The Politics of Second Life

I have started writing articles for Rez Magazine.  I'll be posting the unedited versions here for your reading. These articles are not so much opinion as an attempt to get your own noggin thinking about all things SL.  This article was posted in the November issue.  Enjoy!

Welcome to my first column for Rez Magazine.  I hope my writing provides some serious thought about all things SL.  I also hope a little reflection, laughter and insight comes to you from my writings too.  Friday says I need to make it edgy.  So to keep with Friday’s demands I thought I would begin my first article about the politics of Second Life.  No… really, politics. Okay if you’re still reading I’m shocked.  You should be concerned about your state of mind at this point and thinking about getting some serious professional help.  But regardless of mine or yours mental health I am going to talk about politics in SL.  Why take on such an endeavor?  Well, where there are people there is politics.  In the United States, Americans have to make a big decision this month.  Many will run from that decision or ignore it altogether.  In Second Life, you can run from it, but you can’t ignore it.  One day you’re going to have to face SL politics because it will affect some part of your virtual life if it’s not already.  It may even affect the puppet master pulling on your avatars strings.  So I’m going to discuss it and in doing so I want to start off with a little story.

Jane Doe was new to SL. She started saving her lindens for her own place almost from the first day she rezzed onto the grid (see how I got a plug in for the magazine, editor take note).  After a few weeks she found a job as a dancer in some cheap dive.  There were only ever a few patrons there for her to entertain but she did her best to give them a good show trying to do the best she could with her limited funds and lack of shape shifting skills.  Living in cheap mainland apartments and having to deal with people invading her privacy took Jane’s patience to its limit. The couple next door was again making incredible noises with nothing but a paper thin prim wall between them.  The sounds emanating from the voice channel did nothing if not amplify the sounds of their erotic pixel love and cerebral thoughts behind it.  At first it was fun to listen to but after a while she got tired of it.  Or maybe it reminded Jane of her own loneliness.  In any case Jane had enough.  She also didn't know about the mute button yet.

For months Jane worked and saved her lindens. At the same time she moved up to better jobs, well better dance jobs in better clubs. Money was starting to come in and she finally had enough for a down payment and tier for her own parcel of land. So Jane started looking in the classifieds to find that perfect place to make her new home.  Eventually with a little digging around she found a “new” sim with decent priced parcels she could afford for her to place a home on.  The parcels were quite large for the price so she discussed the terms with the sim owner.  He seemed decent enough and he promised that he would only be leasing out the parcels for people’s homes.  So Jane paid the man the thousands of lindens she had saved for her parcel and started immediately thinking about how she would mold the parcel to her idea of a virtual utopia.

For about three weeks life was good for Jane.  She had purchased a small home, found some low prim cheap furniture to put in it and had actually started molding her land with some nice landscaping.  Then everything started to change.  First of all across the street from her parcel a slum like warehouse popped up.  The place sat right in the middle of the sim and was a terrible eyesore.  She asked the sim owner about his neighborhood rule and he basically told her she had no say.  It was his sim and he needed the cash.  So she erected a large wall on the one side of her property to block it and continued with her design.  In the meantime she got to know some of her neighbors and they too complained.  They all felt helpless even after banding together.

This went on for about two weeks.  Then one day Jane logs into her home and finds it missing.  As a matter of fact not only does she find her home gone, but all of her furnishings, her landscaping, her everything!  In their place are new structures and a new person laying more down, on her land!  She approaches the intruder and kindly asks him what he is doing on her land.  He basically tells her it’s his land and she is trespassing.  Jane immediately checks the parcel profile and to her amazement she is no longer the owner of the parcel.  Her land has been stolen from her.

Has anything like this ever happened to you?  Was it land or something even closer to your heart?  Maybe something you created; something you put a lot of time and effort into?  Has your clothing designs or textures ever been stolen?  Have you had something, anything you've created just ripped from you after many hours of heart and hard work?  Welcome to the world of a government of anarchy in Second Life and the politics that goes with it.  A world with no police, no law, no judges, and no way to right the wrong placed upon you. Welcome to a world where you have the freedom to express your deepest desires and sexual fantasies and a world for every predator to find easy victims to prey upon.  Welcome to the freedom of living in Second Life.  Let me continue on with our story of Jane Doe.

