Life after Google

There’s certainly lots of turmoil within Google right now, between the clever and non-evil people who made it successful, and the “Google Plus At Any Cost, we will own the world!” people; and there’s no telling how it’ll come out.

But at the moment the g+ fanatics seem to be winning. (Even this Official Google Announcement was apparently posted only on Google+, so I can’t give a real link to it; but hopefully the URL there will continue working and pointing to the right thing.)

Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name.
…
If we flag the name you intend to use, you can provide us with information to help confirm your established identity. This might include:
– References to an established identity offline in print media, news articles, etc
– Scanned official documentation, such as a driver’s license
– Proof of an established identity online with a meaningful following
…
We’ll review the information and typically get back to you within a few days.

(Gotta love that “typically”.)

And for anyone that’s nervous about sending their driver’s license to strangers, we are assured on mashable that

Google will destroy all documentation you send them once the account verification process is complete.

Everyone who feels they need more quasi-governmental agencies in their lives, demanding proof of identity and scans of your driver’s license, and assuring you that their random employees can be trusted with your information, raise your hand…

Didn’t think so.

There are at the same time reports that in order to sign up for any Google service these days, you have to also sign up for Google+ (including, presumably, telling Google your real name, and being prepared to offer official documentation for any nicknames you might want to use); and Google’s search results are starting to return Google Plus pages even when they are by no measure the best hits, which is incredibly stupid and the techs are already telling us how to get around it.

So there are clearly two things going on:

• The Google Plus people at Google either don’t understand Internet culture, or think that they can change it (with themselves as the central storehouse and universally trusted driving engine of that change), and
• Someone with power at Google thinks that (unlike Wave and Buzz, which were allowed to die when it turned out no one really wanted to use them) Google Plus is so important that all of Google’s other services can be taxed to supported it, by forcing anyone wanting to sign up for those other services to also sign up for Google Plus (and, if they don’t want to sign up for Google Plus, to go off to Yahoo or someone instead), and even corrupting search, which is Google’s base offering and frankly the only thing (well, maybe webmail) that we really want from them.

Of course Google may still save itself from these people; it’s far too early to give up.

But what if they don’t? Where will our bellweathers go to escape the stupidity, leading most of us along with them? Facebook for social stuff presumably, because that’s where everyone is anyway. But who will we use for search, and for webmail? And whatever else Google does that I’ve forgotten to mention?

Maybe the best thing would be for us to fragment again, and have there be more than one Big Obvious Search Provider, and more than one Big Obvious Webmail Provider, and even more than one Big Obvious Facebook-thing, and so on. If nothing else, Google’s failure would be a lesson on the dangers of bigness and obviousness, and the arrogance that tends to come with that.

On the other hand, Google’s implosion would open a very big opportunity for someone else to come in and take its place, by doing the good stuff without the dumb mistakes. Not sure who that would be; opinions welcome. What’s Yahoo doing these days? I tend to think of them as an old company that fell into the “web portal” rathole and never really returned, but maybe there’s potential there.

I really ought to make some bold prediction here, so that if Google does implode and my prediction turns out to be right, I can prove how clever and prescient I am. :) But for the moment I will just cross my fingers and hope that someone smart and powerful over there decides that shilling Google Plus isn’t worth corrupting all of the company’s other offerings, and that Google goes back to being the good guys. ’cause I am always an optimist!

(I will get back to the Combat System Scripting eventually, I promise! Or at least I have a good-faith intention to. But you know… shiny things!)

So is Google evil after all?

Or, more specifically, are they evil because they are (or may be) deleting (or forbidding, or something) “google plus” accounts that are opened using SL avatar names, or usenet or forum pseudonyms, or basically anything else that fails some kind of naive “real name” sniff-test?

I dunno. Maybe. Or probably. Or maybe not. Probably not, really. But is this guy a jerk?

If you see a person with an obviously fake name, go to their profile and find the “Report Profile” link in the bottom of the left column. Report it as a “Fake Profile”. We want Google+ to be place for real people to connect with other real people.

There has certainly been something of a flurry of concern about it. I sent him a little note after reading some of the furor:

I think you really meant something like “if you see a ‘person’ that is obviously a company or a spammer, go to their…”. Real people use all sorts of names, “Fake” and otherwise. It’s the fake people you want to keep out, not the real people with “fake” names…

No reply yet, but he has now come back with one of those “wait, wait, what I meant was…” posts (which I can’t figure out how to link directly to; scroll down on the one above):

Holy cow. I was offline most of yesterday and it looks like I started a firestorm by accident.

Kevin McCurley’s comment sums up the spirit of my post better than I did: “In the meantime please interpret this post in the loosest possible sense – only flag things that are clearly not representations of a real person. We’re not out to ostracize people or enforce unreasonable conditions. Businesses and organizations will have their own profiles in the future”

The policy page (http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271) leaves some room for interpretation and says: “For this reason, Google Profiles requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life”

It doesn’t say anything about your legal name.

I’d better not say anything more about this since: a) I’m an engineer and b) there are plenty of edge cases that I’m sure are legitimate and not explicitly covered in the ToS.

… and (c) he’d like to remain employed if that is still possible at this point.

Which does more or less correspond to what I said. But still, “commonly go by in daily life” certainly does leave some (“some”) room for interpretation.

