Does SL Have an Intelligentsia?

[archangel969]

Oh how nice, another absinthe lover! In the years I preferred absinthe from Combier & Jade, Pernod, or Xenta (in RL). The method used by Depp in From hell, is more spectecular because he lights the alcohol with a match (funny enough in The Netherlands where I come from we call matches 'lucifers,' that suits the title from hell even better ;-). But anyway, the best method is to slowly resolve the sugar by mixing it with ice water (which you can use an absinthe fountains for.).

I used to cook whole meals with absinthe in them. I still make absinthe parfait sometimes.

Edited August 20, 2022 by archangel969

[Prokofy Neva]

54 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

The Wicked Witch did it better.

 

Good Lord, they really went off the rails with this re-make of the Wizard of Oz, making the Wicked Witch seems like a daring feminist defying convention. Sheesh. In fact, she's the oldest story of evil and grasping for personal gain and power.

[Prokofy Neva]

21 hours ago, Han Held said:

Lastly; whatever happened to the Thinker's group from a decade or two ago?

It still exists in the form of some kind of podcast or something plus meetings featuring only one person with her exoteric concepts, it used to be much more diverse and interesting back when Gwen Llewelyn and Elois Pasteur and others ran it. Nothing to say you couldn't start something like it again.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/19/2022 at 1:08 AM, Randall Ahren said:

Technically, dig potatoes. Potatoes are at the root of the plant and grow underground, so you cannot pick potatoes. You have to dig the potatoes up.

I think the key to being a coffee house intellectual, is to have strong opinions about economics, foreign relations, politics, science policy, philosophy and other subjects and be willing to argue those positions exhaustively.

Well, that *is* the point. The intelligentsia aren't workers so they have soft hands and can't be expected to *dig*; they are picking up the gleanings when they are sent на картошкy. That is, no doubt some Komsomol types are doing the digging, but from what I gather from my Soviet-era friends, на картошкy mainly was the cause of a lot of early pregnancies and early marriages. 

Edited August 20, 2022 by Prokofy Neva

[Prokofy Neva]

19 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

As interesting as this thread is, it leaves me feeling unsatisfied.  My mind turns to C.P. Snow's old lecture on The Two Cultures, in which he comments on the growing gap between the culture of the humanities and the culture of the sciences. From a distance of three quarters of a century, some of his commentary now seems quaint but the basic message is intact. Public discussions among the "intelligensia" or of societal issues in general tend to get hijacked by humanists, who tend to forget that there have always been just as vigorous discussions on the scientific side of the house. 

My complaint to my scientific/technical colleagues is that we characteristically fail to use accessible language, so it's no wonder that humanists tune us out. I am just as annoyed at humanists, though, who all too often fail to recognize that scientists have a role in public discourse too.  I once spent a week at an NEH-sponsored symposium on race and ethnicity, struggling through a morass of code words and obscure allusions, and frustrated by the absence of conversation about the ways that science can affect (and has affected) public attitudes and understanding (for good or evil). I have also sat through many frustrating scientific meetings in which participants whine dismissively about the way that people in the arts and the "soft sciences" waste time on "head in the clouds" discussions.  

This is starting to sound like a rant, which is not what I intended. There are good people across all parts of the science - humanities spectrum, and it is by no means as sharply divided into camps as C.P. Snow painted it 75 years ago. Still, the fact that we still have to stand up every once in a while and wave, "Hey! Remember us over here?" tells me that the gap persists. We have two intelligentsias, and they aren't always on the same page.

To be sure that this post still has a SL context ..... the scientific intelligentsia in SL, if it exists at all, has been very quiet for as long as I have been here.  This thread illustrates -- to me at least -- that members of the "intelligentsia" in SL (to the extent that it also exists) represent the humanities.

Well, I have you covered, having thought about the same essay and blogged about it.

C.P. Snow, a novelist AND a physical chemist, wrote from a sense of discontent in his era in the 1940s-1950s that science was not appreciated enough, and government and the East Coast establishment were in the humanities or at least the soft sciences like sociology, not the hard sciences. And now it's all the reverse with computer science having eaten everything.

