Chroma Starlight

filler bump

I hope you can. And come out and check out SLEA exhibits/events, I know I will!

I think everyone's making their best efforts through what have been some very dynamic years. Careful though about some of these words, like 'democratic' when you mean 'popular' or 'social,' or 'laws' when you actually mean 'internal policies,' because different standards apply and you cannot conflate them. What have they done lately? How about SLEA, or just keeping the lights on and the grid habitable on an aging MMO and contributing to the community despite their newer endeavors? How about the new creation tools/features/improvements?

I'm sorry, can you point to a credibly liberal democratic system in the world today? I guess there's New Zealand? Actual democracy and accountability was never the literal agreement or social contract between members of this community and its technological hosts, for all the reasons. Credibility of a public system of governance should be measured in absolute terms and benchmarked according to compliance with Universal Human Rights, but I'm not aware of an Internet-accessible virtual world anywhere that meets an absolute global high benchmark for liberal democracy and Universal Human Rights, if only because all the ones I know exist within flawed systems, but some have come close to being healthy communities with careful cultivation and a lot of love and effort. I thought the results of LEA that I saw were lovely. Why not just let this thing exist and see without prejudice what results? This entire endeavor, Second Life, is a creative enterprise and that assumes a certain frame of open-mindedness and a willingness to enable others to take artistic risks and grow. To promote that, the first thing we can do is encourage rather than disparage. And then beyond that, perhaps if we volunteer, we can contribute to and influence the organization toward the stellar standards we value.

I don't think the community of Second Life artists is so great that Linden Lab has the luxury of doing it with institutions, boards, curators, fund-raising departments, "democratic" "accountability," or any of that, and I can certainly understand why they may have their own reasons for the selections that they make. It's still a long-term investment in the community, and everyone benefits whether or not they're directly involved.

I think institutions like these help artists network, develop portfolios, and potentially help to progress the culture of the medium itself for the present. Art is cultural, even spiritual, and there are a lot of dimensions to consider, few of them economic.