I don’t particularly like my cell phone provider. Or my cable company. I don’t mind my bank BRANCH, the people are nice, the hours are good, and there’s rarely a line-up (well, the one or two times a year I actually go in) but I don’t like it when someone in some bank office or out-sourced call center somewhere keeps pestering me with offers of life insurance or investments or whatever.

I get a creepy feeling when my phone company calls and says “We’ve been reviewing your calling patterns and we wanted to talk to you about ways to save money.” I find it creepy because why are they looking, and I find it creepy because I never use my phone, the cell phone company has me covered.

The cell phone company itself is mostly non-intrusive, but then they have me locked in to some 3 year plan or something and make bucket loads of money off of me. But they’ll never call me up and say “Oh, did you know you hit the date when you’re eligible for a phone upgrade?”

There are certain things that are utilities and we expect them to work and we want service when they don’t and we otherwise want to be left mostly alone.

The Content that They Carry
But we value those utilities because they usually carry other things.

When I use my iPhone (yeah, I know, Android is cool and open and all that, we won’t get into Apple’s lock-downs just now) I’m interested in the content it gives me access to. I love my widgets. I love Shazam, for example, and am in awe of how it can name that tune.

I don’t text message a lot, but with the few people I do I like that I can send little blurts out to them and I feel connected. I’ve started using my phone more to Tweet, and even though Twitter is mostly headlines and I save my deep dives for early mornings, I get a quick take on what’s going on in the parts of the world that I’m interested in, and I can sense the passing moods or fancies of people I adore.

The fact that there’s a mobile phone company somewhere in that process may be important, but it feels irrelevant.

And I’m not so sure the phone companies or the cable company LIKES being so irrelevant. They don’t really control the content, they provide access to it. They don’t sell the ads – the exchange is one of value: you provide the content, you sell and make money off of the ads, and we’ll make money off of delivering the content in the first place.

The problem is that the building now has multiple doors.

While the utilities were guarding the front entrance, someone was bashing a hole through the back.
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It’s “Time to Take the Internet Seriously” according to a thought-provoking grab bag of insights by David Gelernter on the Edge. And I couldn’t help reading it in the context of my belief that virtual worlds had been staking a new claim for what our digital lives could be like, that worlds like Second Life were prototyping new models for how we might interact, be, imagine, and express our online culture – open ended, imagination driven, clunky tools as ’social media’ but rich sources for storytelling or connection.

Second Life as a story box….but Second Life as an island where we could sit and find context in the raging river of real-time, always on, constantly poked, algorithmic, data scraping wider Web.

Consider a few of Gelernter’s calls to action and ideas, and then go read it yourself, and extrapolate your view of the Web’s future with what you’ve learned in a virtual world:

9. Because your information will live in the Cloud and only make quick visits to your personal machines, all your machines will share the same information automatically; a new machine will be useful the instant you switch it on; a lost or stolen machine won’t matter — the information it contains will evaporate instantly. The Cloud will take care that your information is safely encrypted, distributed and secure.

Second Life IS the Cloud and it WAS the Cloud when it was first built. Log in from any computer, anywhere and your applications are the same, your inventory is the same (if it isn’t borked) and your personal desktop, the avatar, is the same. The information space around you may have changed because in this cloud the world is always on. This Cloud did more – and embedded commerce and IP rights within a SHARED space – there is no other Cloud in the world where the rights to the content in that Cloud can be defined at such a granular level, where the space itself can still be shared, and yet where we (mostly) have individual protections, privacy and control over our identity.

11. The Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work — but it can help create the best economy in history, where new markets (a free market in education, for example) change the world….The net will never become a mind, but can help us change our ways of thinking and change, for the better, is the spirit of the age. This moment is also dangerous: virtual universities are good but virtual nations, for example, are not. Virtual nations — whose members can live anywhere, united by the Internet — threaten to shatter mankind like glass into razor-sharp fragments that draw blood. We know what virtual nations can be like: Al Qaeda is one of the first.

Second Life DID create a new economy, new markets, and it did so on the basis of changing our way of thinking.
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I’ve pinned myself down. I’m stuck in a corner. And I’m trying, frankly, to find a way to blog my way out of it.

Maybe this is the reaction we’re SUPPOSED to be having now that Second Life is over and we’re on to Second Life Social, or Second Life 2.0 (which makes it feel like it’s merely trying to catch up to the rest of the Web), or Second Life the Operating System.

I’m in one of those “on the one hand, but on the other” moments and it feels a little like one of those ethical exercises they made us think about in university: “do you kill the baby to save your family or do you kill the monkey to save the world”….my professor was a famous animal rights activist, you see, and he didn’t like to make it easy for us.

When the viewer came out I had one of those moments of delight that I remembered from the early days of Second Life: it was shiny, slightly clunky in places, but it was new and somewhere past the “ohhhh” moment were a bunch of “ah-ha’s”.

I still remember those early a-has: someone explaining to me about prim hair, rezzing my first box, and going dancing.

