Interview with Prokofy Neva, Part Two

By Bixyl Shuftan

This is the second part of an interview with Prokofy Neva, a longtime resident in Second Life whom is best known for being a sometimes controversial commentator on his "Second Thoughts" blog and various Second Life related forums. In the first part of the interview, he discussed his earlier days on the Grid and his opinions on how conflict and debate shaped it's evolution over time. In the second part, he had a few comments about more recent issues in Second Life, such as content creator rights, the temporary ban of third party currency exchange services, and the announcement of a new grid in development. He also talked some about his idea of "virtuality," and why Second Life truly hasn't succeeded in appealing to the masses with it's version of it.

To read the first part of the interview: Click Here.

To one of Prokofy's earlier comments about Linden Lab, I asked, "You thought they were trying to wreck businesses rather than a case of 'It seemed like a good idea?' "

Prokofy's answer was, "With Ebbe Linden's announcement of a new world, we are going to be dealing with a larger whack than we've ever been given. This is like telehubs, island discounts, homesteads, VAT -- all those scandals -- copybot -- all rolled into one. The Lindens have only one goal: how to make money from land long enough to get rid of land as a business model so that they can move to content fees and currency fees instead. It's also about power-sharing in my view, as I said about the thread on SL Universe (forums)."

"Yes," I responded, "many, including my old boss, wondered just what the Lindens are up to."

Prokofy continued, "Instead of saying to their customers with rental communities, 'Advertise in our welcome areas, help us with our new customers,' or saying to clubs and live music venues 'Advertise in our welcome areas and our splash screen, help us with our customers,' they do completely different things to serve their interests which are short-sighted for the world itself. They create special builder and scripter dev groups and throw them out-world business, they put in Linden Homes and give special contracts to certain designers to build for them, so their business is helped even as ours is screwed, because they really don't believe in the user community outside their own very special and trusted friends who are coders/designers. They can't share power with a class alien to them in values. There isn't a parliament or a constitutional court to solve these things through law. There is only warfare."

"So they put in the Linden homes to try to drive people to buy premium accounts which languished, and to guide newbies toward content purchases. In the end, they couldn't completely ruin the low cost newbies rentals business, or I wouldn't be here or others wouldn't be here."

I brought up, "Two controversies in the past year were the third party linden exchanges, and the Terms of Service change in reguards to content creators. Anything to say about those?" (Note, SL Newser is partialy sponsored by the Podex Exchange)

Prokofy answered, "Well to take it backwards, the content creator stuff is in a way standard Silicon Valley legal boilerplate in Instagram or anywhere, and done deliberately so that the platform can retain the ability to first display your content as a technical matter but then also reserve the right to grab it for advertising or ultimately any reason or no reason. And it's about failure to share power even with their own FIC. Qarl nailed it on the forums although he sounds like a whiner."

"But here's how they will solve it, and I don't think it will be pretty. They will create a privileged class that has license to create, but must supply SS number and ID, or passport number let's say. They have a huge problem on their hands of liability themselves. The world is filled with content swiped from the Internet, textures and pictures and ideas." He drew my attention to the floor, "say, look at this rug here I make and sell! It comes from Malevich's painting for example, which is public domain. But not every thing is. So the Lindens already got some lawsuits from real-life furniture makers. They can't share power and give rights to people who may themselves have violated other rights."

"Now to the third party exchanges. My own view is that this was an evil and vile move, and it significantly depressed my interest, involvement, and purchases of content and land in SL. Why? because I couldn't cash out instantly. In the past, I could do business and instantly pay a bill that came up in real-life, instantly buy groceries for my family if my real-life contractors were slow in payments. Now, I have to set it up to wait 5-7 or more business days. So I really mourn that loss. It was also a huge boon to my customers. I don't think any fraud vulnerability justified it because they had given out essentially licenses or risk APIs to people. I don't know what your take on it is."

I mentioned two opinions I kept hearing, "Some thought it was Linden Lab's legal department overracting to the Treasury Department's sudden interest in virtual currency. Others thought it was a simple power grab."

Prokofy answered, "I think the latter quite frankly, because the reality is that the Treasury Dept never defined the currency inworld as taxable. It's a game point, a limited license to use inworld game currency, if you will, like a Mycokerewards.com bottle cap, not true currency. So they can't tax my bucket of Mycokerewards.com bottle caps I turned into a coupon for Olive Restaurant yet. If I turned that into $5 real money, they could tax it if it built up. And everything cashed out of SL they should tax. I personally and other business people have put SL revenue as revenue in my tax return. It's not much after costs but it's something. So maybe they were gun-shy, but I think they just hated the idea that people were getting a revenue stream they didn't have. Any money cashed out through those other services paid THOSE people currency fees, not Lindens.  Lindens need a non-land revenue stream model. Their hope was currency exchange fees, subscriptions, and content charges would carry it. But it's like all media that can't live by subscriptions or classified ads alone. All media needs advertising, and buying sims is the equivalent of big advertising revenue for any media property."

I brought up, "After their initial decision, there was a particuarly large outcry from overseas residents. I heard of one entire German community talking about up and leaving."

"Well that's just it," Prokofy told me, "I used to use that European company myself, can't recall its name. It had the option to buy Euros and even bitcoins. I thought it would be a place I could put Euros that I earn in Europe from my RL business which lose so much on transfers here. But it was not to be as they had to close, or rather, I think they sell Lindens but they can't cash them out now or something. No one can provide the cash-out service, correct? That's just it, it hugely retards business progress."

"The Lindens are not here to help your business. They are not here to promote the inworld economy. They are here to run their own business. Their interests and ours do not harmonize. They clash. That is the harsh reality that no one has solved, and won't solve as long as you have those with either a techocommunist view about mass culture or mass free economies in charge, or technolibertarians that only care about their own business and not how their customers make a living."

"Google with its Google buses taking over cities, driving up rents, and not caring how the non-Google people will live. I understand Ebbe is now saying something about making the transition to the new world smooth with regard to land. But sorry, that's not specific. I call for 1:1 transfers of sims or compensation of X pennies on the dollar, to be negotiated. But we don't even know if there will *BE* sims in this new world, sims as we know them."

