White Courtesy Telephone

FOX News on Radical Internet Assassins

Tom DeLay: “It just seems that the Left are never held accountable.”

The Rules of the Game

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The July 13, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal Online reported on a new video game called Karma Tycoon designed to teach kids about “fiscal responsibility and social entrepreneurship.”*  Web-based youth organization Do Something and JPMorgan Chase teamed up to bring us a game in which

The more good you do … the more Karma you get!  The more Karma you get, the more grants your not-for-profit is eligible for .... the more money you get, the more good you can do!  The more good you do … the more Karma you get!  The more Karma you have, the bigger of a Karma Tycoon you will be!!

Noimsayin?  Good, good.  Stay with me.  According to Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin, “Karma Tycoon is like a vitamin in a Twinkie.”

Twinkalicious!

Coming out at the end of this month is a new arcade-style game for inner-city kids that teaches them the rules of American civic life.  Playfully called Bootstraps by its creators, the main screen is tilted to suggest an uneven playing field.  On level one (“Mettle Detectors”), players use their joysticks to avoid falling fragments of decaying school buildings.  Intermediate levels challenge kids with monsters like the enchantress Mainstream Medea who attempts to demoralize players by flashing images of “illegals” and “welfare queens.”  Heavily armored Rightwingthink Tanks chase players down tracks that require them to execute dangerous, life-sapping, maneuvers called “Bell Curves.”  The game ends when a player reaches level ten with a few Dignity Points intact.

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* “‘Tis Not Simple to Give Gifts” by Christian C. Sahner

WCT Technology Roundup II: Business Booms in Second Life, Darfur Goes Digital, and Manhattan Goes to Seed

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Business Booms in Second Life   The July/August 2007 issue of Technology Review has a feature article on the “Metaverse,” a proposed melding of Second Life (the virtual world created by Linden Labs) with Google Earth.  Users or their avatars will be able to move seamlessly between the two worlds, touring virtual real estate one minute and zooming down to catch the destruction in Darfur the next (see below).

You’ve read in these pages about the nonprofit presence in Second Life, but, not surprisingly, for-profit companies are also very well represented:

Dozens of companies, including IBM, Sony Ericsson, and American Apparel, have bought land in the virtual world, and most have already built storefronts or headquarters where their employees’ avatars can do business. ... In 2006, Starwood Hotels used Second Life as a virtual testing ground for a new chain of real-world hotels, called Aloft.  The company constructed a prototype where visitors could walk the grounds, swim in the pool, relax in the lobby, and inspect the guest rooms.  It’s incorporating suggestions from Second Lifers into the design of the first real Aloft hotel, set to open in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, in 2008.

An interesting idea from our colleagues in the for-profit world.

According to a recent article in Advertising Age, “Everyone from Starwood Hotels to American Apparel angled to score bragging rights on being the firsts in their respective industries (‘First hotel in Second Life!’ ‘First clothing brand in Second Life!’), until there came a point when it seemed to be news if a company wasn’t considering jumping into Second Life.”

Darfur Goes Digital   The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined forces with Google in a special mapping initiative called Crisis in Darfur.  This initiative enables Google Earth users to better visualize and understand the genocide in Darfur:

Witness the destruction for yourself. Using coordinates provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google acquired high-resolution imagery over the region of Darfur and Eastern Chad. Now you can witness the destruction in Darfur via Google Earth. Zoom down and see what a burned village looks like from above, the vast tent cities of people displaced from their homes, and photographs on the ground of refugees struggling to survive. Read eyewitness testimony of atrocities in attacked villages.

“When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible,” says Museum director Sara J. Bloomfield.  “We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most.”

Manhattan Goes to Seed   The July 2007 issue of Scientific American interviews science writer Alan Weisman who has spent some time figuring out what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared from the planet.  Without the constant intervention of human beings—street cleaners, road crews, pump operators, and others—our infrastructure would quickly crumble.  Water-logged foundations would corrode causing skyscrapers to fall, bringing other buildings down with them.  Rivers that once flowed through Manhattan would flow again, and the island would return to a state of nature in fairly short order.

Weisman’s thought experiment provides a new way for environmental activists to understand and communicate our impact on the environment.

