UNIMPEACHABLE OFFENSE

So to sum up (because a lot has happened since then), here was the deal:

Few months ago, a guy I called "Jedidiah Profane" started slapping giant, obtrusive, ugly-ass "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS: IMPEACH BUSH" billboards on hundreds of plots all over Second Life.  And if you wanted to get rid of one, you had to buy the land it was displayed on at astronomical rates.

Residents cried "extortion", and unleashed hell on the official Forums.  To make sure this high degree of umbrage was reflective of the population at large, I conducted an in-world survey-- and indeed, 70% of the Residents polled knew about them, and hated them, too. 

Here is what Linden Lab policy enforcers did:  nothing.  (Other than delete a few which overhung into other private property.)

Here is what Linden Lab CEO Philip Linden told me last month, when I told him about the 70% seething over the "Impeach Bush" billboads:

"We think very long-term about Second Life, about what it can become," he said by e-mail.  "So although many people doubtless find billboards with political opinions unappealing, we are convinced that to grow to really reach huge numbers of people all over the world, Second Life will have to preserve a free and open environment..."  If the Residents were hoping for help from on high (and many of them clamored to have Profane summarily ejected from Second Life), they'd be disappointed. 

And here is what they did, in response to Jedidiah Profane's campaign, and Linden Lab's inaction: 

           

Nothing.

Oh, there was a response.  It just came sporadically, some of it so ironically self-aware as to almost defeat the purpose (if the purpose was protest.)  Like a virtual world member of the BLF, Blaze Columbia started giving away billboards to place next to Profane's billboards, offering charming, message- jamming slogans like, "SUPPORT OUR POOPS:  USE A BUSH".  Mikey Dripp went him one better by converting his avatar into an anti-Bush billboard, and began flying over official Linden Lab territory in SL.  They wouldn't remove the billboards, well, he'd bring the billboards to them, flying over Governor Linden's city hall, or hovering above Pathfinder Linden's office.   

Because there were upwards of 80 Forum threads complaining about the Resident who came to be known as "the Impeach Bush guy", I put out an announcement in the same space, asking for specific, concrete actions Residents had actually taken in response-- besides creating threads complaining about him.

There weren't many. A few said they refused to buy land, or had downgraded their account, or made other silent protests against the situation. 

Widespread collective action, however, was not in much evidence. 

Noted gadfly Prokofy Neva, for example, launched a petition drive, gathering names from the 125,000+ Residents to present to Philip Linden, demanding change.    After several weeks, it had garnered all of 36 signatures. 

Linden Lab maintains a voting system which allows Residents to campaign for specific upgrades and additions to the next version of Second Life.  There were at least two proposals that would directly and elegantly address the "impeach Bush" conundrum in a way that wouldn't impinge on free expression.  Persig Phaeton's proposition would enable Residents to create a "blacklist" of individuals whose creations they didn't want to see; Chris Wilde's proposition suggested a similar solution, except you'd just pinpoint parts of the surrounding land you didn't want displayed.  Instead of having to look at obtrusive political messages-- or anything else you deemed obnoxious, for that matter-- both Phaeton and Wilde proposed a world where you would filter out whole chunks of reality, according to personal preference.  (In that regard, it was similar to an anecdote from Lawrence Lessig's groundbreaking Code-- though ironically, while the "Impeach Bush guy" controversy was reaching its apex in Second Life, Lessig himself appeared in-world, and when I asked him about the code-driven solution offered in his book, he was hesitant, wondering aloud if a societal solution was preferable.)

In any case, Pheton's proposal garnered 72 voters; Wilde's, 94.  (By contrast, the leading proposal is to introduce Havok 2 physics into Second Life; it's backed by 725 Residents.)

The purpose of pointing this out isn't to denigrate these efforts, but one can't help noticing how un-collective they all were.  Where once Linden Lab's ancient policy of taxing Residents garnered a revolt that seemed to sweep up the entire population (and this when total subscriber base was scarce a few thousand), now a genuinely pervasive annoyance couldn't garner the backing of even one percent of the public.

And here is what happened, after all that:  the controversy went away.

A month or so after it happened, few speak about the "impeach Bush guy" in the Forums anymore.  The signs of Jedidiah Profane still pepper the world, but they're much harder to find.  The world keep growing, new Residents keep joining, and in that crush, Profane's political campaign or his extortion scheme or whatever it was supposed to be has disappeared in the continual stream of new content.  You may need to scroll through several pages of land listings to find his "Impeach Bush" plots now.  And in the end, the controversy waned not from any action by Linden Lab or Residents heroically acting in concert.  In the end, it was overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of perpetual creation.

