They came first for the casinos,
and the gaming bootleggers cheered, as their biz had no competition.
Then they came for the dolls and child avatars,
and the bootlegging ageplayers cheered, as their biz had no competition.
Then they came for the ad farmers,
and the bootleggers cheered, as they continued to flood XStreet, SL groups and members with notecards and IMs full of copybotted merchandise.
Then they came for the Openspace owners,
and the bootleggers cheered, as customers got fleeced again by spurious grid operators running on Opensim.
Then they came for camping bots,
and the bootleggers cheered, for search was still gamed by camping chairs and copybot continued unrelenting,
Then they came for the adult business,
and the bootleggers cheered, as the small weapons dealers and other mature and adult business had to decide to close or move out of private rental estates or mainland malls to “Ursula” continent. (more)
Then the government regulators came for Second Life and other virtual worlds,
and by that time nobody was left to speak up in SL, as there were only bootleggers left.
The picture is the wall in Hamburg on Herbertstrasse in the Reeperbahn. It was erected by the Nazis in 1933, so that they could “protect” the public from deviant behaviour – prostitution.
As you can see, it is still there today. The prostitutes like the wall, and become quite aggressive when women pass the wall, or tourists without wanting to pay for sex enter the street and gawk. (Women aren’t actually banned, but the sign says so – the police discourage women entering) Let me also stress that there is far more prostitution outside this area – it has not kept it in at all.
Remember that, in Amsterdam as a contrast, there is no such wall in their redlight district, and tourists pass through it every day without issues. I’ve walked through it myself as a tourist, with no women throwing things at me.
Remember this when you support an adult continent in Second Life. Do we want that kind of society? Do we want to emulate that? Wasn’t Second Life about being a better world?
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May 10, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Hypatia Callisto
How the walls differ on my proposal –
I am saying, walls made by customers are preferable to walls made by corporations and governments.
I want to give the ability to the sim owner to build their own personal fences, like a normal homeowner would. They know where to build the fence, they know what kind of fences their family and community wants.
What the wall did in Hamburg is turn a whole community into a red light district and KEEP it that way. This is what the adult continent threatens to do in Second Life – tarnish the brand for corporations and educational institutions, while doing nothing good for the adult biz. Eventually the legal adult biz will be stamped out in Second Life when the government deals with bootleggers for the last time. Of course the bootleggers will remain, thumbing their nose at the communities and making nasty snipes on the JIRA to protect their biz.
Do we really want to become the Reeperbahn? It’s a fun place sure, but it’s a sad place too, full of women from Eastern European countries exploited by the slave trade, imported illegally as sex workers. In many respects this is how I view the trend of selling in Second Life, working like a person in a third world country. I simply have a choice whether to follow my ethics or continue to support this anymore. Everything I have been taught in my reading has warned me away from this course – Popper, Friedman, Hayek – all survivors of World War II and Friedman the foremost historian over the Prohibition era. We’re all doing it again, we never learned that lesson from the Nazis to give over wall building to a community process. Building an unwanted wall makes us like the Nazis. I’m sick to my stomach, in both worlds… because the DNS filtering in Germany is the same thing.
May 10, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Hypatia Callisto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists