It is about to become a felony to engage in what a big company thinks should be considered copyright infringement. The people who support SOPA insist that the law is not intended to go after small time offenders but there’s nothing in the text of the law to support that. This is the same reasoning that says child porn laws are only about going after the worst criminals. So why do teenagers get busted for sending half-dressed photos of themselves to their boyfriends and girlfriends?

If the middle men at movie and music studios want to bully those outside of US borders, then let them use the billions they’ve made inflating the copyright laws of the US to do it. They don’t need a law that allows them to cry wolf at any search engine or website that links to something they don’t like.

These are people who have been on the wrong side of history for decades. They fought the invention of television and radio. They fought digital goods until they had no choice. These are not the innovators protecting discovery and innovation. These are the old, rich, no-talent middle men who want to drag technology out as long as possible so they can milk the system of every drop because they have no skill except buying talent cheap and selling it at a huge mark up to consumers.

If we give it to them, we’re going to get exactly what we deserve. Their world. Bought and packaged. For them.

“I am my own heroine.” ~ Marie Bashkirtseff

Fantasy Heroines

I have a friend who has long made the case that Twilight is an abstinence-supporting conspiracy to turn young girls into brooding, swooning extras from 80s horror movies that trip over tree branches while running from the serial killer as punishment for having dared to have sex.

I don’t know about that. But I do know the chick in the movies isn’t my model of a fantasy heroine. By a long shot.

“The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors’ works have survived even in part.” ~ Richard Stallman

Researchers have found that introverts who act extraverted show slower reaction times on subsequent cognitive tests than those allowed to act introverted. Their cognitive fatigue testifies to the fact that “acting counter-dispositionally is depleting.” ~ Laurie Helgoe, “Revenge of the Introvert”

Dear extroverts: you are killing us and fucking up our interwebs. Okay, so that’s not exactly what the research shows, but I’m convinced it’s a statement with merit. What I should say is more like “Dear extrovert-trending virtual environments, my name is Salome, I’m an IFG and I’m exhausted by the lot of you.”

I cannot say that I remember the first time I was administered an MBTI as an adult. I know that as a child I was on occasion given personality tests because I was unschooled and the individual that guided my learning path used such tests as a means to figure out what my natural inclinations would be. What I do know is that for as long as I can remember, I have been classified with words like “right brained” and “introverted.” I test heavily INFJ.

When I entered mainstream school and peer social interaction, I had the advantage of being excited about it. Yes, I was that girl — for the first few years I was thrilled to go to school (although by the end I had senioritis along with the best of ‘em). As I melted into the culture of American public school, there was an overwhelming toll inflicted upon me that increased exponentially.

School, like most American hives, caters to extrovert tropes. Those who excel with extrovert social skills are rated better in the tribal hierarchy. Even counter-culture groups (in my high school days, these were punkers) tended to defer to the bolder, louder individuals of their subgroups. These behaviors are similarly (if unintentionally) rewarded by the school system. I was hard to intimidate as a youth, but I watched “the quiet kids” I identified with suffer through a great many situations like public speaking, large class sizes, and forced interaction. The concept that group activity was more “healthy” than quiet contemplation was everywhere. American schooling, in my day at least, was underscored by the message that you were part of the herd, and the more willingly you mooed the better you would do in the game of life. I understand the wisdom of preparing students to deal with melding into the expectations of society, and I certainly understand the limited resources of education makes highlighting individualism prohibitive. However, even as a teenager, I could figure out that it was a crummy way to run a lemonade stand.

Now more than ever, it’s worth considering the toll this takes on what we now understand to be 50% of the population who can be identified as introverts. By forcing them into patterns that not only go against the grain of their personalities, but may be causing them emotional and mental harm, American society is growing more damaging to its introverted population. Moreover, because they are inclined toward silence, introverts do not necessarily serve their own causes.

Socializing on the internet largely began as the domain of misfits and introverts. It makes sense because in the early days the net just wasn’t all that shiny. The social rewards of those old forums, user groups and BBS’s appealed more to those of us who spent a lot more time with Erector sets and Lincoln Logs than we did at little league games.

