Events don’t changes things. People do. Part 2 – Do the middle class have a right to protest?

There have been several charges levelled against the One Billion Rising in Second Life. One was that it was invalidated by its refusal to address the issue of violence against men.  Or indeed, the issue of all violence everywhere.  So often was this repeated that in the end I actually wrote a post about it – which you can read here.

A second charge that was made against the event (in Second Life and in the real world) was that it was in some way invalidated by the fact that it was organised and attended by middle class women.  Several commentators made this point – including one who, in addition to stigmatising the protest as “middle class” felt the need to stress that they had working class parents.

Middle class women in Mayfair?

Here I want to stress my perspective as a Brit so there shouldn’t be mis-interpretation.  For me, “middle class” is a term that refers to white collar, professional workers. It covers a wide range of trades and professions – ranging from company directors to shopkeepers, from university professors to office workers at management level.  It’s the widest class in the UK – the upper classes are a smaller part of the system, generally being seen as people who have inherited land and/or titles.  A company director, no matter how wealthy, would not be seen as part of this class – although he or she could marry into it.  The situation might be different in the US.

In the UK, the working class would be seen as people who work primarily in junior positions, manually (or jobs where manual labour is a core component).  It would also largely include the non-working population who are claiming state benefits – although some of those might generally be seen as unemployed middle class.  Again, this might be different in the US.

The middle class is the largest class in the UK at present.  In previous times, the working class has been larger proportionately; one of Margaret Thatcher’s ambitions was to ensure that as many people as possible should identify themselves as middle class, and therefore aimed at raising living standards and matching aspirations, with the intention that the new middle classes, their aspirations to – for example – own their own home, should then vote for her party, the Conservative Party. For about a decade, this strategy was highly successful.

Ironically, despite the fact that so many people aspire to join the middle class or would classify themselves as middle class, the name itself is frequently denigrated or used pejoratively – as it has been in discussions of One Billion Rising.

And I believe this is wrong in this context – for four reasons.

1) This event wasn’t just for middle class Westerners
Of the many, many exciting aspects of this event, one of the most exciting was its global nature. The Guardian newspaper live-blogged it, and reported what happened in the UK, the Democratic Republic of Congo, across the US, in Egypt, Ethiopia, Australia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India, Mexico, Philippines, Singapore, Germany, Albania, the Netherlands, Somalia, Israel, Hong Kong, Nepal, Iceland, Turkey, the Maldives, Italy, Poland, Indonesia and … oh yes, they featured an event in Second Life too.

This was not just middle class women – although middle class women were involved.  In Albania, for example, one arena featured a centre for Roma women – one of the most disadvantaged communities in Europe.  In some countries, where dancing is seen as shocking, women marched or watched films, or talked.  In some countries where dancing is frowned upon, women danced in their own spaces – Virtual Evangelical referred to having seen it on a Saudi Arabian blog. In Bangladesh, at least 1,000 acid attack survivors were planning to take  part in rallies across the country.

It goes without saying that there are middle and even upper class women taking part in all these events.  But they are reaching wider. Women of all classes are joining in, from the Queen of Bhutan to Indian street vendors.

Someone made the point on a blog that it would probably be more useful if women spent a week reading the newspapers than dancing.  But that presupposes a free press. It presupposes that women have access to newspapers, and the means to purchase them and that – once they do have them – they know how to read. The idea of dancing was chosen, in part, because it is a simple, low cost activity that is easily understood.

2) Violence against women affects middle class women too
This really should go without saying, but the abuse that women face crosses class boundaries. Middle class women are beaten up and raped too.

3) You shouldn’t limit protests to the people affected
This is actually a more general point – because, as I said above, middle class women ARE affected by the issue.  But even if they weren’t, even if no single middle class woman was sexually or physically abused, I believe passionately that it would still be right for middle class women to protest in support of their sisters – just as we welcomed men into One Billion Rising.