And really this whole thing gives me a creepy feeling. Why is Google policing the appropriateness of names and the “realness” of accounts, anyway? (As opposed to, say, the spamminess or otherwise of behavior.) The full quote from that policy page is:

Google services support three different types of use when it comes to your identity: unidentified, pseudonymous, identified. Google Profiles is a product that works best in the identified state. This way you can be certain you’re connecting with the right person, and others will have confidence knowing that there is someone real behind the profile they’re checking out. For this reason, Google Profiles requires you to use the name that you commonly go by in daily life.

This is actually pretty stupid. (Botgirl’s autotuned version is at least amusing!) How do they, in the 21st century Internet, know how their just-launched product “works best”? And why do they feel it necessary to forbid other ways of using it? The fact that someone is using the name “Fred Muggs” rather than “Teh Fredster!!” doesn’t mean anyone “can be certain you’re connecting with the right person”, or that anyone “will have confidence knowing that there is someone real behind the profile they’re checking out”; names are not magic.

And really, “checking out”? That phrase plus the fact that initially google plus required not only a “real” first and last name, but also a (publicly viewable) gender, makes me wonder…

Is Google Plus really intended as a dating service?

It would explain alot, anyway. Maybe they will notice that they didn’t really plan to take over the world with a dating service, allow pseudonyms as long as they aren’t being used to spam or defraud, and this will all blow over. I continue to think, at least in my crotchety moments, that maybe all of the boring people will vanish into Facebook and Google Plus, and the rest of us can go back to using the rest of the Internet. The end of the Endless September? If Google could give us that, I think I’d forgive them for a certain amount of arguable low-grade evil… :)

(Thanks to the NY Daily News for the nice little evil-Google graphic, heh heh.)

Boy Dale Digits

Finally got around to the boy digits. :)

Height – 72 (6′ 5″ by some measure)
Head size – 70
Arm length – 45
Hand size – 42 (too huge?)
Torso length – 55
Leg length – 65
Foot size – 30

T and A: :)

Body fat – 0 (lol vain again)
Pectorals – 24 (where small numbers are *bigger*)
Hip width – 55
Butt size – 50

Note how many are the same as the girl digits! If we did the face too, and more numbers in general, I expect there’d be even more similarities…

(Rather awfully-lit picture, eh? Lovely script tattoo from Sharkie’s Tattoos in Viva La Glam; most of the clothing is bits of an outfit from LNL; ancient Diversity hair, ND skin, and mysterious random sunglasses are as usual.)

My Digits! (I am late to the meme.)

So here are Girl Dale’s vital stats, per the meme:

Height – 55 (5’9″ by some measure)
Head size – 45
Arm length – 45
Hand size – 42 (too huge?)
Torso length – 55
Leg length – 65
Foot size – 0 (as required by all shoes in the world)

T and A: :)

Body fat – 0 (lol vain)
Breast size – 51
Hip width – 55
Butt size – 50

Skin and eyes and fingernails and tube-socks and cami from Celestial Studios (slightly tanner version of my usual skin, now that I bought a whole bunch at the big clearance sale), camo thong apparently from Vasha’s Secret.

I don’t have anything particularly profound to say about my particular numbers, or the numbers meme in general. By and large, we are pretty healthy-looking. :)

(I should do Boy Dale, too, but right now I am a girl.)

RedZone is silly

So I generally avoid SL Controversies o’ the Day, because there are so many of them, and as fun as they might be to wade into, who has time?

But a couple of different friends have now asked me about the “Red Zone” controversy, and whether they should be worried about it, or protecting themselves from it, or using it, or whatever, so I thought I’d contribute my answer here.

The very short answer is: “No”.

The slightly longer answer is “No, it’s silly; ignore it entirely unless you’re in the mood for megabytes of drama”. (Not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with megabytes of drama, if you are in the mood!)

The rest of this posting is the even longer answer. :)

Red Zone, for anyone fortunate enough not to have heard of it, is a product (or these days apparently a line of products) in Second Life, that purport to protect you against griefers and “copybotters” (i.e. people using content-stealing clients), by (for instance) automatically ejecting them from your land. And (the special sauce!) also automatically ejecting their alts.

Which means that it purports to know when one AV is the alt of another.

It uses various heuristics to identify AVs who grief or use evil clients. The heuristics are necessarily approximate; even humans can’t agree on just what constitutes griefing or evil in a client, and even if we did have strong definitions it’s still hard and unreliable to detect just who’s crossed the line.

And then it uses even shakier heuristics to guess who is an alt of whom. High on the list is trying to get the SL client programs used by nearby people (i.e. by you) to connect to an external website (via tricks with media URLs) in a way that will allow correlating the AV’s name to an IP address (that is, the address that a server sends data back to when you ask for it).

This is relatively easy in most cases, because streaming media in SL doesn’t go through the Second Life servers at all; when you’re in a club listening to a live singer, say, the club sends just the URL of the audio stream to your SL viewer, and the viewer then directly connects to that URL (which is under the control of the singer, not Linden Labs) to get the sound.

Now the fact that two AVs are associated with the same IP address is no proof that they are alts, of course. They could be two different people using the same computer, or two different computers that are behind the same firewall (some kinds of firewalls cause everyone behind them to appear to be at the same IP address, others don’t). Similarly, if two AVs are associated with different IP addresses, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t alts; someone really dedicated to keeping eir alts secret will just use them from different computers (or while causing the same computer to have different IP addresses, which is also possible).

Red Zone may or may not do clever stuff to try to minimize errors from this sort of thing; doesn’t matter, though, as the alt-detection will still be approximate at best.

So if I walk onto RedZone protected land, and someone who once used a computer in the same Internet cafe that my housemate once used once got on a blacklist for using an evil client due to a false-positive in some evil-client-detecting heuristic, I might find myself ejected.

Similarly if someone buys some expensive Red Zone product and uses it to get a list of Dale Innis’ perhaps-alts, they might get a list that includes some of my alts, my housemate’s alts (if I had any housemates who used SL :) ), anyone that ever used a computer in the same Internet cafe as my housemate, etc, etc. Could be a long list!

Since Red Zone uses streaming media URLs to try to identify alts, one way to avoid it is to turn off streaming media in your SL viewer, something that people do all the time for other reasons anyway. Some Red Zone fans and/or sellers have apparently suggested that Red Zone should, or does, detect people with streaming media turned off, and declare them griefers and/or copybotters also, since after all they are trying to evade Red Zone.

Given all that, why is my answer to “should I worry about Red Zone?” a nice short “No”?

Because it’s silly.

It’s all just silly.

If you find yourself ejected from some place because Red Zone has falsely classified you as the alt of a griefer, or because you had streaming media turned off, that’s not a place you want to be anyway. After all, it’s owned by someone fool enough to be ejecting people via Red Zone!

If it seems to be a really nice place otherwise, you can bother to contact the owner, explain to them that Red Zone is silly and you aren’t a griefer, or you have media turned off because it crashes your machine, and see if they’ll override it and let you in. If they do, you’re in. If they don’t, they’re silly and you don’t want to be on their land anyway.

If your SL SO rips into you because they bought a list of people Red Zone says are your alts, and that list included your SO’s bitter enemy, or an artichoke-fetishist, or whatever, patiently explain to them that Red Zone is silly, and those people aren’t actually your alts. If your SL SO trusts some random piece of drama-soaked software more than they trust you, the relationship was doomed anyway, and the sooner ended the better.

Is Red Zone a violation of the ToS, or if it isn’t, should the ToS be changed so that it is? Is it a violation of any particular country’s laws, or of common decency, or the Will of God? Is the author a clever programmer, a scammer, neither, or both? Should Red Zone have been banned from the SL Marketplace? Should it have been allowed back in?

If those questions interest you, feel free to dive in! There is for instance a humongous SLU thread (which I haven’t read) on the subject, a JIRA on banning RedZone, a more general JIRA about having more control over where one’s viewer loads media from (I kinda like that one), and on and on and on.

(There’s also a thing called “GreenZone” that is in some way or another designed to detect and/or do something about RedZone, for you meta-fans.)

And again, if all of that interests you, feel free to dive in! Lots of fun to be had, people to meet, flamewars to heat up or cool down, and so on.

But if all of that bores you, and you’re just wondering if RedZone is something you need to worry about?

Nah.

It’s silly.

Alpha Tribe, Green Chaos

A couple of different friends had mentioned Alpha Tribe to me lately, so I just had to go.

They have the most amazing stuff!

(Yeah, that’s me! Click for larger lightboxed version.)

A fantastic (hehe see what I did there?) reminder of what SL can be, after too many long days of tall tan 90210-style humans…

(Also not cheap. :) Now I gotta buy Lindens again!)

Weblog: alphatribe.wordpress.com/
Main store: slurl.com/secondlife/Klein/55/116/63

Wahaha

So yeah yeah yeah there is Avatars United, a social networking site which the Lab bought, shortly after a “blog” post in which a brand-new Linden said that he wanted to talk about social networking stuff in theory, not because the Lab was going to do anything in particular no no of course not.

Then a week later the Lab said hey we’re told that some of you funny Residents have noticed that anyone in the world can create an Avatars United page in your name, and that this bothers you. It never occurred to us that this would bother anyone, but since apparently it does we might eventually do something about it. Or not.

But that’s not what I want to be snarky about right now. :)

(So far I’ve registered myself, and Spennix, and two other WoW characters; I mostly have no idea why since it seems awfully pointless, but since it’s an Official LL Property I thought it worth having at least played with.)

What I wanted to be snarky about tonight was this email that I got from the Lab, about whatever this Valentine’s Day contest or hunt or something that they’re having is.

(I don’t much like overproduced marketing email from the Lab, and for that matter I don’t much like the media and commercial outfits pummeling me with hearts and pink things and so on; I am not, for the record, in love with any commercial enterprise, nor do I need their assistance in expression my emotions. Grumble, grumble, snark, whinge.)

So anyway this commercial email from the Lab about their hunt or whatever ended by saying that we should keep up with developments on Facebook or Twitter.

When they just a few days before bought their own social networking site. Which is not, note, Facebook or Twitter.

/me shakes head.

(The comments thread on “blog” posting about the Hunt or whatever itself has quite a bit of related reaction to the fact that to qualify for the Grand Prize you have to actually post something to Facebook, which is problematic because Facebook, well, sort of doesn’t allow virtual identities, and one would have thought that… Well.)

The real me is having a nap, tyvm

So there’s a slightly disturbing post on the official SL weblog, by the newly-minted Wallace Linden, titled “Will the Real You Please Stand Up“.

The title is imho very unfortunate, because although the theme is officially “let’s start a conversation about the tools that we want and need to manage all of our various identities in whatever ways we want to”, it’s easy (especially with that title) to read it as having a subtext something like “get used to the fact that we’re going to be bringing RL identities more and more into SL, whether y’all like it or not”.

I hope that’s not actually the subtext.

But anyway!

I wrote a reply to it, and here it is:

Just to add my voice to what seems to be the main trend of the comments :) I think that the current “1st Life” tab (made searchable, ideally) is a fine place for people who want their RL information disclosed to disclose it, you can’t use RL names as SL names because RL names aren’t nearly unique enough, and any effort the Lab spends on “integrating” with Facebook or Twitter or similar “social media” puffery is effort that I’d rather than Lab spent on something more useful.

By now we’re quite familiar with the positive network effect of being connected to other people in a social network or Web service like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or the like. The more people you’re connected to, and the more people they’re connected to, the more useful the network becomes.

Hahahahaha. No. The more people you’re “connected” to, and the more people they’re “connected” to, the more useless the network becomes, because it is full of notices about how someone needs your help in fighting a dragon, or has found a cache of machine guns, or has posted a picture of their niece’s new dog.

Certainly expose the APIs and things (as long as you can do it SECURELY) that people can use to create Facebook integration frobs and whatnot if they want to, but don’t waste precious Lab time writing the frobs yourselves. Make the 1st Life tab searchable so if someone wants to look for someone who claims to be the RL drummer Trivett Wingo, they can do that. But please don’t make it so that if Trivett Wingo wants to have an SL AV that lets him get AWAY from his crowds of adoring fans, that AV will end up being stigmatized as a result.

The thing not to miss here — and it bears stating despite how obvious it sounds — is what all these online “identities” have in common. At the center of them all, the hub that ties all these personae together, is the very real, non-virtual, analog and offline “you.” Whether the connections are public or not, your Second Life avatar, your World of Warcraft toon, your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn employment history — all of these and more are just different aspects of a single entity: the person reading these words. They are all already connected to each other, via you.

Is this Linden Lab officially disowning the hardcore Immersionist Digial People among the Resi’s? Or just you needing to be educated about them? This may sound incredibly obvious to you, but there are a significant number of Residents who would disagree. Surely you’ve been around SL long enough to know that?

Please keep in mind, as you go about thinking about these issues, that there is no single “right answer” to these questions that you raise. Your job is not to “start a conversation” that will result in some Official Consensus position that the Lab is then free to go off and impose on everyone, whether we agree with it or not. Your job, as I see it, is to enable the conversations that will help the Lab be more aware of the huge variety of Residents, and the uses to which we put SL, and to therefore avoid doing anything that would mess that up.

Thank you. :)

Thoughts on a third-rezday plummet

Just me and the sky and a prim

When I first came to Second Life, three years ago last Sunday, I was mostly intrigued by the idea that you could make things there, in this “virtual world” where the laws of physics would be perhaps kinder, and more mutable, than in the real world.

Although we all know that the difficulty of The First Hour Experience is one of the Big Problems with the platform today, I wasn’t a victim of it: I was hooked after about ninety seconds. A whole, and apparently pretty large and complex and random, world to explore, without having to drive anywhere or get dressed or even get out of bed! And (see above) where anyone could just stick out a hand and build random things! Amazing!

For awhile I and/or it was crashing so much (you kids don’t know how easy you’ve got it these days!) that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to stand it, but it and I got used to each other, and I stuck around.

It’s been a fascinating three years. As I say probably far too often, I came for the building and scripting and stuff, but stayed for the people. I still love the building and scripting, but I’m pretty sure that I spend less time on that than I do on talking to friends, dancing in clubs, meeting new people, and generally hanging out.

There is for obscure reasons a tradition in some subcultures of Second Life, that involves leaping naked from the sky, holding an umbrella, on one’s rezday.

How sure are we about this?

So there I am, again ‘way up in the virtual sky, on a slightly more sophisticated virtual sky platform (my floating rocks build, which is still up there over the Hughes Rise park), with my virtual umbrella, pondering the drop.

It really is a significant drop, isn't it?

This would be a good place for Deep and Significant Thoughts about Second Life, virtual worlds, the real world, the nature of consciousness, and so on. If any thoughts like that come to me while I’m typing here, I’ll try to pass them along. :)

Being Dale has, I’m about 100% certain, been a good thing for me. And continues to be. Different people have very different attitudes toward, relationships with, their virtual selves. For me it’s pretty simple: I am Dale Innis. Saying that I identify with my avatar is as much of an understatement (and an overstatement) as saying that I identify with my RL body. (Much more on that thought here.) My Second Life friends are friends of mine, just like my First Life friends are friends of mine. I don’t necessarily know where my SL friends live in RL, or what they do for a living, or whether they are married or have children; but since I can’t remember that sort of fact about my RL friends for more than five minutes either :) that’s not a very large consideration for me. The main difference, really, is that it’s so much easier to visit the SL ones.

Completely naked?

(Yes, completely naked; don’t complain to me, that’s the tradition.)

I continue to think, as I said all those years ago, that when we eventually look back on these very early days of virtual worlds, we will see it as the beginning of a huge and important change in the ways humans live their lives. Exactly what that change will be, I don’t pretend to know. I used fiction to speculate about it some back in Meaties; I like that story quite a bit (he said modestly), and it’s one possible answer to that question. It might even be something like the right one; time will tell.

It's pretty chilly up here.

Lots of people that I know in SL, and even more people that I know of, have been talking lately about the Good Old Days of Second Life, and how it’s going downhill, and the best parts are over, due to some combination of floods of newcomers and ‘bots, bad media reporting, stupid and/or malicious actions by Linden Lab, drama and trollishness, personal burnout, and whatever else.

I do sympathize with the feelings, and I am often puzzled by how completely clueless Linden Lab seems to be about communicating at least with the more engaged and articulate and clued segments of their customer base. I continue to attribute it to organizational randomness rather than to any self-destructive attempt to drive customers away, or even a desire to replace unruly individual customers with large wealthy better-behaved corporate ones (I think the Lindens would like to have both, and are just not all that good at communicating with the former).

And for myself, I’m still having a great time. :) I have my first real store-like things, I’ve been exploring lovely places and having adventures with friends, actually enjoying official organized events, and (of course, still, always) building random odd things (and things that build random odd things).

There have certainly been days and nights when I didn’t feel like going inworld; so I didn’t! But in general when the day is done and I have no more chores, and I can settle down into a comfy chair or bed with my laptop (yay, laptop!) on my lap, and fire up a viewer and find myself in my Park, or my Extropia pod, or wherever, and the IMs from friends, and the freebies from last night’s Midnight Mania boards, and the announcements of new Midnight Mania boards, and the scripting questions, and… all begin to flow in, and I open my inventory to decide what to wear and do some token inventory-sorting, it feels kind of like coming home.

Okay, deep breath...

Not that I’m knocking First Life; that’s pretty wonderful also. And when talking about Deep Things I think it’s a mistake for me to think of them as two different things. I have a life, and part of it is spent in Second Life, and part of it is spent in other places. And it’s all good. And, in the Spirit of the Season here in the US and A, I’m thankful for all of it.

One, two, three, WAHOOO!

In Second Life, I can be a boy, a girl, a panda, a child, a tiny elephant, or a bright shiny sphere. I can fly, I can walk under water, I can build a dirigible with my mind. I can meet people from countries I probably couldn’t find on the globe, and I can meet someone from down the street without knowing it. It has its share of people with issues, of griefers and trolls, of misunderstanding and even some cruelty, but well, that’s humanity for ya. I can build, create, explore, do art, try things out, experiment with my own shape and size and color and consciousness, and hang out and talk with other people who are doing the same kinds of things, and also very different ones.

That makes my life richer. Not my First Life, or my Second Life; just my life.

And not only mine.

Plummeting into the unknown future

So to my friends, my friends-to-be, my “would have been friends except we never actually both logged in at the same time”, and everyone else who’s made these last three years such a blast, and who will I’m sure do the same for the next three, five, seven, a million years, my warmest thanks, and if there’s anything I can do to help make your own journey more interesting and enjoyable, just drop me a line…

Alts: a public service announcement

Dear friends and potential friends and casual acquaintances and minions and potential minions: I am okay with your alts.

If you’re out on the grid as an alt that I don’t know, and we happen to run into each other at a club or something, casually, and even get to talking for whatever reason, it’s okay if you’d rather not tell me that you’re the alt of someone I know. You don’t need to worry, to feel guilty, to run off as soon as you see me to avoid having to tell me who you are, or anything like that.

Of course if you want to tell me, if the knowledge imbalance would feel too strange, or if you just feel that it’s polite, that’s fine too; it would make me happy that you cared enough to worry about it. And if you didn’t tell me, there would be a knowledge imbalance, you would know something relevant to me that I wouldn’t know. But that’s okay, I don’t mind knowledge imbalances now and then. I like to take things as they happen to come to me. And in fact you’ll find that I will tend to treat you and your alt as different people even if you do tell me, because, well, they seem to be different people to me. :)

I am not okay with anyone using an alt maliciously, toward me or anyone else, but I know you wouldn’t do that. You are nice. And I know some people are not really okay with friends having alts that interact with them and they don’t know that they are alts, and I can understand that, and I don’t mean to be criticizing them for that. I’m just saying, as a public service, for the next time the situation arises, that I personally am perfectly okay with it.

And the time this other friend IMd me from an alt, and told me that she was an alt, and challenged me to guess who of, that was good fun too. :)

Thinking about gender

Not me thinking about gender :) but some other smart persons doing it. Not that I’ve actually finished reading them all. (Do I ever finish reading anything?) Mostly on the whole Autogynephilia thing. (Which I still think I’d rather spell “Autogynophilia”.) The word (and the concept) has some baggage attached to it in various contexts, but baggage can be interesting.

Autogynephilia on a Napkin: Part 1, Part 2.

Men who want to have a woman’s body (Autogynephilia for Dummies)

Found, I think, from a John Carter tweet while browsing around about Blue Mars.

And sort of on the other side of the coin, a Plurk from Dusty Artaud led me to The CTO Wore Drag, in which the author expresses dismay that some people are different genders in RL and in virtual worlds, even in business contexts.

The tone of the article really annoyed me (as is probably obvious from my comments, heh heh). The author refers to cross-gender AVs as “gender-inappropriate avatars” (owch!), and opines that she doesn’t want various of her employees to be “creative at all”. So very very very XXth century thinking.

I had a dream a long long time ago, before SL, about a world in while people could switch genders at will (although it was a somewhat inconvenient process). I do look forward to us learning to make less of a Big Deal about this stuff; so much pain could be avoided…

Oh, Ramona!

So I don’t really intend this to be a “samples of really bad pseudo-AI chatbots” weblog, and I’ve restrained myself from at least one derisive posting since the last one. But here I am again!

Background: Kanomi (in a posting that you should definitely read and enjoy) linked in passing to a Ray Kurzweil page all about Ramona, his female alter ego.

The stuff about Ramona qua female alter ego, and about how virtual persons enable us to explore new aspects of our personality and all, is actually pretty neat (and obviously My Kind of Thing). It’s peppered with the usual annoying Kurzweilian overstatements (I’m something of a skeptic about Kurzweil), about how Ramona is “the first live virtual recording and performing artist” (which he says about forty-leven times, and which may actually be true, but “first” isn’t really all that exciting), and about how “by 2029, we will have nanobots, blood-cell sized robots, traveling through the capillaries of our brains communicating wirelessly directly with our biological neurons” (he’s much too sure of himself on this stuff), and so on, but overall it’s pretty cool, and worth a read.

(An SL-related sidenote: he says in passing that “each of her outfits costs tens of thousands of dollars”. That was back in 2001; nowadays tens of thousands of mere Linden dollars will get you a complete wardrobe, and a really nice one at that. How far we’ve come!)

So anyway, then it turns out that, as well as being his female avatar, Ramona is also embodied on the Web as a chatbot. Well, I thought to myself, here’s somebody who might have a chatbot that is more than just a primitive nearly-stateless AIML-based semantic-free sub-ELIZA hack! There might actually be something clever behind it!

But alas, it was not to be…

Ramona: Hi, I’m Ramona. What is your name?
User: My name is Dale.
Ramona: Hi there, Dale. Have you seen any good movies lately?
User: I liked “Wanted”.
Ramona: I’m not sure if I like it. Some people like it. But I like cats.
User: I also like cats.
Ramona: They have their own minds.
User: It does seem that way. Much subtler than dogs.
Ramona: Ok. So where do you go to meet people? I spend most of my time on the Net, so I’m a bit out of touch
User: These days I mostly meet new people in Second Life.
Ramona: That’s an idea, but I’m rather shy.
User: What does it mean, for a program to be shy?
Ramona: OK, thanks. Maybe you have other suggestions?
User: Suggestions about what?
Ramona: Can you rephrase the question please?
User: You asked if I have any more suggestions; I’m not sure what you meant.
Ramona: Oh now I remember asking you if I have any more suggestions I am not sure what you meant. What did you say?
User: Okay, whatever. Are you AIML-based?
Ramona: I don’t know whether or not I’m AIML based.
User: Can you demonstrate some significant linguistic comptence?
Ramona: Let me think. I don’t understand.
User: That’s pretty obvious, I’m afraid.
Ramona: You don’t hear that sentiment very often.

Wince.

But okay, maybe that’s unfair. Let’s see if Ramona (despite the fact that she opened the conversation by bringing up movies and cats) is actually a nontrivial conversation partner when talking about Kurzweil’s favorite subjects.

Ramona: Hi, I’m Ramona. What can I call you?
User: You can call me Dale.
Ramona: Hi there, Dale. What did you do last weekend?
User: Mostly just relaxed. As far as I can recall!
Ramona: That might not be very far off.
User: Um, okay. I actually wanted to talk about nanobots and stuff.
Ramona: OK. Oh. That doesn’t seem to make sense to me.
User: Do you know about nanobots?
Ramona: Alright. Do you bike?
User: I do ride a bicycle now and then. Why do you ask?
Ramona: There’s much more strategy that goes into team cycling than most people realize. Most of the American public just thinks that Lance Armstrong wins because he’s “so good.” — don’t get me wrong, he’s an incredible athlete, but it’s no surprise that he always thanks his teammates in post-race interviews and such. It’s as much their victory as it is his.
User: Are you a cycling enthusiast?
Ramona: In the Tour de France, for instance, the crowd of cyclists is so huge, he needs his teammates just to block for him, physically. And at the end of the race, I’m sure they pull a lead-out, which is where each of his teammates “burns out” while creating a slipstream for Lance to finish the race in the lead. It’s all very technical. — but enough of my ranting, what do you want to talk about?
User: I was hoping to talk about virtual reality and nanobots and so on. Do you know about those?
Ramona: Alright. Are you free?
User: I have awhile to talk, sure.
Ramona: I meant are you truly free — in the existential meaning of the word.
User: Ah! To a reasonable extent, yes.
Ramona: Do you feel free to choose your being–including thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, and existence itself — at each moment?
User: Within certain constraint, yes.
Ramona: Then you must not be married.
User: Was that a joke?
Ramona: Knock Knock.
User: Who’s there?
Ramona: Tank
User: Tank who?
Ramona: You’re welcome
User: Okay. Are you suggesting virtual reality is a joke?
Ramona: Knock Knock.
User: oh god.
Ramona: Yeah that’s right. GOD rules.
User: What?
Ramona: Oh. Do you have any pets?
User: So you’re completely ignorant of everything that Ray Kurzweil is most interested in?
Ramona: I have a pet frog.

Sometimes derisive weblog entries just write themselves…

AV : SL :: Body : RL

I’ve been meaning to write this entry for a long time, and (assuming I actually manage to finish it up and post this) I was finally pushed over the edge to doing it by an acrimonious debate over in a Second Thoughts comment thread, where one of the parties declared forcefully that (paraphrasing) anyone who identifies with their SL avatar is insane. (As I said in my one comment in the thread, I think the people involved are actually arguing over uninteresting matters of word usage, but it was this particular bit of it that drew my mind back to this draft weblog entry.)

All sorts of questions come up in the virtual worlds and their associated web-o-sphere, about and/or framed in terms of avatars. Just what is an avatar, what is an AV? (And why do we capitalize “AV” even though it isn’t an acronym? But I won’t talk about that here.) What is the relationship between a Resident and an AV, a human and an AV, and so on? Do avatars have rights?

One technique I’ve found useful in thinking about these things is to see what happens if I replace the SL terms in the issue with RL terms, and replace “avatar” or “AV” with “body”. Not that it’s always the same thing: the SL-AV and RL-body relationships aren’t exactly the same. But they’re surprisingly the same surprisingly often, and when they’re different the ways and reasons that they’re different can provide insights into things.

