Organic Technology

All the technology we see in eXistenZ is very organic. The game consoles, called pods, are squishy, connected by biological umbilical cords to a port in the user’s spine. Cronenberg flips cyberpunk tropes: rather than metallic “jacks” a la the console cowboys of Neuromancer, the “bio-ports” are lubricated, fingered, stimulated, and serve as a connection to the pods, treated by game designer Allegra Geller as fetal – dependent, vulnerable, precious.

A key McGuffin in the film is a gun (the “Special”) made from the bones of a mutant amphibian and firing human teeth. In a sublimely mixy touch, the gun is made from the byproducts of the factory-farming process by which the game pods are made, and yet serves as a symbol of the terrorist faction seeking to destroy games in the name of the primacy of a reality separate from gameworlds, a faction which might itself be an artifact of game design.

Cronenberg sites the technology at the intersection of the squicky and the compelling: the pods are literally uncanny in their movements, the scene where the game compels Ted to eat the Special and assemble it into a gun really stomach-wrenching. And yet, as I’ll discuss below, the selfsame tech (well, aside from the Special, which only the the sheepdog liked) is portrayed as sensual, even erotic.

The Erotics of Artificiality

The bio-ports are portrayed as another pleasurable human orifice, opening for lubed fingers and pointed tongues as much as for the game pod umbilicals. These gamers are no Borg-like Neuromancer console cowboys, no disembodied cyberspace jockeys: everything in eXistenZ is embodied, physical, sensual and sexual. The game seems to want its players to be sexy – it apparently compels Allegra and Ted to make out, Ted to slip a tongue into Allegra’s bio-port.

In yet another of Cronenberg’s amodern unmakings of modernist dichotomies, game designer Allegra is both sexual and comfortable with bodily organs and fluids, where noob (or anti-game terrorist) Ted is strait-laced, literally zipped up to the throat, deeply phobic of organic penetration, of sexual arousal.

Technology is often portrayed as erotic, but through an erotics rooted in the binary of human/mechanism: sexy cars, sexy metallic robots, an erotics of gaze over touch. Cronenberg’s erotics is deeply Harawayan, utterly embodied: one cannot imagine Gibson’s console cowboys carrying around pocket-sized tubes of lube. Here technology is erotic because it is rooted in touch, not sight: Allegra lovingly strokes her pod, bio-ports are constantly being touched. It is also not othered: technology is connected umbilically with our very bodies, not apart but inside us.

Performance and Simulacrum

It wasn’t the organic technology, the engineering of mutant amphibians for computer parts, that sparked the most revulsion among the CSPO audience, but the intermingling of gameworld and reality. One of my colleagues found the notion of a compelling synthetic reality abhorrent, and all the more so for its mixing with the real. A couple of the others argued that reality is a sensory artifact anyway, so what basis would we have for distinguishing, or prioritizing, a prior sensory artifact over a newly-engineered one?

Jean Baudrillard (a big influence on The Matrix) sniffed that modernity creates simulacra, fake experiences inferior to the real thing, and peddles them as an alternative. Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi, along with others, argue that our game spaces aren’t simulacra but real spaces for enabling performances artistic, cultural and personal. Allegra makes the same argument, against anti-mixy Ted:

(quotes from imdb)

Ted: I want to put the game on pause. The game can be paused, can’t it? I mean, all games can be paused, right?
Allegra: Yeah, sure. But why? What’s wrong? Aren’t you dying to see what’s so special about the special?
Ted: I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I’m kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here.

They leave the gameworld, and Allegra confronts Ted:

Allegra: So how does it feel?
Ted: What?
Allegra: Your real life. The one you came back for.
Ted: It feels completely unreal.
Allegra: You’re stuck now, aren’t ya? You want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because there’s nothing happening here. We’re safe. It’s boring.
Ted: It’s worse than that. I’m not sure… I’m not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you’re beginning to feel a bit like a game character.

That’s fine with Allegra:

Ted: We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that’s not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it’s a game everybody’s already playing.

So why not engineer it to be more interesting, more compelling? This is the argument being made by economist Edward Castronova as well as communications professor Byron Reeves, who would restructure routine work to incorporate lessons from our world’s version of eXistenZ, introducing game mechanics into the workplace, and indeed into a broad range of ordinary behaviors.

Bonnie Nardi tells us gamers hold tightly to the work-play dichotomy in their conceptions of and discourse about play; yet, in practice the two are hopelessly mixed, with playful work and work-like play. Cronenberg takes the natural next step and mixes gameworld and RL, forcing us to ask, just why would we keep them separate and privilege the latter, really?

Dismissiveness and Contempt

This is a subset of a larger problem of Nardi’s, a general ivory-tower disdain for popular cultural production that comes through time and again, despite a grounding in a democratic aesthetic theory. Still, specific instances of ignorant dismissiveness stand out as both unprofessional and inappropriate for a generally positive analysis of a pop-culture phenomenon.

In her explanatory chapter on the nature of WoW, after explaining the difference between PvP (player versus player) and PvE (player versus environment) specialized game servers, she describes roleplay servers as “devoted to role-playing in which characters speak in a kind of humorous, ersatz Ye Olde English patois (see Kavetsky 2008),” and unsurprisingly notes “I have conducted no research on these servers.”

Her statement is wrong, misleading, contemptuously dismissive – and utterly needless. For the same amount of effort she could have included a neutral and accurate sentence about them. But, this attitude fits with her general lack of respect for popular creativity.

That lack of respect, unsurprisingly, is fully voiced in her discussion of Second Life. “On the whole,” she says, “participants have gravitated toward creating content devoted primarily to two activities: shopping and sex.” Of course, no citation is provided. Even granting the statement as true, which I have no reason to do, she still fails to note that in a market economy, which Second Life has, the creating of content will be devoted primarily to sale, which she dismisses as “shopping.”

She adds,  “In a world in which people can do whatever they want, the reproduction of consumption as a primary activity is, in my view, a somewhat disappointing turn (although consistent with the larger culture).” This “view” runs contrary to her embrace of John Dewey’s aesthetics, as I’ll discuss below. It does manage to reject capitalism, personal initiative and the design arts all in one snotty, ivory-tower turn of phrase.

She goes on to cite Malaby (2006) (that date is important) to the effect that “the virtual world evolved into something of a junk heap,” because creative tools were given to ordinary people and not reserved for gifted professional designers. I’m not making this up: much of the middle section of the book is a glorification of the professional game designer and a slam at all the fields of study which find value in amateur creative production.