Because, if you impose that limitation, you are saying that unless you have experience female genital mutilation, you can’t protest on behalf of your sisters.  You are saying that unless you have been through the hell of a forced marriage, or an acid attack, you have no right to stand up and say, “This is wrong. This must stop.”

And if you start to slice and dice in that way, you are left with one terrified girl cowering in the corner of a room … because her experience is unique and, if you have not been through it, you have no right to protest about it.

And that is so very clearly wrong.

Middle class women dancing in the tropics?

4) The middle class – and middle class women particularly – are routinely stigmatised in a attempt to silence them
And other women should not be a part of doing this.

It is an age-old problem that where we should be uniting, women attack other women. They negate what women are doing. They belittle it.  This happens for a variety of reasons, many more complex than the one that is usually cited – that these women want to curry favour with men. I think we do see that, even in an internet age (the appalling attacks on Kathy Sierra involved other women, for example).

But to assume that is the case in every instance is wrong.  There’s a space for valid criticism and a space for valid critiquing, and that is important – indeed, essential.

But the use of stigmatising terms does not foster debate.  It promotes the skewed disparity in language that consistently sees words that reference women acquiring a lower value than words that describe men.

Don’t believe me? Run these pairs through your head and remember, once they were completely matched as a term for a male – a term for a female:
Sir – Madam
Master – Mistress
King – Queen
Bachelor – Spinster
Courtier – Courtesan
In every case, the female pair of the word has either become less of an honorific than the male term, or has acquired a secondary meaning that can be used pejoratively.

In the same way, “middle class” has become a pejorative term, occupying the space once held by “do-gooder”.  It implies people who, through economic stability, are out of touch with the “real world”.  It suggests that these people are patronising and (frequently) domineering, attempting to impose their own world view on others.

And yet …

If one looks at social history, it has frequently been middle class women who have brought about great social change in the world. In times when working class women had little leisure time to give to things such as protests and social change, it was middle class women who were in the vanguard with the male social reformers – from Hannah Moore to Elizabeth Fry to Florence Nightingale to Josephine Butler to Octavia Hill to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. And that’s just Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the best known women.

There were, of course, far many more nameless middle class women involved in campaigns – sometimes as decorous as the slave sugar boycott. led (in Sheffield) by Mary Anne Rawson – but rapidly spreading across the country. Arguably the first political boycott of its time, the refusal of British consumers to be slave-produced sugar played a significant role in the ending of the slave trade in 1833.

Sometimes the campaigns were rather more dangerous.  Josephine Butler had to escape through the window of a hall where she was speaking to avoid an angry mob on at least one occasion. And one thinks too of the bravery of those women who campaigned for Prohibition. Nowadays we might find their campaign wrong-headed, but there’s no doubting the courage of those women who marched into beer halls and fin joints and knelt down and prayed.

The stigmatising of middle class protest has continued into the twentieth century too – it was one of the charges levelled at the women of Greenham Common and their protests against the nuclear weapons sited there, suggesting that their protest was, in effect, a “fashion statement” and that they would, soon enough clear off to their nice warm houses.

Well, the women have gone now, So too have the missiles.

And conditions in prisons, housing, medicine and nursing have all improved. The slave trade is long gone in the UK, women are not licensed and bullied as prostitutes, and women have had the vote for nearly a hundred years.

Thanks, in part, to the efforts of middle class women.

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Events don’t changes things. People do.

One Billion Rising happened yesterday.

Around the world, it was a big thing. It felt like a big thing to be part of it. It felt like a big thing in Second Life too, where I had the honour of being one of the people to organise it.

And this morning, when I wake up, is the world a better and bright place? Have we changed hearts and minds, and reached those clear green uplands where we have peace, truth, and justice for all?

Well, no.  But then I didn’t expect to.

Throughout much of my life, I’ve tried to take a stand on issues that I believe in. Sometimes, those issues have had popular support.  Sometimes, those issues seem to have been proved right by history – I must admit to a wry smile on reading the news that the majority of the public, ten years on, now thinks that those of us who marched against the Iraqi War in 2003 were, in fact, right.  Sometimes, protest against an overwhelming majority felt like being part of a small crazed cult who saw something that no-one could – it was crazy of us not to believe, for example, that siting land-launched nuclear missiles on our small island at vast expense was going to make Britain a safer place to live, and only left-wing fanatics and man-hating lesbian feminists could believe otherwise.

