Questions, Standards & Blame
“There is luxury in self reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.” ~ Oscar Wilde
For those of you unfamiliar with Sondheim’s Into the Woods, there is a sequence where all the fairy tale characters in their make-believe world begin to blame each other for the tragedy of their current situation, which came about through a series of events and misadventures rooted in desire, foolishness, greed, innocence, innocence lost, guilt, vanity, unresolved issues, and lots of other human failings. It has been foremost in my mind while checking in on the Emerald issue.
If you’re not aware of the Emerald situation, a good-enough summary can be found HERE. For me, this summary is a bit too petting toward the Emerald team, but, well, there’s a lot of that going around. My chain of events goes like this:
A. Linden Lab failed to update their product in a way that met the needs of their user base.
B. A talented, but irresponsible segment of the user base created a third-party project for reasons unknown. This project became known as the Emerald Viewer.
C. Lots of people began to use Emerald, as it provided an improved user experience; few of these people knew anything about the team that created and maintained the project.
D. Questions began to arise regarding the reputation and integrity of the Emerald team and their motivations.
E. Despite there being lots of blogs and “news” about Emerald, no one in the blogosphere bothered to ask some point-blank “on the record” questions to the team (I personally sent two emails attempting to get an interview out of sheer frustration. They were never responded to, but then I don’t pretend to be a reporter or a talk show host so I’m sure I was easily ignored).
F. Despite there being no statement of ethics, obvious untruths in their blog posts, and several other low-grade warning signs, people with credibility spoke in support of Emerald and made it clear it was their viewer of choice.
G. The inevitable happened and a member (or members) of the Emerald team abused the trust of their users in a griefer prank. The prank, while not in itself very interesting or damaging, demonstrates a flagrant disregard for ethics, a lack of basic integrity and employed tactics which engaged an unwitting user base in ridiculously childish (and potentially criminal) behavior.
H. An Emerald team member that few people know from Adam posted an “I’ll fall on my sword even though I really don’t think I did anything wrong” non-apology apology; another Emerald member that few people know from Eve said she was stepping up to the plate to get everything under control. Then didn’t. Feel free to read the Emerald blog for more accurate step by step on this part.
I. Rabble, Rabble, Rabble.
J. Linden Lab issued their mock-outrage “we’ve taken care of this” farce statement while dogs and cats began living together (mass hysteria).
K. People began to issue “aww shucks, they’re just confused kids” type excuses for Emerald’s antics, others posted “we think it’s wrong, but everyone’s being so mean” type excuses, and others went the “they’re all a bunch of Nazis” direction. Because, you know, that’s how the interwebs work.
L. Linden Lab continues to fail to update their product in a way that meets the needs of their user base.
There is not enough facepalm in the world. Seriously.
The problem I have with this situation is that some people I like are on the insanely wrong side of this issue, and some people I find disgustingly vile are on the right side. So it’s frustrating. It’s like when you have to admit that the KKK is entitled to free speech. Yeah, it’s right, bt it makes you feel like you need a bath.
Yet, between all the hate-fueled “I told you so” mocking and the Eeyore “you guys are so mean” pouting, there is very little learning going on. It’s enough to make me climb a bell tower and take a hostage. Why? Because there are lessons here that are getting missed in the exchange and they are THE SAME FUCKING THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN GETTING MISSED ALL ALONG.
So, for next time, can we please review:
1. Linden Lab is not releasing a product that services the needs of their users. The buck stops there. If this isn’t where your bottom line on this issue rests, then you’re getting it wrong. Period.
2. If you think it’s shocking that some of the code monkeys working on Emerald had grief-genes, you’re an idiot. I assure you, every product on your computer right now likely had griefers or ex-griefers working on it. They just weren’t in charge, weren’t given a lot of power, or were good enough not to get caught. Save your outrage for the next episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey or something.
3. Third Party Viewers are a valuable tool, but they need to be investigated and held to task. Their project managers need to be interviewed and asked hard questions in a civil, responsible way — preferably by the people who claim to be delivering news to our community. If the names don’t mean anything to the average consumer, their reputation and integrity (or lack thereof) within the community needs to be made clear by anyone advocating the product.
