Avatar rights come back
The Lawbringer: A prelude to avatar rights is an article kicking off what appears to be a series looking at avatar rights in the context of World of Warcraft. It has been a while since the original article on avatar rights has been commented on much on the web, though it still regularly gets discussed in books on Internet law. Very few worlds ever adopted any variant of this as a terms of service, and Metaplace doing so back when we ran a customer-facing service had no real impact other than garnering some publicity.
Oddly enough, the article has been much on my mind lately, mostly because of how it closes, with a prediction that avatar service providers will both hold immense quantities of personal information but also dominate the market, making it hard to use an alternate provider:
Someday there won’t be any admins. Someday it’s gonna be your bank records and your grocery shopping and your credit report and yes, your virtual homepage with data that exists nowhere else… it may be a little harder to write to Customer Service. Your avatar profile might be your credit record and your resume and your academic transcript, as well as your XP earned.
On the day that happens, I bet we’ll all wish we had a few more rights in the face of a very large, distributed server, anarchic, virtual world where it might be very very hard to move to a different service provider…
…It’s a hypothetical exercise.
For now.
Not very long ago my daughter was banned from Facebook. She has no idea why; neither do I. I would keep an eye on her page, and there was nothing untoward on it that I saw. She hadn’t been using it actively, and it took her several days to notice it was gone. And she’s just not interested in it enough to bother setting up a new one.
More interesting is the fact that it just went bye-bye, with no due process and no real recourse and no easy way to do anything about it. And that got me thinking about how important a Facebook page is becoming these days. It is the first stop for looking up a real person, and it is your default identity provider for many many parts of the Web. I commented to some folks at work that “my daughter was erased from the Internet.”
Not really true, of course; she’s got active profiles at sites like DeviantArt and GoodReads and more. But she’s using handles on those, not her real identity. On the other hand, these are often more representative of her than the Facebook page was. It’s all too easy to lose sight of the fact that your Facebook identity is still just a persona — an avatar; just one that happens to use your real name. And the more followers you have, the less this avatar of yourself resembles the real you, as you grow more concerned with privacy and oversharing with strangers.
Internet identities, particularly around social media, are ultimately a combination of self-censored thoughts and the accretion of mined quantified data. In other words, social media profiles are roleplayed chat plus a bunch of stats and badges. Social media is already “gamified” in that sense.
Doing a search & replace on the original article with “social network” instead of “virtual world” (in the spirit of “the world virtual”) is illuminating precisely because it doesn’t change very much.
Just as an extrapolation of gamification trends leads us full circle back to something that looks very much like the world as it already is, unchanged by the addition of points and badges, so too does this line of thinking lead me right back to the last paragraphs in that player rights essay. We do have a distributed, anarchic identity system full of data that is hard to migrate, and we don’t really have solid access to admins or very clear rights in the face of this database’s usage everywhere. If you’ve ever dealt with a credit reporting company, you know what this feels like; just realize that now it applies to who you are and not just whether you paid some bills.
What was a hypothetical exercise is so no longer, and we should expect the same waves of questions that existed with avatar identities and virtual governance to return. If my daughter stays banned and Facebook continues to get woven into everything we do on the Internet, what impact could that potentially have? Does it mean that her real name and identity are simply not available to her? Name camping? By the time she goes out to get a job, what will that mean?
Back in 2008 I did a talk called “High Windows” that sharply divided people. The core point of it was that as virtual worlds started gaining mass acceptance, they sidestepped answering the truly important questions. I wanted to make VW developers have a closer eye towards the consequences of what they did, because if we do not examine where we have been and where we are going, the title of this post might be a statement, or it might be more of a plaintive cry.
38 Responses to “Avatar rights come back”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I hear you man. How’s that thing go. Real life law is 10?? years ahead of virtual law (computer law)?
But there’s no law in real life about having the exact same name as someone else. We all have unique identifiers though. Just like StarCraft 2… (Called our SSN’s of course, for real life). We just can’t impersonate each other, claim to be each other, identity theft, etc.
WoW would never let us transfer our avatar to something else though, because they’d claim we just borrow it, yadda yadda, whatever.
I’d love it if you wrote a few more articles about this. It’s really interesting stuff.
Take it easy. I miss MetaPlace.
a
We’re currently borrowing time in other people’s worlds. Even Facebook to a degree. Just as we pay taxes to live on a plot of land, so do we pay for the privilege of creating themed surrogates in worlds. This is not a right, it’s purely a choice.
In that way, I don’t think we’ve arrived at Avatar’s Rights. Even on FB. We choose to partake. And just like every EULA and TOS that an end user never reads, we dive into these new worlds eyes only open to the promise, not thinking through what can be lost.
At the same time, I’m not sure what it’ll take before there needs to be some legal construct protecting a virtual self. I will guess we’ll be well past the point of having needed that construct before we set about creating it, but that’s par for the course 🙂
It’s gotten easier to avoid talking about this issue as the industries have backed away from virtual lifestyle environments and more into “just games”. But with the rise of legitimatized virtual goods transactions allowing people to transcend from hobby to career, I suspect the flashpoint will be financial in nature. For example, what happens if someone’s FB account is closed but they had invested hundreds of dollars in FB Credits?
