“The Closing of the Alt Frontier” is going to be a discussion of sex, lies, identity, social media and trust. But,the juicy bits are going to come at the end of a road, one that begins with one of the most famous speeches in the history of American History. I promise few of you will die of dysentery along the way, so, yeehaw, let’s ride!
SL, The Final Frontier
In 1893 a young scholar named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a speech that historians of America have engaged with – approvingly, critically, mockingly, tiredly, repeatedly – ever since. Turner said,
“The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people – to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each are of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life… Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area…. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.”
There’s no more quintessential expression of that American character than Second Life, from its very name. It’s been a place to reinvent oneself, to find and manifest one’s true nature free of the constraints of life back in the metropolis, to start fresh – all the things that the communities of the Western frontier provided migrants of centuries past.
In 2008, Mitch Kapor, chairman of the board of Linden Lab, owners of Second Life, declared its frontier closed. He’s someone who knows a thing or two about the concept, having founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation back when the Internet was still an open frontier space.
Just as Turner’s declaration came long before the last traces of frontier life vanished from America (with the continuing exception of the Arizona state legislature), Kapor’s came before the closing of the frontier became an inescapable social reality. That time may be at hand now.
Trust Systems: The Frontier and the Metropolis
Here’s what we all learned in class the other day, myself as much as the students – there’s nothing like a discussion with 25 bright, engaged people from diverse backgrounds for honing ideas.
Trust issues are not tremendously complicated within communities, especially frontier communities. In them, trust is largely a product of personal behavior broadly known – of reputation from direct dealings. While it can be damaged by “identity theft” and other means, it’s not terribly complicated or controversial.
Trust systems in the metropolis – the big, sophisticated world that frontier pioneers have fled – are also fairly straightforward. They’re designed to achieve the same ends as the systems of the frontier: holding people accountable for their actions, determining if someone will do what they say they can do, ensuring consistency of outcomes in dealings. But instead of being reputation-based, they’re document-based. They use third parties, not personal experience.
In short, on the frontier, I am who I say I am. If you want to know whether I will do what I say I’m going to, ask the people around who I’ve dealt with. In the metropolis, I am who my identity card says I am, whatever I may think about the matter. If you want to know whether I’m going to do what I said I’ll do, look to my degrees, my certifications, my credit report. Personal reputation still matters at the margins, but personal contact is often used to verify the authenticity of documents, not to learn about the person.
Both systems work pretty well. Problems come when you try to establish trust across communities using these different systems, or communities holding different values.
This happens in SL all the time. However, it’s often treated as a special case, drawing on the academic concept of “the magic circle,” which is actually utterly irrelevant, I think. Clashes stem from the failure of negotiation of reputation and identity across two communities, RL and SL.
Many SL “Residents” consider the valid culture for reputation and identity to be SL itself, the frontier town. In frontier values, nobody cares whether you were prince or pauper in the Old Country, only how you act and what you do on the frontier.
Many, however, don’t, and want to use metropolitan tools for measuring reputation and identity: documents, certificates, credentials, the tools of a mass, not a frontier, culture.
Much of the social history of SL from 2005 to 2008 came from that conflict of reputational tools.
Next up: “Part 2 – Passing or Clashing?” and “Part 3 – if code is law, code monkeys are rewriting our constitution!”