I understand what you are saying about the different languages in which the "two sciences" speak, but you have only to look at what is coming out of the AMA or places like my local Bellevue hospital and many such public hospitals in the US to see the tide of wokeness that has overcome actual science. 

The problem in SL is the same, in that code triumphs over everything -- woke or not, and not always with rationality, but just nerd culture. There is always a script that overcomes whatever organic law you want to make -- seemingly. 

The scientific intelligentsia in SL -- scripters, coders, hackers -- don't need to speak on the forums -- they go to the right office hours or even just IM their Linden friends and have their influence that way.

That's why, again, I think the first task of the intelligentsia is to go to these meetings and chime in, overcoming the inevitable heckling and harassment that accompanies any non-computer specialist's demands for reason.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/19/2022 at 3:11 AM, Love Zhaoying said:

Heaven forbid, that people should actually say what they mean. Literalism is underrated.

Not search-string literalism and Fisking of sentences just to be obnoxious. Saying what you mean isn't literalism; picking on someone's sentence to combat its actual meaning through distraction is. 

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The scientific intelligentsia in SL -- scripters, coders, hackers -- don't need to speak on the forums -- they go to the right office hours or even just IM their Linden friends and have their influence that way.

Hmm. When I post about scripting and a few Lindens reply in my thread, it feels like I made a difference. 

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/19/2022 at 6:38 AM, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

If intelligentsia means what I think it means then aren't the American founding fathers and their associates intelligentsia? And the founders and developers of Linden Lab/Second Life and whomever they were inspired/advised by?

And am I correct in understanding that you're asking if SL needs an intelligentsia in-world? Would that require the need or demand for some sort of organized, structured societal entity within SL? Like a roleplay community?

I imagine the usefulness of an intelligentsia to be to design such community in a sustainable way, guaranteeing survival and a basic quality of life for all within that society.

I also imagine survival of a community in SL to rely on the minimization of drama.

So, if SL ever would need an intelligentsia, it would have to be one that specializes in drama reduction. An intelligentsia of psychologists and sociologists would be most useful, in that case.

I think most of the founding fathers were considered intellectuals, which isn't always the same as intelligentsia, and there were founding mothers as well of course, without as much fame.

Yes, inworld, but also outworld, crossing into RL. Lindens are in the intelligentsia; Lindens like Grumpity go on panels with other game execs who do thinky panels on the Metaverse. But it's not residents of the world, not even the top scripter, who are at these panels as they were in the past. They've been lost.

I don't know how organized and structured it has to be; it just has to get started and "talk among yourselves" and be more vocal about issues after thrashing them so that the Lindens, and whatever select group of RP "community managers" they select for whatever expedient reasons, aren't all that exists as the voice of the people.

A certain very prominent creator recently claimed "the people have spoken" because a few dozens of his pals in his posse "yessed" him and tried to bully and silence a critic. That's not the community; it's just one of the mobs.

I don't think "drama reduction" is possible when there is no free press and no independent judiciary. There is drama because the other side cannot be told. There is drama because no one can adjudicate disputes in some meaningful way. So whoever has the ear of the Lindens reinforces the strange notice that giant glowing obelisks (to take an example from another thread) are "ok" because they need to have their own grid-wide vanity projects endorsed, and the actual majority of people who don't like them and feel they devalue land near them just don't count. Worse, it's called "drama" to speak up and object and express what is actually a prevalent opinion. 

I don't think psychologists and sociologists, whatever their benefit, can reduce drama. I think only a free media and independent judiciary can do this. They can function outside of SL and need to do so far more vigorously. Here sociologists could play a role by doing actual quantitative studies (polls) instead of just the qualitative studies that too many of them do in SL. Whenever I do a poll on, say, pods, 1/3 of the people say they don't want them or want them demand only; another 1/3 says they never heard of them. It's only the 1/3 who endorses them without even using them much who prevail.

