Re: [-empyre-] Virtual sweatshops, SL:s dark side?

["hugh davies" <huedavies@gmail.com>]

Hi All

I attended xmedia lab in Melbourne over the weekend.

Australia's main telco: Telstra sent a representative to talk up their
SL presence.

He recons that they have received over 1M in press coverage from their
11 islands over the past year. He also showed some figures showing how
Telstra may be the most popular location in SL.

Finally we are all invited to go in and look for ourselves.

Unfortunatly Telstra caps broadband so severly and arbitrarily in
Australia that cluncking around in jittered frames is the experience
that most Australians have of their archipeligo and indeed most of SL.

I worry that this model actually defines much of the SL experience and
im happy to hear that some big corps are leaving the environment. I
feel that, at best, it will be abandoned and forgotten by business and
left to explorers and creators to squat.

I also met a comapny at the lab: vastpark, who are creating an
applicaion that will allow you to create your own 3D environment as
well as to bridge 3d worlds - ideally so you can teleport from SL to
WOW or maybe HOME.

hugh
Av - Analogue Aldrich







On 8/14/07, Christian McCrea <christian@wolvesevolve.com> wrote:
> Hi Everybody,
>
> If anybody is interested to see how the major media corporations are
> reacting to SL,
> its with the usual grotesque abandon. Sony are preparing to launch their "Home"
> service, which is clearly responding by Second Life. It is only for
> Playstation 3, their
> new plaything for the rich and fabulous (a thousand dollars of
> closed-off corporate silliness, although some progress has been made
> with hacking.)
>
> Home is a neutured, stable, clean version of Second Life, where all
> 'user-driven' means is different labels of the Sony BMG music
> catalogue for you to be advertised by. It looks like this:
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu3TEdYL5jA
>
> ... and it will probably not dent the world of Second Life too much.
> It may in fact have the unintended effect of moving the corporate
> superstructures onto these more closed off spaces, where many more
> people will be concentrated than Second Life in its heyday, are more
> easily marketable, and will define the time there around entertainment
> and feedback mechanics. That video shows users customising their
> avatar, staring up a movie on a wall (Sony Pictures, of course!) and
> of course having fun with simple banter. We can imagine the sorts of
> homogeneity involved here; only male or female human avatars, no
> sexuality, no swearing, no race hate, political activity aside from
> the safe kind.
>
> In short, Second Life will look like the revolution by comparison. And
> considering how many of you feel about it... I suspect we'll be
> drinking into the future.
>
> I wanted to quote this article:
>
> "Finally, the current mania is largely push-driven. Many of the
> articles concern "The first person/group/organization in Second Life
> to do X", where X is something like have a meeting or open a store —
> it's the kind of stuff you could read off a press release. Unlike
> Warcraft, where the story is user adoption, here most of the stories
> are about provider adoption, as with the Reuters office or the IBM
> meeting or the resident creative agencies. These are things that can
> be created unilaterally and top-down, catnip to the press, who are
> generally in the business of covering the world's deciders."
>
> - http://many.corante.com/archives/2006/12/12/second_life_what_are_the_real_numbers.php
>
> I agree with this wholeheartedly. People are flocking to Second Life
> (or were) because of a massive - unbelivably massive - push by media
> in which it represented futurity itself. Over the first half of this
> year, The Age in Melbourne could not have had a single week without at
> least one Second Life story; I would take that bet gladly. It makes it
> an incredibly good tabula rasa for art activity and griefing (the
> danger and vitriol is there, its just pornographic rather than
> political) - and from my limited perspective I think Second Life's
> best art moments have been about hype and consensus formation, even
> more so than the identity politics works which have surfed between
> furry cultures and abstract changelings. The works of public nuisance
> and interruption are as diabolically placed as the spit in the face of
> the priest with the camera nearby. The institutions of art, the media
> machines, the academic machine - all of which which requires fresh
> meat and grist concerning futurity - are all behind the camera trying
> to work out if what they are looking at is brillant art or total
> bullshit. Look at us arguing over it, for one. Yet the spit has hit
> the face already.
>
> My first thought with Second Life is that it sounds like Beuys's honey
> machine. Beautiful, important... just don't ask him what it means.....
>
> love to everybody, second or first,
> -Christian
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>