A Conversation By Economists About AI

I had the pleasure of attending a "Sharp Viewpoints" event on my old employer's campus, where Dr. Kevin Hallock, university President, hosted two economists with expertise in AI, UVA's Anton Korinek and MIT's David Autor.  The subject, AI and The Future of Work, should concern us all.

I hope not to misrepresent what I heard, but all three experts on stage consider it inevitable that AI will continue to advance rapidly and that it will disrupt careers in fields such as Finance, Computer Science, and Accounting. These have been popular majors for my former students. The scope of the disruption and what happens to wages, as AI takes on more white-collar tasks, remain to be seen. Korinek cited a ninefold increase in the capacity of AI systems annually, from a 2.5x increase in efficiency times a 4x increase in capabilities. 

Korinek warned the audience that we have a small window of time to prepare for resultant changes without chaos in the economy, though Autor felt that if we were to see a gradual loss of a profession, which he called "generational," our economic health could be sustained. He did warn that nothing on the scope of 10% of jobs lost annually could be tolerated without an upheaval. 

Both speakers likened gradual change to, say, automating trucking. The industry would slowly shed human drivers over time, because prior investment in vehicles and warehouses can't be profitably junked overnight. As older drivers retire, however, gradually fewer young people would enter the field and robots would take on the work of moving cargo on the highways. 

As for me? Whoever or whatever does the driving, I still prefer trains for 90% of the hauling, with a truck doing the final leg of the journey. 

The mood was cautiously optimistic, but I'm no optimist. My dad loved being a long-haul trucker. He was not as happy when he ran a wholesale produce company, though that enabled him to put away some money for when he retired. He preferred "the Road" to the security of a desk, and he passed that love of highway travel on to me.  Driving have him a purpose. Yet dad, in retirement, did not begin to write poetry, learn Greek, or play golf. He watched TV and was bored while living on his social security and investment income.

Something the speakers did not address to my satisfaction: if we do have a future without nearly as many jobs for humans, what do many people without side interests or hobbies or talents do with their time? I'm not a good model: I've stayed more busy than ever since leaving full-time employment.

I ask my question, a Humanist's response, assuming that some sort of basic universal income would arise; Author prefers not a monthly dole but a universal basic investment fund for every citizen, beginning at birth. 

Without it, I suspect we'd have some sort of Butlerian Jihad of the mass unemployed, to smash the data centers, and frankly, I'd support smashing them if the alternative meant vast numbers of destitute folks existing alongside a tiny elite empowered by AI. Our speakers did note how this sort of future could emerge, endangering democracy. I'd argue it already is emerging under the broligarchs of Silicon Valley and our current Administration.

Yet with income for all in a jobs-free future, we might have a lot of folks on a dole, not hiking or painting but watching TV and not contributing to our civilization. In my darkest hours, I also think we already have that, without a dole in the US. 

It's better to have a purpose. I didn't hear much discussion of "what does it mean to be a human?" in last night's one-hour chat. Of course, that sort of discussion has been going on among philosophers for millennia, even before Socrates began to question people at Athens' Agora. 

Both Korinek and Autor did fear a rise in inequality, as wages might fall while AI-copiloted productivity rises. That said, everyone agreed that we will have new jobs emerge, some of them related perhaps to newly found leisure time. Autor reminded us that 100 years ago, 38% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today under 2% do. But a person in 1926 also could not image the types of careers many of us now have. Nor did they have our concept of leisure time. A video-game developer's career would have been as alien as a Man from Mars.

Fair point, but when (according to them, not if) AI and humanoid robots replace most human labor, including game design, what will most of us do to find a purpose?

What will colleges do? Korineck, bless him, as well as Hallock, upheld the value of the Liberal Arts for coming to grips with essential and enduring questions. Autor, while nodding to the value of liberal education, said he'd be more "crass" to note that a college degree also means more income and professional training. I don't disagree with him, yet marrying some careerist coursework to a passion for something seems wiser than choosing a "safe" major in a field that bores you.

The even left me unsettled. If the future they predict comes, I'd begin by having students read Plato's Republic and The Federalist Papers with me, for two explanations of what a society can do to organize itself against chaos.

If you want to see a video of the talk, UR recorded it. Thanks to Fred Hagemeister at Richmond for sharing the link.

Ten Arguments Against Hyper Data Centers

 

We lost the vote in Goochland County; 4 of 5 Supervisors voted to approve a Technology Overlay District (TOD) and Technology Zone that could include data centers. We learned that a likely center would be two million square feet, or 3000' x 200' in size. That's three times the length of USS Nimitz supercarrier or twice the square footprint of the Short Pump Town Center, a huge outdoor mall about 20 minutes from where I live. I've always hated Short Pump and that mall in particular; it was once prime farmland where a friend stabled her horse. It's now a suburban asteroid belt.

The proposed data center is worse. And soon it may be utterly obsolete. I commend to you articles by Bryan Alexander and Noah Smith about why this entire industry could soon find itself in deep trouble and why that matters to the larger economy. 

Other localities will be fighting data-center behemoths that use enormous amounts of energy and water. Their parking lots create heat-islands and they lower property values. It's likely we citizens will be taking the county to court, as plans were modified at the final moment to include 900 additional acres without public discussion. The entire process seemed rushed through, perhaps spurred on by money from industry, before a new Governor in January. She has promised to develop a statewide strategy. I hope so, and perhaps it can preempt the sort of hasty decisions made here. My state has more data centers than any other.

So what are arguments that money-hungry county officials will heed? Quality-of-life issues may help, but I think environmental concerns, sadly as usual, fall on deaf ears. Our nation's brand of capitalism, one I despise, values short-term thinking and profiteering. I'm a Distributist, not a Socialist; I want capital held and decisions made by the largest number of citizens possible. I want data centers small and as rare as possible. 

In any case, here are 10 technical and economic arguments to make with your local officials as you organize against this bonanza. They are based on my remarks at our recent county meeting. You can share these in 3 minutes at a meeting, if you practice! 

1.  AI drives this rapid growth in data centers. 
2. The AI industry is not turning a profit and has shown only limited ROI for hundreds of billions in venture capital and now, risky loans. Subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenue.
3. The current model of AI relies on “brute force” computing to simulate human reasoning. This method requires huge data centers that drive up electric bills for ratepayers, and it uses lots of ground water. The Microprocessors in data centers need to be replaced every few years, meaning short life-spans for their hardware. 
4. Real “Artificial General Intelligence” (aka AGI or “Superintelligence”) is unlikely with silicon-based semiconductor technology, yet AGI is the stated goal of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.
5. Without more powerful new models, investment may well leave this sector, as 80% of firms that have already deployed current AI models have shown no gains in productivity. 
6. While Meta and Google have varied sources of income, other big AI firms are one-trick ponies. If the gold-rush turns into a bubble that bursts, it will harm the entire economy. What would happen in your locality when a data center goes dark, its owner bankrupt?
7. NVIDIA just announced a new Spark workstation that brings hardware-based AI to developers’ desktops. Coders no longer need to send work to data centers for processing. 
8. Soon consumer devices will have this capacity.  When we have AI-on-a-laptop or phone, which is Apple’s goal for Apple Intelligence, the data-center boom will likely go bust. 
9. Does your locality want to build power-hungry, thirsty data centers that may be obsolete in a few years? 
10. Quality-of-life issues are a form of return on investment. Start with that, not data centers.

Image source: first try with ChatGPT 5 for prompt "Generate an image of a two million square foot hyper data center in ruins." 

AI Bubbles and My County: Saying "Not Yet" to Big Data Centers

Note to readers: A version of this post will be submitted to our Board of Supervisors as a formal letter, as well as to a local news outlet. We'll see if it even makes a ripple. 

Even those wary of AI agree that it can do clever work. I use it regularly with students to shape their writing ethically and to design assignments. But can the industry make enough money to continue its progress? A great deal hinges on that answer, including development on the western border of the Richmond Metro Area.

A proposal before Goochland’s Board of Supervisors would allow data centers, perhaps powered by small nuclear reactors, to be built along the Route 288 corridor. Even without considering the environmental hazards, as one who researches the industry, I’ve found economic risks of rushing off quickly to join this AI gold-rush.

CEOs constantly make utopian claims about AI's future, but numbers cloud those predictions. Subscriptions such as mine meant under $2.5 billion in revenue for ChatGPT maker OpenAI in the second half of 2024, according to sources that include The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The rest came from venture capital or circular investing, such as Nvidia's and Microsoft's massive stakes in OpenAI.

The firm estimates that building out its data centers would cost $400 billion. For such ambitious plans, companies need a lot more revenue to balance their books. An "AI Bubble" may be inflating, as several economic journalists have warned. Writing for The Atlantic, Rogé Karma notes that “In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined.” A crash in the AI sector would deal devastating blows to the economy, with local effects when superfluous data centers go dark.

For his part, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman focuses on big ideas that seem straight from science fiction. He writes that humans and computers will become one form of life soon, which he calls “The Merge.” I'll quote from his blog, "unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen." Not all of us would call such things progress, but history shows us that technological breakthroughs take time and a lot of money. Quiet supersonic airliners and nuclear fusion plants have inched closer to reality, over decades.

It well may take that long for AI data centers to not increase ratepayers’ electric bills. We’ve seen that already from existing data centers in the Commonwealth. Before we consign so much open land to data centers locally, let’s consider what experts in the field who are not CEOs or marketers have to say.

A robotics researcher, hired away from my university by Google, insisted to me that human-level thinking cannot be engineered; at best we might imperfectly simulate it, at great expense via a "brute force" computing method run in huge data centers. I recently noted in class how we might improve that, given faster computing using fewer chips, following what’s called Moore's Law. A student challenged me, claiming that silicon-based chips have not enjoyed the leaps in power and speed we expected annually up through the early 2000s.

Several academic papers I looked up support that idea. Without new types of microprocessors or exotic quantum computing, we are stuck with today’s data centers. Concurrently, our AI models remain far from perfect. Alex Reisner of The Atlantic, as well as academic researchers, found developers fudging benchmark tests that measure AI's smarts. They give the software test questions in advance, a tactic beloved by college students for many years. When AI is faces novel tasks, however, it scores far lower. Rogé Karma’s investigative work bears this out; productivity of coders dropped by 20% when working with AI, as they spent more time correcting mistakes.

Other Bubbles have popped with local consequences. A few years ago, I addressed The Board of Supervisors, whose agenda that night included motions to increase suburban-style growth in the east end of the county. I opposed this for many reasons, but one stood out: we had made zoning changes before based on empty promises, when we developed an office park called West Creek for an anchor client, Motorola. Their semiconductor plant would, in theory, have provided many hundreds of jobs.

My late father-in-law, Edward Nuckols, had addressed the Supervisors in the 90s. He was a respected master mechanic and businessman with deep ties to the community; his auto shop, unlike Motorola, had been in operation here for decades. Ed warned that big companies change their minds.

So it came to pass: Motorola backed out of their promises and Goochland was left with over $100 million in debt. One Supervisor reminded me that the county had little choice but to search for other revenue streams to repay that sum. While a fair counterargument, it does not seem we have learned much. Even if Altman and other CEOs are right, such men have no ties to any locality save the posthuman utopias they dream of inhabiting. $100 million of debt means nothing to them.

I’d love to see cheaper, more sustainable AI as a partner in our work. Today's models such as ChatGPT 5, Anthropic Claude, as well as lesser known but powerful tools such as NotebookLM or Research Rabbit, greatly help my students. We engineer prompts to find credible sources that are not hallucinated, we check human-created work for accuracy and voice, we write scripts for podcasts that AI converts to broadcast-quality audio. Plagiarism, the bugaboo of academic AI, concerns me less than does helping my students gain skills for workplaces slowly adopting AI.

My classes emphasize critical thinking when working with AI. So I'll ask Goochland's Board of Supervisors to do some critical thinking and research not influenced by the hype of Silicon Valley's billionaires. Altman claims intelligence will soon be "too cheap to meter." Older folks will recall that fable about electric bills, one made in the 1950s and 60s.

Otherwise, we could be left with more debt and large, empty buildings crumbling in the rain along 288. 

Creative Commons Image: Bioethics.com 

CS Grads Face AI-Driven Unemployment

I have told my students, ever since early 2023, "add value to AI content if you want a job." It seems that recent Computer-Science grads have found this out the hard way. Companies are hiring far fewer entry-level coders as AI takes on that task.

 A story in the New York Times today reports on the troubles faced by this cadre of coders; some of them interviewed had applied for thousands of jobs, without a single bite. One story ended well: a young woman who had been rebuffed again and again for coding jobs found one in sales for a tech firm, probably because of her communication skills honed as a TikTok influencer.

The numbers for these students are depressing:  

"Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

I don't know that others are doing much better, though I was encouraged to see that History majors have an unemployment rate of 3%. My recent students contact me for letters of reference and they are taking part-time teaching jobs, going to Law School, planning to work abroad. The job market is rather grim for them, something I experienced for very different reasons in 1983, when I moved back in with my parents, took two part-time jobs paying minimum wage, and I waited for times to improve. Friends went to the Peace Corps, the military, or grad school. 

What is different now? On the positive side, these young people know how to build professional networks (and have technology for that I'd could not have imagined). They get internships, something unheard-of except for Engineering and Business majors at Virginia in the early 1980s. On the negative side? They have been groomed from birth to get into the right school, then promised a six-figure salary. I see that among the Business-school students I teach too. I fear they too will face a round of rejections, and soon, as AI continues to evolve and companies deploy it for jobs once thought secure from automation.

Those interviewed by the Times note how rejections can come in minutes by email; AI scans the thousands of applications for AI-related skills. None? Instant round-file for that application. I got that treatment too from firms where I naively thought I might be of service as a tech writer. With a flimsy one-page resume that consisted of grocery-story work primarily, I got snubbed.

My Humanist side says "welcome to the club" of under-employed but bright people. My my humane side says "you worked hard yet you have been replaced by a machine." The answers are elusive, because as the story notes, universities are slow to implement AI-coding into their CS curricula, the one area where some new grads find work. And to be honest, that's simply the result of an industry that caught so many of us flat-footed two and a half years ago. It takes years to change a curriculum. 

I fear all those Accounting and Finance majors are next on the chopping block, as companies scale up their AI efforts.

So what do I tell my students this term? Learn to be flexible? Hone those value-adding human skills? Get ready to have side-gigs? Volunteer? Build a robust professional network? I suppose that may work...for now. I'll know more when I begin to use ChatGPT 5 soon. I fear it may be the creative genie that takes away even more jobs.

This moment marks where their and my experiences differ. When I graduated, the Federal government was not axing hundreds of thousands of jobs and no software was replacing entry-level workers wholesale. We had inflation then, but the country was run by a competent, avuncular President and sane and independent Congress. No more.

Before going to Europe for a year in 1985 and after so many rejection letters, though an aunt's contacts I managed to land a professional-writing job for the parole division of Virginia's Department of Corrections. It was soul-draining work, but it paid well. I picked up a volunteer gig tutoring ESL to Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees; that ESL experience helped me land a teaching gig in Madrid. Then grad school, then...where I am now.

Keep at it, graduates. 

Creative-Commons image: Wallpaperflare.com 

Dutch Boy Running Out of Fingers at Linden Lab

Location: Back at VWER Roundtable

How odd it feels to be blogging again, ever so briefly, about Second Life. I have returned to the virtual world for a couple of VWER meetings and am even considering updating Iggy's avatar shape and skin. His relatively new dreadlocks demand it!

Yet following a post I spotted in New World Notes, about Linden Lab's deciding to lower set-up fees for sims, I thought my two cents might contribute to the debate.

Second Life continues to lose sims at a stately pace. I wonder, as many SLers do, if the entire world is no more than a cash-cow for the Lab to milk until Project Sansar launches. Purportedly, it will:

"democratize virtual reality as a creative medium. It will empower people to easily create, share, and monetize their own multi-user, interactive virtual experiences, without requiring engineering resources. The platform will enable professional-level quality and performance with exceptional visual fidelity, 3D audio, and physics simulation."

These promises are at odds. If Sansar lets us "easily" create such 3D content using our Occulus Rift headsets, it would require tools far simpler than Blender or Maya.  Those high-end tools then put Sansar out of reach of many educators I know.  Motion-sickness issues for the Rift may be easier to resolve than those about the tools needed for content creation. I reserve judgement on the "native building options" the Lab mentions. Perhaps in-world creation for ordinary mortals and student teams will endure, freed from the cumbersome permissions system that hamstrings SL team-builds.

Meanwhile, the Lab's original virtual world chugs along shedding 20-30 sims per week of landmass, rather like an iceberg drifting with the Gulf Stream. The Lindens do no, and probably can not, do the one thing that would democratize Second Life again: cut monthly tiers deeply for ordinary users.

 

Image of trends for private estates, from Gridsurvey.com

At $25 per month for a homestead and $50 for a full sim, I'd rent server space to make a roleplaying game from my twisted imagination. I could then take advantage of SL's rich marketplace, finely designed mesh avatars and other content. Linden Lab launched its Experience Keys program precisely for content like what I envision. Unlike 3D creations at Turbosquid, the SL marketplace offers content for pennies or just a few dollars. I could build the rest.

I've no faith that the Lindens would do what it takes to get tiers lower, such as moving to a low-rent neighborhood far from San Francisco's posh restaurants and boutiques. I've no faith they'd focus more staff time on finding out what ordinary SLers, and not just their land-barons, need.

It will be interesting to see what happens as Sansar launches. I fear that some SLers are so immersed in the world that they do not see the dyke cracking and the Dutch Boy trying every finger and toe he has to plug the leaks. Then, one day, comes the deluge.

Private Estates Climb in Second Life

Location: Thinking about a new SL Road Trip

I admit that I have had a morbid interest in watching the slow decline in the number of private estates in Second Life, using Grid Survey as my point of reference.

For the first time in a LONG time, the number of private estates has risen.  One week does not a trend make, but a net gain of 16 regions sticks right out.

Have a few folks who hold land in the virtual world, sensing a new direction by Linden Lab's newly annointed CEO, decided to expand their considerable investment? Or is this mere chance?

If we do see an upward trend in region numbers, then many prognosticators, myself included will have to revise a few ideas.

Some Numbers to Ponder

Though I did get an A+ in the one statistics class I was forced to take (and perversely, enjoyed immensely) I'm no number-cruncher.

So I "ran a few numbers" today, while watching the verbal pie-fight at NWN about the Linden Lab terms of service and how it might be influencing content creators.  It would seem to me that a better test of Linden Lab's success or failure would be how many new content-creators are coming into the platform. A few high-level departures now won't do much, in terms of establishing a trend.

There is a clear trend to ponder in SL. I pulled these figures from Grid Survey's rankings of private estates in-world:

Date/ Number of private estates / Change from previous entry

10-18-10 / 24791
10-31-11 / 24432 / -359 regions
10-14-12 / 21504 / -2928 regions
10-13-13 / 19582 / -1922 regions

I suppose there's comfort in the smaller decline from 2012 to 2013.  What does the overall trend portend? At some point, there will come a tipping point. What the Lindens do when their world is no longer profitable enough to satisfy their Board remains as mysterious as anything else that comes from their offices.

SLers and Paying Attention to Updates

Location: SL Marketplace

As I prepare my swan-song teaching in SL (at least for the foreseeable future) I made some changes to the setting and dangers of the virtual House of Usher.

My last students to use it, in 2011, wanted some real chances of mayhem. I've obliged by adding a roleplayer's HUD to all of the premade avatars, and I set out to spend a few thousand Linden Dollars to add some traps, tricks, and mayhem.

The problem has been that items from Marketplace I ordered have not been delivered. Repeatedly. I think I know why.

Linden Lab recently updated its system for merchants, so they do not use a "Magic Box" server in-world, a remant of the time when the Lab purchased the retailers XstreetSL and Onrez. Now merchants who have read the notices use a direct delivery method. Note those words "who have read the notices" from Linden Lab.

Debates about Marketplace or the coming of direct delivery killing in-world real estate rage, but my concern is elsewhere. Never before have I had a Marketplace delivery to me fail.

Never.

Now both items I've purchased for the Usher avatars failed. I'm guessing that the creators have them in a Magic Box that is now useless.  How many other hundreds of small merchants, no longer active in SL, have had this occur because they were not paying any heed?

I'll send the Usher avatars shopping in-world to buy what they need, but the situation brings up a larger question. With the approach of server-side baking what will happen to tens of thousands of SL users who did not get the rather obscure blog post by the Lab, some time back? Firestorm's team has warned us to be ready. Linden Lab, however, has been all wine and roses and one blog post.

Yet even with Firestorm's good advice, I would hazard a guess that many of us don't read the text on our log-in screens.

If what I see at Marketplace, among folks who could be making money, is any indicator, hold onto your prim hats.

Chaos is coming to a metaverse near you. Wait for it.

Nobody Home (Still) in Fearzom

Location: Fearzom sim, beside my old abandoned 1024 plot

After reading about the closure of two Japanese-themed sims, plus a string of comments about the mainland emptying out, I wondered about my old bit of mainland property. It was the last time I paid tier.

I'll try to post here, occasionally, about its fate. I think I let it go in March 2010, but I kept a premium account and bought a 512 to pay the Lab no more tier. At the time, my university had its own island and I did not need a 1024. I might have stayed, had I known that an exodus of educators, including us, would occur in the next 12 months. Now, according to Tyche Shepherd, "10.6% to 11.6% of Mainland by area is abandoned parcels" and the Lab owns 46.5% of the Mainland.

I rezzed at my neighbor's old plot. He ran a furniture store but  abandoned it too, driven out of business by Marketplace. I thought at first I was at my old home, but a quick check showed my land is still not reclaimed by Governor Linden. The former neighbors' plots all went up for sale in October of 2012 or January of this year.

I wonder how long it will take the Lindens to sell the land? To reclaim mine? Stay tuned, as I've a morbid interest in this topic.

Update: I recall, perhaps incorrectly, that a year ago abandoned land constituted about 9.5% to 10% of total. Not a huge uptick, but it's a troubling one for those still with an emotional or financial stake in Second Life.

A Favorite Merchant, Rediscovered

 
Location: Second Life Marketplace

I'm not fond of Second Life Marketplace. It makes the virtual world less a world. I do use it for last-minute purchases as well as window-shopping for a visit in SL. I salute creators like Laufey Markstein of Trident, who keep a storefront going. I like to stroll through 3D objects and not simply look at photos of them.

The closing of Morris Mertel's in-world store, some time back, saddened me greatly. But there is good news of a sort.

Back when I was first building the House of Usher,  Morris was kind enough to supply it with a nice fireplace! After sitting on a few demos and buying items from Morris, I blogged about the good designs and let him know. He reciprocated with some nice gifts. I don't know that we'd have "met" in quite the same way had he not possessed an in-world store.

Linden Lab made a mistake in forcing so many creators to abandon in-world commerce. After all, the Marketplace commissions are paid in the money the Lindens themselves mint. That pricing scheme only means that merchants earn less.

But at least Morris maintains a Marketplace storefront. So visit 3D Dreamworld Studios for your medieval and renaissance furnishings, including the rats I have so enjoyed using at the Virtual House of Usher.  If Morris does not have it, I bet Laufey does. So go do some shopping!

Hell Hath No Fury, Like a Fashionista Scorned

Location: Duck, Cover, Rant

Especially when, in her blogger profile picture, she sports a tiara. My loose-cannon mouth has gotten me in trouble, again! Yay, me.

At Hamlet Au's post about the impending closure of a sim based on Firefly, I ranted without any evidence that if RP goes out of Second Life, Linden Lab will have to close the doors:

• For all the fashionista angst over mesh doo-dads and the right eyeshadow, I'd wager that there's not enough XXX and play-Barbie customer base out there to keep the Lab open. 

I'll quote and, I hope, answer CronoCloud Creegan's return rant, with me as straw man taking a beating for all the "cranky oldbies" of SL who like to build stuff, increasingly prefer Open Sim, and once had, like many male educators in SL, epic bad taste in fashion and hair (our picture today is a fashion disaster that happened to me in the OpenLife Grid some years back).

Tophat v. Tiara, Round One:

It is partly true that I'm a cranky oldbie, because I'm actually a "midbie" who came into SL in early 2007, smack-dab during the Hype Era. Still, CronoCloud misrepresents me badly in some regards. I don't actually think women are 10% of the Internet or SL; in VWER, they represent more than 50% of the attendees and, yes, they are RL women too because they have First-Life info in their profiles and care about hair, clothes, and shoes.

But this post is not about me, or even women in SL, darn it! It's about how Linden Lab pays its bills. And at the end, I'll offer to place a bet with CronoCloud.


The Numbers, PLEASE!

I faced this claim at CronoCloud's blog:

• Oh Iggy, the hardcore RP community in SL is miniscule. the clubgoing howlzers outnumber them 10 to 1 at least, even in the old days hardcore RP was a niche.

10-to-1 is a big margin. And not all "clubgoing howlzers" are fashionistas. That said, evidence please?

Let's begin with a journey to the bare-chested macho men and naked slave girls (does good skin make one a fashionista?) of Gor. The numbers may have changed, but over a year ago I encountered a statistic that 300 Gor-RP sims exist in SL.

As of yesterday, Tyche Shepherd's Grid Survey for Oct. 2010 (latest available data) shows this:

• 17153 Moderate-Rated Private Estates and 2853 Adult-Rated Ones
• 56.5% of Private Estate regions are Full Regions, 42.9% are Homesteads, 0.6% are Openspaces
• 43.2% of Mainland owned directly by Linden Accounts (Contiguous Mainland is 6723 regions including Linden Home regions)

But back to Tarl Beefcake and his clingy Kajirae: Goreans must all use private estates and not mainland because of the adult-focused content of Gorean RP.  I suspect that many other RP regions are on the mainland, and they won't ring in at $295/month. I have not visited Zindra but I suspect that the Adult-rated continent does not include Gor sims.

Using my 300 as a baseline and Tyche's percentages, that means that 169 Gorean Sims are full regions (169 @ $295/month means $49,855 / month income to the Lab). The other 131 Gorean Homestead regions bring in, at $195/ month,  $25,545. Total for Linden Lab: $75400 per month.

I don't like Gorean philosophy or RP, but that's a tidy sum.  And how does income from Marketplace fees stack up against the sort of income that even 17K moderate regions generate?

Tiara v. Tophat, Round Two?

I'm going to assume that not too many fashion-related regions are Adult-rated and that all of the Gorean ones are. CronoCloud, show me those 3000 fashion sims!  It's possible, perhaps, that 17.4% of SL regions rated Moderate are for "clubgoing howlzers" who go shopping.

But I'd like more evidence.

Let's continue:

• But, Iggy, The Barbie girls...they outnumber you and the people like you by a HUGE margin. Haven't you SEEN the HUGE number of SL fashion blogs?  

I have. I don't read too many, beyond Iris' posts at NWN and, on occasion, Slipsters and Juicy Bomb. I love shopping for suits and shoes. But I doubt that I spend more than 2000L annually on clothes or accessories for Iggy.  My skin is ancient! In 2007 (ah! where's my fake walker and wheelchair!) fashionistas pointed me to hair and skin stores to get rid of my early "Frankenstein Monster" starter look.

I suspect CronoCloud is correct about the "Barbie girls" outnumbering the rest of the SLers. But not about the role of land-income that goes to Linden Lab. Hamlet Au ran some data recently about Minecraft's success, and in that post he cited these numbers from about a year back: using Tyche's numbers at the time, he estimated that for Linden Lab's cited profit of 75 million dollars consists of 72 million from land, 3 million for everything else.

The Bottom Line: Tier is the Thing

So, I want some economic stats to show that fashion-focused SL residents exist in numbers that correspond to an income-stream capable of keeping SL viable, long term. That was my original point in replying to Hamlet's post. Even though I poked fun at virtual fasionistas, my claim was really about the economy.

• Do you not realize that avatar appearance enhancements, drive the SL economy? In other words, the Fashionistas basically run SL behind the scenes. They have for quite a while now. They're the ones spending the money. Skin Fair? Hair Fair? Sin Fair? Fashion for Life? Vintage Fair? Fantasy Fair?

I love Hair Fair, and though I've not been in a few years, I really enjoyed the Locks for Love promotion done a few years back. I need lower-ARC dreadlocks, however. This will be part of my bet, if I am proven right.

But you are not correct when you say "drive." Even if fashion is the be-all and end-all of SL, it is tier that drives the SL economy. Otherwise, the Lindens would have cut it long ago to swell the number of residents owning regions.

Fashion might be the indirect driver of tier (places to shop, socialize, or just strut), but I need evidence. Fashion creators may or may not be renting server space, depending on how deeply Marketplace has affected their in-world traffic.

Without tier from sims and parcels, SL won't survive.

• There's tons of old fashionista centric regions STILL going strong. Because unlike college students popping into SL for a class project. . .fashionfolk spend money. A LOT of money. 

I agree here. But enough to keep the doors open at LL? Evidence please?

As for college students? They are already young and fashionable, in my experience. They spend a lot of money, too, in the physical economy. They don't need avatars to be glamorous because they are avatars with profile info groomed fanatically at Facebook. But this is a digression in my counter-rant.

What I still need to be convinced of CronoCloud's arguments would be numbers.  How much money goes to LL, directly from Marketplace fees or tier from land rented by fashionistas or their suppliers? How does that compare with the RP community? Builders?

Can we even find out? Or do we keep swapping competing and sweeping generalizations?

The Wager: Dreads or 1000L on the Line!

This is fun. Let's see if we can get some answers, CronoCloud! What does it cost to keep the lights on?

Here are more numbers, in the form of a friendly wager. 1000L if you can get some hard numbers, so you can go on a shopping spree. If I am correct, you buy me some new dreadlocks at a hair store of your choice.

Get Your Wallet Out, Mr. Steely-Eyed Missile Man

Location: PayPal

Even if the International Spaceflight Museum leaves Second Life for more edu-friendly spaces in OpenSim, they need assistance in the interim.

If you are waiting to see what sort of crowdfunding options emerge, don't. Go to their donate page and help out. I used PayPal for a donation and it went through smoothly.

If you have political objections to PayPal (/me cues Miso and my other OWS pals) contact Kat Lemieux in SL for assistance in how to help the ISM pay Daddy Lindenbux his back tier and reopen the museum.

Then the real fun work begins, I hope: getting whatever content that can be exported, exported. Then off to the real frontier in virtual worlds and away from the closed playpen for breedable Gorean vampire-bunnies that is today's Second Life.

I was unable, through childish wishes, to save the real-life Apollo Program. But we SLers can at least save the dreams of a better, vanished era when humanity still had the will to climb the ladder to the heavens.

Poll Results 2012 of Education and Land Use

Here we have the results from 35 recipients who took the poll. Last year, I did leave the poll open longer, and as a result in 2011 I had 104 responses.  Perhaps this poll might have included the option that one respondent noted, namely "we own the same amount in SL as we did a year ago."

I like that idea, but I wanted to 1) repeat the questions as posed last year and 2) abide by the nine-question limit that Vizu provides for free polls. Here are the 2012 results:

 
And the 2011 results:

 

I hesitate to draw conclusions from a small sample size of 35, for a poll advertised on two e-lists related to virtual worlds. The data suggest that more people are paying out of pocket and more people in the past year, as compared to the  year before, have given up land in Second Life after the tier-discounts for education and nonprofits ended. 

I do not know who to interpret the "own no land" results. It's possible that many of the respondents are new to virtual worlds and have not made a decision. They may, in fact, be sharing parcels or islands with others, a result that is little changed from 2011.

An educator in the VWER group suggested that I poll educators again in the summer, when the two-year contracts for reduced tier end.  I would also like to know where educators have do their work, both in SL and outside it. Some questions worth asking:

• Do those remaining in SL use mainland parcels? University islands?
• Where are they going? To OpenSim grids? To Unity 3D and Jibe? Somewhere else?
• What factors most contribute to their decisions about renting server space (or hosting it locally) for a virtual world?

2012 Survey: Education, Nonprofits, and Virtual Worlds

Last year, in the wake of the decision by Linden Lab, I posted a poll of educators and those in the non-profit sector. The results can be found here.

One more year on, I'm repeating the survey. It is open until Feb. 1.

Update: Jan.  12: Hamlet Au reports Tyche Shepherd's figures on the number of private regions lost in SL in 2011: 879. I presume that most of these would not be educational sims.

Online Surveys & Market Research

New Pair of Shoes

 
Location: Jeepers Shoe Store

Surrounded by well dressed female avatars at the recent VWER meeting, I realized that my shoes are SO 2007.  All of the guys were getting some much-needed ribbing about our lack of fashion sense.

Educators--especially we guys--are not known in-world as fashion plates. So after a scolding by the ladies, for whom shoe-shopping is apparently a big deal in SL, I used the revised (and useful) search feature in Firestorm, my choice for a Viewer-2 compatible SL experience. I'm making an effort IRL to dress up more on campus, so why not in SL? Baby needs a pair of shoes!

Pretty close to a favorite RL pair of Sketchers boots I love

Without turning this blog into the skid-row version of Iris Ophelia's dispatches, I'll add that I enjoyed the experience of buying shoes in world. I love shoes IRL and buy nice ones, so I'm not a typical male shopper. I look for certain European-style dress shoes or tough-guy boots, in both SL and RL. In those regards, Jeepers Shoes (teleport link) does not disappoint.

I was particularly amused by the unique way the shop handles demos...a rock chained to the shoe.

Given that my suit worn in these shots, a "Madison Avenue" discussed in an earlier post, comes from a creator who has left SL, I felt that I was doing my bit to support the in-world economy by laying down 500L for two nicely made pairs of shoes.

Now if I can only get the shoe-saleswoman-bot to give me a foot massage!

My shopping won't save SL, but it saves my pride.

Luring Back Educators: A Different Revenue Model for Second Life

Location: Prognosticating

I see a very different shadow from the dynamic ones in the new viewer. Some weeks, every other post by Hamlet Au is a "Deathwatch." Recently we have lost, or are about to lose, The Virtual Globe Theatre, the Minoan Empire, The Lost Gardens of Apollo, and the Numbakulla quest-game region. All of these have been long-promoted landmarks in the history of Second Life, as were Rezzable's famous creations.

In each case, the tier structure of Linden Lab's world became an issue, if not the sole issue leading to the loss of content of note. Linden Lab cannot give its world away if it wishes to keep the servers running, but they are losing good content, and I have no idea yet--though it merits a follow-up to my earlier survey--how many educators have left the world or at least reduced land holding substantially. I've a hunch, from our VWER membership, that land ownership continues to decline.

Other worlds survive on a subscription model, and I cannot comment on an appropriate model for other users, something Senban Babii essayed in a reply to Au's post about the end of the Minoan region. I'll consider a model that that might be educator-friendly and emerge to replace tier for that population of users:

• Free 30-day trial with an avatar of decent design, a working if basic animation override, and some inventory good enough for a professional meeting.
• Education-only orientation and welcome areas, with a mentor program, on a new education continent zoned for General and Moderate regions.  On the continent it would be "invitation only" to those not affiliated with education, as it is on our campuses.
• Lower regional pricing than is currently the case, yet higher than OpenSim (in consideration of the excellent content SL can provide).
• A monthly subscription after the free trial ends, $10US for educators and $5 for students. The student price should not amount to more than a cheap textbook, to avoid too many complaints that would discourage use by education. If the student decided to stay after the end of the term, that would be fine. I could see giving educators one alt account with their memberships fee, students none. Adding more alts to either would cost more.
• A small plot on an educational continent with building rights, that might be merged with other plots so faculty and students could design simulations. Plots could be traded to make land adjacent but they could not be sold. Abandoned land would revert quickly to the pool for new accounts.
• Movement toward becoming the de facto standard for all grids, by first leveraging the Linden Dollar and SL Marketplace for use across approved grids.
• More work on the abandoned interoperability initiative: Perhaps for an extra monthly fee, selected inventory might reside outside the avatar and be downloadable as an IAR file on grids approved by Linden Lab and a consortium of grid-owners.

The educational continent, something that was a dream of ours for a while and a rumor just before the massive and unfortunate layoffs at Linden Lab, would be a powerful incentive to get educators like me more involved. Many of us pay nothing beyond a premium account fee.

The new CEO has wisely tried to get more "buzz" for SL with virtual pets and other flashy innovations. Will Linden Lab find enough revenue there to stay in business, as its older creators and creations vanish? And will the CEO renew any efforts to woo back educators, who do make financial commitments likely to persist longer than the latest crazy for cute pets?

Requiem for a Suit

Location: 5th and Oxford Main Store

With this week's conference, Virtual Worlds: Best Practices in Education looming, I felt an overwhelming need to look professional.

I like supporting Second Life's merchants, who have had a tough time during a real-world economic recession.  My hunt this year for a good suit was a short one, given my reading of the hilariously tongue-in-cheek fashion blog, Look at These F*ucking SLipsters.  The blog highlighted the Madison Avenue suits from a firm called 5th and Oxford.

Menswear is hard to find in Second Life, and it is harder to love. I don't want my avatar to be a tattooed love-boy fresh off his motorcycle. That's ludicrous. But a good suit? A suit that Don Draper might wear in Mad Men? Now you are talking.

Arriving at the store, I found every item reduced to 50 Linden Dollars. They are closing. I snapped up all three shades of the suit and an all-black outfit with turtleneck that might have been worn by Andy Warhol.  Shops in virtual world close for many reasons, but this is final: the items will vanish from the grid soon. What happened? I've asked the shop owner in-world and at her blog. Copybotting? Anger at Linden Lab? A new venue outside SL?


Come what may at the conference, my virtual self will have a good suit on thanks to 5th & Oxford. Sorry to see you go; I hardly got to know you. So gents, if you want a good suit, get over to the store now.

Anti-Neuromancer: Norman Rockwell's Comeback

Location: Waiting for my apple pie

image credit: public-domain image from Wikipedia

The BBC carries this story today about the "curious resurgence" of Norman Rockwell's artwork.

Disclaimer: Rockwell is a guilty pleasure for me. I love the man's gentle sense of humor.  But back to the Gibsonian connection: there's not a thing curious at all about the renewed interest in Rockwell's art.

In a present that looks so difficult, and a future that appears bleak if you ask most any SF writer, why not return to an invented world that was a pastiche of actual pre-Counterculture events but framed so that it looked typical?

Rockwell does grate on me at times. In none of his works do I see my Arabic-speaking grandmother and my dad, both hungry enough in the early 1930s to rely on an urban waste-spot for picking dandelion greens. I don't see dad's daily onion sandwich (to his death, he really hated onions).

But I have to put aside my Cybperpunk preference for dark visions and say, "many folks need this stuff and I enjoy it, too."

Or are such delusions dangerous?  As a Peak Oiler who thinks the current downturn is a symptom of longer-term hardships to come, and that technology will not solve but merely mitigate the worst effects of oil depletion and climate change, I wonder if visions of a past-that-never-really-was don't lull us into thinking we could somehow remake it.

Or perhaps we can still enjoy Rockwell for what the work is: comforting eye candy. Perhaps it is a brand of eye-candy with something more substantial inside. I find hope in a statement made by David Kamp, quoted in the Beeb's story:

"To go back to Rockwell's vision of the more community-based, and modest, American Dream has the appeal it might not have held five or six years ago."

That would be welcome news after a time with bloated Hummers with single-digit fuel economy and outsized, land-gobbling McMansions defined US life.

Rockwell's vision might have been middlebrow and whitebread, but it was modest.  That's not been a signature trait in our self-invention of American identity for a while. Like thrift and economy, it may make a comeback.

I believe that identity is invented, in real life as well as in virtual worlds, so Rockwell's return offers some hope.

Have a look at the online gallery at The Norman Rockwell Museum and see how his work moves you.

Born Too Early For Your Job?

Location: Richmond Island

As I took a last look at Richmond Island (today Linden Lab takes back the parcel) I also opened my reader to look at the SLED list.

A PhD candidate just posted to the list that she feels lost in the job market. Her research in the area of virtual worlds is not leading to the sort of career she'd like, as she reads over job listings:

Not one post has come by that has emphasized a knowledge/commitment to virtual worlds, simulations or gaming. I'm starting to almost see my dissertation as a hindrance to getting a job which hurts because I love the subject so much. Am I ahead of my time?

I've had this conversation with others working on VWs or writing dissertations. It does seem that we are using a technology that has not "taken off" yet.  I'd hate to see such bright folks become Blackboard (should be "bored") admins for some college when there are worlds out there to build.

Perhaps the revolution in virtual worlds with user-generated content (UGC) will come from the sorts of efforts John Lester discusses with Jeff Young, in a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Or perhaps the revolution will come from the private sector, when game designers move beyond casual 2D games with limited UGC to something more intriguing.

But it's very hard to wait for the future to arrive.

Wu's "Cycle" and Founding Moguls

Location: Using Google's System to Talk About It

This post begins a series to coincide with my Spring 2011 course, Cyberspace: History, Culture, Future.

We begin the class reading Tim Wu's The Master Switch: The Rise & Fall of Information Empires. I've loved Wu's narratives about the "defining moguls" in various industries. In my title I misused the term "founding" and that is not exactly apt. Such men may not found an industry but they do bring it to its apotheosis.  It's not accidental that Howard Hughes, whose company defined modern aerospace, continues to inspire Hollywood enough to get The Aviator made and released.

Such figures used to be called "Titans of Industry" in prewar America.  Either way, the metaphor is apt: Mogul emperors and pre-Olympian gods had one thing in common with these modern men: mere money has never been the primary goal or motivation. They are, Wu, insists, "a special breed" among the alpha-males and (today) alpha-females of our technocracy (29).

The mogul or titan of old desired power and domination, and their modern counterpart, "like a man who tastes combat for the first time, discovered his natural aptitude for industrial warfare" (Wu 29). No small wonder that they so interest Nietzschean me. I admire such fellows even when I dislike them: Steve Jobs made possible the amazing MacBook on which I compose this post. He also has a scorched-earth style of management that would make Kublai Khan nod in approval. Moguls are often brutes (and the titan Saturn ate his own children to avoid being deposed by one of them).

Adolph Zukor's and Mark Zuckerberg's names roll off the tongue, the similarities in vowel-sounds mimicking the same will to power that these men  brought to their innovations. Both Paramount and Facebook define a certain age of media. Competitors quake.

Then, of course, there is the fall of the Titans. In surveying the history of technology, it is common to find founders with Shakespearean flaws and, quite often, trace what began as heroic competition ending  in complacency, decadence, even madness. Aviator and Aerospace-industry legend Howard Hughes stands before me, an obsessive old man so terrified of germs, some urban legends say, that he put empty Kleenex boxes on his feet as he shuffled around his penthouses in various the Las Vegas hotels. Thus is the fate of many with imperial visions.

If any Second Life readers are still with me, I think you know who I'm talking about.  For my students, the question becomes this: what happens when a founder tries to build a system out of a disruptive technology?

Zukor managed to corral and cow the independent filmmakers and theater-owners who successfully battled The Film Trust. Out of that victory, Zukor and other winners made his system: we still use the world "Hollywood" to mean not just a place but a content-creator that is monolithic and quite often stodgy. Consider how every formulaic superhero film resembles the previous formulaic superhero film. We can thank Zukor and his peers for this.  But we can also thank them for some unforgettable moments in cinema: Ben Hur's chariot race, Dorothy's trip to Oz, A Streetcar Named Desire's heart-rending portrayal of Blanche DuBois by Vivian Leigh.

As for Facebook's Zuckerberg, it remains to be seen if his social network can become a fully fledged operating system for users, in the way that Google seems to be evolving. If so, we could have a ringside seat for a battle of systems, one that will influence our lives as much as the ascendancy of the Hollywood Studios, Microsoft's Windows OS, or Detroit's Big Three automakers.

Update  Jan. 13: I've clarified Wu's term for these men and added a properly MLA-cited direct quotation from Wu to add emphasis to my point (and to demonstrate proper integration of sources to students). Note to students that the first citation of Wu does not need his name with the page number; I already made clear the source's name. The second citation does take the page number because the source is not yet clear.  The same rules apply for paraphrase.

Work Cited:

Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf, 2010.