TO:
Lawrence Lessig
Director, Safra Foundation Center for Ethics
Harvard Law School
124 Mount Auburn Street, Suite 520N
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
FROM:
Vaneeesa Blaylock
Virtual World Performance Artist
Biscuit Bay, An Li
Second Life
Monday, 20 September 2010
Dear Professor Lessig,
I’ve just listened to your conversation with Jonathan Zittrain on The Microsoft Anti-trust Case, Twelve Years After.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2010/09/09/radio-berkman-162-lessig-zittrain-take-on%E2%80%A6-competition/
(the conversation is as insightful as its URL is unfortunate!)
It’s an inspiring conversation, filled with dangerous precipices, frighteningly crumbling cliffs, and yet somehow a lot of inspiration and optimism for this exciting century of ours.
As you and professor Zittrain express, monopolistic, Balkanizing, anti-speech tendencies seem to exist everywhere, and yet somehow it legitimately seems that more human beings have a voice today, the 20th of September 2010, than on any previous day in all of human history.
I am troubled by the paradox that the 25% of humanity that is currently wired lives, largely, in Western liberal democracies, or “physically” lives there, but we virtually live in a series of unaccountable authoritarian states.
Doubtless you are aware of far more anecdotal cases than I, but the case of Violet Blue vs Flickr seems to powerfully illustrate this paradoxical state of our time:
http://vaneeesa.com/2010/02/22/artist-violet-blue/
Flickr decided, apparently without cause, not exactly to “take down,” but to “restrict” the content, the online identity, the resume, the persona, the web2.0 presence, that she had built through years of posting to Flickr.
Restricted means her work can’t be seen at all in Germany, India, China. In places like the United States, it can be viewed, but not searched for. After numerous attempts to discuss the matter with Flickr, she was not only unable to restore her content, but she was unable even to speak to anyone about the matter.
It seems to me that our virtual lives have been surrendered to non-democratic authoritarian dictatorships that “feature” no rule of law, no judicial system, no due process, and no habeas corpus.
In my own world, Second Life, I have been deeply troubled by recent events. Linden Lab has Open Sourced the Second Life viewer and many Third Party Viewers have appeared on the scene. This is wonderful. Linden Lab’s own “SL Viewer 2″ has a User Interface that many believe is exceptionally unfriendly. It was designed by a now fired employee who had a Flash background, was apparently not a “real Second Life resident” and sought, I think, to impose his vision of how we should live and work on a community he was not a part of and perhaps did not respect. Whatever political spin one puts on SL V2, it’s fair to say that many users were uncomfortable with it and the statistics I’ve heard were that the third-party viewer “Emerald” was used by 30% of users and accounted for 50% of connect hours.
Emerald was developed by Modular Systems which was helmed by Fractured Crystal who, apparently, recently turned 18. Probably 95% of Emerald was the Linden Lab code base, but by not incorporating the SL V2 UI and by adding various functionalities it was, in my experience, a very ingratiating viewer. In my personal experience SL V2 felt “wrong” or fought you with every mouse click, Emerald seemed to say with every mouse click, “I understand what you’re trying to do.”
I don’t know how much money Linden Lab spent developing SL V2, but it’s amazing to realize how much more efficient and intuitive a UI the “teenager” seemed to have produced with a team of volunteers.
Unfortunately, the teenager didn’t just produce an elegant UI, he also was, well, a teenager! In the 21st century teenage “acting out” is no longer confined to their parents home, it can be written on a global stage. Apparently Modular Systems Emerald viewer offered both a superior UI, and invasive data mining of its users. Near the end of Modular Systems life the Emerald code was allegedly altered so that every single user, on launching the viewer, was an unwitting participant in a DDoS attack on one of Modular Systems critics. The act was unethical and I’m told, illegal in several countries.
As news of Modular Systems nefarious activities spread, many users moved to other viewers, many said “It’s the best viewer I don’t care what you do,” and a third group was in the middle, chastising Modular, but continuing to use the viewer for the moment.
Fractured Crystal eventually stepped down, the Emerald team reformed itself, and then Linden Lab stepped in and gave the Emerald team a series of conditions, including the termination of three staff members, else Emerald would be banned from the Second Life Grid.
Linden Lab then did ban Emerald from the Second Life Grid and sent an email to the entire user base instructing them to download the “Official Linden Lab viewer,” “or learn about alternative viewers,” and threatening users that attempting to access the grid with a banned viewer could result in “the loss of one’s account.” I don’t suppose Linden Lab would then refund your Linden Dollar balance, export all your creations, export or refund all your material or “virtual-material” purchases, etc, so “the loss of one’s account,” I think, means the seizure without compensation of all your assets by the virtual state.
http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2010/09/07/emerald-viewer-to-be-blocked-from-second-life
I do believe that Modular Systems, beyond Fractured Crystal, had an anti-social culture and I’m not entirely sad that they are today broken up. Still, I am deeply troubled by Linden Lab’s actions. It is inconceivable that Disney would order Mozilla Corporation to terminate three Firefox developers else Firefox would be banned from Disney.com, or that Microsoft would send an email to all of it’s users informing them that Firefox had been banned from Microsoft.com and instructing users to download Internet Explorer 9.
I by no means believe that Mozilla has engaged in the sort of nefarious activities that Modular Systems did, but doesn’t it take a “bad actor” like Modular Systems to define the scope of our civil liberties?
I’m very much an artist not a lawyer, but Linden Lab’s actions to exclude Emerald feel a little like your description of Microsoft’s actions to exclude Java. In my case we do have misconduct from Emerald that I would like some consumer protection on, but I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that Linden Lab, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Facebook are capable of being impartial protectors of consumer interests.
Within a couple of days of Emerald’s ban, a new viewer, Phoenix, was born from the Emerald ashes. I was at an art opening on Saturday and looking at the tags over the crowd’s heads, I saw the familiar “Emerald Percentage” of users with the word “Phoenix” over their heads.
This is good news in that the culture can “flow around bad law” but it is also a disquieting victory to realize that the world you thought was yours is in fact a corporate product and that the corporation can and will do whatever it pleases. Presumably the corporate behavior is mediated by their desire not to alienate their entire user base, but as Flickr did with Violet Blue, as Facebook does with many users every day, Linden Lab can ban users and viewers and create a less free, less open world. As an artist I am well aware that it is not the occasional act of actual censorship, but the pervasive climate of self-censorship, that is the death of ideas, creativity, and freedom.
Is this to be our life in the 21st century? Living in physical democracies but increasingly spending our time and building careers, reputations, and leisure experiences all in the proprietary spaces of unaccountable corporations?
In your “Radio Berkman 162″ conversation, you and professor Zittrain describe the true optimism of our times with a lot of pessimism. Or the perils of our time with a ray of hope. Is this knife-edge where our freedom will be for the entire 21st century? Will we never have confidence in the freedom of our speech, but simply hop from Web2.0 environment to Web2.0 environment faster than Flickr or Facebook or YouTube can take down our content?
The hundred year-old paper photograph of my great-grandmother, the photo my daughter uploaded to Flickr today: which will be alive in another hundred years?
Thank you for all your books and all your words. Thank you for your remarkable career and your vision of free culture.
Regards,
Vaneeesa Blaylock
