Second Rant Podcast #2 - Kong on the Water

Here it is, the famous "I don't get it and they certainly don't" thread in which the term "Feted Inner Core" was coined:

http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=31559

lol, wonderful, thx :)

Prokofy - did you ever consider becoming one of the LL? You are one of those rare individuals that can express your thoughts extremely well and your thoughts are extremely great too!
So I think that this would really help LL make this world a better place :) If somebody would ask me - I would like you to be in LL helping them to simply - understand! :)

Robbie Kiama, Meta Mart www.MetaverseMart.com

Of course not, no more than I'd consider working for the U.S. government. We need to strengthten civil society, not go work for the federal government. I'm definitely not Linden material!

Once again, excellent.

Although the Kong On The Water problem is solved when you build up a community of folks. Yes, I know... gated community, cult, blah blah blah.

But when you suggest that communicating and working out issues is better than any technological tool to solve these problems, well, working out a community first and founding the village second has a long history, too.

I mean, just look at... um... the Pilgrims. The Mormons. The... um...

Okay, fine. It's a cult. A happy, wedding-shooting cult.

(And I don't say "You know" because that wastes 2 of my daily 100 word quota for my podcast. I'm just as Amateur Night as anybody else. Well, except Leo Laporte.)

Law and Second Life is the focus of much of this podcast, and I'm very glad to the issues getting this kind of attention. In particular, Prokofy has some really interesting ideas on the potential for a class action suit against Linden Lab on property devaluation for griefing, tacitly sponsoring fraud, or any number of other things. I easily see a suit like that becoming a reality.

Though Prokofy and I still appear to be on different pages about what the appropriate reaction to Ginko's apparent fraud is (she's right, public prosecution seems just fine to me) it sounds like we do agree that ultimately, situations like that should and will end up in real life courts.

Great interview, great subject, great commentary.

I hope I'm not pouncing :) but there is one minor, though important, point on legal procedure that I can clear up here.

Lawyers from other states actually can bring suit against Linden Lab, not just California attorneys. There's a procedure in California (as there is in all states) for lawyers from other jurisdictions to seek permission to appear in California courts if they wanted to file there. And actually, a suit wouldn't necessarily have to be filed in California anyway (witness Bragg, who sued in Pennsylvania and has managed to keep it there.) So if you're so inclined, sue away with whomever you want to hire. They'll very likely be able to find a way to work out the details of service, venue, and all the rest.

The RL skills and rules that Prok mentions do apply to some situations in SL. But things become completely different from RL when any of the hundreds of thousands of residents can instantly and randomly TP to your land. All those residents have different levels of experience with SL, different social backgrounds, speak different languages and see SL as having different purposes. Mitigation in RL is based on having a set of rules and expectations that have been formed over long periods of time. We do not have that in SL ( heck, we do not even have a common language in SL) and neither do we want to impose such expectations and rules globally in SL. Case in point, Prok justified her proposed methods of mitigation with the fact that SL is a "social network", but that is not a view that is necessarily shared by everyone in SL and it does not have to be shared by everyone. We keep insisting that SL is not a game for instance but, let's face it, to some it is a game and we have no right to decide that SL is supposed to be one way or another. Or should we decide that? It seems to me that it's the direction Prok points at.

Duh, we get that, Benjamin. Can you imagine such a thing, I've been involved in RL with such procedures, helping translate and get depositions for law firms that can of course defend clients in other states; even testifying myself in various cases. I'm not stupid.

However, the reality is, as anybody really trying to defend a client knows, you need attorneys on the scene, especially if there will have to be a lot of meetings and a lot of taking of depositions and finding of facts, and possibly some fine points on law that may be particular to that state. It's very common for a law firm to find a partner in the other state to add to the defense team. There's every advantage to suing with lawyers who are licensed to practice in California; trying to sue from other jurisdictions, meanwhile, can have disadvantages.

This is the sort of persnickety pouncing that serves only one purpose: to show off your knowledge. But we all have typing fingers, brains, and Google and can access this exact same rote knowledge that you or your parents paid thousands of dollars for you to learn in law school.

Likely Bragg sued from Pennsylvania because he used his own connections to make sure the case got heard and to save on travel costs.

Crap, your obsessing about me saying "you know" here and on Twitter is really low, frankly, and I wonder what spasm of spite got to you this morning that you felt you had to do that. I don't say "You know" any more than any other American; probably less. I have something to say; if there are a few "you knows" you can just screen them out. It would never occur to me to cross the street to harangue another human being about them saying "you know" on a podcast, especially if their podcast was interesting. So I encourage you to cease doing that sort of nasty undercutting of a person over nothing -- it's unbecoming, and makes for a rancorous atmosphere that I will definitely push back on.

