Musings on rules, irrational ideas, and art, and how they may become useful to both individuals and society. This is simply a thought exercise.

Any idea that seeks to enable or restrain human choices, is a rule. Rules have existence, most notably in ethical, legal and religious systems. All beliefs in religions and philosophies include at their core, a belief in rules. Belief in rules is generally regarded as good, however rules must be chosen wisely.

Rules can be measured as beneficial or pleasurable, conversely harmful or painful, but they cannot be proved “false”.

If it is simply an idea with no possible ability to falsify or verify, that cannot be acted upon like a rule, is irrational. Examples of irrational ideas that are subjective are values and ethics such as good, evil, beauty, and ugly. Objective and irrational ideas would be of deities, demons, or ghosts, for example. You either believe in them, you do not believe in them, or you suspend judgement. The only good way to decide how to make any of these choices is to listen to your gut instinct and trust in what it tells you. If an irrational idea moves you to happiness and causes no harm to others, there is no harm in believing in any of these things. If it brings pleasure to others with no ill effects, even the better.

Rules derive their ultimate worth from what effect they create when putting them into practice. Deities and other irrational ideas are not valueless, as these ideas can be acted upon through worship, abstinence and practice. However, right understanding towards these ideas means everything, for we must measure how much good or harm such an idea can create through our actions in this world.

Pleasure and pain are the only two objective measures of good and evil. Actions can be measured by how much harm or good they bring to others, so while we cannot prove or deny an idea of deities either way through science, we can measure how much pleasure or pain is caused by a particular action relating to the rules of the deity to a population, and therefore rate the value of that deity objectively.

What may be pleasurable or painful for one person may not be pleasurable for a group of people. If the pleasure is only benefitting a small group, and the effects have measurable damage for the whole of the group, it is a bad idea. “Your freedom ends where the freedom of others begins”.

A good deity does not seek to harm or reward us in a special way. These things are due to the randomness in the world. As deities are irrational ideas, they must observe their own rules, and we cannot “know” the mind of the deity in any sort of objective way. The rules can be measured for their value, but claims of divine sanction are valueless. The minds of deities are hidden from us.

A deity or perhaps number of deities can be seen as rulegivers through a process of revealed knowledge through images or thoughts in a meditative state. I cannot dismiss this possibility, as it has been verified that people can have such thoughts and images and the existence of the deity cannot be proven false. Again the rule must be observed: if the knowledge revealed is a rule that causes harm or pain to others, it must be dismissed as a bad rule and the person who gives this rule must be regarded with extreme suspicion, as they may be acting in pure selfish interest without any thought to others.

But even if one is an agnostic or atheist, an understanding of the need for rules and the measure of good works can still be followed. An atheist can take this same teaching and listen and apply and test a rule revealed to them through the same process of mental images and thought from observation of the world.

People who seek to harm us, have no access to justice or injustice, as they do not seek to follow the rules to neither harm or be harmed. For these rules can only be extended to others who follow them.

If we do not put our thought and awareness into action to reason out the effects of our actions from rules we follow, we are no better than wild animals, and thus have abandoned our civilisation and freedom to gamble with disaster and chance, and chance is what rules our lives when we are unable to exercise the freedom to make decisions or reason the value of the rules we choose to follow. It is undesirable to let rules control us without judgement for their effects, for we then have no freedom to discriminate possible effects of our actions and discern our errors, and thus chance and fatalism have ruled the day.

The messages of rules may be expressed through any kind of art, but the expression of rules through art is not the rule itself. The rule is the message, the art is the thing. Mistaking this rule can lead to idolatry, to confuse the physical representation of a rule with the rule itself. This basic separation between the material thing and the immaterial idea must always be taught.

Laws are iron rules that cannot be broken through freedom of choice, due to the fact they are part of the fabric of the world. The laws of physics for example.

Some further aesthetic thoughts.

If your art has nothing that truly moves your body completely to express to others, it’s probably not good art.

In art, there is no difference between communication and expression. In beauty and ugliness in art, there is no standard except your subjective gut feeling about what is beautiful or ugly. Beauty belongs to the irrational senses and cannot be given objective moral value. Beauty in nature is created this way as well. While it can be judged beautiful or ugly, this decision can never be objectively rational. Again, this does not mean it is good or bad. It only means it is irrational.

The Canon, the Measure, is the scaffold of these ideas, that braid the matter of daily life into the strong ropes of civilisation.

For those living creatures that are unable to form compacts not to harm others or to be harmed, there is neither justice nor injustice. It is the same for all tribes of men unable or unwilling to form compacts not to do harm or be harmed — Epicurus, Principle Doctrine 32

I think history will eventually say, Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” was an interesting book for the fact that it was probably one of the most damaging ever to be applied to the digital economy.  One is better off reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by NNT, Steven Strogatz Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, and Benoit Mandelbrot’s The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence – for a better idea of how bad power laws can be in economics. The “Long Tail” is very correct in that this is how the market works, it is incorrect in letting anyone think that you will get rich from it, and that it is “good for you”.

You might get lucky. You might lose your shirt. You might run around in the end of the Long Tail like a rat in a maze. Indeed, the rats in the maze are most content creators in Second Life.

If you all want a taste of history, then read the last book (Book 6) of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius, for his poetic retelling of the plague of Athens (David Sedley commentary), based on the Plague of Athens account of Thucylides.

Lucretius bears a message about Epicurus. From Book Six no. 17

He (Epicurus) understood that the pot made the flaw, and that by this flaw an inward corruption tainted all that came in from without as though it were a blessing; partly because it was leaking and riddled, so that nothing ever sufficed to fill it; partly because it preserved it befouled, as one may say, with a noisome flavor everything that it received, as soon as it came in. Therefore with truth-telling words he scoured the heart, he put a limit to desire and fear, he showed what was the chief good to which we all move, and pointed the way, that straight and narrow path by which we might run thither without turning; he showed what evil there was everywhere in human affairs, which comes about and flies about in different ways, whether by natural chance or force, because Nature had so provided, and from what sallyports each ought to be countered, and he proved that mankind had no reason to roll the sad waves of trouble within their breasts.

For Epicurus’ Swerve in Lucretius’ epic poem is exactly this phenomenon, too. Sadly, it is also Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. It doesn’t lead to good markets, not without good money management, and right now, this especially does not exist in the USA with Bernanke at the helm.

If you want a taste of physics research, then check out the UPenn research on Brownian motion, where the scaling is asymmetrical. The good news about this is that Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves is probably right about free will though. But too bad for Chris.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1035

I view “The Long Tail” as a plague now. I once liked it, but after seeing it used in practice everywhere, I see how bad it really is. Richard Dawkins is your man (The Selfish Gene) if you want to know how bloody nature is, tooth and claw.

Nature is not intrinsically good. It is not intrinsically evil, either. It is wild, untamed, rough, and undomesticated. The waves can rise high and crash suddenly like a tsunami. It sure as heck isn’t improving the human condition to go back to nature. We want freedom, but maybe not that much freedom. Justice is desirable too.

Seeing this book applied to currency markets is an even bigger disaster. No wonder Chris Anderson doesn’t like Second Life anymore.

Adam Smith was missing something from the whole picture.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1035

This is the swerve, the clinamen of Epicurus. This is what Louis Bachelier and Adam Smith didn’t know about motion.

You cannot have one invisible hand bringing the market into equilibrium. You need TWO HANDS. The money needs to observe equilibrium in order to be stable.