I didn’t understand the concept of dancing because no one really SAID very much – I didn’t realize most people were IMing or checking their e-mail or whatever they were doing, but what I DO remember is that I felt like I was learning a whole new culture and my guides to that culture weren’t really found in any of the books or the forums, they were found because other Residents actually CARED, and shared, and showed you around a little, or at least the ones I ran into did. By most accounts that’s the way that MOST people learned their way around and why they stayed.

I remember discovering that not ALL the sims looked like Mainland, that there were beautiful builds out there as well, sims like Svarga, which I stumbled across one day and thought was a stunning place to just, well, hang out, although I never realized it was supposed to be an ecosystem or whatever, I just thought it was really beautiful and told a story.

But it was also on Svarga where I was griefed for the first (and only) time: someone managed to put me in some sort of box or something which I couldn’t get out of and I panicked…I eventually realized I could teleport out but I felt a sense of shock and violation.

After, I couldn’t figure out why I was responding so emotionally to something that was “just a game” until I realized that I didn’t TREAT it as a game, it was a world, and I had a place in it, and while I could always log my avatar out I was too heavily invested in the sense of ‘being there’.

And I’ve had a similar sense with the new viewer, and Linden Homes, and seeing the new ad campaign they’re planning to run, and the ability to log in to a prim and Tweet or whatever: it’s not that I didn’t WANT all these things or that I didn’t advocate for them, but I’ve also been blogging long enough about the stuff I DON’T want to lose that I feel like I’m making a choice between monkey and child, between world and family.
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It feels like just yesterday that Mitch Kapor proclaimed that the “frontier days” were over for Second Life. Now, maybe Mitch knew what Mark Kingdon had planned even before M himself – but what’s clear is that while the frontier days may have ended it took from July 2008 when he made the statement to today for the rest of us to notice.

Linden Lab is using what I was going to call a “Shock & Awe” strategy for announcing that Second Life as you know it has ended, but that’s soooo 2000s. Instead, they strapped your avatar in, started the ignition and, like it not, you’re now barreling down the autobahn with no exit ramp.

On this week’s Metanomics Esbee and Amanda Linden were generous enough to let me ask them my meta-questions about the new viewer and Second Life Shared Media and while I probably should have spent more time dissecting their choice of chiclets for chat, I was actually a lot more curious about the process that got them here: how do you ‘renovate’ a viewer that’s been around, with a few tweaks now and then, for almost a decade? How do you decide what goes and what stays?

The Cultural Implications of Change
And most intriguing of all, I thought – do you take into consideration the cultural implications of all of these feature changes and widgets, clickable Web pages and tattoo layers? Second Life is a world, after all, right? Since everyone’s talking about Cameron’s Avatar these days, it’s not like it’s some mystery that the natives have their own culture, values and systems – and that it’s pretty easy to screw it all up.

Amanda replied:

“It’s so interesting actually. I was an art history major way back in the day at Vassar, and I understand how much visual design and experience design can impact culture and vice versa. I think it’s a very symbiotic relationship. I think you’re right. There’s a new element within the viewer that is web based, that allows us to create new kinds of promotional and other kinds of advertising capabilities within the sidebar. That’s something we definitely thought about.

There are a whole host of other capabilities within the new viewer that are meant to make it very easy for users to get to the most used pieces of functionality very quickly. We wanted to surface those things up to the top immediately and viscerally so that people can get to what they need very quickly.

It’s been interesting. I mean we looked at, and Esbee hinted on this too, we looked at a lot of other things besides viewers. We looked at Skype. We looked at IM. We looked at Google. We looked at Yahoo. We looked at a whole host of other kinds of communication technologies. We looked at Twitter. I think that what we tried to do is make it easy, and, by making it easy, I think that, hopefully, it will enrich not only the experience with Shared Media and other capabilities, but will also make it easier for people to communicate. “

Now, in fairness, I put them on the spot a little – we were talking about usability and expanding the user base and I was basically asking if they had an anthropologist on staff.

But what’s intriguing about this is that it speaks to a conclusion that I think we can now arrive at with certainty:

To Linden Lab, while Second Life may be a world, it is not a culture. The more important culture in which Second Life participates is the broader one which encompasses our lives on-line. While there may be sub-cultures that find a place IN Second Life, the frontier days are over, and the sense of it still being “one world” no longer apply.

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Doubledown Tandino is in the spotlight over on CNN this week with a focus on “Best Jobs” – and I really can’t help applauding the coverage, mainly because DD is one of those people who just – well, who just makes you smile.

Whether going head-to-head with witty comments in the pre-show at Metanomics, contributing to the back chat, or doing some kind of riffing stand-up madness, DD is one of those people who makes the Grid what it is.

Check it out, but also – don’t be shy and hire the guy! He’s not only an amazing DJ but he can also make a corporate event, not-for-profit outreach effort or even an educational seminar memorable and effective. With training in the serious benefits of comedy plus his skills as a DJ he’s an avatar for the 21st Century.

