It's the end of the world as we I know it, and I feel fine.

So this week seems like an end, and surprisingly I'm okay with it. Not a big dramatic END or an apocalyptic explosion, just a quiet transition point that means very little to anyone not paying close attention, and means perhaps everything in retrospect. Or nothing... I need to admit up front it's entirely possible that it's all in my head - virtual worlds are incredibly good at amplifying solipsism.



But here we are, about six years into this experiment in a 3d virtual world that was not explicitly a game. Linden Lab has a new bunch of folks at the top, including several from Adobe with a focus on customer experience. Both Cory and Phillip have Left The Building. The company is obviously shifted hard towards the business end of things and if you're interested in the bottom line, that's probably a good thing.

On the independent content creator front, the stench of lawsuits is in the air, Bettina has just closed up the NPIRL blog presence. Linden this week very publicly launched their deep-scan DMCA takedown tools, and a number of content creators are leaving or already left some time ago (some loudly, most simply walked off into the sunset). I've never been fond of the major "content creation conglomerates" who tended to underpay and overwork, but these too are gone from the grid.

It's hard in some ways to make the case that this is all bad exactly. It's more like Growing Up, and so I won't rage against the dying of the light, but I will sit wistfully and sip my coffee, and watch the sun come up on the night after what was a really great party, where some weird shit went down, but nobody actually died.

(Incidentally, my virtual alter ego takes this less lightly and will not go gentle into this good night. Instead he stays up all night shouting Ginsberg and writing protest slogans in sharpie across the back of my laptop. He's been reading over my shoulder too much, mostly Wired Shut and probably also this paper I am going to be presenting in about a week at Kings College in London. No worries, his voice will get tired soon anyway, and he's got the attention span of a goldfish.)

Second Life was childish and selfish and ridiculous and silly, and yes more than occasionally pornographic, violent and ugly. It was a big giant horrible beautiful mess - like all of the brains of all of it's users suddenly exploded into a seething mass of Id. In retrospect, because of this it's astounding that it has survived at all. Truly astounding that major corporations, including the one I work for, ever set foot there. Amazing that we're still there.

Linden knows this, and so the great cleanup began. It's the natural way of things in the real world anyway, where the agenda more often than not is set by those with cash in hand, but of course as truly insipid as the name is, the "Second" part of the name "Second Life" always held out promise of a break from this reality. It's difficult to watch the first time a child runs into a sharp corner, the first time someone gets dumped, the first time they realize that the world is not really their friend.

I can't really leave you on such a sad note, so even though I'm writing what amounts to a eulogy, here's a ray of hope: There are still a lot of people on the grid making beautiful things. There are new people signing up every day, and some of them might have stronger ideas that I do about how to make things wonderful again. Better still, there are people in the world who understand that there are reasons to make and share your vision that aren't so relentlessly commerce driven. My avatar might be a nutcase, but he's not wrong - Creative Commons and the open source movement both provide a reasonable grown-up framework that proves the Bazaar AND the Cathedral can coexist, even if at times it seems we've leaned a bit too far towards one side of the sacred or profane.

Concretely, I hold out a secret hope that there are people at Linden who understand the difference between creating something for the common good and creating a business. Ideally, Linden would break the infrastructure portion of it's company off into a nonprofit entity like the Mozilla foundation, who would work on open source software to run the original vision of the "3D web." This would hardly cut into the bottom line - Linden itself could become the primary content holder for all existing content, continue to run Mainland and provide hosting and support service for corporations that want to run Nebraska Second Life Enterprise or their own islands. Perhaps they would chose to spinoff Zindra or the Teen Grid into their own companies, independent entities all sharing a common infrastructure and yes, even permissions system. It could happen.

For now even as you shave off your mowhawks and put away your noserings, remember to hold on tight to your friends and never let go of your sense of wonder. Interesting things are always interesting.

Goodnight.

-T

Story Time with Uncle Madtone!: Opening 10/17 6pSLT

[Visit Story Time with Uncle Madtone! - IBM2]
OPENING SATURDAY 9/17 @ 6p SLT/9p EST

From day one I have wanted to host a full-sim Madcow build. I'm even more pleased to host an epic Madcow Cosmos / Lorin Tone mashup! With voice actors!

When I asked for a bio, the team sent me this: "Madcow Cosmos has no formal training in any 3d rendering software or other artistic skills aside from the culinary, but enjoys working with art of almost any nature at an amateur level." In this build he's working with Lorin Tone: "a maker of noises of all kinds and a Sound/Music Designer with twisted brain."

While I'm happy to agree with the twisted brain and the obvious enjoyment bit, amateur couldn't be further from the truth - MadTone's universe rivals the best 3d and cartoon environments I've seen, with a style so unique you couldn't copy it if you tried.

Perhaps more important is the absolute sheer joy that Madcow and Lorin bring to the grid. A tonic for whatever ails you, this is amazingly rendered pure fun with a brilliant sense of humor. Plan on spending at least an hour to really explore.




Text courtesy of Uncle Madtone:

Story Time with Uncle Madtone is three builds. Each build is based on a narrative that started off during the building process and was polished up later as things took their final shape. More so than just presenting 3 stories the build is intended as a backdrop and a source for you to create your own stories with the sets you see here. Form your own story, take snap shots to illustrate it with, be your own story teller, and use your own imagination. The best stories are the ones you create yourself and expand upon till they take on a life of their own. That said we hope you enjoy the ones we’ve prepared for you to get your creative juices flowing.

You are encouraged to take all the pictures you like, interact with the pieces in a way that pleases you, not just how they are originally presented, and enjoy them as irreverently as you like. We’ve included a number of ways to interact with the pieces, including audio retellings of the stories, text, tons of sounds, ways to make your own music with them, lots of little things to pickup, and devices for making your own avatars that you may fit in with one of the stories. As such hovering over everything and clicking on anything you can will add to your excitement. The largest pieces are in the sky and you might need to turn up your camera distance and not be afraid to look around on the way up or you could easily miss some of it. The three books here at the beginning represent the three stories being told and the paths through them will lead you to the appropriate areas. We sincerely hope you enjoy your visit as much as we enjoyed preparing it for you.

Notes:
Teleporters are available for some of the main areas but, we encourage you to walk and fly when exploring here, otherwise you'll likely miss a lot of stuff!

The story readers sometimes hiccup, this has to do with some technicalities of the SL sound system so if it gets a bit skippy don't fret.

Flight feathers will be very helpful on the largest build, but cruely we didn't provide one till you reach the highest point.

Major Contributors Include:
Madcow Comsos-building
Lorin Tone-Sound/Music design, voice acting
Judi Newall-Pictures, editing, and voice acting.
Lauren Weyland-Voice acting.
1angelcares Writer-Voice acting.
Tezcatlipoca Bisiani-Scripting on the goblin maker.

Second Considered Harmful to Artists of any Life

I will continue to enjoy and support art making in Second Life. I intend to keep the IBM Exhibition Space running as long as I can, and I look forward to all of the amazing things NPIRL crew and others are going to produce in the years to come. I'm not going anywhere. In fact, I hope to have some exciting news to share soon. At the same time, some of you know that I am involved in two worlds as an artist, RL and virtual.

I have always maintained that connecting the two is necessary, not because SL artwork needs the blessings of the art world (it doesn't), but because it's young. Virtual work deserves a spot at the table, but it also needs to pay its dues and find its place in the world. To insist (as some do) that it can live completely on its own is foolish. To pursue this end won't mean a dramatic fiery death, but the worst possible fate for any kind of expression: it will be ignored until it fades into obscurity.

Desiring to connect the two is an act of love, a desire to honor the work. Here's my heart on my sleeve: I am one of the exceedingly few people who actually believe that some (not all, but some) of the virtual artwork being created in Second Life is art. Not virtual art, not technology art, not digital art, not pixel art, just art.

The virtual community’s loss of Eshi Otawara focused this for me. To be honest, once I understood the human behind the character was not hurt, my reaction was indifference. I do sincerely like Eshi’s work, and I will miss her on the grid, but "virtual suicides" are nothing new, and drama is what online communities were built for. Then I read Irena’s statement and it focused my own thoughts.

For the record I don’t wish to attribute my words to hers – I am not particularly close to Eshi RL or SL, and I would never want to imply that I am, but as a fellow artist trying to make sense of this universe her statement helped me to understand something that has been bothering me like a loose tooth:

While I do believe that virtual artworks are "real art," I've come to the rather upsetting conclusion that I cannot possibly recommend Second Life as a place for new artists to work in. Perhaps dabble in, but I certainly cannot recommend that they put any amount of effort into making this their home. It's incredibly unsafe.

The reasons for this are manifold, but for me center around the fact that SL is a proprietary, closed, privately held platform that seems to be on a trajectory away from openness and sharing and towards closed trading. I've written about this a few times before, but it had always been my hope that the opposite would be true - that Linden would embrace the notion of "3d web" (operative word being "web" which, last time I checked, was doing great with no central server, DRM or artificial currency whatsoever). Things can of course change incredibly fast, but at this moment the moment the future looks grim for integration with reality, there are too many stakeholders that want the opposite.

The fact that a market exists and is more powerful than art is not itself a problem. It has always been the case with art making communities of the last 200 years or so, which have a tendency to live in a relationship of mutualism (commonly mistaken by non artists for parasitism, and by some artists as commensalism). But in the real world, a worst case scenario for artists might be that their space is bulldozed to make a train station. Yes their work disrupted, but even in the absolute worst of times, artists have historically found a way to reorganize elsewhere. This is because no matter how bad things get, no one has yet managed to destroy the known universe, and most artwork is actually portable.

This is not so with Second Life. All of the content is created in, stored and protected by a private entity NOT bound by any of the laws of reality. So if you live in a loft and paint, and the landlord decides to turn the building into condos - that sucks, but you have options. In the case of SL, if you invest your life in making virtual artworks and someone decides to flip a switch, it will all be gone, forever, with no recourse whatsoever. You will lose all of your work, but also your contact list, all discussions, every note and record of every sketch you’ve ever made. Artwork in Second Life exists at the largess of a single private corporation, and so work created there is something like the mural that Rivera painted at Rockefeller Center. But at least in New York you may view the absence, observe the space where the mural is not. It is part of public record.

For this reason alone, while I continue to love virtual work, I cannot recommend that a new artist begin in Second Life any more than I would recommend that a brand new musician begin their career with a fully binding agreement with a record label who also gets to own their instruments. It’s way too dangerous a place to focus creative efforts.

My sincere hope is that something magical will happen and we will find a true 3D web. I want to be there when 3D hits its stride the way the web hit in the mind 1990s, the days when designers made incredible sites just for the hell of it (and some, like hell.com, tried to make it private and were openly mocked for the pretense). For all its obnoxious self referential crosslinking, web art understood inherently that it needed to be open, shared, discussed to be relevant. The web does suffer from some of the same problem (archiving, for example) but at least it was integrated from the start in a larger context. Few designers could pretend the web didn’t exist the way artists can ignore virtual worlds right now, largely because the intent was integration. Virtual worlds of course are deliberately NOT integrated. This is fine for game playing (and fine for a second or third life) but it is notable that it is sheer force of will that keeps virtual art isolated from reality. In the end, I conclude it’s far too dangerous a place to focus the artmaking efforts of a single human being.

There are strategies to counter this (AM and Bryn do it well), but they come mostly from an understanding and self confidence that isn't built in by default. For now I remain puzzled and slightly discouraged with no obvious solution in sight.

Stay safe all.

Why Sex Toys will bring about the End of Second Life

Linden has done an admirable job at the recent drawing of the curtain around adult content. So no, sorry, if you were hoping for a rant against the fornicating masses: The presence of artificial orifaces will bring down neither the wrath of God nor the Enterprise (whichever one you are most scared of or who has the most money, take your pick).

But virtual vibrators haven't left the spotlight yet. The sex toys of the apocalypse are with us still, and form the basis for various lawsuits. which, to my abject horror, apparently pleases a number of content creators who seem to think that encouraging more DRM through the absurdity of the DMCA will have a cumulatively positive effect on the community. In fact I'm pretty darn sure it's a the end of the world.

In case you forgot, the DMCA is an act which makes the bypassing of Digital Rights Management technology a criminal offense. Criminal. Felonious. Not like jaywalking or copying your brother's homework, this is more like kidnapping, or child porn, or drug trafficking. Even if you find this laughable (and almost everyone with an iPod does) companies are never amused at being accused of criminal negligence.

