Hot Chicks with lawyers

December 9, 2008 by Leave a comment

In my high-minded discussion of the ethics of blogging I overlooked one obvious hazard of casually appropriating the private details of other people’s lives; getting sued.

That truth has found Jay Louis though, now that he’s on the receiving end of a lawsuit in connection with the book of his blog “Hot Chicks with Douchebags“. It’s interesting that he wasn’t sued over the website itself, presumably because potential plaintiffs need a defendant with some serious money, like publisher Simon & Schuster, before they can persuade a lawyer to take on the case.

I can’t see the suit succeeding, since even someone like me, whose knowledge of the US legal system is entirely based on watching “LA Law” and “Ally McBeal“, knows that the First Amendment protects the right to shower ridicule on your fellow citizens. I guess the claimants – who allege that their appearance in the book has left them needing medical treatment and psychological therapy – are hoping that S&S will settle out of court to avoid the bad publicity. (Or perhaps not; I had it in my mind that Simon and Schuster were a classy operation, but they do publish literary gems like the “Douchebag” book and “Hooking up with Tila Tequila“, so I may be mistaken).

I don’t think anyone could seriously claim that their real-life reputation was damaged by their Second Life activities appearing online, and, even if they did, I believe that Linden Labs have been doing their best to establish that Second Life disputes fall under the jurisdiction of the US courts, so I’ll be able to assert my Constitutional rights. I’m sure that James Madison would approve.

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Uncertain principles

December 5, 2008 by Leave a comment

Regular readers of this blog may wonder why I seldom make any mention of people I have met during my journeys around the Second Life archipelago. This is partly due to there just not being many other residents about, but I do go to busy places from time to time, and there are interesting stories to be told about the things that go on there.

What’s been holding me back are some ethical concerns; principally worries about privacy and deception.

To what extent can the Second Life grid be considered a public space? Do residents have any reasonable expectation of privacy as they go about their business? Even if you accept that your avatar’s actions may be observed by whoever happens to be around, would you be comfortable with the idea that what you do and say may be recorded, and relayed to the world in a manner over which you have no control?

It reminds of a movie that I’ve mentioned before: 1985’s “Perfect”, with John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s not a great film, it’s not even a good film, but it does sort of illustrate the point I’m making. Here’s the plot, as I remember (with spoilers, in case you haven’t got round to seeing it yet). Travolta plays a writer who has been commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to do an expose of the LA gym scene, with the slant that “gyms are the new singles bars”. He starts going to this one place, where the quirky clientele take him to their hearts, convinced he is going to reveal to the world the humanity behind the gym-bunny stereotype. He repays their faith by penning a hatchet piece that portrays them all as sex-addicted losers, but along the way he has fallen for aerobics-instructor-with-a-dark-secret Curtis, under whose influence he revises his article to introduce a more sympathetic tone. His editor prints the original version however, exposing the essentially harmless health-freaks to nationwide ridicule. Travolta makes up for it somehow, I can’t recall how, and ends up with Curtis, but the bit-players’ humiliation is not assuaged.

Times have changed since the 80’s of course, and you could argue that, in our reality-entertainment-soaked age, everyone knows, or should know, that life is a performance, with potentially the whole world as an audience if you’re lucky, or unlucky, depending how you look at it. If you choose to create a new identity on the grid then you are implicitly accepting that your alter ego will be open to public scrutiny.

Anyway, privacy concerns can be dealt with on a technical level, by the anonymisation that is built in to Second Life , which I could enhance by never mentioning names or places, and keeping descriptions vague, though that would lessen the verisimilitude a bit.

Nevertheless I still feel a bit uncomfortable with the concept of appropriating others’ experience for my art (if that’s not too pretentious), though I guess it’s what storytellers have been doing since the first raconteur related the amusing tale of Ug and the sabre-tooth tiger. What anonymisation doesn’t deal with is the fact that it is largely impossible to be a passive observer in Second Life; to see what is really going on you have to be part of the action, and that raises the second ethical concern that I mentioned: deception.

I know that the concept of the neutral observer has been out of fashion since the days of Schrödinger and his cat, and practically every feature you read in a magazine these days is written by a would-be successor to Hunter S. Thompson, but the level of duplicity possible in SL completely blurs the distinction between reporting a story and creating it. Inducing someone to invest emotional energy in an interaction that is based on dishonesty – about my identity, and about my motivation – feels a bit exploitative, but the alternative – admitting up front that I’m only interested in meeting people so that I can blog about it – would, I suspect, make me a virtual pariah.

Does any of this really matter? It’s not like this project is a piece of serious research – it would never get past any reputable ethics committee – and I doubt anyone’s feelings will be terribly hurt if they happen to recognise themselves in my ramblings, in the unlikely event that they stumble across them. Maybe I can justify stretching my principles a little, so long as the end product is worth reading.

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Second reverence

November 30, 2008 by 2 Comments

Coming across the Church of the Animated Bunny the other day made me think of the Church of the SubGenius, and I figured that there was bound to be some manifestation of the Word of “Bob” somewhere in Second Life. I couldn’t find anything though, apart from the Fool O’Beans Coffee Shop, which promises “Coffee … cake … praise [of] “Bob””, and when I visited the location there was nothing there apart from a snowy field.

