What are the original technocrats’ constraints on the techne inside the techne?

I so much prefer Tom’s ideas and thoughts to Thomas Mallaby’s. And it’s because their subject matter is different — the resident population versus Linden Lab itself — but it’s also because they are different kinds of people, and I dare say their methodology is even different. Mallaby is in the tradition of the corporate anthropologist, and I would argue that that’s a very limited take on things, it’s like the Kremlinology books that never looked all the different social movements and nationalities resisting Russification in the USSR.

On the other hand, you can never understand the residents’ culture until you look at the source of what agitates them, and then it’s the Lab. And therefore I wish there would be a Tom and Thomas fluffernutter, if you will, because I think you can’t understand one without the other.

The whole metaphor of “Lab” and “innovation” and “experiment” — it’s like Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” meets Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” — it’s a sort of kitschy kitchen science that we have in Second Life, not *real* science…yet we are experimented on…by social engineers…what are engineers anyway? etc.

Well then — as merely an amateur blogger and not a official solutions provider much less a real scholar with degrees, I’ve also been situating this culture of SL in the wider culture of Silicon Valley. Can we understand virtual worlds without first understanding the culture of Silicon Valley? No, we cannot. Transnational this and transgressive that and trans–whatever — but we have all come out from under Tim Berner-Lee’s overcoat.

I’m not liking the feel of Silicon Valley culture much these days. I’ll sure you’ll find the metaphors in this essay rather blunt, perhaps offensive. But I have to write what it feels like, that combination of culture spread by a consensual fashion that is subversive in ways that the carriers don’t realize; and then the coercive culture spread unconsciously that is also subversive…

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/the-evils-of-silicon-valley-culture.html

When you read the Pogue story, and then read the MC Siegler story, you’ll see what I mean. The culture of coercion and consent in the form of collusion that indeed does lead to addiction that then further subverts the norm of even being to call it addiction….

I think I need to put in a station break here to explain once again (I think people really don’t get it) that changing your gender in SL isn’t merely just some act of whimsy, some sort of very twee thing that you can laugh about at a coctail party and say, I did this at 2:00 o’oclock, I did that at 3:00 o’clock hahahah. That is, I’m quite prepared to accept that it *is* that for some facile types (and botgirl questi comes instantly to mind) that end up betraying their transition.

But quite a few people change their gender — and stick. And they go to a lot of effort never to break character — ever — for years on end. So that has to be respected.

I mean, look at real life, which is, after all, where people go to get story ideas for Second Life.

When you think of some men who have endured unbelievable harassment, even beatings, even maiming, and incredible ridicule, etc. for being transgender. I used to live in a gay neighbourhood in New York City, near Christopher Street. One of the saddest sights was the transvestites who were so persecuted in their own very oppressive communities, mainly black and Hispanic traditional families, that they could only come on the train from New Jersey at like midnight when no one would see them on the train, change into their dresses and wigs and makeup for a few hours in an alley behind some garbage cans, leaving their street clothes in a bag, and then slink back to the alley at 4 or 5 am to change back into their straight attire again. That profound oppressiveness of the alleyway behind the PATH train to New Jersey — I don’t know if I can describe it to you.

But these men would *do anything to feel right*. They would go through *that* just to feel “at home”.

I recall at SLCC in Boston, there was a man who is a female in SL. He decided to come to SLCC in a dress, but without any elaborate effort to pass as a woman — he just came in a dress and had some makeup. Now, he might have gotten a second look by the tourists in the hotel, but among Second Lifers, he was taken for granted. Nobody turned to stare because he was known, accepted. And there was a look of “belonging” on his face.

I’m trying to convey these somewhat dramatic moments because I think the idea that SL is just a costume party or SL is just Mardi Gras — it doesn’t quite capture the need people have to make a second life and reshape themselves online. It’s not like a sex tour to Thailand, you know.

I personally don’t feel casual about my avatars. Even if they are mules to hold groups or inventories for various themed areas so that they are easier to load, or even if they just seem to have a cool last name, they have a certain dignity. I remember when the Lindens cracked down on us and told us we could only have 6 accounts, I think it was. So there was an avatar I had to delete, who I hadn’t used much — he was holding a group together, but I still felt I had to give him “a decent burial”. So I came online, seated myself in a kind of funeral pyre in an Asian home, and set to meditating and left the avatar until he dropped offline before deleting him.