Upon seeing her parcel taken right out from under her Jane contacts the sim owner.  He tells her that he no longer owns the sim and has sold it to another person.  He gives her the name of this “new owner” and tells her she needs to discuss the terms with them.  So Jane contacts this new owner and provides her list of grievances.  After a couple of days Jane gets her reply; “Tough shit, it’s my sim and I’ll do with it as I please”.  This leaves Jane very upset as she spent real money and time on this “investment”.  She contacts her old neighbors only to find that the same situation has happened to them.  Everybody is up in arms and is understandably upset about what has transpired.  Together they come up with the idea to petition Linden Labs about the situation at hand.

This is where the politics of Second Life comes in to play.  In a real world environment there are laws about contracts.  Laws about stealing another’s property (let’s keep discussion of eminent domain out of this dialog for today shall we) and laws of basic civil justice or natural law in most parts of the world.  These laws do not exist in any matter or fashion in Second Life.  Think of that.  A place where there is no natural law, no justice, no due process, no civil laws, no police to enforce those laws and no method of reconciliation or arbitration.  If you need to take care of a wrong pressed upon you inside the realm of Second Life it’s up to you to deal with it.  So, what about Linden Lab?  What is their take on a situation such as this?  The place to look is in their Terms of Service (TOS).

For those of you wondering what this is it’s the terms you agreed to by checking the “I accept” box or button the first time you logged in.  The Terms of Service defines what the legal obligation between you and Linden Lab is when using the Second Life service.  Now as far as a legal contract between a service provider and a consumer, the Terms of Service by Linden Labs is pretty standard and affords you some real world protections and rights.  In this particular case I’ll discuss a few of the terms stated in the TOS.

In the TOS, Section 5 states that a Linden Dollar is considered a “token” and is not to be considered any kind of currency. When obtaining “Lindens” you are granted a limited license to use the tokens to hold or barter, trade and/or transfer then for access to content, applications, services and other user-created features inside the “service” called Second Life.  So in the context of living in-world there is a value aligned to content but no value whatsoever in the real world.

So you’re probably thinking to yourself you paid good “real world” money for these Lindens.  You also know that you can exchange them back for currency.  So they do have a real value right?  Not really.  The tokens you purchase have as much value as the tokens you obtain to play games at your local arcade or favorite kiddy pizza restaurant.  Outside of these venues they have no intrinsic value.

Well let’s get back to the story of Jane to see if solutions to her problems can be found.  She and her neighbors send the petition in.  After some time the petition comes back that there is nothing that Linden Lab can do about their lost property or the Lindens they paid for it.  Caveat emptor!  Again the TOS that Jane agreed to keeps Linden Lab’s hands clean of her situation.  Section 4.3 states that Linden Lab is only a service provider of Second Life and is not responsible or liable for any content, conduct or services of user or third parties that use the Second Life service.  It also states they are not required to arbitrate in such matters.  So Jane now learns there is no natural law to speak of.  There is no justice for Jane and her neighbors.  Or is there?

Upon the discovery that Linden Lab will not assist them Jane and her neighbors take the matter into their own hands.  They set up an operation to determine how best to not let the person that now holds the sim deprive them of the land they rightfully paid for.  So they start asking questions.  They search the forums and eventually they discover they are the victims of a standard sting operation.  Here is how it goes.  Avatar A, the good guy, purchases a sim from Linden Labs following all of the rules set forth in the TOS.  Everything is legal and proper.  Then Avatar A advertises that parcels are for sale.  People purchase the plots for a specified price and the parcel is turned over to them.  Then we move to Avatar B in this sting operation.
Avatar B who may be actually the same puppeteer as the one pulling Avatar A’s strings purchases the sim from Avatar A.  Again everything is legal and proper with the service provider here.  However, now that Avatar B owns the sim they wipe the sim clean of everybody’s content and once again advertise plots are available to purchase.  Once the sim is full of new tenants Avatar B hands the sim back to Linden Lab and moves on to repeat the process.  Jane and her band determine this is what happened to them.  Their decision is to let everybody else know what has transpired and to find help in getting revenge for what was done to them.  They take the law into their own hands.

The group begins to post messages on the Second Life forums.  They create a web site posting conversations of what transpired.  They tell anybody willing to listen what has happened to them.  They hold events and lectures for the sole purpose of letting people know what happened to them and who did this injustice to them.  They hire a group of in-world mobsters to locate the other sims of these con artists who then repeatedly “bomb” the sims with adverse content making the sims completely useless.  Jane and her now band of mercenaries do everything they can think of to put these thieves out of business.  For Jane justice is not served by law but by revenge, which is the only law she can find.  However, there is law in Second Life.  And the law found Jane a few weeks later in the form of a suspension notice of her account.