This is the motion of things that are self movers. When there is an asymmetry. Human beings are self movers, and this is the most basic of self movers, a tiny object that is longer in one direction than another.

Money itself needs to be smooth like Brownian motion and it is not!

As said by my friend Sin Trenton: The invisible hand snatches your money and gives you the finger when it can.

Epicurus says there are two kinds of motion, the straight and the swerve.  Aetius 1.23.4 Dox.Gr.

I have a few ideas regarding money that would probably work for the brewing LindeX problems. I visualise good money as the stable pipes in which the flow of profits from goods and services pass through. The pipes are subject to high stress, from both the volume of trade and unforeseen natural occurrances and business cycles. They must be built well to withstand the pressure. Though pipes may occasionally fail, I want the failures to be manageable and foreseeable, so they can be replaced and fixed as needed.

Two major problems and some suggestions to fix them:

• L$ is being used as a store of value, and fiat currency or inworld land ownership is a better choice.
• The velocity of L$ exiting Second Life is too slow.

L$ is being used as a store of value, and fiat currency or inworld land ownership is a better choice.

Using L$ as a store of value, corresponds to a reduction in land tier fees which are not being paid for. The LindeX has taken this role over, as well as other currency exchanges, as the transaction fees are passed on to the buyer of the currency for the most part. It’s free as in beer money, no recurring subscription fees or even a bank charge. And its not surprising that those who are profiting from the free money train do not wish to change it.

The velocity of L$ exiting Second Life is too slow.

Our money supply situation is like a sink slowly filling with marbles of various sizes, and only smaller marbles are falling through the drain. The obvious way to deal with the sink issue is through charging a demmurage fee, for storing the L$ . The intent is to speed up the velocity of money, thereby helping relieve Supply Linden of the task of selling more L$ to maintain the velocity of money through the system.

My suggestion would be to subtract a fixed x amount for every y number of lindens, at the end of each month. Say 1 linden for every 50 lindens, for example. Once you hit zero lindens in your account, you are no longer charged the fees for holding L$. Fees are only due if you have L$ on your account. An exemption can be granted to special avatars who run currency exchanges, but must be a designated avatar, and should be charged for the privelege.

The other issue is to deal with the speculation problem on the LindeX. This is best met with a percentage rate US dollar fee depending on the amount of L$ you had for sale at the end of each month. The issue here is that it will be gotten around by cancelling and relisting.

Easy way to deal with that is to charge it over an average of the money held over a period of time with limit sales and buys, and once money is set for a limit sale on the Lindex it automatically counts against this fee and the ticker is on. If you have sold the amount that month that you originally listed, great you don’t owe the fee. If you cancelled the remaining order, you still have to pay a fee for the whole amount you bet, sorry. Market sales and buys are exempt from the demurrage fee.

Call it risk management fees to penalise people for risky behavior. As the L$ is emphatically not meant to be a store of value, this would be the most useful for the inworld problem.

While these will raise the velocity again, another issue is that there are already many many L$ that need to be swept out of the system. This can be dealt with through charging L$ for land setup fees and all auctions of land in Second Life for a time, to quickly drain the excess money supply temporarily, getting people back into land ownership. This is a temporary stopgap to drain the supply.

A further idea for internationalisation and stability, is to integrate L$ to US dollar or Euro sales, allowing a choice of fiat currency in which to sell to. This is to allow stability to invest your L$ into a variety of currencies, better reflecting market conditions in fiat currency trading. A main feature of this plan is that the L$ cannot be exchanged directly into any other virtual world currency, it can only be exchanged into other fiat currencies, which can be then transferred out through Paypal. It is possible to add other ecurrency options besides Paypal as well, to extend reach to other countries that cannot use it.

I hope I have put forth some useful ideas to help make the money supply situation in Second Life more shockproof. While markets are wild and difficult to control, we can still build something better than a liferaft to surf the market’s giant waves.

“Poor Wretch”, men tell themselves. “One fatal day has stolen all your gains” — Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 3.898 – 899

It’s well known that volcanoes can undergo a long dormant period before they erupt in a cataclysm. The dormancy may span over many human lifetimes, but the volcano still lives. This is why geologists place monitoring stations around volcanoes, to detect the movements of magma underneath.

Sometimes, geologists are able to predict an eruption with enough forewarning to evacuate nearby residents and divert jet aircraft, through use of such monitoring. Still, the volcano may launch a surprise high into the air. Such is the world of complex systems, and they are both terrifying and awe-inspiring.

The profits and prices of commerce, and magma seem to have something in common. A plug in a volcano can create the illusion of a sleeping giant, but a keen ear to the earth may detect something different. Perhaps a new bulge on the side of the mountain might signal a worrying sign that the magma is actually on the move and pooling in new locations.

Unfortunately, profits and prices are too often confused with money. They are all separate things. Money is simply the medium that economic information flows over. It is the pipes for the information that flows through it. Profits and prices are the information which flow through the pipes of the money system. We need better pipes, and not lava tubes one sees in volcanoes in nature. I would prefer to have indoor plumbing, and possibly a toilet and sewage system also!

So now I will concentrate on money, and not on the profits and prices which are entirely separate.

While we can do nothing about the fickle whims of volcanoes except improve forecasting, money is an invention of human society and possible to domesticate. Money is an instrument, a tool, an invention. While it may be affected by events in the natural world, it does not have to follow a cycle, an oscillation, or a severe eruption.

Imagine money as a high pressure water line. Most of the time, it’s completely safe. But if poorly maintained, or an unforeseen disaster that breaks the line, then we may have a failure. Disasters can and do happen in real life, and they are often unavoidable. Generally workers can cap the line, and bring the system back to stable conditions. Unfortunately, economists often behave more like astrologers than engineers, using sound math to describe a world that doesn’t actually exist in reality. I would describe this as “poor maintenence”. It’s much like staffing the astronomy department with astrologers. Sadly, this is not far from the truth for much of Western civilisation’s existence. Astrology is the last remnant of the completely debunked Ptolemaic model of an Earth-centered universe.

So as they say, follow the flow of money and there may lie the answer to your problems.

Stipends were reduced from their former 500 L$ benefit to 300 L$, making it no longer advantageous to own a Second Life premium account due to the amount of the stipend. But this did nothing actually. All users did was not upgrade to a subscription account, while many downgraded, and all began buying more L$ over the LindeX.

As I showed before in my previous article, fewer merchants are making enough money to cover land tiers through content sales, it has shifted disproportionately to top tier content creators, thanks to content theft sharply reducing the middle range content sales. This means less land rented overall inworld, and a shift to cheaper land rentals on mainland, where tiers are lower. Land barons bicker and fight with each other as they compete for what’s left of people who are willing to buy L$ for paying tiers, and fight over innovation of the Second Life platform in general. Blaming different groups of content creators, such as scripters or sculptie makers, who have in demand and difficult to learn skills. But they are not the cause, this is just a scapegoating, not unlike the screaming about Jews poisoning the wells during the Middle Ages in the Black Death. Just a cynical ploy to eliminate a marginalised group of people doing a job many Christians at the time weren’t allowed to do (moneylending) to better one’s own economic position during a disaster. It was wrong then, it is still wrong now.