No, you don't need a tribe or a community to have "good fences make good neighbours". Nothing of the kind. Universality, universal rules, good practices that everyone can concede are self-evident truths -- these are things we can and should aspire to. Nearly 99 percent of the people of Second Life find that spinning boxes in their view are ugly, stupid, and purposeless. They don't make for more sales, whatever more retarded avatars may be drawn to click on them like children grabbing at a spinning top. They do not help the overall climate conducive to shopping without stress, in a nice environment, and with good neighbours. There are few legitimate uses of spinning signs; those tekkie-wikinistas who feel their Moebius-strip turning prism mobile office should have a right to exist are in the minority, and don't have to paralyze the view of 4 sims, especially if they never log on. They can put it up in the sky; that's the solution many, many sims have found, especially sandbox/creative sims which hilariously enough, are the first to make really good, common-sense rules (like Fur Nation, which says "no yiffing, put it up 700 m2").

I don't understand *what* the Piligrims and Mormans have to do at all with modern American neighbourhoods (and they could be European as well), where my neighbours are Muslims, Hindus, Latin American Catholics, and 20-something nihilst atheists. But we can all agree that the noise from the construction next to the hospital is a blight on our neighbourhood and not helping the sick people, and call 311, which has access to the Environmental Protection Agency which has rules the city puts in place for construction and noise. I don't have to make a deal with the construction company separately; I don't have to convert to Islam to persuade my neighbour storekeeper to call 311 with me. I always marvel at how basic, normal, RL things like city ordinances which could have been established in SL long ago are artificially, completely exaggeratedly, declared as impossible to achieve and unscalable.

You've artificially decided that my concept or negotiations with neighbours based on universal principles strangers can invoke for each other is somehow related to religious communities or likeminded communities of belief; it's hardly the case.

Lem, again, you exaggerate the impossibility of coming to agreement, and you also hugely overstate cultural distances.

Ugly spinning signs are ugly spinning signs. Even the people who make them don't want them in their residential view, though they may decorate their shops with them. Laggy clubs are laggy clubs. And so on. People agree far, far more than you can imagine, and this vast pretense that everyone is so wildly different and we need to be constantly genuflecting in frozen fear over local sensititivities is quite simply crap.

Prok, there are indeed cases where all people can agree, but people are very different and that is why some of them build a Kong on water. Object esthetics are just a minor part of disagreements, I was referring to higher level differences like "what is the purpose of SL", which is the root of most of the disagreements.

If I was genuflecting in frozen fear over anyone's sensitivities I wouldn't post these comments. However, I just don't go on ranting personal attacks either.

I would submit that building a Kong on the water is about as hackneyed and cliched and kitsched a way you could go, replete with references to mass culture in old Kong movies. I don't think it's being a good neighbour to install a giant King Kong on the water, especially when you have a giant island, and can move him inland by a tree or something so he doesn't have to obliterate everybody's view. I think long ago, the Lindens could have encouraged light zoning with a very simple tag on each auction sim: experimental, commercial, entertainment, residential -- mountain, roadside, flat, waterfront. This designation would have readily caught on in people's minds, and would help their intellectual organization of the world. They wouldn't have to enforce it; the people buying and moving into the sims would use peer pressure.

Content wise, good. However, this podcast is a rehash of what other people have been writing for quite some time - in books, on blogs, and in world meetings. Prokofy Neva is not known for playing well with others, yet the commonality of some her thoughts does not demonstrate why this commonality hasn't bridged that gap. In short, some points well made, but these are really just opinions of Prokofy Neva.

And, as a technical note, Audacity is great for removing 'umm'. Might have saved a megabyte that way.

>>these are really just opinions of Prokofy Neva.

That's rather the point Nobody.

>>umm

Wow, I say that all the time! If it really bothers you, probably best to just not listen rather than nitpick.

Better still, produce a better podcast, i'd be happy to plug it here on Metaversed. Hell, if you can really do it, i'll host it! lol...

No, not everyone knows that you don't need to be a CA lawyer to bring suit against Linden Lab, Prokofy. Since the podcast was unclear on the point, I clarified it. That's one of the things comments are for. You should expect people who know more about what you're talking about than you do to clarify things that you get wrong. As is traditional, and out of respect for Nick's forums, I'll ignore your personal swipes.

No, Nothing "Wrong" Here.

I didn't get anything *wrong*, Benjamin Duranske, that's an incorrect statement. And I don't need to be clear about a picayune, tangential matter on a podcast of a broader nature.