So isn't that politics and not intellectual life? Well, politics should have an intellectual base of actual study, finding of the facts, getting to the bottom of narratives, etc. And that's what a free press does. What we have instead are giant shopping blogs with millions of viewers, who demonstratively bar from their essential advertising blogs categories of merchants they don't like or that the top designers want to keep out of the space; we have numerous shoppers and parish bulletins. 

[Prokofy Neva]

12 hours ago, Randall Ahren said:

People educated in the hard sciences are included in intelligentsia, such as physicist Andre Sakharov of the former Soviet Union.

Sakharov is my ideal leader of the intelligentisa. I was fortunate to meet him a number of times in RL as a Russian translator and visited him and his wife in their home, and helped them with the list of political prisoners and such. My greatest memory of him is that despite being famous and a Nobel Peace Prize winner and all, he was very humble and was still willing to make you lunch and would adapt his own Russian in speaking to a foreigner to help you understand his thoughts. He acutely experienced the pain of other people but wasn't overwhelmed by it and took every action possible. 

I had started an installation in SL on his life to be made up of like 9 or 12 episodes illustrating his biography, and had a lot of the props (you can even find an atomic bomb on the MP -- someone, somewhere, has made something you need for a project like this although you also need to make your own things). For example, I took one of those chateau homes in Bellisseria, that look like the Russian dachas of the elite scientists in Arzamas-16, and I made Sakharov's home there with his chess games, Russian knick-knacks on those giant shelves they all have, Soviet couches, etc. and then outside, if you clicked on the curtains, suddenly a chain-gang of prisoners appeared walking behind a barbed wire fence, which is one of the sights that disturbed him. Then they disappeared, on temp-rez. l had this for a year with no one complaining, across from a bear statue, but then I dumped it after I saw what happened to the bowling alley (although it's ok to turn your home into a subway station evidently). I may put it back eventually.

Unfortunately, I had to give this project up first due to illness and then because of the war in Ukraine, I'm not sure it's the time to focus on Russia although of course the need for positive Russian figures who resisted war is acute. Sakharov spent 7 years in exile for opposing the war in Afghanistan. You can read about his life at sakharov.space which I translated into English during his centennial year last year.

The key elements of his life which I think apply to SL:

o willingness to give up privileges -- being "in" with the Lindens, having high traffic, being the top "whatever," not being banned from forums or land in order to speak the truth and defend what is right

o willingness to focus on individual cases and really concrete issues, not just generalities or ideals;

o willingness to appeal to the authorities and be in a dialogue with them without losing a sense of principle; and knowing when to end it;

o willingness to re-examine everything about your "best work" (in his case, the hydrogen bomb) and mitigate it; to re-examine ideals (his adherence to socialism and belief that the problem of the Soviet Union was merely bureaucracy underwent great changes over the years although he died still thinking that a merge between socialism and capitalism was possible and indeed urgent;

Actually, there are scientists of conscience here on the forums like Rolig Loon and a few others with social concerns, like Coffee Pancake, so it isn't so entirely bleak but I think it's safe to say that most scripters won't bother with the forums or really any blogs or anything. They avoid "controversy" or "drama" in the belief that this isn't scientific. In fact, it's the absence of proper science as I said above.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/19/2022 at 3:18 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

 

Yes, all of that, and more.

[Prokofy Neva]

11 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

SL is the embodiment of a science- and math-enabled platform that offer endless opportunities for the humanist. If ever there was a platform that brought the arts, philosophy, and music together with applied science, this is it.

I teach literature. I have far more engagement with those working in the.sciences here than I do at my own university. 

That could be said of the whole Internet, but boy, it's just not true, and everything thing that the founders Timothy Berners-Lee welded into the early Internet, like "sharing knowledge" and "make everything free and open" in fact turned out to be its chief weakness and the bane of humanity. There was never a frank acknowledgement that private property protects not just value and society in general but the much vaunted privacy that all kinds of crypto extremists push for now. But now, like the former Linden at Tor, they think "mathematics makes the state obsolete." Baloney. 