New Solutions to Old Problems

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Responding to MacArthur Foundation President Jonathan Fanton’s call to create a network of people committed to “building more just virtual and real worlds,” Chicago homeless advocates are planning to open two new hypothermia shelters in Second Life and move their administrative offices to There.com.

I think it’s about time direct service providers started being more forward-thinking.  They haven’t improved on the meal-and-a-bed paradigm in years.

Second-Lifer Issues Fatwa on First-Lifer

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Some moll goes by the handle “Glitteractica_Cookie” put a contract on my good friend Albert’s bona fides, calling him “a voice of the anti-SL backlash” for his post on Second Life, that virtual world everyone’s talking about.

All right, all right, he brought this pile of bricks on himself.  Last time he went virtual, he was run out of the eleventh dimension for claiming a duck with wax lips was more whimsical than a goose in a bonnet. People who share personal reflections on their experiences in Second Life and are “very critical” deserve to get sapped, I say. Suck it up.

But I owe Albert a debt: he once gave my mudder a picture of Valentino in the altogether.  She died last year—very, very happy.  Mama mia!

If you wanna write Albert, he’s laying low.  Last I heard, he was in the Sims’ Virtual Witness Protection Program. 

Smoky Joe, Scruggs, you out there?

Nonprofits, Virtual Worlds, and the Triumph of Ironic Distance

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I

I was constrained in my choice of body.  All the human avatars looked a little too perfect, in a distended, Giacometti kind of way.  So I chose one with a human body and the head and tail of a raccoon.  I chose the name Pfrank Pfeffer.  I wanted to go as Al@n T_ring, but to do so I would have had to pay for the privilege.

Buy and Sell Linden Dollars!

Own Virtual Land!

This focus on commerce, on the buying and selling of property, objects, and the tokens of identity, was one of the first things that struck me about Second Life.  “Your World.  Your imagination,” the tagline assures you.  But ultimately it’s your money that enables you to make a mark on this online virtual world of some 5.7 million souls. 

There are buildings in Second Life, and carefully rendered water and trees.  And there are fanciful objects that In-Worlders construct from “prims” (short for “primitives”):

A Prim is a cube or sphere or other shape that you create using the build tools, and which are combined together by linking to make much of what you see in Second Life—houses, vehicles, furniture and so on.

The number of prims you can use will depend on the amount of land you own in a region—simply put, more land equals more prims.

You mix your labor with prims and make yours the objects you produce thereby; you’re given prims in proportion to the amount of land you own; you take land out of the State of Virtual Nature by laying down cash on the nail.

Thus Second Life is reassuringly Lockean in every detail.

II

There’s a Nonprofit Commons under construction in Second Life, described as “breathtaking” on the Nonprofits in Second Life blog.  The virtual land was purchased and donated by Anshe Chung, the first “virtual world millionaire.”   The Commons will cost $200 a month to maintain.

TechSoup’s apologetics for the virtual world are compelling:

• The American Cancer Society raised more than $40,000 through its Second Life Relay for Life event. ...
• Educators are using Second Life to present seminars and stage performances and storytelling sessions designed to help youth learn about other cultures. …
• People with disabilities reportedly  have been using Second Life to explore environments where physical constraints are minimized and where they have almost absolute control over their avatars’ features and actions.

More money for cancer research, young minds expanded, people with disabilities free to roam at will, unfettered by crutches and wheelchairs.

I catch a glimpse of the New Eden when I arrive and find myself surrounded by handsome young avatars with perfect skin and teeth, flying above my head—the preferred method of In-World locomotion.  I see wonders on Help Island—a colourful, 700-pound parrot bending a telephone wire, a holographic news service, fantastic sculpture floating in mid-air.

The spell is broken the first time I open my mouth to speak.

A young man dressed in urban chic, with an unpronounceable name, sidles up to me and types into an invisible keyboard, “Are you from the United States?”  Chagrined that I’ve been so quickly found out, I respond, “Yes.  Was it my tail that gave me away?”  He says nothing.  After a long pause, he does the hula, one of the avatars’ pre-scripted “gestures.”  I reply in kind. 

Embarrassed perhaps by my boorishness, by my apparent lack of interest in his country of origin, he takes a few steps away and begins to examine a mechanical rat.

The biggest problem with Second Life, as I see it, is that we can’t help but bring our selves to it.  Our feeble turns of mind, our bad manners, our overweening concern for the effect of our tails.

