Second Life Sketches: Two Worlds - Fame and Infamy
By Warren Ellis
The following is an independent opinion column, and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.
It’s the biggest digital art installation in the world, the size of eight Manhattan Islands, but there are never more than 20,000 people there at the same time. It’s an instant messaging system, a software-coding environment, a design platform for 3-D architecture, an online community, and, conceivably, the germ of the next generation of computer operating systems. It’s called Second Life.
There are two dominant perceptions of Second Life right now. Due to what some see as clever presentation of numbers, Linden Labs, the creators and operators of Second Life, have parlayed a supposed “Residents” number in excess of two millions into a good story: That Second Life is a snowballing Internet application that gains speed by the moment.
As a privately held company, of course, they have no compelling responsibility to clarity or transparency. Any resident, for instance, can pay ten dollars to create an alternate identity within Second Life. Are the alts counted? How many of those two million logged in once, found their computer couldn’t handle Second Life’s processing demands, logged out and got rid of the software? How many more logged in once and were attacked by other users (a depressingly regular occurrence) or simply decided they didn’t like it?
The “two million” is a great PR push-point, but it seems somewhat sideways from reality. Nonetheless, it seems to have done the trick. Big companies appear to be queuing up to establish their territory within Second Life, and every time one of them pushes their in-world space live, it generates another slew of news stories, and another rush of sign-ups.
The other perception, of course, is that Second Life is a psychosexual nightmare given virtual form, where giant penises roam the land and disturbed people wear the forms of bears and then have repulsive intercourse.
It was interesting to me to see both perceptions collide a few weeks back.
Ailin Graef operates in-world as Anshe Chung, the oft-touted first paper millionaire produced by Second Life. She’s a SL property magnate, and has recently begun tasting real-world fame, cover-featured on magazines and the like. It plays into Perception One, that new entrepreneurial ground has been broken and Second Life is the new field of 21st century capitalist enterprise.
It’s a good story, and the notion of presenting a digital avatar as a business celebrity has an appealing frisson of The Future to many. Recently, she agreed to an in-world interview with a CNET journalist. The interview was broken up by a group who caused a rain of giant penises to plunge down on the stage, helpfully recording their stunt in screenshots and video for the “Second Life Safari” section of the website Something Awful. The Second Life Safari team come from Perception Two, and they see something worth mocking in a publicity-conscious magnate who controls land parcels where people pretend to have illicit sex.
Both the widely-read blog BoingBoing and the website of the Sydney Morning Herald reported on this, leading to nastygrams from Ailin Graef’s husband and business partner Guntram, threatening legal action for reporting on the event - which he categorized as “cyber rape porn” — and posting screenshots of the attack, in an email to BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin, a California-based print and radio journalist.
(Full disclosure: I’ve known Xeni for a few years, which is how I got to ask her a few questions about this.)
“This is an infringement on the personality rights of Anshe Chung and her creator Ailin Graef (my wife),” Graef wrote in the email, which Xeni shared with me. “It is also in clear violation of US laws. … I am sure this happened by mistake and was not intentional. Please be so kind and correct this swiftly.”
“When I hear about new kinds of antisocial behavior online, that’s of interest,” Xeni said. “The flying penises incident certainly seemed like a newsworthy phenomenon. Some people found a social weakness within the system, and exploited it for the purpose of humiliating someone (or some company) who has received a lot of press in recent months, nearly all of it unquestioningly celebratory (”The SL millionaire”, etc.).”
“If someone threw a banana cream pie at the president, I might not blog it,” she added. “But if someone threw a banana cream pie at his SL avatar, I definitely would.”
Xeni said she spoke to a couple of attorneys about the matter: “When they told me that it did not require a reply or action, I set it aside.”
Xeni kindly put me in touch with Stephen Hutcheon, the Sydney Morning Herald journalist who wrote up the event on the newspaper’s blog and received a similar email from Graef.
“I took it to be more of a warning than a threat,” he said. “I fully understand that they’re trying to protect Anshe Chung’s reputation. But it happened it in a semi-public space in front of many witnesses and was reported on by other sites and blogs.”
Both Xeni and Stephen are quite clear that threats of any kind aren’t going to stop them covering Second Life as and when they choose to. Stephen also makes the point that “because I work for a mainstream organisation I also have to watch what I report on (in terms of taste), how I explain what took place and what images I use to illustrate the story.”
It would indeed be my suspicion that the Sydney Morning Herald probably wouldn’t be running images of “cyber rape porn.” Certainly the people I know who are survivors of sexual assault and victims of online stalking wouldn’t recognise anything from their experience in a brief flurry of crudely-fashioned virtual genitalia on a screen.
The Graefs, however, see it differently. Videos of the incident have been removed from YouTube following a copyright-violation complaint. In a subsequent email Guntram Graef claimed that the Sydney Morning Herald “posted an image that contains artwork copyrighted by my wife Ailin Graef and by Anshe Chung Studios, Ltd. and without obtaining our permission to do so.”
They are, in fact, making this a DMCA issue. In their desperation to drop the incident down an Orwellian memory hole, the people behind Anshe Chung are opening up a large and nasty-looking can of worms.(For more on the copyright violation claims, read the Reuters news story here).
The Graefs’ overzealous attempt to chill reportage of the incident is understandable, I think, but also indicative of the recent changes in perception of SL. For a long time, Anshe Chung has been a big fish in a small pond, and the Graefs, controlling a significant amount of in-world land, have become somewhat inviolable figures inside Second Life.
With the incident last month they’ve gotten a hard dose of the real world, and there’ll definitely be more to come as Linden Labs continue to crank up the PR machine. The most celebrated figures of a world that’s been essentially a closed community for three years probably haven’t evolved the best coping skills for the sudden glare of global publicity.