That is, it's not true that science produce a wonder of the humanities, the Internet.

The humanities succeeded in spite of the weaknesses welded into the system. SL succeeds in spite of its obstacles. "A successful failure."

Technically, it's true that in SL you can go learn about the James Webb telescope in better ways than you can on Twitter looking at colorized photos, and learn about like droplets of water and ponds and such but it's actually the humanities that suffer anyway. There is one major book club featuring hard left didacticism sprinkled with some groovy sci-fi, by its own admission. Other book clubs get overshadowed. Where is the book club discussing Matthew Ball's "Metaverse"? I'll have to start one,

Again, it's in the arts that SL really sings. I so mourn the death of Ktahdn Vesuvino, the choreographer and DJ who did amazing events in SL. There are all these amazing performing groups that get little attention. There are vlogs with traffic of 4 that should have 4000 at least. Etc.

[Prokofy Neva]

10 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

The topic and question asked was:

If SL doesn't have an intelligentsia, does it need one?

So I'd say it is a given from what you have pointed out that S/L has one, so point one answered. Second point, does S/L need one? Is there a benefit to S/L itself especially considering LL as a company really doesn't listen to anything the residents have to say nor take or act on their suggestions unless there is some legality involved. Is there any benefit then to S/L from this mass of intellectuals we have in S/L?

It sorely needs one, but those few who understand or care are content to laud the state-sponsored artists from IBM and ignore the indigenous ones. Again, it's about the lack of a free press and a viable blogosphere outside of SL.

I disagree that the Lab doesn't listen to the residents. Bellisseria exists because in fact Lindens shut their ears to the intellectuals in the sordid cafes smoking cheap cigarettes (to invoke Coffee's image and the Beat parody video) crying that SL was become to bourgeois and American suburbia and little picket fences and Stepford Wives -- and they built exactly that (well, more like Trumansville than Stepford Wives as I've explained). 

And over the years, they have responded to uprisings, whether the sacrosanct "Prim Tax Revolt" which Hamlet endlessly invokes as somehow 'dissent" (it's not, when Linden alts lead it and it was an obvious developmental stage) to demonstrations against the VAT Tax, the telehubs, objections to only "solutions providers" getting the grandfathered islands and much more.

But note I don't have very RECENT examples because civil society has suffered a number of big blows, such as the gatcha removal or the removal of comments on the MP by non-customers.

Objectively speaking, the investors of SL today, even if friends with Philip, who is a great thinker and doer, are more about car parts and snacks and the nuts and bolts of just selling product after product in iterations making the previous ones obsolete, don't need an intelligentsia, although I'm certain they think they are part of the American intelligentsia and even its creme de la creme in Washington liberal circles.

But we have a historical burden here to make the Metaverse better as we know it can be better before it is obliterated by the big companies. The danger isn't that Meta or Microsoft or Google will buy out Linden Lab; the danger is that they will ignore it.

I should note the importance of the state-sponsored and state-loyal talk shows, where sometimes some useful questioning does go on. Really, Designing Worlds is at its best when they ask pointed questions that draw long, awkward silences from Lindens. The Lindens feel they have to be on their toes and shape up with some answers, even for this as I said loyalist TV show. More talk shows are needed that are more like Point/Counterpoint.

[Seicher Rae]

1 hour ago, archangel969 said:

Oh, I do this all time. Well, for the absinthe part at least.

And I must say, this pic is inspired by The absinthe scene from the movie From hell with Johnny Depp. But I do have two absinthe fountains and a few bottles of absinthe on my land. But I am relieved that I don't talk about existentialism (Does anyone still do that at all these days? I thought that died a gentle death years after Sartre passed away?) or post-modernism, so I guess I'm not one of those horrible Intelligentsia after all. What a relief!

 

Ohhh. I have that same set, fabulous work. Wish I had a place to set it out.

As to does anyone talk about existentialism? Um... yes? And nihilism. And existential nihilism. And optimistic existential nihilism. That's called "a Monday morning" around my place.