While noting that the “design of Second Life – its bid for tools-without-rules” led to complaints from its designers at its ugliness – almost makes a valid point, but slides away from it. The SL mainland, an anarchic realm under Linden Lab’s direct control, has always been largely hideous. This is in fact due to the Lab’s ideologically-driven choice to provide no restrictions whatsoever. What Nardi ignores, however, is the countless thousands of owner-zoned regions which are home to astonishing beauty, enabled by simple zoning rules that were created not by the professionals, who failed to do so, but by amateur creators and managers, who succeeded where those professionals failed.

To note that, however, would have involved removing ideological blinders, setting aside prejudices, and actually looking at the reality. Much easier to sniff dismissively.

The Magic Circle

It’s rather astonishing that a major scholar has, in 2010, devoted an entire chapter to trying to keep this zombie of a concept in motion. To her credit, the third, directly observational, section of Nardi’s book completely contradicts her attempts to deploy the Magic Circle.

While clearly articulating that game play “is not a sequestered activity walled up in a magic circle,” she argues that “we must revive Huizinga’s notion of the magic circle in its fullness,” because “the meaningfulness of play is bound within the activity of those who actually play.” What she means is that “non-players are apart from the world in which a person’s actions are sensible, interesting, compelling, meaningful.”

It’s not hard to see that there’s no group or activity for which it isn’t true that what defines the group (job, religion, culture, bowling league, whatever) is that the group values the group activities more than those outside the group do. This pedestrian observation hardly requires resuscitating the deservedly-discredited notion of a “magic circle” around game play.

The Dewey Dichotomy

One of the theoretical foundations of the book is John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience. His focus on performance and collective expression fit well with her other theoretical tools. However, she quotes, and then proceeds to deny over and over, Dewey’s statements on the aesthetic as essentially human, populist, democratic, anti-elitist. Dewey states that in pre-modern times “the arts of the drama, music, painting, and architecture thus exemplified had no particular connection with theaters, galleries, museums. They were part of the significant life of an organized community.”

Nardi notes that “[m]odernity sequesters the aesthetic in regulated institutions ouside the normal processes of living. Dewey suggests how deeply peculiar this is.” Yet, much of the book does precisely that: sequestering the aesthetic pleasures of WoW within a museum-like elevating of the designed artifact above player participation and contribution. Her WoW is a temple in which the masses are invited to come perform the orthodox rituals: while she recognizes that other activities take place there, she regards them as utterly aesthetically inferior to both the temple and the sanctioned rites. Squaring this elitism with the democratic Dewey is an impossibility that Nardi simply passes on: she notes Dewey’s views and simply moves on.

Producer-centrism

Nardi seems to position her book as a necessary counterbalance to undue academic stress on the users of technology and the amateur producers of aesthetic artifacts and experiences. While she is certainly right in crediting the outstanding creative work of the WoW development team, it’s an odd reading of the technology and society literature that claims that the balance has tipped too far to user studies.

The academy, motivated in no small part by self-importance, has tended to see itself as allied with the elite priesthood of scientific and technological creation, rather than the unwashed masses of users. User studies have barely begun to redress the neglect of serious analysis of user deployment and modification of technology.

While true that games scholars tend to neglect game-as-software and game-as-code, due in part to their lack of programming and computer science experience, that imbalance does not equate to an imbalance in analyzing the social and aesthetic experiences of game play, the claim which Nardi does seem to make. Conflating the two enables a justification of snobbery, but over-emphasizes the value distinction between professional and amateur aesthetic creation around WoW.

Activity Theory

I‘m just starting to read Kaptelinin and Nardi’s Acting With Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, so I don’t feel qualified to critique activity theory yet. I do note that it’s got some strange approaches to agency, again privileging the designed artifact, it seems, over the user, and smelling more than a bit of both rational actor theory and technological determinism. While this fits with Nardi’s overall cultural elitism, I suspect it raises some deeper problems in assigning and analyzing agency, though largely beyond the scope of Nardi’s work.

In summary, My Life as a Night Elf Priest is two books: one absolutely stellar participant-observer anthropological account that’s clear-eyed, insightful and accessible, and one work of applied theory with a highly problematic elitist bias. Skipping over Part Two of the book in casual reading or in classroom use might well be a good idea.

However, along with Nardi’s exceptional contributions, in cross-cultural fieldwork as well as in the clarity of her writing, her theoretical framework is problematic in many ways, and outright contradicted in her strong observational concluding chapters. Another contradiction running through the book is between her use of John Dewey‘s democratic theory of aesthetic experience (from Art as Experience, 1934) and an ivory-tower condescension towards popular, amateur creative expression, along with a glib dismissiveness of cultural forms outside her areas of interest or expertise.

This post will deal with the book’s many strengths, the next one with a criticism of its flaws.

Nardi states in her prologue that “I believe World of Warcraft is an exemplar of a new means of forming and sustaining human relationships and collaborations through digital technology.” In describing her research methodology, while stating that “there was not a great deal of difference between my work on World of Warcraft and my previous work,” she adds that one difference was “that the research inclined toward the participant end of participant-observation,” as a “full participant in game activities,” citing Pearce (2009)’s term “participant-engagement.”

That’s a clear and valuable statement of the distinction between “RL” fieldwork in situations where the anthropologist is immediately and inevitably tagged as an outsider, and those, particularly online, in which something like full participation in the community is possible. Such a position, of course, calls for a different epistemology, problematizing the reflexivity required of an “engaged” reporter as well as the tensions between participation in the  subject community and the community of academic research.

Nardi seems to have found the liminal space of participant-engagement much less troublesome than I do, but skilfully weaves the subjective through her work.

She makes an unusual and evocative argument early on: that WoW is “a refuge – an ‘escape,’ as players say – from modernity,” which manifests in the appeal of the medieval and “human scale” of architecture and activities, and in a focus on  “character development,” in which the “toon” serves as a proxy for Victorian notions of self-improvement through deliberate activity.

One thinks of the “Vickies,” the neo-Victorians from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, who used nanotechnology to enable a culture thoroughly rejecting modernist, mass-culture values in favor of an advanced steampunk aesthetic – and foresees another post in the Mixy Things series. It’s unfortunate that Nardi didn’t further develop this theme in a more overt way.

While much of Nardi’s discussion of aesthetics is problematic, she does take a good swipe at both Jesper Juul and the narratologists by noting that

“Metrics and competition suggesting sportsmanlike activity tell half the story, but instead of the literal uniformity of sporting uniforms and the plainness and predictability of, say, basketball courts or soccer fields, video games conjure striking visual worlds remarkable in their vivid realizations of unique imagined universes,” and “[w]hile agreeing that video games bring forth imagined worlds, my data suggest that these worlds are less a fiction in which players fill in gaps and more a powerful visual experience like viewing a striking landscape – the world is fully realized, and one need only gaze at it.” That visual surface “did double duty: players could gaze appreciatively at their surroundings, but, simultaneously, the world’s visual features invited players to participatory activity.”

She argues that the success of WoW and MMOs in general is the linking of the performative role of the player to the designer-created visuals, that performance alone, as in text-based and tabletop games,  is not enough to draw and sustain a mass audience. Yet, performance is real: “[p]articipation in virtual worlds is not simulation but performance.” Contra Baudrillard, she argues that “[p]ostmodern theory asserted the delusional quality of mass-produced images, but even as those images were proliferating, new means of authentic expressive performance, embedded in vivid visual spaces, were emerging as forms of mass culture.”

The final third of her book, “Cultural Logics of World of Warcraft,” is where Nardi really shines. Her fieldwork here is very strong, her reportage largely unwarped by excessive devotion to theory over observation (and as I’ll argue next time, refutes over and over again one of her key theoretical arguments from the somewhat dicey middle section).

She addresses addiction, theorycrafting and mods, gender and play in China each in their own chapter. While all are models of anthropological technique and description, her chapter on gender is truly extraordinary. Academics tend to see what they want to see, and tend to interpret the reactions of others as if all were liberal academics – resulting in such astonishing statements as Corneliussen (2008)’s description of WoW as “a playground for feminism.” Nardi clearly describes the “boys’ tree house” atmosphere of American WoW servers, the constant homophobic teasing, men actually choosing female avatars so they wouldn’t have to look at a male avatar, and the creation of a somewhat exclusionary space through boyish, masculinist discourse practices.

Her chapter on Chinese gamers (not gold farmers, but the huge audience of regular WoW players in China) is fascinating overall, and particularly for its contrast with the construction of masculinity in China versus the US: cross-gender playing is much more rare because the homophobic teasing is shaming, rather than more or less good-natured as in the US, and the huge dominance of PvP play marginalizes women to a much greater degree than the US PvE norm. Fascinating stuff, and Nardi notes many opportunities for very valuable future study.

(Parenthetically, in discussing these chapters with technosage, she asked about gendered MMO play in Japan, and I was startled to realize I haven’t read a single thing about Japanese MMO culture, or, even more surprisingly, Korean. I wonder if the incipient release of Final Fantasy XIV will create an opportunity to fill that gap. And, if anybody knows any work in that field, please let me know!)

Next up: problems of agency raised by Nardi’s use of activity theory, and tensions between her use of Dewey and her own fairly evident cultural elitism – which support her use of activity theory and a heavy weighting of the role of technological artifacts over that of users and their culture, which reads like technological determinism without the macro-historical arguments.

It was a terrific exercise (which I’ve taken to calling “Virtual Bondage for Policy Wonks”), and it went a lot better than I’d expected. Here’s the presentation, my first ever Prezi:

I’ve got two key hypotheses, I think. While they’re definitely hypotheses – starting-off wild-ass guesses supported by the barest bits of early observation – I think they’re solid enough to start field-testing:

1. The differences in how canon is deployed in argument and training depend on the platform, not the content. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the document engaged with as the supreme authority is (picking from the communities I’m looking at) the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Qur’an, the Gor novels or Batman Comics: they’ll be used similarly in similar sociotechnical environments and differently in different ones. This is not to say the content isn’t different in all sorts of ways, just that training and argument are platform-dependent more than content-dependent.
2. Preferring managerial communities to self-governed democratic ones is in some significant way similar to choosing to participate in BDSM practices. This isn’t as wild as it seems, but I’m not entirely sure of it right now. It seems to me that there are important similarities in the choice and pleasure of relinquishing/taking control in both the managerial and the Dominant/submissive contexts, and that those pleasures are more popular online than those of coequally sovereign, responsible citizenship.

I think people are voting with their time and dollars to choose hierarchy – and usually a very clearly subordinate role in hierarchy – over any and all forms of egalitarianism. I also think this phenomenon, what I’m calling “Communities of Constraint,” (TM) is insufficiently studied and critically important for understanding emergent political behavior offline.

However, I’m not sure how close the relationship really is between managerialism and BDSM. I’m comfortable asserting that they’ve got a common ancestor in a culture with no meaningful experience of active citizenship and a lot of training in being a consumer. I’m not sure how close these two branches off the same trunk really are, however, and that’s an empirical question for my fieldwork.

That’s where the second hypothesis fits with the first. I’m going to look at training, socialization and conflict in communities with a close relationship to a canon text (and some that don’t, for contrast), to see if groups with profoundly different ontologies use tools in similar ways in similar environments. If, for example, a secular managerial community uses canon in similar ways to a fundamentalist religious community or strict RP group, then it might be possible to argue that either (a) they’re fulfilling similar needs or (b) platform architecture shapes the kinds of groups that thrive on that platform, or likely (c) both.

There are a lot of dots to connect, no question, and much of the interpretation will be the product of the specific theoretical lenses I’ll be using: someone else might well interpret the same elephant in a radically different way.

All in all, I think I’ve got a coherent set of questions and strategies for answering them. It’s telling that the strongest critical comment I got on my presentation from perhaps my biggest skeptic was on one thing: the connection between online observations and offline behavior. After a year immersed in the business and education literatures of online behavior, I considered that something to toss off as a given.

I’ll certainly ensure I nail that point in future work, but if that’s the stickiest issue in “Virtual Bondage For Policy Wonks,” I should have pretty clear sailing!

Here I’m going to digress completely on the way to explaining why an achievement system wouldn’t do what SL uber-blogger Hamlet Au wants it to do: help draw gamers into SL and keep them coming back. Before I can do that, I’ve got to talk about FIFA, Calvinball, and what gamers actually do.

The scoreboard will be frozen at Q to 12 until further notice

Why Most Folks Don’t Get SL

Gwyneth Llewelyn  argues that SL “appeals to a very small niche market, one that reaches out to people with this amazing and extraordinary ability of knowing how to entertain themselves.” She’s absolutely right, and that’s probably the single best statement of both SL’s appeal (one utterly lost on the Lindens, as far as I’ve ever seen) and the narrow demographic limit of it.

She contrasts those who engaged in creative free-form play as kids with those who mostly were passively entertained by TV, saying SL’s for the former and not the latter. She’s right, as far as she goes. But where things get interestingly complicated is with a demographic shaped neither by freeform play nor TV, but by games.

SL really doesn’t work as passive entertainment. It’s a social and/or creative environment. If you don’t make or script things, or engage with people,  your experience of SL (like mine was my first couple of attempts at making a go of it) will be cruising around looking at stuff (entertaining for an hour or so, maybe) and/or, as Harper Beresford puts it, “dressing your dolly.” Which, again, without some instrumental end, gets old pretty quickly. So, people expecting TV-style pushed content will “not get it,” get bored and leave after an hour or so – or come in very occasionally for a talk or a concert or whatever.

Games, Play and Entertainment

As has been widely observed, SL doesn’t work for many people expecting a game-like experience either. But games are very different from freeform play on the one hand and passive content consumption on the other. Games are spaces of action within externally imposed constraints. Games needn’t have win conditions (you can’t “win” an MMO), needn’t have explicit rules (the fun of computer games for many lies in deducing the rules from observed events – in essence, in applying the scientific method in the same way as any experimental physicist. Gamers call this “theorycrafting.”), needn’t have tokens, game pieces or avatars.

Really, the only thing games have in common is the acceptance of a set of constraints, or rules. Johan Huizinga and theorists following him would add as crucial that they’re “not serious,” that they include “play” as something categorically different from “work.” Gwyn implicitly follows this approach in her excellent discussion of the importance of play. But play is a different beast from games, and Huizinga suffered from a bad case of Edwardian-bourgeois rose colored vision in seeing games as protected bastions of unseriousness.

“Kick the can” is play: the players decide for themselves what is and isn’t legitimate within the immediate circumstances: what’s a goal, what’s out, what moves are fair and what’ aren’t, when the play starts and ends.  “Soccer” (or “football,” for everyone but Americans) is a game: players accede to a formal rule set, one that’s not local or contingent, but universal.

The Politics of Calvinball

Gwyn and I are both active and outspoken in a community within SL, the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. The CDS is deeply riven now between two incompatible views of politics and community. One is that of the game, one of play.

Gwyn and her colleagues see the proper formation of a community as one of a game: take a pre-existing formal rule set and follow it, and the resulting experience is that of living in a polity. My colleagues and I see community as play: get together, improvise some locally contingent rules, decide what’s fair and what’s in and out of bounds on the fly. What results is living in a polity.

My ideal polity would be a permanent, floating game of Calvinball. (I note there’s a problem of scale: I’m working on a post on that. You can have a world federation of football, where a world federation of Calvinball is um, not so likely. Contrariwise, a boy and his stuffed tiger can play Calvinball, but not FIFA-rules football. This is actually a crucial, and sticky, problem in political theory!)

(1.8 Score may be kept or disregarded. In the event that score is kept, it shall have no bearing on the game nor shall it have any logical consistency to it. (Legal scores include ‘Q to 12′, ‘BW-109 to YU-34, and ‘Nosebleed to Pelvic Fracture’.))

Gwyn’s would be FIFA fooball, whose “Laws of the Game [were] modified at the 123rd Annual General Meeting of the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in Newcastle, Northern Ireland on 28 February 2009.”

Note that tag line in the FIFA logo: it’s a crucial political statement. The good at issue isn’t that of the players but of the game. I think the CDS conservatives would agree: the good to be maximized is that of democracy-as-rule-set, and not that of the “players”/citizens or their “team”/community.

One of the main problems I have with the CDS is the same one that Gwyn has with an achievement system (though she really means either “an un-game-like reputation system” or “game-like elements in the abstract”): SL is inherently a Calvinball space, and there’s something wrong (both in the sense of “bad” and of “incorrect”) in mandating FIFA-style rules within it.

Mandatory vs. Optional Rule Systems

In the comments to Gwyn’s post, she reaches a political position we can agree on: she argues that rule sets are fine if they’re freely, individually and locally chosen – and not externally imposed. She, along with others commenting on her post, calls for opening the SL user interface the way many MMO UI’s have been, for user modification. Then, if anyone wants to impose a formal rule set on their SL, they can install a mod to enable or enforce their rules. If not, then not.

(another note: the Restrained Life Viewer already does this, and is an ideal, if somewhat unlikely, example of successfully consensually applying FIFA rules to SL )

This is brilliant and important stuff. My friend and colleague Mark Chen will be defending his doctoral dissertation in a couple weeks, in which (among other things) he analyzes the role of one user mod in  World of Warcraft, which transformed a group’s experience of  WoW from one of play to one of a game. Mods are also a powerful tool of political speech within the game environment: they’re a tool for talking back to developers, as popular and effective mods are often absorbed into the formal client or “rule set,” transforming the experience for everyone.

Opening up the UI thus would enable two different sorts of SL experiences: the Calvinball sort that has been the core of SL since Philip Rosedale’s initial vision, and a whole range of FIFA-like games.

That said, of course there have been game-rule enabling tools in SL all along, particularly combat HUDs. SL has a damage system built into it, something a lot of people don’t know, and most ignore. However, there are any number of combat systems enabling everything from samurai duels to Battle Of Britain fighter combat.

Game-like Systems as Misrepresentation

Imagine if the first thing you saw in SL was a combat HUD! While people interested in combat would have a much easier time getting started, it would fundamentally misrepresent the SL experience to the majority. Any game-like system poses the same problem.

Presenting game constraints right off, as if they were an essential part of the SL experience, would be misleading. It would, as I said in a previous post, lack integrity – as so many of Linden Lab’s flailing attempts at capturing the social media/gamer market have. People have a highly refined nose for the phony, and that sort of phoniness would be lethal.

Don’t Game the Gamers!

Say SL did have a World of Warcraft-style achievement system, as I discussed in my previous post. Let’s handwave what seems like the impossibility of coding such a thing in a user-created-content environment. It would, as I said, be useful for veterans, and would fit with integrity into the SL world.

But let’s look at it from the perspective of a WoW player coming into SL for the first time, with no understanding of social virtual worlds.

OK, there’s no quests: no game elements which enable progression along a clear (if not unavoidably linear) track towards a clear and universal goal, the level cap. There’s no ranking system based on universal criteria, no uniform measurement of accomplishment. There’s no end state: no “elder game” to work towards unlocking.

But there’s an achievement system! Our WoW player is familiar with the achievement system added to WoW in the last expansion: an entertaining bit of trivia that can generate personal side goals and that reveals information about their own and other people’s play styles. So our gamer goes out to get some achievement points.

There are achievements for doing some basic things: buying an article of clothing, attending a live music event, rezzing a prim. Our gamer does those things.

And now they’ve seen a little bit more of SL’s content. But do they have a reason to stay? Not thanks to the achievement system. Why? Because all that system has done is show them more of a world completely unlike the game environment!

SL remains a Calvinball space. It remains a world by and for people who can entertain themselves, as Gwyn said. It remains a world flat-out incomprehensible to the gamer. The gamer has spent her whole life working within systems, decoding systems, achieving the goals of systems.  And SL remains a place built on the pure absence of systems!

One might as well argue that avatars should all go around with exclamation points over their heads to make gamers feel welcome. Games (FIFA spaces of formal rule systems) and play (unstructured ad-hoc Calvin creativity) remain utterly different and incommensurable things.

Claiming otherwise is a transparent lie. Remember, gamers spend their whole life decoding systems and figuring out the rules. How long do you think you can fool them in SL, and what do you think their reactions will be when they realize you’ve tried to manipulate them in a way anyone who’s beat tic-tac-toe can see through?

Don’t insult gamers’ intelligence or their core competences. It’s no way to win friends and retain customers.

There is no way to square the circle, to topologically transform SL into a game space. Forget about attracting gamers; work on recruiting and retaining those Calvinball champions!

Second Life’s blogger-of-record, Hamlet Au, has been calling for the reinstating of an “achievement system” in order to increase SL’s appeal among gamers – a huge population that tends to not “get” SL at all. Unfortunately, what he argues for is not an achievement system at all, but a reputation system. Au uses “achievement,” “reputation” and “level” interchangeably, confusing the issue hopelessly.

Unfortunately, the many bloggers who’ve taken exception to his support for the return of SL’s reputation system have followed his lead in treating as synonymous several different systems with radically different social consequences.

Gwyneth Llewelyn argues against Au, claiming that an achievement system would turn SL into just “another form of entertainment” – specifically, something like an MMO. But what she’s referring to also is a reputation system, something that to the best of my knowledge does not exist in MMOs, and certainly not in the most popular ones.

Reputation  Systems

Before my time, SL had a reputation system, a Digg-like tool for promoting or demoting other people’s (or their content’s) reputations. It was gamed so severely, and so easy to abuse, that it was retired years ago. Digg, as it turns out, has been subject to the most vicious sort of political manipulation for some time itself.

I don’t know much about reputation systems, so I’m going to leave my discussion at the observation that in an emotionally laden context they’re a terrible idea (though they work very well in the commercial contexts of eBay and Amazon vendors), and are an open invitation to griefing. Oldtimers who experienced the apparent fiasco of SL’s system can comment on that, or, you can read the Digg manipulation link for a sense of how badly these things can go wrong.  I note, however, that a merchant-ranking system might be quite valuable for SL.

Achievement Systems

An achievement system is a very different beast. Here, the platform (not other players/participants!) awards individuals points for doing particular things – things extrinsic to the game goals! They’re typically socially visible, and serve as both a bragging tool and a quick visual identifier of people’s seniority and expertise – like Boy Scout merit badges or the military “ribbon rack.”

Here’s the achievement page for my main character from World of Warcraft:

This shows at a glance what my interests are, what kind of player I am, and in a sense, who I am in WoW: I’m immersed in the gameworld mostly, more than being a large-group raider or player vs. player combat fan. This information is readily available to anyone: the WoW UI allows you to “compare achievements” on clicking on another avatar, and the WoW Armory, where this is drawn from, displays the information publicly.

WoW only recently added this system: there was nothing like it for most of the game’s very successful history. It’s not universal in games at all: it’s an outgrowth of social media. The single-player game Dragon Age uses a web-based, social, achievements system. XBox Live added one within the past year as well. This is a new tool.

I’ve got to stress again that achievements are extrinsic to the game goals. They’re for things like looting a lot of gold, raising one’s ability with crafting, exploring odd corners of the gameworld, participating in holiday events, and suchlike. They have no bearing on progression within the game. They are not a leveling system.

Is the  information achievements provide socially useful? Yes. Can it be gamed by third parties, like a Digg ranking? No: the game software tracks progress and adds achievements automatically. Does the achievement system become an essential part of the game? By no means.

Sometimes I pursue particular achievements as a personal goal: this coming week I’m going to get the ones for Crusader/Ambassador status at long last. Sometimes they take me by surprise: “there’s an achievement for that?!” I rarely look at anyone else’s achievements, other than to see what friends have been doing lately.

But the system enables all sorts of activities, some personal, some social, some constructive, some silly. It usually does not affect anyone’s core experience in the environment.

Level Systems

Now, a level system is entirely different yet again. Levels mark a mandatory path towards a defined end state, the level cap. Achieving the level cap indicates mastery of the content, and in many MMOs, is the ticket into the “elder game” of  group raiding, as opposed to questing. Levels are the product of earning experience points (XP) which come mostly from doing the core tasks of the RPG part of the MMO: killing stuff and doing chores (which usually involve killing stuff). You play the game in order to level: that’s pretty much the object of the game.

Obviously, this in no way applies to social virtual worlds, and that’s the distinction between the Facebook game Sorority Life, which involves dressing avatars, and Second Life. Sorority Life is a game, top to bottom. Like an MMO, you do tasks for XP in order to level up, there’s (semi-) voluntary PvP content, a roleplay element (you have boyfriends, cars, and you can “dress your dolly), and an achievement system, which, like that of WoW, is an indicator of what kind of player/person you are in that space. It’s not social, not persistent, other than that there are avatars.

There’s no amount of tweaking that could turn one “SL” into the other. They’re apples and fire trucks. So there’s no point in even talking about somehow grafting a leveling system onto Second Life.

An Achievement System for SL?

Here’s my questions to you, dear readers, is it possible to describe the value of a virtual world to the uninitiated?  Does Second Life have a broader purpose that appeals to the masses?  Or does it simply resonate with a smaller niche of society? Can you describe why Second Life matters to the broader population in just a couple of sentences?  Anyone up for the challenge?

Here’s my “why”‘s, and then a “so what:”

1. Hunger for Community. There’s a reason why the user demography of SL skews to 35-55. We’re the most isolated group, by and large, in our physical lives. The 18-21 set has college, 22-30ish has bars, clubs, basketball/softball tournaments and suchlike. Older folks have active retirement communities. Us, though? Many of us go from solitude in our cars to isolation in our cubicles to equal isolation in our suburban nuclear-family homes. Between work, family, kids, the infrastructure of office and suburbia, we don’t have the time, energy or access to the kind of socializing that’s so deeply human.
2. True Bodies. Not unrelated, those of us who’re middle-aged tend towards a substantial disconnect between our physical selves and our internal self-conceptions. For me, the physiological changes I went through between 44 and 47 were as drastic as, and *much* more disorienting to my sense of self than, puberty (middle aged male gender dysphoria is clearly related, but nobody seems to know how or why). I’m now the “middle aged overweight guy” of stereotype, but that’s not who I see in my mental mirror. A huge part of the appeal of virtual worlds  is to gain/regain a fit between our internal and external appearances.
3. Prosumerism. OK, it’s an ugly word, but an important point. SL is one among many manifestations of something deeply revolutionary: an end to the half-century aberration in human history in which most all of us were passive consumers of, rather than generators of, creativity. It’s deeply telling that mainstream RL content creators – music labels, fashion designers, corporate retail in general – failed spectacularly in SL. Given a choice, we prefer our own work, our handicrafts, our arts, our celebrities, to the ones prepackaged for us. SL, along with MMO game worlds, are TV killers. They turn us back into active creators of our entertainment world, as we’re supposed to be.

Can they be a mass phenomenon? Certainly virtual worlds with more structure (game worlds) already are.

But non-game worlds are at core a niche phenomenon, yes.  Despite the rise of the fan creator, the prosumer, we’ve grown up in a world of structured entertainment. We’re used to sitting passively, riding the rails, showing up for our soccer playdates and dance lessons. Very very few of us grew up with unstructured play. Few of us also approach life without structure.

In explaining SL to people, I usually say it’s a midsized city with a really active cultural life, a Portland or San Francisco, just digital. But… most people who move from their homes to cities like that do it as part of a structured path: admission to a school, being hired into a job. Only a small percentage of us up and move to the big city cold, just for the challenge and opportunity. Those likely to in RL, they’ll take to SL just fine. The majority who’d feel sheer terror at the prospect of moving to a new city without a structure in place, they’ll stick to gameworlds.

Nongame virtual worlds, then, could use some sort of structured onramp – being assigned for school or work, going in to some sort of development or leveling trajectory – or they will only appeal to the tiny niche of the deeply adventurous.

But, that onramp has to be real and personally meaningful. It can’t be inauthentic or lacking in integrity, in the literal sense of the term.

That’s where I think Hamlet Au’s plumping for an achievement system for SL is misguided: especially in virtual spaces, people have a nose for the phony, the half-assed, the tacked-on. Something like career tracks or a talent tree might be integrated into SL in a genuine way. Reputation or achievement systems, I think, can only reek of the bogus, of the desperate attempt to copy game mechanics without a deep understanding or integration of them.

OK, that’s an aswer to some of the “whys.” Here’s a crack at the “so what?”

Virtual worlds prepare us for a coming utopia. Without going all transhumanist, it is entirely likely that RL over the next generation is going to look a lot more like SL for a lot of the world’s population. After all, the amount of body modification and ideal-looking physiques in Scottsdale, AZ, the cosmetic surgery capital of the world, isn’t that different from SL!

We’re also going to need to learn how to get along in communities of voluntary association, not the towns we were born into and stuck in. We’re going to need to learn how to work and play with people from wildly different cultures. We’re going to learn to manipulate and customize our RL environments, rather than to inherit the old or take the factory mass-product. We’re going to have to learn how to deal with a mixed economy – not capitalist and socialist, but market and gift. We’re going to have to re-learn how to be creators, producers, citizens, and no longer mere consumers.

The RL world of SL is coming. We early adapters are creating the culture today that may be everybody’s tomorrow.

Why? We need, viscerally need, community and self-expression.

Who cares? Today SL, tomorrow the world.

As Henry Jenkins describes it in Textual Poachers, quoting Bourdieu, “The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes which taste dictates shall be separated.” Jenkins argues that fan culture is mixiness, applying the analytical tools of the literary academy to popular works, taking seriously that which should not be regarded as serious, “perversely misappl[ying]” “high culture” tools to “low culture” work.

The same distinctions too often get made within fandom, so that I could see idea-driven science fiction like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica as a legitimate object of fandom while raising an eyebrow at the action-adventure SG-1 (though, ok, I loved Xena like a mad thing, and that show was my gateway to online fandom and devoted fic reading).

Part of SG-1‘s appeal was that Daniel Jackson is the fictional character I identify with most (along with Captain Sisko, as I described last time, with Tim Drake and Bren Cameron as runners-up, and there’s probably far too much insight into my psyche!). But I think the core is that the eponymous team of SG-1 is a mixy insurgency within a modernist framework.

Parenthetically, this is also an explanation for why SG-1 ran for ten seasons and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only lasted a season and a  half: SG-1 was able to appeal to a modernist audience while presenting, or enabling, a fannish subversive amodern reading; while SCC, once it hit its stride, was so resolutely amodern that it alienated an audience that might tune in to see modernist humans laying the smackdown on evil robots.

I recently watched the SG-1 pilot again, in a week where Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and Jenkins’ Textual Poachers were marinating in my brain. It amazed me how quickly and clearly that episode sketched out the series themes, creating some truly remarkable characters within the action-adventure context.

Jack O’Neill is a cold warrior, an old-school snake-eater. His superiors order him to nuke a village in order to prevent any prospect of an alien invasion – and he flat-out refuses. Instead, he evaluates the situation personally, and is captured trying to free two villager hostages. He engineers an escape, and then does something truly remarkable: he invites his captor to join him! That’s my true-love fannish moment, akin to (hmm….) two symbolic haircuts, one in SCC and one in DS9, where the main characters embrace a mixy destiny in the face of modernist-separatist expectations.

The episode ends with O’Neill requesting the alien, Teal’c, be assigned to his team. In a subsequent episode, O’Neill defends Teal’c, with an extraordinary mix of biting sarcasm and unabashed idealism, from interrogation and dissection by the military. The team coalesces as a very mixy thing: O’Neill, a quintessentially high-modern warrior with an amodern soul, Teal’c, himself a synthesis of human and animal, human and alien; Carter, the science chick, the crack-shot geek; and Daniel, the anthropologist who starts by seeing all cultures, including his own, as equal blends of familiar and alien and who becomes combat archaeologist, ruthless diplomat, a blur of alive, dead and transcendant.

The team spends nearly as much time in conflict with their military-political leadership, which is struggling to keep everything neatly in its modernist boxes, denying there are aliens, denying they’re involved in a galactic war, denying the creative freedom that would enable effective use of captured technologies, as they do fighting the modernist Goa’uld, carefully keeping separate slaves and masters, material and spiritual.  Carter’s father, a hardcore by-the-book general, becomes a hybrid and a mediator, part Goa’uld and part human. Daniel erases the binary of death repeatedly. The team laughs in the face of notions of linear time so essential to modernism, as it blurs the modernist distinctions between sacred and profane, temporal and transcendent.

And yet, it continues to do so within the modernist framework of the US military and political establishment, never calling for revolution (Daniel’s journey through and around secrecy and authority is a mixy mess all its own) but rarely obedient, guided by a moral compass that becomes the product of a synthesis of Jack’s black-ops sneakiness, Daniel’s militant compassion, Carter’s technological optimism and Teal’c's ruthless serenity.  Interestingly, I never really liked Carter, who’s pretty much an unreconstructed modernist, despite the mixiness of being woman/soldier/scientist.

Jenkins quotes Umberto Eco, that “in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.”  This is where SG-1 succeeds as a fannish object (along with the pre-2009 Star Treks) and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and, I think, Battlestar Galactica fail: the latter are two hermetic, too complete and integrated in their execution.

So, I can read SG-1 as the mutual redemption of three very broken people (O’Neill, Teal’c and Daniel), as a mixy insurgency, while others can read it as Jack/Daniel or Jack/Teal’c slash, as a triumph of personal integrity over institutional corruption – or as some really kickass explosions and cool military hardware (P90s! Air Force intergalactic battle cruisers!). Most of those readings don’t preclude the others -that’s what the mixiness of fandom is about.

Jenkins claims that the female fan blurs the boundary (not a border but la frontera, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s mixy space beyond the limits of modernism) “between fiction and experience, since their metatextual inferences relied upon personal experience as a means of expanding upon the information provided and since character identification became a means of self-analysis.”

This was in Textual Poachers, one of the first full-length academic studies of fandom, a very long time ago. What was gendered then is now more nearly universal, in part because “male fandom” has become an insignificantly small part of fandom even as fandom iteslf has mainstreamed: we all read for metatextual inferences now, and few are the remaining starship-measurers and stat-counters.

We are all fans now, and all turn to fandom for that metatextual bridge, that mixiness between the received text and personal significance, between our own critical interpretation and an “authorized” view ever more frequently the product of fans-turned-producers, who enable and encourage textual deconstruction, remixing and slash. We can’t see the modernist text through our slash goggles, and neither do the best producers anymore.

Jenkins also describes fandom as a mixy utopia, a community (a real, physical as well as mediated community, not an abstraction) profoundly apart from the modernist world, one run on the gift economy of fan production, “one defined by its refusal of mundane values and practices, its celebration of deeply held emotions and passionately embraced pleasures…. a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism, militarism and forced conformity.” Fandom is “a poached culture, a nomadic culture… a patchwork culture, an impure culture.”

It’s my culture, from my production of Star Trek novelizations at age seven, to my recent rereading of synecdochic’s marvelous uber-mixy SG-1 fic this month. It’s a culture born, as Jenkins describes, out of a radical, if circumscribed, rejection of modernity.

It is utopian, and fan culture presents a genuine alternative to modernist political systems and ideologies. As SG-1 fought with wit and weapons against modernist political systems human and alien, so the fan creates an alternative political/cultural/technological space apart from the anti-mixiness of corporate copyright, of the cash economy, of institutions which lose truth and justice in procedural conformance, of a politics determined to pit us against them, to maintain purities which never were.

SG-1 is (in one reading, not in any way privileged above others) a parable of fandom, a radically synthetic Haraway-cyborg insurgency within the rotten system of modernism. The mixy, our SG-1, our fandom,  is subversive without being revolutionary, alternative without being oppositional, better, not triumphalist.

Jenkins claims this mixy space for fandom, James Paul Gee for learning, me for emergent political technoscience. La frontera, the land of kokopelli, of trickster gods and cyborgs, is the space of all those things and others, of the queer, the syncretic, the mashup, the remix. It has no border guards but it has its defenders and their heroes, Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson and John Connor among them.

Future Mixy Things: the Greco-Egyptian alternative to Augustus, the Byzantine Empire in “decline,” and hopefully some guest posts from technosage on Navajo and Japanese anime alternatives to modernism.

Latour argues that modernism abhors hybrids, while simultaneously creating circumstances in which they proliferate. Modernism wants clear lines between human and animal, human and machine, nature and culture, culture and technology – yet the world modernism built is one in which those things in fact mix, blend and synthesize shamelessly.

The Terminator (1984) began the franchise as straight-up modernist horror, an updating of the Frankenstein myth. In the first movie, an artificial intelligence (mixy! unkosher! repulsive!) created a cyborg (meat and machine! uncanny!) to kill off the greatest threat to its dominance: the unborn child (natural!) of a sweet, helpless waitress (normative gender role!) and a devoted soldier (ditto!). Modernism produced its own hybrid monsters, but modernism’s category-separation allowed the natural, the human, to triumph over the machine.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) shredded the simple modernism of the original, and stands as an amodern classic, but one harkening back to some very traditional themes. T2, in a theme repeated strongly in Sarah Connor Chronicles, is, among other things, The Velveteen Rabbit (as unlikely a Rabbit as the Governator made!). I’m not going to expand on that observation here, but if anybody’s interested, I can do a post on that.

This time out the hybrid is the hero, defending young John against the pure machine, the sleek liquid-metal T-1000. Sarah is no longer the simpering waitress but a hybrid herself: rigidly logical and diagnosed insane, mother and commando, often colder and more distant than the machine Terminator protecting her son.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9) not only adds to the mixiness, but puts the amodern philosophy of embracing hybrids at the core of the mythos. Why is John Connor the savior of post-apocalyptic humanity? Because he alone rejects the modernism of the machines and the parallel anti-modernism of the Resistance. John embraces (literally, in one very steamy scene towards the end of the series) the hybrid, recognizing mixiness as humanity’s deliverance.

Latour argues that anti-modernism is simply modernism with its polarity reversed – good for bad – while accepting all of modernism’s premises. Where modernism sees the triumph of the machine over human, the abstract over the concrete, the Apollonian over the Dionysian, as an unquestionable good, the anti-modern agrees that all those things have happened, but regards the prospect with horror, and attempts to “turn back the clock” of linear time to a point before modernism’s apparent triumph.

This is Sarah Connor’s enterprise, literally to turn back the clock to enable a future without the triumph of modernism, where the threat to humanity from the machine never was. But Latour (along with John Connor, I argue) asks, “Where does the threat come from? From those who seek to reduce [the human] to an essence and who – by scorning things, objects, machines and the social, by cutting off all delegations and senders – make humanism a fragile and precious thing at risk of being overwhelmed by Nature, Society or God.”

One of the major plot threads of SCC‘s second season involves an opposition to John Connor from the humanist right. Driven to treason by Connor’s consorting with Terminators – as ship captains, bodyguards, and his own sole trusted companion, they conspire to rid him of his weakness for hybridization once and for all.

As Connor comes of age, he does so not as a figurehead for his anti-modernist mother and the anti-mixy Right, but as a cyborg feminist, able to love and trust women both human and cyborg, building a network in opposition to his mother’s isolationism, inclusive where she is divisive, forward-looking to the world after the apocalypse rather than backward to an idyllic world of purely human actors gone, if it ever existed, before his own temporally-displaced origins.

A Fannish Response to Mixiness

SCC doesn’t really get rolling thematically till its second season. I think there’s a particular moment where my response went from “this is an entertaining enough diversion” to fandom: when John cuts his emo hair, signifying a move from Sarah’s over-hyped baggage into badass mixy proto-messiah. Till then, both in T2 and SCC‘s first season, John had been a thing molded by his mother, and there was really no seeing the future leader in the person Sarah was raising. It’s when John rejects Sarah’s upbringing decisively that his own network-based leadership emerges, when he takes the side of his own team of humans and machines over that of his mother and uncle, that we see a hero emerge.

It got me to realize I’ve always loved mixy heroes, stories of the struggle of the mixy against the kosher. From the age of six I was a Spock fan, but my favorite Trek was Deep Space Nine, a radically amodern aspect of that universe, one standing in opposition, in no small way, to Trek’s quintessential modernism. DS9 argued that religion, politics and technology were not separate things, not past, present and future, but all one, all at once. The Wormhole was an artifact at once natural, technological and religious, the Prophets both advanced aliens and holy spirits.

DS9‘s Captain Sisko stood at the center of countless hybridizations – himself rationalist and religious leader, soldier and father, commander of the very human and the entirely alien. His enemies were often dear friends, his dear friends sometimes enemies; his mentor, who he called “Old Man,” a beautiful woman half his age; his first officer an angry terrorist in the uniform of authority. Sisko’s wife was killed by Trek’s Terminators, the Borg, but his own journey could only begin when he let go of loss and rage, the loss and rage in which Sarah Connor is ever stuck. Gods, I loved that show!

So SCC stands as an argument against 1980s modernism, against dualism, against modernism and its opponents alike. It’s as good a parable for our time, one in which state modernism and religious anti-modernism are locked in a destructive cycle, one increasingly absurd, increasingly dangerous, as the rest of us, the children of the network, the cyborg feminists, the treyf mixy people, just want to get on with our fecund creative syntheses.

Next up: Stargate SG-1 as guerrilla amodernism.

The CDS as Modernist Bastion

As I’ve been preparing to write my second year project paper on the now-terminated merger between the CDS and Al-Andalus, I’ve struggled to understand one key element. There’s been an asymmetry of mistrust that’s seemed to me to defy rational understanding, so I started casting about for non-rational explanations.

My partner technosage offered a key insight, that’s seemed to connect a number of my current projects (particularly my ever-forthcoming work on Gor – this substantiates the gut feeling I’ve had that the CDS has a lot in common with Gorean communities). She suggested that an explanation for the confusing (to me) package of views held by the CDS conservative faction was united by an abhorrence of “mixy things,” and that the Al Andalus principals (in which I have to include myself, at least in the context of recent political debates) are very “mixy” people.

What’s mixiness? Harraway’s cyborg feminism embodies it (and I’m deeply grateful to Kristine Ask for connecting the cyborg/trickster/kokopelli dots for me), and it’s part of what Latour describes as the “amodern.” It’s a taste for hybridization, of category-erasing, of synthesis and adaptation. It’s me comfortably one gender in RL and another in SL. It’s believing that a single principle (say, “democracy”) can and should manifest differently in different environments. It’s a view that most things are contingent and few fundamental, that the global and the local are inseparable, that nature, culture and technology are one seamless ball and not foods that can’t be allowed to touch. It may in fact be a preference for the treyf over the kashrut, and hence our opponents in the CDS were quite right for considering our politics unkosher.

The CDS conservatives share a basket of traits and views: they regard nation-state institutions as coequal with democracy and equally applicable everywhere; they are “immersionist,” resolutely pseudonymous within Second Life, and policing a tight border between SL and RL. They trust pseudonymous avatars with large amounts of RL money, with negligible oversight, but are deeply suspicious of identity-transparent people and RL-based checks and balances. They loathe Al Andauls’s manager, Rose Springvale, in a way that transcends politics and requires an explanation that encompasses revulsion, not mere dislike or opposition.

What unites all these things? Well, there are several important factors, one being political-cultural differences between Europeans and Americans. But another is between modernism and Latour’s amodenism.

Latour argues that modernism did two simultaneous but contradictory things: it enabled the creation of “hybrids” (we’ll be coming back to that word a lot) of nature and culture while simultaneously insisting on rigid dichotomies between them. He describes a “double separation,” between humans and nonhumans on the one hand and “above and below” on the other,” arguing that it was exactly the denial of the existence/legitimacy of hybrids that enabled their proliferation, and that the whole enterprise worked until it was so successful that we’ve ended up choking on hybrids, with a mental and political tool kit that denies their existence.

This explains – or at least describes – how it’s been that the conservatives and I spent six months entirely arguing past each other. We simply were inhabiting different ontological planes that didn’t intersect. They inhabit a mental landscape where things don’t mix. RL and SL identities, strictly separated, same with trust mechanisms. A solution valid in one environment is valid in all, and to mix it with other elements is a perversion.

For us in Al Andalus, we live in the mixiness: the community has a mission specifically linking SL activity to RL political problems. We’re comfortable being avatars and corporate directors, of treating SL as both recreation and a venue for professional standards and practices. Rose is a terrifying hybrid, truly a cyborg feminist: alluring and professional, SL avatar and RL mom, a Texas liberal, a legal and a creative writer, a Protestant leading a Muslim community. It’s notable that the loathing largely came from older men, a class of people many of whom find “professional woman” entirely too much of a repugnant hybrid to start with, let alone all the other antinomies.

The CDS enterprise is resolutely, fundamentally (in both senses of the word) modernist: its goal is to impose modern political institutions onto the environment of SL. Al Andalus is equally resolutely amodern, encompassing antimodern critics from within Islam, some occasional postmodern cynicism, and quite a lot of amodern hybrids.

The merger of the two communities proved up Latour’s statement that “the modern constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies.” Al Andalus spun off of the CDS three years ago, explicitly to undertake a hybrid project, of using SL as a meaningful laboratory for RL political change.

The merger was undertaken by people who read the mission of “political experimentation” each community claimed as common, when in fact it was contradictory: the CDS experiment being one of fundamentalist modernism, an imperialist expansion of bureaucratic state institutions into virtual space, the Al Andalus experiment one of radical hybridization of online and offline.

The merger was doomed to fail: our ontologies were so different we were literally inhabiting different worlds, with different physics. We didn’t just disagree, we didn’t even perceive the same world.

Next up: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and John Connor as amodern hero.