Innovation for the Second Life platform is vitally important and will go a long way to alleviate content theft. Scripters do valuable work for hire and sculpt and texture makers create full perms items for use in derivative products. While the full perms trade is not a bad thing, the content theft has insured that there is less variety of full perms items for sale to the middle and lower range content creators. No ability to determine if an item is a derivative of a full perms item, or if its a high value original good. This causes errors in signalling value and actual scarity of resources involved in creation of goods. No ability to determine a copy from an original or an authorised derivative places ripped goods at an even competition with legitimate content sales. Of course, even popular full perms building supplies are ripped and resold in competition with the originals, sometimes in an effort to quell competition from a rising rival, sometimes just to make quick L$, or both. If the item is popular on Xstreet, one can be certain it will be ripped to ride on the back of the new fad.

So now I have established that we have well off content creators, and land barons pushing L$ through the LindeX.

Where is their money going?

Content creators and land barons sell their L$ on the LindeX to get dollars which they then cash out. The LindeX automatically matches buyers with sellers. I documented in May 2006, a hole, a gap, a “spread” that widened when Linden Lab changed the website to include a “Basic” interface. Some may explain this away as “arbitrage” but it is a classical case of information asymmetry in transactions. One side has better information than another, and it was those people who paid enough attention to the LL blog, who found out when the interface had changed and how to set it back to advanced to place limit sells again. Many content creators did not realise what to do, and switched to selling their L$ through “Market Sell”. The site did not indicate to these sellers clearly that they were cashing out for the worst rate. Naturally people listed limit buys to take advantage of the mistaken market sells. A lot of free money was made during that time, as it took a while for sellers to realise they could list limit sells again and close the transactions gap. This further expanded a sizable class of currency speculators, who do nothing but play the spread on the LindeX, waiting for opportunities for people to do dumb things, and take advantage of a widening in the spread.

The tide eventually flipped after stipends were reduced. More people started to buy through the viewer through market buy. Limit sell allows someone who is speculating on the LindeX, to often get a better than the 3.5 transaction fee that LL charges, so they can make a profit from buyers in the viewer and small market buy sales on the website..

At all times, users who buy through the viewer don’t get the best rate on their L$. Alongside the currency speculators, are also land barons and some high tier content creators, as all of them have to push L$ through the LindeX to dollars in order to cash out and pay tier.

However, the one thing that prevents this from being a frozen and deflated economy, and who is stopping customers from getting completely fleeced from making accidental market buys during a “fluctuation”, is Linden Lab with Supply Linden. They are selling L$, lots of them. While I do think they are doing a good short term job, preventing the prices of L$ going through the floor unexpectedly, they are doing something bad for the longterm, too.

Supply Linden is increasing the money supply, and much of this money is going into the hands of speculators, top tier content creators, and land barons who don’t sell it quickly. Many people who are smart enough to list limit buys of currency likely buy their L$ to Supply Linden, who takes your dollars and the transaction fee for them.

I can see why inflating the currency might be a good thing for LL in the short term.

It keeps the L$ from having a significant value, which could cause them serious issues with the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Most western countries forbid complementary currency. LL surely doesn’t want a strong L$ competing with the US dollar. As soon as it did, the US government would be around eventually to haul the computers off.

LL also wishes to keep the money stable, that it doesn’t fluctuate in price a whole lot. This is not only to help customers buying through the viewer not get fleeced too badly, although it sometimes happens, as in December 2008, when the LindeX precipitously dipped as someone must have fallen asleep at the Supply Linden wheel. It is also so that prices remain more stable in Second Life.

So what’s the problem?

Supply Linden is pretty risky. Although the speculators make less money than before, LL is having to pump the economy full of L$ which are not leaving the economy through enough sinks. Speculators are actually more risky now than they ever have been before, and the toilet is stopped up.

The money remains in SL as the sinks are not sufficient, or in the LindeX buy sell orders, or on other currency exchanges, but its not circulating in the economy, and Supply Linden was slowly deflating it. This is good and bad. Good in that the money is not moving. Bad in that the money could move FAST in a point of financial crisis and destabilise the whole Main Grid. At the moment, large amounts of L$ remain on the LindeX, recycled as much as possible to get extra money on the LindeX like a free cash machine.

Sometimes Supply Linden falls asleep, and the exchange rate falls through the floor. The exchange rate however is masking the money supply issues. The money supply is inflating, while we are technically in a deflation due to shifted increased demand for L$ from the premium accounts to buying over the LindeX. If there is a panic of the high powered money in the hands of speculators sold over the exchanges, it’s highly possible we will be in a full blown hyperinflation. This would be devastating on inworld business, both content creation and land. Imagine prices having to change by the minute because of the exchange rate becoming weaker and weaker to the dollar.

Linden Lab is not making enough money on the LindeX, while watching their profits eaten by fraud. Sales from Supply Linden and transaction fees don’t cover the fraud issues. User growth in SL is now flat, while transactions remain high. A worrying trend if anything goes wrong.

So yes, I want to suggest some fixes to the LindeX so that we have the velocity of money, which Supply Linden provides, but without the money supply inflation problem. If that’s not possible, one can glean from my critique of the current situation, how to lay the groundwork for a possible sensible working money system for other virtual worlds, in order to enable a stable commerce system.

“Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.” — John of Salisbury

A few things are going wrong in Second Life for quite a while. Mostly, it’s framed as a debate around copyright. But the more I think about it, its actually an explosive demand for money. This is my first installment of the series, and following this posting is “The Lava Tubes of the LindeX”, and “How to Build High Pressure L$ Pipes”.

This posting concerns the demand for L$, which is exacerbating the content counterfeiting situation in Second Life. “The Lava Tubes of the LindeX” concerns the actual nature of our monetary system and how its causing the economy to falter. “How to Build High Pressure L$ Pipes” concerns what Linden Lab could do to fix it.

Content creators say they are being stolen from. And they are right.

There is a vocal group of people in Second Life, who, for purely selfish reasons, shout them down screaming that there is no theft taking place. Well, let’s examine the basis of this economic position. Wages are the product of your labor. When you make an item to sell in Second Life, this is your wages. I cite Adam Smith.

The produce of labour constitutes the natural recompense or wages of labour.

When you make something in Second Life, this is your wages.

When demand for your wages is driven down by someone counterfeiting your products, this is a form of theft from any reasonable economic view. As we are mainly still in the “natural state of things” in Second Life, most people in Second Life are not paid in wages from L$. The L$ is not actually a good store of value, and therefore it is not used for this. People in SL who earn money from wages more generally earn them through US dollars directly or by exchanging their L$ to dollars.

Content creators earn money when they sell items they have made in Second Life. The content they create is their wages. END.

So what about this argument: “immaterial property” can’t be stolen?

Let’s destroy this fallacy forever. Actually, there is no immaterial property involved in duplication of digital content. Everything in Second Life is bits of data that resides upon a network on real life physical hard disks and transferred across physical communications networks to and from your very physically existing computer. The only thing that has changed: reproduction is insanely cheap to duplicate digital goods.

The costs of creating the data in the first place have not significantly reduced.

This is no less important than another Industrial Revolution, and I am talking about counterfeiting when creating unauthorised copies of products and then transferring it to others for sale or for free.

That being said, I do not support draconian copyright laws whatsoever and support shortening the term, plus broadening fair use rights. Art needs to be displayed so we can enjoy it after all, and this constitutes the basis for an expansion of fair use from a consumer rights perspective from my point of view. I simply support the right of artists to make a fair wage from their labor if that was their choice, in balance with consumer rights to use the content fairly, in the effort to see a more stable economy emerge

The only true “immaterial” property is something that cannot only be duplicated over and over on a hard drive or removable media, or transferred on a computer network. Rather it is something that can be invented and duplicated over and over in the wetware of your human brain as well. These are your ideas, and no computer has ever been shown to create original ideas, and I doubt they will be able to do it in the next 100 years, or the next 100,000,000. Never, in fact. Sorry to all the Transhumanists out there waiting for the Rapture on the backs of hard working content creators, I think you’re all a bit goofy. Better off going to church, for all the good that will do you.

I believe its better to keep making infinite copies of good ideas and spreading them to others! May Plato’s world smile, for we are all still in the cave watching patterns of shadow dance on the walls without quite understanding what they mean, or even what they are. This is life in physical reality. The shortcut to computer heaven simply can’t help anyone to reach understanding of Plato’s world. Besides, some cheeky bastard will just wait till you’re all uploaded, then turn the power off.

And heaven help you if you’re uploaded in San Francisco and the Big Earthquake finally arrives!

Back to seriousness.

Copyright relating to a particular expression of an idea is an obvious way to provide a limited benefit to someone using good ideas in digital form, as the product can be reproduced cheaply. Call it symmetry. Patent seems like a mirror image of copyright to me. That bastard Trademark is just survival of the fittest though.

I believe good ideas are prevented from spreading by setting up a monopoly on these ideas and filing a patent, preventing people from innovating and producing a new expression or improvement on that idea. Others may disagree and I am not expressing a legal opinion (I am not a lawyer). I do see the need for some patent protection, but only in extraordinary cases involving expensive manufacturing, and I support the idea to shorten the length of term generally.

So when someone takes things in Second Life and resells or gives them away, what happens?

They have taken the wages of another, as Adam Smith long ago explained. The time to create, physical work, skill, and good ideas involved to create the item all not yet compensated for. All these things are scarce goods. It has taken a possible sale from either the original content creator, or worse, from other content creators who sell legitimate competing products that were perhaps more desirable or originally cheaper. But now, these are not getting sold either, as the best quality items are getting resold by multiple outlets at similar or lower price points. A race to the bottom has started.

It is true that the top tier merchants may actually dominate the market in the long run when customers realise where to go to legitimately acquire items that they have mistakenly bought from a ripper, or received for free. However, this is at the expense of other content creators who have made original midrange and low priced products. So a self reinforcing pattern occurs, that allows top tier merchants to stay at the top making the most income, and more people are actually not making a great deal of money for their work anymore.

This seems to help explain one part of the “war on freebies” phenomenon. While I am completely in support of people making and giving away items as their free choice, it is no longer a free choice when the market is flooded with low priced and free items that were supposed to be expensive to buy and cost a great deal to produce. The price no longer accurately signals the cost of the item.

A monoculture of cheaply farmed trees has taken over what once had been a complex and varied market forest at the flanks of our LindeX mountain. And this sets up a fragile market condition for producers and products for sale.

Less people who produce items for sale, and fewer unique items available for sale. The “Long Tail” has emerged, a power law has taken over what might have been a more stable “bell curve” of producers and unique products for sale. I maintain this is a fragile market, far more prone to wild swings of consumer demand. With fewer sellers, the market changes to one of a few producers who cash out most of their earnings to dollars, not spending inworld. Those who had a less popular store, make less money and must buy more L$ to pay their land tiers.

More people have to buy L$ in order to buy products, and there are fewer unique items for them to buy now. The quirks of consumer behavior are more freely able to influence the market in all its very human wild ways. People will rush to buy all the same item in one fad, spreading like an epidemic, leading to that item getting copied over and over by counterfeiters in a rush to earn some easy L$ while the fad rides high. Then, the fad dies off and nobody wants to be seen dead in that anymore… the designer now out of fashion.

Once consumer demand falls off, and it always does in fads, so will buying L$ for that product, perhaps even a LindeX lull if the fad was large and fell off sharply. Talented creators who benefit from the fad do better,despite the thieving and the oscillations of these consumer ups and downs. Talented creators who didn’t produce something in the fad fashion, get pushed out further than they might have ordinarily from lack of sales. Either they make similar products to the fad, or they stop producing.

The flood of similar products and lack of ecological diversity in the economy sets up a monoculture waiting for the disaster to happen. A vicious cycle of hunting ripper stores and filing DMCA’s to the roof, with no end in sight. Even the “beneficiaries” of this “unauthorised copying” aka counterfeiting, don’t make enough money to spend all the time it takes to file DMCA’s as it takes away time from producing new items. The DMCA is seriously flawed, as small creators generally can’t afford to drag all these people to court. We must seek  a long term solution to our problems, not using the legal system.

Time and ideas are the scarcest resources of all.

When no longer worth the time involved to produce new ideas that go into products, it is near certain that production should slow as well as demand. Many creators stop producing. Closing up shop, less shops getting rented, less tier paid to LL, less rent paid to middlemen landlords, who then close sims. And with a drop in both production and demand, goes a drop in valuable information in the society. Eventually a drop in the volume buying of Linden dollars can be expected. Especially when the next fad for a virtual world takes place and Second Life is not quite as cool as it once was, in the wake of emerging competition with the ideas of others in new virtual worlds.

“On those stepping into rivers the same, other and other waters flow. They scatter and gather, come together and flow away, approach and depart.” — Heraclitus

An engineering artist, Leonardo da Vinci.

Plan to regulate the Arno River

“Amid all the causes of the destruction of property, it seems to me that rivers hold the foremost place on account of their excessive and violent inundations.

Against the irreparable inundation caused by swollen and proud rivers no recourse of human foresight can avail; for in a succession of raging and seething waves gnawing and tearing away high banks, growing turbid withthe earth from ploughed fields, destroying the houses therein and uprooting the tall trees, it carries these as its prey down to the sea which is its lair, bearing along with it men, trees, animals, houses, and lands, sweeping away every dike and every kind of barrier, bearing along the light things, and devastating and destroying those of weight, creating big landslips out of small fissures, filling up with floods the low valleys, and rushing headlong with destructive and inexorable mass of waters.”

Leonardo da Vinci – From the Notebooks

A philosopher artist – Niccolo Machiavelli

“I liken Fortune to one of those violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another, each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. And although rivers are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and dams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging.”

Niccolo Machiavelli – from “The Prince”

And then they worked for a warrior, a man who was no artist: a ruler with unlimited ambition. Cesare Borgia, to try and divert the River Arno, with disasterous results for both the artists.

“Caesar or Nothing.” – Cesare Borgia

And that story unfolds in the following link:  http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33197&amid=30273892

“As for Borgia himself, the truly astonishing extent of his ambitions only gradually emerged after his death. His plan had been to establish his own princedom in the Romagna. Backed by the diplomatic machinations of his powerful father he would then take Florence and eventually unite the whole of Italy under his power. To give Machiavelli his due he probably realised this earlier than most; he too wished to see a united Italy that would achieve a power it had not seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire over a millennium before. Yet even Machiavelli did not suspect the full enormity of what Borgia had planned with his father. Upon the death of Alexander VI a new pope would be elected by the college of cardinals. There is some evidence that Borgia planned to dispense with this centuries-old tradition for voting in St Peter’s successor to the rule of Christendom. Instead, he intended to seize the papacy, declare himself pope and turn this office into a secular hereditary institution ruled by the House of Borgia. As Machiavelli had seen, the key to Borgia’s success lay in his astonishing ability to outwit his enemies by means of treachery beyond wildest imagination.”

