Telling: Like it Is

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Two days ago (23 March), I was alerted by a Tweet from Skate Foss about the impending demise of The Nation of Victoriana. A day later, the story appeared in the Alphaville Herald, along with the full text of two notecards from Victoriana's owner and Mayor, LittleBlackDuck Lindsay.


I had only seen indirect reference to Victoriana while touring Caledon and Winterfell, and my ongoing project to record what remains of SL's earliest days has made me even more keenly aware of the impermanence of builds and sims. So, yesterday (24 March) I went to take photographs. Today, while uploading those photos to a new online album, I realized I needed to double-check some names and locations, so I went back...





LittleBlackDuck is exporting his lovingly-crafted reproductions of genuine Victorian buildings (most, but not all, in Australia) to a stand-alone OpenSim grid in his own computer. It can be speculated that some of them, at least, will reappear on a more public grid, or be connected to one or more through a hyperport. The photos I recorded yesterday and today are being assembled. It's too late to go see the place yourself.

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Need some color in your Second Life?


soror Nishi -- whose thoughtful blog is on my roll and who also is deeply involved with Koinup (the trans-virtual-world photo-sharing network) -- is first and foremost a sculptor of amazingly fanciful organic forms: trees and flowers that could exist only in virtuality.

Juanita Deharo's Virtual Treeline Gallery has mounted a retrospective exhibit of soror's work. It opened yesterday, and will run for about a month.

Here's the SLurl

Here's another taste:



Be sure, as I did, to look at the work in both daylight and midnight settings.

And here's the artist:


There are also a number of what I call "bonsai" -- miniature trees suitable for inside your home -- and many flowers. Go, look, and enjoy!

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"If a tree falls in the forest, and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?"

You know that one, right -- who doesn't? Philosophy 101, even if you never took the class... and if you did, you would likely have sat through -- and maybe contributed to -- hair-splitting speculations like "What about animals, or birds, or insects?" Eventually, some smart-assed nerd (such as me, in this case) will pipe up with, "Well, what is sound? It's vibrations in the medium of air. The roots ripping out of the ground; the branches striking each other, and other trees, as it falls; the tree hitting the ground; all will displace the air, causing vibrations -- which are sound, by definition -- independently of ears to hear it."

What has that to do with Second Life? Or virtual worlds generally? First of all, I'll quote Dusan Writer (again! Yes, I know... but he can be damned inspirational at times):

The natural extension of the prim is the collation of our ideas of what the future holds. The single atom of the prim carries the imprint of possibility. The story it tells is both our own, expressed through what we display, our avatar, or the ‘build’; and that of our more universal stories, the collective narrative which is made possible because we have a home for rendering content and turning that content into ideas...

Second, I return to that seminal work by David Gelernter which I quoted last time (also, thanks to Dusan):

The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history. They will be bitterly debated and disputed — but it will be easy to compare two different versions (and the evidence that supports them) side-by-side. Images, videos and text will accumulate around such streams. Eventually they will become shared cultural monuments in the Cybersphere.

Stories... shared cultural moments... why, even Prokofy Neva had a rare moment of lucidity in a comment to Dusan (same link as above):

I think that there is so much lore and narration and story attached to all the prims, that you can’t look at it too absolutely. The lore that people acquire to learn not only the workings but the culture of Second Life isn’t techne but episteme[, it] seems to me.

Read More

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Dusan, you did it again! We may not always agree (though there really only has been that one time; I posted my counterargument, and that was that), but one thing you never fail to do is: make me think.
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Enough of the personal messages disguised as introduction. ;) Dusan Writer posted "The Web, Drifting Into View" on his blog, based in turn on a piece by David Gelernter, "Time to Take the Internet Seriously", published in Edge.

One aspect of virtuality in general, and Second Life in particular, about which Dusan and I have never parted company is its culture (I'm tempted to capitalize the word -- Culture -- because it carries that much weight). My guess is that, if you were to ask each of us what we mean, we wouldn't answer the same way... but that doesn't mean that we don't grok each other. So, what do I mean by culture? Commonality: shared experience; shared symbology and language; shared worldview; shared purpose; shared philosophies of what is "right behavior", and why, and how to coax it from people... in the case of Second Life, I'll even borrow from archaeology and include a shared "tool kit". The operative word, obviously, is shared.

Dusan waxes more eloquent (as is his wont):

Where else on the Web can you literally walk forward into a future that’s being crafted and created as we walk through it? And where else can you do so where other people share the space with you and may be altering it and changing it as we walk?
[...]
Second Life is nowness without uniformity. Second Life is presence without the lumbering pressure of the algorithm, of homogeneity. Nowness is spiritual and ennobling, but only when our presence in time is our presence in our own truth.
[...]
Second Life is time made visible, history made concrete. A building, a texture, my library of photos of long-forgotten sims aren’t CONTENT, they’re shared histories, and they’re organic, growing, changing, collaborated upon...

Another attitude Dusan and I share about the culture of Second Life is concern about its endangerment; how trends imposed upon it from outside -- by Linden Lab itself, no less -- threaten to dilute it, or wash it completely away.

