New World Notes

In Case You Missed It, Apple Has a Streaming Comedy Series About Making an MMO Featuring Rob McElhenney, Office Zaniness, Virtual Peen

I missed the debut a few weeks ago but Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet (available on Apple TV here) is co-created and stars  It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Rob McElhenney, who leads the development team behind the world's largest MMO, and to judge by the teaser, brings the same zany, genial a-hole energy to this series. (And the unexpected, mostly undesired appearance of virtual peen suggests McElhenney did his research.) Polygon was somewhat positive on the MMO side of things:

Snowcrash Set to Become HBO Max Streaming Series, Will Ironically Compete With Actual Metaverses for Viewers

After nearly three (!) decades of false starts  -- I'm old enough to remember when the director of Demolition Man was once attached to make it --  it looks like a filmed adaption of Snow Crash is finally taking shape:

Neal Stephenson's influential Snow Crash is finally poised to reach screens, although you'll have to be picky about where you watch it. HBO Max has ordered work on a TV series adaptation of the sci-fi novel that will be written and co-run by the Scott Pilgrim movie's Michael Bacall, and directed by Attack the Block's Joe Cornish. The L Word's Angela Robinson will run the show alongside Bacall.

So "filmed", but not as a movie, and rather for a series to be streamed on the Internet. But given that cash-flush HBO is involved, this is the version most likely to finally make it to the screen. Which is ironic timing for several reasons, including:

Watch: Love the Premise of Free Guy, Where Ryan Reynolds is an NPC in an MMO -- Just Not Sure the Filmmakers Get MMOs

Spielberg's Ready Player One was not a huge hit here -- though notably, a blockbuster in China, where MMOs are much more mainstream -- but here's Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy, Hollywood's latest attempt to turn the dynamics of virtual worlds into a mass market movie. Premise:

In the open world video game Free City, an amalgamation of Grand Theft Auto and Fortnite, Guy (Reynolds) is a non-player character (NPC), working as a bank teller. Thanks to a code developed by programmers Milly (Comer) and Keys (Keery) inserted into Free City by the publisher Antoine (Waititi), Guy becomes aware of his world being a video game, and takes steps to make himself the hero, creating a race against time to save the game before the developers can shut it down.

That sounds good as far as it goes, though as with Ready Player One, all the onscreen action has a flat, forced feel. Here's why: 

Twitter Employees Strongly Support Ban on Political Ads & Want Facebook to Follow Suit, While Facebook Employees Think Otherwise - Blind Survey

Last week Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a policy to no longer run political ads on his social network, and according to a survey on Blind, the anonymous messaging app for tech employees, this shift has very strong support among his staff. Not only do 85% support it, a solid majority of 56% say the policy will have a positive effect on the 2020 election. Perhaps even more notably, 82% of Twitter employees who took the survey say Facebook should adopt a similar policy.

This is in striking contrast to a Blind survey conducted last month directed at Facebook employees, and its policy of allowing deceptive or inaccurate political ads: 51% of Facebook staff who took the survey said this policy might change the 2020 election, and only 54% supported having the policy in the first place. This strongly suggests less internal confidence within the Facebook ranks.

However, there's another surprise from this new survey, when Facebook employees were asked about Twitter's new policy:

Who Wants a Silicon Valley Watch Party on New World Notes?

After a long, miserable wait, the trailer to the final season of HBO's scabrously funny Silicon Valley is here.  (NSFW warning: Very HBO dialog.) Whereas previous seasons focused on VR, looks like this upcoming season will hit on at least a few New World Notes-friendly themes, including:

• Real world advertising in virtual worlds.
• Unexpected spin-offs of Burning Man.
• Dick-punching Big Tech.

Anyone else a fan? Seriously thinking of hosting a watch party post/recap for every episode.

Philip Rosedale Supports Andrew Yang for President, Suggests Ways to Implement Yang's Freedom Dividend

Second Life/High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale just published a really interesting blog post that brings his long experience with virtual economies and virtual currencies to the very real idea of a Universal Basic Income -- or what Presidential candidate Andrew Yang calls the Freedom Dividend.

"I think Yang is great and I'd love to see him get elected," Philip tells me. So his post delves into the challenges of putting Yang's plan to give $1000 to every American adult per month into practice. Rosedale's key idea -- eliminate the fiscal middle man of banks: 

Most people (who aren’t economists) naturally assume that [the Freedom Dividend] would be very hard because… who would cover the bill to give away all this money? It has to come from somewhere, right? The actual answer is more complicated: when an economy is growing (meaning people are making and selling more and more valuable goods and services over time), the government actually needs to print more money, so that the value of the dollar remains stable.

But where does this newly printed money go? Mostly in the USA it gets loaned to Big Banks, and is more generally a tool that governments can use to to their own advantage. But a more direct (and democratic) approach would be to simply give newly printed money out equally to all citizens, which can very substantially offset the cost of basic income.