I was mulling over the implications of Second Life Shared Media – the ability to place media on a prim in Second Life…to embed clickable Web pages, Word documents, videos or Flash. But it occurred to me that I’d written about this before, or written about a concept before which I think bears repeating.

So instead of something new, I give you a reprint of an old post.

Welcome to the Strange Loop

A friend asked whether I thought people acted “more real” in a virtual world than they do in real life. This on the theory that the avatar mask is a distraction – what looks like a ‘disguise’ may in fact be a better way to represent the “real you” than, well, the real you.

I was sent a link to a research paper that assessed queer identity against the backdrop of post-Cartesian thinking where the mind/body duality is challenged with a separate duality of person/environment. The author, Donald Jones, quotes Pierre Levy who says that “the virtualization of the body is…not a form of disembodiment but a re-recreation, a multiplication, vectorization and heterogenesis of the human.”

Rather than losing the body, says Donald, it is instead “rearticulated within virtual space as the boundaries of body/self are extended through the mediation of technology.

The concept brings to mind the strange loop, epitomized by Escher:

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Linden Lab has launched a suite of platform changes which effectively shift Second Life into Version 2.0, with further changes in the pipeline that promise to radically transform the virtual world, its culture, its ability to integrate with the wider digital landscape, and its ability to attract new users.

There will be heaps written about the centerpiece of this: a new ‘viewer’ (the software by which users access Second Life).

But perhaps the BIGGER attraction, in some ways, is the launch of Second Life Shared Media (SLSM) which will allow clickable, embeddable Web pages, editable documents (think collaboration on a PowerPoint or Word document), Flash, and other Web-based content. SLSM will significantly deepen the ability to collaborate, teach, train and create information-rich virtual environments.

Whether this also leads to rampant banner ads disguised as Web pages will partly be a product of how the Lab is handling parcel media and the number of SLSM objects that will load.
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If you stare at it long enough, the mountain becomes unclimbable.

Tally it up.
How much time have you spent waiting for the soup to cool?
Icicles hang from January gutters only as long as they can.
Fingers pause above piano keys for the chord that will not form.

Slam them down I say.
Make music of what you can.

Charles Rafferty from Against Hesitation

Tech evangelist, Twitter monster and meme pack rat Robert Scoble poses the question and tantalizes us with an answer in a blog post sent out across his social media cloud or whatever it is that trails him around (115,000 followers can’t be wrong – can they?) when he asks: “Is Second Life about to enter its “second life?””.

Commenting on the rise and fall of the earlier Second Life hype cycle, Scoble hints that tomorrow at 11:00 am will see the launch of something significant enough to perhaps herald the ’second life’ of the virtual world:

Anyway, one thing happened that I find very interesting: it continued to grow in users, time spent on the site, and dollars spent in it.

On Friday I sat down with Mark to find out why.

First, the users remained very evangelistic. Second, corporations like IBM found other uses for its islands and kept investing (they now use these islands for training and replacements of expensive conferences). Third, the technology has been steadily improving. Fourth, the company has found new ways to bring new users in and make the experience easier to get into.

But he admitted that they had been pretty quiet and avoided doing more PR work until just recently.

Why is that changing this week? You’ll see why tomorrow morning at about 11 a.m. on building43.

I find myself tangled up on language. It’s my own fault really: I get off on a tangent and the bus doesn’t seem to stop.

I used to have this idea, for example, that open source was sort of a homogeneous concept where we’d all build barns together in some kind of collective “let’s put on a show” burst of creativity and effort until I realized that, well, someone needed to supply the tools and the roast chicken at the end of the day.

By flipping the language around a little, I’ve come to realize that open source is more of an operating philosophy than operating reality – most ecosystems of value don’t thrive on “free”, they thrive on some sort of exchange, somewhere, somehow, and that a central problem with open source is not being able to actually SEE where the money is trading hands, or the services being bartered. And so we replace one hegemony with another: entrenched corporate interests who have proprietary code but have share prices and annual reports you can refer to are replaced by economic interplay that you can’t really see unless you look really hard.

And so I start to gravitate to the idea of open systems, although I’m sure there are all kinds of other terms dreamed up in Silicon Valley like APIs or whatever, but the central premise being that there is a “system” somewhere with transparent control mechanisms and measurements and that there is openness within that system for us to craft our own value, and that in the ideal open system there is a balance between what we’re able to accomplish and the controls central to the core system.

In this view, Twitter, perhaps, has achieved the fairly stunning feat of having a reasonably transparent core system (although “monetizing” is a mystery) while the openness around it creates unexpected pools of value and balances the instincts that damage the ecosystem….call it “Facebooking the Value Chain”.

Linden Lab created a platform in which it was clear where the open part of the system lived: in the world itself, and in the viewer, while the economics, policy and governance were still fairly firmly in the hands of the overseers in San Francisco, which was all fine and dandy so long as they were technolibertarians but which felt dangerous every now and then when the need to actually make money overtook the fact that this was a WORLD they were managing not a profit and loss statement.
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