I’ve thought about this and written about this a lot as you know.
And I keep coming back to the same thing: real-life, organic law must apply. That’s all. No magic woo-woo, no special avatar rights. Avatar rights are human rights, just as women’s rights are human rights.
But the problems I’m mainly concerned about — due process and free speech — don’t trump freedom of association (or the company’s right to make its own rules, which is part of its own right to free expression).
So I can only conceive of this lately as a free market in varying First-Amendment levels. Where I think this keeps going wrong is that
Google goes to bat for freedom of expression on the most disgusting issues — like fighting the Italian courts that wanted to take down the video of the bullying of the disabled boy and sanction Google. And the GNI busybodies fire up and support this, as if every case is a Skokie, as if there are a million Skokies, as if each case decides the level of First Amendment freedom for us all — even though it most certainly does not because no provider fully controls our expression or identity.
So there aren’t a million Skokies — or rather, there are, and nobody does anything if they are on Yahoo or Youtube. Facebook is uneven.
Yet on an Ad Sense cancellation, which can happen when some rival spitefully reports you falsely, there is no due process, no recourse, no transparency. So Google loves rule of law in some places and not in others — and it can’t be trusted to become a surrogate for a state actor for that very reason.
It seems to me you are mingling several issues that may not be best served by mingling. That is, you were trying to scare people into caring about avatar rights by trying to get them to realize that avatars are not just your character in an online game, they are you online period, your identity in all its digital manifestations, my bank account avatar, my health care avatar or whatever.
Except, those really aren’t avatars but digital lockers that belong to my organic self, different than my avatar, and even my Facebook persona isn’t really quite the same thing or space as my bank account.
What I really, really want to stay away from is concocting “special Internet stuff”. That’s what GNI is trying to do, and idealogues like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and John Perry Barlow who are more interesting in destroying property rights and collectivizing property than upholding constitutional civil rights for people. I’m definitely not interested in “Internet rights” exercises that are just a cover for this gang to go even further to undermnine intellectual property and copyright and indulge in their anti-corporate crusades under the guise of “rights,” i.e. with the “Net Neutrality” scam.
I used to advocate having the First Amendment apply to online spaces which are like malls. I thought there was solid Supreme Court backing for this. And maybe that is still the way to go. But in about 10 years of thinking of this, I began to see the value of freedom of association not being trumped by freedom of expression on two issus:
o Amazon being able to say “No,” they will not store WikiLeaks cables. They did the right thing. They were not in fact “pressured”. They and PayPal must have the right to deflect anarchist radicals who merely want to feign being intermediaries as a hideout when in fact they are inciters and direct actors. So both for the reason of protecting their own TOS against extreme anarchists AND for the reason of protecting their right to pursue their business without pressure from government of any kind (right or left), I’m for making the First Amendment compliance be voluntary, be a goal, and be a free market with a range. I think that’s the only way to prevent coercion.
o Facebook anonymous accounts — here again, the GNI, Berkman Center gang and Sen. Durbin were all harnessed to lobby against Facebook’s policy requiring identity. I think this was all wrong, and Facebook is right to keep an identity policy. And it was particularly wrong to demand an “activists’ account” as a special dispensation. Again, I don’t think the First Amendment values can be coercive — it’s about “Congress shall make no law” not about “companies shall make a policy”. After all, radical activists who don’t want to divulge their identity, or anybody of any political stripe, can go on G-talk or Skype or Twitter.
I was really annoyed when Ed Castronova created a “Bill of Rights” a few years ago when he made “publishers’ rights” of game gods trump players’ rights, and didn’t affirm freedom of expression of avatars. And he did this (as others have) not only because he simply is a statist when it comes to virtual worlds, but because he thinks you “break the game” if you have players have too many rights, i.e. they will nerf things, or have out of character stuff, or whatever. If you have a coercive First Amendment policy, why PETA could come into World of Warcraft and denounce cruelty to furry animals or something, or Amnesty International could come in and demand no more torture of human beings.
That’s an absurdity, because those RL organizations are probably not going to waste their time on pixels but even if they where, the notion that freedom of association is never trumped by freedom of expression in real-life court cases (Boy Scouts, Sony) would save the game god.
I’m just not worried about game god rights as much, because they already have them and already enjoy a power monopoly. It’s the due process issues (unfair punishment, expulsion without appeal, loss of property, etc.) that many seek from them, even more than freedom of expression, which they might cede for various goals like “civility” or “freedom from racism” etc.
We really do need to work towards the greater good of an Internet that is commonly-owned and operated for the benefit of all humanity, not for private profit.
Until that day arrives, we have exactly those rights that our corporate overlords grant us, and not one iota more.
As long as they can take their ball and go home, we play by their rules.
If we want to have a virtual reality in which individuals and their avatars have certain unalienable rights, step one is revolution. We have to create a commonly-owned, non-profit infrastructure and stock it with content bound only by the rules that we set.
Freeing ourselves from the tyranny of existing networks is the only way I can see of replacing corporate oligarchy with democracy.
Ironically, and uncomfortably, I found myself nodding as I read through Prokofy’s post. However, one relatively minor qualm:
This is simply a failure to recognize a virtual world for what it is: a marketplace of ideas, a place where communication takes place and messages are exchanged. As a business owner, Prokofy, you should know that the best strategy for cultivating brands, acquiring customers, etc., is, essentially, the simple act of taking your business to where your prospective customers congregate. Virtual worlds, like newsletters and shopping malls, facilitate direct business-to-consumer interaction. Writing off “pixels” as a waste of time is itself a waste of time, time that could be better spent on, at least, investigating these outlets.
You have talked about this for so long I hate to ask you to clarify for just me 🙂 There a link I can visit to read your thesis? Reason I ask is because I want to understand better what you term as an “Avatar”.
Right now the virtual worlds seem like enlightened autocracies: ALL of the power rests in the corporations that fund them, but they’re not really anti-player because they recognize there-in lies their power.
I think I can see natural Law work for avatars because the evolution of societies around resource control and distribution bear some resemblance to the kind of growing bi-directional accountability between player and world owners.
But the big difference is you have many different companies building many different worlds concurrently, rather than a mass of culture slowly evolving a single (albeit often disparate) society or a mass of culture imposing theirs over another. Having so many different competitors adopt a common set of operating principals is, well, that these companies incorporate the worlds themselves and adopt governances.
THAT is a very hard pill for them to swallow.
@prok:
All social networks evolve social hierarchies. There are no exceptions.
The best you can do is create transparent contracts for membership or use bound to the rights of use granted under the contract. Whether you call that a corporation or collective is simply a term distinction within the legal framework by which they are constituted and ownership of assets. After that, it is a matter of resource collection, allocation and means by which affordances are allocated and norms are recognized and enforced.
It is the matter of the decisions that establish these that ensure hierarchies will emerge. Again, there are no exceptions. Ayn Rand and the objectivists failed and continue to fail to accept those inevitabilities.
The problem I have with this is that the law most likely to apply is not the law dealing with citizens of countries. It’s the law of consumers dealing with companies. And that’s all well and good when it’s a largely real world scenario, and when interaction with any given service provider is largely optional. But that does not feel to me like where this is heading.
@Morgan, I’m in the same boat here, the railing against presumed erosion of property rights and vast anti-corporate conspiracy aside.
Nicely put Prok.
Though I do agree with Raph’s concern too; the right *kinds* of ‘organic’ law need to be applied. It is unrealistic to apply competition as a solution to this problem too, there’s a strong benefit to certain services if they gain monopolies, to the point that the loss of competitive motivation is completely outweighed. Natural monopolies or monopolies that provide such huge consumer benefits (and by monopoly I also mean oligopoly) really need to be special cased by law unless they’re purely luxury. Anything else tends to lead to rampant abuse.
oh good… human rights… not another delusion about being gods etc….
well finally i guess, after the “children” are affected.;)
the only “new” factors the laws need to deal with are the ones brought by network scales and acceleration.
laws had to deal with this in the beginning of the age of industrial machines, and will have to deal with it again today….. hopefully with social justice and the individual in mind….
but so far, not so much. eh? so much for history and learning new tricks.
btw— http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/playground/
Well… if you want to not have to cede your rights as a citizen in a space that is, largely, commercial you need to lobby your government for virtual places where you can behave as a citizen rather than as a customer.
I know that the Bill of Rights applies in a mall (to some degree), but that’s a very different proposition to a mediated space where you are afforded tools for very specific activities and have agreed to very specific contract requirements. In my mind, many of the social networks like FB are more akin to clubs than to malls. You agree to a set of rules; in some cases, those are over-and-above what the law requires. If you break the rules (one of which may be as fuzzy as “if you piss off the owners”), you get kicked out. The right to assemble gives *you* the right to get together with people you want to… it doesn’t preserve your right to assemble with people who don’t want you there.
Similarly, companies can have employment requirements that are more restrictive than the law, as long as they don’t contravene the law. For example, the law in your state may not place sexual identity or preference in a protected class, but your company can say, “We have a zero tolerance policy against LGBT harassment.” The law doesn’t say you need to overlook someone’s criminal record, but your company can make a policy decision on that, as well.
Facebook is important, I agree. But, in the case of your daughter, Raph, your remedy is a contractual one. If she didn’t breach the contract, you have the right to contact FB and get a remedy. If, for example, she had been harmed in some way by an unfair breach of the contract on their part (for example, unable to contact someone for a job interview), she can try the civil courts.
Do I think this is ideal? No. At some point I think there will need to either be an express admission on the part of the government that our online lives are somehow “above” “normal” contractual restrictions; essentially, that we need some new laws (probably commercial) for how we deal with these spaces. Or we need a civic space that is unconnected to commercial interests. Just as we have spaces like courts, libraries, voting stations, public streets, public parks, etc., where our civic life trumps commercial interests, perhaps we need a virtual commons.
I think we’d have a whole different set of discussions about what would and wouldn’t work there, though. Anonymity and pseudonimity would be major issues, for example. You have the right, in real life, to not divulge your name and stats to strangers, for example… but you do need to provide ID for all kinds of civic, legal and commercial activities. I can’t, for example, get a library card under my pen name. I can’t vote as “Mr. Anonymous.” I can’t tell the cop who pulls me over that I’m “Frodo X. Kirk.”
So… there would be some more rights in a civic virtual space, but probably also some more responsibilities. Which is the trade-off, as always, between interactions between citizens and customers/businesses.
A little off track but that is one of the charms of FB: unfriending particularly in so-called cause pages or the personal pages of those who publicly espouse causes. You get to find out how well or if they tolerate dissent. Some aren’t registering friends; they are recruiting followers. Others accused of such on the contrary are very tolerant of dissent for whatever reasons they practice toleration. I won’t go into cases because that will lead to debates entirely orthogonal to this thread. I simply point out that the affordances of Facebook and other social network software systems are incredibly revealing of the social norms of the people using them. And that is a good thing.
Raph,
When I say that “real-life organic law must apply,” I don’t mean the corporate TOS.
I mean the notions of tort, property, First Amendment etc etc. that all ensue from organic law made by countries and international institutions when it concerns international law.
And it would be great if there were companies that literally followed the First Amendment and made much more enlightened TOS.
But how can this be brought about if coercion is not to be used? Freedom of expression does not trump freedom of association. And in a liberal democracy, they need to be in balance.
What is your solution for that paradox?
@len you’re just spouting rhetoric — you need to explain how you think freedom of expression can legally and rationally trump freedom of association.
@Yukon, hogwash, “we” don’t need anything of the sort. There’s no “we” and there is no “common good” — that’s just the problem. The set of people who can determine that aren’t game gods and coders, and their good is not demonstrable good for the rest of us. The founders of the US Constitution which has pretty sturdily defended democracy and rights all these years, and provided the means to restore them when absent, such as with women and slaves, are more to be trusted as to what the common good is than some random collection of anonymous people on the Internet who show up.
The problem is that while devising your “bill of avatar rights” to get away from the unconscionable corporate TOS (as it was rightly called by the judge in the Linden Lab v. Bragg case) and the unfair gamegods in your own ranks, you’re coming up with something that could be just as oppressive because of this “common good” stuff and insipient collectivism.
I realize that is what you mean… but real-life law is itself saying that the corporate TOS is what would apply. I think, based on legal precedents to date, that barring nationalization of these sorts of services, we’re likely to see them treated as corporations who can do whatever they want within the law that applies to them.
In other words, they would be the ones who get freedom of expression, property ownership, etc; you wouldn’t when on their turf, because it is well-established that freedom of expression is construed by the courts as meaning that the government can’t constrain what you say, not a private company. As the law stands right now, none of the typical rights apply to individuals dealing with a corporation; all of those slide over to torts etc, and all recourse is handled via lawsuit and the court of public opinion.
I can’t think of a way, honestly. At some point, someone or some group has to say “these are the rules from now on.” The creation of the Constitution itself was only a moderately democratic process, and had plenty of coercion involved.
Raph, I get it about real life law. Again, the proposition is to say that real-life law, which has a perfectly good First Amendment, and perfectly good torts and property provisions, and perfectly good due process, *get to apply*.
All you’re saying is “well but that’s no good because it doesn’t apply”. Surely you see that’s not an argument — it’s merely saying “but they’re not state actors so the law can’t apply to them”.
So…define them as state-like actors, like malls or public spaces like Marsh v. Alabama and you’re done. But as we know, the recent Sony case threw out that argument. When a judge in California is sat on by enough Silicon Valley gaming and VW companies who want this, it will happen in the course of things. Nobody thought gay marriage would ever be legalized; it is in some places and eventually will become a norm. If you endlessly said “but that’s the law”, you would never ever change things like getting gay marriage. It’s just not the way to approach things.
The question is *what results would you get* if you applied law to games as if they were countries. All game god advocates like Castronova have been able to do on this discussion for years is spout barking nonsense about how Amnesty International would come in and stop torture in World of Warcraft and “ruin the game,” and all people like Bartle can do is complain that their utopian egalitarian vision of no land sales *like that evil Prokofy wants* would be disrupted if you had external powers of state defining their rights. But that’s all baloney. The law would be applied not to disrupt the fiction of a game, or disrupt some coherent world rules, but to protect players from the following injustices:
o loss of their accounts without case, without due process, right of appeal, right to face their accusers, right to mount an adversarial defense, right of compensation if property is seized
o acceptance of intellectual property and copyright of players
o acceptance of freedom of speech on the forums and inworld
etc.
And it’s really indefensible to call the Constitution something with “plenty of coercion”. The separation of powers, the checks and balances, the Supreme Court — all these things made it a system of freedom and not coercion. If it was as coercive as you’re implying, the result would be something like the Communist system. But that’s not what we have. *I totally reject* the Marxist professors’ gambit (which I just heard this week from my son’s outrageous caricature of a Marxist professor in his college) that because the Constitution was framed “a long time ago” or “only by white men” that somehow we “need a new one” (i.e.: we need to script socialism into it lol). No, we don’t. We have a great constitution that has weathered many storms and protected liberties. And I’m confident that these giant social utilities will eventually be regulated as all kinds of things have been in their day and no game god’s precious creativity is going to get trampled in the process.
And seriously, how can you square the circle of having free corporations, and not nationalization of them, but application of the First Amendment to them as if they were state actors? You can’t. The only way is to encourage a free market in a range of services and levels of freedom. In fact you will find people don’t want freedom. Or they want it, but they want it by coercing others unfairly. They’re all for pressing their vagina art on everybody else at Facebook, even though most people don’t want to stare at juveniles who make vagina paintings as they face on Facebook. If they want that, can’t they go on another site? But they don’t want to go on some small little site. They want *attention* and they want to *force* the issue.
It’s like those at the Berkman Center forcing the issue of anonymous accounts. Most people don’t want anonymous jerks bothering them on Facebook. They *like* identity. That’s what FB is all about. But for the sake of these activists who want anonymity AND popularity in a mass platform, we’re supposed to roll over and suffer Anonymous along with anonymous. No, I’m not for doing that. Want to be anonymous? Go on Twitter, Blogger, Live Journal, G-talk, whatever. Go support open source freaky Diaspora. But leave Facebook to be the mainstream thing that it is. That’s ok.
It would be better, of course, if we could apply the rulings on malls — that they have to be treated as public spaces. But even malls, with those rulings, might allow religious groups to give out literature or political groups to give out pamphlets, but they won’t want people going around with billboards of vagina paintings passing out vagina pictures, you know? And that’s ok. The First Amendment isn’t absolute; it has restrictions as to “time, place, and manner”.
Sure, Marsh v. Alabama can be dusted off for the modern cyber age. Maybe it should be, or something approximating it.
What has to happen, Raph, for this concept to move forward, is for some virtual world or game to actually offer these rights. You went farther than most with Metaplace and Second Life actually goes pretty far by contrast with others. But somebody has to offer it going further, and see if they can serve as a model. See if they can survive the onslaught of gambling, child porn, grotesque obscenities, edgecasing and Haskelling that will go on with this and see if they can craft something viable.
In Second Life, this Gorean dress maker with an ugly build didn’t like the fact that I put up “Huge Tall Pine Tree” (your best friend in Second Life on the Mainland!) along my parcel to block the view of her ugly store and its wares. So to trump me, she put up a giant spinning block with hideous real photographs of it of gory bloody operations and burn victims — really gross. This thing was spinning away and driving away all my customers for weeks. We were all abuse-reporting it endlessly as “broadly offensive” — but there is such a backlog, nothing happened. Finally a Linden came and flicked it back to the Gorean’s lost & found in inventory. She put it out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Most people don’t think a giant cube with pictures of severely wounded human beings, cut off limbs, etc. are appropriate. and yet, this is what people do when they wish to test limits.
Under the “broadly offensive” rubric, the Lindens have removed everything from half-exposed breasts in PG to classic public domain art with nudity in PG to art installations of somebody pissing on the Koran to protest the hanging of gays in Iran to giant real-life pictures on megaprims used to harass people to God knows what. They have, in a sense, established a vast jurisprudence for the Metaverse here in their practice. The limits are not what everybody appreciates. They let this infamous child avatar dressed in BDSM get up by, after first banning the person for “ageplay” which is not allowed — then they were let back, and got an apology (!).
And yet, while parsing these things carefully, there are hordes of people whose accounts are summarily deleted daily, especially if they don’t speak English and can’t explain themselves. Remember what Ed Castronova said about the Customer Service State. That gets very expensive.
C’mon, Prok, don’t relabel to refute what you can’t counter. TOS Is the legal concept that governs the use of assets provided to you under contract. It is not deeper or broader than that. Those claiming freedom of expression for game assets are pretty much the same as people who bare breasts on a beach where the local authorities have explicitly prohibited such. While I agree that the game makers and players and folks such as Castronova spout a lot of nonsense, I think it much like the other thread here where folks are claiming godhood when in effect, they are idol makers. Code doesn’t make law. It makes a generation of frustrated coders feel better to assert that it does. Makes them feel “empowered”. Recruiting worshippers or obligating by contract are not totally dissimilar acts.
Two quickies:
That’s 10 years of suit appeals and $300,000 in legal fees in the worst case, keep in mind. Remedy is not automatic, and often must be coerced.
Speaking of,
This isn’t what he said. Rather:
Emphasis mine.
Ultimately, the issue (well, one major issue at the core of all this) is the tricky legal distinctions that exist when one discusses “real property” (not meaning real vs. virtual, but as used here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_property). Virtual spaces are not considered real property and are not governed as such. Largely, presently, they are considered personal property.
A third:
Combined with:
There is a discussion to be had here about disenfranchisement, and the reduction of power that comes with being outside the majority. For the sake of argument I’d concede the predicate that there will always be some small solution-provider willing to cater to the minority that feels the need for greater anonymity, but only with the caveat that it will most likely not be an alternate mainstream service, by definition. But power is lost by so moving, by hanging out someplace other than where the majority congregates, by literally self-marginalizing.
And as stated, the move may be forced: you may be exiled with little recourse, particularly if you are at a social or economic disadvantage (“don’t speak English and can’t explain themselves”, can’t afford an attorney). Which is, really, where we started (“my daughter was erased from the Internet”).
The degree to which the United States can exercise territorial sovereignty in cyberspace (and thus enforce individual Constitutional rights) is an unsettled question.
I’m deeply concerned by the intrusion of any governmental entity not comprised of and elected by the residents of cyberspace. Having the unwired dictate terms appeals about as much as having Iran pass laws that are binding on my home town.
An uprising by the citizenry might get a corporate hierarchy to grant a bill of rights to users, but I don’t see any mechanism to prevent the same hierarchy from reversing their decision, absent the users also being the primary stakeholders.
If that’s “collectivism”, so be it. I don’t see American farm or utility co-ops breeding any frothing Bolsheviks, but perhaps “red state” has an interpretation I’ve overlooked.
Yukon, I’m TOTALLY opposed to having the wired dictate policy. Because they are already doing that. We’re constantly witnessing the Google-sponsored lobbies and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and all their cronies attempt to write law and policy by invading the FCC and FTC with their friends, instead of through the democratic legislative process. So no thanks, I don’t want your wired communizing and collectivizing resources and creating socialist policies that I didn’t elect and most people didn’t elect.
All you’re trying to do is get a group of your pals together in cyberspace and declare by fiat that you have “rights” and a “constitution” and “cyberspace is yours” — the technocommunist John Perry Barlow did the same thing (and I have debated at length, and even wrote a counter manifesto to offset his famous one).
If cyberspace was really walled off “up there” and not influencing our real lives, one might entertain the notion of those denizens of cyberspace having their way — although they’re not all going to be on the same page about this and now there aren’t just your gaming pals but half a billion Facebook friends who don’t think as you do.
But cyberspace isn’t walled off. The awful thing is that it *does* influence reality in the worst kind of ways. That’s exactly why the gamification thing is so *dreadful*.
Collectivists always try to bat away critics by claiming they are McCarthyites or invoking frothing Bolsheviks, but the fact is, collectivism is criminal. It destroys private property; it harms the individual’s rights. That’s why it has to be opposed. Nobody died and made you king. You don’t have a constitutent assembly. You don’t have a process. You just want to click and put yourself and your friends in charge just because you’re online and can click some widget. No thank you.
BTW, on the factual matter of your daughter, Raph.
What most likely happened is that she chatted back and fast too frequently with too many people or in a group, or she added friends too fast.
The company has some kind of algorithms that set off alarms when those things happen and that activates bots or real mods who take action apparently without really looking at the content or context.
My daughter and her friends have had it happen a number of times that they are merely chatting away about their high school or are merely adding friends from mining friend’s friends they’ve met from another high school, and suddenly those mods will show up with stern warnings of banning and spam, mystifying them. My son had the experience of suddenly being locked out of his account and then had it deleted for no reason he could fathom. While he has the usual menu of stupid kid trick Youtubes and nonsense, I check it constantly and stay in touch with what both kids are doing on FB and I could see a thing that was actionable. He shrugged, and waited awhile and simply made the account again. Kids are more casual about this unfairness — I’ve had my kids also simply close their accounts some times because they get tired of drama and hate.
The bottom line is that the abuse reporting system is absolutely abysmal. I had the Woodbury jerks impersonating me, making accounts with my RL name and picture and my SL avatar, harassing me endlessly. I would try to pull down the menu to protest this — I couldn’t even do this because it demanded an avatar UUID or whatever they call them on FB and I could never find a way to capture those such as to be able to file the report. I saw from the various FB justice groups that there are scores of people who had exactly the same experience and were hugely frustrated. The template was broken for ages before they finally fixed it.
In that sense, Twitter is much, much better. While their Get Satisfaction rerouting is awful, if you get to the direct help desk of the Twitter people themselves, even though they make you send your driver’s license to get action, they still do take action on unlawful impersonation and death threats and such. To be sure, for every person who has gotten them to act as I have, there are others who *don’t* get them to act.
The appetite for justice is ENORMOUS with these services. What you have to think of when you devise this or that rights scheme is what happens when you endlessly affirm rights but don’t have the justice mechanisms to back them up. (That’s why I don’t care for the newfangled concept of “Right to Protect” very much at the UN).
Justice is hugely expensive. Even so the same tools that cause the problems in the first place (unconscious automation) could be used to make filing reports easier and more efficient. They are currently very inadequate.
Serious question: does oligarchy == collectivism the way you are conceptualizing them?
(Also, not picking on you Prokofy! Your posts are incredibly dense with interesting mental hooks. 🙂 )
An oligarchy is a collective, and in most cases there exists enormous pressure within the group to act in ways that benefit the group rather than the individual. Think cartels or (classicly) trusts. I would see that as far more likely to evolve than, say, 4Chan suddenly acting like an anarcho-syndicalist commune.
We seem to have just a few choices.
