First of all, I would like to thank Eyebeam Gallery, Still Water and Rhizome for inviting me to participate. Hopefully, I will accumulate some good karma as a result of my participation (heh heh). Now it is time to get my digital hands dirty and dive into the illuminating questions raised by our Moderator, Joline Blais. I will frame her questions one by one in quotes and then answer what I can:

1) "When communities open themselves up to sharing their resources with the world at large, they also open themselves up to exploitation by special interests."

—I would say that it is possible that any open-system is vulnerable to the whims and desires of external influences that you may or may not personally agree with and/or can relate to. But then again, getting credit for opening up the virtual resources creates virtual prestige and creates a Cyber-Star Class in such a scenario so that is little bit more of a good deal than spending your days living a gated "Half-Life".

However, I think in a closed-system, much worse scenarios can potentially happen. I was just watching this interview with Howard Bloom last night on the "Disinformation" DVD and in it, he addressed the increasing polarization between "Globalism" and "Tribalism".

I would likely agree with him in that if the source for an Avatar Community remains closed, then what might result is this reactionary tribalism or exclusive Neo-Fascism (Tribally centered) which certainly has led to more overt suffering than those caused by government sanctioned affirmative action (Globally centered).

Given all the options presented and time to make a decision, I think I would still much rather live in a plural and open world with the occasional exploitation by a "Special Interest Group" than work as a microserf for a corporately controlled Monoculture…even if it was to be the Monocultural Theme-Park of my own design.

Hmmm…then again…. Ok, and then you might ask what if I was the MacroLord rather than the MicroSerf in my own Monocultural Playground?….hmmm…Difficult one (wink wink).

2) "How can communal protocols and trust metrics address the incursions of such interlopers in a way that is consistent with a community's egalitarian ethics?"

—-Those are very cool soundbytes…I will add "Communcal Protocols" and "Trust Metrics" to my personal glossary of terms. The DigitalSpace Traveler Avatar Community is a great case study for addressing the concern of having a decentralized and virtual government having to come to terms with potential "interlopers" (and there have been many such types in Traveler).

Before I ramble on about Traveler specifically, I should say that there are very few instances in contemporary Avatar environments where there is truly an egalitarian system. There is certainly the pretense of one and some software protocols allow for Avatars to "physically" be equally strong but even then, an obvious hierarchy soon develops and the Traveler Community is no exception. It raises the question then that perhaps a truly egalitarian system in an Avatar Environment is not only Utopian but even desirable?

Taking the case of Traveler, the main selling point of the Traveler community is its fully integrated Voice-Chat system. Therefore, Avatar citizens have to settle the bulk of their disputes through diplomatic channels only.

What a great way to deal with interlopers than to learn the necessary social skills in order to reason with them?

One example occurred in Traveler where a young kid rudely interrupted the weekly church service held every Sunday in the Traveler community. The Pastor (a Black and White Sea-Horse Avatar from Australia) managed to convince this Atheist kid that God is valid enough to calmly worship without interruption. He even used the Traveler Society as an analogy for a world where God looks over all of Creation and passes judgement on an individual's actions. It is possible that maybe this young kid even knew the White-Bearded God of Traveler (aka. Steve DiPaola - www.dipaola.org)who might be watching over him in this Avatarial Aquarium (or CyberPanOpticon) at that very minute. There was no force involved with this young kid's conversion.

Through polite dialog, he was able to simultaneously see the virtual light and the writing on the polygon wall. This altercation was entirely resolved through community protocols and straight-forward diplomacy.

The methods of diplomacy that is happening in Traveler today represents the ideal simulacra for how disputes could be mediated in the offline world.

I should add that Michael Heim (the Author of the "Metaphysics of Virtual Reality", 1993 and "Virtual Realism, 1998" saw the expanded potential for avatar environments to settle disputes with "interlopers" early on in the game and developed his own forum called the International Avatar Initiative for Avatar Diplomacy. www.mheim.com/iai

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Traveler's Distinct Community Protocols are embedded directly into the template design of the Avatar and the structural interface running the software itself.

People use both the simulacra of traditional body-language conventions (or "head language" as there are not many torsos around) such as eye-contact, raising their voice and turning their head upside down (to signal that they are away from the computer). Quite often, the use of these same conventions that we use in daily life such as the oscillation of voice intonation and body language, help enforce the community standards and protocols stated in their Mission Statement.

However, even with all these conventions embedded into the structural integrity of the system, there is still plenty of instances where people play "head games" with one another.

In extreme cases, there are documented cases of Cyberterrorism (or Avaterrorism) in Traveler where certain Avatars dress themselves as room-sized pixellated donuts and squish several law-abiding Avatars at a time. When the OnLive Corporation used to own Traveler, they occasionally had to go as far as to call the FBI to boot the perpetrators off the system.

Now that the Traveler server is more-or-less run by the Traveler Collective, the subversive acts of "interlopers" no longer qualify as "tress-passing".

3) "Does the creative subversion of an open community help us imagine stronger models for such communities, or merely undermine them? "

—-Well, there might be a personal bias here but I would say that, of course, if the act of subversion is truly creative than the community in question becomes culturally enriched. A lot of previous Avatar environments have failed because they did not initially build the software with subversion in mind. Alot of Avatar Companies have said to their investors, "If we build it, they will come". I think they said the same thing about Brasilia ;-D

The best case study to show how not accounting for citizen subversion leads to the entropy of the community infrastructure can be found in Chip Morningstar's and Randall Farmer's paper "The Lessons of LucasFilms Habitat" - <A Href="http://www.ibiblio.org/dbarberi/papers/vcomm/" target="_blank">http://www.ibiblio.org/dbarberi/papers/vcomm/</A>

Morningstar and Farmer made the very first Avatar community for the Commodore 64 and a dial-up modem so they should know a thing or two about the technical consequences of mass-subversion.

I think the essay can be best summarized by their sober conclusion that (in their words):

'The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented.'

Because Habitat was not built with subversion in mind, most of the subversive acts appeared counter-productive to the technical constraints of the server power but by no means counter-creative.