It’s hard to believe that there is nowhere on the grid dedicated to the SubGenius, because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d expect SL-loving types to be into. The in-world search engine is notoriously poor, so maybe the locations are just not showing up.

Anyway, thus inspired, I set off on a pilgrimage around some of the other spiritually-themed places in Second Life.

Most of the mainstream religions are covered; there are Anglican, Orthodox, and Catholic churches, a whole island dedicated to Islam, a centre of Sufi thought, a Synagogue, a Mormon Tabernacle, a Hindu Temple, a Buddhist Retreat, a Shinto Shrine, and a Confucian Oracle. I was surprised not to find a Sikh Temple, and there was nothing specifically for Taoists or Zoroastrianists either. Apologies to anyone else I’ve missed out.

I was expecting to find a few venues for devil-worship, but all the places that came up on a search for “Satan” turned out to be shops aimed at Goths. The Church of Frog and the Black Church cater to those with Vampiric tendencies, while the Church of the Seven Deadly Sins ministers to the BDSM community. If you follow the Cthulhu Mythos, you might run into one of the Great Old Ones in Innsmouth.

Finally, there’s the Church of Enturbulation, an anti-scientology outfit. They have a website too, but it seems to be down at the moment, which may or may not be due to the nefarious actions of Tom Cruise. (For more anti-scientology stuff, check out Anonymous).

The Scientologists themselves deny that they have any designs on Second Life, but then they would say that wouldn’t they? I’m not a great fan of the followers of L. Ron, but then I’m both a psychiatrist and a communist, so I’m sure that the feeling is mutual.

[Postscript: The title of this post reminded me of this.]

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Bunny worship

November 24, 2008 by Leave a comment

Not before time, I’ve worked out how to embed slurl’s in this page, so you can click on places I mention, which will take you to a map of the area at slurl.com, and from there you can teleport into SL, assuming you have your browser set up correctly. (There’s a guide to enabling this in Firefox here).

Continuing my peregrination around the Zygaena Crater, I came across the Church of the Animated Bunny:

animated_bunny02

I can completely understand why someone would go to the bother of creating something like this; it’s not something you would ever see in real life, it’s quite amusing, you can ask your SL friends over to hang out, and people like me might feature it in their blogs.

What puzzles me more is why anyone would take the trouble to recreate a nondescript business plaza like this:

metro_plaza

This is apparently the headquarters of the Metro Corporation, who seem to have some sort of advertising business, though not a terribly successful one, judging by the complete absence of anyone other than me. I did wander around for a while, and I came across a poster that let me teleport to a couple of clothes stores, but there were also a lot of posters that had yet to be rented. Whoever owns this place must be paying quite a bit in land fees (it’s 35008 square metres, which would be $195 a month), and, unless I just happened to be there at an unusually quiet time, making no return at all. (Or maybe a little; I did end up spending L$100 at one of the clothes shops, so I guess Metro will get a cut of that).

Metro do have a plan to drum up some more business; they were advertising for “Personal Assistants to the C-Executives” (plural), to liaise with customers. If it was anything like a real-life sales post that would be a pretty intensive job. I doubt they’ll get many applicants with the salary they are offering of $100 a month (US$, but still).

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The Bedlam factor

November 14, 2008 by Leave a comment

I wrote ages ago about the freak-show nature of the auditions for reality shows like X-Factor. I’ve since discovered that those who appear on what purports to be the first round of filtering have actually already been through a selection process, so there is no doubt that the hopeless losers have been deliberately included by the producers for some comic relief.

I was thinking about this after reading the tragic story of Paula Goodspeed, who was found dead in a car parked near American Idol judge Paula Abdul’s home in Los Angeles, apparently a victim of suicide. Ms Goodspeed had reportedly auditioned for the US talent contest in 2006, and had not gone down well with the panel, to put it mildly. (No doubt the clip is a favourite on YouTube right now, but I don’t feel like searching for it).

It is of course folly to speculate on someone’s state of mind when all one has to go on are reports in the popular media which vary greatly in detail and luridness, and I suspect that there were other, more personal, reasons for Ms Goodspeed’s actions that were more significant than what happened on a TV show years ago, but even so it does raise questions about the exploitative nature of some of what passes for entertainment these days, and the potential human cost for those who submit themselves to the reality TV industry.

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A foreign country

October 29, 2008 by Leave a comment

I was out of town for a few days last week, at a conference in the city where I went to university, prompting some elegiac reminiscence.

Several years have passed since last I was there, and, unsurprisingly, the place has changed a bit. The hotel where my meeting took place was in the district where I used to live, which has gentrified considerably in the time I have been away.

I know that everyone claims that they lived in an edgy part of town when they were in college, but I really did. Even at the time I found it less charmingly picaresque, more scarily lowlife, and I couldn’t imagine residing in such a locale these days. Hookers and dealers on the corners, regular stabbings, an occasional axe-murder, it was never dull I guess. Each day threw up new and interesting questions. Is that body lying on the waste ground across from my house an actual corpse, or just a passed-out junkie? What the hell was all that screaming about last night? Why, despite all the mayhem, do you never see any cops around here? (Except of course when you’re holding, when they seem to be fucking everywhere).

