Universal Gloom

October 5, 2010 by Leave a comment

The Tory Party Conference is under way, and the headline news today is George Osborne’s plan to abolish child benefit payments to higher rate taxpayers.

This is a smart political move, as the fuss the cut will generate among the middle classes will dominate the media, and provide cover for the even harsher cuts he has in store for poorer sections of society (the full horror of which we probably won’t know until the conclusion of the spending review at the end of this month), promoting the fallacy that “We are all in this together”.

The attack on child benefit isn’t just about saving money though, it is a strike at one of the central pillars of the Welfare State, the concept of Universality. The idea that all children have the same entitlement, whatever their background, is a powerful statement of social equality, and eroding it is part of the Tories’ plan to turn back the last 60 years of progress and return us to the divided society of the pre-war era.

There is already a two-tier education system, which will be extended by the plans to allow Universities to charge what they like for tuition, effectively reserving higher learning, and the economic advantages it bestows, for the rich. The NHS in England is going to be dismantled in favour of a patchwork of privatised provision, and the general benefits system is threatened with huge cuts. All this while a double-dip recession looms, and millions face joblessness. The wealth gap may have grown massively over the last decade, but it looks like it may get mediaeval in the years ahead.

Grim times. It would be nice to think that things were looking brighter on the other side of the Atlantic, but it seems that the right is set for an unlikely resurgence there too. This month’s Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the Tea Party, their regressive politics (summed up succinctly by writer Matt Taibbi; “After lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit”), and how, ironically, their incoherent populist anger is being co-opted by the Republican Party to serve the interests of the financial elites that the TP-ers supposedly despise. The Democrats, meanwhile, seem to have been stunned into inaction by the disappointment that has been the Obama administration.

Grim, grim times. We can only keep working away, and hope that the cold winds of change blow some life into the embers of revolt.

Filed under Economics, Politics Tagged with ,

The Revolution Will Not Be Twitterised

October 1, 2010 by Leave a comment

4chan seems to have been in the news a lot recently, and the /b/tards have been presented in a rather more sympathetic light than hitherto. I’m used to thinking of 4chan in terms of Lolcats and trolls, a place I’m aware of but would never admit familiarity with, at least in polite company. (Though naturally I’ve always had a soft spot for their war on Scientology). It jars a little then to see the Anonymous masses described as “internet activists” who have apparently developed some sort of social conscience.

The immediate cause of this rehabilitation, around here at least, seems to have been 4chan’s role in tracking down the infamous kitty-binner, a popular move in our pet-loving nation. They followed this up with something more substantial; going after ACS:Law, the UK lawyers notorious for their intimidation of alleged file-sharers. (Ars Technica has an excellent dissection of ACS’s reprehensible shakedown scheme). 4chan’s “Operation Payback” looks like it may put the final nail in the coffin of aggressive copyright enforcement, in the UK anyway, which can only be a good thing for both consumers and content creators, if not for lawyers.

Any romanticisation of the 4chan crowd as mischievous scamps who stand up for the little guy and stick it to the Man is obviously absurd, but it does tie in with a more general idea that the internet, and social media in particular, have levelled the political playing field, and given the ordinary citizen a weapon to wield against the power elites who run the world. One hears this from all sides; Peter Ludlow had an article in the The Nation this month on “Hacktivism”, specifically referencing Wikileaks and 4chan, over at World Affairs they think that Twitter will bring down the Chinese government, and Tea Party organisers laud the power of Facebook.

Perhaps I am just too wedded to old Bolshevik notions of the vanguard party, but I am very sceptical about all of this. While the web may be able to facilitate ad hoc attacks like “Operation Payback”, the sort of sustained campaign that would be needed to really change society requires a central organisation to give operational and, more importantly, political direction to the movement.

Substituting diffuse social media links for a more traditional party structure seems attractive, but I think it may be counterproductive. It might feel like one is part of a collaborative enterprise, but it is more atomised than it looks, and there is little opportunity to develop a collective consciousness. The Twitterverse has no effective memory, and there is no mechanism for a social media movement to learn from its experience. These things – pooling knowledge and experience, remembering mistakes and lessons, passing it all on to new generations – are the functions of a revolutionary party, and I can’t see that there is any way to replicate them virtually.

Internet activism can burn bright, and it has the potential to score transient victories, but I think it lacks the stamina for the long, hard slog that is the struggle to challenge entrenched power. If you want to change the world you have to face the truth:

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

Filed under Culture, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,

Blame It on the Boogie

September 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

Exciting news from Scandinavia this week, where Swedish developers MindArk (the team behind Entropia Universe) have teamed up with the Michael Jackson estate to produce Planet Michael, “an innovative interactive gaming and social experience that celebrates Michael Jackson’s life as an artist and humanitarian”.

I could use this as a cue for a whole host of bad-taste jokes, but we’re much too classy for that here at SLS, so instead I’ll note that MindArk, along with other virtual world firms like (NSFW) Utherverse Digital Inc., seem to be following the sort of business plan that we’ve been advocating for Second Life for a while; don’t chase the mass market, go for the niche customers who are willing to pay a premium for the particular virtual experience they are interested in.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with , , ,

Thoughts on the Pitt Meadows case

September 20, 2010 by Leave a comment

A disturbing story came out of Canada last week; a 16 year old girl was reportedly drugged and gang-raped at an illegal rave in Pitt Meadows, near Vancouver. That’s horrifying enough of course, but what followed made things worse; pictures of the alleged incident were posted on Facebook, and while they were taken down by the site soon after, the images had already gone viral and spread world-wide.

It’s hard to imagine what the people who downloaded and distributed these images were thinking, but I suspect that few of them would see themselves as publishers of violent child pornography, which is what their actions amount to. It seems to be another example of the distancing effect of virtual communication, something we’ve commented on before. The medium can detach people from the emotional content of the information it carries, so that everything is reduced to affectless sensation, and a brutal sexual assault becomes just another transient distraction.

It’s only a tiny minority of internet users who are as morally blunted as this of course, as the outraged reaction to this story shows. I would guess that in most cases the people who passed on the pictures were acting thoughtlessly rather than malevolently, and felt guilty once they had considered it for more than the few seconds it takes to click “Fw:”.

It’s open to debate whether modern social media have created this type of behaviour or merely facilitated it. I would say it is a mixture of the two; the likes of Facebook and Twitter may not be responsible for what people think, but they do lower the barrier between thoughts and actions, allowing impulses that would previously have gone unexpressed to find their way to the surface.

There will be those who point to the Pitt Meadows case as an another example of how our society is going to the dogs, as traditional bonds of family and community are displaced by empathy-free Facebook “friendship”. The counter-argument, which I tend to favour, is that, far from weakening our ability to relate to our fellow humans, the new channels of communication opened up by social media, untrammelled as they are by limits of culture or geography, actually provide us with a greater opportunity to experience our shared humanity. Sometimes this process will highlight the darker side of our collective character, but mostly it has the potential to be a force for good.

Filed under Culture, Psychology Tagged with , , ,

The rest is silence

September 13, 2010 by Leave a comment

Back in the days of my youth there existed a publication called Soviet Weekly, which one could buy from old tankies on demonstrations, or pick up from big piles that were left in the foyers of certain union offices. It carried uplifting stories about grain surpluses in the Ukraine, or record tractor production in Minsk, along with pictures of heroic cosmonauts, and smiling orphans enjoying free holidays on the Black Sea, all painting a picture of the workers’ paradise that was the Soviet Union. It was always detached from reality of course, and by the late 1980’s it had become completely surreal. Not long before the USSR finally fell apart Soviet Weekly disappeared, and even a few weeks later it was hard to imagine that it had ever existed at all. (It has vanished so completely there is hardly a trace of it on the internet; all I could find were a couple of scans and some old copies for sale on eBay).

