Does SL Have an Intelligentsia?

[Persephone Emerald]

9 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

[snip]

I could note that in my SL Public Land Preserve, the religious sites get the most traffic and are used daily.  There is the Notre Dame de Cyberie which has among the highest tips to help cover tier (I put a photo there for Strawberry's famous landmarks challenge this week, as she said you could pick the Eiffel Tower or any other famous RL landmark -- of which there are many in SL!). We have a working mosque with multiply daily visits from the faithful who likely provide the most tips (no project in SL ever seems to get covered by tips alone but I estimate at least 15% of the whole system is covered, and mainly by religious and spiritual sites). 

I noticed you'd posted a picture of your Cathedral in Strawberry Linden's latest challenge thread. 

So you get tips from people visiting it? That's interesting. 🙂 

Edited August 21, 2022 by Persephone Emerald

[Scylla Rhiadra]

10 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

If they could tolerate the Communist Party and Spartacus book tables at Sid Smith (as we had in my day any way) and Noam Chomsky in Linguistics 201 (which I dropped mid-term in second year and was fortunate to get into Turgenev in the 300 level), then surely they can allow the Society of Jesus, and any way, Canada still has freedom of religious (or non religious) belief in compliance with UN treaties the last time I checked. The Jesuits are among the most liberal. My daughter's Catholic school (Fordham University) had professors who called God "she" and even a transgender bathroom). I can't speak to their book policy back in the day. I think when they merged the campuses further under the University of Toronto, the colleges lost some of their identities but surely not all of them.

I was fortunate to have even a first-year course at PIMS and to audit the lectures of Anton Pegis. PIMS is respected the world over for their scholarship. even if you balk at the term "medieval" or the beliefs.  They taught all the world's great thinkers there, not just providing a solid background in Plato or Heroclitus but Martin Buber or John Paul Sartre. BTW I also attended the lectures of Marshall McLuhan, the great pioneer in media studies. You may not know McLuhan used to attend daily Mass.  

Once, as we walked to Mass, McLuhan quoted to me the verse "Who will stay the dyer's hand?" (he actually taught a course on sonnets as well) which of course is the main "tragedy of the commons" in media and in virtual worlds. It's the background for the name of my first avatar in the Sims Online, Dyerbrook (also the name of a town in Maine where we once had land) and my first avatar in SL (who was retired long ago when Philip made us cut down to 5 avatars only, I should bring him back). By this question, McLuhan was asking, if you provide freedom of the media, then anyone can get into the stream, and of course he with the purple dye upstream dumping it into the stream, will be most visible. So who will stay (restrict) the dyer's hand? College education is wasted on 20-somethings and it took me some years to understand this. I used to have a Basilian priest professor, the same who had us memorize "The Four Quartets," complain that we should all go to work and send our parents to college instead of wasting their time. 

I am grateful to St. Michael's for providing me a Catholic and catholic education, for launching me on the life of the mind, and to the people of Canada for my low tuition and scholarships when my father was laid off from Xerox. It wasn't a priest but a lay professor who said I was his best student in philosophy (I wrote my thesis on St. Augustine - my major was Russian studies and minor was religious history) -- but that he wouldn't recommend me for graduate study because likely I would marry and have children which would be my proper role in life. Fortunately, you don't hear that nowadays from anyone at colleges. PS some was paid back in 30% real estate tax years later in Nova Scotia! (Which BTW the US government retaliates with same against Canadian citizens in the US renting or buying property).

My grandfather emigrated with his family from Ireland to Quebec City and in fact its the Basilians who reign at St. Mike's even with the Jesuits, and the reason people from the Rochester, NY area come to St. Mike's is that it is the same order of priests as at St. John's Fisher College and the same order of nuns, St. Joseph. 

I could note that in my SL Public Land Preserve, the religious sites get the most traffic and are used daily.  There is the Notre Dame de Cyberie which has among the highest tips to help cover tier (I put a photo there for Strawberry's famous landmarks challenge this week, as she said you could pick the Eiffel Tower or any other famous RL landmark -- of which there are many in SL!). We have a working mosque with multiply daily visits from the faithful who likely provide the most tips (no project in SL ever seems to get covered by tips alone but I estimate at least 15% of the whole system is covered, and mainly by religious and spiritual sites). 

Oh, I don't have anything in particular against the Society. On the contrary, in fact: they probably are more liberal than most other orders, and they are certainly more intellectual. My mum, who wasn't brought up a Catholic, but did attend all-Catholic schools in the UK, has always had a rather bizarrely romantic attraction to them, which she half passed on to me.

And the Basilians are fine too. I didn't like being interrogated by one as though I had no idea what I was doing when I was clearly and demonstrably a grad student from the university -- I've used special collections and rare book rooms in Canada, the US, and the UK, and I've never had to undergo a process like that, not even as a grad student. i barely needed ID the first time I used the British Library. That's how libraries should work: they require safekeeping, obviously, but not gatekeepers.

I also generally regretted the courses I took at St. Mike's as an undergraduate -- I took them because they worked best with my schedule, and I only took, I think two -- but they were, for what they were, perfectly good courses. I remember my first year Philosophy there, taught by a lay faculty member whose very clear agenda was to demonstrate that Plato was really a Catholic, only no one had told him so. I learned a whole lot more about Augustine, Aquinas, and Maritain than I did about Locke, Kant, or Hume . . . which is fine: I enjoyed it, and it's proven useful. But it wasn't great prep for second year philosophy elsewhere.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about colleges and universities built around particular religions. I suppose that's fine if you know what you are walking into (which I did not in my first year). That is, however, in Canada anyway, a fast disappearing phenomenon: our universities are all publicly funded, and they have very much been secularized over the past 30 or so years.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

Is there maybe some confusion about what exactly we mean by "intelligentsia" here? And more particularly, of their function?

• Historically, the Intelligentsia have tended mostly to be oppositional: they don't work "with" authority, and were most often threatened by it. (As, arguably, is still happening now in some places in the West.) Working with Linden Lab isn't really part of the job description in an SL context.
   
• The Intelligentsia are not organized or structured, they are not singular in ideology or perspective, and they don't produce neat proposals for things that they pass on to authority. That would be the "think tank," which is a rather different animal, although there may be a lot of overlap in the membership of both groups. It's not really the job of the Intelligentsia to produce collectively-authored "white papers" and such. Rather, their function is to analyze, critique, and generate ideas that may well be reflected in "proposals" and "white papers," but . . . again, not the same thing.
   
• And the Intelligentsia are not generally activists, lobbyists, or even "advocates," although, again, there may be some overlap between all of these groups.

Poetry, W. H. Auden said, "makes nothing happen":

                                        ". . . it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth."

So too more generally the ideas of the Intelligentsia. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, but had pretty much zip influence on the revolutions that marked that year, outside maybe of a tiny influence in Germany. It took decades for the ideas that it embodied to filter out into a larger public where, eventually, of course, it did have an outsized influence. Marx and Engels weren't storming barricades -- they were thinking, writing, and publishing.

I think it would be cool to talk about "activism" in Second Life -- it's a subject I have some personal experience and knowledge of. But, again, it's not the function of the Intelligentsia to be organizing protest pickets or storming LL's User Group meetings. Don't look to the Intelligentsia for an "action plan" for the new user experience, or retention, or fixing region crossings. They can contribute in invaluable ways to such things, but they'll do so by exploring and disseminating ideas.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra
Format

[Love Zhaoying]

8 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Is there maybe some confusion about what exactly we mean by "intelligentsia" here? And more particularly, of their function?

Not really, they (Prok and those who take the same stance) have been explaining it for 14 pages now. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

13 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Not really, they (Prok and those who take the same stance) have been explaining it for 14 pages now. 

Thanks Love. I thought we were still on page 2 of the thread. And of course I've read none of the above, including my own 26 contributions (oops! 27 now!)

My point is that people are displaying very different expectations about what this "Intelligentsia" is supposed to do, and how it functions, and in the process we are eliding a lot of rather different categories and functions in this discussion.

If we want to talk about activism and advocacy, then by all means let's do so. And if we think it would be useful to bring together experts into quasi-think tanks to produce complex and coherent plans of action for things like retention, then great.

But dismissing the Intelligentsia because it doesn’t do these things misses the point: they are not really its function.

[Coffee Pancake]

But there is no outcome,  just talk. 

We would be better pushing for a resident union and getting as many people in SL on board as we can.

[Luna Bliss]

This poem reminds me of the Intelligentsia:

Caged Bird

By Maya Angelou

 

A free bird leaps

on the back of the wind   

and floats downstream   

till the current ends

and dips his wing

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

 

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and   

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

 

The caged bird sings   

with a fearful trill   

of things unknown   

but longed for still   

and his tune is heard   

on the distant hill   

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

 

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

 

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams   

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream   

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied   

so he opens his throat to sing.

 

The caged bird sings   

with a fearful trill   

of things unknown   

but longed for still   

and his tune is heard   

on the distant hill   

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Luna Bliss

[Scylla Rhiadra]

6 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

But there is no outcome,  just talk.

Well, yes. Because "talk," albeit (hopefully) intelligent and well-informed talk is what the Intelligentsia does.

And that can be valuable if people are listening. I've seen no evidence that, in SL, they are.

8 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

We would be better pushing for a resident union and getting as many people in SL on board as we can.

If that is what seems most beneficial, then let's talk about that. It doesn't obviate the usefulness of an Intelligentsia, necessarily, but maybe that's a more important priority.

If you've got a broken pipe in your house, you call a plumber. You don't consult first with a professor of hydraulic engineering.

[Prokofy Neva]

26 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

But there is no outcome,  just talk. 

We would be better pushing for a resident union and getting as many people in SL on board as we can.

Do you mean a labour union, that goes on strike or something? Except we are definitely in a situation of "We pretend to work/and they pretend to pay us" as the stipend is really us paying ourselves if we have the premium and everything else comes from other residents.

Or do you mean just a union like a student's union? But then this isn't the intelligentsia.

The great thing about the intelligentsia is that they don't have to be organized to function. 

[Rolig Loon]

47 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Is there maybe some confusion about what exactly we mean by "intelligentsia" here? And more particularly, of their function?

To be sure. In fact, I think that's largely what Prok was inviting us to discuss.

I have been trying to present an interpretation of intelligentsia as influencers, not necessarily in any organized way but as individuals or small groups who not only think about what is possible in SL but actually do things to help them happen. They may at times be oppositional.  They may also be philosophical at times, or activist. They may be advocating for change openly or by example. The basic point is that they are residents (not Lindens) who have a vested interest and the skills and experience in some aspect of SL where they contribute to meaningful change. 

I think accepting a definition of intelligentsia as "people who think about what's possible" is way too narrow. It constrains us to exactly the sort of criticism that Coffee is correctly raising. In the context of SL, I think it makes more sense to think in utilitarian terms.  Who are the people whose actions and creations contribute to fundamental change, aside from those who are in the Linden Lab corporate structure?  How is their role different from what might be found in other platforms (say Roblox or Meta)? 

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I noticed you'd posted a picture of your Cathedral in Strawberry Linden's latest challenge thread. 

So you get tips from people visiting it? That's interesting. 🙂 

I put tip jars at all the sites in the SL Public Land Preserve, a project I've had since 2004, and the tips help to pay the tier on those sites, along with some content sales and donations or tier, builds, or items to give as gifts, from some residents.

Strawberry at first seemed to emphasize the Eiffel Tower but there is only so much you can do with that and she added "any landmark sites" later so I thought it fit. There is a much better build of Notre Dame on another sim. Mine was a very early build I purchased along with the land in like 2005; I had a builder do some refurbishing and add the basement some years later, and it was deeded to the group for us to work on. 

BAD IDEA!

Never deed builds to a group that is open.

One problem is that you sometimes can't get back into your own prim. We once had to have Lee Linden come and undeed a palace that some of us couldn't get back into. The whole idea of group builds is a very faulty ideal and you don't need to literally be doing this in SL. This function declared as a "feature" and not a "bug" -- whereby you can return group-set prims even if not empowered with a role in that group to return group-set prims if they are on "share"  -- it's destructive. I mean, how many people would you enjoy handily just returning parts of your build they happen to dislike? And of course this is a recurring bug/feature hard to duplicate on Firestorm as I attest to weekly when people return rental boxes, trees of their neighbour they don't like, etc. 

You can collaborate on builds in ways I see people in Mieville do all the time without this literal share-bear stuff. Example: one person builds the main structure; another adds elements to it, refining it; , a third decorates the interior; a fourth, like the wonderful choreographer Ktahdn Vesuvino, who sadly died in RL this past week, puts in dances; someone else makes boards for contests, etc. etc.) The event they did called "A Night at the Museum" which was part build, part dance, part game, part story will long live in my mind as a highlight of my Second Life. This is the intelligentsia, really, which isn't always sitting around in the cafes and griping but rises to the occasion to perform works of art and entertainment quite often!

But with our Notre Dame de Cyberie...A disgruntled resident with an axe to grind joined the open group and then demolished the build by throwing pieces of it all over that sim and nearby sims, on other lots so they returned, up in the sky, etc. It was all in pieces and utterly destroyed.

So we asked the Lindens to roll back the sim. They never do that for Mainland and it wasn't enough to roll back the sim because of all the scattering. I seem to recall that they had to put the build on an island, then put it in place or something and we had to tinker. I had it re-dedicated. There have been concerts and weddings there and Stations of the Cross during Holy Week.

I really liked what an early visitor said about it. "There's parts you have to let go..." to immerse in its possibility, that is, you can't be hung up on the amateur nature of the build. 

Then much later after that, I changed some of the textures and tried to reduce the primmage with convex. So it's hardly ideal as a build but after contemplating the existing beautiful version of Notre Dame on the MP, it's land impact, the inability to really use the interior, I decided to leave it as is. 

[Prokofy Neva]

13 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

To be sure. In fact, I think that's largely what Prok was inviting us to discuss.

I have been trying to present an interpretation of intelligentsia as influencers, not necessarily in any organized way but as individuals or small groups who not only think about what is possible in SL but actually do things to help them happen. They may at times be oppositional.  They may also be philosophical at times, or activist. They may be advocating for change openly or by example. The basic point is that they are residents (not Lindens) who have a vested interest and the skills and experience in some aspect of SL where they contribute to meaningful change. 

I think accepting a definition of intelligentsia as "people who think about what's possible" is way too narrow. It constrains us to exactly the sort of criticism that Coffee is correctly raising. In the context of SL, I think it makes more sense to think in utilitarian terms.  Who are the people whose actions and creations contribute to fundamental change, aside from those who are in the Linden Lab corporate structure?  How is their role different from what might be found in other platforms (say Roblox or Meta)? 

You're absolutely right that the intelligentsia can't just think or gab in cafes ineffectually; they do have to have some influence on the powers-that-be.

That is why Lenin had that pamphlet "What is to be Done?" which was a title actually taken from an earlier revolutionary and is still asked today.

You mentioned the making of mesh bodies. This is in some ways a scientific endeavour and in some ways, or even mainly, art. And there is politics around it constantly, over which clothiers are selected to be "rigged," whether this thing or that thing is on mod or not; whether they are all going to have "squishy thighs". These might hardly seem the stuff of science or art, but then, what is the purpose of all this versimilitude?

To make Second Life be more like real life. What a shock to look at those early avatars and compare them now. I literally sometimes can't tell apart a photo of a RL person on my Twitter stream, from a photo of a very dressed up and finely wrought avatar with all the latest mesh this-and-that. 

I sometimes realize that I have committed all the faux pas that become the stuff of Virtual Secrets; my mesh hands were made by one company, and they weren't in the same skin tone as the mesh body; then if I put that company's hands on, I'd mix up version 5.0 and version 6.0. I really don't like mesh bodies at all. The whole thing is just way too complicated and I think some day one of these companies will emerge with something really simply and really modifiable and all these complex ones will fall away, like a complex prim build replaced by one piece of mesh. I only got this ridiculous thing on sale for the utterly crazy reason that my el cheapo weekend bargain clothes didn't fit on anything. So if I got a really cool pair of 60L sneakers, whoops, I couldn't fit them as you can't just disappear things strategically on a system body (although I have gotten far enough with this so I don't always do the mesh bodies which are a chore). Then once you have that sneakered mesh foot, whoops, the pant legs and the leg don't work, etc. etc. And it goes on and on.

Why? Well somebody may want to look good and look fashionable; that would not be me. I want to just not be bothered and have the thing be easy and just pass well enough so that virtual moms will not pull their little virtual children away from me in horror and people run screaming from the shopping mall and my neck/head mismatch lol.

Is this part of the work of the intelligentsia? Well, you convinced me it was because I was persuaded that the work of making the virtual world seem more real because (and who ever knew this before the pandemic, really) this is really going to replace a lot of real life and we want it to be really good. Yes?

[Coffee Pancake]

20 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Or do you mean just a union like a student's union? But then this isn't the intelligentsia.

The great thing about the intelligentsia is that they don't have to be organized to function. 

Yes, and unlike an "intelligentsia" would be able to act as an intermediary between residents and LL, representation of our interests as paying invested customers.

The great thing about the intelligentsia in the face of an all powerful unassailable corporation is that they can be safely ignored, will always have questionable legitimacy, will never mutually agree on anything and will be prone to getting distracted by their own navel gazing. They would be a continuation of the status quo, 20 years of verbose rambling has finally gotten to the point of asking "is anyone even listening?" .. 

[Rolig Loon]

13 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The great thing about the intelligentsia in the face of an all powerful unassailable corporation is that they can be safely ignored, will always have questionable legitimacy, will never mutually agree on anything and will be prone to getting distracted by their own navel gazing. They would be a continuation of the status quo, 20 years of verbose rambling has finally gotten to the point of asking "is anyone even listening?" .. 

I think that's what our difference of perspective boils down to, this last question. I am less cynical than you, or perhaps less beaten down by the sorts of things I have been doing for the past 15 years.  I acknowledge the slow pace of things at times, and I feel the frustration of not being able to do some things that I'm sure would be possible if only I had the right magic wand.  The difference between us is that I also see how much SL has changed in the years I have been here. I believe that many of the changes would not have been made if SL were a world like Roblox where players are "users" of the platform, not co-creators.  

Edited August 21, 2022 by Rolig Loon
typos. as always.

[Prokofy Neva]

20 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Yes, and unlike an "intelligentsia" would be able to act as an intermediary between residents and LL, representation of our interests as paying invested customers.

The great thing about the intelligentsia in the face of an all powerful unassailable corporation is that they can be safely ignored, will always have questionable legitimacy, will never mutually agree on anything and will be prone to getting distracted by their own navel gazing. They would be a continuation of the status quo, 20 years of verbose rambling has finally gotten to the point of asking "is anyone even listening?" .. 

You can have both. And I have no reason to think a "resident's union" will have any better effect -- but it's worth doing if it can be large, even massive and vote on issues.

I do wonder if having tier-payers and non-paying residents in the same organization is workable, if it is valid, or if it is fair. Because I've seen what it's like having large numbers of complainers about land barons who don't pay anything for their SL. But as soon as you make these "class distinctions" somebody complains that it is unjust, it should be one resident, one vote. In RL, however, most people have jobs and pay taxes and the society makes a provision for the poor, the elderly, the immigrant, etc. In SL the balance is very different. In any event political organizations are another topic. I think I emphasized the intelligentsia because I think a lot of thinking needs to be done about the hard issues, including of justice, in virtual worlds, with lots of willing experimentation and I think that's the role of the intelligentsia.

[Randall Ahren]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

You can have both. And I have no reason to think a "resident's union" will have any better effect -- but it's worth doing if it can be large, even massive and vote on issues.

How about a People's Cooperative that buys SL from the current owner, and thereafter runs the cooperative for the good of the people? That would be revolutionary.

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I do wonder if having tier-payers and non-paying residents in the same organization is workable, if it is valid, or if it is fair. Because I've seen what it's like having large numbers of complainers about land barons who don't pay anything for their SL. But as soon as you make these "class distinctions" somebody complains that it is unjust, it should be one resident, one vote.

Some corporations have voting and non-voting shares, Berkshire Hathaway for example. Only holders of class A shares may vote, class B shareholders cannot vote. You could have a similar structure.

The intelligentsia really aren't that influential. They tend to get exiled, such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Radishchev. Even you reported being banned. That's the price of being a vocal member of the intelligentsia.

[Love Zhaoying]

1 minute ago, Randall Ahren said:

How about a People's Cooperative that buys SL from the current owner, and thereafter runs the cooperative for the good of the people? That would be revolutionary.

Some corporations have voting and non-voting shares, Berkshire Hathaway for example. Only holders of class A shares may vote, class B shareholders cannot vote. You could have a similar structure.

The intelligentsia really aren't that influential. They tend to get exiled, such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Radishchev. Even you reported being banned. That's the price of being a vocal member of the intelligentsia.

Maybe the topic belongs in the Roleplay forum!

[Seicher Rae]

14 minutes ago, Randall Ahren said:

How about a People's Cooperative that buys SL from the current owner, and thereafter runs the cooperative for the good of the people? That would be revolutionary.

Some corporations have voting and non-voting shares, Berkshire Hathaway for example. Only holders of class A shares may vote, class B shareholders cannot vote. You could have a similar structure.

The intelligentsia really aren't that influential. They tend to get exiled, such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Radishchev. Even you reported being banned. That's the price of being a vocal member of the intelligentsia.

Soooo... if I was banned from inworld a while back for a Forum thing, was that really LL recognizing me as the Intelligentsia? I think that makes sense, actually. I can live with that idea.  :::winning!::::

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 hour ago, Seicher Rae said:

Soooo... if I was banned from inworld a while back for a Forum thing, was that really LL recognizing me as the Intelligentsia? I think that makes sense, actually. I can live with that idea.  :::winning!::::

Dahling, I have a cornfield just for you, done up in black and pink satin. 

Welcome to the struggle, comrade.

Edited August 22, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra
Thought better of my original reference

[Love Zhaoying]

There ya go! Being willing to "be banned" as an Intelligentsia is equivalent to "being willing to die for the Revolution". 

Dis gud rollplay!

[Akane Nacht]

The definition of Intelligentsia seems to be all over the map here. If it's creators of popular things or influencers in SL then that means the fashionistas who introduced enormous butts and pouty lips and whoever scripted Bloodlines are Intelligentsia. 😬

[Love Zhaoying]

1 hour ago, Akane Nacht said:

The definition of Intelligentsia seems to be all over the map here. If it's creators of popular things or influencers in SL then that means the fashionistas who introduced enormous butts and pouty lips and whoever scripted Bloodlines are Intelligentsia. 😬

I love it! Since the "trendy" things (no matter how outrageous, or a drag on viewer performance) drive the SL Economy - the True Intelligentsia and their supporters will be easily identifiable because of their adoption of those trends. 

Next time you see a friend, if they now have squishy bewbs, greet them privately with, "Friend! I had no idea you were Intelligentsia! Long live the Revolution!"

Edited August 22, 2022 by Love Zhaoying

[Prokofy Neva]

6 hours ago, Randall Ahren said:

How about a People's Cooperative that buys SL from the current owner, and thereafter runs the cooperative for the good of the people? That would be revolutionary.

Some corporations have voting and non-voting shares, Berkshire Hathaway for example. Only holders of class A shares may vote, class B shareholders cannot vote. You could have a similar structure.

The intelligentsia really aren't that influential. They tend to get exiled, such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Radishchev. Even you reported being banned. That's the price of being a vocal member of the intelligentsia.

I love the idea of a cooperative that buys SL from its owners but I think that would be impossible to do.

I wouldn't say it would ever be representative of "the People," whoever they are, but it could be representative of those with most stake or who appreciate it the most.

You could look at the history FreeSO, which is the re-engineered The Sims Online. TSO was an interesting game some of us were in for years until the big GAME OVER sign went up in the sky and EA.com, the big game company that bought it from inventor Will Wright, retired it, after an experiment in user content. By that time it had lost a lot of players to more exciting games. 

But there was such a determined core of developers and fans that they reverse engineered it and put it up again and gained a following. I'm not sure why EA.com didn't care by then. They added new content in an innovative way just by making things that fit over, or were made out of, existing content -- of course that was limited. But it's fun. I was active in it for awhile when SL was particularly unworkable for me and I look in occasionally. It even has a 3D version now. 

I was hoping Open Sim or some offshoot of SL would become more viable. But they haven't, really. I think for reasons of ideology or personality or whatever, but the thing to do maybe would be to go in that direction, to make a viable Open Sim kind of version of SL. The main problem is that such things never gain enough following to be viable, you need people for an economy.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 8/20/2022 at 10:02 PM, Akane Nacht said:

I'd have to disagree with that, if by intelligentsia we mean an educated elite guiding the structure of our virtual world as analysts, thought leaders and visionaries. SL is a corporate entity and is structured as such. We can shoehorn that into an "intelligentsia" structure but... imagine if Meta bought SL tomorrow.

I think, too, that the vast majority of SL users don't even know the names of what we may consider prominent scripters, builders, or even Lindens, nor do they care. As consumers, if the direction of the product goes somewhere that doesn't suit them, they won't adapt - they'll leave. In RL we are subject to Clever Ones running our countries and businesses. In SL we can up and leave the planet if it gets boring or frustrating.

In short, I think intelligentsia is an inaccurate term in this context, and it's also structurally impossible.

Well, it seemed "structurally impossible" for Vaclav Havel as well. You try any way.

[Love Zhaoying]

11 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

To be sure. In fact, I think that's largely what Prok was inviting us to discuss.

I have been trying to present an interpretation of intelligentsia as influencers, not necessarily in any organized way but as individuals or small groups who not only think about what is possible in SL but actually do things to help them happen. They may at times be oppositional.  They may also be philosophical at times, or activist. They may be advocating for change openly or by example. The basic point is that they are residents (not Lindens) who have a vested interest and the skills and experience in some aspect of SL where they contribute to meaningful change. 

I think accepting a definition of intelligentsia as "people who think about what's possible" is way too narrow. It constrains us to exactly the sort of criticism that Coffee is correctly raising. In the context of SL, I think it makes more sense to think in utilitarian terms.  Who are the people whose actions and creations contribute to fundamental change, aside from those who are in the Linden Lab corporate structure?  How is their role different from what might be found in other platforms (say Roblox or Meta)? 

I read, re-read, and re-read again some of the interpretations and come up with disturbing scenarios.

By many of the definitions, the intelligentsia of SL could be a small, disorganized group, and as you say, "oppositional" at times. But, a key aspect seems that they are "influential". So, a minority of influential users.

Scenario: A minority of influential users, who are intelligentsia, convince Linden Lab that "what's best" for Second Life's future, growth, and economy, is to ban Furries. (Because a majority of potential new users would be "turned off" by them; most furries are "poor" and don't contribute to the SL economy; they give Second Life a "bad image"; make up your own reason.)

Boom! No Furries. Replace "Furries" in the scenario with whatever group or aspect of Second Life you choose. Slex. Skill Gaming. Adult clubs. Allowing 18+ users. Gestures. Security Orbs. Right to "travel" without barriers. Privacy controls.

Another basic scenario: A minority of Intelligentsia could easily convince Linden Lab to change the TOS in ways that affects long-time users. 

So. What could possibly go wrong, supporting a minority Intelligentsia who can influence the direction of Second Life? Use your imagination. The minority is not always going to act in a way that is supportive of YOUR interests. 

Edited August 22, 2022 by Love Zhaoying
"Them" not "then", missing words