I've asked "Jedidiah Profane" for his perspective on what, if anything, he thinks he ultimately accomplished; I'll post any reply I get here.  But from my own point of view, he has accomplished something valuable, though perhaps not what he had in mind.

For what would happen if Profane's signs had said instead, for example, "Buy Cialis on the Web!" or "Eat at McDonalds!", or any number of other real world advertisements or statements that most Residents would consider noxious 3D Spam?  Surely the same thing:  a flurry of outrage, scattershot protest, and after the initial storm, nothing. 

Early on, I had thought that Residents would resist the intrusion of real life ads and other forms of commerce into Second Life, collectively rising up against any intrusion that impeded the purity of their grass roots imagination.  But considering the story of Jedidiah Profane, I now think that was naive.  That isn't the kind of utopia we're dealing with here.  At best, we are left with the hyper-utopia dreamed up by libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick:  not a single version of the good society, but a multitude of visions, defined and demarcated by private property-- sometimes a socialist collective, sometimes a walled-in compound for conflict-loving gun owners, sometimes a severe paradise of submission and domination. 

And for the most part, a rough-and-tumble world of conspicuous wealth, endless shopping, and parties that never end, interrupted only now and again by giant blue cubes of obnoxious free speech that occasionally appear on the horizon.

Update, March 6, 4:59am SLT: 

Just got a series of e-mails from "Jedidiah Profane".  Asked what he thinks his campaign acheived, he said this:  "Accomplished: generated a buzz, got lots of people thinking, met many interesting people from different sides of these issues, and got the Lindens to come out with an oppinion, in public, stating that tolerance and freedom of expression are important for a society like SL to exist and thrive."  (Citing Linden Lab's last newsletter on this point.)

"I still get a charge out of people calling it the 'Impeach Bush' thing," he adds.  "No mention of 'Supporting Our Troops,' 'Restoring US Credibility,' or 'End the War' concepts at all."

Update, March 6, 12:41pm SLT: Claude Desmoulins just passed along a link to the current website to Neualtenburg, the "nonprofit cooperative and self-governed community" modeled after a Bavarian mountain town. 

Comments

[Selador Cellardoor]

I think that after years of truly appalling customer service, we are now seeing the result of that: utter apathy.

When the raised voices of residents are consistently ignored people get hoarse and stop shouting.

There was a recent posting by Jeska asking for opinions on the resmod program. She got them - pretty much universal condemnation, with many good arguments. The response? To continue with the resmod program, and tell is how great it is.

No wonder residents feel powerless - we *are* powerless while the Lindens dismiss our feelings as irrelevant.

The 'Impeach Bush' issue hasn't gone away. It's just that people no longer talk about it. Speaking personally I feel very unimpressed by the Linden response for two reasons. One, that they insisted on regarding it, perversely, as a free speech issue, when in fact it was an issue of extortion. Two, that by ignoring it, they were putting themselves in a position of complicitly supporting extortion.

I have noticed how the atmosphere of Second Life has changed during the last couple of years. At one time we all felt like fellow travellers in something that was new and exciting. The Lindens governed us, but it was with humour and, at that time, with wisdom. Their customer service in other respects was crap, but we could forgive them that. Now the Lindens seem colder and more remote and indeed more uninterested.

I do hope they will come to realise that customer service is not something that is done after all the other tasks have been completed, but is in fact a vital part of their business.

I know of potential residents who have turned away because they could not get any assistance apart from form letters that arrived after five weeks.

I realise that the Lindens are trying to save money, but the creation of a post in customer support would, in my opinion, be an investment.

[Rhynalae]

I do think Customer Service can contribute to the problem, Celador, and I haven’t been here long enough to experience the shift in the Lindens’ attitudes that you describe, but I do not think that the blame for public apathy can all be laid on their heads.

Why? I look at the RL society around me, and I see the same behavior mirrored here. People try to blame the government for our general ennui as a nation, and while there’s some teeth there, much of the fault still lies with us and human nature.

We generally hate to expend energy. We like to feel comfortable. We’re caught up in the details of our own little worlds. We substitute complaints for action, because in a society based on free speech, it takes no actual commitment to grouse about something. We’re encouraged to create noise but not to actually channel it into a positive action.

Election years depress me. For a few months, people complain and argue about things they don’t do anything about any other time… then ultimately vote to keep things the way they are because the daily details of their lives won’t be affected much. We are very vaporous, distracted, and only really respond to things that mess up our pursuit of personal satisfaction.

Aside from being an eyesore, the signs made no real dent on people’s normal activities of shopping, hanging out, building, or whatever else we liked to do. So while we were annoyed, there was no easy solution, it wasn’t worth the energy to find one, we ignored the signs long enough, and now life continues as usual.