Things have changed – the missiles have, to a large extent, gone. But “socialist” and “feminist” are still often used as abuse.

There’s a story – I don’t know how apocryphal – that Chelsea Clinton had always tended to treat her mother’s feminism and her defensiveness about it as something of a joke (“Oh, Mom!”). Until she was out on the campaign trail with her – and saw for herself the level of venom and hostility directed against her mother not for political reasons (although that obviously happened too) but simply because Hilary was a woman.

Since I was a teenager, I’ve defined myself as a feminist.  I’m still a feminist. Not a post feminist.  Not a modern feminist, a lipstick feminist or any of the other labels that are applied in an effort to make feminism sound less threatening.  Just a feminist. I believe passionately in female equality – and for a lot of my life – and, let’s face it, even today in many parts of the world and in many, many societies, that’s still a deeply unpopular and often a dangerous position to hold.

Living in a Western social democratic country, I have it comparatively easy.  But throughout my life, a thing that has made me blazingly angry is that I am the target of sexual abuse simply because of my gender.

To put this in perspective – I have not been raped or beaten.  But I have been flashed at a few times, been aggressively propositioned by kerbcrawlers, been groped, verbally abused, sexually threatened etc etc. A third of women will be raped or beaten. But the overwhelming majority of the remaining two thirds will be subjected to a level of “Eve teasing”, as the appalling Indian phrase has it, that will make us feel shocked, soiled and very often scared – not because of our actions, but because of our gender.

But many men don’t understand this. I was once at a wedding party where a group of us where sitting around a table – me, my husband, a young male friend we’d brought, a single woman, and a mother with her five daughters, all in their late teens, early twenties.  For some reason we got on to the subject of the levels of abuse women faced for being women. My male friend thought that the older women were exaggerating – until every single woman round the table said, “It’s happened to me.”

And our experience can’t even compare to that of women around the world where social and cultural norms mean that for a woman even to uncover her face or step out of the door alone is to become a target for state supported abuse that might take the form of physical beatings or worse.

So do I think that dancing yesterday changed any of this?

Of course I don’t – any more than I think we stopped the Iraq War by marching, or that protests at Greenham Common sent the missiles away.

But what marching against Iraq did do was to change the focus of debate.  For politicians now to claim that a distant country endangers us and we should commit our soldiers to all-out war is far harder. Not for all time, and not for every cause – but (as the Guardian article points out) the terms of debate have been changed.

And those cold night protesting against cruise missile convoys did raise the level of debate too.

Dropping a pebble in a river won’t make a dam. But if enough people drop pebbles over enough time, there will be a dam.

Some people, of course, won’t like pebbles. They will argue the merit of grit, or mud, or concrete. “If we can’t have concrete,” they’ll say, “it’s not worth doing at all.” Some people will say that the river doesn’t need to be controlled – that if people choose to live in the floodplain, well, that’s their lookout.  Leave well alone.  All of these arguments have their merits.

But I will stand here with my pebble. Drop.

Various arguments have been raised about why One Billion Rising was wrong, was not a good event, was pointless.  I want to address some of those points. But, as I don’t want to bore you with a HUGE long screed, I propose to do this as a series of posts.

I want to make a few things clear before I start.

Posts that name people who are not taking part in the debate here, posts that attack individuals, and posts that use abusive terms will be moderated. My blog, my rules.

Other than that, let’s talk.

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Age and Avatars and One Billion Rising – two talks today at Virtual Ability!

There are two discussions today, Friday 8th February, that you won’t want to miss at the Sojourner Auditorium on Virtual Ability – at 11am and 12 noon. In the first, Saffia will be sharing (for the first time) some of the results of the survey into age and attitudes that was posted recently on this blog.

