The future of the internet and how to stop it

looks like a book worth reading.

Brings up the balance between the "sterile" and "generative", with the boom of 90s being because of the technology becoming generative, and the current success flipping it back into sterile field. It's quite insightful and relevant for anyone - thinking of where is their place in this emerging soup. Long watch, but very much worth it.

Human beings will always betray you

Ciaral Laval posts an interesting question/news: apparently the stuff created by "Cory Linden" is now seen as created by "Cory Ondrejka", and there is a discussion of "Is using your real life name for your avatar name good or what ?"

I can understand the possible reasoning on LL side for musing with this idea - the attempt to avoid the burden of regulating the world by attaching this burden to possibly "spoiling" one's RL identity by "wrong" inworld actions in SL, and as well to assist in RL legislation over the activities of SL.

To me, quite frankly, this would mean the end of the "our world, our imagination" thing, and it's one of the worst moves that LL could make - unless they want just to become a kind of "virtual 3D communications platform for real world".

I've been always saying that one thing SL did not do what it could - to become a field for trying out the possible completely and crazily new economic and society ideas, at a relatively small expense - compared to trying them out in the real world. Ok, well, maybe replacing the centrally-issued currency with some other form of interaction is too much - so the crazily new economic ideas are out. But still there is/was the interesting social experiment - how will the world organize if left unregulated.

The absence of the bind of RL name to avatar name inworld, means that the people are able to act genuinely, with much less constraints put on them - hence allowing for a better exposure of the true human nature, as opposed to the "human nature altered by the society, economics, and current morale".

But as soon as you bind the RL name to SL name - you push the actions under the microscope of their interaction with the real world.

There's quite an interesting video documentary series. I do nt agree with at least some parts of it, yet it makes one think and wonder - which is, although painful, is always a good thing.

It makes me draw some parallels, and argue that if there is a RL name exposed by inworld, this means the end of SL.



SL is unique in comparison to many other environments is that there is no explicit purpose in playing it. So, it is an extreme experiment in "negative liberty" as defined by Isaiah Berlin - see the third movie of the documentary series for an indepth discussion on this.

I'd argue that the low concurrency numbers of SL and declining growth are the consequence of the absence of purpose. The exponential growth was the hype that has arised there - you can make millions while not standing up from your chair!. While not necessarily the most sophisticated (there might be some things in the world that are better than money), it is certainly a purpose. And this has attracted new millions to SL.

And together with that there was a discovery of wildly deviant behaviours for someone with "augmentist" view on SL and strong conservative view on RL - so there were vocal few who said "Pheww... Beurk!", and the chanting crowd that always follows the leaders went into the same spin - and the same folks who a few months before were blindly singing hallelujah, were now throwing the stones. Couple this with some attempts to regulate the scammers or the biz that was not legal according to the US legislation - and you get what we have now.

Cory pushed out or simply left, Philip steps down, and everyone seems to understand and welcome the move. I can understand both. It gets boring - it gets exactly the same like any other business. Noone would argue that the toilet paper is extremely important, yet it's not something worldchanging - and it's worldchanging possibility that I like SL for, not just being an "3d business platform".

Nobody Fugazi argues that it would be hard to introduce this in a way that hurts the community. I would argue the opposite - it is hard to introduce this in a way that does *not* hurt the community.

As a pure "3d business platform", SL is years before being mature. Besides, if i am in for a serious business, like buying the car, I'll still prefer to go to the dealer and try out the real thing. It's this magic smell of "you can be anything and anyone and do almost anything without bringing the baggage of your RL reputation and without risking much" that makes SL so special.

Do not take it that SL reputation is not important - I hope "Dalien Talbot" has some reputation and some image, which I value. It's maybe even not so different from the one of the meatball behind the keyboard, but I prefer to keep the two - to be able to clearly separate where I try things and dream about things - here, and where I do the things "as I am supposed to".

If that little invisible and shaky wall of different identities disappears - there will be much less room for experiment - and, remember, as they say, human beings will always betray you, so think twice before you fully trust your avatar life fully to them...

