I chose the Confederation of Democratic Simulators as a research site, as a community to live and work in, and to be a legislator in, because I don’t understand it.

The government of the CDS isn’t exactly a community management organization, and it isn’t exactly a roleplay site – though to me it’s historically been much more of the latter than the former. It’s a utopian experiment without the experimental spirit, or much of the utopian impulse. It’s been a closed, isolated, stagnant community – yet it voted to merge with one of Second Life’s most dynamic, experimental, utopian regions. It’s home to some of the nicest people I’ve met, and to some truly epic douchebags.

It’s a study in contradictions.

It’s not the only one. You can’t examine politics, culture and law online without becoming enmeshed in baffling antinomies which are both mirror and bellwether for the wider world.

Part One: Observer

One question in particular has risen to the top for me, not only, or even primarily, in studying the CDS, but in online political behavior more broadly: why are people who are clearly terrified of change here? I don’t understand wanting to turn back the historical clock, but I especially don’t understand using the most advanced technology to try to do so.

I don’t understand a group of people who defined themselves as engaged in “an experiment in democratic governance online,” and recreated some of the most undemocratic institutions of a bureaucratic nation-state, and slapped them onto the structures of a particular virtual world, with particular needs and affordances, without seriously engaging with the fit between goals and tools.

I don’t understand the naked viciousness when faced by the prospect of actually doing something beyond playing at factional politics in a church-like meeting room, the existential horror in the face of an agenda of concrete actions proposed by a strong professional woman  – and I believe both those factors, actual work and a strong woman, to have provoked yesterday’s vileness in equal measure.

I’m studying Gorean communities for a similar set of reasons, and the behavior I saw yesterday from the minority faction in the new Representative Assembly is what I would have expected and understood more in a Gorean meeting hall. Though, Gorean roleplayers seem to be a practical bunch, with a firm eye on where roleplay ends and management begins, a notion lost to more than a few in the CDS.

What unites these genuinely disparate cases, I believe, is a rejection of one fundamental notion: we can do better. The Gorean would say, human nature is what it is, slavery is an essential part of the human condition, as is the inferiority and subjugation of women. The Enlightenment and modernity was largely a mistake, unnatural and irrelevant. Some in the CDS old guard would recoil in horror, standing fast by the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is incorporated into the CDS constitution – and then in the next breath say that the structures of the 18^th or 19^th century European nation-state are the last word in management and governance, and apply everywhere without adaptation or exception, just as the Goreans do about their canon of novels.

There are a number of other issues to be explored here. A big one is my hypothesis that essentially no one is interested in democracy, if taken to mean active participation in community management by essentially all members of the community. The CDS bills itself as “SL’s only democratic self governing community” – while inaccurate in a number of ways, the statement is largely true. Why, in a space of millions of people over half a dozen years, who have created everything the mind can conceive? Why only one community?

“Democracy” and “Government” are not fun games. Virtually no one chooses to play them. A tiny handful do – a very tiny handful. Most people in most circumstances will, and do, gladly pay to not play that game, and hire other people – corporate managers, elected officials, community liaisons – to play it for them.

What people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun. This is not so different in the external world, at least in America.

Another issue is the powerful, visceral appeal of reaction, of rejection of modernity, equality. For more than a generation, commenters have looked worriedly at the popularity first of Tolkieneque fantasy, then of games based on Tolkien’s medieval tropes. We spend our entertainment dollars on and in worlds of masters and servants, castes and kings, the building and destruction of empires – and not on games of “Democracy,” “Government,” “Human Rights.” Some of the most popular products in Second Life enable restraint, subjugation, submission. We seem to want simple worlds where our place is clear, with simple lines of strong authority over us. The Goreans are right in saying that the urge to bend the knee is wide, and deep. It’s an unknown, illicit craving deep inside many, that finds expression in the worlds of our imagination. That’s a territory I want to map, where the deepest parts of our psyche become utterly politicized.

Taken together, if what we build in the spaces where we are most free is prisons of the past, chains of our deepest urges, then perhaps the Enlightenment experiment is a niche product, destined to gather dust on the gaming shelves. I don’t like this answer. I firmly believe, We can do better. But we cannot if we delude ourselves into thinking our games are more popular than they are. We have to examine, define and acknowledge our natures, then make those games of freedom that appeal. That’s the challenge of the progressive activist in the current age.

My grim hypotheses may or may not be supported by further evidence and study. But it’s a damn important question to be asking.

Part Two: Participant

I said above that what people seem to want online is to be left the hell alone to play the game they want to play, while knowing that there are fair rules in place to deal with problems and conflicts, and while happily paying a team of people to provide, or enhance, their fun.

Whether that’s understood or accepted is one of the fracture lines between the two voting blocs in the new Representative Assembly. One faction doesn’t really care how many people play “Politics,” but charges a subscription fee to non-players to subsidize their play. The other doesn’t really care to play “Politics,” but wants to use those subscription fees to provide a really first-rate space for the fun of the people paying.

And by “fun,” I don’t mean just the social mixers and dance parties that drive the old guard into apoplectic fits. Fun in Al Andalus, and for some in the CDS, is putting on an academic conference. Or hosting a book club, or contests for writers. Or experimenting with consensus decisionmaking. Or participating in a discussion series on religion and philosophy. Or designing and building new towns. Fun takes a lot of forms – but that “Politics” game isn’t one of them for most people.

We differ in opinions, values and goals. The group wanting to enable fun has a one-vote majority in the RA. “Experiments in democratic self governance” include losing elections, right? Then why the rabid, vicious assault by reactionary forces?

Why?

We can do better is more powerful a force than any explosive. It shames the contented, horrifies the backward-looking, terrifies the lazy. We can do better invalidates the very existence of the mediocre, the incompetent, the reactionary. It goes beyond the give and take of votes and elections, the disagreements of the politically active. It is a slap to the face, and it is being taken as such.

Unfortunately, We can do better implies a question at least as uncomfortable for the progressives as the reactionaries. As the old joke had it, “Whaddaya mean ‘we,’ white boy?” The naysayers have acted as if there is no “we,” while talking from both sides of their mouths on the matter. They have opposed the merger with the progressive elements of Al Andalus, they have viciously attacked our leaders, pointedly failed to publicize or support our events. They act as if there is no “we.” We have claimed there is a “we,” that the CDS and Al Andalus can be one progressive community.

Yet as we announce, We can do better, we look around, and have to ask ourselves, “with these clowns tied around our necks?” The six reactionary votes in the current RA are not the CDS. The handful of nasty old men, on and off the RA, are not the community. And yet, what if we took a good sharp knife to the rope tying the liars, fools and nutcases to our necks?

We’re spending hours every week, every day, countering Big Lie allegations, pushing back against stall tactics, losing energy, momentum and faith to the sharp-toothed ankle-biters.

We can do better, indeed….