Sojourner Auditorium, Virtual Ability

Second Life’s Little Secret: A discussion
PRESENTER:  Saffia Widdershins
FRIDAY, 8 February 2013, 11am SLT

The Sojourner Auditorium, Virtual AbilityOver the years, the question of gender in virtual worlds has formed the fodder for a wide variety of newspaper and magazine articles and several well-regarded academic studies in the wider world, and some fascinating blog posts from inworld. But one area that has been comparatively overlooked – and one that may have an important bearing on some of the problems that Second Life faces today, and some of its potential strengths that could ensure its longevity – is the demographic of age.

Saffia Widdershins discusses one of Second Life’s open secrets – the fact that the inhabitants of Second Life may well be older than they appear and she’ll be talking about the results of a survey she’s conducted about age and attitudes.

Presented in voice, with text transcription.

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What is One Billion Rising About?
PRESENTER: Honour McMillan
FRIDAY 8 February, noon SLT
The Sojourner Auditorium, Virtual Ability

What is One Billion Rising about? Honour McMillan explains!

One out of every 3 women in the world will experience violence during her lifetime which totals more than one billion. Women, and the men who love them, will participate will walk away from their homes, businesses and jobs on Valentine’s Day and join together to dance in a show of collective strength.

One Billion Rising in Second Life is an officially registered event associated with the real live movement. 24 hours, 24 performers and 24 artists on 4 sims.

Presented in both Voice and text.

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Because there are always some people out there who don’t get it

And they are on blogs and forum posts and in IM telling us we are wrong because we are supporting One Billion Rising in Second Life, an event about women.

So let’s get a few things clear.

Why is this event not acknowledging the fact that violence is far more likely to occur against men than it is against women?
Because it is an event that focuses on violence against women.  There are other events that focus on different issues, and we give active support to some of these too.  At the moment we are supporting an event that focuses on violence against women.

Later in the year we will be focusing on an event that is about cancer.  That doesn’t mean that we don’t think heart disease and strokes are problems too.  But we have chosen to get involved with an event about cancer.

Why can’t you change the event to make it more inclusive? It’s anti-men!
One Billion Rising is a global event. In the real world, there are events associated with it going on in many, many different countries. I’m in the UK, and today I had an email from an MP saying how she and other MPs want to raise the issue in the UK parliament, using One Billion Rising as an occasion. A group of us decided to bring the event inworld to Second Life – as part of this huge global thing.  We are a part of the global event now.  Men are very welcome to join in – we have men on the team pulling the event together in a variety of roles. In addition, some of the artists you will see will be men, so will some of the performers. This is not a men-hating event, any more than an event about cancer would hate the healthy.

Why are you supporting an event which favours one gender and provides no support for the other? This event is one-sided!
Supporting One Billion Rising is s a choice we have made. Violence against women occurs. It should be stopped.  We quite agree that violence against men should be stopped too.  But supporting a campaign against one isn’t a denial of the other.

If we chose to support a campaign to raise awareness of prostate cancer, that wouldn’t mean we were ignoring breast cancer, or saying that prostate cancer was the more important issue or or that more people are affected by prostate cancer than breast cancer, or that resources should be directed to one and not the other.  We would be choosing to raise awareness of prostate cancer, and another time we might support a campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer or epilepsy or kidney disease.

Wanting to support a particular cause at a particular time is, actually,  rather sensible – of course you could have campaigns that oppose all violence, everywhere, just as you could have a campaign against all forms of illness.  But, historically, it has proved more fruitful in terms of raising funds and raising awareness, to focus on aspects of an issue.

If people know of a campaign that is holding an event against violence against men, let us know. We’d very likely be interested in lending our support. And we wouldn’t complain that it wasn’t including women or children or elders. We’d support it as a campaign against violence against men.

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Designing Worlds discovers when griefing turns into extortion

Now available on the web – the first show in our new season as we look at what happens when griefing becomes extortion, talking to people who have been threatened, and looking at some of the solutions people are trying, in the absence from intervention from Linden Lab.