I always imagined that the end came for Soviet Weekly when the strain of reconciling what was actually happening with the Party line plunged the editors into some sort of existential crisis, but actually it seems unlikely that anyone took an active decision to kill it off, such was the ossification of the Soviet bureaucracy by that time. The final blow was probably struck by something mundane, like the embassy running out of money to pay the printers, or the old Telex machine breaking down.

Anyway, I was thinking of this when I read that Hamlet Au was throwing in the towel at New World Notes and decamping to perennial next-big-thing Blue Mars.

I don’t want to suggest that Hamlet’s essentially harmless SL-boosting was ever the equivalent of glossing over the legacy of Stalinism, but I do wonder if, like the editors of Soviet Weekly, he eventually found the continuous demand to find positive things to write about a world that was crumbling around him just to difficult to sustain.

Filed under Blogging, Politics, Second Life Tagged with , ,

Brainy Dead

September 8, 2010 by Leave a comment

We haven’t had a zombie story for a while, so here’s a good one; Baltimore University is offering a course in Zombie Studies, which gives students the chance to “get … ready for a zombie apocalypse.”

“[Students] think they’re taking this wacko zombie course,” says Jonathan Shorr, chairman of the university’s school of communications design, “But on the way, they learn how literature and mass media work, and how they come to reflect our times.”

This is the kind of thing that makes me wish I was a student again; it sounds considerably more interesting than any course in my undergraduate curriculum, and, if the worst happens, it may turn out more practical too.

(For more academic commentary on the living dead see this post from our crypt).

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Running Away

September 6, 2010 by Leave a comment

I rather belatedly got around to reading the latest issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research this week, and, among a number of interesting articles, one in particular caught my eye. Who am I – and if so, where? A Study on Personality in Virtual Realities, by Benjamin Gregor Aas, Katharina Meyerbröker and Paul M. G. Emmelkamp, reports on a Dutch study looking at the question “How stable are personality traits when entering a virtual reality?” (This was an issue I identified as worth investigating back in the early days of this blog, though of course I never did anything about it).

The authors recruited 57 psychology undergraduates at the University of Amsterdam, and got them to sign up to Second Life (interestingly, only two of them already had accounts). They then had them complete an in-world version of a standard personality inventory, and compared the outcomes with the results generated when the same students took the test on paper, 7 months previously, during their induction.

The headline result was that the test results were stable over the two settings; the personality traits of the participants did not vary between the real world and the virtual world. This was true over all of the five dimensions measured by the test – extraversion, friendliness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and development.

This result is at once encouraging and depressing. Encouraging because, as the authors note, it suggests that “virtual realities could function as new reliable platforms to assess participants for psychological research”, and depressing because it implies that, however much we dream of liberating a new personality in the virtual world, our old selves will always catch us up.

Filed under Psychology, Second Life Tagged with ,

Twilight of the Gods

September 3, 2010 by 3 Comments

A couple of posts ago I was pondering the question of why I completely lack any sort of religious sensibility; it turns out that it’s because I am perfectly in tune with the Universe.

It would be nice to think that, now reason has banished God from both biology and physics, the proponents of organised religion would accept that the game was up, and fade away without a fuss, but, as I touched on in that post, I expect that won’t be happening any time soon.

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Anatomy of a scandal

August 24, 2010 by 4 Comments

I know that the only thing sadder than blogging or tweeting about an inconsequential internet phenomenon is blogging about people who blog or tweet about an inconsequential internet phenomenon, especially one as five-minutes-ago as “Emeraldgate“, but this is exactly the sort of thing that we live for here at SLS, and I’m hardly going to pass up the chance get all pseudo-intellectual on the topic.

What was it about this issue that elevated it above the usual Second Life drama, and made it the talk of the virtual steamie for a day or two? I think it was down to a combination of the nature of the tale, and the characteristics of the audience.