30 pieces of silver...

I've been reading up so much on the SL content piracy in the blogs, that it is not much fun anymore.

Some of the folks it's an easy problem that should "just be fixed", and it is not fixed yet merely because of the stupidity and ignorance of the punk libertarian tekkies.

Some of the folks realise it's a damn hard thing, entangled with psychology, economy, philosophy, one's notion of integrity, and somewhat a little bit technical (I applaud Ordinal for the well balanced analysis of the situation - but call up for the benevolent dictator to appear out of the box and fix everything.

Personally, I believe in the openness.
However, one thing I question is if we'd take a random sample of 1000 avatars from the crowd - how many of them would knowingly go and save 30 silver pieces in exchange of their integrity ?

I've mentioned the experiment the other day - but today I thought - there's already quite a few places live, where this kind of experiment might take places - it's just a matter of exposing them.

For this purpose I've created a new blog Second Thefts: the alleged thefts in SL revealed and openly discussed.

The rest is written there, and I will be looking forward for any posts there, and we will see how the experiment turns out.

A random noise about common sense, but without any trace of it

Reading the comment of Taran on the post on virtuallyblind about the agelock, I thought - indeed, if all was done with a common sense in mind, it would all be so much easier...

But the reality is, everyone has his own "common" sense - and the laws are merely an attempt to formalize this in a way which would look "common sense enough". Note, that with the time this sense does change.

With the internet village in mind, this brings a funny construct - a law system, which would be automatically constructed, based on the, say, the average of all of the "locally acceptable" behavioral spaces, as defined by everyone in the village. The results would be collected and automatically processed, forming the "lawful" behaviour for the next time interval.

Could be a good idea to adjoin it with the tax collection - which can be much less in that case, since the lawmaking function is essentially automated.

But since making the personal copy of the laws is going to be even more boring than filing up the tax form, there would be a set of outsourcing companies which would help to offload this function.. You come, you consult them, and get your copy of the law to be submitted.

In the simplest case, with application of the exactly the same strategy for all the customers of any given "lawmaking consult", all of them get the same kind of "personal law". So, it would be pretty much exactly the same as the current political parties.

And they can sell their "lawmaking product" to the citizens, who would then advertize the brilliant qualities of it on the internet. Now, of course, in order to be effective, they would need to not only have a good package, but also have a bulk of the customers - to have enough weight.

Which would be achieved the same way it is done in any business - by good price and good quality.
This way the incompetence will automatically go out of business just by means of normal economic competition.

Now, that was an easy case. Consider the scenario when the "lawmaking co." is offering the custom services to each customer. The results of such an exercise at large would be the end behavioural space which is closest to what the majority desires - i.e. a perfect law system.

Now, we just have to learn how to capture and encode these acceptable behavioral spaces from everyone within their lifetime, at least.

LA flights are now flying in SL

Stumbled on the secondrussia.ru (the text is in russian). One of the possible sources - SLNN.

Basically, seems like now the folks from SL can look at the airspace above the LAX (Los Angeles International airport) inworld, almost realtime.

Although the pic on the russian site does show the 3d view of the airspace, and the SLNN article mentions the "zooming" on the aircraft - I wonder whether this kind of location is the most practical form :)

Flying all around the sim, trying to find the aircraft is more of an entertainment value, than practical use. At least they should provide a convenient billboard which would TP the interested avatar into the current location of the plane, so they do not have to search for it :)

The next step is to equip the airplanes with built-in translucent LCD screens in the windows - so the passengers could see the glazing avatars on the outside :) But this is much more expensive. And there might be some nervous types out there who might not like it :)

If you spend too much time in SL...

...you maybe should exercise to ensure you stay in shape and can still move yourself in the meatworld. But you could also do both at the same time, and tease your friends who have to exercise while staring at the wall in the fitness:




Via: O'Reilly Radar, there's more fun links in the original blogpost, check it out.