A transcript of Robin Linden's office hours last Wednesday (full and SLHerald's excerpt) should put some light upon Second Life's future. It should but, as you expect, it doesn't. It starts with Robin mentioning that somebody who is arrested for child porn in Germany is also Second Life's resident. Despite the fact that does not make any proof of anything it may be the good starting point for argumentation. It ends with some sweet picture from the future:
The more likely scenario, however, is that Residents will join together to create local regions where they agree on rules. In that case our role becomes more one of oversight. When the day comes that the group can host their own servers, then they can do whatever they want and answer directly to their local authorities.
But, let's see what lies between today's censorship paranoia and future utopia.
Robin says there is nothing new in second life and that no new rules are imposed in notorious blog post.
The standards are set by our community standards. The big 6 that we have lived by since the beginning.
I don't want to argue about why, in the case that nothing changed, there are thousands of residents organizing in groups, making protests and living in panic. I would like to know what the big six is. For all this time I live my second life, this is the first time I hear about it. Second life is big enough so I believe I could miss that info but then, if there are clear rules why Daniel haven't stated them when asked? Why Robin haven't stated them this Wednesday? That would clear a lot of things and maybe made situation a bit better. Really, do you know what the big six is?
Another thing I'd like to know is what are Lindens are planning to do. Because
we may find there are times when behaviors that we have allowed in the past, e.g. ageplay, are viewed strongly enough by some jurisdictions that we have to decide, for the sake of the business, that we aren't going to allow them anymore. I doubt very much that ageplay is the last behavior that will come under this scrutiny.
Well, make up your mind! We feel like in that old cartoon: "How do you expect us to catch you if you move all the time?"
Instead of trying to catch Lindens and new rules of our world, residents were much more constructive:
Jazhara Keon: Robin, to let you and all the other people here in this meeting know – United Protest, the group that contains about 4000 people through other groups represented by their owners, has only one goal: keep Second Life free of Censorship, like Linden Lab always said they would. Our efforts in this are geared toward working together with Linden Lab, in a peaceful and communicative way. If ever you want or need help, opinion, or feedback, do contact us.
You can also do something constructive on United Protest's web site.
After we all learned what we knew from the beginning, it is not Lindens that are evil and that wants to take away our toys and all the fun from the world, it is something from real life that is the bad guy in this story. The thing we may not have known is that Lindens may be our allays
There may be times when we decide to fight something that the real world tries to impose on us. One case I can think of would be if some government asked us to give them information about political activities among their citizens. But there will be other times when we have to decide that non-compliance will result in a harm to Second Life, and we can't allow that to happen.
Ok, if I got it right, Lindens are to go with RL oppression as long as they have to in order to preserve the Second Life. But, that is not quite clear. When Second Life is harmed? Does that counts only threats to mere existence of the platform, the number of residents or we can agree that resident's freedoms are essential to second life and that harm of them is a harm of second life?
We can guess that no Linden knows the answer to this one. It seems that they are waiting for things to solve themselves and that everything come in order by itself. Or, at least, they are waiting to see what they will have to give in order to preserve the second life. Is that the best strategy?
Photo of Robin Linden is taken from Second Life Wiki.
Hey, just wanted to drop you a note saying that once again we share a perspective on this one. Here, take a look: http://www.metaversed.com/onder/blog
I was thinking about making you my “Blogs I Read #2″. Would that totally creep you out or is that ok?
Creep me out? No, I am flattered. :)