1) have the policy effectively dictated by companies, which may well grow to near-monopoly status in the market.
2) get the government to regulate, and use our influence as citizens to make sure they don’t do in a way that just favor lobbyists and corporations
3) have the wired dictate it, which basically requires a bunch of upheaval, actually
I have advocated handling virtual places as “places” for a very long time now. But nothing much has changed overall since I wrote these mailing list posts 8 or 9 years ago. It is still a horrendous mishmash. In practical terms, the rise of kids’ worlds and theme parks as the dominant form of virtual world will push strongly towards corporate authority over the spaces, with a leavening of COPPA style protections on things.
@raph: I think your first point is rather important. The critical mass/monopolist thing is a threat to “free” cyberspace.
I think this can be avoided, to some extent, by forcing monopolists to use open standards that break their monopoly. So yes, regulation that removes lockin-strategies might be needed. This isn’t unique to community software though, applies to word-processing too.
I also think that TOSes that present walls-of-text-in-a-tiny-window to end-users should be considered invalid. Nobody read them (5-10 pages of gibberish?). Nobody understand them. Users understand them only after they have become addicts, that is, when they hit the boundaries.
I think companies running larger social systems should be bound to a default TOS based on common end-user perception of fairness, and if they want to deviate from that they should have a simple bullet-point list that even dim people read and understand before joining the system. I think companies aiming for the mass market actually should be required to tailor for the mass market.
With such a system you could simply have a government agency that take complaints from users. They then inspect the system. If the system doesn’t stick to regulations, they simply shut down the entire system after a period of running daily fines. No courts involved. No exessive burden placed on end-users, which is rather important.
The company running the system can then sue the agency if they want to. Of course, effective regulation requires rules that are easy to evaluate.
You absolutely should get one vote in any virtual world of which you are a member.
You should absolutely get zero votes in any virtual world of which you are not.
That’s what I mean when I say “wired” vs. “unwired”. That’s democracy, not socialism. It’s the precise opposite of elitism.
Collective action in the form of co-ops and the like strengthens individual rights by pooling efforts and leveraging combined resources. It’s not criminal — it’s perfectly legal. Thousands of cooperative enterprises exist in the United States, for everything from utilities to groceries. It just average, everyday people pooling their buying power and influence to get a better deal.
There do exist people to whom that’s deeply threatening. I’d say such fears are a wee bit over the top.
raph.
1 and 3 are basically the same… the “wired” are the “hired” and thus the same “cogs” of whichever corporate master they sign up for. Be it VC or Disney…correct?;)
So that leaves number 2… which of course has been worked out of existance as “popular” for 30 plus years….and of course the “great middle” has been erased during that time , making the entire system to where it exists today…. “balancing on virtuality and delusional myths”
which is why i assume so many pay to hear “gods” talk about “playtime + games” as if theyre something to master for personal/civic health 😉
The seperation of virtuality and reality, is NOT a “edu-techie-philosphical-god debate” its now after 60 years plus come to full “value” in our lives and the lives to come….
Theme park/kids game toys -worlds.. are not the problem, only the way they are managed and financed. How they are valued…. and that is where the “culture” that already has devalued NEWS and PRESS via virtualization is shown wanting as they now “digest” GAMEZ and GAMIFICATIONZ as the fodder which is sold by the same memes.
Before every person pledges alliagence to the corporation that pays theyre weekly salary, i suggest each person spends a few months learning the history of reality, as opposed to racking up hit points/vote calls for the latest virtualities entertainment programs.
Of course the experts at “Gartner” want that gamificationz reality to sell reports on by 2015… The Trojan Horse was made of shiny metals too- most likely.;)
Random: It feels like the necessary step is the creation of a legal entity that’s not a corporation, not the state, but acts as a set of trustees. A sort of sub-national state, I guess. That seems overcomplicated, though. But this seems like the easiest way to distinguish “corporation for the sake of profit” from “corporation which provides a social service”.
Reminiscing: A blog that I read recently went through an ownership upheaval that resulted (in large part because of the original blogger’s considerate attitude) in a community-elected set of moderators with administrative powers and a promise to use them only as the community sanctioned. It was really an awe-inspiring piece of niche activism where people carved out a safe space for themselves that I wish I could see repeat itself elsewhere. (Slacktivist, if anyone was wondering. On Typepad.) Unfortunately, one of the main reasons it worked out well was because everyone had a good sense of who everyone else in the core community was.
Musing: The disenfranchising of anonymity is a really interesting legal tangle, Peter S., but I don’t have anything close to resembling the know-how to start poking at it. Anonymity has always been a side-effect, initially a happy one, but a mildly reviled one now… and I wonder whether or not it’s useful to reframe it as a right of a netizen. Dunno. I’m being ivory tower, though; I haven’t been anonymous online in a long time.
@Michael Chui,
Oh, indeed. Plus, there’s conversations about avatar-as-personal-LLC that would also demand some attention…
…which makes the geek in me want to connect that to Personal Area Networks as found in the latest incarnation of Shadowrun…
…making my real point: no, neither do I. ;D
(No, seriously! It’s the adoption of avatar-identity into meatspace, the mirror of injection or real identity into the Internet, and the ultimate slippery-slope conclusion of you-are-your-ID-number sorts of systems [you are your personal IPvX domain number, in both realms].)
Yukon Sam: You absolutely should get one vote in any virtual world of which you are a member.
That would destroy artistic worlds, or worlds aiming for a narrow subculture.
How so? I can think of any number of artistic or subcultural communities that thrive through either majority rule or unanimous consensus.
And there’s no particular reason that such couldn’t exist side-by-side with corporate/feudal hierarchies, for those people who find the responsibilities of freedom too intimidating (and those who enjoy directing such people).
I think the concerns referenced are “worlds created specifically as artistic statements” and “worlds where players outside the target audience achieve voting majority.”
For an example of the former, a world where users live the roles of oppressed serfs — perhaps an educational world intended to demonstrate what life was like under such a system of government. Voting rights within the environment would damage the intent, though i can see a case to be made for voting rights outside, as long as everyone works towards the same intent.
For an example of the second case, imagine a world intended for fans of Twilight, which gets overrun by Anonymous and is voted into being a Justin Bieber fan world (sort of the inverse of http://xkcd.com/591/ )
How about this? Or is that more like TTP?
Valid points.
Okay, I’ll backpeddle a bit. I was thinking more in terms of general-purpose social spaces, but I see nothing wrong with specialized spaces where people agree to a more restrictive charter in order to participate. You’d still at a minimum have the sole right we enjoy today, which is the right to log off and unsubscribe if things are not to your liking.
I’m in the early concept stages of my first (small) virtual world, and I have to admit that as a creator, I want the central theme to remain consistent. So as an armchair designer starting to get out of the armchair, I might not be willing to put my money where my mouth is.
Yes oligarchs generally always benefit from state patronage so they are collectivist too.
Raph, the choices aren’t as limited as you state, and you’re pre-stacking the deck again to let the game-gods win by scarifying about government regulation or draconian corporate TOS less enlightened than your own. The answer is simple: freedom. Freedom to be englightened like you are — or not. And a free market that picks this — or doesn’t. That means doing nothing. If the government is really threatening to regulate — and I find that LOTS less scary than Richard Bartle and Ren Reynolds regulating — then we can adapt as needed but encourage them to do nothing. But the answer is not to pre-empt that and make self-regulatory bodies which will be as bad or worse than the current companies’ rule.
A free market in First-Amendment level services should be encouraged to emerge. Some companies will voluntarily keep their draconian game-god policies; others will evolve and become better and more fair. We get to pick. So do they. Everybody is happy.
The government should regulate if we must have regulation; not Ed Castronova and the Terra Nova people, which is what they are clamouring for now. NO THANK YOU.
They cannot at all be trusted in this operation and the first thing they’d do is put in mass bans. They have to be fought hammer and tong. A government could be appealed to; litigated again; re-elected. Not so Ed Castronova or Richard Bartle. Again NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2011/04/no-no-keep-the-game-gods-from-self-regulatory-bodies.html
Well, the argument you are making is basically for the status quo. The free market is what got you the TOSes that you have now. The free market has well-established precedent that customers have no First Amendment rights when on the business’ turf. And so far, despite speeches and examples, ALL companies have kept the draconian game-god policies. There isn’t any market pressure to “evolve and become better and more fair” — instead, the evolutionary pressure to date has led us to where we are.
To get something else, the users — the customers — would need to vote with their feet. And they haven’t.
Voting with our feet is unsatisfactory if everyplace we walk is essentially the same.
The free market worships at the alter of the Profit. If granting rights will maximize returns, it shall be done; if taking rights away increases returns, it shall be done.
The best deal that the players get in such a scenario is enlightened despotism, where there may be a great deal of liberty but that liberty can be rescinded at any time on any pretext.
But if the players buy into the world, own it, and establish their own governmental structures, the only entity that can abridge the rights of the people are the people themselves. While that has its own limitations and dangers, I believe these to be much less than rule by arbitrary TOS or unelected panel.
I wonder if having a right to a grey shard would cure much of this.
Stupid rulesets applied to all humanity by corporations, like it or not, plus holding all our data hostage, plus having no support… that doesn’t seem like a path to profits long term nor for the “good of the mud”.
Yet here we are, and yes those are the motives, profits and the good of the mud. It ain’t the motives, it’s the nearsightedness.
Just a note on open standards as a means to ensure increased competition. Systems like Facebook could be required to:
1. Provide profile-exports. Let users export the profiles, messages and so on as a downloadable XML dump. That would enable users to move to a competing system that allows for Facebook-imports.
2. “Exiled-authentication.” Let users keep an identity in the system they left that can be adressed from the external system. That makes it possible to stay in touch with their friends without opening the system for spammers.
3. Provide cross-world messaging. This is known from the MUD world. Let users that that has switched to a different system send private messages to their friends in the competing system.
Basically: Make it easy to leave and require the most critical person-to-person “stay-in-touch” aspect to be driven by open standards which effectively makes for a “distributed super-world” rather than many insular worlds.