If I were running any company in this scenario, I'd think very carefully about making the DRM in my product more secure. After all, it's trivially easy to circumvent right now, and if I'm criminally liable, I had better cover that base at least. In fact, if I WIN the lawsuit I might do the same, just to make sure it doesn't happen again.

So I posit the net effect of these lawsuits will likely be an even more severe lockdown of content than we have now. Technology based DRM is of course fundamentally impossible to enforce, but it doesn't matter, since now the encryption is strong, tracking is good, and suing the crap out of customers becomes a routine business expense. I don't really believe anyone is truly happy with this scenario, least of all the platform providers who must now essentially foot the bill for a private police force to track down content violations, but the lawyers are smiling and the masses get their pound of flesh.

If SL were a distribution mechanism for content (like itunes) I would write this off as an expensive nuisance, but since most SL content is created in-world, I'm taking it rather seriously, which brings me to...


...THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO THAT KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT:

By the grace of some entity, Linden will be with us for many years to come. But imagine an alternate future where things aren't so rosy. One thing leads to another, and the company goes bankrupt.

First order of business is to sell off all of the corporate assets to pay back the creditors. And what a great asset - Millions of dollars in virtual content! But here's a twist: The Terms of Service for Linden state that the intellectual property but not the bits on disk, belong to the residents who create them. Intellectual property is an abstract noun. So yes you own (drumroll please) your thoughts about the thing that Linden now has locked in their dead servers.

Terms of Service grants Linden a license to your content, which means that they can reuse it. What is not clear is if this transfers in the event of a bankruptcy proceeding. In fact, I'd suggest that the recipient would NOT have millions of dollars of valuable assets, but instead millions of dollars in potential liability, owned by millions of individuals with the DMCA and god on their side. Add to this the fact that (thanks to those earlier lawsuits) you happened to have encrypted everything in a way that requires a functioning grid to sort out. That grid isn't running anymore. In fact the servers have been unplugged, and the developer that wrote the code is off at his new job and not looking back.

The only course of action I can imagine playing out here is an incredibly sad one: to avoid potential liability problems, in the event of a bankruptcy, all resident assets are simply destroyed like poker chips from a defunct casino. It's violent but it's fair, in line with DMCA. Nobody gets sued. No harm, no foul. Just a game folks, nothing to see here. Go register a WoW account.

Now if you DO sell virtual sex toys (or shoes, or tshirts, or chickens) you probably don't care all that much. It's not that I'm bashing these things (I'm really not, they're kind of fun), I'm just pointing out the obvious: not one of the SL commodity items work particularly well in the absence of Second Life itself. Seriously, think about it: without an avatar, where are you going to wear that AO?

Here's where we take a deep breath and I ask half of you to take a leap of faith. The other half will walk away in disgust, but I suspect they left the room at "sex toy" so we're in pretty good shape...

ready?

Some of us believe that some of the content in Second Life is on par with content created in real life. Some of us think this content amounts to cultural artifacts, belonging to a culture which is unique in the history of humankind: a virtual culture.

There are art projects which, some of us believe, constitute a record of this unique online culture.These artifacts exist nowhere else but SecondLife, which to many of the residents is a place, not a file server in California.

But to the eyes of the DMCA the entire universe is a legal liability held by a private corporation on hard drives in server racks somewhere in the American Southwest. Thus the "fair" resolution in the above scenario is tantamount to burning to the ground the only repository of the only record of a unique online culture. Like Marianetti and the Futurists, we might choose to embrace this and welcome the kindly incenderists. The rest of us will probably sit around a Cafe in Blue Mars, drinking aquavit and smoking our pension in smuggled cigars, remembering the amazing builds of our youth which were destroyed in the great sex-toy crash of 2015.