You admitted yourself that you were nitpicking and confessed as such by saying "I hope I'm not pouncing". I urged people who had land devalued in Second Life to form class-action suits and find litigators in California -- because that's just plain good advice, to have litigators in California that have the knowledge of state law, presence in San Francisco or a nearby city to be able to deal with LL -- and have the ability to reduce costs. A litigator in another state might wind up having to join another attorney in CA *anyway*.

I didn't claim that no one else could file suit; I didn't say it was impossible to file suit if you weren't in California -- that's why it is simply *incorrect and false* to claim I was "wrong". I merely urged people to find litigators in California because it simply doesn't make sense for a lawyer in Connecticut to go to the expense and the trouble of doing something complicated like a class action suit on this very unworked territory of torts in virtual worlds from another state.

The fact that Bragg or Stroker Serpentine filed in other states is about their own personal convenience as individual plaintiffs in suits which aren't about torts related to virtual land itself as such. Bragg's case is about confiscation of his property and dollars in his account, and tangentially does try to establish intrinsic value for virtual land, but it's not about wrongdoing and loss on that land itself. Stroker's case is about intellectual property unrelated to land.

I think when you try to get a pro bono attorney to pick up a class-action cause, you have to figure that attorney will only be motivated to take up something time-consuming and difficult if he has every convenience to himself. And that's why you'd expect the person to be in California.

Once again, I'll ask you to cease stalking me and harassing me in forums. If you have substantive criticism to make about an actual substantive point I've made, by all means post it. But don't use this forums as a means to nitpick and pounce, in a vain effort to establish something that people either accept or don't on your substantive points, that you are an "expert on virtual law".

Well, wait, which is it?

Commonality of thoughts with others or...just Prokofy's own idiosyncratic opinion?

I don't see that this particular podcast was a "rehash," but I think inevitably to be clear, especially to new listeners, the fastest growing group in SL, some old ground had to be covered.

Benjamin Duranske said: "As is traditional, and out of respect for Nick's forums, I'll ignore your personal swipes".

Ditto.

"Local counsel" is what you're talking about here, and you are right this point: most lawyers that you hire who aren't in CA are going to want -- and in some cases need -- to partner up with a CA firm to file documents, etc. I don't see any reason people would need pro bono counsel here though (and I don't see any reason most firms would take a class action by a bunch of people who are worried about virtual land prices on pro bono anyway). This is about land value, and the class action suit would be for money, some of which would go to the lawyers who brought it in a typical settlement.

And right on cue, Prok has just reached a new low: http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/08/my-enemies-lis... It's something that I will not ignore even though (and NOT because) I am not on the list.

"their recurring hate problem and vilification of me only subtracts from their own reputations." What do you think it does to YOUR reputation, Prok?

That is the best thing I have seen in so long, Lem. The title alone is priceless. I could not imagine a better end to a lousy week covering SL financial problems than making the top of that list, even ahead of such dastardly characters as Mark Wallace and Hamlet Au. Thanks for posting. Here's a parallel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon's_Enemies_List

Paul Newman has said that his inclusion on that list is one of his greatest accomplishments. I'm sure I feel but a fraction of his pride, but it is pride nonetheless.

>I don't see any reason most firms would take a class action by a bunch of people who are worried about virtual land prices on pro bono anyway).

In order to be the first attorney or law firm to set a precedent, of course, out of concern for people who bought pixels and whose purchase was devalued. It's a consumer cause. People who have had a loss of what are relatively small amounts of dollars lost can't afford attorneys; or conversely, if they're foolhardy enough to have lost thousands on something like pixelated nothings, they won't be rich and won't have the money for attorney's fees; they'd have to find a lawyer to work pro bono. I bet some could be found.

As for the "enemies list," I think it's important to show the very short list of people who have made me an enemy and constantly seek to vilify me -- you realize then it's a campaign by a few, and you don't give it weight.

Again, no. What you are describing is the very reason class actions suits exists. A small number of people -- typically consumers -- don't have a claim that's worth bringing individually, but collectively, it is. A class action suit is incredibly expensive to bring. But since there's a large number of people, it's often worth it for attorneys to take them on anyway, on a contingency basis (the attorney gets part of the eventual settlement or award). As for pro bono work, it's usually reserved for people who are actually poor. Not people with multi-thousand dollar computers who are complaining about an ad farmer next door to their virtual apartment complex. I'd be sort of appalled if a firm used its pro bono time on a case like that. It's not supposed to be free advertising for the firm (though that can be a side benefit) it's supposed to be there to help those people who actually need it.

Thanks everyone, some stuff has been removed, and i dont have time to play mother anymore so comments are now closed.

Do feel free to continue the conversation on your own blogs.

Cheers