"so -- right click, SELL LAND for Prokofy, while that lack of clarity and that self-interest on the part of (the) Lindens prevails. And remember, I'm just a tiny self-aware unit in this economy who thinks and blogs, there are hundreds more who don't blog and maybe even don't think about this issue, but they have thousands of dollars at stake not tens or hundreds, and they will act, and that action will influence the outcome."

I followed his comment about the Linden Lab CEO, "Yes, at the third party viewer developer meeting the other day, Ebbe Linden mentioned the development of a next generation virtual world."

"Yes, and it was immediately bruited about as good news that it was closed source," Prokovy commented, "but bad news because no backwards compatibility. None of the things in this room could come with me. Pr let's say I could get their builders to re-rez them as mesh. But what about my outfit? It's made by Osprey Therein, who died in real life. Now there's no way to port it," he frowned, "Sure, I could possibly copybot it or something. But it's not the same."

I sadly nodded, having attended and written about Osprey's funeral.

"Or my Moth King staff Osprey made. Let me show you." Prokovy got it from his inventory, "See the staff?"

"Yes," I answered, "When did she make those clothes?"

"These are very old school clothes," Prokofy told me, "made on that original avatar outfit maker, which is why I like them. Look at what she did with this. Even fur-lined boots, Russian style, all on that old thing. I tend to like the old things better and I only have recently started putting in prim or mesh hair. I think this is prim hair."

"It does look unique," I told him about the outfit.

Prokofy went on, "I don't like mesh. Occasionally I'll find a good house made out of mesh my customers have. I haven't bought them because I can't *see* them half the time-- they don't rez right, even with my computer and new FIOS blazing Internet."

"That's something I've heard from many content creators," I spoke of his dislike of mesh, "and more than one who aren't buying it."

"Well again, to speak of classes," Prokovy commented, "and mind you, I'm certainly not a Marxist and not a European, I'm American and for a more democratic and classless society and upward mobility. But there are classes in SL, and there are those who can see mesh and those who can't. There are entire groups of people living still only with prims not even sculpties, like aboriginals. It's hard to make the world develop uniformly, the 'future is here, only unevenly distributed.' This new world of Ebbe's is definitely one of those futures arriving unevenly distributed. We don't know if we will have graphic cards to view it. We don't know if we will have to buy Oculus Rift headsets to view it, etc."

"So basically, 'It's being developed, that's all we know?' " I asked.

"Well read the latest," Prokofy suggested, "lots of happy speak shy of details. But here's the thing, the model for the economy, which tends to then dictate governance and new user experience is 'the customer is the creator.' The creator class (is) what is top and most important, NOT the consumer class or amateur creator. So what that means, tools for high-end creativity are featured. Which means I can't rez a prim, or edit a prim. Those things are important to rental agents who adjust everything constantly, for customers, ordinary people."

"So basically, it means we are mere spectators at the Renaissance Faire. We're to buy some of the guilds' expensive items and  put them in our homes which are under limited control. That is incredibly dull for me. I could watch TV if that were my purpose. I don't want to watch, I want to interact, as an amateur."

"So what I see then is that once again, they can't conceive of how to make a world mass-user friendly, except by their very old formula, which is 'have a privileged class of people or the game devs themselves make content, bring in the rubes.'"

"And when I talk about compensating those of us who were not in that class and still made the world what it is. Lordfly says 'Game designers don't give you free stuff in the next sequel.' To which I can say, this isn't a game, it's a platform. I can also point out what is coming then for those fancy creators, which they themselves don't seem to realize, which is the other Silicon Valley model that goes with the prosumer model: HUGE FEES, like Amazon, where I sell my e-book."

"Sure, I sell my ebook for $2.99 a pop and buy my family groceries. It actually sells everyday, it's about Snowden. But Amazon takes out 30%-70% of every sale, huge cuts."

"Oh, What's the title?" I asked.

" 'Privacy for Me and Not for Thee' -  http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Not-Thee-Invincible-Transparency-ebook/dp/B00I2CJKI6 . So sure, be a seller on Amazon or be a merchant on Third Life -- but pay huge fees then, guys"

"Snowden's certainly sparked no shortage of conversation," I commented.

"Yes, well I know a lot about the Snowden story as Russia is my field of expertise," Prokofy told me. "So I have unique materials there translated from the Russian press. But more importantly, I write about hacker culture, which I learned about in SL. And I have two chapters just on SL in that book. So it might be interesting to you."

"I'm sure it would," I thought out loud.

"What I hope is that there will be an outcry and a debate about how the new world is made," Prokvy expressed, "so that it is not all decided by LL itself. But I see little opportunity for that frankly. If it were Philip doing it, there would be. But it's not. I have a whole theory about virtual worlds in general I've written about."

My next question, "I was going to ask if you felt today's Linden Lab was less interested in
the residents' opinions than the early one."

"Oh no question," Prokofy answered, "Philip was integrated into the world, he did Town Halls, walkabouts, he answered mail. M Linden was more removed, he started by making his name impossible to pull up in search. Then the one before Ebbe, he was completely incommunicado. He didn't have a tweet or a blog hardly the entire time. I honestly don't know what he did all day with this world. He developed LL's OTHER products to be sure, so they could say now they are a game company with multiple products. I don't think those products do terribly well, but then, I don't have a tablet. Like most people, a computer and a phone in the family for each member already strains the budget. (A) tablet -- just too expensive."

"Anyway, Ebbe makes a show of communicating with the swells on Sluniverse.com. Call me when he holds an inworld town meeting with the top land barons. Of course, I may be in the dark, they may have already had secret meetings. Who the hell knows? But let him have meetings with furry or Gor or elves or fairies or whatever communities. All of these people sink money into SL, they pay his bills, what do they think? They aren't on sluniverse.com as creators necessarily, although some of the key power brokers are. In any event, I have tried to write to Ebbe multiple times, no answer, no bear, no nothing. And I am busy in real-life so I can't chase him as I used to other Lindens."

"But here's my concept of virtuality in a nutshell: Virtual worlds as a destination is an obsolete concept and will fail as a new project. The direction of the future is virtualization of reality itself, not destination worlds. Destination worlds will remain niches of course for half a million or 500 million. But not billions like Facebook or Twitter. People don't avatarize and immerse well and the learning curve and technology is too hard. We don't realize that, we're acclimated. Most people can't acclimate. They can't live in the mountains with less oxygen."

