Oh, there’s been plenty of them, but you may not have found them visible, as they take place in the virtual world itself and on the forums and blogsphere, not physically in San Francisco. And I suspect Daniel Linden, who is notorious for never answering emails, would be the last person to ask about protests in Second Life.

The open protest letter this week with 3,800 signatures is probably something virtually like that march Daniel denied could occur 2 weeks ago, however, and even he’d be forced to admit it now.

And there have been very strong protest movements, such as by telehub mall owners and private island owners that protested so effectively that LL was forced to change policies, they had to compensate for the loss of the telehub land, and had to postpone their plan to make price hikes on the islands.

I find this video absolutely chilling and disturbing, all the more ominous because the news is delivered by this affable blonde sunny hippie in California.

Here are the highlights of some of the profoundly worrisome concepts they are promoting:

1. Getting rid of the offense of RL disclosure essentially ends the second life concept. It means bullies who use RL information to silence dissenters or try to change the behaviour of people they don’t like by outing their gender, or blackmailing them, or simply threatening them with RL stalking, will now be able to operate with impunity. That’s wrong!

The motivation for this was likely the RL businesses who don’t see why they need a fake game-like name. But in this intensely emotional virtual world still used mainly for socializing, many people want their identity protected. SL loses its very being and nature by removing that protective layer. Just because you can’t police something 100 percent doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be promoted by the federal state as a norm.

2. I loathe the overall contempt for the user that I hear coming from this Linden. My God, we are not weasels. We are not people in the unemployment line. We are not grocery clerks making ladies’ lingerie out of our Queens apartments. That kind of arrogant sneer, trying to make out the SL population *that pays your salary, Daniel Linden* has no place in your management culture. None. Zero. It needs to get gone quick. We are all very different. Some people have businesses they make livlihoods from. Some people simply work for IBM and meet their co-workers there. It’s really ridiculous to try to stereotype SL by the minority of furry baby ageplaying BDSMers. It’s long past even being a funny joke at this point. Get over it, Daniel, we all did years ago. Second Life or something like it — virtuality — will be incorporated to most urban populations’ real lives in 10-20 years. It won’t be about baby weasels, it will be about multi-billion dollar businesses, and don’t think YOU can control that economy by disparaging everybody else seeking access to it as a baby weasel or a Queens grocery clerk. Because that’s what it’s about.

3. Symmetrical nodraw is another name for Stalinist airbrushing of people you don’t like right out of history, out of photographs. It’s wrong. You can’t force people to get along. But you can promulgate some basic “do unto others” sort of minimal values and not let the world Balkanize and degenerate endlessly to “I Rule” tyranny like a living Tropico hell.

And doing that automatically is just poor management. Anybody who has done customer service in SL knows that some people ban each other 3 times a night then make up, and don’t keep each other on mute. It’s not rocket science to use ban and mute, and that should not be automated so that people who have a moment’s annoyance with a newbie who is clumsy successfully have him Ban-linked from huge swathes of SL forever.

4. The idea that Lindens don’t intrude with their own wacky, culty, utopianist ideas of governance is wrong. They do. They say that someone reporting from an abusive Goreans’ land will find that complaint routed right back to the Master Gorean leaving the slave or the wandering furry helpless. Again, the federal government should have some minimal obligation to maintain the minimal peace and that means at least processing appeals after local remedies are exhausted. There’s some really objectionable features of this “local rule” stuff as well, such as having chat logs for an entire sim then go into the hands of the sim owner.

5. I could go on and on about all the bad ideas represented in the Linden dystopia, that has made a grid of selfish, vicious, hedonistic people, where only the tiny niche of politically-correct lefty Creative Commonsers sandbox script-kiddies and Burning Man nutters are considered “the community” and the rest of us little better than software beta load-testers.

But…the main point is…why does Linden Lab get to decide these issues affecting us all, by itself, in secret, alone, or only occasionall ina little chat like this in Stanford??. in secret, with only self-selected special beta-era and other friends they pay to come to SF to chat to them in SL Views? You don’t have to have a cumbersome “parliament” to have basic, normal open channels — like a forums, which is now closed, or community round tables, which have been closed.
Routing everybody to take part in a geeky bug JIRA lets us know exactly what you really think about feedback: you want it from the 13 1/2 people who can code software and have the time to work for you for free. Do you really think a handful of kids on a beta grid are the way that a company with grown men collecting high salaries for coding should be testing and gaining feedback on their product?

We all pay the tier that makes up 80 percent of LL revenue. How can we be so disenfranchised from the actual governance of the software features and world’s nature??? This can’t last, and this insularity will be among the reasons LL is overtaken by other world-makers in the long run.

There is nothing enlightened about this despotism. the removal of the forums, the banning of people from criticism of LL itself from the blog, the very idea that Daniel espouses in Rolling Stone, that if you are “not moving the conversation forward” (as defined by this clique of coders) then you need to get gone — well, it’s just dead wrong. It’s unacceptable in RL; it’s unacceptable in virtual life.

What kind of creativity is it, intense though it may be, that leads people who don’t live in the desert to adopt for a few days the false posture of those who do, and worse, make an effigy of something which they then go about destroying by fire? That’s the most primitive and stupid kind of tribalism. Why is that what inspires Second Life?

Soon enough we will all be despots of our own servers oppressing Prokofy Neva by its very existence. I can hardly wait!

It was good to see Daniel mention the importance of the social facilitator. Those of us who have taken on this role often are doing it for free, and I’m glad LL values it, even though we’re not very visible. Some of us are officers in groups and could be counted that way.

The continued movement toward user control and open source and/or licensing is great. I was very glad to see a welcoming, hands off attitude toward the “niche verticals” of specific subcultures. The tendency in the various official and unofficial forums to yell “your subculture is about to get banned” is grade school stuff in comparision. It was reassuring to see that adult space will always exist in some form, since some of the most creative subcultures are a bit off the wall.

Inclusion and diversity have always been important to me and are core values in the group I run, Bisexuals in Second Life. I was glad to see Daniel support a tolerant, welcoming, inclusive Second Life. I think the San Francisco-style liberal mainland is very marketable and always will be, while diversity proliferates all around it. This is a very constructive vision of the future of Second Life. Thank you!

Ive seen many moments of this.

1). copy bot caused a vast amount of Business to close down there shops, this was such a big thing it actually caused a dip in the economy. Linden lab had to make a statement about copy bot and admit that everyones stuff could always be copied.

2. recent inworld conferances with Robin Linden have been swamped by angry protesters.

3. the fact that you cant relly have many residents in one place at a time means we cant mass a big protest in one place anyway. If we could fit 500 on a sim you would see something remarkable im sure.

I know personally of several instances where in world businesses were told to remove “offensive” products or be shut down.

THe sole advantage that I see is the impetus to create a truly independent version of Second Life which cannot be controlled by any “central committee”.