Prokofy Neva

No, Masami. In SL we are not consumers. We are prosumers because we co-create. The world is taking a step backward and making us passive consumers again. It's not about this artificial "choice" you substitute for the real choice of accessibility of tools. It's Soviet-style communism to pretend that Mesh, which is highly complicated, with expensive tools, or wonky and obfuscated opensource tools forcing you to buy the manual. That's not capitalism; it's extortion. Smart people accessed prims and even sculpties, go know. Mesh removes that freedom.

Open source always imitates, never innovates, and imitates badly, then obfuscates to force people to either buy the book, or buy the geek by the hour to endlessly tweek it.

Is it up to you to learn Russian or Chinese or Portugese in the new global economy where all those countries will be surpassing the U.S.? No, you imagine you will use...Google translator or something. *Some accessible tool,* eh? That's why the "power tools" analogy is silly. The power tool was the ability to edit and build simply. The old hand loom is the mesh. Just look at the idiotic machinations people have to indulge in to wrestle an item off one of those 3-d makers, dividing it into parts, and pushing it inworld. Insane. It isn't "up to the individual" to accept forced changes. It's "up to the individual" to demand accountability when democracy is removed.

No, the dream of the creator/coder elite in SL has always been to figure out how they can torque the tools and the rules their way. There were even calls for giving creators free texture uploads and making everyone else pay, or having newbies have to wait until they could save scripts, or having newbies never be able to sell anything -- there have been numerous proposals that are all about trying to ensure that a narrow class of people rule the roost. This is the latest iteration. Here's the difference between the history of cars and mechanics. At first, mechanics, often stable hands who used to care for horses, or handymen who used to perform odd jobs, were the drivers and fixers of cars. But they were not in a upper social class. In time, they began to lord it over the owners and casual drivers and charge a fortune. Even so, they remained in garages, and remained in the lower classes, whatever their capacity to bilk the owner class. Computer and the Internet work differently, as the New Class of geeks not only considers itself above all other classes in intellect and ability; they believe they should rule every aspect of life because so many aspects of life are digitalized. So whether politics or education or brain research, they feel they know best and can control everything. It's not at all about "holding back innovation" to "protect those who are prim craftsmen" as if they were Luddites. No, because the innovation was in fact the prim that enabled anyone to edit it, and the regression is the medieval mesh that requires only a guild class to make, locking out ordinary people. That's the issue.

No, not "self-selected," any more than you could say the same thing about people who learn Russian. The person who has learned Russian doesn't turn around and scorn the person who hasn't, or tell them to go learn it. In fact, that's why geeks invented the awful Google translator, because they want to even out abilities and prevail with technology and not have anyone who might know something they don't. Indeed, putting Mesh in now *is* handing out passes to a select elite -- the NDA crowd got a total leg up on preparing items for the market. Watch the Mesh gang demand that prims-based technology be removed because it will be characterized as "confusing" compared to their confusions and "newbies can't understand it".

Linden Lab has not said that, nor have I, so stop being tendentious and looking for fake quotes. In fact, Jack Linden said at SLCC that prims would be maintained. However, the reality is, if a woosh of Google sketchup and turbosquid and such content comes pouring into SL, it could completely wash out the prim based economy. Just because you're personally looking forward to it and it may benefit you doesn't mean it's an unalloyed good. Try to zoom out beyond your own narrow caste.

Why would you convert a call to make tools accessible into a pretense that this is a demand that more skilled creators be locked out? That's pretty diabolical. It's not about complacency, and real diversity means accessible objects that people can easily change, edit, collaborate on. Doesn't sound like that is the route we are taking with prim-sculpty-mesh.

Third worldism goes digital. Can you grow digital food that will feed your real body, too? What happens when all the laborers in RL have to be digitalized? Have you thought how they can earn money to feed themselves? See above.