The more we side bar data and Web-ify it, the more we lose the value of the prim itself, its power as an information atom, and its ability to be assembled with other atoms to create richer meaning than a Wiki, a blog, or a MySpace page.
[...]
If our nowness is presence in the uniformity of Facebook we’re only one cog in an algorithm, our domain of expression of our personal “now” is narrowed, confined, lessened.
[...]
...socially connecting me to 200 people whose names I don’t know in Avatars United doesn’t mean I’ve connected with more people, it means that rather than me drifting into view people have collected me like a baseball card, I’m a Facebook profile now, when what I prefer is to slip into the back of a dance club and listen to the conversation wander and float.

I believe the concerns are real, and they are certainly shared by (some) other Residents who write in the SLogosphere and forums. The question then arises, "What can be done to preserve and maintain this amorphous, evolving thing we call culture, without causing further harm by trying somehow to 'enforce' it with rigidity and the denial of its natural right to change?" The answer is elusive; the attempt to enumerate points imposes the very rigidity we are trying to avoid. Nevertheless, I don't believe the task is as daunting as might be first thought, and there are two examples from the real world to back me up.

To set the stage: Gelernter made this his Point #31 (which Dusan also quoted):

The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.

Mr. Gelernter is mistaken. The first "virtual nation" to make an indelible mark on history was forcibly created in 70 C.E. It exists to this day, and is commonly called the Jewish Diaspora. Despite centuries of iniquities performed against them (which I hope needn't be enumerated here), they survived -- at times, they flourished -- and even picked up a few additional members along the way, myself being one.

The success of my first example in preserving their diverse, evolving culture in exile in the face of such adversity caused my second example to consult the first for advice. In 1990, His Holiness the Dalai Lama invited a cross-section of intellectual Diaspora Jewry to Dharamsala, India -- the "capital" of Tibet-in-exile -- precisely for that purpose. A great deal else was learned in the process; it is described as a personal experience by Rodger Kamenetz in his 1994 book The Jew in the Lotus (which I strongly recommend to Jews, Buddhists, and those "Juddhists" in between who have already discovered the striking similarities, as well as to curious goyim).

A virtual "nation" or culture is not dangerous merely because it lacks a physical homeland. Nor is a culture founded in a virtual "homeland" irrevocably endangered by adversity thrust upon it. Resistance is not futile; you may refuse to assimilate.

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Loose End the First: "United", You Fail

So many fewmets have hit the windmill in the last two months that it may take a serious jog of memory to recall "United Nations Citizen", a promised new virtual world that was all -- and only -- about The Good Life of conspicuous virtual consumption. I dissected it in a post titled "Vaporworld", in which you can also find a link to Dio Kuhr's wielding of the scalpel upon the verbiage to be found at UNC's website.

In the comments to my post, Dale Innis said:

I think this United Nations Citizens thing (doesn't the UN have some kind of trademark, btw?) will be completely forgotten in six (three? one?) months, except as an amusing example of how everyone and his uncle thinks Virtual Worlds are the cool thing to do.

I decided to wait two months (7 weeks, to be more precise), before taking another look. Granted, given what I and others found, predicting a stillbirth was not difficult... even so, it appears that the dissection I performed was an autopsy after all, even though the subject was unaware at the time that it was already dead.

Anyone who contacted UNC around the time of its announcement, including me, was sent a boilerplate email that alleged to list their roll-out schedule. It ended with: If you are still interested, we will be providing a comprehensive email on next steps, retail locations, potential positions and more on Jan. 22, 2010. Anyone get that email? I didn't, and I should have been on the mailing list.

On January 25, a biz-blogger named Andy Abramson posted "Need A Job? Go Virtual With Cisco, Equifax and Harris". He referred to his "good friend Tony Loiacono", and also said:

Since it launched it has 65 job applicants. The UNCitizen jobs go live February 3, with at least twenty percent getting work from the start.

February 3 is soooo last month... any of you 65 applicants get a response yet, let alone an offer?

Andy also said: Not bad for a concept without any VC funding yet. No VC funding? Surprise, surprise...

Nothing has changed at UNC's website since January 13th, either... except that the front page includes a feed from it's Twitter account, uncavatar, which has generated all of 9 Tweets -- the last dated Jan. 30 -- and has a whopping 20 followers.

Put away the butter and jam -- UNC isn't toast, it's charcoal.

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Loose End the Second: Blaming the Medium

Anyone not read this horror story yet?

Girl starved to death while parents raised virtual child in online game

OMG! The Internetz is Ebil! Gaming is addictive! Pass a bunch of laws against those "enabling" PC-bangs, right now! Gaze deeply into your own soul and admit that you, too, are an addict!

'Scuse me, folks, but I call bullshit. Not that I think the story of those two people and their dead daughter is false. My complaint is with the pop-psych hyperbole of the last couple of decades that publicly brands any perceived divergence in normative behavior as "addiction" to something.

As long as there has been a human imagination, there have been means to "escape from reality", and there has been a tiny fraction of the population with a tendency to remain too long engaged in the escapes -- usually to their own detriment only, but sometimes harming others as well. It is justified to be outraged about the behavior of those two individuals, but it is in no way justified to blame what they didn't do on what they did instead. They neglected to care for their daughter, and she died as a result. Those two individuals probably would have acted the same way in a time before MMO's, or the Internet, or television, or radio...

If you're going to place the blame on immersive virtuality for the crime of neglect, you might as well blame the entire genre of Fiction.

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