DISQUS

Feldie:

Thank you for a terrific feature! If anyone's interested in offering support, either within Second Life or in other digital worlds, please feel free to contact me by notecard in SL or through a comment to my blog, cited above.

I do want to clarify, though, that the community of Extropia is "mine" only in the sense that I live there and serve on its Board of Directors: the community belongs to its residents and supporters, currently numbering around 400, all of whom make it a stylish, futuristic, and safe place to live, work and explore!

Hi Gwyn! Thank you for engaging so thoughtfully and comprehensively with the issues that I raised!

I agree with just about everything you say on your second and third pages, but I have to disagree in part with your depiction of my own views.

Your analysis of how a society comes to integrate a new technology into itself is terrific, and it's an apt depiction of how digital worlds will come to be generally used in the coming decade.

But your analysis presupposes a unitary culture, and overlooks a key difference between digital worlds and the other technologies you address.

What separates SL (and in time other worlds) from the telephone, the automobile, from currency, is that it establishes *place* and *embodiment*. The telephone, the automobile, did not create new social, economic and political *places,* but rather erased the barriers between them.

I think the analogy between SL and the opening of a new physical place for settlement - Antarctica, say, or a space station - is a strong one. They are all new places for living in, beginning as blank vessels to be filled with culture.

Now, there are two approaches to entering into such a space. One is to import all the culture - the laws, the economic relations, the fashions, the architecture, the sexual customs - of the society people came from, and just extend the old culture into the new space, absorbing the new space as part of the old.

That's called colonialism.

The other approach is to try new things, to create a synthetic culture taking into account local circumstances, consciously choosing the best among available alternatives, tried and untried, and creating a new place apart from the parent society.

That's called settlement, and it has two great values. It can offer a better life to the people who settle, by replacing ineffective, unpleasant or downright evil traditions with newer, better systems. Its other value is as an example to those living under the old order, an existence proof that better ways are possible.

Whether synthetic worlds will be colonies or settlements is a question still very much up in the air, though the colonialists tend to be louder (myself excepted!) and to get most of the press.

I'm a digital nationalist, an anti-colonialist, but by no means a separatist: I see the "magic circle" as potentially a national border, one which allows a vast amount of free exchange of goods, ideas and people, but does provide some level of protection for the development of a national culture and institutions which may diverge from the dominant political consensus.

I hope that experiments with economic and political systems can thrive in SL, face tests in use, and evolve naturally, without being IMF'd out of existence by that dominant political consensus.

I think that's a goal we both share.

Gwynyth - this is a brilliant article, and conclusively explains the whole "verification" foolishness.

But, you overlooked a point. While it isn't essential to your argument, it *is* essential to the evolution of identity and personality in virtual worlds.

You said, "The only thing that LL knows is that a certain avatar, claiming to be person X, is, indeed, person X."

But who *does* that?

How many of us go around making *any* claim as to an atomic-world identity, let alone any claim that might matter to anyone?

Sure, there's the occasional pathological liar, like the murder suspect who claimed to be an 18 year old soldier - but the numbers of these people in SL, just as in RL, are too negligible to matter.

I *specifically disclaim* any atomic-world identity: what is there to verify?

This isn't just some immersionist quirk - it actually parallels something of tremendous importance in the atomic world, which is long overdue in being carried into the digital - corporate limited liability.

Corporations are "artificial persons." You do business with one, you're dealing with the corporate avatar, not the atomic human employed by it or directing it. If something goes wrong, you sue the *avatar,* not the human - and getting through to the human is very.very hard under the law.

There are good reasons for using these avatars, and they have made the modern world possible.

Yet, LL would have us forget all this history, all the usefulness of the concept of "artificial person," and have avatars be no more than a domino mask at a ball.

It's *not* good for the growth of virtual worlds, and it's damn annoying to the great number of us who live Second Lives without making any claims about a First...

I agree with all your commenters - Guilio got it precisely backwards.

For some fascinating commentary on this issue, including several comments from Guilio, please see my post on his article!