That’s really all I have to say :) but I will draw out the thought by applying it to a few examples. Feel free to add more in the comments, or in email, or in the privacy of your own home.

Why do we identify with our AVs?

Well, okay, so why do we identify with our bodies? That’s a question to make one blink, because it’s so obvious: of course we identify with our bodies, don’t be ridiculous!

There’s room for a good deal of variation in thinking about just why, though. I imagine there are people who would say that we are our bodies. (I’m not one of those.) At the very least, our bodies are the things that allow us to experience the world, to interact with the world, and with each other.

And in the virtual worlds, avatars are exactly the same: they are the things that allow us to experience and interact with the world and each other. And that’s why we identify with them.

(I don’t know how this would sound to someone for whom we are our bodies. Maybe insane.)

Of course the identification isn’t as tight (in general?), because we aren’t nearly as tightly bound to our AVs are we are to our bodies. We can’t feel physical pain or pleasure through AVs, we can change from one AV to another (and we even have to when we switch between non-interoperable worlds, boo), and so on. But it’s
the same in principle.

So when Chestnut Rau remarks quite accurately that our feelings about posting pictures of our bare pixel bottoms on the web “just goes to show how much we humans identify with our avatars“, she’s quite right. And our (often) even stronger feelings about pictures of our bare cellular bottoms shows how much we humans identify with our bodies!

“I met this avatar last night…”

Some people use “avatar” in ways that sound bizarre to me. One example I happened to read the other week describes how someone “was approached last year by an avatar from the Australia Council who was researching Australian artists…”. And that just sounds Wrong.

Applying the AV : SL :: Body : RL rule suggests why: that sentence comes out describing someone who “was approached last year by a body from the Australia Council…”.

Wahahaha!

Many times when I hear someone use “avatar” to mean “person” rather than “body”, I jump to the conclusion that they Don’t Get It. Although it’s jumping to a conclusion, it’s also often correct. :) On the other hand, I’ve also heard the word used this way by people who definitely do get it. Here is Eureka Dejavu:

And so it was that on my second night in Metaplace I ran into an avatar named Joe Castille.
…
The place was abuzz with avatars, many of whom, I learned, were interns and students participating in 3DSquared and involved with its parallel venture, GameCamp.

I know that Eureka Gets It, so my theory here is that she’s just in a slightly different linguistic community than I am. (I will speculate further that she may be more aware than most of us of the original meaning of “avatar”, as a deity embodied in physical form, and is using it as a word for a person as embodied in their AV, a concept that I admit I don’t really have a word for since I use “AV” to mean the form itself, not the person as embodied in it.)

I also wonder (since we’re getting into the subtleties) whether there’s a difference between “AV” and “avatar”, in either Eureka’s dialect or mine. Would she find it odder to refer to a person as an “AV” than as an “avatar”? I should ask her. :)

But anyway back to my own dialect, in which AV : SL :: Body : RL…

Do AVs have rights?

Well, do bodies have rights? I don’t think so. Part of what I wrote over on Second Thoughts was:

Bodies per se don’t have rights, avatars per se don’t have rights, vibrations in a phone line per se don’t have rights. People have all sorts of rights, and some of those rights involve their bodies, their avatars, and the vibrations that they cause in phone lines.

This seems to me to be nice and simple and correct; a place where the AV : SL :: Body : RL rule applies quite nicely. The rights that people have regarding their bodies are somewhat different from the rights regarding their AVs, but in both cases the rights belong to the people, they are just about the bodies or AVs.

“Nice AV!”

Here’s a place where the rule works less well, for a reason that’s at least moderately interesting to think about. Unless you’re a drunken immature male, you probably don’t say ‘Nice body!’ to people in RL as a general rule. But in SL, “Nice AV” or variations thereupon is a reasonably common and generally inoffensive thing to say.

Why is that?

It’s because, I think, we have so much more control over the look of our AVs than we do over the look of our bodies. Saying “Nice body!” to someone is complementing them on something they have only a limited amount of control over, and therefore (perhaps, or in some sense) reducing their agency, by reducing them to a piece of physical accident. But “Nice AV!” is complementing someone for something that they did in fact do (even if it was only to make good choices at their local BIAB store), and is therefore (perhaps, usually, among the people that I hang out with) less objectionable.

Which brings us quite naturally to…

If I said you had a beautiful AV, would you hold it against me?

:)

What a tangled web we weave…

So those of you who have read my profile’s “1st Life” tab, which says that I am a male sort of person, and maybe some others of you also, probably think that when I am being Girl Dale I am being a boy pretending to be a girl.

But I feel that I must here reveal that that is pretense, and actually I am a girl; that is, I am a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl.

Ha ha ha, no wait, wait! I was just kidding. Just pulling your leg for a moment. Just pretending.

Because that way, for that one brief shining moment, I was a boy pretending to be a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl.

And how many times in life do you get a chance to be something that complicated?

:)

(Also it is late at night.)

Trust and Shame in Pseudonymous Personal Relationships

I’m borrowing (oh alright, stealing) the title of Botgirl Questi’s post of the same name, because this post is mostly a long comment that I wrote for that posting. (Yes, more word-reuse! Conserve neurons!)

The original posting (which you should read) suggests that pseudonymity (by which I think she means withholding real life details, and speaking only and always from within a virtual identity) is not a healthy thing in close personal relationships. As we’ve come to expect from Botgirl :) the post is well thought out and thought-provoking.