"In my real-life jobs, I use Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Google Maps, and other various chat clients. And I live in a virtual world that is the sum total of those tools, it's the virtual world called 'The War in Ukraine.' With the tools, in that virtualized space, I can ... watch the tragedy of the Odessa fire live. I can interview people with Skye standing at a demonstration in Kharkiv. I can chat with my colleagues and translate the news. I can watch Twitter and see a citizen journalist has uploaded a picture of a Russian tank not in Russia, but Ukraine, where it should not be, and find experts who can confirm, yes, that's a Russian tank. I can geolocate that tank using Google Street View even for little towns in Ukraine."

"This *is* the virtual world, not a destination called "Second Life" with a sim called 'Ukraine.' So eventually 3D will enter that space by Facebook or by somebody, Google or Yahoo or whoever, so that we can manage those tools, those images, those chats, those experiences. And not as a destination but as a kind of rolling layer over things. Does that make sense?"

I nodded, "It does."

Prokofy went on, "Somebody in Ukraine can't log on to SL because either Internet is spotty or graphics poor on their laptop, but they can use their cell phone and call on Skype. They can set up a stream, so eventually less heavy virtualization where you can avatarize or project yourself into the interstices of these outworld tools will create worlds of sorts. That's how I see it."


"Also I've written about how the Internet of Things will play out as a virtualized world you control with a console. This is the analogy I think of from my father's business. He was a ceramic engineer. He used to explain that bricks are very heavy, very old fashioned, too expensive to move, to build, to maintain. So going into the brick business was a very heavy, expensive old fashioned thing to do. But if you worked on carrier beads in Xerox machines, they weren't heavy. And people were motivated to buy and move the Xerox machines themselves. So I realize that those of us who made bricks are obsolete in a world that wants carrier beads which have ceramic components for Xerox toner. You may not have realized that what happens with a Xerox copy, ceramic pieces of toner are fused to paper, i.e. toner is a kind of ceramics, if you will."

"But even Xeroxes are going out of style in a world of mobile phones with pictures. On the other hand, the metaphor works both ways. People who make destination worlds are in a sense obsolete too, because people need much more portability. And frankly I don't mean having open source and free content, which is how everyone understands this issue. I think permissions systems can and should be built into every world and every virtuality -- it could have been built into Instagram but wasn't for ideological reasons."

"What I mean by portability is usability in everyday life across various platforms and settings. Google Street view is easy to port, Twitter is easy to port, Skype too. Second Life isn't, even if on a phone. It's about culture and about settings and expectations and not just technology. It's about user control. People join things on mass that have two features, 1) devs provide enough of the bare bones so you don't have to fight the platform to use it, 2) but you can easily generate your user content.  Twitter really hits that sweet spot and so does Facebook. SL doesn't."

"Anyway," Prokofy relaxed a bit, "I've bored you with my theories quite a bit, I should get back to work."

"Well, you mentioned where the outfit came from," I brought up, "But one other question about what you're wearing," I directed my attention to an ornimentation he had with a number of country's flags in small cicular disks, "What kind of necklace is that?"

"Oh this is my Peace on Earth hunt necklace found a few years ago," Prokofy informed, "I like it because it has all the countries on it, their flags. It's part of my International Bazaar, which is a project I have where you can get notecards to go to all real-life foreign country sims. It's what I had set up in the infohub for years and years, which sadly I just had to remove because of ridiculous buggy Land Impact issues. But I will get it back. I still maintain the main hall for it with the notecards, so you can go to Russia, China, France, etc. My hope was to encourage exploration. I used to have a discussion group called Council on Virtual Relations to discuss foreign affairs and those sims. But like all things in SL it got griefed, had problems, etc so I had to suspend it."

"Oh, sorry," I told him.

"Well as I noted to you," he went on, "I used to spend a lot more hours on SL. I would average say 4 hours a day. I would make things, explore, think up ways to improve my business, etc. I made a tutorial for new businesses. I would help people in various ways. But since various real-life challenges occured, I had to suspend this and limit myself now to pure customer service, and perhaps occasionally some card updating. I can't say when I will be back to normal as I have a rare illness now and the treatment is worse than the disease. And all my energy has to go into my real-life work to make a living. But I'm sure it will get better in a few months. I certainly understand better now what Osprey went through, what a brave brave and creative soul."

"Sounds like you were both good friends," I expressed.

"No," Prokofy corrected, "I wouldn't say we were such close friends or anything like that. It was more like this, she was a very kind person and even though she was among the oldbies who hated me, she was very kind to me personally. And we got together around the Moth Temple years ago. I was the one who thought up the idea of the Moth Swarms. She then immediately picked it up and made the moth feelers, moth wings, and this kind outfit. Yes I thought it up actually, although people think she did, but we were creative partners, I had the idea, she made it work. So she was a creative partner. We did those moth swarms and other moth things, including the moth lanterns that she made to replace the Linden ones that mysteriously disappeared."

"Then the other area where we collaborated was the Resident Developed Infohubs. I ran two of them and she ran one of them. We made a group of like 10-12 of us doing that, tried to make some uniform content for them like newbie help, and tried to lobby Lindens on their issues. So we did that for several years. Hers was Ambat. I hope they didn't take it down, it's probably still there."

"What I like about SL is that you don't have to be friends with someone, they don't have to be your best buddy, you don't have to share real-life news, etc. But you can meet as minds and souls and make something and share a deep connection and then move on. They could be your enemies, politically or lifestyle wise, but they are shared collaborators in the business of making the world. So I have furry or BDSM tenants, or neighbours who may be antithetical to my world views, let's say. But in SL we could collaborate on some shared interest like 'let's keep the view nice,' 'let's make nice builds,' 'let's help newbies,'  'let's have live music.' And those things can be done without having to even know that person votes Republican or Democrat or whatever, which real life does not enable."

"I don't mean to idealize that shared creative existence as it is frail and can rip and be in tatters soon enough. But it's an interesting basis for community. And that's why I liked the foreign sims idea, or 'international sims' as foreign implies they are foreign to us, but they aren't foreign to themselves. So when the London terrorist attack happened, I could TP and say 'I'm sorry,' Or the Poles lost an entire planeload of leaders -- I could say 'I'm sorry,' or the Egyptians were killed in demonstrations, I could say 'I'm sorry' with a translator. Or just show up to light a candle or buy something or whatever. The virtual world enables things like that which are interesting, not part of real life, but to make them work better."

"Lindens have to establish better governance tools. The thing they care about the least is managing the world as a world society. They do not want to be in the governance business. They want a customer service state and that's it. And you can't blame them. World governance is endless as a proposition, especially with open source cult ideals."

Prokofy chuckled, "Anyway I've babbled on quite a bit. Hope that was interesting."

"It was," I told him, "Thank you for your time."

"Sure," Prokofy bade farewell, "nice to talk to you."

I tipped my hat, and we went our separate ways.

To check up on the latest from Prokovy, he continues to post in his blog "Second Thoughts" (http://3dblogger.typepad.com/second_thoughts/) under the avatar's real-life identity Catherine Fitzpatrick, occasionally a long commentary, sometimes just a picture. He also has a Twitter account: https://twitter.com/Prokofy .

Bixyl Shuftan

Interview with Prokofy Neva, Part One

By Bixyl Shuftan

While most in Second Life are known for what they do, Prokofy Neva is known more by what he says. Over the years, he's made a number of opinions on a number of issues, getting a reputation for never backing down from an argument. Besides maintaining some sims out to renters, Prokofy posts occasionally on his blog "Second Thoughts" under his real life identity Catherinne Fitzpatrick. Having met Prokofy recently, we agreed to an interview, and later on I traveled to his place at Waterfall Canyon in the Refugio sim (which has a security system - griefers don't bother trying to enter), and he welcomed me inside.

"We are at the site of what was once my First Land 512," Prokofy began, "in 2004. So it's 10 years old."

"That is pretty early," I commented.

"I came to it soon after it was born," Prokofy continued, "and Anshe Chung had already bought all the surrounding area for a telehub mall on the next sim. Well I wasn't the first here, it was taken over by some oldbies at first. There used to be a big TV and Radio store here."

Prokovy invited me to his den, "Have a seat."

"Of course," I answered, and did so as he took another.

I then asked him the first question, "So, when did you first hear about Second Life?"

"I first heard about SL from Barnesworth Anubis," Prokofy answered, "We were in the same group in The Sims Online where he had the name, Cornelius Vanderbilt and I had the name Dyerbrook. We had a group of parcels called 'Sim Arts' or something like that, and he was one of the first explorers to go from TSO to SL to see if it would be better, people were unhappy with TSO for a number of reasons. Eventually a number of us migrated from TSO to SL. This was back in 2004 for me. I actually made my first account in SL in May 2004, but then I didn't like it and left. Then (I) came back in September 2014 and made Prokofy Neva."

"How did your first days here go?" I asked him.

Prokofy answered, "The first time I made the account Dyerbrook was difficult because I didn't have the graphics card to see Second Life. I went to a hockey game and struggled through lag and blur to see it. I gave up that time, and came back later when I had a new computer and graphics card. I happened to land on the very day that Philip Linden was holding a Town Hall. I went to an oldbie's place to hear it on a relay radio, the old-fashioned way they held those town halls. They had them on one sim but then handed out relay radios to get it broadcast to other venues."

"So I struggled first to sit down on a bench -- no mean feat for a newbie -- it didn't work like TSO. Then I heard Philip utter the magical words ...  I can find the exact quote for you somewhere ...  but it was basically that he had a vision then of real estate agents now appearing in the world, and an avatar with a name like 'Buzz' would appear with a helicopter, and show newbies new land, and have a business, and that someone would build a golf course."

"Now, mind you, this was just a vision at first.  It took me about 3 months to figure out how land worked, how to buy it and sell it, how to work it. I am a slow learner on technical things like SL and it took awhile. I remember the very first newbie mistake I made. I flew around vainly clicking on land that seemed empty, trying to buy it. Why didn't it work like TSO? In TSO, you could look at a map, and if you saw a blank spot on the map, you could zoom in and buy it easily if it were an empty square. So I flew around vainly clicking on what seemed like empty woodland (laughs out loud)."

"Finally someone explained the 'First Land' thing to me. But then I immediately ran into the harshness of Second Life. An oldbie had already captured the First Land on this sim under his various alts. His plan was to put it all under his old account. This was an oldbie and a group of alts that bedeviled me for years and  years. He kept trying to get me to sell him my little rocky plot. It was a mountainous waterfront, more valuable than most even being rocky. But I stubbornly clung to my little turf. I put out a modified house from Barnesworth on it and struggled to try to build or edit things."

"So, he wouldn't take no for an answer?" I asked

"He kept trying to harass me off the plot," Prokofy answered, "It was amazing. Eventually, I had a friend who bought another plot and then two parcels went up on the auction. I bid on them, using the money I had made from selling my TSO avatar, rares and simoleons on eBay. So my very first purchase in SL was $250 US on the auction, and it seemed very scary to me, like throwing money down a rat hole. Essentially, that *is* the case with land in SL as I can explain more."

"But in any event, I was so scared at having that huge parcel for that huge (seemingly) expense, that I immediately calved off half of it to sell.  I had no idea how to price it properly. I had no idea about waterfront, snow prices being through the roof then. I was still in the TSO mode. I remember very distinctly trying to edit the land, trying to make a group with a friend and alts, struggling, struggling. Finally I got the thing cut in half, put it to $6 and Anshe bought it within minutes. Everyone said I was so stupid!"

"Anyway, then I made the other classic newbie mistake -- I overtiered by mistake, sticking myself with a higher bill. Linden Lab was ruthless on that, they would never forgive. In my entire 10 years hear I maybe got them once to forgive on an over-tier mistake. That's when you actually up your bill for the entire month by one rash click on a 512 that is over your tier mark -- or even 16 m,  doesn't matter. So now I had to buy other land there for sale to make it all worth it."

"For those who don't own land," I asked, "could you please explain over-tier?"

Prokofy answered, "Well, let's say you are at the $40 tier level. If you go and click on land -- even a small square -- and buy it, it will immediately simply put you into the next tier bracket. So you go from $25 to $40 or $40 to the higher levels in a flash and are stuck. Nowadays, they have a menu warning (for) you, 'Are you really sure you want to do that?' It says 'This will increase your tier level to X.' But in the old days we didn't have that, so oops."