4. When warning signs appear and then begin flashing in neon, YOU PAY ATTENTION and don’t just hem and haw and hope it all gets better. You certainly DO NOT put your name and/or reputation behind the mess unless you’re damn sure you’re right.
5. An active griefer is not going to behave just because you like them. Just because they haven’t griefed *you* doesn’t mean you can trust them not to behave like an idiot. Are griefers evil? No. Sometimes they’re even useful in a social way. But they’re generally irresponsible, juvenile and reckless on the fly. These are not the people you want in unchecked positions of responsibly in any format or project. You just don’t let an alcoholic tend bar, ffs.
6. You cannot cry about being deceived if you never did anything to educate yourself as a consumer. If you didn’t know about the Emerald team and used their product anyway, then just shut up and switch to Imprudence with the rest of us. Your right to bitch is exactly zero. Oh, and while you’re at it, check into the Imprudence team — don’t just switch to them blindly.
In the meantime, welcome to one of the big reasons the Second Life community continues to be bad-mouthed in technical and professional circles. When “he’s kind of a friend and I don’t think he’ll do anything bad” trumps obvious warning bells, when consumers bitch and moan but don’t educate themselves on their choices or advocate for their needs, when bloggers and journalists self-promote but don’t even try to get answers to hard questions, when “Ha ha ha you got what you deserved and I hope you all die” counts as a valid part of the general discourse — well, how can you take them seriously?
I’d really like it if we didn’t drive this self-hating cycle into the next race on the same tack. Pretty please? With sugar on top?
So stop crying “poor me,” quit making excuses for fuck-ups, back off blaming the branches and learn to identify the roots of a problem, refrain from engaging the hate-mongers, advocate and educate and just LEARN FROM THE FUCKING MISTAKES ALREADY so we don’t end up back in this same place. Ever. Again.
That is all.
I agree, mostly. At the end of the day, this is Linden Lab’s failure more than anything else. The fact that they would allow any 3rd party viewer to gain such a large part of the userbase is disgraceful. If LL was capable of delivering a decent product, then this whole episode would never have risen above the level of obscure coder drama.
“You cannot cry about being deceived if you never did anything to educate yourself as a consumer”
Commented by Annyka Bekkers on August 26, 2010 at 1:23 PMThat’s a bit unfair. Most people never read the fine print, and wouldn’t understand it if they did. Even with all the issues about Emerald spelled out in detail, its surprising how many people don’t understand what happened. Again it comes down to marketshare. For the average person, the only thing they have to go by is how many other people are using it. Numbers become the endorsement of quality. 50 million Emerald fans can’t be wrong, right?
A lot of what’s going on in SL (and RL for that matter) today has a great deal to do with people being lazy consumers and simply assuming there is some giant nanny in the sky making everything right. There isn’t, and the more we hand-hold about it, the worse it gets.
There has to be consumer responsibility. There has to be consumer advocacy. It’s part of the basic product/demand checks and balances of a free market. If people don’t demand quality and don’t educate themselves on their products and purchases, this is the result. Yes, it would be wonderful to live in a world, virtual or otherwise, where you didn’t have to watch out for yourself. When that world is invented, sign me up.
And, let’s be honest — using a third party viewer isn’t the same as skipping over the fine print (not that skipping fine print is an excuse). To use Emerald or any other viewer, the user had to go to the website, choose to download and install it and tweak it to their specifications. I refuse to accept that every girl I know can edit their hair prim by prim or set up their A/O custom animation by custom animation, but somehow asking them to pay attention to what software they’re installing on their computer is too much to ask. You make time for what’s important.
Most of these people moaning and crying about being “betrayed” by a company they knew nothing about spent more time finding the sliders for their breast buoyancy than they did checking into the company responsible for relaying their login information to LL’s servers.
No, I don’t think it’s a bit unfair.
Commented by Salome on August 26, 2010 at 1:56 PMI did my research, balanced my needs with the information that was available to me and made a judgement call. I was wrong and said so. I went on to apologize to anyone who might have been influenced by what i wrote. At the end of the day I agree we all have to make informed choices. I am just sorry I was not smarter when I made mine.
Commented by Chestnut Rau on August 26, 2010 at 9:14 PMT”here is not enough facepalm in the world.”
