New World Notes

Read an Excerpt of The Hivemind Swarmed: A New Oral History of Gamergate, the 2014 Online Harassment Campaign That Changed Everything (Plus Get a Special NWN Discount Code!)

It's impossible to understand US politics or Internet/gaming/virtual world culture without knowing about Gamergate, the numerically small but highly coordinated online harassment campaign unleashed almost exactly 10 years ago. Fortunately there's a new oral history on the topic: The Hivemind Swarmed by David Wolinsky, and the book's summary puts it well:

Gamergate holds the grim distinction of being the first modern online harassment campaign. It arguably served as a model for the alt-right movement that would help propel Donald Trump to the White House. And it highlighted a toxic media culture—not just in gaming, but in film, TV, journalism, and more—in which leaders, through their passivity, took the side of the oppressor. Now, 10 years later—in the wake of #MeToo, Charlottesville, the Trump years, and the January 6 insurrection—the questions discussed here are more important than ever.

I was honored to be one of the many people David interviewed for the book, a highly readable and engrossing first-person account of that period, and what we've (hopefully) learned since then. Thanks to him and his publisher, New World Notes is featuring a lengthy excerpt (below) and a special discount code:

Click here to order the book from Beacon Press and used SCHOLAR25 as the code for 25% off the list price, along with free shipping.

Here's the excerpt, featuring indy pop star Jonathan Coulton, journalist Clive Thompson, virtual world pioneer Richard Bartle, and others (including, well, me, very briefly piping up here):

TikTok's "Very Demure, Very Mindful" Meme Spreads to Second Life's Flickr Community

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

In early August, TikTokker Jools Lebron offered viral advice about dressing for work. She pointed out that her clothes at work were demure and she remained mindful of why she was hired. There might be a slight, deliberate contrast between her glamorous looks and her “very demure, very mindful” advice, but that’s the point. She’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, especially in subsequent videos and she has sparked the “very demure, very mindful” meme.

I was curious if there were many very demure, very mindful people in Second Life posting to Flickr. And yes, there are!

Pengu Blep seems to have taken a riff off Jools being “very demure, very mindful” at a bar where she left her ID. I think they have captured the idea well, demurely, mindfully drinking and even one demure and mindful woman sitting on the bar. What more could you ask for? 

For more demure and mindful pics, click here:

Video Game Museums Directory, Online and Around the Globe

Here's a whole huge list of real life video game museums compiled by my colleagues at the Virtual Worlds Museum. Featuring places across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, it's a handy reference for your upcoming travel plans. 

For instance, the SF Bay Area is home to The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (in Oakland near the 12th street BART station), featuring thousands of games across decades of platforms, including a playable version of Habitat, the first virtual world. Here's a fun news segment on the The MADE:

 

Second Life's Strange Connection to the 2024 Presidential Election

If the Trump/Vance 2024 presidential campaign seems odd to you (to say the least), here's another bit of weirdness to contemplate:

Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that the Trump/Vance campaign would not even exist. 

I'm quite serious. But to understand what I mean, we need to go back into ancient history -- by which I mean 2004:

While it launched in 2003, Second Life first began gaining heavy media attention in 2004, after creator Linden Lab made an innovative announcement for the time: They made it possible to trade the virtual world's internal currency, Linden Dollars, for US dollars.

"The world will increasingly buy and sell and trade these things we are making [in Second Life]," as Philip Rosedale explained to me back then. "So I think that real digital worlds will naturally have real economies and real exchange with real life."

The move drove growing Silicon Valley excitement around the Second Life economy, leading to the hype wave of 2006-2008 fueled by the infamous BusinessWeek cover story and a slew of other coverage. Linden Dollars were mainly used to buy content in SL itself, though people began to experiment with using it to buy non-SL items. (For instance, someone experimented with selling PC graphics cards for L$.)

And then, in 2009, Bitcoin was invented.

The digital currency attracted growing excitement among hardcore technophiles, but the problem back then was this: There was no easy, legal way to buy and sell Bitcoin for US$.

Enter Linden Dollars. As I write in my book:

An Author Darkly: Last Years of Philip K. Dick Remembered by Jonathan Lethem, Tim Powers, and Linda Levy -- PKD's "Dark-Haired Girl" Muse

Above: PKD with Ridley Scott after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was optioned for Blade Runner (via Tim Powers)

Author Philip K. Dick was an enormous influence on popular culture, including the evolution of virtual worlds/the Metaverse -- both for writing the book that inspired Blade Runner and stories like "The Trouble With Bubbles", which Matt Ball credits (among many) for helping inspire the concept. One of my own favorite PKD novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), has a depiction of a drug-induced virtual world that eerily resembles the avatar-based Malibu that Second Life eventually became.

