Second Life to Le Pen: Non!

By now, everybody who reads global geeknews has heard about the more or less spontaneous protest, by francophone residents of the Second Life virtuality, against the appearance, the week before last, of a virtual office connected to the ultra-rightist Front Nacional party of Jean-Marie Le Pen. If not, a very good account can be found here -- comprising not only original reportage by militantgeek, but solid quotes from (and links to the work of) SL journo Wagner James Au, whose analysis of the events is both lyrical and acute.

Because the Dobb's SL laboratory and Caffeine Cathedral is on Ile de France in the French Archipelago, I was on the scene as these events unfolded -- as usual, my jaw dropping and the hair on the back of my neck standing on end with the eerie feeling of being present as history was being made.

And as usual, the lay media got it wrong. And in this case, even the SL media got it a little wrong -- not because they didn't understand what was going on, but because they were explaining it mostly for an audience of SL residents.

The facts aren't in dispute: Le Pen's office appears. Beginning ironically on Martin Luther King day (a fact of which the French were no doubt mostly unaware, but which inflected our stateside perception of events), a protest is mounted. Over the course of 24 hours or so, the mood becomes increasingly ugly. And then, at a certain point, an attack commences -- residents pull out chain-guns, push weapons, rez cages and start sending in flying saucers dropping exploding pink pigs. Eventually, the Le Penistes retreat, taking their office with them, and trailing cries of "We shall return!" And today, a small casino stands on the spot.

In the aftermath, the global media concensus (at least among "fair and balanced" sources) seems to be that:

1. This is important. Which I don't dispute, but then again, important why? There have been fights and protests in SL before -- but this is the first time (I think) such famous names and deeply-polarized philosophies have been involved. Beyond that, there's nothing much to mark this incident as having special significance ... then again, we could say as much about the Potemkin affair or the capture of Fort Sumter -- not distinguished or particularly meaningful actions in and of themselves, but definitely "shots heard 'round the world."
2. It's a good thing that SL residents drove out Le Pen. Which I do dispute, but only a little. I'm all for free speech and assembly. But frankly, it's hard for me to be concerned with the free-speech and assembly rights of neo-fascists. And I find the tenacious counterculturalism (an agglomeration of leftism, greenism, sciencism, humanism, libertarianism, entrepreneurism, anti-corporatism and other weird bedfellows) of SL refreshing and hopeful. Also, this is my SL neighborhood we're talking about -- donc je m'en fiche les questions de 'constitutionalite.'
3. But it was bad that SL residents used "violence" to quash "free speech." This, I dispute stridently, on semantic and philosophical grounds -- and it was this point the lay media most completely failed to grasp. Violence in Second Life is symbolic -- confined to displays of fireworks, tossing avatars around harmlessly, and various forms of high- and low-tech "griefing" (i.e., tossing avatars several thousand meters, attaching 200MB textures to people's heads to blind them, rezzing cages around them, etc.). Annoying, yes. Denial-of-servicey, sure. But harmless. And unless you have rights to property, you can't hurt, steal or displace it at all. So all the apparent violence done, here, could be construed as no more than a form of "speech."

   Posted by John Jainschigg at 01:54 PM  Permalink

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