Dreams in Digital

A discussion about the premise of Copyright, IP and Artificial Scarcity #SecondLife

 

The premise of Artificial Scarcity is, at the core, flawed at best and woefully inadequate at worst in the context of the digital age. It is no secret that copyright and intellectual property is gravely threatened by the digital culture we live in today, and increasingly so at an alarming rate of advancement. Such is the nature of the Internet to effectively circumvent censorship and treat all attempts to censor as damage and route around it.

 

 

 

 

After all, the Internet is a digital system that was at its very core designed to withstand a nuclear war and come out relatively unscathed.

 

What is most disconcerting is not that the Internet itself is nearly impervious to the worst attempts of censorship, but that the paradigms that fostered the creation of this system are no longer relevant to the situation at hand. Worse, still, is that this understanding of distribution of materials and information in the digital age is entirely counterproductive to the existing paradigms which create these media forms.

 

I can give a quick lesson on the past ten years or so of innovation in this digital culture, but I’m fairly certain most of us already know the drill. Peer2Peer came about in systems like Napster, and the copyright and IP industry lost their nut trying to kill it. All that managed to do was throw fuel on the fire, leading to more advanced networks of distribution and even after those legal battles ensued – first against the networks (which by law should have been protected under safe harbor) but later against individuals as young as twelve years old and as old as your dear grandmother in what amounted to a legal paperstorm.

 

Astronomical fines and penalties, legal cases that no individual could possibly afford to protect themselves against, and what turned out to be further fuel on the fire of piracy in the form of the invention of Bittorrent.

 

Clearly the attempted enforcement of artificial scarcity within the confines of a system that does not acknowledge scarcity at all is likely to lose, or make the problem worse.

 

There are very interesting insights from people like Jaron Lanier who believe that artificial scarcity is a necessity in order to give digital experience value and meaning again, but I will have to disagree with his assertion (at least in part). When it comes to Jaron, I rarely disagree with his vision – but this is one of those topics where I have to respectfully shake my head.

 

It’s called artificial scarcity for a reason, and that reason is because it is an artificial construct in a system specifically designed without scarcity in the form of digital media in all forms. When music was simply on CDs, there was natural scarcity in the availability of the content in physical form, but in the digital world it doesn’t cost anything to copy data. There is no physical cost in duplication, and the very least of the costs is relegated to the production of the original media.

 

But that’s where the costs really end. Unlike pre-digital days, the costs no longer carry over past the production cycle, and such things as marketing and distribution are freely available, if not exponentially so and for free. Even the production cycle has a diminishing cost, as we can see with DJs, Mashups and Youtube.

 

Nobody has to pay a distribution center to get airplay on the radio any longer, or produce physical compact discs for the record store shelves. Terrestrial radio airplay isn’t as important as it used to be in the face of countless internet radio stations, satellite radio subscriptions and more.

 

This is the dilemma.

 

It’s a matter of old school thinking versus new age. In a world that became accustomed to the natural scarcity of products, and literally based their entire business model on that natural scarcity and the control of the distribution channels from start to finish, it must be terrifying to suddenly lose that control – and so we see a constant battle between copyright and IP holders (RIAA & MPAA) and the “Pirates”, culminating in toxic legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, as well as the attempt of leveraging $75 Trillion dollar fines (RIAA vs Limewire).

 

This isn’t a new problem, however. This goes back to the printing press itself, wherein the same arguments were leveraged and fought tooth and nail. It carried on further with the invention of BetaMax and VHS, the Cassette Tape, Blank CD Media, and the MP3 Player itself (Roxio), and even into the right to use the MP3 Format altogether (Thanks, Fraunhofer, for the legal battles).

 

The thing about this history is – no matter how much we cry and complain about the damages that a new technology will bring to an industry in the form of piracy, those fears never seem to materialize. Even more interesting is the seemingly opposite effect that piracy has had on the music and film industry, with the record profits of those industries plain as day despite their constant arguments that piracy is hurting the industry and costing them hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Uproxx provides an excellent insight to this by giving an overview to the situation (further reading)

 

Pirates are your friends (Yarr!)

 

Yes, I just opened up a massive can of worms with this statement, but it had to be said. Given the industry of intellectual property and copyright, it can be shown time and again that the greatest harm to the copyright and IP industry are themselves.

 

Let’s break this down logically…

 

Modern piracy is simply the enactment of a highly efficient and targeted distribution system without any centralized control or overhead of cost. We can’t necessarily claim that piracy is stealing, because theft is the removal of the original instead of making a copy. Piracy is copying, plain and simple. The only difference today versus prior to the Internet is that there was a physical component which acted as the barrier to entry – Cassette tapes, blank CDs, VHS tapes, etc. and those media forms came with an additional blank media tax to compensate for perceived losses to the industry. The only reason that piracy is equated to theft is because of the false assertion that every file downloaded is automatically a lost sale.

 

If we were paying attention, we’ve seen this claim for as long as these industries existed – case in point:

 

 

 

 

 

Clearly this turned out not to be true, as the recording industry continued to make record profits and even today they continue to post profit gains and not losses. The only losses they are claiming are entirely imaginary losses based on fabrication.

 

We could make a convoluted claim that even the unauthorized copying is costing the owners of the copyright and IP the premise of future revenue which is entirely estimated, and based on fuck all, as seen with the RIAA statement that they believed Limewire owed in damages an amount that exceeded all the money in the world. The RIAA and MPAA can spew out all the make believe numbers they want, but it’s not based on anything substantial. It’s a lot like me saying that because people read this blog I estimate the damages from lost revenue to be 400 trillion dollars a year. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass, and totally out of context to the total situation at hand, much like the RIAA and MPAA does regularly.

 

Zen and the Art of Piracy

 

So how do we effectively stop piracy? I’m the first to proclaim that protection of intellectual property and copyright is something that needs to happen – despite my advocacy of piracy in the same breath. It’s really about looking at the bigger picture and actually taking the time to see the widespread implications past narrow interests of the old paradigm.