All that said, here's a fascinating online conversation going on now that fellow PKD admirers should check out: 

Philip K. Dick, The Last Ten Years: A Conversation Between a Dark-Haired Girl and Tim Powers

It's a public conversation thread on The WELL, the pioneering online community, with participation by PKD friend and acclaimed sci-fi author Tim Powers, along with commentary by literary giant Jonathan Lethem, who edited the Library of America's Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.

Most specially, they're joined by Linda Castellani (nee Levy), one of Philip Dick's "Dark-Haired Girl" muses. The memories they share of PKD are hilarious and moving, but also, disturbing and sad, as the author struggled (and sometimes lashed out) amidst  mental torments, poverty, and drug abuse, just before the cusp of his breakthrough with Blade Runner. 

You can read and participate in the whole thread here, and I've excerpted some key passages below. First, from Lethem, commenting on these bruising memories of PKD: 

At a moment where readers of this thread may be somewhat stunned into silence by the revelations about "our hero", I'll say that I'm thinking a lot about this stuff in light of my current renewed researches on PKD before the Festival this coming weekend, where I'll try to put some of this in the context of his writing life. I want to say something that I hope will not seem flippant or odd: The cruelty and coldness you experienced from Dick may not have been so much a bug as a feature.

That's to say, the argument about android v. machine in him was also taking place in his life, in his body, in his own choices and responses. Even if he failed to accept this and instead projected it onto others -- and so often, and tragically, he projected it onto a woman. A dark-haired girl.

So when you say "she was a redhead", what you're saying is that in a very sad way, hair-color was a kind of dumbed-down Voight-Kampf Test he was applying. Without understanding that he was actually looking in a mirror. So, that the coldness he thought he detected in you was a terror-vision of the empathy-devoid android self he most feared in himself. So -- perhaps the same thing he processed so powerfully for us in his art (even if processed incompletely, by definition) was inverted into a nightmare in his behavior.

As for those "revelations", Linda shares some of them, such as a time she was driving with the author, who'd already declared his unbridled adoration of her:

New Startup Building Platform That's "Garry's Mod meets GTA meets SL powered by UE5"

Hypersonic Laboratories is a new startup which just got funding to build HELIX, an upcoming multiplayer role-playing sandbox platform for user-generated content (UGC). I got an early peek at what they're building, and the ambition is pretty impressive. As David Chiu, Hypersonic's head of business, put it to me: "Think of it as Garry's Mod meets Grand Theft Auto meets Second Life powered by Unreal Engine 5".

So, yes, intriguing. Also notable that the development team has veterans of major game developers from Roblox/Uplift Games (creators of "Adopt Me") and Activision. This roughly fits my prediction in the book that we'd soon see the rise of Grand Theft Auto-type metaverse platforms. 

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has the whole story, including:

Her Starring Scarlett Johansson Actually Has More Interesting Things to Say About AI Than Either Sam Altman or His Detractors Think

In case you missed it, the latest version of ChatGPT (previously here) is now under fire from Scarlett Johansson:

Johansson said Monday that OpenAI used an "eerily similar" voice to hers for their new GPT-4o chatbot despite having declined the company's request to provide her voice.

Earlier in the day, OpenAI announced it would no longer be using the voice, but did not indicate why.

"Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system," Johansson wrote in a statement, which a representative shared with NBC News. "He told me that he felt that by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people."

... Johansson voiced an artificial intelligence chatbot in the 2013 movie “Her,” which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referenced in relation to the company's new voice offerings — something Johansson noted in her statement.

While Altman seems to think the movie Her was basically a product demo, his detractors on social media are largely depicting Her as a dystopian cautionary tale. 

However, I checked back on what I wrote about Her when it came out in 2013/2014, and its depiction of sentient AI is much more interesting than either depiction (spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it yet, and you totally should):

Coming to Netflix: Ibelin, Acclaimed Documentary of Dying Quadriplegic Gamer With a Vibrant Virtual World Community in WoW

Acclaimed at Sundance 2024, put Ibelin on your Netflix watch list:  

Will Artificial Intelligence Totally Transform Culture & Intellectual Work? An Engineer & Author Debate. Part 1, Music & Movies

Pictured: Barbenheimer meme created through generative AI programs Midjourney and Gen-2 

In the near future, will we keep wanting to watch Hollywood movies like Oppenheimer and Barbie, works of visionary highly personal art by beloved human artists -- or will much of their work be replaced by generative AI programs?