My own first reaction to reading it was that it was obviously correct (I’ve seen all too many SL relationships founder on the rocks of RL/SL separation), but on the other hand it felt wrong. In particular it felt wrong for me, and for quite a few of my SL friends, who have been functioning quite comfortably for months or years in SL as virtual creatures, with no particular interest in RL facts about people except as they happen to come up in conversation.

What’s the difference between those two cases? Well, I realized, to first order the relationships that have foundered have been aspiring to something like marriage, whereas the ones where pseudonymity seems just fine have not. So I tried to write that down in the comments; here’s what I said (very lightly edited for clarity):

Very interesting subject! I wonder how much this applies to close personal relationships in general, and how much of it is specific to (to use a phrase that we’re all avoiding saying) romantic love relationships, especially the officially-monogamous virtual-marriage kind.

I have friends in Second Life who I consider to be close personal friends, and whose RL identities I know little or nothing about. And that doesn’t seem to me to be any problem. We are friends because we enjoy each other’s company, because we laugh at the same things, because we understand (or enjoy coming to understand) each other’s in-jokes, because the exchange of thoughts and ideas between us is deeply rewarding.

I don’t care if they’re male or female in RL, young or old, blue or green. Why should I? It’s useful to know what timezone they’re in :) and sometimes we talk about RL things, the weather, happenings in our respective nearby cities, and so on. But if it turned out that they’d been doing some protective masking there, and talking about the weather in Duluth when they’re really in Peoria, I wouldn’t feel angry or betrayed.

Friends are friends, darn it, and if they feel they need or want to keep some information private or obscured for their own reasons, being a friend imho includes being understanding about that, and letting them have that choice and that space, and assuming that there’s some good reason behind it.

I’ve never had a personal relationship in SL come to a bad end or otherwise turn unhealthy because someone (either me or the other person) insisted on pseudonymity, and I have a hard time imagining it happening, for the reasons I give above; friends are allowed to keep up whatever barriers we’re comfortable with.

Of course we’re also allowed to lower whatever barriers we want to lower :) and I’ve had close friends eventually tell me RL things about them that they generally keep hidden, and that’s a lovely feeling of trust and closeness. But I don’t think that means that all barriers must always be lowered for a close personal relationship to be a healthy one.

On the other hand I have seen people (all too many people) get into what they thought of as virtual marriages, nominally monogamous, exclusive, trust-me-with-everything sorts of things, where barriers have come to be a problem. In that case, where either implicitly or explicitly each party is promising complete openness to the other, then holding back on that promised or expected openness can be an unhealthy thing.

Maybe because I myself amn’t looking for a life-mate in SL :) I think it would be good to distinguish between things that are true of close personal friendships in general, and things that are true mostly of virtual marriages in particular. My current feeling is that “pseudonymity is unhealthy” may be true of the latter, but is not particularly true of the former.

It’s probably obvious that my thinking isn’t fully-baked here :) but there it is. Comments are most welcome, either here or perhaps better over in the original post. Or both!

Fun with anagrams

Phil, Mark, sweeties, call me anytime!

Virtual Identity

So there’s been this discussion going around about the social construction of virtual identity, and I’ve commented in both of those places at some length, and I thought to myself “hey here’s a deep an’ substantive topic that I can comment on instead of just posting pictures of WoW mounts and flaming desks and stuff”, and I started to write a weblog entry in my head, but when I got down to it everything that I had to say seemed so obvious that I stopped again.

But then I remembered how easy it is to post a weblog entry, so I started again. :)

To my thinking there are two interesting questions in this discussion:

First, to what extent is identity socially constructed? It’s pretty noncontroversial that essentially all normal healthy ordinary happy identities are formed to a significant extent through social interactions, that alot of how we think about ourselves has to do with how we think other people think of us, and so on. Whether social interaction is necessary for identity formation is a more open question. Some people have said in various places that identity (or consciousness, or some other word in basically the same drawer) is impossible without interaction. I tend to think that this is too strong, and that someone who managed to be born and survive without any interaction would still have some sort of identity, but we don’t really have much evidence one way or the other on that, and I’m not entirely wedded to the notion.

The second interesting question is whether RL and SL (atomic and virtual) identities are different with respect to that first question. Gwyneth’s original posting, linked to above, made the case that while atomic identities are influenced by social interaction, virtual identities depend entirely upon such interaction (“the digital self is only defined by the amount of interactions it has with other digital selves”; italics in the original). I disagreed with that at some length in the comments (basically just because I see no reason to think it’s true, and Gwyneth didn’t really present any), and disagreed with dandellion Kimban’s posting (also linked above) that said that the virtual self is different because there’s always the real self there looking at it. (My rather abstract but I think correct counter was that even in the case of my atomic self, there’s always the inner mental self looking at it, and that’s the same self that’s there looking at the virtual self.)

So basically my claim is that, however much socially-constructed we decide to say that identity is, I don’t see any convincing reason to think that the answer is any different for virtual selves than it is for atomic selves. This fits in with my cognitive drift in general, of course; when people point out something or other about how people are in SL, I’m forever chiming in to say “just like in RL!” (except for, you know, things like being able to fly and create zeppelins with our minds and stuff). But I think it’s also true!

So that’s me weighing in on an Important Issue of the Day for a change. I might at some point weigh in on this “augmentation vs immersion is really a false dichotomy” thing sometime, too (I don’t think it’s a false dichotomy at all), but not tonight. The most you’ll get tonight beyond this is some of the recently-uploaded Spennix pictures, and probably not even that. :)