You see, while I said the politics of Second Life is anarchy, which is indeed the case, the politics around how one conducts themselves outside the place of the virtual world is entirely different.  When it comes to the rights of not the avatar in the simulation, but the rights and privacy of the puppet master pulling the avatars strings, the law provided by Linden Lab is very clear, strict and enforceable.  Jane and her band of friends got their first taste of the TOS Community Standards.  The standards are in place to promote privacy, respect without harassment, and to minimize intolerance between residents.  In this case there is no anarchy just swift and decisive justice handed down without regard to circumstance or facts.  And Linden Lab is the judge and jury of the verdict.  How can this be?  Section 11 of the TOS says so.  Yes you agreed to these terms to be in their virtual world.

The law in our virtual world is very limited.  Avatars have little to no rights in the world.  As a bisexual woman in Second Life being in a lesbian relationship I get a lot of abuse and criticism from others about how my avatar chooses to live her life.  Yes in Second Life it’s a freedom of choice not to be confused with real life.  She constantly has to thwart unwanted sexual advances by others.  She constantly has to ignore the requests for sex or threesomes with her lover.  And in some cases the hate that her chosen lifestyle brings on has to be dealt with too.  However, as long as the advances and hurtful words are directed at the avatar and not her puppeteer no “laws” have been broken.  This is the virtual world we live in.  The world we agree to when we check that little box at the end of the wall of text presented to us.

The politics of our virtual world does not protect the rights of its citizens. The politics of our virtual world does not provide a means of justice for wrongs perpetrated against avatars themselves.  The politics of our virtual world does allow the predator to feed off of the naivety and trust of the ordinary citizens and the food are those virtual tokens.  Tokens that carry no intrinsic value other then they can be used in world for all commerce and then exchanged out of world for actual currency.

So what is an avatar to do?  The first is to understand that I do not condone what happened to Jane and her band of would be landowners.  They were played in a sting operation that was entirely legal to the creators / owners of the virtual world.  Once they learned the virtual world politics themselves they understood how to use those same politics to their favor.  They continued to stay banded and created their own community on their own sim.  They actually instilled their own set of politics in the form of rules and guidelines.  They used the land convenient, a political tool to install a sense of rights, responsibilities, guidelines and policies over their new home.  In a sense they formed a new government moving away from the politics of anarchy to a form of egalitarianism.  They created their utopia on their own terms.

So what does the politics of Second Life have to do with anything in our real lives?  Actually it has everything to do with our real lives and nothing to do with our avatars life.  The politics is driven by Linden Lab’s constitution called the Terms of Service.  In the real world we are consumers of the service they provide and we agree to abide to those terms, not as avatars, but as real consumers of the service.  The politics are real and have real implications.  The anarchy of the virtual world and the politics that drives that anarchy has no real implication.  We can remove ourselves from that anarchy by just logging off.

If you understand anything from my ranting here understand this.  Your avatar has zero inherited or inalienable rights in the virtual community.  There is no law and there is no justice.  You are on your own to do as you wish.  This allows great freedom to do as you wish and to be honest that is a great thing about Second Life.  You’re freedom extends to the point of disrupting the service or violating Community Standards used to protect our real lives inalienable natural rights.  Because of this freedom that stems from the politics of Second Life, there are many more implications in how our avatars live and in how we live in the real world with ours and others avatars.  It is these implications you will hear me discuss in the future.  They range from economic to social issues, from in-world technical changes to changes and destiny that leaks into our real lives.

Second Life is an incredible social simulation that opens our eyes to our own personal needs, wants, secrets and desires.  It helps each of us to learn and maybe fear a little bit what we discover about ourselves.  It can be a tool to help teach all of us how to be a better real live person by teaching us that intolerance, bigotry and closed minds have no place in just society.  And yes, it can teach us that with complete freedom comes discovery, but also corruption and hate can find they flourish there too.  I recommend each person reading this really review the Linden Lab‘s Terms of Service.  Not just to know what you can get away with, but to know how you are protected and what actual rights as a consumer of the Second Life service you really have.

The politics of Second Life while not directly protecting your avatar has a profound effect on the environment your avatar live in, just like how the politics of the real world has a profound effect on your real life.  But because of the environment of freedom and what it allows in-world to the life you live, how you live it now comes down to how you socially interact with others, which can cause yet another virtual world reality called drama.  And that I’ll leave to another discussion.