In recent months I've been having a friendly Whatsapp debate on that question with Adam Frisby, CEO of metaverse platform developer Sine Wave Entertainment, one of the smartest technologists I'm lucky to call a pal. Even though Adam takes a highly AI maximalist position on that question!

“Every intellectual job is at risk," as he recently put it to me bluntly. "The ones which can be easily outsourced already today, will be first. Even very prestigious, difficult and stressful jobs like C-suite execs are at risk honestly. Humans can only handle summaries, AI can handle huge quantities of raw data; long term, we're at a disadvantage.”

As longtime readers to my blog might guess, I'm highly skeptical of that -- and not just as a professional writer devoted to the human aspect of technology in the Metaverse and beyond. I've been working in Silicon Valley long enough to have heard grandiose predictions like the above before (and then maybe yet before that before). I tend to think AI will just become one more technology tool among many to produce movies and other art -- but not fundamentally change who makes them. (I.E., human producers, directors, writers, actors, and others talented artists and craftspeople.)

But maybe this time the grandiose predictions are different?

Recent news around OpenAI and Sam Altman recently re-joining as its CEO after a week of confusing tumult may accelerate the issues we discuss, given the org's heavy involvement with Microsoft. Disney, historically a very litigious protector of its content, recently asked Microsoft to remove some its IP out of its AI image program, and may ultimately see Microsoft as a potential competitor. 

Anyway, read our conservation and decide for yourself!

PART 1: How Artificial Intelligence May Change Movies and Music

Wagner James Au: I’m sure you saw that the Screen Actors Guild got the studios to forbid use of AI characters in movies and TV without the underlying actor’s permission. So that puts the kibosh on AI totally transforming popular culture, right?

Adam Frisby: Not at all. “Why pay for a real actor?”. Humans are expensive, notoriously difficult to work with, and the studios are investing vast sums in building someone else’s brand that they don’t even control.

(This is not to be callous, or to devalue artists' contributions to media - just that, as soon as a machine can do a human's job reliably and cost effectively, it will; no matter where or what that job is.)

WJA: But name actors are integral to funding and marketing movies. Even when it’s a CGI animated movie, studios depend heavily on having A list stars doing the voice work.

AF: Yeah; but that's just a matter of branding. AI can be tuned to reproducible results, studios could invest in their own stable of "actors" and probably will. There may be initial backlash -- it'll likely happen somewhere small first, TV maybe? Where novelty is okay.

It could happen via some VTuber initially. That's actually more likely -- low risk, already happening, has a human heavily driving it, someone gets a high profile from Twitch or YouTube, "stars" in something bigger -- low budget film or a TV series, as their character.

That goes on for a little while, the owner licenses the character more fully; precedent has been set.

WJA: But how would that supplant how Hollywood studios work with human actors, when they’re already bound not to use AI actors without permission for 3 years and SAG has no motivation whatsoever to change that in the next contract?

AF: AI versions of existing actors, and permission by the actor themselves. Hell, another route could be someone like Bruce Willis. Someone who for a tragic reason needs "AI help" to act again.

Or, it'll be someone who does something Avant Garde -- "The Film With 10,000 Endings"

However it happens, it'll start small. The studios are not fools. They're aware everyone in the industry is nervous. But that toehold will grow; and eventually the economics of brand name actors will be broken. Because the human actors -- and the supporting infrastructure (cameramen, etc) will be a huge expense for an ever decreasing proportion of the budget

VFX will be long gone by then -- that'll eventually be 5 guys running prompts over raw footage.

Look at this, this is pretty preliminary and early tech, but you can easily see how quickly it'll be able to do complex VFX shots [watch below]:

These 5 Excellent Books Helped Inspire My Writing of Making a Metaverse That Matters

Here's five of the best books for understanding virtual worlds and internet culture as recommended by, well, me. Featured on Shepherd, an author-driven book recommendation site, the editors asked me to write about the books that informed my own book, Making a Metaverse That Matters. 

Those include the face-punchingly obvious influences, like Snow Crash:

The OG Metaverse novel is still as smart, hilarious, rollicking, and inspirational as it was 30 years ago. I’m amazed at how many technologists talking about the concept have not read it and realized how influential and prophetic it actually is, envisioning scenes of virtual life that have since become commonplace for millions of Internet denizens...

And the less obvious guides, like Taylor Lorenz's Extremely Online: