1 post tagged “equality”

Last night, the Level Playing Field Institute hosted an event in Palo Alto, California. The event was somewhat mirrored in SL through streaming media. Mitch Kapor (chairman of Linden Labs, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and creator of the Lotus spreadsheet application among other accomplishments) gave some introductory remarks at the SL portion of the event. In his remarks, Mitch made a few comments that lead me to believe that in his view, Dr. Martin Luther King's hope for a completely equal society had been achieved in SL. Not being a professional journalist, I didn't take his words down verbatim, nor do I know the address where the video stream was hosted so you may check for yourself. You'll just have to depend upon my recollection. [edit: better yet, here's a report from the Second Life Herald]

Mitch's proposition was that in SL, everyone is equal because no one knows (and most don't care) who you are, where you live, what kind of car you drive, what color your skin may be, whether you attend a church or not, etc. What matters in his view is what you know and what you can do. So we now have a world where people are truly judged, "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

I might agree with his assertion, in principle, but I think it falls short on the practical implementation. Consider me, for example (what can I say? I'm an easy target). Leaving aside a fairly strong background in computers (in comparison to Joe Six-Pack, anyway), I don't know anything that would be useful to anyone in SL. It might be possible that I could function as an academic tutor in some subject areas, but because I don't know much about working with prims or scipting and am not terribly artistic to begin with, my potential to be an economically viable entity in SL in its current incarnation is very slim. Instead, I would have to exist as as nothing more than a consumer, cabable of interacting with other SL residents, but incapable of being economically productive.

Consider, also, the basic infrastructure that must be in place for me to even be present in SL. I must be affluent enough to own a fairly current computer (or at least have easy access to one). I must also have a fast internet connection or be willing to wait a very long time for all of the textures to finish rezzing on a slow one. I must be comptuer literate enough to use the software. I must be capable of using text as a communication tool (enough written language skills to be able to communicate effectively) and I must have something to say that people might actually be interested in hearing (arguable whether I meet that condition, but we can pretend).

In effect, SL is an environment where the residents have a greater degree of commonality than you would find in real life. Until such a time as SL is practically accessible to the public at large, Dr. King's dream remains only a dream, even in the virtual world.