I just typed 3 paragraphs and deleted as it was going to be too long. As you know i can go on. So to make it short. I agree with most of what you say except I dont know any other “entity” like Sl to compare this too. Any other place I would be logging into using the company’s provided software without any options to do otherwise. So when I bypass the craziness that is TOS for a company’s product, I assume that my paying for their service entitles me to a bit of protection. I figure Blizzard is going to do its best to keep my info safe and secure. I kinda expect them to keep a database and sell off info. Ok that is the cynical side of me. Which is like all of me. Point is. I still expect them to want to keep me, the customer, safely using their products.
LL just fails. The whole tpv thing is voluntary. When I first saw this list i rushed to make sure I would still be able to log in but now i find out you can still log in with old viewers. So what exactly was the point? You can still log in with pretty much whatever you want. “Hey Im a programmer. Let me hook you up to the grid!” This may be an exaggeration but seems to be how it works. So LL just makes no effort to do well, anything at all. LL pulled a datamining scheme if i recall so how are they more likely to be trustworthy than the other fella?
Some Avatar makes a viewer and I use it at my own risk right? No problem until 30-50 percent of your concurrent users are on this product every day. But LL is so far from the grid they are apparently clueless. Or LL just plain doesnt care. “Hello, 2.0 is failure! Scrap it and start again.”
Am I a lazy consumer? I had no idea who made the viewer. I picked up on a few rumblings. Noticed what a resource hog Emerald is on top of SL’s resource hogging. I saw the “pranks” played by ex-emerald folks. Considered not using it. But still used it. Why? Because I dont think LL is much better than the other fella. Because I thought TPV meant something. And frankly because so many people are using it that it had to be safe. right? right? Ok ok. shush.
In the end I use Imprudence and Kirsten now. I know who makes Kirstens but no idea who is behind Imprudence and how they might be safer than LL and the other fella. Im not going to research an avatar. Meaningless. I will pay closer attention to any rumblings. If i started getting critical in my examination of the people involved with LL and Second Life. I would probably just end up cancelling my account. I sure as heck can’t count on LL to care anymore than the other fella.
Commented by Veritable Magic on August 26, 2010 at 10:39 PMChes, you did your homework as best you could for your own needs, balanced that against the risks, made your mistakes, admitted them, etc. As far as I’m concerned you don’t owe anyone more than the truth and you’ve given that. I think it was an error in judgement to speak out in favor of Emerald the way you and some others did without all the facts, but you seem genuinely sorry for that, so there’s no point in trying to draw blood from you on it (crazy cat ladies aside). The one thing that doesn’t sit well with me is the fact that you’re intermingled with many of the people claiming to be a news outlet for our virtual world. Before endorsing a product with clear smudges on its reputation — I want to believe that someone like you would have used your influence to try and get some straight forward “on the record” answers. Would that have mattered? I don’t know. It may have provided more insight, or put pressure on Emerald to be a little more responsible, or it might not have. It’s the fact that everyone seems so willing to base everything on “some coder I know” or “my friends all say…” and not do their own due diligence that bothers me. Certainly that is not your burden alone, nor should you feel the need to crucify yourself relentlessly about it. All I’m trying to say is that this situation wasn’t all that hard to see on the horizon and there are things to take away that appear to be getting lost in finger pointing and drama.
Ver – My buck begins and ends with Linden Lab. If they improved their product to meet the needs of its user base, took privacy and responsibility of people’s information seriously, if they did any of a billion things, situations like this wouldn’t be necessary. Agreed. But at the same time, as a consumer, everyone using Emerald made their choices. And we both know that most of the people lamenting about being “betrayed” don’t really care that they were used in this lame griefer battle and don’t even really understand what happened. They didn’t bother to do anything but download the viewer their friends told them to, largely so they could see bouncy boobies and figure out who was blocking them on their friend’s list. Do consumers like them and you and me have a right to believe that there should be some basic protection and integrity? Absolutely. Emerald is 100% in the wrong and they deserve to sit in the doghouse on this. At the same time, the level of bile and outrage circulating about this issue is eye-roll ridiculous. Because in the end no one cared enough before and no one really cares now. It’s just a vehicle to exhibit drama and give crazy cat ladies a platform.
Being an educated consumer means you take responsibility for your choices. Being a person of integrity means sometimes you do without the things you’d rather have when they go against your basic principles. And for all those people claiming “I didn’t have a choice” I seem to be reading a lot about switching to Kristen and/or Imprudence.
All I’m trying to say is people should be (1) identifying the problem accurately as the fault of Linden Lab; (2) realizing that they were lazy consumers who made a bad choice and take personal responsibility; (3) stop pretending to be outraged that their uninformed choice “betrayed” them; (4) learn to be more aggressive in their information gathering on products.
Seriously, Emerald, while at fault and deserving of rebuke and removal of privilege, did exactly what their user base did — they took the lazy out and ignored basic principles and anyone who doesn’t see that correlation simply doesn’t want to.
Commented by Salome on August 27, 2010 at 12:32 AMDear Salome,
I’m sorry, but I have to agree with Annyka. The point is, to understand the issues with Emerald, you’d have to dig through (virtually) dozens of pages on SLU. It’s a complicated issue and on the surface there’s nothing wrong with it, unless you’re an experienced coder or familiar with SL lore and heard a few names a few time too much on the wrong connections. I did that research myself, and I stopped using Emerald a year ago, and have been trying to educate people about some of what was going on there on several occasions. Still, I can’t blame anyone who didn’t get the message, as it got easily swept away with a tide of supporters.
On top of that, I’m not doing the same research with other things I’m using every day, even though I’m trying to be diligent in my choices. For example, I’m using Opera as a browser (I’m even a shareholder). Do I know anything about the people creating Opera? No, I don’t. Same goes for my computer (Apple). Or my phone (Acer). Or whatever else we use. Doing a thorough research on all the things we use is simply too much for the average user. In the case of Emerald, I was just lucky to get the drift early, having heard things and feeling something was wrong, doing some more research and getting convinced something IS wrong. In other cases I’m not that lucky. (Did you know the latest release of Mac OSX shares your geolocation data with Apple by default?)
Personally, I believe there’s no way to save us (as users) from getting exploited in this manner. You can be careful like Chestnut and still do the wrong decision. Things like this happen, as well as the public outcry when they come to light, and the hate-mongering and blind faith following that ensues afterwards. We make our beds, and we lay in them. If anything, the paroles being shouted might make some people dig deeper and look into what really happened. A lot has been written about it all lately, so it’s not really hard to do.
I’m also not – and I never thought I would ever say this – blaming LL. They open-sourced the viewer code for exactly this reason: To give the community an opportunity to create custom “experiences” (to use a Labspeak term). I can’t see anything like RLV coming from within the lab. Or jiggly boobs. Or even a radar. (Just remember the crying that ensues from within the SL merchants community whenever LL introduces a feature that might threaten some of their products.) If I was the Lab, I’d do just the same. And I’m also not blaming Tim Berners-Lee for phishing-sites, or for the latest IE screwup.
So, to make a long reply short: I believe the Lab did the right thing, both about the viewer, and about steering their users through this problem. We’re all still learning what this thing really is, that we’re working on each day, and how we can adequately work with it, and in it.
Commented by Vanish on August 27, 2010 at 10:06 AMVanish, everyone’s entitled to an opinion and I thank you for posting yours here. I find serveral flaws in your logic that disturb me, however.
1. Discovering that there were concerns with Emerald doesn’t require SLU digging at all. It requires a cursory search of the SL blogosphere, maybe, but that’s called “doing your research.” I have never belonged to SLU. I find the owner/operator to be a jerk big on ego and short on ethics. I base this on my brief personal experiences with him. As such, I don’t participate in his forum or projects or even follow links to his sites. I fully understand the issues with Emerald and I’ve never dug through a single SLU thread. There is information out there, but not enough of it and not in the places where it should be.
2. I understand that we can’t perform complete background checks on everything we use every day. At some point you take a few risks and make a few sloppy choices. That’s just how it goes. However, that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility as consumers to realize we made our sloppy choices and to accept some of the responsibility for it. I check most food labels for HFCS, but I’m sure some of it slips in now and then when I just don’t care enough to look. There is never going to be a way to protect ourselves 100% from being exploited. But the entitlement mindset — that there are always supposed to be nannies to protect us while we download and use anything we want — is dangerous. If half the people screaming right now become even slightly more vigilant consumers because of this issue, then it was a good lesson.