 

 

 

For instance, think about all the money spent in the promotion and distribution of media by the RIAA and MPAA. More specifically, let’s look at the process for the RIAA wherein they spend an astronomical amount of money to A&R representatives in order to essentially buy a spot on the radio to play a new single for promoting an artist. This is a regular occurrence, and it baffles me.

 

When I was younger, my highschool actually had its own radio station and radio communications was one of the classes offered. Of course, I was enrolled in that class and managed straight A’s (45 days away from having my radio communications license to work as an on-air personality). Even then, the process baffled me due to the no solicitation rules. The station manager would have us regularly listening to new music coming in, and checking to see if it violated any of the rules, but that list of music always came from some A&R representing a label, whereas local bands trying to get heard would be routinely turned down. As DJs, our hands were pretty tied, as the station manager would be approving the playlist and helping to compile them.

 

Even if we were approving music on the list or disapproving it, most of the time that didn’t even matter. Those songs would be inexplicably stricken from the list when we approved them, or oddly added to the playlist when we as DJs decided the music was utter crap by consensus.

 

It more or less came down to who was willing to pay more money to get a band heard and played, and not necessarily based on merit. 

 

The apparent point of this process is to get an artist’s material heard by a large population of listeners, and they treat this process as a marketing expense, yet if we turn the tables and look at piracy – this is exactly the sort of distribution and outcome that Bittorrent has without the overhead. Interestingly enough, piracy is based entirely on merit and not who has the most money or connections for marketing and distribution – a stark contrast to how it used to work. Today, that local band (Garageland) wouldn’t have to be bending over backwards to get their music heard, and instead they’d simply make an official website for the band and distribute their own music via Bittorrent as a marketing loss. Those local bands would simply exist on their own merit and ability – which I always felt was how things were supposed to be.

 

So let’s call this what it is – it’s the inability of the industry to differentiate between personal piracy and commercial piracy. Commercial piracy is the problem and by all means should be fought or at least intelligently channeled, whereas Personal Piracy should actually be encouraged to no end.

 

The moment we stop trying to lump together personal piracy and commercial piracy, the faster we realize the benefits that personal piracy gives us. This idea that personal piracy costs the media industry hundreds of billions a year is absurd (as absurd as the assertion that it cost the RIAA $75 Trillion dollars in damages from Limewire) – because if anything it is actually increasing the revenues through widespread proliferation of new media at a cost that is exactly zero to the distribution channel (and subsequently to the media holders). What scares them the most is that media is now based on the idea of a meritocracy and not who has the most money or connections.

 

Personal piracy is good as long as we’re willing to call it what it is in proper context. The best course of action for the media industry going forward is to literally, and without hesitation, pirate their own media and make it available at a high quality to the masses.

 

 

 

 

Why on earth would I suggest this? I mean, I just offered the equivalent to the digital media apocalypse as the solution to the digital media apocalypse.

 

Natural Scarcity

 

This brings us back the idea of artificial scarcity versus natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the model that the media industry was originally built on and it worked absolute wonders. It wasn’t until the introduction of mass reproduced media that they began to panic and invent methods of artificial scarcity to sustain a model that is based on natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the sold out concert you couldn’t get tickets to, artificial scarcity is deliberately limiting the amount of CD’s pressed to inflate worth arbitrarily or (in the digital age) creating convoluted DRM schemes to restrict the usage rights of agnostic digital media.

 

The future of media is authentic experience. Natural scarcity is something you cannot reproduce in a digital form, and thus holds intrinsic value over time. You can film a concert, and maybe sell the t-shirts online, but you can’t pirate the actual unique experience of actually having been there. You can create DRM and other artificial scarcity methods to continue propping up your old business models, or attempt to force the old business methodologies on new media, but the sad truth is – artificial scarcity in an environment built without scarcity is a costly and failed endeavor.

 

In the movie industry, I’ll just cite all the DRM and Ultra-Violet Digital lockers having no effect on Bittorrent distribution except to make it more popular. However, I’d also state that all the unskippable garbage and advertisements on those DVDs are also a major factor, just like advertisements in between and during shows on television send people off to pirate the more authentic experience of the DVD version off of Bittorrent.

 

Physical goods and actual experiences that are unique are the new media paradigm to embrace, while the old media paradigm (currently being propped up desperately by artificial scarcity tactics) should be relegated to marketing channels in order to promote the natural scarcity of unique experiences and sales. Sure there are people out in the parking lots selling knock-off t-shirts for $5 out of their trunks, but the only reason they manage to make a killing is because you’re charging $10 for a cup of beer, $5 for a hotdog and $40 for a t-shirt inside. The problem isn’t the counterfeiters, it’s your inflated sense of worth and douchbaggery to the honest customers and fanbase.

 

Instead of writing piracy off as a revenue loss, we should be saying it is a marketing and proliferation surplus without additional cost. We’re actually saving money through personal piracy, if we’d actually figure out how to embrace it and wean ourselves off the artificial scarcity paradigm, we’d see that it’s actually helping far more than it hurts. As far as counterfeiters – actually curtailing them has less to do with trying to stop them and more to do with stopping yourself.

 

Telling a Story

 

Remember when VH1 had the Storytellers concerts? Only a certain amount of people could attend those intimate concerts, and there was far more natural scarcity for the experience than listening to it in MP3 or watching the recorded show on VH1. There’s a level of abstraction there, and anyone who watched those VH1 Storyteller episodes has at least once thought to themselves how amazing it must have been to actually have been there.

 

 

Authentic experience is the new reality of media | Greenday at Storytellers – Extraordinary Girl

 

 

Hopefully you’re starting to get the bigger picture now. VH1 Storytellers was (and is) a unique experience, an authentic experience, and not easily reproduced. It had intrinsic value – far more than the DVD version or the MP3 Soundtrack. In this manner, we foster the piracy of the VH1 Storytellers albums online, and even offer the videos online without restrictions (but maybe advertising is alright). The end result is you are utilizing the piracy aspect of a lesser experience in order to strengthen the value of the natural scarcity of a greater experience. You can always offer a pay what you want model as well, but you should never be under the delusion that it won’t be pirated for free after a short period of time.

 

If you want to offset that personal piracy as marketing loss, sit down and figure out how to charge for live streaming access to that experience, as well as the much more valuable experience of the tickets to attend that experience in person (since it’s a limited audience). These limited experiences should be more available as the revenue source, creating a value based on natural scarcity and access instead of artificial scarcity. The more authentic the experience, the more it is actually worth.

 

It’s always much better to attend a Broadway show than to watch it online, but if you were streaming it online for free, you’d drastically raise awareness (the point of marketing) and increase the demand for the personal experience of actually attending that play in person as an authentic experience.

 

The other benefit to pirating your own media is that you are immediately sabotaging the bigger threat of commercial pirates who are trying to sell the media illegally. Why would anyone buy what they can get for free? More importantly, what is left to pirate commercially is something that cannot be pirated at all – the authentic experience. Authentic experience creates loyal customers – which is another lesson for Social Media.

 

I actually applaud Deadmau5 in this context for the way one of his recent concerts was handled – it was streamed live on Youtube for the first hour (maybe half hour) as a preview and then turned into a pay-per-view sort of experience. However, this doesn’t entirely grasp the full potential of unique experience or utilize it to the fullest advantage. It’s a good start, but could definitely have been done better.

 

Sure, the ideal here for the limited access to a live streaming concert is still considered artificial scarcity, but it is based on natural scarcity at the root and not just arbitrarily applied as we normally see. For instance, in the context of the Deadmau5 concert, it would have been better to stream the entire concert for free in SD quality and make the HD stream a pay per view stream. The first half hour would have been an HD preview of the live concert, switching to the SD quality free stream afterward unless you had already paid for the stream access in advance.

 

Again, we’re going on the concept of pirating your own media for your own benefit, and writing it off as marketing expenses instead of lost revenue through piracy. It’s a balance between marketing and natural scarcity, creating additional value in a digital product or unique experience.

 

Who got this brilliantly right?

 

Pomplamoose

 

This is how you pirate your own music for marketing benefit. Take note, media industry.

 

 

Even better would have been if those concerts were streamed using not just high definition audio, but a Binaural audio stream for spatial audio fidelity. One step further would have been to offer that binaural stream in conjunction with 360 degree video so the viewers could pan around in real time with full spatial audio.

 

This is a massive step up from the lower definition of a simple SD stream for free, and something that constitutes a unique experience worth more money to the fans. The more authentic the experience, the more value it has in a culture where the lowest common denominator is mass distributed media.

 

And that’s the point, really.

 

It’s not piracy we should be afraid of, but the clear indication that non-authentic experience is nearly worthless in the digital age. It is this understanding that should be shaping our decisions going forward concerning digital media, copyright and intellectual property. Authentic experience has value, and that value can be used as marketing to sell more authentic experiences with increasing tangible value. The very fact that this point is being ignored on the whole is far more troubling than the specter of piracy.

 

Virtual Environments

 

Which brings us to the idea of virtual environments and the idea of prosumer culture. In a virtual environment where the users can create anything they want, it is no surprise that they more often choose to create what is familiar – as in brands that exist to them in real life. Companies have done an excellent job in marketing their brands into ubiquity and pop culture, but seem to be utterly confused when the ultimate result of that comes to pass.

 

Of course people want Coca-Cola in a virtual world and any number of other familiar brands, and they aren’t in a position to have to wait until such time as those brand owners decide to give it to them. This creates a conflict of interest, because we’re trying to apply the artificial scarcity rule to a virtual environment that (much like the Internet) has no such constraint of scarcity.

 

The current accepted practice is to file DMCA notices and have the offending content removed, which is a direct violation of the Streisand Effect, having the exact opposite of the intended outcome. Agnostically, we look at media overall – whether it is an asset or an MP3, and we should already know that it’s not in our best interest to call it piracy, but instead call it marketing.

 

In the end, what is more important to the end-user is authentic experience. As long as you control the authentic experiences, the non-authentic experiences of lesser digital value should serve as marketing in order to support the authentic experiences.

 

Case in point – let’s go back to Coca-Cola.

 

The proliferation of unlicensed digital representations of branded merchandise in a virtual environment like Second Life constitute the lower quality and less authentic experience, and as such act as the user generated marketing and advertising for the authentic experiences which they will gladly pay for in real life. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola merchandise in a virtual environment, generated by the users themselves is the best viral marketing the company could ever hope for, because it creates further brand loyalty (and is in fact a display of that loyalty) which in turn leads to the authentic experience of actually drinking Coca-Cola.

 

Even if those virtual representations are being bought and sold, it is in the best interest not to place that into the category of commercial piracy in that the users themselves are showing a willingness to pay to be advertised to on a wider basis than you could ever hope to achieve had you spent a few millions dollars on a 30 second Superbowl ad.

 

Does this necessarily mean that you should be relinquishing your right to the brand? By no means! It’s more about how you choose to handle that brand in context to the environment of experience. Much like Youtube offers a ContentID matching system for videos, virtual environments should offer something similar – wherein a ContentID match wouldn’t necessarily mean the content is removed, but instead simply labeled as being owned by a certain content or brand owner.

 

This follows the general rule of sanctioned personal piracy as marketing. If a content creator exceeds a certain amount of money in a virtual world from the sales of a branded item, then it should trigger an automatic percentage paid to the brand owner as compensation (a virtual item license fee).

 

In this manner, the brand owners actually make some money on what normally is seen as purely a piracy loss, instead treating it as pure marketing and licensing gain across the board. It also costs a lot less in legal fees, DMCA and litigation because you aren’t in a mindset to try and stop the actions but instead finding ways to foster it to the extreme for your own (and the prosumers) total benefit.

 

The end goal should always be promoting authentic experiences and fostering additional value in things which cannot be pirated, through encouraging personal piracy and brand loyalty to the extreme.

 

This doesn’t mean, however, that DMCA takedown requests aren’t needed. In context, it should be treated as the absolute last resort instead of the first. Explore all of our options first before we invoke censorship as a solution, because the potential for backlash with censorship is far more damaging than trying to work within the system of digital experience and organic community.

 

What fighting over the internet looks like

Translation: DERP DERP DERPPPPY DERP DERP DERPPPY DERP DERP DERP!

Feel stupid yet? I know I am.

An Island Unto Themselves

#Marketing in the Prosumer Culture

For many of you, this post will seem a bit dull, but the implications from it are far reaching and profound. I'd like to state up front that this sort of topic is my forte' and I regularly advise on this to what often seems like an entirely baffled room full of executives (not to mention lawyers who are ready to grab pitchforks and torches) - but as I've often said in those situations: Bare with me, because what I'm about to say is probably the most important thing you could hear on the matter.


We live in a digital culture of sharing and mashup, where 1's and 0's are interchangeable and cheap. It doesn't matter to the prosumer culture whether those ones and zeros are configured in a manner that yields a photo, mp3 or streaming video - what matters is the sharing of ideas and media that pertain to their topic of interest at that moment.

On the subject matter, the best advice I can give stems from what I like to refer to as the Gospel of Virtual Environments, but for most you would know it as Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat. Written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randal Farmer in 1991, this synopsis addressed the lessons they learned from running a massive multi-user virtual environment in the late 1980's on the Commodore system known as Habitat, and while the graphics were definitely paltry by today's standards, the lessons are just as important today as they ever were - because they address the underlying nature of technology as well as the attitudes of people that use those types of systems.


One of the most important lessons from that synopsis was simply:

Work within the system

And while this lesson is open to interpretation, the story that accompanied it really set the stage for understanding how not to address prosumers in a digital age if your goal is to protect IP, or system type mechanics/rules.

I won't go into the entire story here (it’s available at the end of the post as a link for reading), but I will address the fundamental understandings that came out it, and how they still apply today in the digital world context.

Essentially what it boils down to is this:

If you are a company with a brand and IP to protect, you have more options today in order to enforce it than you did twenty years ago utilizing traditional methods. The landscape has changed quite a bit, and the 1's and 0's of today are agnostic, while the mentality of the prosumers is that of simply sharing for the sake of conversation or furtherance of devotion to a particular brand or image. In modern context, this still holds true on a much wider basis than it did twenty years ago, and so our defacto arsenal of "cease and desist" and litigation often times is met with an outstanding backlash in the wider sphere of digital culture, causing more damage and loss than had the entity utilized the "Work within the system" lesson.

No better example of this sort of backlash (humorously named the Streisand Effect) can be given than that of the RIAA and MPAA with many years of fighting and litigation efforts to curb or eliminate the acts of piracy among Peer2Peer networks. It is now over ten years later and such an approach has not only cost those entities more than it's worth to enforce, but has had the opposite effect to curbing the "violations" worldwide - eliminating single file P2P systems like Napster, Limewire, etc but giving rise to massive file collection P2P systems like BitTorrent where no longer single files are shared but large quantities of files as a single "set".

Where the RIAA wanted to stop music piracy by shutting down places like Napster which offered single tracks per download, they ended up fostering a worldwide backlash that is BitTorrent where finding a single track is unlikely versus searching for the entire discography of the artist for download. Clearly, this is throwing gasoline on the fire and acting surprised that the fire did not go out.

The interesting thing about all of this is simply the fact that digital culture and mashup mentality often do a much better job at proliferation of ideas and content than even multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, creating new content from multiple sources that transcend the originals – beneficial to multiple entities all at the same time, as we see in the Gwen Stefani vs Britney Spears music mashup below titled “Tick-Toxic”.

Whatcha’ waiting, whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting for? Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think.

Working within the system entails an unorthodox methodology, in that the proper approach to "infringement" no longer is a black or white scenario, but instead many shades of grey for the negative approaches (and in methods that offer mutual gain, 16.7 million colors of awesome) - often entirely dependent on the situational context. While cease and desist options and litigation are still a part of that arsenal of enforcement, it no longer constitutes the cut and dry option, and in fact should be the absolute last option to be enacted - instead of the first or only.

When you find yourself looking to protect IP or a brand, the first question that should be asked is no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" but instead should be "How do we monetize this situation, foster its growth and make it work for our own benefit?" - aka: Working within the system.

Working within the system entails a willingness to work with the people involved in that system on the same grounds and foundation that those people utilize within that particular system, whether that be business or individuals (prosumers) in order to foster a mutually beneficial situation while limiting the constraints that would cause a backlash and do widespread harm. Think of it like trying to disarm a nuclear weapon - you wouldn't go in and bash it with a sledgehammer for fear that you could cause a massive explosion. Instead you handle it delicately and with foresight for the bigger picture. Cease and Desist (litigation) is your sledgehammer, and should only be used as a last resort.

Instead we should first think about ways to work within the system at hand, for our own benefit (because we are still self-interested as companies) but also in a way that addresses the underlying and fundamental need of the prosumer mentality to spread and share IP, Brands and derivatives of those properties.

One of those many shades of grey happens to be simply allowing the proliferation of the IP or brand to continue while adding only monetization or supplemental marketing to the situation. This can be seen today in the general approach by Youtube where music in the user created videos is now more likely to come with a link saying who the artist is, the name of the song, and a direct link to purchase that music. This, in turn, offers a solution to working within the system and IP infringement in that the question answered was no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" and instead "How do we utilize this infringement to our own and their benefit?".

In the case of Youtube, however, while the approach is sound there is still no method to actually handle the mashup and derivative offerings that spawn in abundance from this culture – as we can see from the Tick Toxic video where both Tick Tock from Gwen Stefani and Toxic from Britney Spears is put together for a new take on two songs, Youtube only recognizes the Gwen Stefani part as the music to tag and offer for purchase (catching only half of the potential).

In the long run, prosumer integration of your IP or brand in derivatives or outright is the best form of free marketing for your brand or IP that you could ever hope for. You would never think to shoot down free marketing on your behalf, especially when things like videos on Youtube have this wonderful habit of "going viral" wherein hundreds of thousands if not millions of people share and view those videos, giving the brand or IP massive amounts of free exposure. The trick to all of this is to look at it from a marketing perspective and not a legal perspective.

Prosumer culture is the predominant force in the digital age, and we are best served by allowing that system of understanding to proliferate with little or no negative intervention. While this flies in the face of the crack legal team on call at most companies who want nothing more than to fight the good fight, the benefits far outweigh the costs in the long run - and only serve to offer additional revenue models, and widespread marketing and goodwill among this global system if approached properly with complete understanding.

What we have today are companies that essentially shoot first, and ask questions later (if they bother asking at all) with their DMCAs, Cease and Desists and litigation. This is detrimental on the whole because of the prior notion of the Streisand Effect, moreso because it fosters an "island unto yourself" mentality, cutting you off from the system in ways that would otherwise be beneficial on a massive scale, turning instead to a methodology that actually harms you and your brand/IP.

In order to succeed in the digital age, we must understand that we are not an island unto ourselves. This is true not only in social media of all types, but in the greater scope of the digital culture we rely on today. The rules of engagement here are different than we were taught traditionally, and we need to be willing to think creatively and innovate if we want to truly excel. While cease and desist, as well as possibility of litigation still remains, we need to keep our perspectives in check, resorting to that route only when all other possibilities are exhausted and explored in context.

Remember: Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think they are. They could very well be the fountain of youth to invigorate your brand and IP on a global scale.


Further Reading
Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat: http://bit.ly/oPbUdr
The Streisand Effect (Wikipedia): http://bit.ly/r5FY8L
Prosumer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer#Producer_and_consumer

Unconventional Conventions

When chaos theory applies, only those who seek heretics win out. #SecondLife @Rodvik |

 

Years ago when I was the CTO of VR5 Online, my boss at the time came to me with an interesting and possibly impossible challenge. At the time, I answered to the CEO of the company who was Mr. Clark, and he was an interesting and sly individual. One of the major purposes of VR5 Online was to explore and research methods in virtual environments while taking extensive notes on the outcomes for future applications. During that time we were engaged with ActiveWorlds as a technology, running our own world called VR5 | City of Nidus for which this blog is originally named (cityofnidus.blogspot.com).

 

 

 

 

There is a deeper story behind the name City of Nidus, in that the original project was run by @AdamFrisby (who went by the name Gwala). As far as I can remember, it was originally a world owned by ActiveWorlds called Flagg007, named after the AWI employee who provided the world for experimentation – Flagg (the community leader of AW). Now, Gwala at the time was experimenting with different ideas in AW with the Flagg007 world such as ideas for design and lighting, and a little bit of modeling too. There were a handful of people in that project, specifically hand-selected to participate purely for the ability to innovate ideas in a virtual sense. At that time, I remember I was invited to work in Nidus with Gwala and I brought along a friend Wesley Seay (whom to this day I call Capri).

 

Capri was a name I came up with because when he was a kid (he started using virtual environments when he was around 13 or so) his nickname was Liquid Cool, and my first impression was to say “You mean like Capri Sun drinks?”. Well, the nickname stuck and over the years he just kept it which is in many way how I came to use the Darian Knight nickname – I originally chose Aeonix as a nickname back in 1996 but I became known among my friends in real life for watching way too much Sailor Moon (and to be fair, it was the only thing remotely interesting on television when I was getting ready for school) so I ended up with my nickname being Darian out of habit, versus Aeonix.

 

This is still related to the post, by the way… it’s just a bit of context and backstory.

 

But I Digress

 

When my boss at the time, Mr. Clark, proposed some research at VR5 Online, he came to the conclusion that I should run a virtual world in ActiveWorlds by which he would give me a list of things I had to accomplish and research each year in order to validate another year renewal for that project. That went on for a few years before it was decided to close the project, but in the beginning of it, I was to find the best ways to do certain things on that list.

 

 

 

 

Now, as a professional you would normally see things in a manner which excludes all of your options. This is your scope and vision, more or less.  Some of us have a wider scope than others, while in many cases we become specialized and thus myopic in our scope. There is a place for both types of thinking and scope but we first have to understand that a limited scope and ability can be detrimental to a project or endeavor if we aren’t careful to identify that ahead of time.

 

I remember one of the points on the list for Nidus was simply to launch a behavioral study and utilize it toward marketing in virtual environments. The “impossible” aspect that he threw in was that I had to do so in a manner in which nobody would ever realize they were being studied, in effect I had to blend it all together as if it was perfectly natural.

 

What I came up with was pretty ingenious, even to this day.

 

It was a small town, and it had lots of different stores and aspects. But then on a more minute detail there were other studies and aspects underlying and they all worked together. The important part about this is the team that put it together.

 

It was a motley crew of individuals, and I’m proud of them to this day – many of them went on to become successful media designers, while others remained rogues and unconventional assets to projects. The most interesting part was that many of them were teenagers, or recent high school graduates who had simply accumulated years of experience in a virtual environment and how to create within them. I intentionally saw the merit of experience versus traditional education and decided that the experience of the individuals far surpassed the qualitative assets they could have brought to the project if they were simply of traditional education. It was a voluntary basis, and its own little community, and those teens ran circles around even ActiveWorlds Inc as a company.

 

 

 

 

Now, when I say they ran circles around AWI, I’m talking to a point where they put ActiveWorlds to shame as a company with the things they could do versus what the company itself was doing with their own technology. To this day I’m proud of their accomplishments, and I learned quite a lot over those years as to the best manner to work within a virtual environment setting. Years later, the things that were discovered and innovated in VR5 | Nidus continue to shape the direction of ActiveWorlds and even contribute to virtual environments as an industry.

 

This is what I like to call “Unconventional Conventions” in that the best approach, and the best way to get deeper insight and progress is often times (in virtual environments and elsewhere) to abandon our preconceived notions of scope and ability. I could have put in a budget request to my boss in order to hire a staff related to the project, but I wouldn’t have progressed anything. The band of rogues did things that to this day are extraordinary and pretty amazing, and they did so because they wanted the challenge, and furthermore knew that I was a hard-ass that would push them above and beyond to do better. In the end, they did things that to this day have yet to be replicated in an open ended virtual environment like SecondLife or ActiveWorlds in any official capacity.

 

 

 

 

Oh, they often hated me when I was telling them they could do better, or when I pointed out flaws. But they learned over time that the best compliment for a job well done is when somebody like me says “This is fantastic!” or when the rest of the community looked up to them as innovators, however much a set of rogues they were. Nothing said that more than when we put together a live concert, not once but twice in ActiveWorlds with the band Aztech Rising.

 

The first concert pushed the limits of conventional ideas for “events” in ActiveWorlds by introducing the idea that a live concert could be played in a virtual environment on a large scale, while on the second concert a year later we revamped the entire stadium with particle effects and a custom arena, complete with a fireworks show and lasers. The latter concert took it a step further by introducing the idea that a virtual event can be linked to real life merchandise, and as a result, a shop was available at the stadium during the concert to allow the concert goers to get real life swag such as concert t-shirts, hats and more. Remember, this is an innovation that came out of the minds of wild card prosumers and not traditional education.

 

 

 

 

Later on in places like SecondLife, we take these sorts of ideas for granted. We have events and giveaways, and there are plenty of live performers on a nightly basis. But in those early days, this was totally unconventional, let alone the idea of selling real life merchandise in conjunction with a virtual concert. In an unofficial capacity, this idea continued to blossom, but in a conventional and official capacity that is Linden Lab themselves, the idea has yet to catch on. If anything, the wild cards are still innovating despite Linden Lab constantly trying to put on the brakes.

 

Full footage of the first concert can be watched here on the Aztech Rising archive. 

 

The idea here is that even to this day, the rule of unconventional conventions continues to work with the same brilliant results as they did in the late 1990s and through to 2007 when Nidus reached its end goal and shut down.

 

Recently with IEEE Virtual World Standards  there has been an ongoing project among the group to create demonstrations for the public in order to show the ideas of interoperability. The original idea for this demonstration was to build a multi-universe game of PONG where you’d hit a ball in maybe SecondLife and have it go down the play area, and at the halfway point, disappear and show up in say, ActiveWorlds for instance to be hit back to SecondLife.

 

Now, the people in IEEE Virtual World Standards are some extremely talented and brilliant men and women. However the case may be, I still had an inkling ahead of time that a game of PONG between multiple virtual universes may be entirely outside of their scope. Initially, it should come as no surprise that I asked Jon Bee to contribute on my team in the IEEE group to make this happen, after all he was also one of the people in Nidus and even today he contributes in Andromeda Media Group. I knew this man would be the unconventional convention that was needed.

 

After a number of weeks (maybe a month or two) the group wholly decided it really was outside of their ability to create a PONG game across universes, but luckily for myself and Jon, neither of us attended that meeting to hear a collective defeat. Instead, on a random day the following week, he spent a few hours doing what some of the brightest men and women in virtual environments just recently washed their hands of out of frustration. In a few hours, Jon Bee, the rogue aspect to the high professional aspects of the group, sped through and had a working demonstration of PONG, and later that night he began the link-up between SecondLife and ActiveWorlds.

 

When the early demonstration was given to Tom Starai to show the initial stride in progress, I remember that he was impressed but also assumed that such a stride in progress must have taken a lot more time to accomplish than it did. In his scope of understanding, and based on the efforts prior by the rest of the group, he was under the impression that such an advancement must have interfered with real life endeavors and projects over a longer period that the rest of the group simply could not afford to give attention to, but in the scope of Jon Bee and our unconventional conventions approach what seemed like it should take a few weeks of constant work actually took a few hours in one night.

 

By choosing an unconventional convention, or wild card, the promise of an inter-universe game of PONG was given life in a short amount of time, thus advancing the group as a whole forward where they previously had given up on the idea.

 

Why is this unconventional convention idea so important? Well, by widening the scope and being willing to look for unconventional solutions and people who may not fit our preconceived notions to solve our problems, we often find a wealth of untapped talent and insight. What would seem like an insurmountable challenge becomes trivial, and often with wildly successful outcomes.

 

We find determination, drive and persistence but most of all we find people who aren’t blinded by preconceived notions, training or scope. This is crucial, and ultimately so when we deal with virtual environments like SecondLife or ActiveWorlds.

 

Unconventional SecondLife

 

The reason I’m writing all of this is to lead up to a current conversation I had with one of the Phoenix Team developers recently about why what Linden Lab has been doing all these years actually makes perfect sense when you understand the limited scope of operations they are restricted to.

 

For instance, it seemingly makes no sense to fire Philip Rosedale and replace him with Mark Kingdon, only to fire Mark Kingdon and put Philip back in place, only to replace Philip again with Rod Humble. All of the interim maneuvers that Linden Lab has taken during this constant changeup seems like a company without a clear understanding of virtual environments, and this is ultimately true but for reasons many don’t realize.

 

For instance, Philip Rosedale was more of a visionary than a business leader. He had the charisma and cult of personality aspect down pat, but in business he likely did not speak the same language as those which Linden Lab are indebted to. He looked at things in a manner which would say “This is good for people” but likely had little to say in describing how it was good for the bottom line or how a long tail approach would balance the scales of business versus community.

 

In that frustration, and lack of communication, we saw the introduction of Mark Kingdon who is arguably of a high business pedigree – and his scope for business was shown immediately as he began to shift Linden Lab away from a community aspect and into an Enterprise aspect. I don’t fault Mark Kingdon, because he was merely working within the constraints of his scope, and he really didn’t know the intricacies of a virtual environment ecosystem, nowhere near as well as Philip Rosedale.

 

The problem was that Philip spoke as a visionary but not as a business person. Mark Kingdon spoke as a business person but not as a visionary. When Mark took a lateral step aside and Philip resumed where he left off, we had a visionary at the helm again – but those who Linden Lab are indebted to wanted faster ROI and expansion, even if that meant cannibalizing the ecosystem to make it happen. Philip likely had a crisis of conscience which led him to leave again, being replaced by Rod Humble, who speaks the business of Video Games.

 

Rod is the closest we get to a hybrid of business and visionary, but there is still a lack of ecosystem understanding, and that is very dangerous for Linden Lab in the long run. His scope is video games, and while video games are close to what virtual environments like Second Life are, it isn’t a good enough match to apply the same methodologies, because ultimately the things that work for a video game scope will backfire if applied to a virtual environment scope like Second Life.

 

 

Subtractive Value

 

An excellent example is the recent announcement of the new benefits for Premium membership in SecondLife where you get a free “exclusive” gift and access to Premium Sandboxes to build in. The problem is that the “exclusive” gifts have no added value when free users have access to a plethora of content from the community both free and paid for, and likely those in a free membership would have half a dozen similar sets in their inventory by the time they decided to upgrade to Premium.

 

The other issue is the Sandboxes because this is yet another indication that @Rodvik and those in the marketing group are clearly outside of their scope of understanding. One of the reasons people upgrade to Premium accounts is for the ability to purchase land of their own, which immediately negates the usefulness of a Premium Sandbox. Even as a free user, the private sandbox idea is all but a moot offering in that even free users can rent land, and that again negates the private sandbox idea if even free users can rent their own land, effectively eliminating most of the need for a sandbox up front.

 

The same issue applies to giving Premium Members their own premade “Linden Homes”, in that whatever Linden Lab is offering in that aspect is a pale shadow to what a free or premium user could get on their own. Prefab houses and skyboxes are plentiful on Marketplace, making the selection that Linden Lab offers for Linden Homes look like a joke to the community.

 

 

 

 

Again, if the major added value to a Premium membership is the ability to purchase and sell land, then Linden Homes become a moot offering. Even as a free member you can rent more land and have more options than Linden Lab gives you as an added incentive to become a Premium user. What makes this worse is that leveraging access to legitimate support as a Premium user “added value” tells each and every new user with a free account that you simply don’t give a toss about them, and the last time I checked, that’s a horrendous first impression to be making.

 

So we have Linden Homes being an attempt at relevancy in the already existing homes, land and accessories markets maintained by the userbase ecosystem of prosumers. Sandboxes that miss the underlying understanding that Premium accounts can buy and sell land, making premium sandboxes an error in judgment. Even free users can rent land, and nearly eliminate the need to use sandboxes. Giving “exclusive” gifts is also a moot point since nobody really cares about an exclusive furniture set when they have a mountain of options otherwise, free user or premium.

 

More importantly, however, is that while this does show that their scope is extremely myopic at best, and their understanding is lacking, the worst part about all of this is that these seemingly innocent mistakes in succession have lasting and long term negative effects on the ecosystem that is Second Life. At every step of the way, Linden Lab continually turns in on itself to cannibalize the ecosystem and that’s a very bad thing for not just you and I, but for Linden Lab itself.

 

What we have here, is failure to communicate.

 

I don’t mean that @Rodvik isn’t listening to the community. No, he’s doing an excellent job on that front. However, there is a difference between listening to the community and actually knowing how to interpret what you are hearing into actionable outcomes that foster a balance of understanding for the ecosystem that is Second Life.

 

I do not suspect that even @Rodvik is in a position to be effective at that part, and it’s not a negative thing. Of course it’s not necessarily a positive thing either. What it is, is a lack of proper context in overall fashion of this system.

 

@Rodvik has a lot of business insight pertaining to video games. He’s not a virtual worlds visionary like Philip was, and he’s surely no Chip Morningstar, F. Randal Farmer, or Jaron Lanier.

 

However, that’s what is missing from the equation. This is precisely why Linden Lab continues to falter. You need balance… you need a sound business mind who at least partially understands virtual environments running the place, but you also need a visionary to guide that leader.

 

The visionary, or advisor, shouldn’t be the CEO in this case. No, that job is taken and should be held by somebody who knows business scope. The advisor or visionary position, guides and acts as a mediator between the chaos that is a virtual environment system like Second Life, and the business sense that is traditional thinking and scope. They are the person who can read the tea leaves and explain to the CEO. It’s also the sort of person that is comfortable doing that in reverse as well, as in interpreting the business scope into the ecosystem of the virtual environment.

 

It’s a complimentary sort of role, and nobody needs to be fired to make that happen.

 

I could argue that Philip Rosedale holds some sort of advisory position on the board for Linden Lab, but I doubt it’s an active involvement. If anything, it’s simply a courtesy sort of thing and Philip is likely wanting to put SecondLife behind him and concentrate on his other projects, like Coffee & Power.

 

So what we are left with is the understanding that what is needed to bring balance and healthy expansion back to Second Life is an unconventional convention. There are often times when conventional scopes have little impact, or even negative outcomes when applied, and these are the times when it is prudent to start looking for a rogue to guide you.

 

When we broaden the scope and start looking at unconventional conventions, we eliminate the artificial narrowing of scope we apply out of preconceived bias, and we find solutions that would normally be outright rejected under conventional means, but suddenly offer wildly successful outcomes as a result.

 

Just like a rag-tag group of teenagers can run circles around a corporation using their own technology, and how a wild card user can do what some some of the best in technology collectively wash their hands of in defeat, the solution of introducing a wild card into the mix is our unconventional convention for Linden Lab.

 

You’re not likely to find those wild cards through traditional methods, either. Looking through resumes that dictate traditional education instead of hands-on experience and real-world application will get you people who are classically trained to be blind to the proper solutions. They are trained to think inside the box, so to speak – and there is really nothing wrong with that when in proper context, just like there is nothing wrong with Rodvik, Mark Kingdon, and Philip Rosedale all having a narrow scope which excludes seeing the bigger picture. Those scopes are specialized and have a very important purpose, but without balance – without our wild cards, those narrow scopes change from being an asset to a dangerous destructive force.

 

The day Linden Lab effectively fills an advisory position with a true wildcard that isn’t traditionally educated, but brings a wealth of insight and hands-on experience with virtual environments (not video games) is the day that you’ll see the balance return, and Linden Lab surge ahead in to a second golden age.

 

A second life, for Second Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t Be Stupid.

Amending #Google’s motto into something more realistic.

 

I believe Google should be amending their slogan from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be stupid". They've essentially thumbed their noses up at the very nature of the Internet and the roots of what makes it great. Pseudonyms are a part of the very fabric of what make the Internet what it is, and the culture that has given rise to what we know as Cyberspace. While this has brought both good and bad as a result, I believe the very existence of the Internet as we have today is ongoing proof that the good far outweighs the bad.

In a digital culture such as we have today, everybody is famous in their own way, and pseudonyms comprise an irrevocable part of that culture. To make any attempt to deny that history and legacy is to do so at their own risk.

 

 

 

We live in an era of multiplicity of identity, each having proper context and just as much weight as any other name we may use. In that Google wants only a wallet name shows only willful ignorance on their part in failing to understand that they are dealing with people who are represented by multiple identities, interests, and behaviors, all which are a part of a greater whole of the individual.

In a court of law, individuals are innocent until proven guilty. So too should pseudonyms be addressed - they are acceptable until proven otherwise. It is the individual's right to choose what name they use, not a corporation. This is why there are laws in nearly every country on Earth defining the very legality of using a pseudonym at will for a myriad of purposes farther reaching than a simple social network.

While the Electronic Frontier Foundation states in a recent write-up “A Case For Pseudonyms” that companies like Google and Facebook are entirely within their right to forbid pseudonym usage, they also point out that it is horribly short-sighted and often times damaging and even life-threatening to do so. I'd like to believe that Google is not so blinded by short-sighted goals and profits that they are willing to jeopardize the well-being and even lives of others in the process.

If the purpose of Google is stated as being the intention of bringing all the world's knowledge and information together, as well as the people, then they must understand that they simply cannot exclude a majority of the people or outright deny the culture that gave them this opportunity. If it wasn't for a world full of pseudonyms, Google would have no Internet to dominate. For every person, there are multiple identities, each with distinct metrics and differentiation of personality in context of the virtual space in which they inhabit as their domain. In the eyes of Google, this should account for much more opportunity than they currently seem to grasp.

Yet, while Google and Facebook are entirely within their right to deny the use of pseudonyms and demand a wallet name, the price they pay for doing so may, in turn, be far too high for even them to accept. This fiasco is reaching mainstream media, and even celebrities such as William Shatner are lamenting over their profiles being suspended, while others such as @Skud are continuing with interviews in mainstream media railing against these policies, all for the world to read. Twitter is alight with similar discontent from users who have had their profiles suspended for pseudonymous usage, and as these personal accounts continue to mount in public view, the future of Google+ does not look as bright as it once did. While Google+ may, indeed, enjoy a fair amount of success, it will have willingly sabotaged its own growth and success from what could have been a true game changer.

While Google and Facebook are within their rights to deny pseudonyms and even anonymous usages, surely they are not so ignorant as to fail to understand the maelstrom of bad PR and ill-will they create worldwide in doing so. 

 

While it has been claimed that I somehow believe that avatars are real people, I must contest the oversimplification and misstatement of such. Avatars to me are merely digital representations of a person which bare the context of a virtual environment space pseudonym. As I believe that pseudonyms are just as legitimate as a wallet name in all but the most well defined cases, and are protected and sanctioned by nearly every country on Earth through law, I make my claim that I believe that the context of the pseudonym matters little while the actual usage of the pseudonym matters most. In a digital world, we carry many pseudonyms or possibly just one that is well known or chosen, and each usage of such is entirely dependent on the use context – that being the scenario by which the individual decides what personality best suits the digital arena by which they will participate, while retaining the right to manage their multiple personality order as they see fit.

 

In the context of social media, such as Facebook or Google+, the right of the individual to freely choose their forward facing personality and context of immersion is a cherished right and not a privilege. As such, an avatar to me constitutes as much of a real person as I would attribute to that of Mark Twain and the works and actions thereof. Simply using a pseudonym in context does not invalidate any part of the person using it, nor does it make the person behind the pseudonym any less real. By association, therefore, an avatar is the representation of a real person and fueled by the actions of the very real person behind it (excluding the actions of an artificial intelligence bot at this time). However, just like anything having to do with digital representations, an avatar on it’s own does not constitute a real person, but instead constitutes the forward facing chosen identity of a real person in proper context to the digital environment space they are currently participating in. Whether that space is a virtual reality or a social media hub is inconsequential as our multiplicity of identity will eventually become cross-domain and interchangeable, and indeed already has despite efforts by companies to the contrary.

 

This, in and of itself, offers a very profound glimpse into the future of our digital multiplicity, or multiple personality order, in that the concept of “True Names” takes on an entirely different meaning in today’s society than it did prior to the digital age. As a result of this profound paradigm shift, we see today that even large corporate entities such as Google and Facebook somehow are unable to understand the importance of multiplicity of identity, and continue with their attempts to reshape the entire fabric and legacy of what made the Internet and digital culture what it is today.

The final question remains - At what point does the price of their policies become too much to continue? From a perspective of simple common sense, I'd say they've already reached that point, causing more harm to their reputation and social media product than may be reversed before they've managed to make it to an actual launch.

In the end, the point remains: What people are angry about is that their common names are not recognized by Google, and simply offering those people the chance to comply with practices that they already are against is not an answer, in the same light as this "solution" is really further proof that Google is willfully ignoring the very premise of the debate and in doing so, are blatantly insulting the world. If a common name happens to be a Pseudonym, then so be it. There should be no obligation to fill in a field with a wallet name, and a pseudonym should be just as acceptable - if not more acceptable since in many cases, the world is more likely to know the pseudonym than the wallet name.

 

While I’ve heard the opposite take on this subject, being that we are not “forced” to use Google+ or any of Google’s services, that is much like asserting that a near monopoly of services aren’t forcing you to use them. Simply because a company offers great things, and arguably better than competition, does not constitute a right to demand things from your users that can be dangerous. Yes, as users, we are the commodity not the customer, however I challenge that notion since we are willingly trading mountains of information about ourselves on a daily basis for access to a service, which in turn make these companies a lot of money. We are, indeed, customers in that we are paying for these services with something vastly more valuable than money – our own privacy and identity. The very least we can do is draw a line in the sand for one crucial piece of information that we alone should have control over – and that is our own identity and how it is presented.

Because of this, I have chosen to refer to Google as a company whose motto should be changed to "Don't be stupid." It is far more fitting given the current situation, and bares repeating when a company such as Google seems to have entirely missed the obvious.

Signed,
Will Burns
Object Interoperability Lead | IEEE Virtual World Standards
Aeonix Aeon in SecondLife

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A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow
Co-Founder Electronic Frontier Foundation

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.