State of Formation: Exhibit by Selavy Oh

[Visit State of Formation - IBM3]
OPENING WEDNESDAY 9/16 @ 2p SLT/5p EST

There are artists who present their work in virtual worlds, artists who work with the tools of virtual worlds, and then there are those exceedingly rare artists who inhabit the tools themselves. True manipulators of the Matrix, these artists work with the underpinnings of the system, using the rawest of digital materials to deliver their vision. Selavy Oh is such an artist and, if nothing else, State of Formation has set the bar in terms of the results we should expect from the toolset that Linden has provided us. In Selavy’s hands the OpenGL alpha rendering bug becomes a tool, camera controls literally alter your perception of space and moving your avatar across the surface of the ground is an act of participation that would make Robert Smithson jealous.



In general I am biased against abstract and excessively formal art in the digital realm, if for no other reason that it is exceedingly easy to produce (computers are good at math) and often substitutes phenomena for strong concept. Perhaps because of this, I am all the more pleased when I encounter works that avoid this trap. Selavy’s work is formal, and occasionally abstract, but fortified with a strong conceptual backbone, a sense of humor and deft touch often missing from similar looking works. If you are one who tends to dismiss the style of hand, please let this show change your mind.

Despite these brave words, I’m always hesitant to put a weight on weightless things. The experience of State of Formation is pure delight and not nearly as clumsy as this writeup. Come visit, and click on everything! Do not merely cam around - this is not a work that can be experienced without participation. Take photos, but realize that no machinima or static image will ever quite capture the sense of leaving your own trace as you walk across the water, or the strange sudden shift of 3D to 2D when you sit in the chairs (each is different, incidentally).

State of Formation by Selavy Oh is on display at the IBM Exhibition Space, IBM 3, Secondlife, from Wednesday September 16th until November 1st, 2009

[Visit State of Formation - IBM3]

Spiral Walcher: A Machine's Dream

[Visit A Machine's Dream - IBM2]

A fun and spectacularly detailed collaborative build organized by Spiral Walcher, including the talent of Quite Oh, Andrek Lowell, Jopsy Pendragon, Sleeves Rhode, Deson Bowenford, Darlingmonster Ember, Tormented Twilight, Janet Rossini and Jenrose Meredith. Explore an elaborate sim-sized version of Spiral's top hat - it explains a lot!

Reflections on SLCC - Part II

Once, over a bottle of Jim Beam, I berated Philip Rosedale on the failings of the SL DRM. In between politely ignoring me, Philip talked about how amazing LL office culture was, and it took me a while to realize that here he really meant it. After all, what other company can you name whose employees voluntarily (delightedly?) change their last names to match that of the corporation? If there is criticism of “Linden” in the below, know that I’m speaking directly to those running the company (whether they’re listening or not), and certainly not the day to day “Lindens” we see running the show. For those folks I have only love and unicorns, and occasional snacks.

---

When I wrote this post for the NPIRL blog I wanted to highlight the only reason I spend any time in Second Life at all, and that is the people. I meant it all, but also told only part of the story. Notably I left out the details of my disappointment in the keynotes (and I don’t mean the awful canned phone-in by Ray Kurzweil, I mean the Linden talks) and exactly why towards the end of my NPIRL post I advocated for community “lifeboating” in the form of OpenSim and content moving tools.

Linden Labs is a remarkable company in that their main product, sold to us in spades is: Us. Linden itself makes no content beyond that which is minimally necessary. They provide little to no content creation support beyond the basic tech support. With the notable addition of sculpies roughly two years ago, the build tools remain largely unchanged as they were in the early 2000s, when I alpha tested Linden World. Linden does very little to actively support builder requests, and in some cases has come down quite hard on the best user hacks, before delivering a viable alternative. Linden itself runs no classes on content creation and they sponsor almost none of the larger or long term art projects in SL. In fact, they issued a defacto revocation of support for many of these when they deprecated the void sim pricing structure.

Of course there are temporary, large scale events such as SLB and BurningLife, but with due respect, these have more to do with the event itself and the attendant press attention than long term support for a content creation community. In this sense these are exactly like a corporate sponsored version of their Burning Man model: perhaps wonderful, but by design transient, temporary, and not meant for dialog. You go to Burning Man to be there for the event - the rest of the time it's an empty desert.

As for build support, there are of course community volunteers. Many of these are incredible folks who deserve an enormous amount of thanks, but quick: Name one other corporation that can convince users to provide free support to other users. There are also no doubt a few Linden staff working on improving the build experience, but with so many half-implemented features (how hard would it be to allow in-world windlight settings, seriously?), these projects very obviously do not take priority.