Some of the information shared on this show might surprise or even shock you. How griefing tools are freely available on the marketplace. How people are exploiting newcomers to the grid in some pretty unpleasant ways.

Our guests on the show: from left to right – Rails Bailey, Robert Galland, Frolic Mills, Dina Petty and Kiff Clutterbuck

We talk to Kiff Clutterbuck and Dina Petty, the owners of Junkyard Blues – whose notecard to group members about the extortion they were facing triggered a widespread concern; to Frolic Mills, of Best of Second Life, who encountered a particularly appalling griefer who attacked (and continues to attack) the fashion industry; to Robert Galland, owner of Galland Homes, Member of the Second Life Bar Association and real life attorney, who gives a legal perspective of what has been happening,; and to Rails Bailey, volunteer mentor and head of security at events like SL9B, who talks about ongoing security problems in Second Life.

This is an important show – make sure you don’t miss it.

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Designing Worlds returns – with a show you can’t afford to miss

Join us at 2pm SLT today, Monday 21st January, for the first show in our current season of Designing Worlds at our studio in Garden of Dreams as we tackle an important issue that is affecting a growing number of businesses within Second Life – griefing used to run an extortion racket.

The guests with Saffia and Elrik

The griefing issue was tackled in a number of blogs – including Prim Perfect (When will we get to grips with griefing?), and we decided to follow up some of the stories we heard as a result on that.

We’ll be talking to Kiff Clutterbuck and Dina Petty, the owners of Junkyard Blues – whose notecard to group members about the extortion they were facing triggered a widespread concern; to Frolic Mills, of Best of Second Life, who encountered a particularly appalling griefer who attacked (and continues to attack) the fashion industry; to Robert Galland, owner of Galland Homes, Member of the Second Life Bar Association and real life attorney, who gives a legal perspective of what has been happening,; and to Rails Bailey, volunteer mentor and head of security at events like SL9B, who talks about ongoing security problems in Second Life.

Junkyard Blues, site of griefing attacks

This is a very important show – so make sure that you don’t miss it! Do come and join us at 2pm!

Or – if you can’t attend in person – tune in at 2pm SLT on Monday for the live show on http://treet.tv/live – where you can now chat with other audience members and even some of the participants during the show – or catch it later in the week on our shows page on the Treet.tv web site at http://treet.tv/shows/designingworlds – our very own version of the iPlayer!

Our guests on the show: from left to right – Rails Bailey, Robert Galland, Frolic Mills, Dina Petty and Kiff Clutterbuck

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Prim Perfect Jigsaw: Junkyard Blues

Junkyard Blues

Today’s jigsaw forms an interesting link between yesterday’s blogpost and today’s Designing Worlds show.

The image is from Junkyard Blues, that great blues venue where you can hear awesome music and dance the night away (whatever timezone you are in). So there’s a link with our plans for a huge dance party to celebrate One Billion Rising.

However, sadly, Junkyard Blues has recently been the target of some particularly vicious griefing attacks, which have been carried out by people who have tried to extort money. A protection racket, in other words. I blogged about that – as did many other fantastic bloggers. Now Kiff Clutterbuck and Dina Perry, owners of Junkyard Blues, will be on today’s Designing Worlds show to talk about their experiences – along with other guests.

There’ll be more details about the show later today, so watch this space!

In the meantime, let’s do a jigsaw!

Junkyard Blues, photographed by Wildstar Beaumont

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Catch up with your Prim Perfect jigsaws (showing images of Second Life and other virtual worlds).

If you’d like to submit a photo of your own to feature as a jigsaw, send it to the Prim Perfect Flickr Group. It should be sized 800w x 600h, or else it will need to be re-sized.

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Shine, Perishing Second Life

Cerridwen’s Cauldron – photographed by Wildstar Beaumont

In the UK, there are two meanings of the word “perishing”. The formal one is the one Randall Jeffers uses in his glorious poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic” – where the word is used to mean to “be destroyed or die, esp in an untimely way”. It can also mean to rot as in “leather perishes if exposed to bad weather”.