A quote from Benoit Mandelbrot, from where I found both excerpts of Da Vinci and Machiavelli:

http://www.amazon.com/Misbehavior-Markets-Fractal-Financial-Turbulence/dp/0465043577/

“But the sensation of roughness has almost entirely been ignored by scientists. Euclid, the Greek geometer whose Elements is the worlds oldest treatise with near-modern mathematical reasoning, focused on its opposite, smoothness. He and innumerable followers studied smoothness in exquisite detail. Lines, planes, and spheres are the matter of Euclidean geometry, as we are all taught in grade school. I love them, but they are concepts in men’s minds and works, not in the irregularity and complexity of nature. How many natural objects around you really fit these old Greek patterns? Maybe the surface of a pond, where there is absolutely no wind or wave, appears truly flat like a plane. Maybe the irises of your children’s eyes, if you gaze deeply at them, appear close enough to circular. But how many other smooth, natural things can you name? As I put it in 1982, in my book-length manifesto, The Fractal Geometry of Nature: “Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line”.

Now, to talk about fractals and roughness may seem like a digression from the workaday task of financial analysis. But a look at the extraordinary range and power of fractal geometry will provide insight into what is possible in finance – and set the stage for further chapters”

Second Life is idealised, like Plato’s solids. It has very little “roughness”: attempts to bring in the rough – such as improved tools for terrains, a better avatar mesh, better atmospheric rendering like Windlight, better procedural modelling, meshes and sculpties, and procedural tools like Speedtree, all met with strong resistence in Second Life.

Simply. The rough in our art threatens to blow away the smooth in Second Life’s finance, and it makes people fearful. But, this desire for a smooth financial model is doomed anyway. The real world is not smooth, it is turbulent.

This constant resistence to developing the roughness of Second Life’s graphics seems reflected into the financial mentality of the leadership, who believe they have tamed the river of finance and commerce in Second Life.

Rivers are never tamed. We can hope to make peace with them, but only if we work with them with at least some understanding of its uncertain nature, and a respect for that kind of uncertainty.

In economics, Knightian uncertainty is risk that is immeasurable, not possible to calculate.

“Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated…. The essential fact is that ‘risk’ means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character; and there are far-reaching and crucial differences in the bearings of the phenomena depending on which of the two is really present and operating…. It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.” — Frank Knight

It is only natural that I would love the opportunity that Blue Mars represents to independent artists: roughness is built into Cryengine 2 at every level of its graphics engine. The ability to more closely model the real world is unparalled – even the ability to create breakable items that people can rend into fragments, warms my Epicurean soul. Even if nobody else used it, I would use it. And I know there are more people out there like me, who are less concerned about ugly “conventional finance” and more concerned about beauty as represented by the real world, both in art and preserving that real life beauty. We may not be a mass majority, but we are a significant amount of people. I want to make that number rise.

I believe that roughness will influence this virtual world in unforeseen ways. I’m starting to raft on that river now. I know the ride will be rough, but I will see it to the end.

Drunk CorpoHippies at the Helm of the Ship

Never in my whole time in Second Life, have I felt as demoralised about the Company as I feel right now. Content creation is the backbone that allows the land model to thrive in Second Life, yet I see that the service provider is hopelessly blinkered by their overconfidence in their overarching “vision” for corporations and education. Like the White Star Line’s hubris when they caused the sinking of the Titanic, the captain is encouraged to plow their “unsinkable” flagship luxury cruise liner full speed ahead into a field of randomly floating icebergs.

It is now trivial to copy avatars and items in Second Life, for any average resident who wishes to do it, with an opensource viewer. It is no longer something that requires any significant technical experience to do. This development was inevitable, and it is here today. This genie is not going back in the bottle. But it does not have to be all doom and gloom.

Nobody seems to understand at Linden Lab, that unfettered copying is only feasable if there is no unfettered selling and mass distribution capabilities. This is how the real World Wide Web works, because it works with Real Money Transactions regulated by governments and banks concerned with a maze of laws and the real need to limit their risk. File sharing sites are cracked down upon. Many attempts at microtransaction economies have been tried, but all microtransactions with “token” currency, are equal to the chips received in a casino, and are high risk ventures due to lack of oversight. Sometimes, the market doesn’t work like you’d want.

MMOs are games worlds and not sandbox worlds like Second Life. They limit their risk by not making the currency officially tradeable, not allowing user-generated content, or any actual rights to the graphics in the game. Rather a subscription fee is paid. Works for Blizzard with Worlds of Warcraft, and a host of others to keep the Feds and Interpol away from their office doors. Sure third-parties trade it, that’s not the point. The point is keeping their business running and their core customers, the gamers, happy.

Merchant accounts on the net are dear and hard to acquire, and not everyone trusts Paypal. (with good reason)

The microtransaction tokens model, in combination with good distribution paths for all content in Second LIfe, regardless if its legitimate or copied, allows even the casual user to turn copying into cold hard cash with ease. The fact that legitimate content cannot be differentiated from copied content, that likely reputable merchants cannot be told apart on first glance from likely dodgy ones, is also hurting Second Life content business, with confusion of goods.

Linden Lab apparantly has no idea how the token money in their economy is actually changing hands. I sat in horror watching the Metanomics webcast about virtual goods, as CorpoHippies described their inworld money transactions as happening in a fog. I bet it was just a drunken Gaussian stupor. Yeah, I am sure the Secret Service and Interpol will enjoy hearing *that*! Great way to provide opportunity for money laundering and profit opportunities for organized crime and terror organisations. This can prove to be more fun than the ageplay, gambling and banking bans, and more damaging than the adult content fiasco ever was.

Wait, what?

Yes, losing the whole microtransactions model in Second Life is possibly at stake, here.

No individual content creator can stand up to the current level of wholesale content theft in Second Life. We neither have the support of the company, nor the tools of the platform to maximise our gains and limit our losses like any normal retail business would do, and the game is drunkenly rigged in favor of wholesale corruption. The only option is to form “media companies” to protect our rights via lawsuits under the DMCA, and we all know how those go in Real Life. I’m rooting for Stroker Serpentine and Munchflower Zaius, but I know this road will be deeply difficult for them. Long term, it’s not a solution for virtual worlds to go this route: I’m sure they agree. We need something better than class action lawsuits. But it’s all the merchants can do, who rely on Second Life for their income, to limit their losses. It’s impossible for most of them; too expensive and time consuming.

A good example. Walt Disney formed his own company and invented Mickey Mouse, after his character “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” was legally stolen from him by another media company he was working with,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney#Oswald_the_Lucky_Rabbit

Now Walt’s company uses contracts that can harm individual artists rights with work-for-hire agreements, slanted in favor of the corporation. The artist trades a bit of job security for trading in all their copyright interests. Disney actively lobbies  for laws that will keep Mickey Mouse under the company copyright forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Which has a twist, because the heirs of the artist can eventually file to reclaim these copyrights.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/in-wake-of-disney-marvel-deal-cartoonists-heirs-seek-to-reclaim-rights/

The artists during their lifetimes have given up all copyrights to their work to the corporations through the work for hire agreements. But after they are dead, heirs can eventually sue the company for the control of the rights that the artists never got to enjoy. Oddly enough, letting the copyright expire fairly to the public domain in a reasonable period of time would have benefitted the corporation more, as trademark law can cover the business rights in these properties. Trademarks expire when they are not used, unlike copyrights.

While Walt Disney may have done well for himself by founding a corporation, this path hasn’t improved the situation of artists. This casino is rigged for the house. Even if you play the “found a company to protect myself” game to win for yourself, the house still wins every time. IANAL – I am not a lawyer, but I feel reasonably sure-footed, that laws slanted in corporations favor are of no real use to the little guy. And that’s trying to use the DMCA in Second Life – useless for artists unless they have unlimited money for lawyers and courts. They do not have the time or the cash.

I’m also reminded of how I felt when Metacreations imploded their key product offerings, selling all its real products, such as Poser, Bryce, and Painter, opting instead for restructuring into a “dot com” biz. Their products are relegated to the dustbin of spyware filters, while their original products are still selling and developed by other companies. This is Linden Lab ignoring the backbone of their business to “restructure” to appeal to corporate and educational customers playing “office” in virtual worlds. Someone else will take their original business.

Ask Fujitsu how well virtual corporate office went, Linden Lab! The corps and edus for the most part, didn’t go for playing “office” in Worldsaway, because better and far cheaper tools existed for offices even in 1996, comparatively speaking. Second Life is not *that much better* than Worldsaway was in this area, to change the majority of those conservative minds. They think that employees are playing a game on company time.

Meanwhile, we content creators are thrown to the thieves and crooks who take advantage of the platform for whatever nefarious srs bzns they are doing. What original content might have been sold at a living wage, is quickly devalued by these people to nearly free, sometimes in the space of hours after release.

Reading Interpol’s Intellectual Property Crimes description was something of a wakeup call, a final one in a series of wakeup calls.

http://www.interpol.int/Public/FinancialCrime/IntellectualProperty/Default.asp

“There is general agreement that IP crime is a high-profit, low-risk crime, which inevitably motivates criminals to engage in this type of activity. It is clear paramilitary terrorist organizations have traded in counterfeit and pirated goods to maintain their organizations and fund their activities. In light of this, INTERPOL remains concerned about the possibility that some other terrorist groups would seize the opportunity to finance their activities through IP crime.”

I can’t protect myself against these people by suing them under the DMCA. The DMCA gives them my personal information if I file, so they can come and make my life miserable both online and off. This is why I don’t file DMCA’s. If its organised crime, and I suspect a good deal of the endemic content theft to resale market is related to real-life crime. Given the stories I hear from many other content creators, it’s only a matter of time before the Feds and Interpol show up in Second Life, demanding where the L$ money trail goes.

L$ IN THE FOG!

Second Life content creators, the more they do for this platform, the more they benefit the corrupt users who may be engaging in other crimes in real life, various sorts of organised crime such as drugs, terrorism and money laundering. Lately “Protection” seems to be getting added to the list. Shut up about our rip bzns or they’ll grief and bot you to poverty. These are chilling effects on the Second Life economy, and no self-respecting corporation will want that kind of embarrassing blowout anywhere near their branding.

Linden Lab merrily skims off the transactions and enjoys the tier paid by these illicit businesses, in flagrant disregard for the fact that they can lose their safe harbor defence by profiting from sales of pirated content. Plus it destabilises the backbone of the legitimate businesses on Second Life, just like they did with “investment banking”, “securities trading”, gambling and ageplay, while satisfying their desire to have limitless “almost free” content to lure in corporate business, and a constant flow of people to rent sims at exhorbitant prices. The piece de resistance is that the hardware has gotten exponentially better, yet LL is not passing the savings on to the customers in the form of tier savings. No, they just lower and raise the “setup fees” in ways that harm those who have bought the sims already. But that goes back to my other rant on CorpoHippies blundering around with the Mainland.

Now, this might seem like a conspiracy, but I believe deeply it’s not a conspiracy at all. Never explain by conspiracy what is better ascribed to sheer stupidity.

I believe this is all unintentional random blundering around by a company with no compass for its corporate direction. Without good leadership at the helm, their blunders take the form of the drunkards walk — many people may be familiar with Brownian motion from statistics or physics classes. Linden Lab is actually just treading water with no idea where they are going, and that’s how they think the money is behaving, too. CorpoHippies drunk at the helm of the ship, floating seemingly nowhere fast.

Real Life doesn’t actually operate this way. Drunks do not just sail around in circles, heading for nowhere. That’s a computer simulation.

Drunks eventually crash the ship into something else.

Yet, they refuse to stop steering the ship while intoxicated. They are going to crash into a random iceberg, eventually. Or run this ship ashore like the Exxon Valdez, ruining Second Life for everyone.

Thinking about my own, existing Second Life content. It’s not really worth doing anything about the content I have made already. I’ll keep selling to benefit those golden souls who understand what doing the right thing means. But I can do more to legally protect the content I have not released yet. I am sure to do so, Linden Lab. I must protect myself from CorpoHippie blundering drunk habits, because you are drunkenly bumping into me too, and I’m afraid you are going to run me over with your ship. CorpoHippies all might wander around in what they perceive as a drunken fog, but I don’t. I want to achieve enough distance to be out of danger of CorpoHippie blundering drunk habits.

I don’t work for Linden Lab, and I am done doing things for Linden Lab for free, right now. Since when was I supposed to work for free in Second Life, when I am certain to have little to show for it but heartache and abuse? I’ve been down this road already: No thanks, LL.

Did it ever occur to these CorpoHippies, that average corporations and serious educational institutions don’t like IP theft, and have a serious attitude about trademarks? Because they have their own investments and content in this area to protect? That they want to buy content that also respects these laws? Not only that, they want to import their own content and they expect to be protected by these laws and by the platform sold to them?

So the LL CorpoHippies cynically took the easy way out. They devised a system that protects corporate customers like Fort Freaking Knox, while leaving the little guy out in the cold? But it doesn’t really help the corps or edus who may find a virtual world useful, because what most of them want is a multiuser immersive simulation (think 3d WEB SITE) that allows an audience that can scale (SITE VISITORS, LL!) over the Internet, and they want people to come visit, minus the phallus rezzing griefers and copybotters, and secure enough to keep out sim defacing hackers.

So instead of dealing with that problem, it was easier to simply not allow a regular Second Life audience to come visit with all their stuff securely tucked in their own inventories, believing the corps and edus would be happy shivering out on their cold and lonely standalone Second Life inna OfficeBox? Shutting out the mass audience, just to be free of a few hackers, griefers and copybotters? How about devising tools to deal with hacking, griefing and copying across the whole platform instead?

Nor can these corporate clients buy content from the majority of Second Life content creators either? Only from “approved sellers” who sell a certain volume and then hand over stuff “opensource” with just a license? Which is fine if they wanted to buy fully licensed content, but it doesn’t address the need for an audience, who will want to wear *their* stuff that they bought, and their content rightly won’t have a license for the corporate customer to use.

Was it too difficult to devise an asset server system that allowed an avatar to still be connected to the LL Inventory system, without transferring assets over to the Corporate Grid they are visiting? Did it ever occur to devise a system that simply made the issue of copying largely irrelevant?

Didn’t anyone tell LL CorpoHippies that selling a certain amount of merchandise does nothing to guarantee quality of content? It only insures that its inexpensive? So corporate customers can still really, only go through “authorised developers” to get custom content, or use their inhouse people? Why can’t corporations make their own choices on who to buy from?

How not to be forked as the Content Creator Chicken Main Course

I feel for the decent working Joes and Janes who work for Linden Lab, the many talented developers whose work has also gone into creating this platform. My screeds aren’t aimed at them. I have much love for all of these talented people. They’re just “doing a job” and they love the company that they work for, and want to see it thrive and prosper. Actually, so do I.

