Image source: Blog post about Second Life up-skirt photography museum.
I’ll give another example, this time from the online world Second Life.
Second Life is a massively-multiplayer online world. People rent land and build structures. Folks hang out with their friends, go to interesting places, and buy and sell goods. Until recently the creators of the world, Linden Labs, subsidised popular destinations by monitoring the number of people who came to and stayed in different places.
The amount of traffic and hanging-out, a measure called “dwell”, is popularity. The creators of the popular places were given Linden dollars, the in-game currency. It was so Linden Labs could ensure people spent time in the world and had a good experience.
But this meant people started making the easiest possible destinations to accumulate dwell and therefore dollars: sex shops, gambling games, and nightclubs. That’s one level of gaming.
Here’s the next level of gaming. People would just ask folks to hang out on their land, doing nothing, in return for a cut of the subsidy. They invented “camping chairs.” You could leave your character sitting in one of the chairs, while you were away from your computer, and every hour or so you’d accumulate some dollars.
What does this mean for our space-ship? Perhaps there will be competition to get close to the central power source, or whatever. More popular destinations will be allowed to sit closer to the space-ships centre. Will some people dupe passers-by into coming into their habitat, to make themselves look more popular and attractive, to get iterated closer to the centre? Won’t that have a reinforcing affect, so that every place of social value in the space-ship is surrounded by a halo of wannabes?
In our cities, concrete and property prices mean that such movements are slowed, and such organisation never really occurs—the speed of fashion is greater than the speed of habitat movement. In space there is no gravity and no weight, no impediment to reorganising the city. There is a lightness of location.
Now, just to explain the image on this slide.
When you get your avatar – your representation of yourself – in Second Life, you have to give it clothes and so on. There was a fashion – perhaps there still is – for what they called “pussy pants,” texture-mapped clothes to look like genitals, male and female. Without these, your avatar’s legs just meet in the middle with nothing special. Second Life can be a pretty adult place.
The other important thing to know about Second Life is that while you’re standing somewhere, in this 3d world, you can move your point-of-view around. If this room was in Second Life, my body could be standing right here, but my point-of-view (my eyes, if you like) could be moving behind this pillar here.
Apologies for the image I’m about to put in your head here, but what this means is I could easily be looking up your skirt. But you know this! You know I could be doing this!
Consider. In a world where you deliberately wear these sexy pants, your pants are world-readable (readable means that they can be seen by others), and you’re wearing a skirt so that you don’t have to remove clothes for the pants to be readable, and you know the point-of-view of people nearby can move anywhere… what expectation of privacy do you have?
In this case, somebody started a museum of the images he’d captured by looking up people’s skirts and seeing their pussy pants. This slide shows one of the least pornographic images.
If you were photographed, do you have a right to be upset? You’ve deliberately put these pants on your avatar, and they’re used only because you’re into behaving sexually in-game. You know they’re on display. Yes, it’s out of order in our physical world, but things are different here. Is it wrong? Only distasteful, or not even that?
The museum was closed down, by the way.
My point is this:
From a simple change to the physics of this online world, new social norms must be negotiated. Awkwardly and furiously negotiated in some cases.
Second Life opens up new fluidies; it takes time to negotiate the time limits.