Re: "Object trade within Sl will collapse." I tend to agree. I'm raising the issue of the creation of another FIC elite class "beta mesh elite" that lords it over the old prim and sculpty craftsmen, and effectively sticks it to the hobbyist or weekend amateur making a box table. No one can manipulate the new products, interactivity, interest, collaboration falls way off, except within this little hothouse elite. You're raising another globalizing problem, which is the existence of vast hordes of 3D artists out there in the gaming/Internet/art world that can now come rushing into SL (assuming the obstacles of the viewer and graphic card demands don't hobble them). So both an elite formation with higher prices will occur as well as a globalizing hurricane (in theory) that will undermine that elite -- and each other -- and drive objects to the zero cost that the Stallmanites, geeks, hippies, technocommunies always dreamed of. Um, now they can "share". A big interest in SL for a lot of people -- just like in RL -- is buying and selling, making and shopping. Once that is gone and we've got instead something like a giant Soviet flea market, where the only thing for sale of any value is the stalls near the door to get the eyeballs, then the hustle will move to classifieds, search gaming, etc. to position to see and obtain those free/dollarbie things. Meanwhile some rare, better, exclusive content might sell, but it will be an exoticism. "This is not visionary or progressive, this is reactionary corporate profit driven madness." I agree. It's quite a depressing stage of technocommunism, which is what the Lindens and their fanboyz seem always to have been after, even the Randians (especially the Randians!) among them. Because they want to sell the search and the "customized skills," making a certified dev class and promoted coder/design class that gets the big jobs. As I have often written before, the commodity then becomes not the object, which is free to change hands (if on transfer) and be modified (if on modify) and enhance and democratize the economy, the commodity becomes that worker-for-hire and the experience that he creates, which is a mixture of object/event/connection/cool whatever, a gestalt. So, this isn't the Grateful Dead letting you make tapes for free off the sound board to trade and selling t-shirts and the odd album to make a buck, this is the Grateful Dead able to package the concert music/venue/dope/people next to you as a multimedia device and sell that, or try to. A TP into a crowded sim of the cool sort might be what becomes available for sale then. It will be interesting, if not painful if you're affected, of course, to see how this flood of "outsider" 3D stuff comes in -- or not. Maybe the Lindens and the FIC have already whistled to their friends in the SF gaming/dev/Internet world that this is where they can now have a playground. Maybe this will only happen in fits and starts as people come in and find a) search is broken and stupid still b) the viewer is a pain c) "there's nobody there". I found it interesting that when Skye Galaxy, the SL boy wonder singer always touted by Hamlet, had his big break with the Internet personality Zefrank on a Pakistan fundraiser, what soared as a result wasn't people joining SL to see him in concert here, but what soared were his Twitter followers. And there is this, perhaps, to save us: everybody will stampede to some other place of virtuality/web that is more cool, perhaps only on their i-phone, and the Lindens will be forced to be nice to those that remained here and serve them.

Um, forcing people to learn something new to participate in an economy *is forcing them*. It's not about me, it's about the principle of the matter. Forcing out people with skills, people in business, in line with some new "better" technology (a dubious proposition at best, as we've heard from some here) can *hardly* be described as "choice". That's like the sort of "choice" the Soviet government gives you. Learning new skills isn't for everybody. Will you be learning Russia or Chinese today? My kids are doing this. Do you have something wrong with you that you can't go on the free youtubes and participate in the global economy? It's not about learning *ANYWAY*. It's about ACCESS. It's about whether or not YOU CAN EVEN MANIPULATE EDIT meshes in the first place. We heard some babbling from Lindens at SLCC that oh, yuh, sure, we'll have mess that you'll be able to modify. Now all of a sudden, they've fallen silent on this score, and there's nothing here in Jack's post on it. Figures. It's not about me making something, so stop being a pedantic nerd about it. It's about the principle of access and the principle of collaboration.

Yeah, I do have to wonder about the "change or die" gang. Everyone was told "learn sculpties or die" and step on prims -- and they went along with it. And...look where it got them now.

Why don't you learn Russian, WADE1? Or Chinese, for that matter. You're missing out on understanding the world's up and coming markets and much of the planet's thinking not to mention rich historical and literary heritage. What's wrong with you? All it takes is an open mind, just like you learned English. There are even free programs for learning languages. Nobody needs to be left out in the cold in the coming global economy.

Um, I think what you mean to say is, "Gosh, you didn't come around instantly to my way of thinking, so I guess I'm going to pretend you're intolerant of others' views because you didn't come to heel, that way I can discredit your continued dissent against my hegemony."

No. You don't tell people making a point about access and destruction of businesses and markets that they must forcibly "learn something new". It's not about creator-fascism "learning something new" all the time like friggin robots. It's about freedom to manipulate others' creations and make simple creations yourself. That isn't being built into the equation here *as it was on the other stages of technology*. Now...why do you think that is?! It's not about "fighting change," but about *insisting on change* -- revolutionary change that Second Life represents when it made accessible tools and collaborative capacity. When it retreats from that stance, it is not "change," it is not "progress", IT IS REGRESSION. This idea of "skills transferal" also holds no water. Certain skills are applicable to certain situations or platforms. You don't hear Facebook API engineers all complaining that there is "nowhere else to go" and you don't hear Diaspora *really* taking off. Um, where's that opensource Twitter at that all the Gilmor Gang were touting? Nowhere. No, the decision isn't *yours* -- which is what you mean when you say, facetiously, "the decision is yours and yours alone" -- to go learn some new yet more exotic and complex technology to make tools and objects yet more unfree.

The smugness and even viciousness of people like you sucking up to power is always off-putting on the forums. It's one of the reasons Second Life doesn't grow. Do you realize that? Your attitude of cut-throat suck-up Social Darwinism *is one of the reasons SL does not grow and lots of ordinary people don't join it*. Torley reminds me of Crystalshard Foo and other oldbies deliberately ruining the television market by undercutting it with free scripts in 2005. It's nasty on the Internet, there is a concerted faction that is always out to leverage the hacker culture to destroy other's businesses, even if those businesses have a better product and better customer service, which the freebie makers never have. No, you have to expose nasty behaviour like that and I'm glad you've done it here, even if you yourself are in a case of Swedish Hostage Syndrome around it. Again, demanding accessible building tools and creation that isn't hobbled and stepped on and made only the province of elites isn't Ludditism, isn't FUD, isn't backward, isn't obstructionist, it's the most revolutionary thing on the planet. That's why people are afraid of it and wheel out all these awful theories of "progress".

No, it's not "up to the individual" to eternall be in a forced-march of fake modernity that actually returns us to the Middle Ages of crafts guilds, rather than free manufacturing at will. You, like others boosting this fake linear "progress," can't answer my fundamental challenge here, which is *the ability of the individual to manipulate the creation of the other.* THAT is the heart and soul of SL, and THAT is what is threatened. It's not "up to the individual" -- that's a fake "choice" when in fact he is pressed against the wall, and his freedom to manipulate and co-create and COLLABORATE is REMOVED.

can you explain more about what the means and how it will work?

Um, don't everybody talk at once...

It seems you are unfamiliar with the basic principles of solidarity and decency, Masami. What are you going to do with all that abandoned land? Have a happening?

You'd sing a different tune if you were among the losers. So I need to save this quote and bring it back to you at some other juncture : )

Social Darwinists like you are always about suggesting *other* people change and adapt and suffer. Never yourselves. Never on your skin, eh? The creation tools in SL are not only very simple to learn to make very simple things (a table, a chair), you use them to MODIFY other people's creations, and at least resize, recolour, retexture. That already became very hard to do or impossible with sculpties because they aren't easily handled; with mesh, it will be all the more case. This obvious point about inclusiveness and freedom simply eludes you. You imagine that because you bothered to learn Blender or Maya or whatever that "everybody" can or *should*. Why? I don't have to know Photoshop or Blender or Maya to put out a prim, make a simple thing, or more importantly, handle other people's things. *But I will with Mesh and that creates a divide*. This may be inevitable due to the rapaciousness of "technological progress" but then let's not sugar-coat it and prettify it and pretend that "anyone" can go out and master Google Sketch or Blender. Mesh will be *that much harder* that the skills of prims or sculpties and the freedom of the world is thus considerably eroded. I have no idea if the there will be "grid-shaking" changes to the economy or not. It's hard to tell. There were changes with sculpties, basically undercutting any ordinary furniture maker and forcing them to go either very low prim to compete, or very high end Frank Lloyd Wright artisan-like or die. These changes happen swiftly and unpleasantly, unlike real life where they are slower and various strands co-exist alongside each other for years. It's not true that "anyone can make them for free" -- why lie about it? You have to be skilled, and invest in the programs -- or be wonky enough to handle whatever their opensource buggy imitators are. My complaint with the "continuing state of the art" is that it is not about art, and it is not better. It's not art, but a hustle. It's elites gaining leverage over an artificial situation in a manufactured world. It's also not demonstrably "better". Google Sketchup and all that sort of Renderosity stuff out there may gives us boatloads of really awful kitschy stuff (Ann has pointed to the obvious porn kitsch we can expect). I saw that in Metaplace -- and in fact, that may mitigate against a too sudden uptake of mesh -- the sheer lousy qualitable especially at first. Sculpties also have a lot of awfulness, especially because there are so many people selling the virtual equivalents of those paint-your-own-lawn-ornament templates. It's not about "change for change's sake," which it's always about for people like you. There are very obvious issues of sequencing here: o given that this might really demolish some businesses, even some very high-revenue ones, is this the time to be introducing it, given all the other depradations faced with search, display names, etc.? o how open will mesh be to manipulation by the ordinary person? These are factors that can be built into it now, rather than put on a backlog and forced as an office-hour lobbying job of a year from now o and once again, have the Lindens REAAAALAY calculated what this means? In real monetary terms? They are the only ones with sufficient facts to do it o I think it's no accident, comrade, that just when something that is about to have a horrible impact on the economy and knock some of those PMLF people out of the ring, the statistics are going to be hidden.

This is why I speak of Social Darwinism in my original reply to Jack. Because of replies like this. Because of people who believe that you don't have progress unless you've savaged and burned some other group of people. Because of people who believe that you can't criticize obvious favourism and elitism, and indeed, deny its very existence. It's not about false unionism and protectionism and keeping the unskilled or amateur from "going under". It's just the opposite. It's about making a robust, diverse, *OPEN* economy that isn't a closed shop like a Renaissance Faire, forcing a good chunk of those who log-on to be passive and mute consumers.

Ugh. You're not even going through the motions of pretending to be concerned about the effect of the introduction of mesh will have on the economy. Enabling a professional class of higher-technology creators is even more FIC than the current FIC (which is why my new FIC list has "Beta Mesh FIC" as a separate category). It means these people -- and some professional 3-D content creators outside of SL currently -- can come in and step on the old prim craftsmen. Thousands of people, some of whom even make a living selling prim furniture and other prim-based items. Of course, your fanboyz are likely to kick up the usual Social Darwinist nostrums and "oh-you-Luddites" admonitions, complaining that we aren't "adjusting to the creative destruction of the market" or "realigning our business models" or "accepting innovation" or are "filled with FUD" blah blah blah. There's an even more important aspect of all this than the stomping on an old merchant and craftsmen class. And that's the concomitant feature of having anyone, any amateur, be able to modify the creations of others easy, or make very easy creations of their own. Not so with Mesh, that requires 3-D programs that can be expensive, and more skills than the creation tools of SL -- *which are now made obsolete*. and before we hear lectures about how Mesh represents advanced technology and we must always and everywhere make way for new technology "just because" (the fallacy of progress), let me point out that what was REALLY progressive and revolutionary was putting creation tools into ordinary people's hands, so that the "what about the people with no talent" question always had an answer. Sort of like the social media revolution and the open-ended virtual world concepts themselves took these media out of the hand of elites and made it possible for ordinary people to tell their stories, too, without dependency on Hollywood, etc. I'm getting pretty bitter about the way you are running SL lately. And I'm not usually bitter about SL, even being a critic. One feels as if there is no home here, as if we are always being squeezed out. If you want to address these concerns adequately, you'd have said in this post that LL will preserve the ability to make prims and the creation tools even as mesh is put in and not phase them out, and you would also indicate whether you've REALLY studied the impact on the economy. And that would mean having independent consultants, because you yourselves are an interested party, you have have always seem hell-bent on trying to make SL like some fantastic game engine of some other company you imagine you are competing against for the geek gamerz who are your peers.

Again, this is one of those geeky affectations that comes out every time UTU comes up. Most people *don't* pass money back and forth on scripted objects or bots. A few might do this to be "amusing" and "prove something" but even they get bored. Most people *don't* "money launder" but they may pool money on one account to cash out or have a "business avatar" that handles most transactions. Most of the transactions are *not* corrupt -- anyone in business in SL who sees hundreds of transactions go down every day realizes that. Yet by flogging this edgecased exotic notion, the Lindens then get persuaded (falling for this edge case themselves) that we "don't need" UTU numbers and that these numbers are "flawed".

I'm glad to see you're finally paying attention to the figure that you're calling "MONTHLY ECONOMIC PARTICIPANTS". This is basically the only true number, as everything else is very misleading, i.e. sign-ups or user-to-user transactions. But it used to be described as "number of people who spent more than one dollar inworld". That way it was only a number of those who spent, not those who received. So perhaps you could clarify why you'd changed that, and whether in fact the numbers of the past were both spending and receiving or only spending. I only have snapshots of that number, but it is slightly different than yours, it seems, because as I've been reading it, it has always steadily and slowly climbed, but had a crash around the time Viewer 2.0 was introduced. I don't recall the big spike in July 2009 at all, perhaps you can explain what that's all about. Was it the introduction of some expensive new continent, Nautilus perhaps, with its huge sinks in Linden sales on the auction? I think it's a terrible development to be retiring economic information. There was frequently a Linden lament that some of these numbers were too squirrely, but not all of them were and more importantly, they followed the trends over time. It makes no sense to hide the number that is likely most important to merchants: the break-down in user expenditures by category, i.e. $1-100, or $500-1000 or whatever. That number tells you potential what constituency you have in a market. If there are only 20,000 people who can spent $10,000 a month, can you expect to get any of their purchases? Or should you price down into the next rank below for 40,000? Another number that really is evasive and unaccountable to be hiding is the number of positive-Linden accounts. This is a figure that lets us know where people stand in the economy, and whether the $10 or the $1000 categories are growing. It's terribly important to watch. By hiding these numbers you can only look bad. I don't accept that UTU is some kind of garbage number, either, although I'm well aware of this deeply held geeky belief that there are people who sit there passing thousands to their alts all day. There can't be more than a handful of those, and they don't matter to skew the overall shape of the results over time. It's also not clear whether you are now going to hide the land statistics. The numbers of islands sold is an important number for land barons to watch too, and for all of us to understand whether "there's always another guy to buy the island" in the inimitable words of Kenny Linden. And finally, not publicizing the "Supply Linden" sales is just unaccountable. If you want the SL economy to be taken seriously as "not a game," you need to publish that number.