I’m talking straight to the CorpoHippie suits who pay their salaries. I’ve made some suggestions to these CorpoHippies on the JIRA to avert their course as they sail the Second Life luxury cruise liner into the icebergs, and the steering wheel is in their drunk hands.

Here’s a short list that summarizes how the plan against the copying of content should be reading. I call it:

“The Four Prongs in Forking Copied Content.”

Making the copying issue irrelevant is the answer to the problem.

1. Make it easy to buy high quality legitimate content.

2. Make it easy to find infringing content and remove it

3. Limit the ability to widely distribute copied content

4. Make it difficult to profit from copied content

1. Make it easy to buy high quality legitimate content.

Currently there are not easily recognisable channels in SL in which to buy good legitimate content. Search sucks, Xstreet is a corrupt pile of dodgy crap mainly lifted from other 3d content communities, the Web, and other Second Life residents. People mainly rely on word of mouth for good content creators, or use inworld groups.

Make it clearly obvious the difference between legitimate content and that which isn’t. When I talk about making it clear about legitimate content, I want to see it clear not just for high end content creators like myself, but also for full perms resellers, so they have confidence in their products getting sold to and used by legitimate users. Legitimate users of their products can benefit a lot by having some way of making it clear that they are.

So this should really trickle down to the bottom, to the average seller of derivative goods made from items created by other merchants. (the ubiquitous seller of 50 linden “screw me” heels). They need a way to mark themselves as legitimate and derivative goods, to differentiate themselves as better than the copies competing with them.

Quite frankly, its this user who drives the land market the most, and if they close down shop because they feel like they can’t continue easily in the face of others who just rip content to compete with them, we are all losers.

I have suggested other ideas on the JIRA, such as my ratings system, which in conjunction with content authentication can go a long way to creating a profitable trade in legitimate goods, giving corporate customers a tool to filter content coming into their sims, both on the Main Grid and off. This is the carrot, without which none of the sticks one uses against content theft will ever work. Linden Lab must outconvenience piracy and instill trust at all levels of the content creation selling and creation process.

Mesh import and other advanced Second Life tools that allow industry standard programs will help a lot for the corporate customers and high end Second Life users alike, and mesh building supplies will certainly be a trade once it appears in Second Life. It can overall improve content quality, if implemented well. But in order to have good results, and not a gianormous clusterfuck of uploading existing meshes from all over the Internet, Linden Lab needs to take an overarching approach to the issue of unauthorised resale and distribution of copied content.

2. Make it easy to find infringing content and remove it

This one’s important too, especially to drive home to retards that buying, selling, and distributing copied content doesn’t pay. Authentication can help with this one, too. Efficient processes to deal with those who try to slip through the cracks of the legitimate content trade have to be dealt with.

3. Limit the ability to widely distribute copied content

Important, but not working by itself, it needs support from the other prongs of this fork in order to work well. I suggested limiting transfer on unverified accounts, that will halt a good bit of the casual distribution of copied assets inworld. If one was to translate this to Opensim, just devise an inventory system which doesn’t transfer assets to the sim you are visiting, but remains either the property of the user or even of an online store. Sure users on a sim other than yours, can copy what you rez on your body, but as long as it sits in your inventory, they can’t touch it. Your avatar should behave as if it were a sim. “The Theatre of the Avatar”, but that is a topic for another discussion.

4. Make it difficult to profit from copied content

By limiting transfer on unverifieds, can end brutally reselling them through microtransactions by those accounts. Content control with legitimate goods will erect barriers against copied content as well. Opensim can simply do this by adopting the iTunes type model. The store is the ultimate arbiter of uploaded content. Works for the 3d communities, too.

This might even save the Second Life microtransactions model, before law enforcement agencies start to wonder about what other illegal purposes its getting used for. When or if that happens, and its more likely a when than an if, we can all call Second Life, “game over”.

But I think all my suggestions are a pipedream, that Linden Lab will never act upon anything I have suggested. However, its a plan for those who have walled garden grids, many on OpenSim already have similar models to Second Life, and I write my ideas for them, too.

I hope developers still have a job after the ethics-free CorpoHippies are done wrecking Second Life, and sadly this is something I doubt longterm too. Because CorpoHippies will just as happily crash into the developers and other employees to the wall as they smile vapidly in their brainfog, same as they do the rest of us unwashed “residents”.

Try calling the residents CUSTOMERS for a change!

The damage to some people could be great; those who are dependent on the money to pay their bills, those who are highly invested in land in some aspect of their business, or work for the company directly. The “end of the world” will likely *not* come to pass anytime soon. The LL CorpoHippies cynically know this much as they stumble around trying to steer the ship in their mental FOG, but I am doing my duty from the lighthouse, and warning people that there’s danger in these waters.

Icebergs ahead! Watch out for the shore! Pay attention to the lights and the foghorns!

I feel deeply for my fellow creators, honest estate owners, LL employees and the responsible customers of Second Life businesses who find themselves caught in the middle with no good options. For myself personally, I find that I actually do have a few options, all of which I can do simultaneously, and I will detail the list here.

1. Keep on having fun in Second Life, and don’t do Second Life content creation as srs bzns.

Priority no. 1! Support the content creators and estate owners you care about, anyway. Some of them don’t have the luxury to leave Second Life srs bzns content creation or estate rental biz, and deserve support and empathy. The ball is out of our court here. I will simply not make more stuff as srs bzns in Second Life, however. Not unless I see srs chng (and I doubt I will ever see it). I am taking my chickens to sell through other venues, to other 3d communities with me. If I make anything else for Second Life, its because I wanted to have fun with a few friends. That’s payment enough. I might sell a bit, I might not.

2. Concentrate on Blue Mars content creation. (only suitable for those going after the mid-high end)

Avatar Reality is far more enlightened about the image many corps and edus want to be associated with, and the need for easy access of an audience to their worlds while maintaining security for these clients. No CorpoHippies running the place at AR, I like that. Corporate through and through, just like many of the customers they aim to reach. Still early days yet for the platform, but I feel optimistic. It will *not* be a replacement for Second Life, nor is it even intended to be this, but I find it exciting in its own unique way. Long time ago (1996 when I was just playing Worldsaway on Compuserve), I predicted first person shooter game engines would be used to create virtual worlds; I am delighted to be part of this seachange in their usage. If you are a talented 3d artist, you should be checking out Blue Mars. Keep the suggestions for improvements to it coming. It will only get better.

3. Help Opensim turn into viable competition to Second Life at the low and midrange, by donating and selling worktime to create real business opportunity for myself and others, with basic graphic assets for others to use in its content creation.

OpenSim is a failsafe place for hardcore Second Life folks to go. Even more so if Linden Lab finally commits a suicide of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts while drunk on the spiked Kool-aid. Longterm, if Opensim is turned towards a real money transaction model, it could be a good platform for serious 3d artists, much the same as Turbosquid, Renderosity, and DAZ3d are for the many programs that 3d content is made for and with. This trade will trickle down to those who have less technical skill in 3d, just as it does on those sites. On 3d content sites, there are many divisions of labor of content creators – some texture artists, some modellers, some animators, some programmers, some folks just making renders for fun, etc. This needs more fostering. Fostering it will sell lots of inexpensive Opensims.

OpenSim and Second Life are really like a 3d rendering program where you can pose and animate your virtual dolls and build 3d environments, similar in most ways to a 3d rendering program such as Poser and DAZ Studio, while at the same time you can invite all your friends, in a giant Sim sketchpad to do anything you want to do. It is clear that content creation drives the rental of Opensims, which are far cheaper than Second Life Sims. If a viable economy emerges, there may be something approaching a thriving 3d web.

