"People cannot stand too much reality." C.G. Jung
Not far different than the panacea during the California Gold Rush, the promises of Linden Labs about SecondLife, and the life itself are littered with tiny bits of gold dust and huge chunks of fool's gold in an ever growing desert of segmentation. Unlike the achievers during the Internet boom that made real dollars off of their ingenuity and created real unfettered opportunities, second life's game provided a very limited drinkable "virtual opportunity" during its heyday for only a very few which now appears to be feeling the drier results of its inevitable evaporation (gambling, landbots, and now banking). Only a few it seems will ever be allowed to extract any gold if ever a gold vien is struck in them thar serverfarms of San Francicso. Most that now newly start the wagon treck cross the internet wires to LL's servers, like the many innovative pioneers that have already died or are drying out due to the lack of virtual water (Ginko, Bragg, W University , Europoeans - VAT, casinos... add more as the list grows), these new "venturers" seem destined to starve or be given up or to be slowly eaten one small linden at a time by the vulturebots of SL;; these poor SecondLife avatarsouls, land of virtualdead it would appear, will live out their posterity permanently encoded in a tiny bit of magnetic server space in the isolated growing desert that has become this virtual unorganized unstable web-kind of game.
This result seems to me is constistent with the historical outcomes of simliar historical larger closed communal loopback systems subject or carriers of of ME, "malignant egophenia" (coherently described by Paul Levy in his recent work The Madness of George W. Bush). While not enough space here to fully discuss Mr. Levy's analysis and its applicability to the hysteria and addiction surrounding Second Life, a few points he makes for the world at large and collective hystiera are notworthy for considering why domain farming the phrase "second life" in the real world, like buying virtual land or selling scripted objects in Second Life, is ultimately valueless and detracts from productivity gains in the real world lives of its participants. (Currently aggregating as many "secondlife" domain names and their current status: intial results indicate that over 99% are "parked" awaiting great speculation. A few recently showed up on ebay, (here's a new one:
SLAvies.com - SL domain name short Second Life Avatars http://cgi.ebay.com/SLAvies-com-SL-domain-name-short-Second-Life-Avatars_W0QQitemZ250130292320QQihZ015QQcategoryZ11153QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQtrksidZp1638.m118.l1247QQcmdZViewItem
prior ones were not purchased). (Oops, I bought a few too... have to put them up soon). Though a virtual world, Second Life cannot escape, and unfortunately emboldens and propigates this current affliction of the human psyche.
To paraphrase and apply Mr. Levy's analysis within the context of Second Life (using "[]" to signify this author's opinioned modifications to Mr. Levy's original text):
"One of the signatures of ME disease is that it hooks people through their unconscious blindspot, so when people are afflicted by this deadly disease, they are truly asleep to what is being acted out through them." [Participants are] "being manipulated, used and victimized, like [] puppet[s] on a string, by a deeper matrix of coverup and deceit that has been perpetrated -- and has now taken on an autonomous life of it's own. Malignant egophrenia is an expression of, and is at the root of, the extreme polarization and dissociation in both the human psyche and the world process at large." "Egophrenia is a disease of the consciousness -- it is consciousness itself becoming so sick so as to create a greater level of health and wholeness in itself. The disease is the conduit through which consciousness grows into greater orders of freedom. In the disease, consciousness is revealing itself to itself, which is to say that the disease is an unfolding relveation." (Which is one of the reasons I insisted I was quite lucky to have been banned and my land taken from me. That act by LL conferred an unintended benevolent result upon me; I was broken free of the disease and its concurrent loopback addicton.)
Looking at the grid and participant and commentators infatuation with the process, it occurs that Second Life engenders a collective psychosis within its limited community, no different than a cult. "It induces a very hard to recognize form of insanity. "When we fall prey to egophrenia, we are unable to recongize that we are taken over, as we become bewitched by our own porjections, [our avatars], accusing other [avatars] of what we ourselves are doing." ... "Part of the sinister nature of the disease is that when we point at it and call it by its true name -- as being a form of insanity called ignorance -- people who are stricken with the disease will see uas as the one's who are crazy. Because egophrenia hooks us through our unconscions, when we are infected with it, just like a sociopath, we don't experience ourselves as being sick or needing help. When we are taken over by egophrenia, we always see the problem as existing in someone else."
"By being duplicitous and trying to hide [ulterior motives are] unwittingly reveal[ed]." The pleadings in my case declaring to the real world that essentially "own" did not mean "own" but rather something like leasing server space (see cite / quote) (Clintonspeak ... "does 'is' mean 'is"?), and in the near past, Mr. Ginsu Yoon's description as recorded by Neva at [secondthoughts.typepad.com], seem to evidence "unkonwingly giving voice to the unconscious shadow, the part of the [entity] whose intentions are the polar opposite [of] they consciously imagine[] and represent[] them to be at the moment." In their pleadings in my case, and their later statements, and in numerous other ways cited across the internet, the LL had finally begun to meet one of its objectives, to be transparent, "blowing its own cover in the process" and presumably hoping for forgiveness or hoping that there was sufficient momentum, that it had passed the "tipping point" to corporate freedom within the corporate brothehood, so as to continue its way unharmed untarnished and uninhibited by its prior shadows. "Unless we recognize the insidious nature of this psychic disease, there is a crazy-making field around it that will make us a part of itself. Collective psychosis is like that."