While I personally didn’t like the signs, I am glad that the Lindens value the preservation of free speech.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

There is the issue of general ennui, certainly, but I confess that while I was originally extremely annoyed by said signs, I soon came to realise that there was little difference between what this chap was doing and what others were doing - he was simply doing it better, and on a larger scale.

Highly irritating land signs can be found everywhere and he simply pared down the concept to its core point; instead of simply putting up an ugly block that encouraged its neighbours to buy the area, why not put up an *appallingly* ugly one which practically *required* removal and inflate the land price ridiculously? And others have now taken his lead.

The actual "Impeach Bush" signage was merely both a (flimsy but maintainable) defence when challenged, a way to potentially cause more offence to some but gain support on grounds of "free speech" from others who agreed with the basic principle.

Life continues as usual because eventually, once the flurry of outrage died down and people simply stopped bothering to buy the plots, there really wasn't an awful lot of difference between the Bush signs and what is there at the moment in a lot of areas. In the charming, picturesque region of Theretra where I hail from, there were a couple of Impeach Bush signs, but they were hardly noticeable amongst the spinning cubes, pink malls and mysterious floating... *things*.

[Icon Serpentine]

To this day I still haven't heard any good counter-argument besides the placid response from LL. It's all been pretty one-sided and lacking in evidence.

However, the opposition I've taken on the issue throughout has added merit due to the lack of protest. It's only merit though -- without any evidence as to whether this Mr. Profane was actually extorting residents has yet to surface. I say merit because I didn't believe there was any evidence to prove his intent to extort residents into buying his land -- no evidence means (again, IMO) that there wasn't any significant outrage from LL's response (this is going on the assumption that people would organize a large response if certain liberties were at stake -- like being threatened by extortion.

[Cocoanut Koala]

Just what did you expect people to do, Hamlet, aside from what they did do?

coco

[Graham]

I think the lack of involvement from LL is by far the best thing they could have done.

It annoys me that the Linden's keep talking about forming a country, or that people are so quick to demand their intervention in the guise of "customer service." Second Life should not be a country, it should be a world. The Linden's should be the God's, with a strict policy of non-involvement, and the country or countries - the governments - should be left to be created by the people. If the Linden's were to simply take a step back, then the ingenuity of the people would take over and they'd step in and start running things themselves. The result would be a better world, one that is more democratically run and that isn't like the dictatorship we have right now.

Second Life has the creative tools and enough people that, if left to their own devices, social forces would take over. Objectionable, unwanted things would be pushed out the way by those forces, or would be overcome by grass roots campaigning. People don't stop shouting because the Linden's don't list. People stop shouting because the Linden's DO listen, and because they've all been coddled to the point where they've forgotten how to do things for themselves.

People need to be more self-reliant.

As the world grows and more people pile on the servers, I really don't see how the Linden's think they're going to be able to effectively govern the entire world. They're undercutting the efforts of the people right now, and they're going to find themselves in way over their heads in the near future.

Those self-replicating balls? The Linden's should be focused on maintaining the servers, and stopping them from going down, yes. But how long do you think it'd take the people to counter those balls with something else? Second Life is an open source world. I can't help but feel that if the Linden's would just stay out of it more, the collective creativity of thousands would put an end to the grief pretty quickly. And if anything new turned up - and it will - then the people could handle that too.

It's a matter of numbers.

[Sable Sunset]

You also need to cast your eye farther than just the standard SL forums to get a true feel for how the average resident feels.

You'll find that for some (like me) the point of posting in the regular SL forums is less and less obvious. Responses to requests for comment from the Lindens about certain topics are simply ignored; pertinent and interesting discussions are drowned in a tide of name calling or thread redirection by a mass of people that either don’t understand or care for forum etiquette; and if you happen to avoid that you run the risk of having your opinion on any particular item belittled and being personally ridiculed by a small group of very vocal individuals, or having a post that ‘steps out of line’ delete or edited by ResMods (I have to say none of this has happened to me personally – but it’s there, happening to others every day). Faced with all of this why exactly would the ordinary, sensible, SLer ever venture into the forums?

There are simply too many people posting; too many people with other agendas trying to redirect threads; and too little understanding or control from LL to make the forums appealing. It just leaves you feeling like you’re wasting your time.

So what do we do? We move forums. There’s other places that people with interesting opinions, fun attitudes and the capability for intelligent discussion congregate, well away from the mess that is the SL Forums. I myself post at www.SecondCitizen.com now, and am much happier for it. You remember what it’s like – just recall the SL forums a year or so ago.