How does the saying go?

Sow an act, reap a habit
Sow a habit, reap a character
Sow a character, reap a destiny

—for this life and the next, it appears.

III

I’m in my garden as I type this.  Nothing moves.  My strongest impression is the sun’s light on my skin.

My body pushes against the wooden bench on which I sit.  I sense the rough, weathered texture of an old pillow against the small of my back, the drip of sweat down the inside edge of my upper arm.  I feel the purple glow of the azaleas, the sticky green of new growth, the yellow-green of bamboo reborn.  I feel the heavy green of a tired hemlock.  I see—almost taste—the rust color of a young pine that didn’t survive the winter.  I smell grass and magnolia blossom mixed with the scent of my own body.

A sparrow’s chirrup announces the slightest breeze and suddenly I’m in the moving, indescribable Infinite.

Vote for THRONGZ and Support Your Local Blogger

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A good friend (Charles Forsythe) and I have been working on a project called Throngz to help social activists more readily connect with one another online.  Although we had nonprofit advocates in mind when we created it, Throngz can be used by any community of people.

Throngz is a web-based tool that calls people together for discussion from different parts of the Internet in real time.  Once they’re brought together into a single “cyber-salon,” they can discuss topics of mutual interest or simply shoot the cyber-breeze.  You can read more about Throngz by clicking here.

We submitted Throngz to the NetSquared Innovation Award competition, and we very much need your support.

Part of the competition involves a get-out-the-vote effort, so we’re asking White Courtesy Telephone readers and supporters to visit the Netsquared site and vote for Throngz.

Here’s how to do it:

1.  Please take a minute to visit the NetSquared site and register.  You’ll need to enter a valid e-mail address (this is where they’ll send your password).  You can go to the registration page by clicking here.

2.  Go to the e-mail account you gave when you registered and retrieve the password the NetSquared folks e-mailed to you.

3.  Next, go the Netsquared login page.  Enter your username and password to login to the NetSquared site.

4.  Finally (you’re almost finished!), go to your ballot (click here) and enter your choices.

Please, PLEASE for the love of God let one of those choices be THRONGZ: The Online Discussion Space That Comes And Gets You.

Please note that you’ll need to vote for a minimum of five projects for any of your votes to count.  Fellow blogger Sean Stannard-Stockton gives us his favorite picks here.  You can read about all the other projects by clicking here.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my blogger colleague Holden also submitted his GiveWell project to the competition.  Twenty projects will be chosen from around the world, so we both have a shot at the prize.*

This sounds complicated, but it really isn’t.  If I’ve made a hash of explaining this, you can review the voting instructions here.  If you get stuck, please send me an e-mail.

VOTING CLOSES ON MONDAY, APRIL 16, SO PLEASE TAKE A MINUTE TO CAST YOUR VOTE!

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After you’ve voted, please let your cyber-buddies know about Throngz.  You and they will be invited to a no-holds-barred, online party here at WCT.  The Countess Apraxina will distribute signed photographs; Chickpea will model the season’s latest bonnets; and Miss Dixie Moline will entertain us with her throaty rendition of Embraceable You .

As you might have already guessed, the motivation for Throngz came from my own experiences on the Internet.  The Story of Joe Sector has in many ways been my story.  My nonprofit colleagues and I have often just missed one another in cyberspace.  Like Joe, I’ve frequently squandered my time on the web in search of that perfect online discussion in real-time.

I realize there’s much more to building social change movements than simply facilitating discussion on the Internet.  As my colleague Sally mentioned in an earlier post, we bring to the Web all the deficits, all the bad habits of our lives offline.  How can we possibly make a good omelette out of bad eggs?

These themes have been picked up here and here.

Nevertheless I’m hopeful that, over time, all our Web exchanges— penetrating political analyses offered free of charge to all comers, the lessons from our contemporary mad Socrates, the younger voices gleefully shouting down the old—will dissuade us of the view that “humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”

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* Winners will be flown to the NetSquared conference at the end of May where they’ll get a chance to pitch their projects to funders.  The top three projects will also get the lion’s share of a $100K kitty.  If my partner Charles and I are lucky enough to win, we’ll use our prize money to hire a Java programmer.

The Phenomenology of Blogging

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I am present to the blog.  Beneath its textual exterior, I sense the movement of its eidos.  But I don’t grasp it in its absolute essence, in its “flowing thisness,” as Husserl called it.  It’s a state of consciousness that appears to me: the state of a self-identical real ego-subject.

I’m so caught up in my present doing, in the writing of this post, that I fear the clear impression will slip away.

Stephan Bodian, Dharma teacher in the Zen tradition and the author of several books, including Meditation For Dummies, writes:

From the highest spiritual perspective, we can never lose our connection with being. In fact, the separation between being and doing is just another fabrication of the mind. No matter how still we try to become, doing is always happening …

Beyond the vivid intuition that it is there-for-me, what, then, is my blog doing?  It is …

Satisfying my need for self-expression.   Perhaps I demand freedom of speech as compensation for the freedom of thought I seldom exercise.  Dixi et animum levavi (I have spoken and given my soul rest).

Creating a space for the free exchange of ideas.   Let this blog be a lake in which elephants can wade and sheep can swim.  Let it play a role, if it can, in democratizing moral and intellectual authority.

Introducing and propagating memes.   Dawkins’s catch-phrases, beliefs, fashions, ways of making pots—they’re all here at White Courtesy Telephone.  In the days of Noah, some of these might have been called “ideas.”

Transforming a group of loosely associated individuals into a community with shared understandings about the world and how to change it.

Perhaps most of the time my blog is doing none of these things.  Let me remember, however, as it sits there on my screen, staring at me blankly with its reptilian eyes, that there’s a beating heart beneath its tightly stretched skin.

The Problem With The Internet, Part 2: The Internet and Social Change

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With all due respect to my WCT colleague, Albert Ruesga, I don’t believe the Internet is currently the best place to build a social change movement rooted in deliberation and consultation.

Deliberation leading to shared understandings that subsequently inform action; consultation broadening a social change community beyond a few committed elites—I’m convinced the brunt of this work can best happen offline.

I’m not denying that the Internet has provided communities of social activists new tools for collaboration.  It clearly has.

I’m saying there are many characteristics of the Internet and its use that get in the way of transforming a group of loosely associated individuals into a community with shared understandings about the world and how to change it.  The story of Joe Sector, described in an earlier post, begins to name some of these barriers, but there are others.

Consider the state of our critical thinking and reading skills; our general lack of media literacy; our inability or unwillingness to penetrate what some critics have called the Illusion of News.

We carry all of this baggage and more with us on our travels through Cyberspace, though we convince ourselves that we’re fleet of cyber-foot, dancing effortlessly from site to site and blog to blog.  We fill with frenzied points and clicks the time we might otherwise spend banging our collective heads against a shared problem.

The Problem With The Internet, Part 1: The Story of Joe Sector

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Joe Sector, an environmental activist, wants to develop an advocacy strategy for the upcoming presidential election season. He longs to engage other activists in an extended discussion of the candidates and their views; tactics for engaging the media; and other election season issues. Unfortunately, the next conference for environmental activists is months away.

Joe goes online to his favorite blogs, listservs, message boards, and networking sites in search of wisdom, but the results are less than satisfactory. Here are just some of the challenges he faces:

1. Light’s on but nobody’s home   Joe submits a question to a listserv here, a message board there, but can’t depend on getting a timely answer (or any answer at all). Sometimes it takes days to get a response. In any event, Joe wants something that feels more like a real discussion.

2. The wrong people at the right time   Joe has to contend with the usual trolls, flamers, and ninnies who throw discussions off-topic. He visits various chat rooms and networking sites for activists, but, as is often the case, few people are present and contributing, and the best minds and moderators are absent.

3. Drive-by commenting   Joe finds a few warm bodies willing to engage in a discussion of the upcoming election, but they keep straying off-topic. Because nobody really “owns” the discussion, it gets sidetracked easily.

4. A million vases for a thousand flowers   Nancy, a communications wizard, likes to hang out at Omidyar.net, but Mary, a master strategist, would never darken Omidyar’s cyber-door. She much prefers Change.org. And so it goes. Joe has to visit twenty sites to have a prayer of finding the best wisdom on the upcoming election.

What’s a wired, networked, discussion-starved social activist to do?

Coming up: The problem with the Internet, part 2