As for teens — it’s just not a big deal. There aren’t that many of them. The teens are a metaphor. They are an icon for fears of exposure that various adults on Second Life are experiencing who are the equivalent of the people who have to take the PATH train from New Jersey at midnight, and change in the alleyway. That’s all. They are projecting fears, they are valid, but they can’t be allowed to shape the entire space, either. They are afraid more than anything not of teens being exposed to sex; they are afraid of *being set up by other vindictive adults* who would like to persecute them by charging them with unlawful relations with minors. That’s it! That’s the Teen Grid agida in a nutshell, and let’s not pretend it’s more grand than that. Second Life is a hateful vindictive place; PG exists not as a zone where you can feel relief from the endless display of maturity; PG is where people lure their enemies to in order to trip them up swearing, so they can then AR them.

One of the ways Tom (and others who do this) go off the rails for me is when they begin to get all “meta” on Western culture and say “But you know, 150 years ago, we didn’t have childhood” or “Childhood was a Victorian invention” or “But you know, people used to marry at the age of 16 so really, we shouldn’t be obsessing so much”.

Um, ok. But there are reasons — and they aren’t just economically determinist reasons like the Marxists imagine — why we have evolved a concept of children that doesn’t put them to work at 9 years old or doesn’t marry them off at 16. Part of the liberation of women is in part a liberation of children from being pressed into service as miniature adults. It’s funny how people invoke notions of child work and child sex to justify liberationist notions in the modern world today in the West, when in fact those notions were categories of oppression in the past, that in fact the Western concept of a prolonged childhood liberated human beings from while they were in formation. To hear people talk about it these days, you would think that the Western notion of prolonged childhood is a plot by the religious right. But it’s helpful to remember that it is itself a function of a previous liberation.

That someone thinks that we need to stop being net nannies if a 16 year old sees Second Life rauchiness because 16 year olds were married 200 years ago or are married today in Afghanistan is to overlook the problem of oppression — and I say this not without any heavy feminist Dr. Spivak type of overlay. There’s nothing grand about marrying a young girl off to some 50-year-old letch or even merely to serve as the inhouse farm help and breeder for the son in the extended family. Exposing teens to the deep mendacious oppressiveness of BDSM; to the deep coercive cynicism of the SL urban noir sex culture; or even to the idiocy of rural sim life — that’s not liberation. I think it’s important to be a little more critical of this.

Well, ultimately, somebody who pays the bills will ask: does any of this virtual research help us understand real life better?

I’m not certain it does.

i love this..lol.

ironically i think Vernes is in more favor nowadays. faith in techne and all.

that “American culture” was the TV. The box created an interface to shared “moments” since lets call it 1960, as we elected our first TV star leader, then watched him killed on the same medium.

As for avatars, we have actors,, as for multipuppeaered avatars we had Muppets on Sesammme street and animated cartoon characters TEACHING our children since the late 60s with more “face time” than mom/dad or teacher.

Its true “childhood” was a 18-19th century invention in many ways(marketing/machines/city living birthed), but as we segment more (marketing again-machine needs to quantify to monetize)in current times it seems that its not only children who get older… but adults who perpetually keep acting younger. — WE flatten, as we know network machines tend to do….
natural life forms curves when graphed…machine systems flatten lines with a spike here and there, that spike usually considered the anonomoly that must be debugged.

a world of 21 year olds living via a machine and being deleted by said machine as a system?
Logans Run… run runner run!..:)

food for human thought,

I wish LL had even a vague idea of these issues, it seems that they have absolutely no idea of how huge virtual worlds are.

One is that members of my family don’t regard the people in SL as “real people” even though they know some of them in RL.

In the same way, Twitter was (to me) a mass of noise with some news in it — until I had a small epiphany of seeing that there were people I know “in there” — and Twitter became something different.

The other thing is the *hostility* that a lot of Second Lifers have toward Facebook and Twitter. It’s something that LL seems oddly blind to, and they often wave what amounts to a red flag by supposing that everyone’s on Facebook and Twitter.

I think there’s a common idea that Facebook and SL are antithetical… I know that a good number of us in SL talk to each other via the various SL forums and Twitter… but I don’t know anyone who uses Facebook as a substitute when they can’t get inworld.

Maybe that’s just a matter of who I know?