Holy Serfs and Dickhead Libertarians

This week saw a wonderful issue for focusing on the intersection of governance, economics and personhood in virtual worlds. Blizzard Entertainment, the owner-operators of World of Warcraft, announced a new policy with respect to user interface addons developed by third parties. Addons, they declared, must be free – and by free, they mean makers cannot even solicit donations on their non-Blizzard websites. UI mods are an enormous enterprise, with thousands available to add customizations for particular visual styles as well as class- and activity-specific tools not available within the standard game.

It’s been fascinating watching the reaction. My main sources for public opinion are the discussion thread on the LiveJournal WoW community and the comments to a terrific, thought-provoking post by veteran game designer and commentator Scott Jennings, “Rights, Profit, Drama.”

I see two polar attitudes towards the politics of virtual worlds as being the most common by far. One, shared by many gamers, is Holy Corporate Serfdom, a firm belief in absolute corporate sovereignty. Not just “we have no rights against people we buy stuff from, deal with it,” but “it is good and right and proper that people in commerce can do anything they want without recourse.”

This goes beyond the set of values sometimes called the “California Ideology” of techno-libertarianism. That ideology values freedom, and thinks that both state and market institutions need to work to maintain it. Holy Corporate Serfdom, by contrast, sees no particular value, ethically or financially, in freedom, and is quite content to live, work and play at the sufferance of management teams enforcing absolutist EULAs. This view characterizes a significant majority of the comments on both forums.

The other is Dickhead Libertarianism, usually expressed as “the First Amendment means I can say anything I want.” As Jennings notes, this is the ideological smokescreen generated by griefers and trolls, people out to game or destroy the system, or people simply incapable of behaving in a civilized manner.

There’s a third voice, or babble of voices, saying “it’s not that simple,” of course. Jennings is one of them, and his post balances his own strong reactions as a game designer with an understanding of the complexity of interests and value claims at issue. He pegs his analysis off a quote from the terrific Josh Fairfield, from an article this week in the Yale Law Journal, “Escape Into the Panopticon: Virtual Worlds and the Surveillance Society,” which presents some of those complexities from a very different viewpoint.

Nonetheless, those first two views dominate discussions of the politics and economics of online communities. And, like many false dichotomies, they’re based on shared axioms. Both Holy Corporate Serfdom and Dickhead Libertarianism share a legal reductionism all too common in American society. This view holds that the structures that govern and shape community are those of law and law alone, and that law is a comprehensive, instrumental, utilitarian tool for achieving specific rational ends.

So, the Holy Corporate Serfs look at the section of the EULA that says “we can do absolutely anything we want to you,” and they go, “see? the law says so!” and that ends the discussion, unless a prayer to the All-Powerful God of Market Capitalism is thrown in for piety. There is no “should” that could limit market power, there is only the naked rule of power, and that rule is good.

Likewise, the Dickhead Libertarian reads the First Amendment to the US Constitution (“Congress shall make no law abridging…freedom of speech”) to mean, as commenters to Jennings’ post had it, the absolute right to stand on your lawn and shout obscenities at you. There is no notion that society is constructed and constrained by much more than constitutional law, that there is a legitimate role for social norms and standards.

Why the assumption that only law and power are legitimate? Simple: we’re not taught a language for thinking about personhood, about membership in a community. We’re not taught how to think about values aside from the two options on the menu: rational-actor theory and Abrahamic religion. And even religious people find it very challenging to use religious concepts in thinking about most public issues. So, the only set of discourse tools we have is instrumentalism, legalism, utilitarianism: if it’s not down in print, it doesn’t exist, and if it is down in print it means exactly what it says, and loopholes are fair game for exploitation.

A legalistic society reads a EULA that claims absolute power and concludes, if it says it in print, it must be so. A legalistic society reads the First Amendment and concludes, “there’s no thousand page volume of enabling regulations that specify that I can’t use these ten words in those twenty places, so there are no limits on me.”

What might another set of discourse tools look like? See David R. Kendrick’s “What Makes a Fuckhead” for a deconstruction of Dickhead Libertarianism, or Wikipedia’s meta-essay on “Don’t Be A Dick.”

Tools for handling the Holy Corporate Serfs? That’s a harder question, and one for another day.

Friday 500: Virtual Hobbes

Linden Lab yesterday announced a new policy of segregating and policing adult content in Second Life. The largest of the changes – relocating adult businesses from the Linden-owned Mainland to a separate “red light” continent – make sense, and follows the market, which has indicated a strong preference for zoning.

The rest of the scheme, though, involving a complex and vague system of flagging content as “mature” or “adult,” and requiring property owners to restrict access to visitors with age-verified credit cards on file, is further evidence of a system of government all too familiar: selective enforcement of the law. Linden Lab’s measure raises a question of just what it means to be free.

Supporters of the Linden decision seem to be adopting a view of freedom close to that of Thomas Hobbes: you’re free if nobody’s confiscated your property or thrown you in jail – yet. While it’s a particularly post-9/11 view, it’s one that comes back again and again in fearful times, from the aftermath of the English Civil War of 1642 to the specter of human sexuality haunting Linden Lab today.

The distinction between freedom and slavery, and what made a republic free, was a subject of high-stakes debate in Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century. Traditional republican theory held that “the predicament of slaves is that they have no control over their lives and are consequently forced to live in a state of unending anxiety as to what may or may not be about to happen to them.” (Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, xiii) “According to this view,” Skinner says, “it is the mere existence of arbitrary power, not its exercise in such a way as to stop us from acting, that takes away our liberty and leave us as slaves.” (Skinner 152).
They Thought They Were Free is the title of the book in which the famous poem by Martin Niemoller was first published:

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

Hobbes, it seems, would argue that Niemoller was in fact free under the Nazis: he defines freedom to mean nothing but the absence of external impediments – like being in jail, or behind the Berlin Wall, and argues that someone confronted with “obey or die” is free, because they have a choice. Seriously, I’m not making this up – this is the core idea of one of the most important political philosophers of the past half-millennium.

But then, that shouldn’t surprise people familiar with political debate in virtual worlds. Assault? You can always log out. Economically or socially ruinous policies? Either shut up or leave. And the Leviathan, Hobbes’s absolute sovereign? Has nothing on virtual-worlds owners: EULAs (End-User License Agreements) are pure, uncut Hobbes.

In fact, no better argument in support of Hobbes’ ideas could be devised than the Second Life EULA. Hobbes argued that limited government was a dirty lie: that the “social contract” wasn’t one where you could haggle over terms: you traded your natural freedom to the sovereign for the protections of civilization, and it was an all or nothing deal. Any attempt to negotiate “limited government” or “constitutional government,” or, heavens forbid, “a government of laws, not of men” was nothing but a pathetic exercise in self-delusion: sovereign power is sovereign power, and it’s absolute and that’s that.

So Hobbes would look at most EULAs, which say “we own everything you say, do, or make,” and nod his approval. That’s a free society – you can do anything the company hasn’t prohibited, and even do the prohibited stuff until they catch you, and they’re your sovereign, pure and simple. He’d look at the Second Life EULA, which claims to give Residents intellectual property rights in their creations – unless Linden Lab needs to appropriate them for publicity, or unless they’re patent rights, or unless they just don’t feel like it, and would laugh at the act of mutual delusion being perpretrated.

Linden Lab’s latest bit of flailing over sexual content shows just how right Hobbes is. First, they pre-released news of the policy to a handful of favorite bloggers, who had time to prepare their analyses in advance of the official announcement. In a bit of black humor, Hobbes says that what the people who cry out for freedom really want is just a seat at the table, they want to be able to think of themselves as something better than just another faceless subject. So Linden Lab doles out privilege, and the bloggers pat themselves on the back for how free they are.

As of yesterday, Linden Lab’s policy was that all content categorized as “Adult” would require credit card verification of age for access, whether on Linden-owned land or private estates. Journalist Wagner James Au asked the Linden VP of Customer Relations and Linden counsel about a few examples:

One of the more popular roleplaying groups in SL is “Dark Den RP Group”, which by its own description, offers “Kidnap, auction and slavery RP”. Would that be designated as Adult? Surprisingly, both suggested it wouldn’t, since the wording is “not about sex and violence.”
How about “Capture” roleplay, generally associated with S/M sexuality? Again, they suggested, if sex wasn’t explicitly mentioned, it wouldn’t be defined as sexual.

Meanwhile, the “Maturity Ratings FAQ,” which disappeared from the Second Life website sometime today, defined “Adult” to include, as blogger Dale Innis read it,

any “publicly accessible Region” that “advertises, makes available, references, or displays… genitalia, whether or not photo-realistic… [or] Photo-realistic nudity”. Under those words, a gallery with a reproduction of Michelangelo’s “David”, or a private home with a realistic nude portrait on the wall, is “Adult”. And that’s ridiculous. It also clearly includes nude beaches (where genitalia are of course displayed).

It also would include most vendors of avatar skins, except for those that have been showing up on some of the default avatars, with opaque underwear “baked in” to the skin itself.

What does this mean? Innis said that in the discussion forums, Linden representatives were saying that while the text of the definition did cover those things, they would never enforce the prohibition that way. Innis concluded, “So we’re not supposed to worry about what the law actually says, and just trust that the enforcement of it will be reasonable. And that really annoys me!”

Unlike Innis, several bloggers seemed quite happy with that, confident perhaps that their favored status with the regime would protect them from Niemoller’s fate. Hobbes would agree: they’re free to say and do anything they want that isn’t in any way sexual, and anything sexual unless Linden Lab chooses to make an example of them – which they won’t do to their favored subjects. So all’s well.

Just like those of us who don’t look like Arabs, and don’t have the same name as suspects, and don’t donate to the wrong political groups need only fear terrorists, and not our sovereign, right?

Four centuries ago some radicals thought otherwise. “According to this view… it is the mere existence of arbitrary power, not its exercise in such a way as to stop us from acting, that takes away our liberty and leave us as slaves.”

EULA, PATRIOT Act, whatever.

Friday 500: The Elevator Pitch

The elevator pitch: if you can’t explain your product or service in a tweet (140 characters) or the time it takes to ride up an elevator with a potential investor, you don’t really understand what you’re selling.

This is what my faculty advisors have been trying to tell me, I think, couched in the language of  mobilization of theory. They’ve been saying that I have a good sense for the interesting questions, good descriptive and analytical skills, but something’s missing. That something is my elevator pitch, my analytical core, the perspective I bring to the things I find interesting. “Duuuude, lookit this!” is not an elevator pitch. 

When asked what I do academically, I have a series of answers that boil down to (a) hide behind jargon familiar to the person asking or (b) launch into a long ramble about the interconnectedness of everything. What I don’t do is deliver a coherent and *accurate* tweet-length answer. It’ll probably take a dozen of these posts to develop one, so it’s time to begin.  I’m going to distill a tweet from the useful bits and pieces swirling around in my mind.

Ludotopianism

A post last week on Terra Nova introduced the term:

Ludotopian

Adj. The belief that through games the world can become a better place.

There is a growing body of work that, to a greater or lesser extent, suggests that games can make the world better. The notion is generally that through participation in a game we actors gain some form of improved outcome. The scope of outcome ranges from the narrow sense of, say, an educational outcome for an individual or the wider sense of a social change brought about through game culture.

That’s my basic perspective. I’ve come to games/digital worlds/online spaces from an old interest in space exploration motivated by the same desires: to use technology to create better communities. I left space activism because our need for better communities is profound and immediate, and space settlement will not happen soon enough to matter.

The obvious next questions are, what do I mean by better communities? what’s the problem? why do I think new technologies can solve it?

The Descent of Icarus and the Problem of Representation

In our HSD core seminar this week (kudos to Clark Miller for a rich, provocative and varied set of readings this semester), we read the first three chapters of Yaron Ezrahi’s 1990 work, The Descent of Icarus. Ezrahi has a beautiful elevator pitch for my concerns:

In the early twentieth century, the question of whether knowledge can liberate society from the burdens of scarcity and conflict persists; whether Icarus’ flight to the sun is feasible, whether science can carry politics on its “wings” to spheres where collective human existence is free from chance, prejudice and arbitrariness. (Ezrahi 3)

The statement introduces a brief description of the debate between JBS Haldane in Daedalus, or, Science and the Future and Bertrand Russell in Icarus, or the Future of Science, both wonderful, mindblowing, insightful reads.

A century on, the question is if anything more pressing.

Ezrahi lays out three notions of freedom, or solutions to the tension between the values of freedom and order: the libertarian (Smith and Hayek), public enlightenment (Condorcet, Mill and Dewey), and the centralized democratic administrative state (Hobbes, Hamilton). All three solutions are typically in play, in rhetoric and practice, with different ones dominant in various eras, according to Ezrahi.

We live in the third, with some jockeying at the margins over the past thirty years. In the third, the role of the citizen is to watch the spectacle of governance by the few, and provide critical feedback. It seems to me no coincidence that this model rose to prominence in the era of television and mass-market consumerism: the citizen is a consumer of statecraft, the voting booth the Nielsen meter on their television.

I have long been drawn to the second model, with strong sympathies for the first. It seems to me that the third necessarily renders people unfit for self-governance. The system, from public education (next week’s Friday 500, possibly) to the supermarket to the voting booth creates insubstantial illusions of choice and participation, while allowing the few to work real power behind the scenes, subject only to the occasional manipulated scandal or disaster too large to conceal.

From there, I’m interested in theories and practices of representation and agency (in the legal sense), of alternatives to geographic representation (what a bizarre notion!), of effective and accountable systems of delegation of sovereign individual decisionmaking.  That information and computer technologies can play a transformative role, just as the mass media did for the centralized state, seems obvious.

Social Protectionism versus the Long Revolution

What separates space settlements from digital worlds? I was drawn to the former from the belief that experiments in new political systems required isolated laboratories, that otherwise the dominant culture of the centralized consumer-capitalist state would absorb, crush or co-opt them. Mars, three to six months away, presented such a space, beyond real-time access to mass media, separated as America was from Europe by an uncertain sea.

I think I’ve been proven categorically wrong. Wonderful republics of public enlightenment have thrived, built and maintained value sets far, far from the norms of the dominant culture, and thorougly rejected attempts at buying them off or drowning them. Slash fiction communities have given voice to a transgressive women’s sexuality while engaging with the products of consumer media. Second Life Residents utterly rejected corporate pabulum in favor of their peers’ creations. World of Warcraft guilds have given millions a real experience with the problems and pleasures of community management and tools of governance. What Kim Stanley Robinson calls “The Long Revolution” of human dignity right now has dancers on its barricades in online spaces.

The enlightened republic is possible, and ICT provides the tools to make it real, and the spaces to enact it.

What do I want to do? Here’s my tweet: I want to help shape and strengthen the digital enlightened republic, and welcome people to it who are ready to abandon consumerism for citizenship.

Hope you enjoyed the ride up the elevator; this is my stop.

Friday 500: Aporia

Friday 500: a weekly essay on some puzzling aspect of virtual worlds studies

This week: ” I don’t have a freaking clue how virtual worlds and the internet shape communities.”

I discovered a wonderful new word this week, and I’ve chosen it as the title for my (oft-renamed) blog: aporia.

Stephen D. Smith in Law’s Quandry,  a short book on legal metaphysics I’m reading for fun (leading me to think, despite my grave doubts, that I might actually be an academic), describes Plato’s “aporetic dialogues:” a question is posed, such as “what is courage?” and Socrates professes to have no answer. The earnest philosophers of Athens engage him with their definitions, and Socrates deconstucts each attempt, leaving himself and his interlocutors in a state of aporia, or quandry, having become convinced that they don’t know what they know.

This is what graduate school has done to me. My excesses of temperament had always been those of certainty: I’d been quick to speak, quick to act, rash, ambitious, arrogant. Two years into my doctoral program, though, I find myself intellectually paralyzed.

What I knew was, my interests have long lain in examining how technology can be used for political and cultural innovation. I began in early adolescence with an interest in the Soviet experiment  – in the goals and dreams of the revolutionary generation, and in understanding how they led to such a disaster. A few years after my master’s in Russian studies, I returned to an even earlier interest, space exploration. Starting with Robert Zubrin’s essays on Mars as a laboratory for social change, I spent about eight years analyzing and advocating space settlement as a means of enabling experiments in government and society, finally concluding that space settlement won’t happen in my lifetime.

Two years ago I discovered virtual worlds, and saw the opportunity to do today what I’d hoped to do someday in space: try new forms of community enabled by advanced technology. I applied my usal decisiveness and ambition: changed my graduate program of study, built a reading list, and set out to master the theories, history, issues and politics of the field.

When I set out on paths like this in the past, my results were dramatic and immediate: I always found myself in leadership positions quickly, ready to expound on my clear, settled ideas and work with the very best people in my chosen field. I took for granted that I’d have the same experience with my interest in virtual worlds.

Two years on, all I have is Socratic aporia, a few largely-abandoned virtual worlds accounts, and an academic trajectory that looks more like drain circling than arrows of desire. This essay – and probably several more of my Friday 500 essays, which I’ve committed to doing along with my colleague Murray Thomson – will try to determine why.

First Hypothesis: There Is No Table

Most communities have a fairly apparent structure, such that key people and organizations can be readily identified. When I became interested in space, the institutional players included the NASA field centers and at most a half-dozen NGOs, and any list of the people whose work was influential would include the same 50 or so names, most of whom could be found at one of a few major yearly conferences. The network was tight, yet open: show up at a couple conferences, deliver some good work, and you could meet and collaborate with everyone.

My current sort-of academic field of sort-of Science and Technology Studies is different: there are a number of overlapping interdisciplanary subfields, all doing slightly different work, with a slightly different corpus of literature: STS, History & Philosophy of Science, Science Policy, and more. Our core seminar has spent a huge amount of time just tracing for us what all the various academic communities do and read, while we try to figure out which tiny ecosystem we fit best in – if any.

I came in interested in how virtual worlds and internet communications can enable experiments in self-governance.  Where’s my literature?  Some of it is in cultural studies, some in English departments, some in schools of communication, schools of information, computer science departments, psychology and anthropology departments, a good bit in law schools – and virtually none where I would have expected, in political science. And none of the people writing in those departments or disciplines really reads anybody else’s work.

Likewise, while ASU usually feels like a terrible fit, there is no clear center for this stuff. When I wanted to do Russian Studies, I had about five good schools to choose from, each different enough that the decision was fairly clear (I ended up at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs as a Harriman Fellow).  For virtual worlds – well, MIT does good stuff, but it’s not clear they’re asking the questions I am. Then there are people here and there – Georgia Tech, Irvine, USC – but as virtual worlds studies are dissipated over so many disciplines, the field seems to be mostly isolated scholars with small, unintegrated bits of the puzzle.

And so far, I’ve failed at integrating those bits. With everything I’ve taken on before, at the two year mark I felt I really had an understanding of the ideas and the players. Now, I shuffle the bits around, but no picture emerges.

I don’t have a freaking clue how virtual worlds and the internet shape communities, except to speculate that they enable so many myriad pico-communities in near isolation that there can be no table where the A-list players sit, no key nodes in the network, no clearer picture in practice than the fragmented picture of the academic communities studying the practice.

Is this where we’re destined to end up?  Empowered by communication technologies to the point where we’re a universe of mutually incomprehensible, weakly bonded, atoms of narrow interests? Are we a universe of giraffe fetishists, PEZ dispenser collectors, and scholars of 1960s Albanian post-modernist science fiction movies?

Law’s Quandry grapples with the claim that legal discourse is “nonsense,” or just words. Is the answer to my speculation of how the internet shapes community that it enables pure mutual incomprehension, the Tower of Babel given electronic form?