"Anyway, we decided to try to recreate what we had done in TSO, which was also very naive. But you can only learn from your newbie mistakes. We made a club with trance music, and we also created an architecture club and contests. We decided to reward good SL architecture, the way we had in TSO. The problem is, the meter is ticking on your tier bill in SL, you can't just fool around aimlessly. Tier is a harsh task mistress. How to make revenue then? You can't live on tips. I started making some content to sell, but it didn't sell very well, because I sucked at making things (laughs out loud). My first thing I sold was the leopard-skin men's briefs from TSO (laughs out loud), not a barn-stormer I'm afraid."

I responded with a few chuckles.

Prokofy went on, "Anyway we tried to have these contests and bring in traffic, and in those days the Lindens had these awards they would give out. First you had the dwell payments,
remember those?"

"I don't believe I do," I told him, "sorry."

Prokofy explained, "If you could attract people to your land, you would get Linden dollars into your account. Well, they used to have a loss leader to try to get the community to entertain each other and be creative with events. So they had a system that rewarded you for traffic, and another system for events awards. So let's say I put on an architectural contest, I could get a $500 Linden award. They were handed out like candy. You could have a wet t-shirt contest at the beach and get the $500 creative award."

I chuckled again at the thought.

Prokofy went on, "The dwell was something that could be real money if you had enough traffic. There was a formula. So let's say I could put 5000 traffic on to my club, it would translate as cash. That cash would pay out every Wednesday, just like group fees now debit. It used to be group fees debited AND credited. However, again, this wasn't enough to pay the bills."

"So then I started trying to flip land, and of course, that was disastrous because I had no idea what I was doing and got stuck with 'end of the world' land that I thought was waterfront. In the old days, you could see the sims as they were being rolled  out. You could see a sim being born, often in the middle of the night. The sim would rise up out of the mist slowly and then these little green triangles would fill it. Those were tree buds the Lindens planted. The trees would appear, and it would seem as if the edge of that thing was 'waterfront.' They'd set it to sale, and an idiot like me would buy it. I remember Dyerbrook's first purchase of his newbie land was a fake waterfront like that. Then oops, a week later, the Lindens would lay ANOTHER sim down next to it. Then it became swamp or woodland with no waterfront. So you get the idea, lots of false starts and learning by idiotic mistakes."

"I remember once going on the forums and asking if an oldbie would be willing to be paid to teach me Sl for an hour. And I was scoffed at. This is when I began to see the class warfare in SL -- the oldbies, who were mainly coders and graphics designers, and this other class of people called 'land barons' whom Philip had encouraged to come in in order to have a revenue stream to sustain the development of SL. There were hardly any island purchases in those days. We were terribly scared of islands because they performed badly and had the 'void' problem."

"Void Problem?" I asked.

Prokofy explained, "Also an old SL problem where you literally could not fly to a location over the void. This was a terrible problem, yes. I once bought land on the auction and couldn't fly to my own land. Remember, (there was) no pinpoint teleporting from the map then. These were the very old days, telehub landings, then fly 1000 meters plus, very rocky stuff, sim seam crossings, and voids where you'd crawl around the edge trying to get to the next sim. Eventually, the Lindens filled those in better."

"Anyway, I went from making the club, which I have to say didn't do very well, and got removed and turned into condos, to making a mall, also a trial-and-error process. The Lindens eventually ended their event awards and the dwell system, and it's just as well as it got gamed. After they pulled that, however, they set the stage for the camping stuff -- remember camping?"

"I do, I knew some who did it a little while reading email," I answered, "How did the condos do?"

"The condos were going to be great at first," Prokofy Neva answered, "I had a beautiful building, art deco, and some other beautiful FLW houses. Not many people had tried apartment buildings. It was a bit counterintuitive because you're all on the parcel and you can't have dedicated media. But I thought there was a market for people who just needed a little space to change their clothes, sit with their friends, put out a few things. Not much privacy, but just a little area for newbies in particular."

"So at first I filled the condo and the parcels easily, life was grand. However, I still had that old oldbie enemy harassing me and shooting me on occasion for the crime of not turning over my first land to him (laughs out loud)."

"Then suddenly, disaster struck:  The Barbie Club. A club of hookers and strippers, in my beautiful snow mountain paradies appeared on a 4096 that I had sold to Anshe. At first, I thought, no problem, the working girls can rent my apartments and condos. Boy was I naive."

"The problem is that the Barbie Club sucked up the available avatar spots on the sim, 45 it was in those days, and still is. So if I had tenants, they literally couldn't fly home. They were blocked from their own houses by the Barbie trade. Not good. So everything emptied out. Then I tried to make lemons out of lemonade and rented mall space to Barbie and tried to get the Barbie people to rent. However, they then demanded full group perms to *re-rent* my cheap land. Plus as a club, it was endlessly griefed. Clubs always attrack shooting, grieging, low-lifes."

"That was the end of my club rental efforts -- I couldn't waste my time policing griefers and having Barbie girls sell clothes at huge mark-ups and earn gadzillions more than they paid me in rent, while the rest of my customers couldn't get home. The mall rental prices then were much higher than what I charged -- Anshe charged a fortune. I was trying to get into business by offering rentals cheaper than Anshe. The irony is, that Anshe even rented from me, to then re-rent to high-end customers she had. Trying to break the Anshe cartel was nearly impossible, until a group of land sellers made a stock market and collectively bought and sold land to try to diversify the market."

"Then there was the telehub story, remember?"

"I remember some about those," I answered.

Prokofy told me, "Well, zoom over to the next sim and see the old telehub area, now an infohub with a mall next to it. This was once heavily contested territory. Anshe bought up the immediate telehub area, and another oldbie bought up the island on Ross you can see out the window. They were the early way to teleport, but from one hub to another. That oldbie tried to sell content and have events. So as hubs, they had commerce naturally attach to them. That was in fact the urban planning Philip originally envisioned. It would be like subway stops in NYC with stores around them."

"And it was a great idea but here's what happened, again, class warfare: the oldbies who originally populated SL, the coders and designers, they didn't want to be around telehubs which they viewed as lagfests and griefer venues and blinger hangouts. So they had their boutiques far away in prettier, more expensive sims, and they arranged their communities around them, and bypassed telehubs, which they protested against. The rest of us embraced telehub malls because it was more democratic."

"To get into the circles of oldbie merchants, you had to practically marry into one of the old founder families. To get a spot to display your wares in another's store -- endless suck-ups and cultivation. But telehub malls brought more Western-style commerce where anyone with the money to pay could enter at will and rent. You didn't have to be friends with Anshe or be approved by Anshe. You had to right-click and pay and get the group. So these areas thrived with newer people, and also some oldbies, but not the Brahmin of SL, the privileged early adapters I called the FIC, the Feted Inner Core. So that's where people sold the music systems, clothing, shoes, hair, etc. and that's where I opened up rental offices."

"So I opened up offices on Anshe's telehub malls offering people to rent in my condos or parcels. I started to have a little bit more area then, I had the area around Ross, Refugio, and then I bought the sim of Ravenglass, my first sim on the auction. Cost me exactly $1501, I beat out an oldbie."

"Anyway, the Linden coders hated telehubs. They wanted to have p2p like they themselves had in god-mode. And the oldbies hated that now they had competition to their boutiques in the boonies. This is my social and economic analysis of Second Life that many don't like to hear, but it is really the truth. I once went to Philip and asked me to tell him the statistics for traffic and sales per sim to prove that telehubs did way better than oldbies boutiques. And he wouldn't give me exact figures but he conceded they did very well. And quite frankly, that's why the Lindens put them on the auction at a much higher opening bid, and sold them for FORTUNES, Mainly to Anshe, Blue, and some of those early land barons who made a killing."

"So then the issue came as I've been writing about lately of the telehub cancellation. Word was leaked of a screenshot of a map showing the ability to travel to pinpoints. Before, this was done only by a script, i.e. people sold a script you could load with landmarks that would "fly" you to locations, like a plane or bus. So when that map leaked, some people instantly understood its importance. Anshe immediately switched from *rentals* to *sales* of telehub land at huge prices. She saw the handwriting on the wall. Not everybody did, and kept buying it, obliviously. In fact, Anshe sold me some of her land at the discount price (for then) of only $6/meter. Here I was, newbie-happy, thinking, at last, telehub land for a mall, whee."

"OK, so here's what happened. By that time, land barons were organizing into a political group, if you will. There was a period in SL when people organized into factions or political movements with interests, because there were things at stake like Mainland policy, new group tool policies, and so on."

"Political movements?" I commented, "Interesting."

"Huge struggles were had on the forums," Prokofy described, "Some of these groups were huge, because Anshe would essentially bus in her tenants. I had a group, smaller, with associates and tenants. Then people li"ke Lordfly and oldbies who were coders and designers made their own groups. There was constant warfare on the forums -- this was the period I was banned from the forums 'permanently' i.e. for 2 years until the Linden who banned me left SL and then it was instantly undone."

"Basically what it came down to was this, the same struggle we see today as the news from Ebbe Linden unfolds. Will you have 'creators as customers' or 'customers as creators?' Will the platform provider focus on a core group of privileged customers or 'pro-sumers' as they are sometimes known, the super users who are coders, designers, service providers, and have them drive growth and the economy, or will they have more democratic policies, as I would call them, making easier entry to the market for unskilled laborers or amateurs?"

"In one sense all  of SL is a pretty much an amateur created market -- I mean, most really skilled high-end graphics artists in 3d will not be opening in Sl, they'd work for the gaming or TV industries. But still, (they are) skilled compared to me or you, skilled in Photoshop, Blender, etc. When Philip opened up the land market, and when he allowed the Lindens to be cashed out to Gaming Open Market and other exchanges, he created a more Western style open economy, free enterprise, not the old guild-style economy that you could say was Eastern, i.e. privileged classes of people allowed by the state to be merchants or Medieval even, guild style economies. Some people said SL had a feudal economy if you will."

"Anyway the land barons who were provided the service of land sales or rentals communities banded together. They demanded a meeting with Phiip. Somewhere I have a copy of our agenda in my never-loading inventory, but it involved issues like:

"No more invisible Linden visits -- all visits to sims must be 'in uniform' -- Lindens used invisible mode to spy."

"No more Linden endorsements of only some oldbie businesses and not others by going to concerts to DJ, or appearing in billboard ads (Lindens used to do that, yes, hard to believe, but true)."

"A Linden code of conduct that would be publicized."

"This was because of a phenomenon that happened. At that time 1/3 of the Linden staff was drawn from the oldbies themselves. So you had this awful phenomenon of conflict of interests. People who had successful businesses in SL on one account could go and be a Linden, and then have inside info that would help the businesses of them or their friends. Or it wasn't always so crass, it was more about group influence, some people having greater reputational influence, and being able to use that politically, to prevail on the issue of telehub removal for example."

"We strove in vain for weeks of political debate to prove to the Lindens that the hubs were not laggy, they were a good thing, they were good for business,  they were good for serendipity. I personally took Robin Linden by the hand and showed her 10 telehub related malls and communities to prove they were not ugly and not laggy."

"But - in vain, as the Lindens pulled them. We as land barons then demanded compensation if we had bought the land on the auction, not knowing they were going to do that. And to their credit, the Lindens made a compensation deal. They bought back the land on a formula, or you had another option which they came up with later. First they took all those hated telehubs and turned them into infohubs with hippos in them. These were widely ridiculed. Hippos is a Linden inside joke. The infohubs did terribly. Nobody wants to go to a state-sponsored propaganda stand, which is what it was. So they then said they'd open it up to resident developers."

"Where did that come from, for those who don't know?" I asked about the Hippo joke.

"It's explained on an SL wiki somewhere," Prokofy explained, "somewhere in the SL code or something when you turn up a page it says 'hippos.' It's a placeholder perhaps. I remember I used to see that "hippos" in the old days when things loaded. So they had actual hippos on all perms they handed out that people could modify and make into things, I have one in my infohub. He is very miniature, wearing a fez cap, and you can click on him for the history of the telehub."

"Then we entered the flourishing Renaissance period when we developed all those hubs, with Linden cooperation and blessing, then they abandoned us with them. For a time, they had newbies able to opt to go to them, or be randomly delivered to them. See that was the issue. People said, 'you've just cut off all our traffic and business, all our customers by pulling those hubs and re-directed it now to your oldbie friends and their boutiques or new sims that were being build WITHOUT telehubs.' "

"Imagine, first they build the continent called the Moth Continent with NO HUBS. Literally you had to take a boat or plane there. They thought this would be more 'organic' and would 'prevent blight.' We pointed out acidly that the people buying their shiny (then) new land were not the people who wanted 'nature' in SL who didn't have the money to buy land. So we deserved telehubs. I found out to my shock that the Linden who built Moth Temple, who came and gave a talk to us once on his ideas and where he drew his images from in real life, that they could have made it a telehub sim with one rez and click, just like you do on your own island. There was no 'complexity' to it -- just an ideology."

"FINALLY after a huge battle, they added the telehub object/script to Iris, the Moth Temple sim and some others. Then they put in p2p, changing the economy forever. In some ways I think it never recovered. The Lindens have always wanted content creation, not land, to drive the economy."

I asked, "So point to point teleporting wrecked the Second Life economy?"

"Here's the thing Bixyl," Prokofy told me, "for unskilled newbies, for unskilled anybody, land is how you participate in the economy. Not everybody is a computer programmer or a graphic designer. But single black moms from Detroit, and disabled retired postal workers in Cincinnati -- or a single mom in HUD housing in NYC like me -- could become business people in SL by having land as their opener. They could buy and sell it, they could put rentals onit, they could make a club, they could make a mall by commissioning others to build, they could make some other activity like live music, etc. None of this required skill, it only required sweat equity. A truck driver could become a famous dress maker in SL, but she needed to break into the market somehow, and the telehub malls gave her that opening. That was made possible by land barons."

"Anyway you get the idea I think. Land is very important not only for the Lindens' business model but the SL economy itself."

I asked, "Was there any proposed compromise, such as making point to point teleporting available only to premium account holders?"

"Oh no," was Prokofy's answer, "because they flooded in free accounts. A lot of people didn't want them. They brought griefers, they said. I personally was happy to have them because it meant that an Italian shoemaker who couldn't get a US credit card could make money in SL even if he had no premium account with a credit card. That was hugely important. I had many customers who had NPIOF who made money in SL as dressmakers or club owners and then they had a little bit to pay for rent -- they never cashed out. There were many people who never had a dollar leave SL, they lived, worked, paid for their content inside the world because the freebie accounts were made possible."

"What I discovered from 10 years of having low-cost rentals, there is a high number of women in SL from ages let's say 30-50, or even up to 70. Many are married, and their husbands don't want them to make frivolous expenses. They hate the idea of recurring monthly fees. So this enables them to thrive. Also a younger continent, let's say early 20s who don't have a lot of disposable income. We used to get the economic statistics. We could see the TRUE population of SL, not this "30 million sign-ups" crap, not even the '1.5 million uniques' with a lot of bots. But the real population of people who spent at least $1 Linden dollar inworld. That population was about 450,000 to 500,000 a few years ago. A tiny percentage of those people could spent the equivalent of $5000 US -- i.e. they made money and cashed it out as big land barons or big content creators. Then there was a huge population of people who spent say $25 US or $10 US That was my market of people, and most people's, people willing to spend the equivalent of a movie or a dinner a month. This market wasn't endless. It was growing nicely. but then various policies crashed it."

"Today we don't know its size because they stopped publishing that information. Remember, I am seeing Second Life through the reverse end of a telescope. I am trying to put together my understanding of it based on field experience. Griefers might reverse-engineer the scripts of SL or the code, which they did before it was open-sourced. I tried to reverse-engineer their social systems. So I made land groups or I made newbie villages or whatever to see how things worked, what made them work. If I had been sitting at their consoles I could have gotten this information from their servers, but they didn't publish it. So I would have to test it in world my self. I made my rentals not so much for a business, as I had a demanding RL job, but to see how SL worked, to see how virtuality works. So I would put stores in malls and stores in fields and test how they did."

"We used to get a LOT more information from the Lindens. For example, I once got a windfall from Philip that was published in the Alphaville Herald. We had this problem of the Leader Board. Remember that? or you weren't here for that?"

I told him probably not.

Prokofy continued, "The Leader Board showed the richest avatars, the avatars with the most friends, the most build skill awards. It used to be every avatar had a profile where you could 'posrate' or 'negrate.' I was famous for negrating Philip, which few dared to do.
Posrate got gamed. Posrates gave you dwell points on that Linden awards system too you see. So people had posrating parties, it was awful."

"Anyway, that Leader Board was sus. People wondered, how did certain people get so high on it? And the traffic was sus. People used traffic gimmicks, posrating parties to lure in traffic, later they had the camping gimmicks. It was impossible to tell what was organically doing well in search: i.e. what people really did go to, without gimmicks or bots."

"So I suggested that Philip calculate it differentlly, not through the traffic numbers in search generated, but looking at the profile of each avatar, seeing their 'favourites' and seeing what that yielded. And it was a very different list than the top traffic veniues. Not completely different, because sex clubs will sell without gimmicks obviously. But it was just very interesting. The people and venues the Lindens endlessly promoted in blogs and in-person appearances were not the same as the people's choice. I noticed that discrepancy instantly when I began to study the map."

"Second Life has always had a lot of different interest groups struggling. I haven't even begun to mention things like furries or Gor or elves. They all had enormous political struggles with the Lindens on various issues. The group tool period. See here's the thing about the group tools, Philip had that vision of the land economy and Buzz, remember, that oldbies hated but he encouraged? But the groups didn't support that vision as we quickly discovered."

"The problem was the old officers' election system. Let's say you made a corporation of 5 people and made a group and made yourselves all officers of the group. Let's say one or two of you paid for the land, the others were builders or just supporters, tenants perhaps. At any time, 4 of the 5 who hadn't paid for the land could trigger an 'officers' recall' and *vote an officer out of his own land group, so he would lose his land.* This was a horror of course. The tools were made by California hippies, techocommunists as I called them."

"Interesting name," I commented.

Prokofy went on, "So they didn't want to have 'tyranny' and wanted the ability to overthrow 'tyrants.' They thought of their own start-up culture where coders often end up throwing out founders of start-ups. But this was devastating for a land market. It ruined private property by collectivizing it. See here's the other thing I have to explain. Originally in SL, the Lindens put an incentive into groups to make them buy land and make communities. If you put your land in a group, it would generate an extra tier free 10 percent, so you could hold 10% more land in a group and pay X tier that without a group would cost more."

"So that's why there were even groups. But they were not suited to *business.* They were suited to communes."

"Devastation happened, like the infamous mall story where a few people, aided by their Linden friends, (threw) a guy who had paid for the land out of his own group. I had griefers join my group as members, then trigger an 'officer's recall.' Oh, what that did was freeze me in the group. I couldn't buy or sell or do anything while frozen. So the only way to prevent that idiocy was to put alts into the group. But you could only have 5 alts under their rules, only 5 accounts per credit card. Most people only have one credit card."

"The other problem with groups is that they lag out horrible and chat freezes, and griefing is a problem. So I solved that problem by making multiple land groups. But I didn't have enough alts to staff all of them. So I would find trusted people willing to donate tier, and give them a rental discount. I still have that system. Some people have been with me for 10 years."

"How has it worked?" I asked.

Prokofy explained, "I was hugely criticized on the forums as being a newbie deceiver by offering people to put tier in my group in exchange for $250/week discount, so that would give them a newbie house for $250/250 prims let's say. They would buy a premium account and put their tier in my group. If they seemed reliable, some of them I could make officers. Back then, I got ripped off only once that way. By and large people were decent."

"But we fought to have that idiotic hippie commune stuff removed from the tools. No one who bought land should be thrown out of their group by chance griefers or drama queens. So then they created levels of powers. You could make it so someone could deed media or terraform yet not sell the land out from under you. The nesting groups of powers were complex. Enormous debates took place over them in the forums, and the Lindens convened various town halls and then separate conferences inworld just on these tools. The problem is that the furries who were open source sandbox technocommunist types wanted to keep the old system without hierarchy. They had arcane reasons for this. They wanted to show 'co-ownership' like a socialist commune. The business people, the capitalists, if you will, wanted one owner, the person who paid for the land. Then underneath that, his tenants or workers, Say, if a club."

"The tools had to be flexible for all types of group use. But some insisted that their model of society like communism be welded into the tools. It was enormously frustrating because the Lindens wanted capitalism on the one hand to give them revenue, but wanted utopian socialism as a world model that they thought Second Life would help bring about. But eventually, those early utopianists left and now some of them cause major havoc in real life with things like Tor."

"Tor?" I asked

"It's the circumvention program for anonymous browsing," Prokofy answered, "Read my other blog called Wired State and you can see my discussions of that."

"In any event, the group tools finally shook out to what you see today,  which still contain some elements of communism regretably. That is visible in what I call a bug, and others call a feature. If I deed a prim to the group, a member in the group, whether or not I've given them the power to return objects from sims (one of the granulated powers in the group), can return that prim. That's horrible because it means griefers return TV sets, or anything that people put on 'share' not even deeded. Let's say they have a chair they want to move around. They put on share for others to move it. But then it can be lost because anything put on deed returned to the server is DESTROYED. The SL asset server, when confronted with collectivized property, destroys it."

"Eventually, the Lindens did two things to try to fix that horror. First, a warning, that did little good.But they also set it so that if the item was on all perms, it could go back to its original owner who deeded it. But if it is on no perms it is still destroyed. Most TVs are on no perms."

"Anyway, I talked to the original Linden who coded that. He conceded it was a flaw. But another Linden disagreed when I kept reporting it as a bug on the JIRA because he thought it was a great builders' boon. If you are in a collective, anyone in the group can return a prim that is in the way or they don't like. But it's havoc for rentals. That's just it again: 'creator as customer' or 'customer as creator?' Do you build policies and tools to feed the whims of a tiny caste of high-end creators who tend toward the open source cultism about property rights --they want to collectivize them away? Or do you build policies towards more typical mass market free enterprise types who want businesses where the griefers can't return the prims?"

"Protection of private property, this is a concept of the rule of the law the Lindens not only didn't grasp; they repudiated it. That's why we had ad farms and Impeach Bush."

"Yes, I remember the complaints about the ad farms," I told Prokofy.

"I have to wonder who was behind the ad farms," Prokofy commented, "I believe it was everyone from the RL Russian mafia who naturally gravitated to extortion schemees on line, to Lindens on their alts to Anshe and co trying to drive people to her island rentals. The plan was to exploit and ruin the Mainland and force people to islands. It worked. Only the hardiest pioneers remained through this awful 4-year period. That's a long time in business. 'Mainland Rentals' is almost an oxymoron, although you see more of them today now that there are less destructive policies. There are actually a lot of little interesting businesses on the mainland. I used to fly around and admire them and tip them sometimes or feature them on my blog. Some of them swiped my rental card (laughing out loud). I have an open source rental cube which I encourage people to use for business."

"This is my point about open source, that it is not to be rejected but to be used where appropriate, I'm not opposed to somehow removing open source from life, but I'm for removing the cult that goes with it which is anti-business."

Prokofy briefly went back to his business card, "Well I don't care if they swiped the card and its ideas. But then their customers would call me because they'd forget to remove my name from the card (laughing out loud)."

I chuckled a bit.

Prokofy went on, "Anyway there are plenty of newer people 2-4 years old doing interesting things. You never hear of them, they are not on the forums, they are not in the news, the sub-rosa life of SL. You have covered some of them of course."

I answered, "Yes, I have."

"I try to cover sometimes," Prokofy told me, "but my blogging is limited now. As we are sitting here, I just got ... let me count ... six new customers. Never heard of them before.  Some new, some older."

"And that's the amazing thing about Second Life. During that time I had one refund. It's a constant process, but SL is always regenerating. People have an amazing, amazing capacity to sustain the horrible storms and purges and blights that the Lindens have hurled at this world, mainly in the form of the technocommunist policies, and bounce back with free market initiatives time and again. The Lindens keep trying to destroy business. For example, they put in the Linden Homes. That undercut anyone with a newbies rental business. I had to close or revamp my communities after that. So many challenges like that, so hard a learning curve. But people keep coming, and amazingly, they start little businesses or clubs."

"So that's what keeps SL interesting to me."

*  *  *  *  *

To Be Continued, In Part Two Prokofy talks about matters such as the new Grid under development by Linden Lab, and last year's Terms of Service issues: Click Here.

By Bixyl Shuftan