Anyway, it’s all much nicer now. High-end apartments, boutique hotels, classy gift shops and faux-bohemian cafes have taken the place of the crumbling tenements, soup kitchens and thrift stores. Our conference venue occupied a site where once stood the city’s largest homeless shelter. I spotted a few members of the homeless community hanging around in the side alley, looking wistful, as if they were pining for their old haunt. The strange thing was that they all looked much too young to have personal experience of the place; maybe it was some sort of wino ancestral memory.

My friends who still live in the city tell me that all the violence has moved out to the suburbs these days, and if anything it is a bit more intense. Their stories of drive-by shootings make my tales of the bad old days seem a little quaint.

As the years pass I do look back with increasing fondness on my student days, which I guess is an unmistakable sign that I am getting old. I do try to stay focused on the future, and most of the time I succeed, but not many days go by when I don’t think about how nice it would be to be 23 again.

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L$700 Billion Question

October 2, 2008 by 2 Comments

What effect will the financial crisis have on virtual worlds like Second Life? Given that the economic underpinnings of the Linden dollar are flimsy enough to make CDOs look like Krugerrands in comparison, I fear that the grid may not survive the looming depression.

Others are more optimistic, seeing spaces like SL as a escape from the harshness of the real world, where we will all be able to forget our worries in the perfect sunny landscapes of the grid, in the same way that our great-grandparents sought refuge from the bleakness of life in the 30’s by flocking to the cinema to lose themselves in dreams of Hollywood.

Time will tell I guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning to find that Second Life has disappeared. I wonder if the bailout bill covers L$ deposits?

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Diane …

July 3, 2008 by Leave a comment

It might seem that I have been idle over the last month; but not so. I have in fact composed several high-quality posts; unfortunately I am much better at thinking about things than actually doing them.

Also, I think that my reluctance to put anything down in writing stems largely from the fact that my words always seem witty and profound when they are in my head, but sadly cliched and banal on the screen.

I should maybe get a 3G phone so that I can post stuff while I am out and about. Or carry a dictaphone, like Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks.

I once visited Snoqualmie, in Washington State, where they filmed Twin Peaks. It’s a nice place. They have a big log right on the High Street. I had coffee and cherry pie in the diner. Come to think of it that might have been in nearby North Bend, where they also shot some scenes. I also went hiking in the hills, and nearly froze to death. (That’s another, and altogether more interesting, story. I should write something about that sometime. Just after I type up all my other good posts).

I never did get to meet Laura Palmer though.

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Almost Famous

November 30, 2007 by Leave a comment

This blog has been getting a steady trickle of hits, most of them via Google searches featuring the words “second” and “life” somewhere (like “second life adverse events” or “how to find adult club in second life” – that guy must have been disappointed). Hardly anyone ever leaves a comment, so I’ve no idea what visitors think of the site, but I suspect most of them click away again pretty quickly.

Since it’s clear that there is no way that I’ll make money from Second Life by any means other than writing about it, I’m going to have to do something to improve the stickiness of this column.

Writing stuff that’s vaguely interesting would be a start I guess. I can see two ways that this column might develop an audience.

The first option would be a gonzo-journalism style travelogue, where I dot around the grid like a virtual Hunter S. Thompson, cataloguing the collision between the established order and the emerging counter-culture. The problem is that Second Life hasn’t been around long enough for a dominant culture to develop, so nobody is really pushing the boundaries, because there are no boundaries to push against. I guess I could contrast SL with real life, but my feeling is that SL is more of a complement to the existing social order than a threat to it, so there’s none of the sense of danger that would give the column some edge. It’s possible that I’m underestimating how liberating the SL experience can be for people though, and it might be more revolutionary than I think. There is probably some mileage in exploring that further.

The alternative model for the blog would be a character-based episodic narrative, something like “Tales of the City”. To make that work I’d have to find some sort of vibrant SL social scene and immerse myself in it, and I’m not sure that I have the patience for that, if such communities even exist. I don’t think my writing skills are up to it anyway.

Even if I do build up a readership, there would still be the problem of turning hits into revenue, something that has defeated smarter business brains than mine. Advertising perhaps, or syndication, particularly to non-internet media. Maybe Rolling Stone would bankroll me while I did some in-depth research, like John Travolta in “Perfect”. They printed a big article on Second Life just a few months ago though, and anyway it’s not like I’m Lester Bangs or anything, so maybe not.

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Rotterdam Bar

November 12, 2007 by Leave a comment

I finally went someplace with more than a couple of other people in it; the Rotterdam Bar, which recreates a real place in Belfast, to catch a live music set from Chris Dickson.

The crowd did mean that there was a horrendous lag, which made moving around a bit unpredictable. I accidentally rushed the stage at one point, a bit embarrassing when the performer is a sensitive singer-songwriter. I did manage to say “Hi” to a couple of people, but it was far too crowded to have any sort of sensible conversation. Still, it was the most fun I’ve had in Second Life so far.

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