The Solution
March 22, 2011 2 Comments
In other news, Hamlet Au at New World Notes has discovered what is wrong with Second Life; it’s the residents. His answer to this problem? We should all get lost, and let the Lindens recruit a better class of customer by befriending people on Facebook.
It puts me in mind of Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem The Solution:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writer’s Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
A few months ago I joked that New World Notes was the virtual equivalent of Soviet Weekly – perhaps I was closer to the truth than I knew.
Second Life Shrink 
There used to be this Linden, Lee Linden, who was extremely phlegmatic, shall we say.
I once complained to him personally about a sim that was lagging and running terribly with physics problems somewhere not visible perhaps, and this was back in the days when the FPS was calculated differently and Lindens were more reachable as it was smaller (5 years ago).
So he came to the sim to examine it and then said “It’s running fine, there are no avatars on it.” And I said, well, but we can’t keep it that way, with no avatars on it. And I realized: the optimal state for the Linden Lab sim was a sim with no avatars on it, and they just run better that way.
The concept of “having to elect another people” has its literary history, of course but in Soviet history there is of course the story of Krupsakaya, Lenin’s widow.
Apparently she became rather critical of the Bolsheviks after Lenin’s death and Stalin said “We need another widow of Lenin.”