 

[Rolig Loon]

So, after an impressive number of pages of discussion, back to the first question: "Does SL have an intelligentsia?"

I think we have a resounding but fuzzy Yes.  As in RL, I think we have several candidates. Some are real and some are imaginary constructs (although that still makes them influential shapers of our universe).

There are many intelligent people -- some of whom have become successful in their own pursuits as land barons, merchants, creators, and the like -- who thus have a major influence over where people live, what they consume, and what new features on the landscape are likely to survive. Some, but I think really just a small number, may actually work together as semi-permanent groups to achieve common goals.

There are technically-minded people -- Prok singles out scripters, but these also include many mesh modelers -- who understand the infrastructure of SL well enough to push it in directions that even the Lindens may not have imagined. They also advocate for the further features and refinements -- like materials and Experiences -- that have shaped residents' expectations and changed their standard of living.

There are forum denizens, who are (or imagine themselves to be) the voice of the people.  I suspect that many of them spend more time in the forums -- our equivalent of coffee houses and bistros -- than they do in world, but they spend a lot of time thinking about SL. Lindens do listen to them, either as sounding boards when they introduce changes to SL or as canaries in the coal mine who are sometimes the first to point out unexpected behavior.

There are people from each of the first three groups who give a lot of serious thought to moral and ethical issues that are often overlooked in the nuts and bolts conversations that concern most other people. These might be the absinthe (or red wine) intellectuals in RL. They are in the awkward spot of being cast as effete snobs or eggheads by both the power elite and the average residents. Paradoxically, that makes them both influential and easy to ignore.

I could go on and on.  There are bloggers like Inara Pey, for example, who keep tabs on what's new and deserves attention. There are the developers of TPVs -- perhaps a subset of the technically-minded intelligentsia -- who shape the tool set that gives us access to and control of SL. There are drivers among the gaming and RP communities who advocate for changes that will make SL more attractive to people in MMORGs. 

Each of these and many others might be called an intelligentsia or perhaps, collectively, as The Intelligentsia.  They are certainly influencers, and their voices are heard beyond their own groups.  The cynics among us can debate how much real power they wield at one time or another, but the Lindens listen to them, if only because they affect the corporate image and thus how the world outside perceives SL. 

Finally, what makes this not a simple YES but a fuzzy one is that individual residents may think of themselves as members of an intelligentsia, or may vehemently deny it, for personal reasons. There are practical reasons for imagining or denying the existence of intelligentsias. Among them are desires for (or the fear of) authority or simply a place in the spotlight. Intelligentsias might just be a convenient way of explaining how the world of SL works.

[Persephone Emerald]

8 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

 

So ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which can baffle people from non-Western societies or even outside of American capitalist experience.

 

I don't understand why you used the phrase "ontogengy recapitulates phylogeny" here. If it's some kind of metaphor, I don't get it. Please explain how you think embryology and evolution relates to this discussion of whether or not there is an "Intellegentsia" in SL.

Thanks

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I don't understand why you used the phrase "ontogengy recapitulates phylogeny" here. If it's some kind of metaphor, I don't get it. Please explain how you think embryology and evolution relates to this discussion of whether or not there is an "Intellegentsia" in SL.

I think Prok was implying what used to be embodied in the phrase "What goes around, comes around".  

[Love Zhaoying]

13 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I don't understand why you used the phrase "ontogengy recapitulates phylogeny" here. If it's some kind of metaphor, I don't get it. Please explain how you think embryology and evolution relates to this discussion of whether or not there is an "Intellegentsia" in SL.

Thanks

Sometimes quoting things makes people seem smart, even if other smart people think the quote was irrelevant.

It's almost like a test, where we have to be the "editors" for other people and their really long posts, with red pen in hand to cross through sections and notate: "BS!"

Great job!

Edited August 20, 2022 by Love Zhaoying
I was familiar with the quote, but hadn't picked it out of the literally "too long, didn't read" post!