But it can also be used as an intensifier, qualifying something in a negative, but almost humorous way as in “it’s a perishing nuisance” or “it’s those perishing kids again!”  Indeed, the later phrase was at the root of a very popular comic strip series in the UK known as The Perishers. It owed a lot to Peanuts, but there were decidedly English.

This dichotomy – between the drama of the destruction and the dying, and the intense irritation – seems to me to reflect something about Second Life; much loved and frequently infuriating, its demise is also frequently signposted … but is it always what it seems?

Recently, the news came out that the number of Main Grid regions has dropped below 28, 000. Oh noes! As recently as April 2012 they were above 30,000. Surely this slow decline marks the approaching demise of Second Life?

The Temple of Neptune in Nautilus Blyth

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.  Numbers of Main Grid regions are dropping – but they have been significantly lower before (and not just before the late 2006 boom).  They were below 28,000 from the beginning of 2009 until late June 2009, when they began to grow again, despite the real world economic downturn (and post the Open Space debacle). Maybe this is “The Beginning of the End”(TM), or maybe it is a start of year blip.

The New Year is bringing in many changes, and some departures. But it is also bringing in new opportunities and new ventures which can be rather exciting.

Alchemy Immortalis

For example, Alchemy Immortalis will be closing their open regions – news that has saddened many of their fans. However, that sadness is tempered with the fact that freeing Alchemy and Immortalis from managing bed and breakfasts will allow them more time to concentrate on creating new and exciting products for the store and other projects.

Oh, and the patisserie remains the Ultimate Place in Second Life for lunch with discerning girlfriends – and you can pick up amazing recipes there too that you can cook in real life!

Armada Breakaway

Sadly, Armada Breakway, that fantastic region of floating pirate ships and improbable airships all lashed together, will be closing shortly, but I understand that the active pirates there will be heading off for a new home in the Blake Sea. I look forward (with some trepidation) to learning what they will be getting up to there.

In other news, Gabrielle Riel, the well-known owner of Radio Riel, is ending her ownership of the New Toulouse estate.

New Toulouse

For the past four years, Gabi has been the owner of New Toulouse, an area with the look and feel of New Orleans back at the turn of the century.  Now she feels that it is time to move on … but she hasn’t finished with community management; she is just ready for a new theme! The estate of New Toulouse has been sold (as it was once before – to Gabi!) and will continue, supplying a home and a commercial location for all those who like the Louisana feel and music.

And Gabi will develop her mysterious – and very beautiful new community, around the regions of Witchport, Witchwoods and Cairntaigh.

Witchwoods

Similarly, the ground level of Cerridwen’s Cauldron – surely one of the most beautful regions in Second Life – will shortly be closing, something that will make a lot of its fans very sad.

But that sadness is mitigated by the news that Elicio Ember, the Cauldron’s owner and creator, is closing it so that he can undertake a complete rebuild of the ground level – something that many people are excited to see.

Cerridwen’s Cauldron:the temple in the sky – photograph by Wildstar Beaumont

And if you do suffer withdrawal symptoms from missing the ground level of the Cauldron (which hasn’t closed yet, so do go and see it!), there is still the temple level to explore.

And there’s the glorious Calas Galadhon estate. Closed for the whole of January – I had some very worried emails about that! – but, hap[pily, just for a complete overhaul and redesign - which the owners are very excited about.  We're planning to show that on Designing Worlds in the near future.

Calas Galadhon – photographed by PJ Trenton

But there are problems. Some are projects coming to an end – the closure of the Swedish Embassy, for example.

And there was the threatened closure of Arcachon – a lovely Francophone region which I wrote about the other day.  The good news is that the word about it got out – people went and donated, and raised enough money to give the region another month of life.  But whether that can be extended is a moot point.

Arcachon – under threat

So go and enjoy the beauties of Second Life that are going … and look forward to those that are to come.  Shine, perishing Second Life.

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Prim Perfect Jigsaw: Beauty … and the beastliness of griefing

Rosemist Isle

Today’s jigsaw comes from an brilliant post written by Honour Macmillan yesterday on her blog – Honour’s Post Menopausal View (of Second Life). Yesterday she wrote about the griefing problem (There is no Second Amendment in Second Life; Crimes & the Lack of Punishment) that I talked about in my post too.

Yordie Sands and Inara Pey have also written about this too – I do recommend checking them all out.

And as a matter of urgency, contact Linden Lab and ask them to add Terms of Service Violation as a flag on the Marketplace, so that if you find tools designed to crash sims openly on sale on the Marketplace, you can report them. Currently you can only flag for listing violations and infringement of intellectual property rights (or standard sales things such as ‘not as advertised’).

But before you do that, let’s do a jigsaw, a photograph taken in the stunning sim of Rosemist Isle.

Rosemist Isle, photograph by Honour Macmillan

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Catch up with your Prim Perfect jigsaws (showing images of Second Life and other virtual worlds).

If you’d like to submit a photo of your own to feature as a jigsaw, send it to the Prim Perfect Flickr Group. It should be sized 800w x 600h, or else it will need to be re-sized.

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When will we get to grips with griefing?

The answer is, of course, never, as long as some script kiddie is getting his (and yes, it is usually ‘his’) lolz by causing misery, frustration and anger in other people.

But we really don’t have to enable it.

Yordie Sands has an excellent post written yesterday about the griefing that has been happening at that brilliant music venue, Junkyard Blues. Go and read it – I’ll wait.

Junkyard Blues – the jive already jumping at 4.30am SLT

In brief, Junkyard Blues has recently been hit by relentless griefing attacks – as they (Kiff Clutterbuck and Dina Petty, owners of Junkward Blues) describe it “multiple griefers with blinding graphics card attacks and sim lag/crashes … In some instances the computers of many staff and patrons actually shut down or rebooted as a result of the attacks.”  Staff were concerned that the repeated attacks were damaging their machines, and pretty inevitably, patrons of the club were staying away.  And, in fact, this wasn’t just for the lolz.  Junkyard Blues say: “At one point we were told that if we paid money to the griefers they would stop attacking us.” This is a protection racket. This is criminal extortion under UK law – and I would imagine US law too.

As a result, after six and a half years, Junkyard Blues has had to become a member only venue. That lovely environment, which we featured in our May 2010 issue, is no longer a venue for popping in to casually to catch a favourite act. Inevitably, audiences will be decreased.  And that has a concomitant effect on the small stores that trade alongside the club, from which the club draws a significant part of its revenue, I’d imagine.  That is an economic model, remember, that has already taken a body blow from the Marketplace.

Yes, you remember the Marketplace. It’s the place where griefers can get sim crashers for as little as $50 Lindens. These are, of course, sold with wide eyed declarations that these are only to be used in sims which purchasers are allowed to blow up, and they are not to be used for griefing.

This is simply not good enough. The Marketplace is policed by residents and Lindens for instances of copybotted goods; the same thing must happen to tools used for griefing – in other words tools whose primary functions deliberately violate the terms of service.

Some of the Broadwalk Stores at Junkyard Blues

In addition, there needs to be a system where sims that are coming under regular attack attract a special level of attention.  in the case of Junkyard Blues, “In all but a few of the attacks we could not recover the Junkyard sim without Linden help, sometimes resulting in hours of waiting for business hours to begin the following day” and “All that was available from Linden Lab was the invitation to file abuse reports, one by one, on each individual who attacked us if we could even give them a name, and then we’d see the same people we reported returning to do it again.”

In a system where it is the work of minutes to create new alts, arm up with new weapons and attack again and again as part of a criminal enterprise, there needs to be a better system for protecting residents under systematic and criminally motivated attack than abuse reports.

The grid is already suffering economically and seeing a pattern of slow long term decline.  If (in addition to the problems of high tier and the dominance of the Marketplace forcing small businesses off the grid) venue owners are forced to lock down their clubs to members only, the grid is going to become even less welcoming to newcomers and the decline will continue.

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