3. I didn’t write my post to attack Chesnut or anyone specific. I think Ches has made her mistakes and paid her price and she certainly doesn’t owe me or anyone else anything more than she’s already given. I don’t feel anyone except Linden Lab and Emerald have anything apologize for — aside from the crazy cat lady and her brethren who are being disgusting in their behavior, but that’s par for the course for them and hardly worth singling out to this issue. You don’t expect Jerry Springer to apologize episode by episode.
4. I would have less problem with the public outcry if the bile-slingers weren’t getting pats on the head for their vile behavior and if people were being a little more honest about their personal responsibility. It’s right for people to be outraged, up to a point — and to demand better as consumers. The rest is all just enabling disgusting behavior and pretending to be all in a froth about issues most people don’t really care about or understand.
5. The idea that LL can just hand out code and let the rest of the world improve their products is a position that frightens me. Giving them a pass on meeting bare minimum requirements and letting everyone else solve the bigger problems or meet the needs of the community is deeply flawed. User-based content should improve and add options, not fix lazy mistakes and/or prop up a lackluster product. The LL viewer should be the viewer of choice, meeting the needs of the majority of the community. Third party viewers should be there to fit niche markets or special needs. When 60% of the user base or more opt-out of the “from-the-source” product that is a problem. Your smart phone apps are there to customize your experience, but your phone and operating system should still meet the majority of your needs.
6. Piggybacking on that point, the idea that the Linden Viewer should never improve or implement anything because there might be a market for work-arounds is… I don’t have an adjective. Making the LL viewer obsolete will not keep those markets in business — they will just drive people to third party viewers (putting them at the mercy of no-name coders) and those markets will die anyway. Besides — building in an A/O will not kill the A/O market — most of the money in those markets are made from the custom animations — the A/Os themselves are all mostly based on the free ZHAO model. Radar? Are you kidding? Improving the base tools is just as likely to create new markets as anything else. But even if you want to stand on that point, explain to me things like double-clicking in your inventory to wear/remove items or being able to copy and paste without hot keys? What market are those going to kill? Also, this point would have a lot more merit if LL wasn’t constantly trampling the creative market by dipping their fingers into things like, oh, prefabs.
7. Your Tim Berners-Lee analogy is off base. He created a format — a tool — a foundation for technology to build from. You don’t blame Karl Benz when your accelerator locks. However, you do blame Toyota because they’re the ones who made and sold you the car you’re driving. Linden Lab isn’t making a car and letting Emerald, Imprudence et all sell you custom seat covers. They’re failing to keep their viewer up to snuff and shuffling the responsibility on others. If that’s the lazy route they’re going to take, then I think they should have some minimum requirements for profile information for the companies and coders behind approved third party viewers including real life profile information. And that’s a big statement coming from me, because I support virtual identity and anonymity in nearly every case.
Giving Linden Lab a pass on this, to me, misses the most important take-away lesson from the entire ordeal.
Commented by Salome on August 27, 2010 at 10:55 AMHi Salome,
I guess out different opinions stem from the fact that to me Linden Labs is just another webspace provider in the Metaverse. I don’t spend as much time on Linden Grids as I do on Hypergrid or my own standalone. However, I can understand their perspective. That doesn’t mean I agree with it, or I like it. It just makes sense, from a very simple economic point: The viewer isn’t their product as much as the platform is their product. The greatest revenues LL is making comes from tier (a little more, on top of that, comes from upload fees and such, and Lindex sales). The viewer itself doesn’t generate revenue.
So, in economic terms, the viewer is an accessibility module. It’s neccessary to have, so people can access the “service” and spend their money on it. But, economically, there’s no great loss if you opensource the viewer and put development on it into others’ hands. (Opensourcing the server code, on the other hand, would be disastrous to LL’s business model.) Thus, my Berners-Lee analogy, however flawed, makes sense when I see Linden Labs as the mere platform provider. (A better analogy would be to compare them to AOL, however. The AOL browser was hardly a winning point why people joined AOL.)
Likewise, I never said the LL viewer should never improve. It’s just the way SL works that every change / improvement LL is considering draws a lot of whining from inworld commerce. I couldn’t care less about SL merchants, as I don’t spend money in SL anymore. It’s merely the way it is, just as someone gets called a Nazi, and then there’s pictures of kittens. Thus, the flaws in my logic stem partly from the fact that it’s not my logic, or logic at all, but experience with how things happen in SL.