I’m not implying that “the good old days” were better. Obviously, web culture is far richer now than in those early days. But I can say that as an introvert the web is a far less comfortable place for me than it once was. Social networking and virtual environments are shifting from introvert-friendly to extrovert-dominated. This evolution happens simply, without any conspiracy. The perception is that the majority of people are extroverts, so, naturally, the people designing environments want to target the things they see as appealing to the largest possible user base. Moreover, extroverts are accustomed to being catered to and are not afraid to be the squeaky wheels demanding grease, while introverts are accustomed to shutting up and adapting as best they can.

In gaming terms, however, where there is lots of player burn-out and turn-over, this may be a key to addressing player engagement, immersion, and loyalty. Take this excerpt from Laurie Helgoe’s Psychology Today article: “Revenge of the Introvert”

With a biological makeup that enables them to see positive emotional stimuli as a distraction when they are focused on another task, introverts are good at resisting all distraction. Using functional brain imaging, Stanford biopsychologist Brian W. Haas measured the reaction time for introverts and extraverts when they tried to identify the color in which an emotionally provocative word was printed. Introverts proved more able to focus on the task of color identification while disregarding the emotional content and had significantly better reaction times. Concludes Haas: Introverts, who exhibit a higher resting state of arousal, “don’t need the same kind of outside entertainment.”

Put simply, our quest strategy and goals are different, and concepts of reward are similarly different.

There are huge implications here for motivational behavior in both physical and virtual domains. In schooling terms, high school and colleges would do better by 50% of their student populations by developing methods and procedures that engaged extroverts without alienating and discouraging introverts. Businesses would benefit greatly from being able to identify introverted employees and helping fit them to better positions that would allow them to excel and recharge, thus prolonging their work energies, creativity, and company loyalty.

Virtual environments have the most to gain, however, because so much of what would benefit introverts is just a matter of coding. Allowing introverts like myself the privacy controls and the ability to opt out of too much information/social stimulation would tremendously increase immersion, loyalty, and engagement in the format.

Attempting to force introverts into the same corners that much of society already corners us into, virtual environments risk losing 50% of their user bases to gradual burn-out and withdraw. Conversely, structuring formats that provide the tools so that introverts and extroverts can customize their experiences to their own personality types is fairly simple.

It’s time to stop spamming users with unwanted social interactions and information and allowing introverts to be introverts if they choose. As a business model it was always ethically dodgy to bombard users with forced visibility and exposure in order to make them feel obligated to engage, but certainly there is a stronger case now for it being simply bad business as well.

“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity” ~ Tom Peters

Recently, while debating a friend, I made a simple statement: “Ethics do not alter.” It’s the type of statement I would consider an axiom. After a two-day argument, however, I realized I was missing a few words. What I should have said was “ethics do not alter according to situation.” My friend wouldn’t have agreed with that statement anymore than the first, but it would have saved a few hours of semantic negotiation.

As a person who does not believe in spiritual forces of good or evil, I am of the opinion that ethics and morality have evolved over the course of humankind’s walk on this planet from a communal commitment to survival. Survival taught our ancestors that there was safety in numbers (not to mention greater odds of procreation), but it must have also been obvious from the beginning that some people just don’t play well with others. From that start came compromise, standards, values, hierarchy consequences, and a number of other factors. For me, this is simple logic. If you remove assigning morality to the decree of a “higher power” then all that remains as a constant in the human condition is survival.

A number of great minds over the centuries have tried to make the case for mankind being inherently good- or bad-natured. In my opinion, such a debate is a waste of time. People are neither. Some are more predisposed to empathy or creativity or destruction, but that’s usually based on bad meat development or funky chemistry. It’s not about good or bad; most people are just inherently simple — they want their survival necessities, their creature comforts, and to spend most of their time seeking pleasure. From an evolution standpoint this makes infinite sense. Evey hive has more drones than queens. The balance of hive society rests on rewarding worker bees just enough so that they don’t want to eat the queen’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Advanced citizenship places extra burdens upon its drones, however, and that can generate rifts. Republics and democracies break down if the people do not hold their leaders accountable. In a free market, if consumers do not keep corporations from overreaching, you get things like depressions. I don’t know the math, but I’m sure there is a probably an equation that demonstrates how much falloff to expect per removed generation. Someone like myself takes a great deal of freedom for granted as a basic right, but someone who immigrated to the US from a less generous nation would likely not take as much for granted. It takes a while for entitlement to set in.

Entitlement is not always bad. Cultural entitlement is how society sheds the scales of previous ills. For example, generations coming to age now in the US and many other countries take equality for granted and are largely repulsed at the notions of racial or sexual discrimination.There are types of entitlement, however, that paralyze or destroy systems like government and commerce because people forget they carry a burden of obligation that goes along with privilege. The pursuit of pleasure has a price tag; how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Ethics and consumer advocacy thus become the “everyman’s burden” in a free society. However, the less these burdens are underscored by survival needs, the lower the odds that the average person will uphold their side of the social bargain. Corporations exist free of ethics. They are, for all intents and purposes, emancipated psychopathic entities that are only charged to follow the letter of the law and generate money. They don’t have to consider the spirit of law or any benefit to society; their survival is often contrary to human survival.

If you look at what is going on in the real world these days in regard to how the general population addresses ethics and consumer advocacy, you can almost draw a line between the things that link directly to a sense of survival and how much the public invests in fulfilling their side of the social bargain. (Religion, of course, is the eternal wildcard in this deck, but I think you have to consider religion intimately linked to survival in the minds of followers — they view spiritual survival at least as important as physical survival.) Downloading unauthorized entertainment or circulating copyrighted material is hardly even a blip on the moral radar of most people. Despite what Lars Ulrich told congress in 2000, no one died from downloading illegal copies of Metallica songs. Unethical corporate CEOs nearly killed the global economy, but other than a few slaps on the wrist, they didn’t have to break stride or surrender an ivory-handled backscratcher. They may have evaporated the savings of billions of average people, but they didn’t directly cause any death, so they didn’t trigger any survival instincts. I don’t equate downloading songs to bankrupting the civilized world, but apparently, most consumers do, because the consequences are largely the same: nothing. In the case of corporate CEOs they even managed to sell the narrative that consumers and the government were at fault. In a way, that’s true. Holding corporate greed accountable is the responsibility of the citizenry.

It is chilling to consider what effect this could translate to when looking at Virtuality. With few exceptions, survival does not come into play in the virtual world. Virtual goods are about as removed as they can possibly be from that key element. And what is the result? Customer service is frighteningly absent from places like Facebook, Blizzard, Linden Lab, etc. Most average consumers don’t even expect immediate responses to inquires anymore, or have been conditioned to accept long hold times to get addressed. Consumer advocacy is also pretty thin on the virtual ground, and when you get a consumer advocacy heavy hitter in technical circles, they invariably end up the target of some power-crazed entity.

Personally, I believe that ethics and consumer advocacy are, in themselves, survival structures. They balance the scales between the average citizen of the world and those offering service in exchange for power. Just as those who feel they are entitled to everything without maintaining their side of the social bargain disrupt the balance, so do those who see problems and choose to do nothing.

If we can’t be trusted, as a society, to connect the dots between greed-based corporate entities ushering in an information-age depression, how can be we be trusted to police the current or next generation of virtual world players? If we don’t redefine survival to include these advanced concepts, how will we maintain ethics? Or will the virtual world transition from the domain of anonymous and free expression to the territory of corporations abandoning consumer care and ethical standards without consequence? Are we already owned by our dependency on a handful of big names?

Don’t get me wrong — I lean capitalist, but capitalism isn’t just about companies, it’s about consumers, too. Yes, it is the job of a company to make money, but it is the role of consumers to demand companies execute their duties with ethics and fair play and it is also the responsibility of consumers to assign consequences when companies fail the basic standards of society.

What consequences are any of us willing to execute in order to define ethics and standards?

Social interaction is the most valuable element of almost every virtual environment and it happens on MMOs, social networking sites, virtual platforms, forums, etc. With that in mind, ask yourself the following:

A) Would you give up your favorite virtual social outlet tomorrow if the company behind it behaved in a way you felt was unethical?
B) What kind of ethical trespass would have to happen for you to give up your favorite virtual social outlet?
C) If you wouldn’t give up your favorite virtual social outlet under any circumstances, do believe you would have any obligation to try and advocate for change of the policies you feel are unethical?
D) Do you even pay attention to the policies of your favorite outlets?

I’m not looking for anyone to answer these questions for an audience, but I think it’s important we ask ourselves things like this and figure out where our own standards are and where we expect them to be and how we plan to address ethics when removed from survival.

If you’re not willing to walk away from something, it owns you, so here’s the million dollar question and really the only one that matters:

E) If you look at your online habits, add in the ethics you’re willing to take a stand on and evaluate the outlets you’re not willing to do without — what owns you?