Christmas Feast Day at CorpoHippie Farms

At some point, the Second Life Chickens will become cruelly aware of the reality of CorpoHippie Farms. Eventually, all of the Chickens, including the Estate Owning Chickens and the Employee Chickens, will join their cousins, the Content Creator Chickens, at the CorpoHippie Farm. The sim will be Damage Enabled. Rotisserie Chicken is the main course and all will be chased down in a drunken attempt by the CorpoHippies to skewer all the Chickens to the Rotisserie grill for the massive, one time ever CorpoHippie Christmas Chicken Feast. Only CorpoHippies have a good chance of getting out of the farm, alive.

The site of the feast is high atop the Golden Feed Silos. All the CorpoHippies shall be force teleported to the Silver Lining Chicken Cage Restaurant for the final Christmas Feast Bacchanalia. Then merriment, drunken antics and loose women will prevail for a time, dressed in botted Nomine outfits bouncing on copied Sexgen beds.

The only way down is to swandive from the top of the silo towers, after copying to inventory with full permissions, exquisite golden parachutes embroidered with ivory chickens. All textures uploaded from Deviant Art, naturally, and the parachutes genuinely copybotted from Cubey Terra’s Aerodrome using a freebie opensource script.

The glide down to Earth may be quite dangerous for those suffering from foggy vision. Some of the CorpoHippies are sure to drop with an unopened parachute, too drunk from spiked Kool-aid to pull the release string. Others may nab greedily more than one parachute to ensure a safer sail to the terrain below. And some may have simply eaten too much Chicken while Intoxicated, puking into the parachute all the way down.

Watch your Dixie cups.

No CorpoHippies or Chickens were harmed in the Reenactment, as they were safely Teleported out of Second Life upon Time of Death.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Postscript.

This article is Parrhesiastic, sometimes engaging in Black Dry Humor, Sarcastic throughout, and meant to be so. For an Epicurean has failed her friends truly, if she does not offer frank criticism. Still, there is a sense of the absurd, as anything I try to do for my fellow Second Lifers, is all in the end, utterly pointless.

Be excellent to each other.

Something that has bothered me for some time has been the insistence on the gold standard by what I can only describe as the twin cults of Rothbard and Rand. This is just a rambling note of some of my thoughts on the matter – they are freely given and probably have the same value.

This gold standard cult became more apparant to me when I was rereading some of my cybernetics books by Norbert Wiener. Something that both Wiener and Friedrich Hayek were deeply sceptical of, was the use of mathematics in the social sciences. It was why Wiener refused to develop applications of his techniques to economics. This has been done today, to great distress for the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and the popular author and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

When reading Wiener, it seems that he took the early research of Mandelbrot very seriously, although this was before much of Mandelbrot’s work with fractals. Mandelbrot is mentioned quite a few times in his books, especially in Wiener’s famous layman’s version of the Cybernetics tome, The Human Use of Human Beings.

This relates very much to the DRM discussions today, as it looks quite obvious to me that money in the digital age is nothing more than a form of information, and would be subject to the same sorts of phenomenon as any information is. That is, it follows a direction exactly opposite to entropy – it is an economics of plenty and not an economics of scarcity. The gold standard is a form of “DRM” system – it tries to force an economics of scarcity onto what is virtually an unlimited resource – money. This probably should inform us in virtual worlds as we go forward – a real money transaction system or a fixed transaction system to a government-regulated currency might be a more viable option.

Governments do not adopt the hard DRM method, rather they try to control the money supply via interest rates. This is more like the “jamming of signals” that Wiener has described. The reason for this, and this was a key insight of Milton Friedman, that the money supply needs to grow. But I feel that Friedman may not have gotten the whole picture. He believed in a money machine that would just keep printing money at a fixed rate. (eliminating the role of the central bank) I’m unsure if that was a correct view, though I do sympathise wholly with what Friedman was trying to do. Rather it becomes more obvious to me that the money supply needs to flex with the size of the population. As human population has been inflating, it makes sense that you would need to inflate the money to keep up with the population. But as a population shrinks, it also makes sense that you can end up with massive inflation.

When thinking about a better method to control digital rights in the virtual world, we probably should be thinking more like the government – we need to “jam” the signals in order to maintain a virtual economy. The “DRM” of scarcity is clearly not popular with users and should be abandoned just as the gold standard was. This is going to take a central role of a trusted authority, and a pretty strong campaign on pirate distribution – the reselling of these files. It is encouraging to see prices for MP3s become more normalised as i-Tunes and other legal distribution channels come available for buying digital content at a reasonable price.

Now when I talk about Second Life, and the permissions system, which works just fine for what it was intended for, I want to make clear this is not a DRM system. It is a “jamming the signals” system. The files themselves are not protected by any sort of DRM. Rather they transfer plain old file attributes common to any operating system, which transfers the wish of the person who sent the files for the network, they do not always restrict transfer or copying, they only do this here and there in a “jamming the signals” way. This system does not exist outside the network operating system – the files themselves are in fact, DRM free. This is essential to displaying the data in the viewer, of course. We can’t have real DRM or we’d never be able to display the files.

Just a short note about Brownian motion, which Wiener was famous for extending on the mathematics of Einstein. I believe there is a critical error in this, and it started with Einstein. Einstein used the observation of a pollen grain floating in water,  which lead to his proof on Brownian motion. However, a pollen grain is round, and water molecules are very uniform as well. This leads to the “normal distribution” of which is a nemesis for Mandelbrot and Taleb. This in fact does not invalidate Brownian motion at all – it invalidates the normal distribution as the only assumption for Brownian motion, as not all molecules have the same shape. Much of econometrics relies too much on notions of equilibrium, and this can lead to false predictions and incorrect assessment of risks. An even deeper fault in econometrics is that humans do not act rationally all the time. Game theory is only for the casino.

I shall show how this notion about the Brownian motion of ellipsoids was proven in 2006 by the University of Pennsylvania. The random walk of an ellipsoid does not follow the Gaussian normal distribution.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1035

Twenty seconds of a measured random walk trajectory for a micrometer-sized ellipsoid undergoing Brownian motion in water. The ellipsoid orientation, labeled with rainbow colors, illustrates the coupling of orientation and displacement and shows clearly that the ellipsoid diffuses faster along its long axis compared to its short axis.

“The experiments confirmed the theorys curious description of how an ellipsoids random motions are different from those of spherical particles.  On average, particles undergoing Brownian motion do not move very far.  For example, in one second, the largest number of particles will stay very close, say within one micron, of their starting point; a smaller number will move between one micron and two microns; a still smaller number will move between two microns and three microns, and so on.  A plot of the number of particles traveling specific distances yields the famous bell-shaped or Gaussian curve from statistics.  The Penn researchers found that the same experiment, carried out on ellipsoidal particles, produces a curve that is not Gaussian.

“Since ellipsoids are longer than they are wide, they experience more water resistance going in one direction than the other,” said Yilong Han, a post-doc in Yodhs research group.  “These effects are larger in two-dimensions than in three, and the coupling of the rotational movement – spinning – with the translational movement – the distance traveled – give rise to the weirdly non-Gaussian behavior we observed.”

Food for thought.

I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, whereever it may be seen. Moreover, I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality because the people who have elected communication as a career so often have nothing more to communicate.

– Norbert Wiener, from the Human Use of Human Beings

I feel like there is an ax at the root of originality in our world… and it grieves me deeply.