It may mean that we can’t ‘have our say’ as far as the SL forums are concerned – but if no-one’s really listening then what does it matter?

[Elle Pollack]

Om a tangent:

"...just recall the SL forums a year or so ago."

To my recolection, the SL forums about this time a year ago were in the middle of the Prokofy Neva uproar among other things. Which is *not* a slur on Prokofy so much as a statement to the fact that I don't believe the forums are any better or worse or less tumoltuious than they ever have been in the year and a half I've been in SL.

Being a new ResMod, I should probably also add that ResMods cannot delete posts and the only edit known to take place was because of a permissions error and "newbie error" on behalf of someone who recently resigned her position. But I don't deny that there's a lot of early bugs that need to be worked out of the program.

[Cocoanut Koala]

I took part in gathering the signatures, too. Here are some comments by Prok, along with my comments on them:

-----

"Hamlet, I didn't gather "36 signatures" -- I gathered hundreds. I just merely sent one sample card that only happened to have 36 on it. We never made some systematic effort to impress anyone with numbers; the point was just to keep them coming to Philip Linden in particular, since his concept of "free and open" is one we share, and we find that hindering people's view with large, ugly, intimidating, hectoring signs, devaluing their property, spamming them, and extorting them to buy their view back is the antithesis of "open".

Many cling to the glorious revolutionary Lindenor past iconic moment of the prim tax revolt. But that was in a tiny population, able to constantly communicate with each other, and a very homogenous group at that -- on a real no-brainer issue.

Today, there's no reliable way to access any "125,000" people -- which in any event isn't really accurate as a figure for this community. 20,000 a day log on. 5 percent read the forums. So if at any one 4-hour session, there are 4500 logged on, then a few hundred petitions then begins to seem like a far more important statement.

There's no mass media within the world of SL itself; the society is atomized in many ways; in fact "civil society" as such is only in its rudimentary forms there. I wouldn't expect a petition campaign to be some wild success; I'm impressed that so many people so fervently became involved in drafting this text, taking the risk to sign it, and repeatedly meeting for demonstrations and confronting the signster.

There's one rather important correction to make. He isn't called the "Impeach Bush Guy". Not at all. In the vernacular -- just check the forums, the Herald, and any other watering hole -- he's called simply "the Bush Guy". Let the record show that the guy who came to try to attract attention to Bush's bloody adventures abroad ended up being called "the Bush guy", the opposite of his cause. Serves him right.

----

I, too, feel that a pretty good effort was made to protest these extortionary signs, and, as Prok points out, it is a different world than it was during the tax revolt.

Moreover, what can you do? People post a jillion posts, bunches of them in the Hotline, have meetings all over the place, yet keep getting told that the Lindens aren't going to do anything. There is only so much that the populace can do, so I don't think it is helpful to minimize their attempts. People would be kind of stupid not to give up eventually. That does not necessarily mean, however, that the overall effect of the Bush signs is good at all for SL's bottom line, either now or in the future.

The reason for not doing anything about the Bush guy's signs (and yes, it is referred to as "the Bush guy" and "the Bush guy's signs") is it sends a clear message to Coca-Cola and any other interested parties that there will be a definite hands-off approach to any advertising messages they may wish to mount in SL, however tall, bright, high, sparkling, spinning, pulsating, or whatever, if they buy the land to put it on. It sends the same message to any real world political interests, or any other social interests, that they can certainly post whatever they wish in whatever manner as well.

All of those businesses and interests groups are potential residents of SL, and with deeper pockets than most of us.

coco

[Hamlet Au]

Cocoanut, you yourself were the one who gave me Neva's petition of 36 names, and I asked you then why there were so few. The time to have said all the above would have been then.

If there really were "hundreds" of names that were gathered for the petition-- and that would still be a small percentage from the 5000 peak concurrency, and a *very* small percentage of total residents-- please seek their permission and then post them all here.

[Ingrid]

I think Selador is right. You can care to a point and then apathy sets in when you realize absolutely nothing will be done about a problem. coco may have had only 36 signatures but I can tell you that I received many, many complaints in Live Help about the signs. People were completely frustrated and felt powerless. They would often end up swearing a threatening to tier down. And my response to them as a Live Helper was: "I understand." What else could I tell them?

Signing notecards wouldn't have helped. LL is convinced that they need to preserve the individual's right to "free expression". Which is all lovely until someone uses that umbrella to grief/extort. The 'ol "Hand of God" might have helped, but then we'd all be banned wouldn't we? I still see the signs everywhere, people still hate them. But LL condones them so I guess we're all just SOL aren't we?