Democracy as dictatorship

A very interesting and wide-ranging discussion in the first session has now closed. But what stood out most was the issue of jurisdiction and the meta issue of forms of government.

Ginsu Yoon from Second Life was asked if Linden Labs weren’t in fact running a benevolent dictatorship. This sparked mention of terrorism in Second Life – apparently people have been using their pixelated virtual selves to blow up pixilated virtual buildings. Later on, Marc Rotenberg stood up at the mic to explain that the Electronic Privacy Information Center had inserted Second Life between San Marino and Singapore in its “Privacy and Human Rights” book (an extremely weighty tome) because it now considered it is own jurisdiction. Continuing the same theme, Cyrus Beagley, suggested there was an important role for governments in protecting people’s privacy.

Yoon explained that it wasn’t the first time Linden has been asked to impose rules on Second Life. But, he explained, as soon as you impose *any* rules, you are telling people how they need to behave online. This is, he explains, “democracy as dictatorship” and it was instead “up to people to form their own social rules”. Jonathan Taplin observed that far from democracy, there was a “certain level of anarchy in Second Life”.

So what is it – dictatorship, democracy or anarchy?

It’s probably telling that the CIA popped up at this point. Second Life is, it appears, the best method that the Central Intelligence Agency has ever found to teach its people Korean manners – how to teach people “not to do something culturally inappropriate”, according to Taplin, who said he spoke witha "mid-level" CIA employee about it. If that wasn’t enough, Yoon then posited that if terrorism became virtual people blowing up virtual buildings (rather than real people and real buildings), then it would be a “tremendous evolution” for humankind.

In one sense, he’s right, except try telling that to companies that in the future may spends millions on real estate and use it to run billions of dollars of trade through. If that was to get blown up, it would have immediate real-world consequences. In this utopia, we may be physically safer, but if the economy suffers (and money is increasingly a virtual series of 1s and 0s on bank servers) we may not be able to raise the money to pay our broadband bills and so be able to keep visiting the bombed-out virtual world.

As my fellow blogger Richard Akerman has pointed out the connection to the real world is where those servers are based. But even so, it sparks yet more issues of jurisdiction. If someone physically based in Korea breaks the laws of the United States in a virtual world contained on servers held in Brazil and a bank in Singapore fails as a result - a scenario that is not impossible to imagine - what do you do?