However, I still believe it’s too much to expect people to do research on anything they use. As much as I dislike the current hate-mongering (and luckily don’t have to witness all of it, as I don’t spend much time inworld anymore), I can see why people chose Emerald simply on recommendations by their friends, and are now upset about their misuse of trust. Because that’s what it boils down to: We trusted them. That’s the way it should be – we trust people by default. And, most of the time, we’re getting along swimmingly with that. And it’s not that the Emerald devs didn’t know we trusted them. So, the blame is on them to misuse our trust. Does that mean, we should now change our default to mistrust? I don’t think so.
Commented by Vanish on August 27, 2010 at 11:28 AMVanish, please tell me this is a typo: “However, I still believe it’s too much to expect people to do research on anything they use.” I mean by that logic people get to mindlessly consume like sheep, but still have the right to cry about getting fleeced. Maybe that’s the future of SL and consumerism in general, but I sure hope not.
Being an educated consumer isn’t about trust or mistrust alone — it’s about common sense. When there is brand recognition and a history of product integrity, you get to make reasonable shortcuts. In the real world I might trust Trader Joe’s brand on good faith. But if I’m in the 99 cent store just picking up random snacks, I’m going to pay a lot more attention to the labels. I might barely blink at updating my QuickTime when it needs it, but I read my Firefox Plug-In updates carefully. The same is true here — Linden Lab has a reputation for better or worse, but Emerald was…who, exactly? And what was their reputation and history? Why should anyone have trusted them without doing any research? It’s too much to expect consumers research a product that no one knows much about? It’s too much to expect for the “journalists” covering our virtual realm to ask questions?
I take your point on the economic motivations of Linden Lab regarding updating their viewer, but providing the best possible user experience is integral to the success of their platform. Defending the integrity of how people connect is squarely their job — they don’t get to just opt-out. You say you don’t agree with it or like it, but you understand it. Well, of course. We all understand bad choices and lazy decisions, but that doesn’t mean we defend them. I understand why Linden Lab fails all over the place, but I’m not going to defend it.
We happen to agree on the point that Liden Lab needs to come to terms with being merely a platform and a service provider, but until they appear to get that memo, all we can do is hold them to task for the roles they claim to be filling. And, we also agree on not caring very much about the majority of the griping that comes from SL merchants. I’m an SL merchant, and I do get annoyed when LL undermines my ability to connect to my customers (search, groups, etc) but I’m not worried about competing with LL over content. LL-based content sucks. Hell, they can’t even blog well.
Commented by Salome on August 27, 2010 at 11:59 AMSorry, in that case “anything” = “everything”, meaning you just can’t do research on every single thing you use. English not be me native lingo.
As far as common sense goes: I think the latest “shenanigans” are the things the general public cares about, and applies to that common sense. Anyone giving blind faith in Emerald up from this point has lost his common sense (and probably many other senses with it) a while ago. Yet, shady backgrounds, datamining operations, whitewashing et al are warning signs, but they’re hardly common sense warning signs. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t expect much of common sense, as it’s, well, common.
Thank you for your lengthy replies, though. They help to clarify a few things and are much appreciated.
Commented by Vanish on August 27, 2010 at 12:23 PMI don’t think that you can just assume that Emerald users were ignorant of any risk involved in its use. It’s equally if not more likely that they familiarised themselves with the information available, did a risk/benefit calculation, and decided that having access to the features of the viewer was worth taking the chance.
Using the viewer, even knowing all we know now, is not necessarily an irrational decision. The question the average user is interested in is not “Are the Emerald devs shady types who do bad things?” but “Are the Emerald devs going to do bad things to me?” On the information available the answers to these questions would seem to be “Yes” and “Probably not”.
Of course if you are narcissistic/paranoid enough to believe that your secrets are so special that the bad guys are going to be especially interested in stealing them, then the risk/benefit ratio will probably be skewed towards ditching Emerald. I expect that the usage rates of Emerald are going to take a steep dive in the immediate future, but I think that that tells us more about the psychological profile of the average SL resident than it does about the actual hazards of using the viewer.
Commented by Johnny on August 27, 2010 at 5:04 PM