Almost everything about Second Life that is truly worth seeing, keeping and having, Linden gets for free.

I know of no other virtual world that has been able to stay solvent with this business model. Other large scale 3d virtual worlds (World of Warcraft is currently the most visible of these), sell you content and support that they produce at great expense. When their user base flags, they release an expansion pack. Other long-standing community-built virtual worlds (text based virtual worlds come to mind, some of which have been running for nearly 30 years) avoid this problem entirely by not seeking to make any kind of money. Many are hosted under desks at universities and dorm rooms, or in someone’s garage-turned-ISP. This isn't a viable business model either, but the administrators know it.

It doesn’t trouble me in the least that Linden Lab wants to make money. They can, they should, they ought to. In fact, I would feel better about the whole arrangement if Linden ceased talk of community and instead issued clear edicts about corporate strategy and infrastructure. In this sense I found Michael Kingdon and Tom Hale's keynotes at SLCC refreshing and honest. Both talks made it clear that Linden isn’t stupid – they understand the Newbie Pipe and have a plan in place to keep it flowing. They understand also that commodity users are a cash cow. They get that commerce around content in real dollars (XStreet + PayPal) are incredible sources of revenue. These are valid business strategies, but all of them are predicated on the assumption that there will be a community there when the renovations are complete.

So here, finally, is my frustration: In the face of an audience composed of individuals dedicated enough to spend vacation time and several hundred dollars to be there, why did Linden seem surprised that the audience was nonplussed at the "new" walled-garden approach to social networking unveiled on secondlife.com? Tom in particular: Why so indignant that we called you out on announcing exactly half of an API – the part that will get content IN to Second Life, but nothing that will get it out? Import mesh is terrific, where is export? Making a phone call to users who tend to prefer the multitasking ability of text chat is (maybe) a cool trick, but when can a business meeting in SL call out to a remote participant?

What I hope is that someone at Linden understands that their greatest asset is the community of individuals who have voluntarily created some of the most beautiful and compelling virtual objects of the last few years. These individuals continue to toil away and to make enormous strides towards validating virtual creations as works of art, even as Rezzable, Electric Sheep, Princeton and others leave the grid. Furthermore, the most interesting of these individuals exist in the real world as well, not merely as avatars, and much of the content they create is worthy of existing outside of the virtual walls.

It seems that Linden has embraced a protectionist approach to content out of fear that, given a choice, users will leave. If all the content were produced as commodity, they might have a point, but the best content (even that for sale) is produced with a love, or at least a clear understanding, of the context in which it will be used. Today's best content creators understand their audience because they are members of the community, and this is why community is the only asset Linden truly has. Individuals will put up with almost any shortcoming in order to be with the people they care about.

In my mind, the worst part of the scenario Linden has created is that if all of the best content creators were to leave Second Life tomorrow, absolutely nothing dramatic would happen. There exists now millions of human-years worth of work on the grid, and it's not going anywhere. It's also true that well paid, high-profile creators are rare beasts. Most of us fail often, hard, and at great expense. We occasionally produce something amazing, but only after hours of toil. We’re damn expensive. We complain a lot. In the beginning it might seem a boon to be rid of us, and the downhill slide to mediocrity will be slow and quiet.

Despite our eccentricities and loud insistence on improvements, we make the world worth being a part of. We are the difference between plywood cubes and monographs on virtual architecture. In the long run, we make the neighborhood liveable. And unlike Real Life, where artists form the forefront of urban renewal and are eventually and inevitably pushed out in favor of luxury condos, in SL, you have the option of keeping us indefinitely for a fraction of the price.

So Linden, while you’re planning on much needed remodeling and infrastructure upgrades (for which we are all grateful, even when we’re whining), don’t forget to actively reach out to the residents providing you with hours and hours of free labor - those who collectively constitute your best asset. Consider it Percent For Art or at least those complimentary signs that we can hang on the scaffolding so people know our small counter-culture store is still open even though the street is torn up. Because while they certainly pay the rent, nobody travels across the country just to visit Walmart, and nobody visits Second Life to hang out with the executives from the CIO's office, no matter how much they paid for that site license.