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Recently I met with Eben Moglen, the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, and David W. Levine, a researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and IBM representative to the Architectural Working Group, for an informal conversation that looked at many of the fundamental social, technological and legal questions of building 3D immersive online spaces like Second Life.

I live only a couple of blocks from the Software Freedom Law Center. And, as the opening sourcing of the Second Life Architecture is pressing forward, I decided I must at least try to get the thoughts of my neighbor who is the great advocate for the role of free software as a fundamental requirement for a democratic and free society.

I was delighted when Eben Moglen said that I could stop by and ask some questions. But he made clear, from the outset, that he wasn’t the optimistic advocate for immersive virtual worlds that I am. But the stage was set for what I felt could be a very important debate, so at the next Architectural Working Group meeting in Second Life I asked David W. Levine (a.k.a Zha Ewry in Second Life) if he was willing to come along and take part in this discussion. The photo of Zha below is by Noelani Lightfoot the proprietor of Quixotic Photography in Second Life (see her great Flickr stream here).

David is one of the most experienced architects, not from Linden Lab, involved in the Architectural Working Group’s efforts to open source the server side architecture of Second Life and develop open standards for virtual worlds. What followed was a fascinating and wide ranging conversation in which Moglen and Levine discussed how the choices we make about the design of virtual spaces and avatar interfaces in general can affect the whole path of human society.

Moglen and Levine explore, in depth, the problem of defining digital public space and issues of privacy on the internet, offering many suggestions on how to implement online privacy enhancing technologies and insights as to how we could design the next generation of these technologies in responsible ways.

A Conversation Between Eben Moglen and David W. Levine. (instigated and transcribed by Tish Shute, Ugotrade)

In this interview David Levine is speaking personally, not representing IBM’s official position on any of the issues under discussion. Also, neither Eben Moglen nor I (Tish Shute) represent or have any affiliation with IBM. We are all speaking from our own perspectives. And I apologize in advance for any errors I may have inadvertently introduced through faulty transcription and/or editing to the speech of Eben Moglen and David Levine.

David: This is entirely Tish’s idea, I’m tagging along to ask interesting questions and hear your insights.

Tish: Yes I roped David in because in terms of the Architectural Working Group in Second Life and the open sourcing of the server side architecture as he is one of the most experienced architects not from LL.

David: Yes IBM has an interest in promoting virtual worlds as standards based environments.

Eben: On the theory that avatar based interfaces have some broader purpose?
David: Right. Something akin to Second Life or variations of it in five or ten years is going to be deeply disruptive. Exactly which piece of it, I’m not making predictions actually, or exactly how it becomes disruptive.

I think it turns into the flavor of things like right now you go into Amazon, you go to book reviews. And there are 50 or 60 people who very carefully putting their opinions down and there are maybe ten other people who are curious about the author — who currently are thinking about buying their book. But you can’t see them on the web at all. But they’re there side by side pulling the pages reading the reviews commenting on them. But you have no chance of interacting with them at all. If in fact we can say now that you’re interested in talking about this author and this book, there are ten people happen to be in the internet context, interested in doing that.

Can we bring you together and have a conversation. You can ask a question rather than simply read someone’s written report. Why do you think the character is interesting? Was it because they do interesting things? Was it because their thought processes as described by the author interesting? What makes this a compelling book to you personally? And we can have a dialog rather than a static web.

Things like that, I think, are going to happen. Do they look like giant wolves wandering around freely through the Internet - which is half game space and half social a space, half social interaction spacee. Partially because in fact because Linden Lab didn’t set out to create that thing, people did, so I figure some of that meets human needs.

But the disruptive change is this weird blend between Wiki, comment pages, chat, talk, and 3D helps along with it. I’m deeply opposed to calling it 3D internet. I think you focus on avatars and visualization and you miss the fact that it’s a blend between what My Space does and classic internet chat that’s really exiting -which a lot of social community building.

What followed at this point was a wide- ranging discussion on whether Virtual Worlds may effect fundamental aspects of human neurology -“Is this an interface that grows the mind or shrinks the mind?” - and underlying issues and problems with privacy on the internet. Two key questions Moglen raises are: “Is store it yourself fundamental to freedom in the 20th Century?” and, “Who gets the logs?” I touched on these questions in an earlier post, “If The Metaverse Goes Wrong….” And there is an excellent podcast of Eben Moglen speaking on these issues at the MySQL conference. Also see David F. Flanders blog.

To focus this post on some very practical suggestions re privacy and avatar rights that came up in this particular discussion, I begin the transcription where the discussion began to dig down, both conceptually and technically, into the architecture of digital public space.

Eben: When I teach about this with law students, I say there are three elements that are mixed up in privacy and we tend not to notice which one we are talking about at any given moment.

There is secrecy - that is the data should not be readable by or understandable by anybody except me or people I designate. There is anonymity which is the data can be seen by anybody but about whom it is should be knowable only by me or people that I designate. And there is autonomy which isn’t about either secrecy or anonymity but which is about my right to live under circumstances which reinforce my sense that I am in control of my own fate. And this form of privacy is actually the one we talk about in the constitutional structure when we talk about the right to get an abortion or use birth control.

The Supreme Court says this about the ability to make our own life choices about having control over the serious consequences of circumstances in our lives in which we make moral judgments. But in the original companion to Roe against Wade, Doe versus Bolton, which was the Georgia Law that was being challenged at the same time that the Texas Law was challenged, Mr. Justice Douglas wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in which he talked about the freedom to walk, loaf, or stroll meaning that it was more than just a question of some particularly important life decisions.

There was a feeling of a constitutional liberty in making ones own decisions about all the matters in ones life, which I think is also the liberty interest that the court protects in a case like [[inaudible]?? The guy simply wanted to walk about LA in the night time and got tired of being asked to show his drivers license at every step because he was a six foot tall black man with dread locks. He sued over the right, which I thought we used to have in the US, to walk around without having to identify ourselves to people all the time which isn’t just an anonymity problem but becomes a problem because it forces certain kinds of choices on us.

I think that the real issue here is about the forcing on choices on us. I see again and again the ways in which people now find themselves unable to make certain life choices easily because there digital self has acquired an inflexibility that constrains their non-digital self.
Lets start with really simple stories of minor behavior.

A law student comes to me and she says: “I had this bad break up with my boyfriend. And I didn’t want to be on My Space all the time looking at all the photos of him with his new girlfriend. So I dropped out of My Space and I went away. But the problem was that I was the photo collector for my little circle of friends which wasn’t so little. And, I had eight thousand tagged photos that was everybody’s life in law school. And, I was the one who was the keeper of everybody’s photo album. And, when I dropped of My Space they couldn’t get to those photos anymore.

So this was a real cost to people and they were really pissed about it. And they needed to decide how to go ahead and persuade me to come back to My Space. But of course they had already graduated and spread out among law firms and cities in N. America. So they had to coordinate the campaign to get me to come back to My Space. So they made a make so and so come back to MY Space page, in My Space. And, they went and hashed out all this over their photos because they weren’t going to leave all their photos from law school in a place which they couldn’t get to them because of my break up with my boyfriend.

Now there is a point that a fundamental decision occurs that she feels pretty seriously about as an individual. But she is being subjected to a campaign of peer pressure to hold her in circumstances that she is not going to like in order to get the photo album back.

Oh we might say oh there are a million other ways to solve that problem you can upload them all to Flickr and get the hell out of there. But what is actually happening she wanted to leave town and she couldn’t.

We have got to understand that when she wanted to leave town and she couldn’t. The digital self was trapped by a fence that the physical self had no problem passing through and moving on from.

We don’t want that to happen to people. We understood when the Soviet Empire decayed that all over it were places where people felt trapped in webs of surveillance and betrayal and interaction that had a kind of sinister feeling even if there is no Gulag and there is no shooting. And many of us feel very uncomfortable with the changes in the society we live in the United States in the past several years where for us there is no Gulag, no shooting, no being swept away with out charges.

We don’t actually think that like some poor lawyer in Oregon that our finger print is going to be misidentified as that of a suicide bomber’s accomplice in Spain. But we are aware that these webs of knowledge about us are beginning to control us because our digital persona is subject to leverage and to being interfered with in ways that matter.

I think that the question is there a power in projecting yourself into new environments in which you can meet people in new terms and in rich ways has no second answer, and there is no downside to it. But we owe it to people to build safe spaces.

When you said its Anaheim and they own it. We are touching on one of the really important problems for me as a lawyer which is these concepts of property.

I have just got done with guys who think protocols are property. Now I am going to have guys who think music is property. And after that I am going to have guys who think carriage is property. And at the other end is this sort of “you are on my digital island and I can look through your clothes if I want to because it is my island and that’s the way I make the rules.”

Now we have got a very strange notion here of property and we have a very unusual structure because most of the property that they could have in Anaheim is subject to governing. And even if it is Celebration Florida they still have only as much Home Rule as the Florida legislature will give them. And if there march against Alabama or even Logan Valley shopping center there’s rules that say what you can do in a company town about controlling people’s speech. I feel absolutely certain that when Google does it there will not be a guaranteed right to carry a sign that can be read by everybody in town explaining why Google sucks. It’s just not going to happen that way.

David: This is the “I write the TOS for people coming onto this public space. And there is no constitutional guarantees in this space.” Argument.

Eben: And I get the benefit of calling it a public space by which I actually mean my private space, real estate I invented.

David: Now in fact if you wanted to do something interesting there. This is to toss something into the tools to play with. And to toss it to you, in particular, because you are good at playing with these kind of tools. Which is, if I was going to attack that, I would go and attack that under common carrier. If you want to be a public space, if you want the benefits in law of being a common carrier then you have to accept these constraints on you behavior.

Eben: Well this is why this network neutrality thing rolled up out of nowhere. This is where this came from. The problem with this it is that it already begins by saying what you really like is innkeepers and stagecoach guys. This is an attempt to throw your selves 800 years in the past in order to come up with an analogy.

I think what we really want to say is something like this. If you are talking about a public space your talking about a thing that has not just a TOS contract but a social contract.

It’s a thing which has to do with what you get and what you give up in order to be there.

There ought to be two rules about. One: Avatars ought to exist independent of any individual social contract put forward by any particular space. And two: Social contracts ought to be available in a machine readable form which allows the avatar projection intelligence to know exactly what the rules are and to allow you set effective guidelines about I don’t go to spaces where people don’t treat me in ways that I consider to be crucial in my treatment.

Its one thing to say that the code is open source - let’s even say free software - it is another thing to say that that code has to behave in certain ways it has to maintain certain rules of social integrity.

It has got to tell you what the rules are of the space where you are it has to give you an opportunity to make an informed consent about what is going to happen given those rules. It has got to give you an opportunity to know those things in an automatic sort of way so I can set up my avatar to say, you know what, I don’t go to places where I am on video camera all the time. Self, if you are about to walk into a room where there are video cameras on all the time just don’t walk through that door. So I don’t have to sign up and click yes on 27 agreements, I have got an avatar that doesn’t go into places that aren’t clean and well lit.

David: So if I am going to walk into a space there is an “Ehum - you about to go into a space you really don’t want to go into.” So I can make an informed decision whether the trade off is worth it or not.

Eben: But that’s fine but you are going to have to go even further by saying here is the reason why you don’t want to go in there. Here is what you said in the past about why you don’t like places like this. You got to have an angel sitting on your shoulder - a code angel.

David: But before we can even do that we have to mark the world in such a way that I can make - that I can detect that I am making that choice.

Eben: That’s right you have to force the existence of social contracts in terms that are explainable. It is like I say to my students: “Should there be informed consent for My Space or Facebook?”

If I were doing this as a University project - if I was setting this up inside Columbia University - and building one of these space, and if we were going to have people there, volunteers, I would have to go to the IRB. I would have to explain why this was permissible human subjects research. And I would have to show the IRB an informed consent disclosure that showed what the risks were and allowed people intelligently to decide whether they wanted to run them.

Now I have got libertarian colleagues around the university, in the Law School in the Philosophy Dept in other universities who think this IRB stuff is creeping totalitarianism because it is inhibiting the rights of researchers to find out about the world.

And I understand their point of view. Just as I also understand why we have decided that there is some unethical human subjects research conducted in the past of which we consider so abhorrent that we won’t allow researcher to use those numbers. We consider that data to be the fruit of the poison tree. Not even to save our own pilots shot down in cold water will we use the studies about what happens when you put people in freezing water because we think that evidence comes from experiments you shouldn’t be allowed to conduct.

Now I look at these immersive experiences for children that the Times was writing about last week where you have four and five yr olds buying virtual gear in immersive spaces. And I think that is unethical activity. I think that the rules about children television are weak and not very important. But they are way stronger than that would let you get away with that kind of stuff on TV.

I think that is really serious screwing around with children’s wiring to explain to them that they have to be consumers of stuff that doesn’t exist where the only reason that they can’t have what they want is because the software is programmed not to give it to them unless they pay.

That’s a fundamental education in control of life by unfree software so elegant that Stallman probably doesn’t even know it is there because it is so horrible. But that is another perfectly imaginable outcome of this stuff. We create these things we create beautiful 3D amusements parks. We sell children rides for actual money extracted from real parents because the ride won’t go unless you put another nickel in the slot. And we going say - well its ….Disney Land.

Tish: Yes the children’s worlds can be very extreme….

Eben: Well Disney Land is a little extreme. When you go to Disney Land they open a file on you and they follow you through life. Disney buys everything that is can buy about all those children who have ever been to Disney land and they have got a reason which is bringing them back.

The average number of visits to Disney Land by people brought to Disney Land as children is four in a lifetime. Disney’s goal over the next 20 years is to make that six. And in order to make that six all they have to do is keep buying everything they can buy about all those people they opened a file on as children looking for opportunities by data mining to find an opportunity, like the oncoming 65th birthday of a parent or an oncoming retirement or a this or a that. They just have to play the siblings off against one another - you’ve never been to Disney Land but Johnny has. … They are going to do what they can do to create feelings around that person that says remember what it felt like being in Disney land when you are child - do that again.

Tish: So what can we do about this - for example now we have an architecture working group - a community group - that is working with Linden Lab on creating an open architecture that aims to get away from the current model - the one that you are talking about right now that is currently the model for LL and everyone ….

David: And Linden Lab are better than most in that they are actually relatively explicit.

So, for instance one of the things that came up in their kick off for doing their next generation of architecture was what are the Avatars Bill of Rights what things do we prevent the technology from letting happen to avatars. They actually had that discussion.

And Lessig who was relatively enlightened about this had some comments about “Well we don’t want to force going to a public space that somebody else hosts other than Linden Labs to be a way of taking away rights from avatars explicitly.” Which is good. But none the less the model for 90% of the service providers is always going to be: “We have got you’re data. We have got your chat stream, we may have your voice stream, and we have your action stream. How much do you realize we data mine?”

Tish: Is the architecture group thinking about these issues?

Eben: One way of imagining that business …is that there is a “screen” and somebody is going to get it. Another way of looking at it is there may be some element in which the avatar projector is itself the guy who has a part of the screen.

If you want to be really aggressive about it lets assume we have infinite processing power and can slow things down to a crawl. We can take that screen and split it up in a shared secrets manner so that you could reconstruct the screen out of the data held by all of the people who were there. You could even reconstruct the screen if you had opt in co-operation from say 4/5ths or 5/6ths of the people who were there but no one person who was there could reconstruct the whole screen.

This is the sort of thing which cryptography was designed to make it possible to do. Its how escrowing systems in the high security world are supposed to work.

Lets just go ahead and finish this up. For every one of these that is built in the non secret world there is going to be one built in the secret world. So in the Government world we are going to have secure structures. One possible way of having secure structures is there is a trusted server and that will work for intranet kinds of use.

But lets just imagine for a moment what I think of for a conceivable reason for having this stuff is for the conduct of diplomacy, actual meetings. There is a whole lot of stuff that diplomats do because which is very expensive to do because it involves sitzplatz.You send guys to Vienna and they meet every week for thirty years for no good reason . You could do a lot of that in other ways - some of it by video conference - but lets us just for a moment assume that there are things you could do by means of certain kinds large meetings that occur in a neutral environment.

You could set it up so that no one party at the negotiating table actually has a record of what happened. Only by cooperation of multiple parties is the record of what happened there reconstructable. Because the way the space works is that it automatically divides all of the stream data up amongst the avatars and gives it to them in a shared secret structure. So without the cooperation of avatars you don’t have a reconstructable event.

At the moment, I am talking about technology that I can spec but it would be a little bit burdensome in performance terms to implement. But that doesn’t mean anything if we just keep doubling the speed of the chips.

David: Presumably if any of us get together and we have a conversation at my client end I see everything that is said, in some form. The question is how you prevent me from keeping that stream.

Eben: yes right we are going to be living inside an encrypted environment ..

David: Yes right and right down to the eyeballs of course because at some point the digital stream is there and I can capture it…

Eben: maybe although but remember the data mining isn’t just have having the chat stream…

David: No I agree, so the question is how much can you reconstruct - you can reconstruct a lot of it. I can pretty well capture the stream of everything my avatar saw. I can’t see what the other people had in the background conversation without their cooperation. But I can do everything that is said in public.

