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10 Big Pieces: My Life as a Night Elf Priest, part 2

Sep 022010

My previous post focused on the many strengths of Bonnie Nardi’s new book, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. This one is more critical, looking primarily at her deployment of theory. In all, the book is exceptional, and an invaluable resource, but particularly if used in the classroom, should be accompanied by serious discussion of some of its problematic issues.

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.

Communities of Constraint, take 1

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Aug 222010

A few days ago I delivered a Works in Progress presentation to the people paying my way this year, the Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. It was the first time I’d done anything that comprehensive, and my first time before an audience completely unfamiliar with, and not necessarily inclined to appreciate, my subject matter and research methods (yes, you can draw inferences from the quality of the website to my general relations with the Center!).

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:

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.
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!

Calvinball, FIFA and Second Life: The Politics of Play

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Aug 072010

Last time I started addressing the question of whether an achievement system would be good for Second Life. I untangled the differences between leveling, reputation and achievements, three terms used confusingly and interchangeably in the blogosphere discussion. I said that while a reputation system could be a great idea for SL, it’d be nigh-impossible to implement, and would be useless and disingenuous as a tool for early retention, or “improving the first hour experience.”

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!

Reputation and Achievement in Second Life

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Aug 072010

What’s wrong with an achievement system for Second Life? After criticizing it strongly a few days ago, I’m going to change my mind and argue: not nearly as much as I’d first thought. However, I’m going to draw an important distinction that’s gotten lost in the discussion, one between an achievement system (good) and a reputation system (bad!).

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?

Let’s talk specifics, then. Say SL had a (developer-imposed, highly visible) achievement system. So what?

It wouldn’t solve the first hour/retention problem at all! However, it would be a useful tool for self-analysis, goal setting, and social evaluation for those of us who stay. For that, I think it’d be a very good idea, but I can’t for the life of me see how it might be implemented.

What would my “achievement page” look like for SL? I’d have a ton of points in nightclub attendance, far far too many in bureaucratic meeting participation, I’d be maxed out in shopping. I wouldn’t have any in roleplay or combat, only the first handful in building, none in scripting. The graphic result would be a good at-a-glance picture of who I am in SL.

But how could that possibly be coded in a user-created environment? How would the client software know when I attended my thousandth dance club night? My 50th Representative Assembly meeting? My 200th shoe sale? Inventory-related achievements would be easy, grid-location ones possible, but capturing either the creative skills or socializing that together are what SL is about seems unattainable. How would the “master scripter” achievement be determined by the software?

Most importantly, though, for the current debate is the unavoidable conclusion that it wouldn’t be a meaningful addition to the “first hour experience,” or aid in early retention. It would, as I argued before, be disingenuous and inherently deceptive.

My next post will explain why, via international football rules, Calvin and Hobbes, and gamer culture.

Virtual Worlds: Why and Who Cares?

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Aug 032010

My dear friend Charlanna Beresford just issued a challenge I’ve got to take up. I suspect I’m going to have to answer her questions in academic/employment contexts a lot, so it’ll be good to get a start on a potted answer. She asked:

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:”

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.
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.
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.

Mixy Things 1: The CDS as Modernist Bastion

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Jul 302010

Last week I found myself deeply immersed in a group of texts that went together all too well, and generated some insights into how and why my long-time interests and quandaries are related. Put Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, politics in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Stargate: SG-1 into a brain blender, and here’s the tasty energy drink that results: a series of posts on the politics of modernism, hybrids, fandom and cyborgs.

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.

Bye Convivencia, By Jingo!

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Jul 222010

Group Notice From: Micael Khandr

Our AA community met in two separate meetings yesterday: the majority wanted to separate the AA and CDS sims, some strongly and some with regret. A few individuals want to stay in the merger.
Therefore, ViDI as owner of the Al Andalus Estates, has notified the government of the Confederation of Democratic Sims that it is electing to separate its territories from the CDS.
Thanks to all who participated in the town halls (transcripts attached).
May both communities only grow stronger by this decision.

This notice has an attachment.

And with that announcement via the Second Life group notice system, the Al Andalus-CDS merger came to an end today.

CDS founder Gwyneth Llewellyn drove the last nails into its coffin in a forum thread a few days ago, in which she clearly showed the true colors of the CDS.

The CDS was founded some six years ago as “an experiment in online democracy.” Both the spirit of experimentalism and that of democracy are long dead, ossified into jingoism and institutional formalism devoid of any respect for democracy as the voice of the people.

Read the thread for yourselves: it’s fascinating, and it sums up the political and personal disagreements that led to the failure of the merger. Here’s the key excerpt, though:

I couldn’t care less if I’m intellectually persuaded that any other system is better or not; I might even agree it’s better; but that’s not the kind of system I’m interested in having in the CDS. I’m sorry. There is absolutely no interest for me to participate in a community that is managed and run “like any other modern community”, in SL or otherwise.

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker here in Arizona, another place where the “laboratory of democracy” has given way to blind patriotism, hatred of foreign persons and ideas, and closure of minds, borders and budgets: it said, “If You’re Not Behind Our Troops, Get In Front of Them.”

To its credit, the CDS doesn’t have armies, prisons or death squads.

It does have every element of the mindset reflected in that bumper sticker: pride in one’s home turned ugly and vicious.

The Al Andalus/CDS merger was undertaken in good faith, approved by the great portion of the CDS community which doesn’t share the nasty jingoism of the old guard. It looked towards a creative synthesis of democratic approaches, of skill sets and experiences.

The old guard has fought it, rarely fairly but always viciously. They have slandered our leaders time and again, lied over and over to create a climate of fear and mistrust (one of their favorite memes is that we would somehow steal the original CDS sims from their owner of record, the secretive eminence grise behind the curtain of legislatures and bureaucratic procedures and convert them to – authoritarianism, nonprofit status, RL-transparent management, Islam, killer robots, whatever).

They hold something they call democracy to be holy writ, but have regarded their recent loss of a legislative majority in the recent election (in which our Leader of the Representative Assembly won four times as many votes as theirs) as an anti-democratic coup, in the perversion of language common to everything they say.

Al Andalus was founded on, physically crafted as a recreation of, the principle of convivencia, of cohabitation of different cultures in a common, respectful space.

The CDS old guard holds that very notion anathema, as Gwyn’s posts show. In common with the closed-minded everywhere and rabid nationalists worldwide, she holds any truck with foreign ideas as a triumph of the forces of darkness.

A strong majority of the residents of Al Andalus have had enough. Enough of our leaders being slandered. Enough of easily-disproved lies being repeated over and over. Enough of a culture where hostility and conflict is prized and new ideas demonized. Enough of the whole process being such a miserable experience that many of us don’t even want to log into SL, because of that sinking feeling of returning to a poisoned community every time we do.

Just… enough.

So, the community of convivencia and the community of jingoism will part ways.

I’ll be staying in the CDS’s Representative Assembly to finish out my term. I’m still a citizen there: I have a nice little office in one of their regions, which qualifies me. And I took an affirmation of office:

I, Kaseido Quandry, having been elected as a Member of the Representative Assembly of the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, do solemnly affirm that I will faithfully discharge my duties as such to the best of my ability, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, and that I will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of Confederation of Democratic Simulators.

I don’t regard that oath as running to the CDS old-guard minority junta, and I consider my advocacy of fundamental reform entirely true to the constitution and founding principles of the CDS. Unlike certain state governors, I regard my election as a contract with those who voted for me, to do the job I was sent to do, and to see out my term.

But my energies, and my primary loyalty, will be to the community whose commitment to democracy isn’t built on flag-waving and blind loyalty, but on the daily hard work of meeting, of talking, of building -

-Of convivencia.

CDS: Not Democratic, Not A Government

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Jun 212010

In a previous post, I briefly summarized Robert Dahl’s excellent outline of the theory and practices of democratic nation states, On Democracy. A community I’m studying and participating in, the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, considers itself a, if not the only, democratically governed community in Second Life. Using Dahl’s framework, I’m going to show that the CDS is neither democratic nor a government. I have a hypothesis as to what it actually is, but I’ll save that for a later post.

Dahl begins with

one elementary principle: that all members are to be treated (under the constitution) as if they were equally qualified to participate in the process of making decisions about the policies the association will pursue. Whatever may be the case on other matters, then, in governing this association all members are to be considered as politically equal. (emphasis in the original, p. 37)

He acknowledges that, prima facie, all persons are not created equal, but spends several chapters making the case for why, as a matter of political policy, it is strongly desirable to treat all resident adults in a community as if they are. This is not unproblematic, as Dahl acknowledges. He also shares the universal sin of political scientists, in ignoring the right not to participate in a political association, a point which may become important later.

I think Dahl’s statement is one to which all of the CDS founders and leadership would agree, at least publicly, however much some may privately consider themselves part of a natural ruling elite.

So, holding that as the standard by which the CDS institutions should be judged, let’s go into more detail as to what Dahl says those institutions should look like.

1. Representation
Dahl is absolutely adamant that representative institutions – a legislature elected by universal adult suffrage – are essential for democracy – in a nation-state. For any community smaller than classical Athens, up to about 30,000 participants, Dahl holds that democracy is best served by direct participation in lawmaking assemblies. The equality principle holds that persons, since they are all equally capable of making political decisions, should do so, if possible. Dahl, following late 18th century and later political theory, holds that in larger communities, doing so becomes impossible, necessitating a representative system as the best means of ensuring democracy in a mass society – but that it is a compromise with fundamental principles.

The CDS created a representative legislature for a community of 40 people, six years ago. In last month’s election, after merging with another, larger, community, the merged CDS had all of 130-odd eligible voters.

Classical Greek and medieval Nordic and Italian city-states managed for centuries with assembly democracies of 10-30,000 eligible participants, as have modern towns in New England, Switzerland and elsewhere. Yet the founders of the CDS considered a few dozen people, all of whom had voluntarily chosen to live in a community with a “democratic government,” as unable to govern themselves directly.

2. Transparency and comprehensibility
Dahl holds that citizens both have to know what laws they are obliged to obey, and what actions have been taken by their elected representatives, in order to hold them accountable at elections.

In a later paragraph, I’m going to argue that what the CDS “government” does is entirely self-referential, and has quite literally nothing to do with those things which need governance in Second Life. As evidence for that point, I wanted to examine the laws passed by the Representative Assembly during the recently-concluded term, to see how many of them dealt with self-regulation of the governmental institutions, as opposed to regulation of the polity.

I couldn’t.

There is no compendium of legislation by term, though there is a compendium of dubious currency here.

Not only that, it’s nearly impossible to get a current, comprehensive copy of the constitution. At several sites in the CDS regions in SL, there are notecard givers with copies of the constitution – which are one to two years out of date. A candidate for Chancellor recently assembled a comprehensive copy, by digging through transcripts of legislative sessions searching for approved amendments. As for routine legislation, there is no source by term, so no ready means of holding a legislature accountable for its actions.

3. What Needs Governing in SL?

I would think that any design of a government would start with the question, what needs governing? Not only did the CDS founders apparently not ask that question, they seem to still regard it as incoherent/illegitimate/irrelevant.

A territorial community (as opposed to a community of interest) in Second Life is essentially an assemblage of sublessors of virtual real estate. Linden Lab, SL’s corporate owner, rents land, typically in virtual 64,000 square meter parcels, to individuals or nonprofit corporations (Estate Owners), who then may sublet it for residential or commercial use. There is no mechanism for a collective of any sort (other than a nonprofit corporation) to serve as Estate Owner.

The sublease fee (“tier”) charged may include a premium over pass-through charges to LL. This premium can be used in three ways: to fund community events, to finance expansion through acquiring new regions, or to pay out profits or salaries.

The primary instrument of governance in SL is the real estate covenant, a document much like the CC&R’s (covenants, conditions and restrictions) of a HOA (homeowner’s association) in American real estate usage. The analogy is a very strong and direct one: the SL covenant may set forth setbacks and easements, limits on architectural style, property usage, on signage, on access and restrictions to access, on prohibited nuisances. The covenant is thus the written locus of governance of much, if not all, potentially divisive actions and objects within the community.

Add on some community standards which might not be (but often are) covered in the covenant, typically on expression (is adult content prohibited/regulated/encouraged? is hate speech prohibited/regulated/tolerated? Nudity?) and you’ve got about all the issues which might generate conflict or require a community consensus.

Most all SL communities are governed by unilateral actions of the Estate Owner who writes the covenant as a “take it or leave it” contract which must be click-through agreed to in order to sublet land. As the market is highly liquid and competitive, over six years covenants have converged on a general standard, subject to variations for particular communities, such as roleplay environments or regions with a strong architectural theme, or unusual behavioral norms. But any survey of a couple dozen covenants (I did this a few years ago) would show a very great similarity of terms, which have evolved to reflect those rules to which people generally prefer to subject themselves.

Let me reiterate that: market pressures in a highly liquid market for SL real estate have generated a standard reflecting what most all people want, with some specialty variations.

Working from first principles, democratic governance in SL would require financial transparency and accountability of the Estate Owner, approval over the amount of tier fees and their discretionary expenditure, and collective approval of the terms of the real estate covenant and any subsequent changes to it.

4. Does the CDS govern?

a. Estate Owner/Treasury

The CDS constitution defines no role for the Estate Owner, and makes no reference to a treasurer, or to financial transparency. Currently the Estate Owner of the original CDS regions (exclusive of Al Andalus) is also the treasurer. Until last week there was no financial oversight body, and it remains to be seen if the treasurer will permit an independent examination of financial data (let alone an external audit). There is no way for any citizen to ascertain whether there actually is any money in the treasury, let alone to provide meaningful oversight.

b. Covenants
The original CDS regions have differing covenants, and do not reflect the market-democratic consensus developed across the SL economy. The CDS is historically autarkic, and profoundly uninterested in the products of governance outside its small borders (to reiterate, there are some million and a half regular monthly users of SL, and about 130 in the CDS).

I’m sure there is some mechanism for altering covenants, but I’ve yet to figure out what it is. To the best of my knowledge, they have not been modified since the regions were established. There is clearly no evident mechanism for democratic modification to the covenants, and even simple coordination among regions has eluded the CDS.

c. Taxing and Spending
Again, the tier rate is not subject to transparent democratic decisionmaking. I’ve heard rumors of properties being marked down by CDS officials to sell to friends. Currently parcels are sitting vacant, priced at 10 to 100 times market rates. No member of the government has surveyed the SL market to determine what standard prices are.

Spending is within the province of the Representative Assembly, whose members were elected for the first time in a democratic election (although pursuant to a system called “Single Transferable Voting,” which Dahl described as “a method of counting votes too complicated to describe” in a book of reasonable length from the Yale University Press) – as opposed to a previous system where people voted for parties, not named individuals. However, the constitution requires reserves of three months tier for all regions, a number defying all financial sense.

There are secondary failures: toxic norms of political discourse, and willingness to engage with and incorporate the best practices of other communities, in particular.

In short, the CDS fails on accountability and transparency of finance, fails on democratic engagement with the covenants, fails on transparency and comprehensibility of its rules, and passes on oversight of discretionary spending.

Let me be even clearer: on the major areas of governance in SL, the “government” of the CDS has no active means of addressing the issues, democratic or otherwise.

What they do have is a vast edifice of self-referential institutions and debates, most of which have only the most tangential relationship to SL. The “government” does not govern the regions in SL owned by the CDS estate owner; in practice nobody does. What it does do is argue, legislate, and tinker with its own institutions.

If Second Life shut down tomorrow, there are many “active” members of the CDS government who might not notice for months. The “government” could easily decide that the end of SL would have a negligible impact on its activities, many of which take place outside of SL even now.

The CDS is not democratic, as it unnecessarily restricts citizen participation through an excessively complex institutional system. It is not a government, as it does not govern the issues in Second Life which require the informed consent of participants.

What is it, then?

In a later post, I’m going to argue that it’s a failed roleplay environment, having destroyed itself over conceptual and practical mismanagement of the in character/out of character interface. Stay tuned.

Ten Big Pieces: On Democracy

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Jun 212010

I’ve been having a very rich debate with Gwyneth Llewellyn, of the conservative faction in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators, on democratic theory and its application to Second Life. She’s inspired me to dig deeper into some of the more traditional expressions of democratic theory, which led me to a nice little book, Robert A. Dahl’s On Democracy.

Dahl, Sterling Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Yale, writing in 1999, is a passionate booster of representative democracy for nation-states, and I think serves as a good proxy for the views of the CDS conservatives. Dahl’s book is divided into four parts: The Beginning, Ideal Democracy, Actual Democracy, and Conditions Favorable and Unfavorable.

He begins with an interesting observation, that democracy is the natural condition of hunter-gatherer bands, and only began to be supplanted by hierarchical systems when people settled down for “agriculture and trade,” thus negating the conditions he sets out as favorable for primitive democracy – group identity, little outside interference, and an assumption of equality. That bears further thought in the context of the governance structures built and chosen by members of contemporary nation-states, a topic for another time.

Beginning with the principle of treating all members of the community as politically equal, he deduces five standards for a democratic process: effective participation, voting equality, enlightened understanding, control of the agenda and inclusion of all adults, calling each necessary for meeting the requirement of political equality, while acknowledging conflicts among those principles.

He then identifies 10 desirable consequences of a democratic state (all his work is subject to the caveat that it applies only at the nation-state level, and not to much larger or smaller communities, a point I’ll return to at length). One of them is “a maximum opportunity for persons to exercise the freedom of self-determination – that is, to live under laws of their own choosing.” Dahl notes a paradox here, one very applicable to my work with online communities, particularly in the Gorean and BDSM contexts: “How can you both be free to choose the laws that are to be enforced by the state and yet, having chosen them, not be free to disobey them?” Another question to explore in full in a later post!

Dahl argues that

All other regimes reduce, often drastically, the scope within which adults can act to protect their own interests, consider the interests of others, take responsibility for important decisions, and engage freely with others in a search for the best decision. A democratic government is not enough to ensure that people develop these qualities, but it is essential. (p. 57)

In his section on “Actual Democracy,” Dahl clarifies his early observation that his work only applies at the nation-state level. He notes that until the 18th century, representation was considered not an attribute of democracy, but of its antithesis: representative systems had been created by kings in order to legitimate and enable levies of money, goods and people. However, it had been recognized since antiquity that democratic systems were really only suited to smaller communities.

So, at what size should direct, participatory democracy give way to a representational system? Dahl, ignoring communication and transportation technologies almost entirely (they get a paragraph), looking at the experience of classical and medieval city-states, finds a tipping point somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000. Below that, he says, the ends of democracy are better served by participatory systems, and above that, communications and transportation problems (again, assuming a technological constant from 2500 BC to 1999 AD) favor representation.

Why then did representation come to be merged with democracy? Dahl, again ignoring technological factors, handwaves and says that the nation state came to be the optimal size for a political entity, and thus for democracy to apply, some other tool – representation – was necessary. He acknowledges that city states fell militarily to nations, acknowledging that military technology and logistics played a role in establishing a larger optimal state size, but doesn’t pursue the point.

Dahl does acknowledge an interesting flaw in “assembly democracy:” he notes that the maximum number of particpants who are able (I’d add, “or willing,” an important oversight I’ll return to) to express themselves in any meeting is limited, and so they become proxies for the silent, without any means of assuring that they do in fact represent the views of the silent – who might thus prefer some mechanism of choosing representatives to speak for them.

He summarizes,

The smaller a democratic unit, the greater its potential for citizen participation and the less the need for citizens to delegate government decisions to representatives. The Larger the unity, the greater its capacity for dealing with problems important to its citizens and the greater the need for citizens to delegate decisions to representatives. (p.110)

Dahl identifies three essential conditions for democracy: control of military and police by elected officials, democratic beliefs and political culture, and no strong foreign control hostile to democracy. Two other conditions he considers favorable but not essential: a modern market economy and society, and weak subultural pluralism. Interestingly, in a wide-ranging discussion of subcultures creating tensions for a unitary democratic state, from the Walloons in Belgium to small linguistic communities in India, he never mentions Islam – a clear sign that the book was written in the 20th century, but still a fairly astonishing oversight.

Overall, Dahl’s book is a clear, jargon-free, logically organized primer on democracy in theory and practice at the nation-state level. He has a few blind spots: the interplay between technological and governance institutions, the rise of Islam as an intellectual and practical challenge to the representative-democratic nation state, and, crucially, non-state institutions of equivalent size to the state, particularly multinational corporations. In his blind spots as much as in his advocacy, Dahl is a creature of the heyday of the sovereign bureaucratic state. Nonetheless, On Democracy is an excellent read for anyone interested in modern political theory.

Next up, I’ll apply Dahl’s analyses to the political systems of the CDS, which claims to be a, if not the sole Second Life example of a, democratic government. I’ll argue that it’s neither democratic nor a government in any meaningful or recognizable way.

10 Big Pieces: Gang Leader for a Day

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Jun 152010

At GLS 6.0 last week, in presenting “Legal Anthropologist of Gor! a methodological conundrum,” I argued that online researchers have largely been ducking a serious issue of ethics and methodology. It was definitely an “out on a limb” move for a noob – I was betting that (a) I hadn’t missed something everybody else knew about and (b) I wasn’t going to get crushed like a bug for my temerity.

Immediately after the panel, Constance Steinkuehler, who I fangirl like whoa, came over and very intensely talked with me for a good while, a pep talk that’s the highlight of my academic apprenticeship. Among other things, she recommended Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader For A Day, as an example of someone working in the territory in RL that I want to explore online.

I ordered it while I sat there I regularly read a lot of great stuff, but this one’s the highlight of my year. Even if I weren’t doing participant-observer fieldwork myself, Venkatesh’s story of his graduate work with a Chicago street gang is more gripping than any movie. It’s a great read, and it gave me one huge insight, along with a lot of smaller ones.

Fourteen years ago I came across a question that I took on as my own, and in fits and starts came to recognize as what I want to devote my life’s work to. Science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Mars trilogy, and later in Antarctica, asked, what kind of a society do bright, capable people create when you take them out of the establishment world of nation states and finance capitalism? He argues that what you get looks like the academy writ large: apprenticeships, a gift economy, management and administration as a burden rather than a (healthy) goal, meritocracy.

I was drawn to similar people, similar environments: my mentors at NASA founded a polar research station to ask very similar questions, and I got my start kibitzing on their work. I started writing about the political economy and cultural dynamics of the space community, speculating on what might evolve on space stations or planetary research outposts. I argued that Robinson’s socialist-utopian answer wouldn’t always be true, that other concurrent forces would shape different ends. But that was the idiom I kept writing in during my space phase, from 1996 to 2004.

In 2007, I ventured into Second Life, after hearing of how my old NASA colleagues had thrown a Yuri’s Night party there. I saw right away that the forces and people I was interested in were right there, doing every day the work I speculated about for some future Mars mission or distant polar station. But, I never clicked with the environment, largely for a bunch of personal reasons, but in part, I think now, because what was actually happening there didn’t mesh with my theories and expectations at all.

Not only were people not building Polanyi’s Republic of Science, they were providing a texbook-perfect proof of the failure of anarcho-capitalism (an ideology I’d strongly adhered to until then), as the Linden-owned mainland quickly turned into a pit of griefing, bad architecture and incessant petty annoyances. But they were building and doing amazing things, in unexpected directions.

What surprised me about Venkatesh’s book was how similar the society of Chicago’s housing projects was. I’d been asking, “what do smart, privileged people build in highly technological spaces away from (some of) the constraints of the status quo?” Venkatesh came to ask, “what do people who have next to nothing, who’ve gotten the short end for generations, build where the status quo has largely abandoned them?”

Turns out, there are an awful lot of similarities. The institutions arising from the projects – gangs-as-police, gangs-as-corporations, fixers, grifters, hustlers, communities of support and cooperation – none of these things are alien to the social history of Second Life, or of World of Warcraft, or of any significantly large and complex grouping of people who, out of freedom or necessity, improvise their own institutions.

The structures of power in the projects look very much like those of the “adhocracies” or “dictatorships” of SL communities, gaming guilds, LiveJournal roleplay communities – and nothing like those of the bureaucratic modern nation-state.

I’m going to be building an argument that that’s no coincidence, that what we learn in “bowling with others,” so to speak, is that the social dynamics of human groups is really fairly constant, and that it will adapt itself around, route itself around, institutions that seek to make us other than what we are. The attempts to create the Christian city on the hill, the New Soviet Man, all the projects of the right, left and otherwise that sought to remake us, simply fail.

Only by understanding who we are – and recognizing that while advanced technology or malign neglect may create freer spaces for expressing our nature, it is always there, constant, and at work – can we build tools for solving social problems that have some hope of actually working.

My class of law and graduate students struggled in frustration with the free rider problem, coming to recognize it as a variant of low voter turnout, economic incentives to pollute, and a host of other issues. Advocates of the state order in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators cannot account for the immense unpopularity of their model, and turn to vicious personal attacks to cover their political failures. The Goreans argue that both submission and mastery are deeply ingrained, each joyous in their way, and roleplay accordingly.

These responses may be frustrating, ugly, horrifying – but they are real. Venkatesh struggled with the chasm between his faith in the status quo and his admiration for people working to fill in where it had failed.

I think there may be two sets of responses to a failure of modernity, a failure of the institutions we forced ourselves into in the 18th through 20th centuries. One looks backward from the chaos, and seeks to impose clarity and order. These are the fundamentalisms of the book, be that book scripture or roleplay canon. These argue that order must be imposed, boundaries policed, categories reified, a place for every one and every one in their place.

The other, one I openly advocate, not despite but because of my presence as a researcher in fundamentalist communities – looks forward from the chaos into a new synthesis, a perpetually dynamic equilibrium, and celebrates the blurring of types, the intermixing, intermingling, the miscegenation of peoples, genders, politics and forms. It looks to the cyborg, but to the Dionysian, the embodied, the radical politics of the intermingled mind and flesh, rejecting the sanitized and compartmentalized world of the fundamentalism.

Technosage said the other day that embodied politics is vigilante politics – and I’d add Venkatesh’s “guerrilla sociology” as well: it holds that passing off responsibility to institutions, from persons to mechanisms, is simply wrong. We need tools to use to solve our problems – but we must not let the tools use us. In the world of modernity, we have. Systems – of politics, of finance, of sexuality – have run and shaped us, rather than us using those tools to shape our world towards useful and agreed ends.

In this, I agree with technoskeptics like Langdon Winner, but I find these people look backward in an unconstructive way. I think the solution is to do as the people in the Robert Taylor Projects did, as people in Al Andalus in SL have done, as radicals in education are doing, and act as if the system doesn’t matter.

The solution is to be ourselves, know ourselves, and build what works for us. Some of us will get crushed: Al Andalus may not survive the months-long assault of conservatives, vicious old men and hand-wringing incompetents. Promising educational projects may not survive the pressure of fixed curricula and standardized testing.

But some of us will thrive, and succeed by simply out-competing the tottering old institutions. There’s no guarantee at all that what survives will be the most progressive, rather than the most ruthless. Forced simplicity may beat out embraced complexity. That’s the struggle for our time, though.

Older Entries

10 Big Pieces: My Life as a Night Elf Priest, part 2

Communities of Constraint, take 1

Calvinball, FIFA and Second Life: The Politics of Play

Reputation and Achievement in Second Life

Virtual Worlds: Why and Who Cares?

Mixy Things 1: The CDS as Modernist Bastion

Bye Convivencia, By Jingo!

CDS: Not Democratic, Not A Government

Ten Big Pieces: On Democracy

10 Big Pieces: Gang Leader for a Day

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