The story itself was serious enough that people could be bothered commenting, but not so serious that they felt obliged to think much about their comments; the perfect recipe for a froth of instant opinion. The technical level was just right; the average reader understands enough about terms like emkdu and DDOS to grasp that something is amiss, but not enough to really quantify the risks involved, producing a haze of uncertain anxiety. Then there was the Woodbury sub-plot, and the allegations of Linden collusion, which added another layer of conspiracy theories (all that was missing was the JLU). Perhaps most importantly there were enough angles to allow people to use the story as a hook for their characteristic preoccupations; thus Pixeleen was able to reprise her Woodward & Bernstein act, and Prok could roll out another semi-coherent rant about… well, I’m not sure to be honest, the evils of opensource software I think. I of course am free to produce another batch of our trademark psychoanalytical posturing.

For the real secret of the story’s success lies buried in the collective unconscious of the Second Life blogosphere. We are suckers for this sort of paranoia-inducing narrative because it appeals to our narcissism, both on a personal level – how flattering to think that someone has gone to all this bother to track our virtual lives, or that the FBI will chase us for being accessories to cyber-terrorism – and in relation to Second Life itself, which we imagine is as important to the rest of the world as it is to us. The reality of the situation – that no one cares what our avatars get up to, or what our real-life identities are, and that this saga is of no interest to anyone outside of our obscure little garden – is rather less compelling.

Naming this episode “Emeraldgate” only emphasised the preposterousness. Most SL residents are probably too young to remember the Watergate scandal, which involved the President of the United States being forced to resign after being exposed as a crook who had subverted the Constitution, a notable affair by any standard. By contrast, these shenanigans have not, as far as I can tell, caused anyone anything more than mild inconvenience, and are unlikely to be the subject of an Oscar-winning film any time soon.

That said, the story has not been unamusing, and, as a piece of harmless entertainment, it has been quite diverting. Readers may recall that a couple of months ago I made the claim that, occasionally, the Second Life meta-narrative could “[come] together to produce an instant of dream-like clarity that makes the whole project seem worthwhile”. Well, the tale of the Emerald development team’s nefarious activities is just what I was thinking of. Only Second Life, with its unscripted nature and disparate cast, could produce a story like this, and if I were in charge of the Lab’s publicity department I would be using it as an example of the potential of the platform. Something tells me that’s not going to happen though, which is a shame, because without the storytelling element Second Life wouldn’t be half the fun it is.

Filed under Culture, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with , , ,

Teenage Kicks

August 23, 2010 by Leave a comment

I’m aware that lately we have been rather remiss in our duty to provide you, our dear readers, with ill-informed opinion on what’s going in in the wonderful world of Second Life, so here’s my two cents on some recent events:

Philip Rosedale at SLCC – Philip delayed the start of his family holiday to show up in person, sending the clear message to potential corporate customers that virtual communication is OK for trivial stuff, but if you really want to impress your audience you had better appear in the flesh.

Teen Grid to close – Not much of a shock, given that some sources put the average TG concurrency as low as 300. What’s more surprising is the decision to open the main grid to 16 year olds. I can only imagine that this has been done to placate content creators who do business with the educational sector, or perhaps the educators themselves. It looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen though. It’s one thing to have kids sneaking into your adult establishment – as long as you make some token effort to exclude them you can claim that any bad things that happen are their own fault – quite another to invite them in, thus assuming the responsibility of keeping them free from harm. I predict traumatised teens will be signing up for the inevitable class action before the end of the year.

The Emerald Viewer controversy – Now this is really what Second Life blogging is all about – the chance to work oneself up into a lather of righteous indignation over some utterly trivial “outrage”. I know that clandestinely co-opting your customers into a DDOS attack against a rival developer, or secretly building a vast database of your users’ IP addresses, is thoroughly reprehensible behaviour, but, on a global scale, it’s hardly worth getting angry about (unlike this, for example).

But who am I to talk? This whole blog is just a way for me to relieve my frustration with the world by mouthing off on subjects I know little about. I can’t say that it’s not cathartic, and it’s always fun working out how I can shoehorn in a link to some classic music.

Filed under Culture, Second Life Tagged with , ,

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