[Prokofy Neva]

12 minutes ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I don't understand why you used the phrase "ontogengy recapitulates phylogeny" here. If it's some kind of metaphor, I don't get it. Please explain how you think embryology and evolution relates to this discussion of whether or not there is an "Intellegentsia" in SL.

Thanks

History repeats itself, and not even first time as tragedy, second time as farce, but just the mundane run of things. It merely means that structures of the past replicate themselves. The Linden recapitulated American business and society models and the "residents" of this artificial world recapitulated thehackneyed but comfortable forms they knew from RL. Nothing extraordinary to see here. No fabulous joining of science and humanities in some ideal way as if we are in living out the utopian novel Herland. No, nothing like that at all. Shopping, dressing up, romance, sex, nothing that out of the ordinary. No forging of fantastic new meaning and forms. Just a respite from real life. A respite, and that's good enough, and you need an intelligentsia even for that. You can't just have one model and one school of thought and mechanical repetition. You have to try at least to make it not just a little bit different, but more real.

[Love Zhaoying]

11 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I think Prok was implying what used to be embodied in the phrase "What goes around, comes around".  

Think I remember that coming up in another context recently. But as a professional programmer, and as a person of general conscience, GIGO and an understanding of Karma do the job. At least it wasn't in Latin or Russian, this time.

[Rolig Loon]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Think I remember that coming up in another context recently. But as a professional programmer, and as a person of general conscience, GIGO and an understanding of Karma do the job.

Whatever words you want to place on it, the meaning is the same:  "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."  

ETA:  Or if you want to get Biblical: "There is nothing new under the sun."  😉

Edited August 20, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[Prokofy Neva]

3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Sometimes quoting things makes people seem smart, even if other smart people think the quote was irrelevant.

It's almost like a test, where we have to be the "editors" for other people and their really long posts, with red pen in hand to cross through sections and notate: "BS!"

Great job!

It didn't occur to me that remembering a phrase I learned in 10th grade AP biology, not getting a PhD at Stanford (which I don't have, and didn't attend LOL), would be seen as being pretentious and "pseudo-intellectual". I don't pretend to be an intellectual when I have only a B.A. from the University of Toronto, which is where poor Americans go when their parents can't afford even the much lower tuitions of the 1970s. It was "friendly, foreign, and near" as they used to say about Canada and was "abroad" when you couldn't go to the UK, with high tea at the Lothian Mews and all the rest of it. I'm a terribly under-educated person with only "life credits". I can't be intellectually pretentious because I don't have a higher degree nor a job in a fancy think tank or anything of the kind. So it's great if you are busy with red pens to edit my over-lengthy prose which is a mere factor of me never having learned a separate, "thinker's" written language different than the spoken language closer to the stream of consciousness narrative. That's all. You're not required to read it or lead a "sicky face" or "ridicule" face after every single post as Klytyna does, an absurd waste of time. 

There are other people in the thread who are more deserving of your editor's red pen not for their actual copy but for their nastiness and mono-thinking but I'll leave you to it. I don't think I have anything more to add to this thread.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Rolig Loon said:

Whatever words you want to place on it, the meaning is the same:  "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."  

Not sure whether I'd normally post the Led Zeppelin song "The Song Remains the Same", or Bowie's "Changes" - but did in fact post the LZ song recently in response to a similar discussion. (Just noticed "LZ" is also my initials, bother!)

[Scylla Rhiadra]

11 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I don't pretend to be an intellectual when I have only a B.A. from the University of Toronto, which is where poor Americans go when their parents can't afford even the much lower tuitions of the 1970s.

/me ponders the implications of the fact that Prok and I are alumna of the same university.

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

/me ponders the implications of the fact that Prok and I are alumna of the same university.

Both alumnae, but probably not sorority sisters, I'm guessing. In any case, take it as a mark of distinction. 

[Innula Zenovka]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

/me ponders the implications of the fact that Prok and I are alumna of the same university.

A similar relationship exists between me and the late Aleister Crowley, come to think of it.