"As US President," Philip expands to me in e-mail, "I'd work with the Federal Reserve to change monetary policy to redirect funds to citizens that were originally going to be loaned to banks... That alone is something like $1 trillion per year. Plus, any gains in real GDP can also go back directly to everyone in the same way. "

Philip's latest virtual world, High Fidelity, uses its own cryptocurrency, and Second Life with its Linden Dollars (exchangeable for real dollars) continues to maintain a thriving virtual economy -- so thriving, the grassroots content creators on the platform make as much money as the actual company. So as you'd expect, Philip's blog post has suggestions for implementing cryptocurrency to manage the Freedom Divided -- and points to Second Life's own use of a Universal Basic Income (so to speak) as a potential proof point:

Blizzard Employees Strongly Support Company's Punishment of Hong Kong Advocate & Player Censorship of Sensitive Chinese Topics - Blind Survey

Blizzard HQ photo by Heather Newman

Blizzard has been under tremendous backlash since its October 8 decision to punish Chung “blitzchung” Ng Wai, a Hong Kong-based Hearthstone champion, after he advocated for the city's pro-democracy movement during a live post-game interview. Anti-Blizzard memes have spread through the gaming world, along with calls to boycott the company's games, and protest at its conventions; unsurprisingly, Blizzard just cancelled an upcoming Overwatch launch event in New York.

However, aside from a small walk-out protest and other ripples of dissatisfaction, one point remains unclear: What do Blizzard employees think of punishing its players for expressing opinions considered taboo by the Chinese government on their gaming platforms?

According to a survey recently launched by the development team of Blind, an anonymous messaging app for tech company staffers, a strong majority of Blizzard employees actually support the punishment of Chung -- and in general, strongly support censorship of players criticizing China's government.

About 500 Blizzard employees are members of Blind's community for the company, Blind co-founder Kyum Kim tells me. Of that 500, fifty to seventy Blizzard employees took the two question survey, along with hundreds of staffers from many other tech companies -- raw data on the right.

Asked, "Should Blizzard reverse its banning of the Hearthstone player?", only 36% of Blizzard employees surveyed responded Yes. However, a solid majority of 64% opposed the reversal. This greatly contrasts with answers from employees across the tech industry, which supported a reversal at ranges from 67 to 92%. (With the notable exception being Riot Games -- like Blizzard, a game company that's heavily dependent on the Chinese market, with opinion split 50/50.)

Blind launched this survey last Thursday, just before Blizzard softened (but did not completely reverse) Chung's punishment. However, when asked a more general question about sensitive Chinese political topics, Blizzard employees were about as adamant in their support of player censorship :

Cyber Harassment Legal Expert Wins MacArthur "Genius" Grant -- Read My 2014 Interview On Her Proposal to Strip Anonymity Privileges From Abusers

The latest batch of MacArthur Fellow "genius" awards have just been announced, and they very astutely include law professor Danielle Citron, who's been leading the charge to combat Internet-based harassment for many years. At the height of "Gamergate", the 2014 online abuse campaign which helped utterly deform the Internet we have to deal with today, I interviewed Professor Citron about her then-new book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, and her brilliant suggestion for how online communities can defend against harassers -- strip them of their anonymity privileges:

"[R]equiring users to own their own words, so to speak, has the effect of bringing online speech to a level playing field as offline speech," Professor Citron explains to me. "Offline, social norms develop as people react to speech and gauge people’s reactions. Workers are far less likely to sexually harass fellow employees because others will think badly of them and because it may in fact be cause for termination and liability for the employer."

In online spaces which allow people to identify themselves by their real name or by an anonymous pseudonym -- such as Twitter -- that calculus changes:

New Twist on "Reality is a Simulation" Theory Just Secularized Rehashing of Bible's Tower of Babel Myth

Fascinating twist to the much-discussed "reality is a simulation" hypothesis featured in last weekend's New York Times. Many scientists are now trying to prove the theory is true, but philosopher Preston Greene argues that that's a really, really bad idea:

[I]f our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation. If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world.

Of course, the proposed experiments may not detect anything that suggests we live in a computer simulation. In that case, the results will prove nothing. This is my point: The results of the proposed experiments will be interesting only when they are dangerous. While there would be considerable value in learning that we live in a computer simulation, the cost involved — incurring the risk of terminating our universe — would be many times greater.

This pretty much illustrates my point that the simulation hypothesis is essentially indistinguishable from traditional religion:

Trump’s Own Campaign Helped Radicalize a Violent Video Game Community

With Trump blaming the latest white supremacist terrorist incident on violent video games, it's necessary to re-state the obvious: Trump's own campaign and lead supporters helped radicalize Gamergate, the small but rabid online community of violent gamers, to help support Trump's election in 2016. Since then, this community has been associated with even more violence -- including the very acts that Trump is now claiming to condemn.

And while this happened only a few years ago, few media outlets are now noting this history. So here it is again: