSM parties. Historical re-enactment. Live-action roleplayers. All of these are situations which say, “within these bounds, the rules are different”… and that’s cool.

If you want a place where you can be your ’secondary’ and not deal with your ‘primary’ and all the rest of the extropian jargon, get yer own simulator and post the rules. No different in general principle than running a nudist colony… but kindly don’t ask that anyone else follow your lead elsewhere. I keep a modicum of seperation between meatspace and virtual, but I’m more or less the same person in both; the only difference is I have a touch more freedom of self-expression in a virtual world.

I agree with just about everything you say on your second and third pages, but I have to disagree in part with your depiction of my own views.

Your analysis of how a society comes to integrate a new technology into itself is terrific, and it’s an apt depiction of how digital worlds will come to be generally used in the coming decade.

But your analysis presupposes a unitary culture, and overlooks a key difference between digital worlds and the other technologies you address.

What separates SL (and in time other worlds) from the telephone, the automobile, from currency, is that it establishes *place* and *embodiment*. The telephone, the automobile, did not create new social, economic and political *places,* but rather erased the barriers between them.

I think the analogy between SL and the opening of a new physical place for settlement – Antarctica, say, or a space station – is a strong one. They are all new places for living in, beginning as blank vessels to be filled with culture.

Now, there are two approaches to entering into such a space. One is to import all the culture – the laws, the economic relations, the fashions, the architecture, the sexual customs – of the society people came from, and just extend the old culture into the new space, absorbing the new space as part of the old.

That’s called colonialism.

The other approach is to try new things, to create a synthetic culture taking into account local circumstances, consciously choosing the best among available alternatives, tried and untried, and creating a new place apart from the parent society.

That’s called settlement, and it has two great values. It can offer a better life to the people who settle, by replacing ineffective, unpleasant or downright evil traditions with newer, better systems. Its other value is as an example to those living under the old order, an existence proof that better ways are possible.

Whether synthetic worlds will be colonies or settlements is a question still very much up in the air, though the colonialists tend to be louder (myself excepted!) and to get most of the press.

I’m a digital nationalist, an anti-colonialist, but by no means a separatist: I see the “magic circle” as potentially a national border, one which allows a vast amount of free exchange of goods, ideas and people, but does provide some level of protection for the development of a national culture and institutions which may diverge from the dominant political consensus.

I hope that experiments with economic and political systems can thrive in SL, face tests in use, and evolve naturally, without being IMF’d out of existence by that dominant political consensus.

I think that’s a goal we both share.

Coming first to SL out of curiosity, I too soon began to derive “real” income from atomic world companies. And my relationships with a number of the people I met became more than just SL relationships, meaning we use real world names.

Yet as I continued to do consulting there is a great deal of hesitation on the part of others with a different view of SL. If they do not identify themselves and I can not reach them outside of Second Life, doing work for them was not possible for me. I had been burnt by one such relationship and so am now understandably am hesitant.

Yet I’m on the board of a charity that has a SL presence and one of my questions is what is our mission here and how is it different than our mission in the physical world? How is it changed by the fact that it’s perceived by some as being less personal while others would claim that it’s even more personal – or with totally different personas or aspects of our selves?

Thanks for the thought provoking piece. And for providing a forum for talking about this sort of question.

I think I agree more with you than with Soph here. The line between digital and physical worlds will blur and disappear as technology makes virtual reality more real and physical reality more virtual.

I must say, and some people here will not like it, that I see no fundamental difference between SL, email, IM, videoconferencing, phone or snailmail. They are all useful communication tools that help us do more things and faster. Some are, of course, way more efficient than others for specific applications.

I think the question of whether digital issues will be considered important will be self-solving — as digital worlds become more important to more people, then of course it will be considered important to them. Just like digital privacy is important to a set of people now.

Miraculously I can’t think of a super-long comment to swamp your blog with beyond this, so I’ll just leave it at that!