Eben: Yes, of course, and the most important thing is that, that is as much as the space manager can see too. And the space manager can see no more than what happened in public which is usually what we are concerned about.

David: So one set of reasonable desiderata here would be that stuff that we build enable a lot of that - which is to say that assets held by private individuals it should be possible to put them on private servers and pair wise or group wise discussions should be securable in and of themselves.

Eben: The protocols ought to be agnostic) But, it would be enough if the protocols were agnostic with respect to how that collection occurs. If the protocols of operation don’t necessitate that the data of operation wind up in any particular place then you got a protocol consistent with both what is now the familiar model and the less familiar model where more information stays at the end place.

David: Right now every single bit of data that’s in Second Life is owned by Linden Labs because you put it on their server and they fetch it back out.

One thing we are going to do for lots of good reasons is go to a web centric model where lots of the assets get pulled on to web servers traditional old fashioned web servers. At that point there’s absolutely no reason why I can’t say these are my assets I will let people come to me and ask for permission to see them. And many of them I will share freely, because the clothing I am wearing is the clothing I want them to see the clothing I’m wearing. But the contents of my pocket, my wallet, I’m not going to be so eager to give them. And it ought to be possible to have this office in a virtual world in which you say…

Eben: My filing cabinet is locked.

David: Right! The furniture, everything in here is public. But I’m going to pull out this document in which I’m going to show you some really cool ideas about this law suit we’re engaged in, and you can read it here, and you can walk away with what I gave your client to read. But you can’t find out the rest of my file cabinet at all because it’s safe in my machine.

And you may not even be able to take that document off the island as it were, out of the office. You may be able to take the pages you’ve read from it. The other thing that’s equally important is can I do the chat pier to pier rather than through the central server. Is there any reason why Instant Messaging as opposed to public chat gets dragged through public space. It certainly shouldn’t be.

Eben: Right. The protocol design ought to take as a feature that there is no requirement for intermediation of any communication among parties.

David: Right. Other than that which we need to do to actually get the consensual state. What we’re doing is taking my word, your words, Tish’s words, putting them into one spot and then sending them back out.

Eben: There are things we can agree to do together, but once we are together there are things we can agree to do apart.

David: Right! But there is some core tapping. If we were each sitting on a computer 500 miles apart, in order to have this discussion we do have to bring the space together and spread it back out. But we don’t have to let the guys over there see it unless we want to.

Eben: What we have is both point to point and many to many kinds of conversational modalities and that there shouldn’t be any intrinsic reason to block them off. Now there may be situations since that famous parental controls system. I don’t actually want people sideling up to my children and whispering in their ears in public places. I’m content to let my children be publicly addressed in public places because transparency is an opportunity to avoid certain kinds of misbehavior. And there may be locations which are transparent locations. And if you enter a transparent location, that should be something known to the avatar in a technical way as an entry point and it should be possible for avatars to either seek or avoid such spaces.

I think the goal here is to confine the conception ‘property’ to meaning something like traditional right to exclude and not let property in the form of the greater includes the less since it’s my property I may define everything that goes on here, and I may make whatever rules I please here. There is some community of communities which defines ’states’ which it is OK for places to be in.

There was a story in the New York Times a day or two ago, about a public park in Oregon that had gone bad. It was written in a slightly frivolous but not entirely frivolous way. It’s an ex-urban park, meant originally as a kind of highway rest stop park, far enough from everybody else that bad things began to happen.

People began to have sex in public, there are child molesters who pitched tents there and lived there, and so over time it becomes more a locus of crime than a locus of recreation. And what the parks authority of Oregon does is they shut it down. They close it up. They chase everything away from it. And now they’re in what they think of as a sort of rebooting period for the park. And then it’ll come back and a different community will be attracted to it and it will be a different park.

This is an example of ’space gone bad’ in meat space places. You can certainly imagine renegade space in a immersive world. Places where operators are not following the rules. Places where the operators are taking advantage of the free software nature of space building to build spaces which are deceptive about how they look.

They seem to be spaces of type X and they’re actually spaces of type Y. That should be at least a regulatory interaction if not a crime. That should constitute socially actionable misbehavior. Making spaces that don’t behave the way they seem to behave, that don’t give you what they seem to give you. And if we come out of all of this saying the FTC will occasionally make an order about this, I’m going to feel very dissatisfied.

David: There are a couple of interesting things lurking there again, one of which is, in the web today we don’t generally think of it as having two parts. There’s the very public part of the web, where you go to a page like CNN and you get the content and it’s assumed to conform to fairly common broad norms. And then there’s a different part of the web where people know that that’s not true. All pornography and large portions of adult community which are not necessarily pornographic but have some content of theirs that’s restricted and they tend to have click throughs often. So you get something that says you need to be informed at some level that something’s happening.

At the moment none of that interestingly enough is in the protocols, there’s nothing in http that says I have to mark my page as mature, or I have to mark my page as you might not want to bring your child here.

Eben: Right. And as you may recall Larry was himself a big believer in picks and the idea of privacy platform standards built in the web pages. In the end the theory was look there’s a big first amendment problem with making people grade their web pages.

Sandra Day O’Connor went for this theory of doors and locks and walls in cyberspace in the first child decency case. Larry realized he had started the United States Supreme Court down a very dangerous crooked highway and to climb back out again, it’s never happened. And Tim Burness Lee and the others weren’t enthusiastic to say the least, so it never occurred.

Now here it’s a little bit different and the reason it’s a bit different is your public accommodation law kind of aspect. You’re making a public space OK? We’re not telling you grade your web pages, we’re telling you if you’re going to have a public space you’ve got to obey the fire code. You have to post maximum occupancy. You’ve got to avoid chaining the fire doors shut.And you can’t put a surveillance camera in the ladies room. You can’t do it! And that’s sense. Not it’s my space I can do whatever and if you don’t want to take a piss in my monitored men’s room, you don’t have to. That’s not going to fly.

David: Right. There’s a series of layers here just like we say look there are certain things that you can never do in your public space or even in your private space. We don’t allow you to say this is my 5000 acre ranch therefore I can shoot people. We say there are limits to your right to use your space as you desire. Even if you have your Celebration – home rule ends with the norms of the state.

Eben: You can even own a city but you can’t own a city which is an island in space all by itself. It’s got to be part of the rule of law it has to acknowledge sovereign power

David: Except for Mogda Dishu perhaps.

Eben: Well — and that’s what we call a failed state. And I guess what I’m worried about is building a…

David: failed digital space.

Eben: That’s right.

David: That I think there is an argument here that is interesting and worth exploring which is what would be good ways of - you know - we don’t have good rules for digital space we have none in fact. They are a Wild West in fact. There isn’t any sense that the constitution will apply in digital spaces.

Eben: This is why the whole political evolution of free software turns out to be interesting. Stallman creates in effect a constitution of the project, that’s GPL. It functions very narrowly but within its very limited range, it’s supreme, as Judge Marshall would have said right.

Debian free software guidelines and the Debian social contract tried to imagine the constitution of a distribution. Tries to imagine a constitution of a state solely about software building. Privacy policy in the United States which his supposed to be market driven and grow out of positive interaction with the FTC gives you the Ebay privacy policy, which is basically an attempt to imagine the constitution of a flea market.

David: And it is a reasonable thing to do if you are running a digital flea market.

Eben: And what you just said is that Second Life didn’t have a constitution because it it overdrove its headlights. And now your questions is so as that explodes as it inpupalizes as it loses its org chart and begins to float free as technology what would it mean to imagine the constitution of digital spaces in a multiplicity of reproducible forms ? That would be when it franchises.

David: What would it mean if in fact we succeed at the desire to say now we have an open software specification that says anybody can host a chunk of content they can create a public space using this technology and they can invite people to come into it and can bring content into it and share it. What would be good social contracts for those space is a very cogent question.

Eben: So one aspect of this is the debate between those who believe in the so called Aferro GPL and those who don’t. Let’s go back to this as a question of Free Software specialism.

I am going to make a pitch that if you don’t copyleft the software you have got another whole problem. Because in effect we all then l go to work for the guy who wins the race to the bottom. If we imagine this a BSP software we all become developers for the guy who has the one that is most abusive and least free.

That is why, in situations like this where we are talking about software with profound but multiple social consequences, I feel strongly about the utility of copyleft. The second thing I would say that if you imagine within the world of copyleft the fundamental difficulty of the, “its my server I made private modification I want to run this code for people who are willing to have this program run for them,” you can sort of see why even if you’re not distributing the software, if you’re offering services with this code, you have got to release the source code so we can see the modifications and learn from them becomes an important property in licensing.

That’s why the young guys like Mako Hill and others around Stallman are partisans of the Aferro GPL, because they see this in the long run as a really important freedom related question.

Google of course has entirely the opposite point of view of resting on rights which they want to exercise. And Google increasingly says, “well we’re rich enough to re-implement anything we want to, If it’s got a license and we don’t like on it, we won’t use the free world version. We’ll just write our own.

And that raises questions about when do you have to regulate regardless. Now in the world of e-bay because the free market takes real money for real goods and is patently engaged in interstate commerce nobody wants to rumble with the federal government and so everybody has a chief privacy officer and everybody acknowledges that there’s a regulatory role to play.

I think you could get to a point where that would be less obvious than true with respect to other kinds of entrants to the field. And I’m not convinced that the way you can get this done is by licensing the code correctly. But I do think that licensing of code is probably a part of the solution. I think the question of who is the steward of the code also matters. That is to say I think it probably does matter who the legal personalities are who maintain the spaces.

That Central Park out there, that’s a very municipal park but it’s got a bunch of people called the Central Park Conservancy, who are rich people who sit on a board of directors, some of whom hold public offices, some of whom don’t. But they put up a lot of money to keep that park and they have some kind of mysterious rights in Central Park that I’m not entirely sure I understand very well.

Just as I’m not very sure I understand this business improvement district for Lincoln Square that has these little rent-a-cops who patrol my neighborhood. As a local small business, I’m supposed to be very happy about those guys. But I’m perfectly aware that that’s a layer of government in which I am complicit but which I don’t control. And if I see one of those rent-a-cops kicking a homeless person it’s not exactly clear to me whose telephone number I’m supposed to dial. Even though in theory I’m the owner and supporter of those guys.

So I think that there is an ethical advisory board kind of question. I think there’s a dialogue. I think it’s a structured dialogue. I think it interacts with architecture at technical levels. And I think it interacts with structures of licensing and IP control. And I think it interacts with the strategists who invest on the basis of expectations about business laws. Because I think among other things it has a public informative role to play.

I’m sure that we’re going to enter here at maturity a dialog which looks a lot like some American style discussions about regulation. The people who think that disclosure is enough, the people who think that rules are enough, the people who think that you need agencies with quasi-prosecutorial powers to unearth wrongdoing, the people who think you should reward whistle blowers and so on.

The part that most interests me is the engineering because I believe in the durability of technology which is path dependent more than I believe in the congressional will to get things done or to stay where you’re put. The most corrupt man in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet Simon Cameron Said, “the definition of an honest politician is a man who when bought stays bought.” and I’m very dubious about the honesty of our politicians.

David: There are clearly some really nice social activism open source related questions and any of that is…

Eben: And I don’t want to press this decline of reading stuff either because we agreed that is whatever it is so now let’s try and talk about the stuff you came to talk about.

David: By the end of the day I think there are 2 questions here one of which on a personal basis is as technologists one should have a responsibility to build technology that’s socially responsible. If you don’t you should stop doing it frankly. There’s a fairly good question: “Are we in fact as stewards of the technology doing the right thing architecturally?”

Eben: Well your proposition about disruption is the right proposition in response. Something is going to happen.

David: Right. But as technologists we can’t prevent the disruption necessarily. But we can shape it, shape some of the consequences of the disruption and thoughtful voices like yours saying here are things to look for.

Eben: It’s what lawyers usually do. Having thought about this let’s now let me try and tell you about things you’ve written [I submitted some written questions from myself and other Second Lifers prior to meeting Eben in person].

Tish: Well when I mentioned that I was going to talk to you several people had some questions in Second Life. This one came from Gareth Nelson (a.k.a Gareth Ellison in Second Life):

LL get people to sign a contrib agreement allowing them to relicense their work commercially. They also use trademarks to make it very difficult to release a product based on the viewer without their consent in order to release a non-SL product based on the viewer you’d have to remove all mentions of SL in the code or LL have stated their
policy is to enforce the trademark. It would be interesting to get a legal opinion on that - i.e is it reasonable for them to deny forks with such means?

Eben: you can imagine somebody so embedding their trademark material in a GPL program that the difficulty of removing it is so severe that in practice they’ve essentially made it impossible. And, if they then behave in a way which attempted to inhibit distribution of the software through the exploitation of their trademarks they would in fact have in one sense or another made the GPL a nullity.

But here we have a complexity because it’s theirs to start with. They haven’t got any third party code in there. So until they have some third party code in there they could have not had GPL at all and that would have been perfectly acceptable. And they can GPL it but nonetheless make their proprietary commercial license business attractive to people by creating incentives to use the proprietary licensed version instead of the GPL’d version.

Since removing all the trademarks from the GPL’d version is a job that only has to be done once, because after that all you have to do is remove the trademarks from patches, and removing the trademarks from the gifs doesn’t mean going through the whole codebase again. The general likely outcome is I’m going to say no foul has occurred. It’s their code you can scrub it once.

It would be highly desirable if they took say the step that Red-Hat has taken of finding ways to segregate all their trademark graphics and other ancillary elements into one branch of the code tree so that you can come along and lop that branch off and replace it with other graphics or other materials that don’t bear trademarks and be done with it.

And if in the long run it’s the Linden Lab position that they want to live as easily as possible with the community that’s what they’ll do. But I don’t think the short way across is to say they can’t do what they’re doing now. The short way across is to say if they inevitably continue to do what they’re doing now and they mean it about aggressively protecting their trademarks, they will wind up defeating the community they seem to want to have.

Tish: This next is a question about virtual assets causes a lot of controversy when it comes up in discussions on Second Life:

How can the Architecture Working Group (a community alliance working on an open architecture for Second Life) think about assets in a broader world than SL? And how can AWG encourage and make fair content creation? What properties would be desirable, in such a scheme, and what legal issues show up?

David: Let me toss in a little background. This is a question I’m particularly interested in, which is people are busy creating digital assets and they want to share broadly and in particular they want to sell them. And, in some sense, one can argue whether encouraging content makers to do content for money is a good thing or a bad thing. But it is certainly what we do for a world these days. But, How do we deal with music? How do we deal media? How do we deal with digital assets that people want to share?

Eben: So the problem again is that we live in a world in which duplicating bit streams is easy and asset value consists of the artificial hardness that we put into the work of duplicating the bit stream.

We create a scarcity which we protect by technological means. The more that scarcity value increases, the more desire there is to subvert the mechanism that inhibits the doing of the actual trivial act of copying the bit stream. The consequence of which is that we get a whole lot of weight on the paratechnology of protecting bitstreams against doing what networks do to bitstreams which is copy them. That’s one of the things which bears down on this.

You have to have everything on one server, because then it’s the operating system code on the server that protects against the copying of the bit streams. So the Fort Knox of the asset system becomes the server which has little rules about who’s got what.

Unfortunately there is no actual difference in the world between Second Life assets and first life assets because money has also ceased to exist in the twenty-first century. Money in most of the long history of human beings was stuff with scarcity value in lumps which could be weighed and measured. After that money was the fiat currency of governments whose credit was either infinite or knowable which was hard to counterfeit.

In the 21st century money is information flows arbitrarily assigning to me the right to purchase so many goods in the world and to you the right to purchase so many goods in the world, and so on. And the banking system is essentially a system for securely keeping sets of information books which if hacked, or otherwise interfered with, can radically result in the transfer of immense amounts of money in no time because all that’s happened is some bits have changed.

So we’re moving very rapidly into a world in which the Fort Knox’s of first life and the Fort Knox’s of Second Life are the same. They’re numbers in protected files protected by access control levels of one sort or another.

The good news is again through shared secret kinds of technologies or other ones we can break those assets up and distribute them across a million servers so that it doesn’t have to be centralized in order to be as safe as it is when centralized.

I can’t spend the money, you can’t spend the money, and she can’t spend the money because no one person or even two out of the three of us can reassemble the check. Bring us all into one place, make her J.P.Morgan, you Morgan Stanley and me the borrower and suddenly we can put our pieces together and the lost dollar bill is resuscitated.

Again it’s not a perfect solution to the problem. The 21st century economy is the first time there wasn’t anything that prevented me from stealing all the gold in Fort Knox. Sooner or later all the gold in Fort Knox is going to get stolen.

We faced in the first round of crypto wars the presence of the thing called the briefing which is what the incoming president and vice president used to get from the NSA about how we saved the planet through surveillance and if you had unclean encryption there’s going to be nuclear destruction.

I can remember when Mike Nelson of IBM got ‘the briefing’ as an incoming Clinton administration figure and was then sent to Phil Zimmerman and to me, Oh if you only know what I know now you’d give up the fight. And they said well publish it Mike and maybe we will. Instead we constructed a thing called the alternate briefing which was a briefing to policy makers which said because you don’t universalize strong encryption in the world because everybody doesn’t know how it works and everybody doesn’t have access to it, a secret hole built up last night in the world banking system three trillion dollars had disappeared. Nobody exactly knows where it is this morning. Markets open up in three minutes what do you do now Mr. President?

The problem with the Second Life asset is really the problem of the [First Life] asset. It’s not different. And one of the scary things about the 21st century is that it isn’t different. Having said all that, I agree that this question of making money out of nothing, so that assets come into existence suddenly is scarier for many of the people who run the world’s monetary system than the sudden disappearance of money.

It’s really scary that somebody could be making something that would have value in the system that they built because they think they’re the only people with right. In theory it could get to be a really important problem, The good news is that most of the people on earth can’t eat virtual food. In the end the power of the real economy is going to keep this thing restricted to a certain kind of luxury production. And we are probably good at that. That may cushion some of the difficulties that arise in the world where Pay Pal does more business than all the Forex markets everyday.

The stupidest piece of economics I ever read in my life was the paper which when I got to law school was the most admired piece of economic reasoning of the past generation which was Milton Friedman’s classic article about why currency speculators contributed to currency stability Friedman wrote this paper and most of the economists who taught me when I was in college in the seventies thought that that paper which was then 16 years old attacking the Brenton Woods’ system on the ground that currency speculation is the primary means of maintaining currency stability was the most brilliant thing they had ever read.

Bernie Saffron, my teacher at Swarthmore, who had served on Jimmy Carter’s council of economic advisors gave me a B+ in micro economics in 1979 after the A+ I got in macro economics in the fall because I wrote on the exam that Milton Friedman’s paper was the stupidest thing I ever read. Now as George Soros can explain I was correct. He was the one who got rich knowing that Milton Friedman was an idiot.

Currency speculators don’t contribute to stability of the world currency reserves. And the reason that they don’t is because they are not the marginal arbitragers that Milton Friedman thought they were. Milton Friedman’s logic was revealed to be horseshit the minute that the Forex traders started trading more every year than the monetary reserves of the large countries because that made central bank intervention irrelevant. And that’s what shelved the Rubel.

And it is what produced the great problems of currency in the late 1990s. And it is what’s about to produce the enormous difficulty we are going to have with the United States dollar - which is governments don’t control currencies levels anymore. Friedman thought that these arbitragers, these beautiful capitalist business men operating at the edges of a system whose gravity is over here can do nothing but stabilize it. Soros said wait a minute the axis has been flipped governments can’t even stabilize what I can trade.

Now we about to live in a world where that is square. And there is effectively no way to get larger than Pay Pal or the other bit traders eventually get because they have every business from two kids in a bar sharing a bar tab. I watch these guys in my twenty something crowds in LA first then in New York. When they go out for a round of drinks they Pay Pal the money back and forth to themselves from their handhelds at the bar. That is how they square the drink stab at the end of the night.

They have everything from that micro handle to all the business on EBay to the point at which if I want to get money to somebody elsewhere in the world I am way better sending it through Pay Pal than almost any other mechanism. It is almost one thirtieth the cost of sending a wire transfer internationally, and my bank is going to give me all this bullshit, and the Federal Government, and the know your customer and all that stuff.

Now admittedly the United States Government crawled inside the ass of Pay Pal when [inaudible]? were running it in the first place. They had it totally wired. But that’s OK it is less paper work than I have with dealing with J.P. Morgan.

Now we come to the Second Life asset stream look at what happens. We have virtualized the entire world …this stuff is stuff over in the corner but you can’t eat it. In the end you can’t trade it in for the stuff you can eat at anything like the speed that would be necessary in order to build it as a hole in the world financial system. When it is a hole in the world financial system you will suddenly meet some very powerful people making a real fuss.

Is anybody from one of the major investment banking houses sitting in on the Architectural Working Group.

David: No they are not.

Tish: But they are hovering around Second Life.

Eben: Well I will make a prediction. They will show up. And they will show up very heavy, very hard. If you are lucky they will show up through the securities industries financial management association or one of their sort of combined IT shops. If you are not lucky they will show up with the storm troopers because this is their stuff you are fucking with.

David: It is only a million a day turnover today so that is not scary to anyone. But if it goes from 1 million, to 10 million, to 100 million over the next ten years, they need to understand what is going to happen.

Eben: And they can expect to either be looking at an unregulated wild west that they would approach with both vigor and prudence or a highly regulated environment in which they will look for a way to use the house edge. And what they each want will depend on forces I can’t foresee about what Merrill Lynch and Citicorp are each thinking.

David: If I personally had the decision about this I would say we have pretty good micro-payment systems - called Pay Pal - why on earth would you make a new one.

Eben: Well yes… except that that one has its roots dug deep in the actual financial system which means the minute you go there, there is no fire wall. The play money aspect of the thing makes it possible for a whole lot of stuff to happen.

Your guys who are all so interested in their assets values they haven’t met the tax authorities yet.

David: Some have.

Tish: Yes in Europe with the VAT.

Eben: Yes I have heard that.

David: But the vast majority of them haven’t worried about the tip they get for playing live music being taxed the way they should be.

Eben: What will happen if that thing gets its hooks into the financial system, if it did share a payment platform with the real world, the taxing authorities would be there immediately. Look at the United States government’s attitude about gambling.

The asset values built up in an Antiguan casino online are the asset values in second life. They’re paper profits and losses generated in a flow of offshore money which if it has an entree to the American Credit Card and bank account is the story. So you could model this with the online poker explosion.

My CTO Bradley Coon was there every step of the way going up and every step of the way going down. Bradley used to sit at home in the evenings and play 12 tables while his wife was doing the Live Journal. They had a beautiful little digital console. Bradley played blindfold poker 16 tables while working for me. And of course made lots of profits which as the United States government began to close down the online poker shops and arresting British business executives on their way through the United States on their way to Acapulco and stuff like that, slowly closed down. And figuring out how to get your money out of each of the online poker houses as they each surrendered to the government and they effectively quarantined peoples winnings became what all the poker players were doing.

If Second Life actually ran head on into the tax system there would be a sudden recalculation of a whole lot of trading positions. This whole problem is the problem with the internet sales tax moratorium. It’s the problem of the bit tax not just the VAT on the goods but the VAT on the telecommunications services which is the great unregulated question in European tax laws.

David: And Australia for that matter. They have the same regulatory scheme, pay for bandwidth, pay for each bit.

Eben: And that proposition leads to the clear sense that the telecoms provider ought to calculate cost going in and cost going out and pay the VAT on the difference which produces an enormous windfall to the public fisc and which has uncalculable consequences for the nature of the digital economy. So people back off.

In an European law faculty there will be a person with a tenured chair in VAT that’s a separate legal specialty OK? And I’ve heard the European VAT professors when they get together and start fighting about the bit tax. They use services. Sales taxes on services have a very powerful European history. There was an 18th century system for sales tax on services which were brilliantly effective. It was called stamp taxes. It meant putting little pieces of revenue stamp on the pieces of paper on which services were performed. And if you were a service businessman all your documents in and out had revenue stamps on them and stamped paper was what you did business on. British have been paying stamp taxes since the early 18th century in perfect peace.

When you attempt to introduce sales taxes on services in North America you get trouble. It was done by the British Empire in the late 1760s and there was trouble. It was done in Florida in the 1990s and there was trouble. Our state advertising agencies didn’t like being taxed by Florida sales taxes on services and they contributed a great deal of advertising to making it very hard for the government of Florida to continue until it withdrew the sales taxes on services.

We on the other hand paid poll taxes in the United States until the Supreme Court outlaws them with the greatest happiness in life, in part because it helped us to keep black people from voting. Poll taxes were imposed in England twice, once in 1381 resulting in the peasants rising, and once under Margaret Thatcher resulting in the end of Margaret Thatcher’s regime.

Which cultures will pick what taxes is a very hard thing to understand. Nobody knows what virtual communities will bear and how they will pay their taxes. But when their values rise to a certain point they will pay their taxes and the question of that imposition will be disruptive in another way.

So I think that people ought to go cautiously they ought to understand that the big players with the big power, the people who use the money system around the world with a great deal of muscle and the people who use the tax system around the world with a great deal of muscle have not arrived at this party yet.

If they start making their rule under the assumption that those guys are never going to show up, they’re going to be very negatively surprised by the outcomes.

What they really need to be doing is inconspicuously and thoughtfully planning for what their positions are going to be when the big guys show up. And they need to get ready for that more than they need to have pipe dreams of their own about how they’re going to use technical means to preserve their asset values in currencies that will never make it to market, and that will never be subject to income tax and VAT. It’s going to look very different when it reaches equilibrium.

Aferro GPLv3, Architectural Working Group, data mining, digital public space, Eben Moglen, Free Software, IBM in Second Life, online privacy, open metaverse, Open Source, open sourcing Second Life, social networks Software Freedom Law Center

Recently I participated indirectly in the The Foresight Insitute’s Vision Weekend. I joined Melanie Swan’s tour of Nanotechnology Island on Second Life which she conducted live as part of her virtual worlds presentation to the unconference.

I was delighted to meet Melanie, the principal of MS Futures Group, for breakfast in New York City a few days later. She is a futurist and hedge fund manager based in Silicon Valley. Melanie has a highly nuanced understanding of the intersection of technology with social, political, legal, regulatory and economic regimes (see her post here). Melanie is also one of the organizers of She’s Geeky. Unfortunately I couldn’t make the lunch last Saturday here in New York City to discuss She’s Geeky EAST this winter.

Melanie and I had a fascinating discussion over breakfast about many aspects of the metaverse including it’s potential use as a platform for Artificial General Intelligence. Ben Goertzel (see my post on Ben Goertzel’s work here) also presented on “AGI meets the Metaverse” at the Vision Weekend and Melanie mentioned the very interesting work of Monica Anderson who presented her Artificial Intuition approach.

Picture is of Melanie Swan in NYC and on Nanotechnology Island in Second Life.

Last Saturday I went to the Book Party (and after hours party) celebrating the launch of, “Second Life Herald, the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse” by Peter Ludlow (Urizenus Sklar in SL) and Mark Wallace (Walker Spaight in SL).

The book, a history of the Second Life Herald which began in 2004 as The Alphaville Herald in The Sims Online, comes out at a very interesting moment.

The sun is rising higher on the metaverse(s) and there is much speculation about a bright day to come in some quarters (e.g. Ugotrade), more skepticism and a wait and see approach from others (e.g., Gartner), and fears of a “high noon” kind of show down between a “bottom up” user generated creation culture versus “top down” corporate control (e.g. Second Thoughts). For a thoughtful look at “Do virtual worlds liberate us?” see Ren Reynold’s post on Terranova.

Ludlow’s and Wallace’s book not only looks at a crucial time for the metaverse, its birth, it is also a study of some of the most important questions about the metaverse’s expansion. One question that motivates my own writing is quoted by Ludlow and Wallace in their intro. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig in his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

the very architecture of cyberspace is up for grabs: “Depending on who grabs it, there are several different ways it could turn out.”

Ludlow/Wallace’s approach to this challenge is very different from my own. I focus on the blurring of virtual and real worlds and how this access and control to data and meta data that will certainly empower business and government can also be available to benefit people and the planet. Also I try to keep people who do not yet have access to cyberspace in the conversation where possible. Ludlow and Wallace, on the other hand, focus on stories from some of the first people who began living much of their lives in the metaverse and “the conflicts between the owners of virtual worlds and their users, and between groups of users, and between individuals.”

I found myself aware of The Herald’s “mission” very soon after I began blogging about Second Life. Prokofky Neva, with a typically irreverent Herald turn of phrase, dubbed me “the chirpy whitewasher from Ugotrade” (here ) for taking too lenient an attitude, apparently, to a notorious griefer. And, in the body of the post, I was lumped fairly and squarely in the camp of the chief Herald antagonist, Philip Linden, (aka Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab) who got a wicked Herald tongue lashing for what was described as his “granola crunching fatty huffing way” of dealing with the same griefer.

For those of you who were in Second Life during the time this book covers hopefully it will bring up narratives and memories that you might have otherwise forgotten. For late sleepers who missed out on the “dawn,” Ludlow and Wallace provide an opportunity to catch up (also see LA Times Review).

For me the book provides an opportunity to look deeper into the question of what the metaverse has to teach the paraverse and visa versa by providing an intimate “Herald style” history of a metaverse, Second Life, that has truly succeeded in creating communities around user generated content.

Zha Ewry, a key metaverse architect and thinker I met in the Architectural Working Group in Second Life, said something that I have really taken to heart recently. Though Zha herself said it with a *chuckle*:

I sometimes, when I am feeling.. difficult.. assert that I don’t really trust the judgment of anyone who has never

1) Lived in Second Life or Everquest Online, or The Sims Online long enough that they can get 20 or 30 residents who count them as someone they know by name and behavior

2) Cracked at least half way up the level structure in World of Warcraft, Everquest, or similar

3) Managed some sort of small social community (wiki, bbs, moderated maling list..etc)

The Ludlow and Wallace team have done all of these three things and done them deep. So when Ludlow and Wallace talk I prick up my ears. On the left Urizenus Sklar and on the right Walker Spaight at his wedding to Destroy TV.

The Metaverse and The Paraverse

Exactly how and when the metaverse(s) and paraverse(s) like Google Earth and NASA’s World Wind actually evolve (and likely merge) to become a phenomena that millions or rather billions of people participate in is unpredictable at this juncture. But the consensus is that is will happen soon.

My own optimism for the future of the metaverse is based on an underlying proposition that the blurring of the lines between “virtual” and “real” worlds can be an exciting and liberating juncture for humanity and the planet (see many previous posts). I asked Peter Ludlow the same question I asked Cory Doctorow in London (see previous post):

1) What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds? Or as Cory D. rephrased it: “What happens when cyber space everts?”

Peter Ludlow:

well, the blowback of info from RL might be useful for some applications of virtual worlds, but I always found virtual worlds to be fun and interesting precisely because the bandwidth of communication with the real world was *narrow*. I don’t want that crap coming into my virtual space — it kills the atmosphere and sense of presence.

I don’t doubt that massive info blowback will have a role in virtual worlds, but that is the point where they aren’t really virtual worlds anymore but just boring communication devices — information rich telephones.

So if the blurring of the virtual and the real is inevitable (which in my view it is) and I agree with Ludlow that mere blowback of data into virtual worlds is potentially a boring phenomenon: “What can the metaverse teach the paraverse?” And, “How do virtual worlds avoid becoming just another boring communication device?”

“What is most likely to become boring when the lines between virtual and real worlds blur is the physical world.”

As David Orban pointed out as we chatted in skype:

My view actually of the blurring is not that the online worlds will be invaded by the physical worlds’ data but absolutely the other way around. The richness and variety of the online worlds will explode into the physical via interfaces and mashups and we will look back and see the physical world as boring and static.

“Huh, a tree that doesn’t even tell its own species?” without the augmentation, or “How could you meet people who didn’t send ahead their v-agents?”

“If you can drape real information across the physical world there is no reason why you can’t drape imaginary information over the real world.”

Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future said this in his presentation at the Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup (much more on his presentation later in this post).

This room may be a conference room in Wallenberg Hall. But with a click of a mouse or a flip of a switch, I could convert this room into a meeting room on Starship Enterprise. Or right outside the walls in the quad in Stanford you could have a Medieval Tournament going on. You can drape total fantasy, total fiction, total imaginary reality on the physical world.

He showed an example of some dramatic new thinking in the world of video games - a mock up of a game idea from a Nokia sponsored research program in Finland. And Liebhold noted, this is only a hint of the kind of ideas people are working on.

How Not To Be Just Another Boring Communication Device.

And even if cyber space everts it will not become just another boring communication device if the read-write culture that has defined the metaverse (exemplified by Second Life) continues to flourish.

Again I refer to the brilliant Larry Lessig who in his TED talk points out that read only culture was ushered in with the telephone. Lessig demonstrates how the digital age has created new opportunities for read write culture again, even though many of our laws are at odds with this.

In my view, whether virtual worlds remain the heart of a reemergence of read write culture or turn into “boring communication devices” is not so much about “massive info blow back” itself, but more about how the culture that has arisen around social networking and user generated content, again the great exemplar of this is Second Life, is worked out in the confluence of metaverse, paraverse, and meat space.

My interview with Peter Ludlow was conducted by email because the book party was too much fun. I could not ask one of the hosts and a man in demand to retire into a quiet corner. The book party was also a metaverse meetup and packed with Second Life movers and shakers including, Nathan Freitas of Cruxy, Joshua Fouts, Rita J. King of Dancing Ink Productions (Eureka Dejavu in SL - see her blog for more on meetup), Marvel Ousley (see he post on SLNN), Andrea Foster of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Eric Reuters, Jessica Segal (aka Pica Paperdoll, Electric Sheep Company, Andy Fundiger, Marshall Sponder (see his post), Morton Swimmer, California Condor, Donald Schwartz Image Link Productions, Dean Pence, and many many more. I posted some pictures to Flickr.

Notably the party was held in 3rd Ward the artists/entrepreneurs city in a warehouse that is home to WelloHorld - the start up that is the brainchild of co-author Mark Wallace, with Christian Westbrook and Jerry Paffendorf. They are on stealth mode so Mark declined an interview until their launch. But I did snap this chart pinned to their office door that might give some clues to their direction.

The after hours party that Peter hosted back in the Marriot by the Brooklyn bridge was also too entertaining to interrupt. It included both a screening of Peter’s screenshots taken through “dawn of the metaverse” and a very rock ‘n roll drama with the hotel security who were bent on ending the party early. In the picture below Ron Blechner (aka Hiro Pendragon) talks with Peter Ludlow about Peter’s early experiences in Second Life. Mark Wallace is on the left and Boris Kizelshteyn of Combined Story (aka Adonis Bussy in SL) is seated on the couch.

Interview with Peter Ludlow.

I collaborated on questions for Peter with my friends Gwyneth Llewelyn, David Orban and Hiro Pendragon. I will indicate which are their questions.

1) Who/what will be the future competition to the SL - based metaverse?

As you probably know, there are lots of alternatives to second life under development, but I continue to believe that ultimately Trevor Smith of Ogoglio has it right: the metaverse is not going to take off until we have widely available web 3.D development tools in the hands of tens of thousands of website designers. When that happens we will each be building our own little corners of the metaverse and supporting them on our desktop computers. Communications protocols will govern how we move between these worlds and what we can take with us.

2) Your current work is in RL on Philosophy of Language? The new book you are working on - is it a collaboration with the Prof. from NYU I met briefly at the party?

There were a couple of profs from NYU at the party. I’m not collaborating with them, however David Velleman has interesting things to say about narrative and avatars and agency, so I recommend that your readers check out his web site.

Right now I’m working on a book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, which has to do with conceptual puzzles that arise in computational/representational linguistic theories like Chomsky’s. Basically I’m obsessed with that at the moment.

3) What is the future of the SL Herald as an SL institution and what will be your role in it? Will the Herald go the way of SL Insider and start to cover 20 other MMOGs like Massively. That is will it become the Metaverse Herald? (This question was suggested by Gwyn)

In the past the Herald has covered other MMOs, but in the way that a hometown paper covers other towns. Typically we would only cover events in other MMOs if they involved a political protest or some dispute with the game company.

The Herald will stay in Second Life at least until our readers and the people we report on move elsewhere. That is, we aren’t really reporting on Second Life so much as a community that currently resides there. We followed them from TSO, and if they go nomadic on us again we will follow them.

4) What is the relationship between Peter/Uri -similarities/differences? Do you have alts and avatars in other verses? (Hiro’s question)

We all have many different avatars that we use in everyday life. We dress and act differently depending on whether we are conducting business, socializing or whatever. If you think of these ways of acting and dressing as modes of presentation, then you see that it is the same as using an avatar to present yourself or mediate your social interactions with others. Like you I have lots of different alts and avatars even in the real world. You’re talking to one of them now!

5) The digital doesn’t fossilize in one out of a billion specimens, but allows perfect preservation of time-sequences, in the changing metaverse. This means that unavoidably in time it is going to become richer than the physical world itself. How are we going to equip ourselves in coping with this? (Question from David Orban)

it can’t become richer than the actual world because information has to be encoded in physical states of the world. That having been said, I’ve never been impressed by the preservatory aspects of the digital so much as the fleeting and fragile aspects of it. This has been made salient to me by my years in Second Life. I’ve seen so many interesting builds and groups come and vanish. Part of the project of our book was to preserve some of this history. But rereading the book yesterday I was reminded of a lot of events that didn’t make it into the book and may be lost forever.

More generally though, digital media does not give us perfect preservation. You can’t fight the second law of thermodynamics. High entropy will trump low entropy, and there will be lots of bit rot between now and the heat death of the universe.

6) Are we living in a simulation? (David Orban)

There’s a philosopher at Oxford who says that there is something like a 75% chance that we are. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say “I don’t think so.” Actually, I know we aren’t, but if you want that story you have to take my course on skepticism.

7) What is the future of identity and IP in the open metaverse? The call for identity authentication grows louder by the day.

Identity shouldn’t be a problem. It should be possible to establish identity even for avatars using a version of public key encryption for digital signatures. IP is another matter. Technologically, preserving IP is getting close to impossible, but on the other hand if the US Congress keeps passing draconian laws that “give” IP rights for patents like crustless peanut butter sandwiches well then maybe it can be preserved by old fashioned meat space head cracking. Zero tolerance for crustless peanut butter sandwiches. Sell one and you go to prison. The only question is how much of that kind of crap people will put up with. When they finally figure out it is a scam (of if they do) then that will be the end of IP.

Is the blurring of the lines “between us and them” - human and machine the “high noon” of the metaverse? Or as Ben Goetzel writes here in his post on Global Brain Memes. ” I think this ties in with Ray Kurzweil’s point that by the time we have human-level AGI, it may not be “us versus them”, it may be a case where it’s impossible to draw the line between us and them…” (Also see David Orban’s Conversation with Ray Kurzweil on YouTube).

I don’t buy this for a nanosecond. First of all, is there even such a thing as “general intelligence”? I’d be surprised. “intelligence” is just a covering term for a basket of cognitive abilities that we prize. If you are impressive at enough of those abilities we say you have intelligence. It’s like athleticism. There is no single property of athleticism, there are rather lots of different physical abilities that we prize. If someone has enough of them we call that athletic. When we say something is “intelligent” we are just saying that we are impressed by it. I remember when playing tic tac toe counted as “intelligent” in AI. It doesn’t anymore because the problem is too easy. We aren’t impressed by it anymore.

Now, on the question of whether we are becoming indistinguishable from machines (and I can’t help but think of Blade Runner here) I am also dubious. First of all, I seriously doubt that we will ever see a machine that can pass the turing test for any significant amount of time and broad range of contexts. But that just goes to the question of whether we could be fooled in conversation. The real question is whether machines are actually like us, and here the real problem is that we have no idea what *we* are like. We have just a glimmer of a picture of the nature of our cognitive architecture and zero idea how that architecture supervenes on our wetware. Well, if we don’t know what we are like, then it is difficult to know how to build something like us. It is not an engineering problem. It is a basic science problem. If we knew *what* to build I don’t doubt we could build it. But what to build?

The State of Play

If you are unfamiliar with the state of play between paraverse(s) and metaverse(s) Susan Kish has an excellent roadmap. My friend VJ also has a nice collection of paraverse links tagged in Delicious. In her report, “Virtual Worlds: Second Life and The Enterprise,” Kish notes, “The combination – whether a Google Life or a Second Earth or another similar entity - could be the ultimate enterprise in Virtual Worlds.”

The question is also: Will this confluence be as important and beneficial to non-profit centered enterprises. For example, the notion of Amazon.org is a social software entity that Bruce Sterling evokes in Shaping Things.

And, of course, very importantly, the question that Peter Ludlow raises - will the confluence NOT be boring.

3D Data For Real Virtual Worlds

I was fortunate to attend the very inspiring presentation of Mike Liebhold from the Institute for the Future titled, “3D data for real world virtual worlds” at the Stanford University’s Metaverse Meetup organized by Henrik Bennetsen. The meetup was streamed into the International Spaceflight Museum in Second Life last week. It was an amazing lens into the state of play in the paraverse. Henrik published the talk abstract before the event:

Abstract 3D data, maps, and software will change the way we compute and interact with spatial services. Moving beyond simple texture mapped terrain and boxes, new 3D mapping frameworks are rapidly evolving into platforms for real world virtual world media, interaction, commerce, and science. In this talk I’ll review work of various groups who are building different components of a 3D Geoweb. I will first describe how their 3D data and software will work as a platform for a 3D real world virtual world, and then, what kinds of new applications and user experiences might be developed on these platforms, and then finish with a brief discussion of prospects and mechanisms for data interoperability allowing users to create, discover, use, and exchange 3D data across platforms.

And Leibhold truly covered everything outlined above! The fascinating talk will hopefully be posted to the web soon here. But there is a very entertaining and thought provoking post up on Wrxli FlimFlam’s Second Life blogSecond Front already. I chatted a little with Wrxli who is a performance artist with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse during the meetup and look forward to more conversations.

Highlights of the talk - Leibhold’s responses to some of the questions.

Once again I asked the question that came from call to action that Cory Doctorow made in my previous post:

1) How can the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that are frequently only available to big companies and used by them in order to realize profit and control also be put into the hands of individuals?

Leibhold’s response was concrete and detailed but due to the sound cutting out in parts I will have to refer to the recording myself when it is posted here later this week for all the details. But Leibhold mentioned several examples including police crime maps that were increasingly available, and the sensor web project at Microsoft where they have networks of all kinds of environmental sensors out there available freely in GRSS format on Microsoft Virtual Earth. Leibhold pointed out the sensor web architecture at Microsoft is built on common standards will work on a variety of sensors. He continued:

We are also seeing a lot of sensor data collected by life scientists and physical scientists available. A lot of biological information and weather information is going to come on line. There are citizen sensing projects Eric Paulos at Intel Labs, Berkley who has being doing all kinds of things using mobile phones as sensors. There is a group at UCLA called CENS (Center for Embedded Network Sensing) that has a whole project to allow citizen sensing. And Nokia has a project called Sense Web, I think. And they have sponsored research programs at about ten universities world wide to come up with interoperable standards and mechanisms for ordinary people to create and share 3D sensor information and to visualize it as well.

Another very interesting point he made re a larger vision of interoperability was that:

while there was division between the worlds of geospatial standards, the worlds of scene rendering and Hollywood, the video game worlds, CAD, Google will prosper. And Google is creating defacto standards around KML and Collada that we are all going to have to live with.

But when I raised the notion that Second Life’s expansive vision for a new open grid architecture might mean noting that, in my view, “Second Life is also the furthest along re open sourcing of the 3D immersive worlds” (someone from Sun disputed this assertion pointing out Project Wonderland has been open sourced top to bottom since March, and I realized I should have limited my assertion to previously closed immersive virtual worlds). But Leibhold’s response was interesting:

I would dispute the fact that Second Life is furthest along. I think that quite frankly I believe that any day now Google is going to announce avatars and avatar based social networks for Google Earth and the rumors are rampant that they have already tested it. And if that is the case they are farther along. There are structural problems with the computer server architecture in Second Life that restrict the kinds of applications you can run. I think that Second Life is one of the greatest social experiments but technically I think they are going to be eclipsed.

I had IMed Ginsu Linden at the start of the meetup to offer him a TP (teleport) if he wanted to attend. But unfortunately he was busy. But, of course, immediately I shot off an IM to him reporting this prediction of Second Life’s eclipse by Google’s imminent launch of avatar based social networks for Google Earth! Ginsu sent me back this reply:

[8:32] Ginsu Linden: Thanks Tara5. I am actually really looking forward to Google’s entry into the market. Will give people something to chew over.

Yes, it will! And IMed my friend Zha Ewry too reporting this prediction of Google supremacy. In response she pointed out how much depended:

19:25] Zha Ewry: on how Google approaches things,and how much freedom they give their residents, if they are even at all residents, not merely transitory avatars. It will interesting to see how they do at running it.

And of course there is the Linden Lab initiative to restructure the Second Life grid to be watched and participate in through the collaborative effort of The Architectural Working Group.

To return to the theme of this post:

The very architecture of cyber space is up for grabs, and: “Depending on who grabs it, there are several different ways it could turn out” (Lessig).

Don’t Miss the Next Stanford Meetup!

The event is taking place on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 from 6:00pm – 7:30pm SLT/PST and to attend via Second Life you go here:

http://slurl.com/secondlif e/Spaceport%20Bravo/66/74/184/

Physically it is at:

Wallenberg Hall, Stanford University

Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. His work regularly appears both in print and online, and he has spoken around the world on issues such as the global environment, technological transformation, and political change. In 2003, Cascio co-founded WorldChanging.com, the Utne Independent Press Award-winning website identifying models, tools, and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In March, 2006, he started OpenTheFuture.com as his online home. Cascio presently serves as a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, as the Director of Impacts Analysis for The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and as a founding fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Talk abstract: The Metaverse — what does it include, where is it going, and how will it change our lives? Based on my work for the Metaverse Roadmap Overview, I’ll look both at the underlying technologies of the Metaverse and at the social, cultural and economic impacts it could have.

3rd Ward, architectural working group on Second Life, artificial general intelligence, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, Brooklyn Metaverse meetup. Stanford metaverse meetup, citizen sensing, embedded sensor networks, geospatial standards, Ginsu Yoon, Google Earth, Lawrence Lessig, Linden Lab, Mark Wallace, metaverse, Microsoft Virtual Earth, nanotechnology, NASA World Wind, Ogoglio, paraverse, Peter Ludlow, positive global development, Project Wonderland, Second Life, Second Life Herald, Sensor Networks, singularity, social networking, The Dawn of The Metaverse, the metaverse roadmap, the open future, Urizenus Sklar, Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds, Walker Spaight, Wello Horld, Zero Linden Zha Ewry

“Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world,” Cory Doctorow, Craphound.com, boingboing.net

When we spoke at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London last week, Cory Doctorow outlined a vision of how ways individuals tap into data and metadata to create instrumentation in “virtual” worlds might be thrown out into the “real” world to give people more agency there.

Cory D. turned my initial question inside out and gave a brilliant glimpse of something a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea for an Amazon.org. Amazon.org is a social software entity that can answer questions. Questions about our world. Questions about objects. “What questions? Not the profit-centric questions that obsess Amazon. The serious questions.” (Shaping Things)

“The Inverse of the Surveillance Society”

Me: What happens when Virtual Worlds become flooded with data from “real life” objects, geo- positioning, etc., and extreme life–logging enters virtual worlds?

Cory: Well this is like Spook Country the new Gibson novel – What happens when cyber space everts – hmmm? I’m not sure I have anything very pithy to say on that EXCEPT………

Apart from all the traditional kind of overlay reality stuff, if there is one thing I am actually interested seeing from a virtual world migrating to the real world its instrumentation.

I think lot of things that are characteristic of very successful internet based business is that they are extremely finally instrumented so like Amazon knows in aggregate on a second by second basis how their site is being used by people and they can twiddle the dials in real time.

As users of the world we have very little access to that kind of instrumentation. We don’t even know how the tube is running. The tube knows how the tube is running and we kinda of don’t. I would be really interested in seeing that. You’ve seen Joi Ito’s WoW interface right. Have you seen it …

Me: Ummm no! [But I have now. Joi Ito sent me a Flickr link to his photo. Thanks!]

Cory: When they are doing a raid at a certain point the number of instrument panels on his screen actually eclipses all of the vision of the raid you no longer actually see the raid. You are experiencing WoW through a purely numerical and data visualization system.

There are different abstraction layers at which you can experience the world and one of them is through the instrumentation of it. It is in some ways the inverse of the surveillance society.

Surveillance is all about when people in authority know a lot about you. Instrumentation is when you know a lot about the world. And it allows you have more agency. When people know a lot about you it takes away your agency.

Me: So is that on the lines of personalized virtual operation centers – like MySpace’s with instrumentation….?

I don’t have this fleshed out into a nice solid like a non abstract thing. But the thing that I have been noodling with is what if all the kinds of data visualization and aggregate statistical information about the world that big companies use in order to realize their enormous profit and control over us as individuals was in our hands.

This is a little like Bruce Sterling’s idea of an Amazon.org [see page 111 Shaping of Things] where all the data from the positional and temporal characteristics of all the objects that we own were in aggregate visible and available so that we can mix and match them remix them understand them and have more agency in the world.

I think that empiricism, measurement, understanding more about the world is the thing that the Enlightenment is grounded in. Like being able to write down how the world works using objective measurements being able to compare them with other people in terms of peer review and experimentation that is the core of what makes us contemporary human beings – post enlightenment, non alchemic, non superstitious, empiricism grounded people.

Being able to understand what is going on the world – How much RFI is there right now where I am standing? What frequencies is it running on? What are the aggregate histograms? Tell me about it. Are people looking at the web around here, or talking on their phones, or sending SMS? Am I in a spot where the thermal signature of lots of people is high or low? What was it like ten minutes ago? Is this typical or atypical of the characteristic histogram of thermal and electromagnetic energy in this space for this time, year on year, day on day, and hour on hour?

Just knowing that and knowing it on some liminal way where your clothes feel different based on whether the room is typical or atypical. That is a really interesting thing to know.

Games do this all the time. You know a lot about the way the game is performing by things like audio cues, like coloring cues, Also by cues that have to do with network jitter. You hop onto a shard with like a zillion people on it that shard performs differently. You don’t know when you walk into a room necessarily what the activity level in that room is, especially if it is a room subdivided by a lot of physical baffles and things that hide what is going on from you. But you know when you walk onto shard whether it is an active or inactive shard.

So can we grab all that stuff that lets us know a lot about the virtual world and exert agency over and influence over it and throw it into the “real” world.

That what be very cool.

A Global Virtual Worlds Open Source Community

Open Standards are frequently cited as a key part of what will make virtual worlds “fit for business.” But for a reverse surveillance society where virtual operations centers could be universal information resources for all of us open sourcing and open standards are also the key to tapping into the myriad data streams currently only available to business and government.

At the Virtual Worlds Forum in London the virtual worlds open source community was not on one panel together. But they were a small but noticeable cohort that caught my attention.