Number one, there’s the glaring problem that keeps happening, to which I’ve addressed many blogs before, which is that the Architectural Working Group and Zero Linden and his followers keep taking on all kinds of huge social and political and civic issues, like here, even avatar rights (!) *and deciding them* without the wider community, or even the sort of “intelligentsia” of the blogging public of SL. How can this be? From the outset, this group purported to be “just a technical group” and its documents “oh so technical,” and in office hours, brusquely dismissed anybody with non-technical concerns. Yet under the guise of “just making the software,” of course they are profoundly, profoundly taking control with only their ideas, unquestioned by any kind of participatory and democratic debate.

Having a handful of coders decide in “democratic centralism” isn’t *liberal* democracy.
This idea that the revolutionary avant-garde gets to craft the notion of the human being in digital manifestation , and if you didn’t get to the laggy sim on the right office hour or Life 2.0 you missed it, is all wrong. There’s no sense of “This is a draft, what do you think.” It’s more like “Here is the truth, as it has been revealed to me, and thus it is written…”

The very obvious objection anyone reading this from the non-technical but humanities perspective would say is: but people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That is, it isn’t up to a game god and coder to say, “Well, we’ll decide to have material dictate consciousness or have consciousness dictate the material” (that’s essentially the discussion dressed up here as “the environment and the avatar are separate). And even if this contemplation weighs in on the side of allowing (because that’s what it is, the coder “allowing”) the individual his individuality, there’s a credibility gap — who is the coder, after all, but just another member of human society that does live (and die) outside of the code?

There is a basic premise to be debated here, unfortunately, and not taken for granted.

And that is that avatar rights do not spring from coders ceding them. They do not spring from software. They do not spring from platforms. They are not made by coders; they can only be reflected, enhanced, or obstructed by coders.

The architecture cannot contain human/avatar rights; if it does, they are not rights but a misleading simulation.

Avatar rights are human rights, and human rights, as it was famously enshrined at least in the US (and in other similar ways nodding to universality and the rule of law in other parts of the world), are endowed by their Creator (let’s not get too bogged down here in whether that is a traditional God, a higher being, or what it is, and hope it can be understood as “something higher than one mere mortal man”)

You might think that the coder can stand in here for the Creator, not only by analogy, but by functionality. I beg to differ. This is social software. We are indeed inside it. I’ve always been saying for years “we’re soaking in it.” And that means its actions upon us and our interactions with it become a kind of property, a kind of virtualized but still real property that is not the coder’s. Our table, purchased in a store, is not his, even if he designed it, on a platform made by coders.

This is a very important concept to get across to Zero Linden and his followers who is airily making these decisions without us. There is a whole debate to be had about whether individuals, avatars, in Second Life even *want* to walk to other worlds. That debate just isn’t even *happening* in Second Life. There is a whole discussion to be had about how their stuff, their intellectual property, their integrity are to be ensured.

There is the entire *political* discussion to be had about separation of powers. Linden Lab could open source, and yet never separate powers, that’s the awful thing to contemplate.

Some of what Zero is saying sounds as if he is attending to the notion of the persistence of the individual, but given the process by which he is arriving at these notions and articulating them (a closed one, among coders in his group), I really have to question what ideologies might lie underneath it.

What houses avatar rights? What is the foundation of avatar rights? It is not the code. Code-as-law is a very mechanical, even harsh thing, and making it into streaming 3-D interactive software hasn’t softened its sharp edges. Avatar rights must always lie outside the code, even if avatars themselves are human beings manifesting inside avatars. I’m not saying that there can’t be any discussion about avatar rights because they are already human rights (this is a position some are taking). I’m saying avatar rights are most emphatically important as a separate topic, and are linked to human rights that ought to manifest in these worlds as they manifest in real countries.

Oh, sure, I realize you want to keep a special shelf in the edifice called “artificial intelligence” and there’s even been a horrid blurring of the concept of the avatar-as-individual in this structural discussion (and in the working blueprints) by having “collective” or “Group” avatars that can house organizations or wikis (sigh) . But these are merely what coders code it to be, like bots, it is an extension of their ideas by mechanical force, and should be marked as such. There is always a set of individuals or an individual behind every bot and group, and you shouldn’t lose sight of that.

So much stress is placed on the forced-migration policy that is usually what stands in for “freedom to leave” that some of the ramifications aren’t being considered here. What does this mean, the right to have all your data removed?

If I bought your script or your chair or your land or your house, and you leave, you take it all with you? Why? Because it is your intellectual property that I only rent? but why? Nobody would treat a CD that way. Surely you don’t mean to suggest that leaving Facebook, my gift of a birthday present is wiped out, as if it had never been.

There is so much to be said here, and I can only urge Linden Lab: put as much high profile attention to the problem of how to “open source” civic and political issues as you are to these “architectural engineering” matters; these issues have to be understood as being part of human life not subserviant or dependent upon code.