Drama couldn't make up crazy stories like the following example.

The richest of the rich in Silicon Valley are actually throwing money around the GOP in order to defeat Trump from receiving the nomination.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3483046/Silicon-Valley-bosses-Republican-leaders-secret-talks-stopping-Trump-s-bid-White-House.html#comments

Meanwhile their own hometown ballet company closes its doors due to lack of funding.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/breaking-news/ci_29610630/silicon-valley-ballet-shuts-down

This is the attitude of the tech elite for you in spades.  It also highlights my continual theme that these people are insane and they truly believe that they will reach the "Singularity" rapture.  They fully expect to live forever inside machines.  In fact they hate their own bodies.

So it is no surprise that an art form celebrating humanity and the beauty of human bodies would fail to thrive in their vicinity.

Here is another contrast in photos that says it all...

Techs would rather watch this...life in simulcrum

Over going to the theater to celebrate beauty like this...

These people are truly without culture and they flail around trying to create it anew.  In the process destroying everything that makes us human.  And this is all due to the fact that they hate that their own bodies.

This was cross posted at my non-tech blog

Long Live the New Flesh

There is a ramping up of motion capture hype in regards to Philip Rosedale's new VR Hi-Fi.

And of course, it is all another sign of what Mediabastard (another SL alumnus) calls the aptly named Media Induced Psychosis or MIPS for short.  Mediabastard was the one who really tuned me into Marshall McLuhan and the Medium is the Message theory.



Watch the video, then read the comments...also read Ciaran Laval's blog about the video here.

Now imagine if you were face to face with someone in deep conversation.  But what you saw were the "expressions" that were "captured" for the Hi-Fi avatars.  Honestly...would you accept those expressions in every day life?  Or would you deduce that there was something wrong with your conversation partner if his/her mouth continually hung open?

One of the things that Mediabastard and Jaron Lanier write about is dumbing ourselves down to accept the new media hype, the latest thing.  Lanier wrote that current AI is only acceptable because we have to take ourselves down to its level.  In a way that we would never do for another human being.  In essence, we are denying our own humanity and highly evolved senses to buy into AI/VR media hype.  Because it is cool and the idea is exciting, we are willing to accept the good enough, the very large shortcomings.  People may think, that it is only temporary but it isn't.  It changes us.  This technology is not making us better.  It is devolving our own advanced social processes.  This would not be the first time we have all degenerated because of technology.  Lanier pointed out that people now feel more comfortable typing into devices rather than having conversations.  That young people have a harder time with eye contact due to technology.  He also concluded that this is no surprise since technology is developed by a group of people who by and large have problems with the interpersonal aspects of life.

Technology people are more likely to suffer from forms of autism or have conditions on the spectrum.  They use technology to cope with a world that at times baffles them or even frightens them.  I have nothing but empathy for them.  Not being able to hold a comfortable level of eye contact nor being able to properly read facial expressions is akin to being blind on a very basic level.  Imagine all the visual information about friends, loved ones, and strangers that is lost simply because you can not see it.

These are the kind of people now involved with motion capture in VR technology.  They can't see where they are going wrong.  But they are asking people who do know, to get excited over the promise of Mocap not the shoddy way it is designed.  The great majority of it depending upon all of us dumbing ourselves down to accept a facsimile of "human expression" in VR that in real life we would rightly conclude is evidence of mental disability.

Mocap could lead to problems of a new generation not being properly able to read real facial expressions much in the way young people now cannot hold eye contact.

Where Mediabastards MIPS theory comes in, is that no one can see that they are making gargantuan amends to accept these poor simulacrums because the ideas are so alluring.  We are embracing the illusion, the psychosis over the reality.  THAT is quite frightening.

So...death to videodrome...long live the new flesh indeed.

Ready or Not Player One

Above is my current avatar standing in one of the patches of land that I rent.  At the time it was taken, this SL visit was just like any other day.  Little did I know that a few days later I, and other SL players, would discover that Second Life is basically over.  And not over by any other company than its parent company Linden Lab.  Due to a planned or unplanned leak, Linden Lab has confirmed that it is building another virtual world.

At first I was excited.  Second Life needs a great many quality of life upgrades which are mostly out of reach due to the age of the platform.  A new place with better avatar tools would be great.  But as I came down from my high, other more logical questions started to surface.

Mainly about land. The land market is now essentially dead and that is a little frightening.  Because Second Life's revenue stream is land.  Prokofy Neva wrote a great post about it from the rental business viewpoint.  This could potentially be a fiasco that could be a bigger than the Zindra shakeup a few years back.  Ebbe Linden answered a few basic questions on Sluniverse.com regarding the new world.  He mentioned that they were thinking about lowering land costs in favor of item taxation.  A concept which I thought was strange.  Does the lab think that they can make more from adding fees to creators and buyers?  Did they have an accountant look into this?  Or is this another pie in the sky idea from some insane ideology that Silicon Valley people love to worship?

How will LL plan to deal with all the landholders, including myself, who are now holding the bag for worthless land that costs a monthly fee?  Granted I only hold almost a quarter of mainland.  Not a lot compared to people like Anshe Chung, Prokofy Neva, etc.  but it is still a big investment compared to most single users in the world.  This isn't including the land I rent from themed estates that I love such as Winterfell and 1920's Berlin.  I admit I spend much more on land in Second Life than I should.  But I look at it as an entertainment expense on par with going to the movies.  When all is said and done, I would spend the same amount attending the local movie house.  But I get more joy from Second Life than I've ever received from passive film watching.

Will there even be land, as we know it, in the new place?  Already people on sluniverse are screaming for no setup fees or tier fees.  They are campaigning for bubbles (like the failed Cloud Party) that will disappear when their users are not logged into the world.  So there will be no world, no places to visit, and no homes or landscaping to admire.  That would be a deal breaker for me.  I simply would not move over but stay in old SL until the lights go out.

According to Ciaran Laval's site, he pointed out a Linden post on sluniverse that Second Life isn't on par with World of Warcraft but more like the old Everquest.  Which just flabbergasts me.  Why is an employee of the company downplaying the success of the company's core product?  What possibly good could that do in the public image?  This indicates to me that LL, as well as the rest of the VR tech community, are still beguiled by the Snowcrash/Ready Player One fantasies.  Fantasies that have been shown time and time again to be just fantasies.  WoW didn't get made with fantasies that there were about 10 million people out there waiting to play its game.  They were hoping for old Everquest success of a few hundred thousand to a million people.  That they attracted more was an outlier.  So developing the next VR with the idea that millions of people will pile on is laughable.  Especially when it has been proved that only a small number of people feel comfortable with the avatar experience and an even smaller who are capable of self directed play time.

Recently there was a news story which stated that children who don't learn their letters through penmenship (just by typing or tracing letters on a computer pad) are not forming the same neural connections as people who did learn their alphabet by writing.  Technology is literally changing the human brain.  And I'm beginning to suspect that this has a large bearing on Virtual Worlds.  Mainly because the audience for a free form virtual world that only LL offers (SL) has an audience that skews older.  The known, guaranteed audience for virtual worlds are old as in old enough to have gone through the schooling system before new technology.  This is something that must be taken into account and in fact should worry virtual world creators.  If this is the case (as it appears to be)  their audience is old and getting older with no one to replace their numbers.  I speak from experience.  I'm in middle age and getting older than that soon, I love SL but my young niece was wary of it.  All the people who grew up in new technology either gravitate to on the rail games or just hang out in Facebook like interfaces but mainly text message/twitter.  Twittering, by its very nature, doesn't encourage exploration, it doesn't encourage deep thinking.  What it does encourage is burp like exclamations about lunch and bathroom habits.  That is not the kind of thinking that takes well to virtual world experiences.

Despite warning signs, I really hope that it will be Linden Lab that creates the next popular platform.  Mainly because I'm more comfortable with the devil you know over the devil you don't idea.  Linden Lab does like doing things its own way but it also has consistently changed its direction due to public feedback.  Granted many changes were due to outcry but at least things got changed.  Worlds don't get made without protest or the ability to protest.  Unfortunately the fascistic turn that real world and the tech world are experiencing actively discourages protest.  Where will that leave us?

Right now, we are left in a holding pattern.  Land will become a lot cheaper as people dump their holdings in preparation for the new place.  But I don't see much of this land being purchased.  Who would want to buy something that will not carry over to the new place?  I'm at the max of the tier I can pay, I should probably dump what I have but I can't do it.  Not yet.  I already came to the conclusion that I will not recoup my expenditures.  Not only will the land market suffer but I see people holding back on home purchases such as housing and landscaping.  Maybe fashion will be able to hold up.  But really why spend loads of money on things that will not transfer.  This is worrying because by all accounts the new place will not even be ready for another two years.

Whatever the case someone's goose is being cooked.  Just whose it is, is not clear.

Hypothetical Gaming of Reality

This eerie and frightfully prescient little short film was showcased on HuffingtonPost.com today.

Yes we can laugh at the absurdity and shudder at the thought of people sitting zombie like in empty rooms staring into a Facebook inner space.  But the reality is, is that gaming tech developer's are already trying to make this dystopia a reality.

Check out my posts previous posts about gaming reality here and here.

Dionysian Bacchanalia

History is a study of circles.  We all know this and yet we travel in the same rut.  We ignore the well worn signs.

Life at the end of Weimar Berlin is now.  Just as Weimar Berlin was the same as any great culture on the verge of collapse from Greek to Roman to Ming to Mayan.  People sense the impending disorder, get nervous and mindless just like wildebeest do when sensing an approaching predator.

Leave your Troubles Outside!

So Life is Disappointing?  Forget it!

In here, life is beautiful!

The Girls are Beautiful!

Even the Orchestra is Beautiful!

At those tipping points, people find release in fantasy.  We create a spot for ourselves in that cave of wealth and death (written about by blogger Elaine Meinel Supkis).  In that cave we play with mirror societies.  Those mirror societies are decadent, they push social norms and explore new expression.  Of course, this all has to do with sexuality because the cave is sex at it's most basic and it is a death too.

In the past, these mirror societies were created by artists.  Audiences with similar desires, but with no talents, would vicariously live through the artists' work.  But at our moment in time, that has been destroyed. Our current art and performance offerings are not allowing us the release we need.  In fact, our current culture is fighting the very need for release.  But this impulse cannot be denied, it must find an outlet.

Virtual reality has allowed the previously untalented spectator to recreate the cabaret, to celebrate the Bacchanalia and push boundaries.  In VR, as the song says, life is beautiful even the girls are beautiful. In VR we explore sexuality and gender roles.  In VR, women can be men and men can be women.  What is beauty or sexy?  In the past, the artists had all the fun while we watched.  Now, in this temporary bubble of order and disorder, anyone can take part in the cabaret.

In most articles on VR, Second Life is most often pushed as the pinnacle of decadence.  But SL is not the only cabaret.  It exists even in World of Warcraft, where many have designated the Inn at Goldshire (on just about every server) as a free zone for Bacchus.

Of course, the developers have no idea what they created or why it makes people drunk.  I believe Prokofy Neva once pointed out on his blog, that the developers are largely conservative.  They are more attracted to tight-ass, fascistic movements such as Singularity.  They have no idea what to do with the "freaks" who settled in their utopia.  Far from playing masters or mistresses of ceremonies, they want to change everyone into their ideas of what VR should be, of what avatars should be or how we should play their games.

If only some enlightened developer would come along and willingly become an avatar of Dionysus.  To delineate for the revelers the sensible division between fantasy and reality.  To stop the nonsense that VR drunkards are currently telling everyone, that their drunken revelries are part of real life.

But I suppose we should be happy with what we have now.  It won't last...when the money runs out and the backlash takes back our new ground.  The merry-go-round goes on....

This is you, on Video Games!

I think that cat is experiencing Urgent Optimism!

Don't get me wrong, I like video games.  But I'm not blind to the fact that they are created in the same way this trainer gets her cat to high five.

You will share your name!

Blizzard Activision has just announced that their forums will be linked to their REAL ID system.

Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

Up until now, the REAL ID system was plugged by the Warcraft crowd as a useful tool to keep track of real friends/family while in game.  But now that this system it shows that the tracking system is all pervasive and the perfect opportunity.  The perfect opportunity to live in the future that businessmen such as Mr. Jesse Schell, and others in the tech world, would like us to bend over and take with a smile.

In true California Business Plan fashion the company direction is dressed in faux concerns, such as preventing trolls.  Which is a bunch of pure bullshit.

Obviously the opt-in push for this program was not as successful as Blizzard Activision planned it would be.  At least certainly not enough people signed up for it in order to make it feasible as a marketing cash crop.  So the company needed another way to push Real Id, and that was the forum angle.  Most say that the forums represent a small portion of the Warcraft player base.  But truthfully I don't believe that, not if the company thought it was a large enough linchpin to get the Real Id program started.  As players have repeatedly pointed out on Blizzard forums, all customer service policy questions ultimately lead to the forums.  So any kind of customer service problem will lead to a player having to opt in to Real Id if they want help.

Revealing the names of the players also leads to larger problems of stalking.  This policy opens up problems for female gamers, children/teens gamers and LGBT gamers.  The gaming community at large, is not a welcoming place for minorities.  The last thing the majority racist, homophobic and sexist player base needs is a way to track down the players they don't like.  As for trolls on the forums, I have a hard time figuring out what a troll actually is and what people will unanimously agree is a troll.  Is it a person who posts thoughtfully but doesn't agree with the majority opinion?  Is it a person who debates vigorously on game policies that they like or don't like?  Or is it that ridiculous person who just throws out nonsensical but aggressive gibberish towards one and all?  What I see mostly on forums is people with legitimate concerns being labeled trolls and their speech is curtailed.  The gibberish people are allowed to post at will with no consequences.  There are better ways to deal with the gibberish and they don't include pimping out the real names of the player base.

As of now Blizzard Activision is silent on this new policy.  Which indicates to me that its full steam ahead.  On their own forums and around the blogosphere there are reports that enough people are quitting over this new policy to cause a slow down on their account servers.

But they aren't blinking.  And they won't blink or cry uncle.  Because everyone must realize that we are in a struggle.  Jaron Lanier pointed out that the tech world, as it is now, has debased our culture so much that the only value that can be gleaned from anything is from advertising dollars.  The commercial is sacrosanct in the tech world.  They have barricaded themselves into a corner with the "info wants to be free" meme that the only money they can receive for their services is in advertising.  To get to that cash cow, they will happily sell out the regular people.

Blizzard Activision has a deal with Facebook.  Obviously they think that the masses of Facebook Farmville addicts (most of whom are not mmorpg gamers) are an untapped resource that will gladly move to Warcraft.  That they are enough of a sure bet that these Farmville fans will replace the people leaving due to Real Id controversy.  Since the Farmville people have already revealed their personal information on Facebook, they will have no problem with revealing it for Warcraft.

They are putting this to the test right now.  Because the world that Mr. Schell celebrated is the world the tech companies want.  A world with no personal barriers, in which advertisers can pick over your carcass to send you targeted advertising that will reward you with funny money from the latest game.  Its a no cost world out there for the tech elites.  But we can expect to pay, pay more and pay again.

All for Love

For quite some time, I've noticed a smallness of character inside Philip Rosedale.  A flaw, if you will, in the great work.  This does not negate my past opinion that the man has real genius.  He does, but like all of us, he is at the mercy of the subconscious.  Each of us labors under the aspirations of who we hope to be and just as surely hampered in these aspirations by desires that work against them.

Rosedale wants so much to be an influential cultural pundit.  He sincerely wants to make the world a better place through technology.  But each time he creates, he plants a seed of destruction.  In Rosedale's case, he has a need to set opposing forces in motion.  Which doesn't have to be as catastrophic as it sounds, but Rosedale sets them up in such a way that there must be a victor.  And the more bloody the victory, the more legitimate the winner.  He presided over these blood battles at Linden Lab when he set up the policy of the JIRA(Malaby - Making Virtual Worlds - Ch 2, pg. 76)

The JIRA had a horrific effect on the company and employee spirit.  It encouraged the formation of employee gangs that would kill or vote up specific issues that these gangs favored.  Not only that, it completely marginalized departments that were not glamorous.  Frankly it was ridiculous that a department such as accounting should have to compete against the technology division in a JIRA policy war.  Did Rosedale even notice this deformation in the company character created by the JIRA?

Apparently not, because he then instituted the JIRA for residents as well.  So the warfare metastasized outside company walls into Second Life itself.  It pitted resident against resident and resident versus Linden Lab employee.  The gangs enlarged creating a cutthroat atmosphere that completely disenfranchised minority voices.  Simply because they did not have the numbers to combat the gangs.  Linden Lab employees so used to working the JIRA inequities in house, used the public JIRA to force their own interests or bury ones they did not favor.  Some residents who voted consistently against popularity were banned from the JIRA boards.

But none of this ruffled Rosedale's feathers because he was under the impression that, ultimately, crowds would vote for their best interests.

He is once again working on a project that uses psychological warfare, a company called Love Machine.  In essence it works on the JIRA type of spirit.  A company with the Lovemachine in place enables employees to send "love" to other employees.  These "love messages" (commendations) are then posted on computer screens around the office for all to see.  At the end of each quarter, management can then count how many love messages an employee received or did not receive and base promotions upon this horrific system.  It doesn't take even a dunderhead to realize the problems in this system.  The fact that it would once again inspire employees to form gangs in order to give a thumbs up to certain employees or lynch mob employees they would like to jettison.  What is even worse is that it doesn't factor in malfeasance from management that could skew the love results.  Just as it did with the JIRA at Linden Lab.  Like the JIRA, the Love Machine would and will create balkanized groups voting for their own interests, their own people.

Somewhere along the line, Philip Rosedale conceived the notion that he could change people psychologically for the better.  That through his technology he could institute cultural experiments that would inspire people to be more communal or selfless.  That he would be able to short circuit the motivation for individuals to be self serving.  But each time he attempts this grand experiment it blows up in his face.  I don't understand why he keeps banging his head against this particular wall.  It only leads me to believe that he enjoys the wars he causes and legitimizing the notion of might makes right.  Despite his genius, he doesn't recognize the fascistic motivations swimming deep down inside his own mind.  He uses these policies to convince himself that he is selfless in his love for his fellow man but works in such a way that is anything but selfless.  I don't believe that he respects people outside of the technology business.  Because if he did, he wouldn't have the need to change us.  The sooner he recognizes this fault in himself, the sooner he will create something truly groundbreaking.  Unless he truly enjoys being a Marquise de Merteuil, then all bets are off or more likely voting up love messages.

Gaming the Populace

Jesse Schell, Professor and CEO for game design, was Metanomic's end of season guest today.

His topic was turning the masses into game pods ripe for companies to scrape.  What will they scrape data, money, Intellectual property, human rights etc.  Truly the world is their oyster.  And is this professor even thinking about ethics?  No.  What he is dreaming about is unending streams of funny money.  Funny money that you and I will receive in payback for our lost rights.  Yes,  dear folks, in payback for you being turned into a walking commercial for Disney, Proctor & Gamble, Chase and so many others in lifestyle "games", they will give you a few cents worth of "game" money.  In the past they would give you about 20 to 40 bucks for your input on their services.  But now it won't cost them a penny anymore because you will be their "product game" monkey and you will dance for banana WoW gold.

In response to my comment about data scraping, Schell was flippant in stating that Google already scrapes with their gmail program.  So the length of his ethical deliberation in all of this was...Google does it.  So if Google does it, then its full steam ahead.  He also stated that it was up to the people to either use or not use these "games/services".  Because the companies are already so honest as to make clear what they do with our data.  Their long and convoluted TOS policies are generally ignored by the public whose eyes glaze over when they see long blocks of text.  Which the companies are counting upon.

You see, Schell is working on the California Business model.  Which is to exploit any holes in the system until there is a mass uprising against underhanded practices.  This is what occurred with the newspaper, film and music businesses.  The technology companies scraped, scraped and scraped away using the populace as their cat's paw until the news and entertainment businesses started to fight for their IP.  Now they have moved on to bigger pastures...us.  And mind you, they will milk us dry for everything that is of any monetary value.

And if you don't think this is the case, watch the Metanomics program on their site.  Schell was very adamant about the people having to cause a stink about this mass enslavement for "games" before any changes could or should be made.  This coming from a PROFESSOR who teaches the younger generation.  No doubt his professional connections to many companies and his own company also taint his ethical stance on these issues besides him just being rather blithely sociopathic.

Because when any person starts to see the cave of wealth and dreams (as Elaine Supkis calls it), it twists them.  It starts them on the path to seeking the infinite.  Which just as assuredly spikes upward then crashes to zero.  This happened with the dot com bust.  It occurred with the big data scrape heist (this war is still ongoing).  VRs are just starting to go bust except for the big behemiths like WoW or games connected to behemiths like Facebook.  And now the new bubble of customer data scrape and IP heisting of the little consumer will begin in earnest.

This of course will crash as well.  And perhaps the current financial disaster will work in our favor.  After all people cannot buy bread with WoW gold.  Or sleep in virtual houses.  Someone still has to pay the bills.  Perhaps deep in the back of their lizard brains, Schell and his colleagues know these facts.  But the tech industry is built on exploiting holes and ponzi financial schemes.

They are going to sell these pipe dreams to companies for all they are worth.  Hopefully becoming infinitely rich in the process then pulling out to leave some jackass holding the bills.

And that jackass will be you and me, the game losers.

Brave New Sociopaths

Prokofy Neva wrote a great post about developer Jane McGonigal's speech at TED.

In this discussion McGonigal gushed about gamers, their love for games, their obsessive game playing strategies and how that energy should be harnessed to change the world.

What McGonigal fails to address is the gang, the posse, the mob witch hunts that all online games encourage.  I've seen it in action in various forms all across the web.  From the brow beating of people who wanted to debate changes in WoW's game, attacks on bloggers of various subjects that range from politics, finance, fandoms or fashion, to people who suddenly decide that a company is a failure and must disappear (i.e. the attacks on Warhammer Online for example).

McGonigal naively calls this mass behavior, this group on a verge of their "big win"... Urgent Optimism.  She wants people in charge to give out quests to this unruly mob in order to fight hunger, poverty, global warming and various other misery windmills of human beings.  Throughout our collective history as human beings the one failing we tried to prevent in our collective survival strategies was the formation of mobs.  Mobs have no conscious, they have no empathy, they are only driven by extremes of anger, fear and more often, mania.  It is awful to state this but our games now encourage mob behavior.  Because the collective formation in games don't include basic survival strategies.  They are only activities that reward mass mob actions to attack others.

What McGonigal fails to understand or just plain ignores is that mobs cannot be controlled.  They are directionless entities prone to violence and will cleave to the appearance of any leader that inspires them.  More often than not these "leaders" do not have the best interests of human beings in mind.  They are people such as Stalin, Hitler, Manson, Jim Jones, or Torquemada.  Those people were very capable of harnessing that Urgent Optimism that McGonigal enthusiastically crows about in her speech.

So what is a more realistic example of McGonigal's Urgent Optimism?

Alexis Pilkington being attacked by faceless mobs on her Facebook page.

This may or may not have been a factor in her decision to commit suicide.  But the mob so driven by their Urgent Optimistic mania, kept up their attacks on her even after her death.  Obviously they needed to go back and exult in the presence of their big win.

How can people be without empathy for a young girl lost at the beginning of her life?

What McGonigal needs to be enthusiastic about is finding the reason why the internet and it's games fosters, harbors and loves sociopaths.  Far from making us more loving of our fellow human beings, the internet is cutting us off from each other.  It is turning us all into the "other".  It is turning us into "Horde", "Alliance", "Order", "Chaos" etc.  And if the chosen enemy's name is highlighted in red, it's dead.