It’s (Second) Life Jim, Just As We Know It
The Minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun.
It did the experience pathetically little justice.
— Iain M Banks, Excession
Gwendolyn Kronsage and Wild Winger, advance team for RL Dutch Parliamentarians, in SL Amsterdam* [Looks like Centraal Station, without the endless building works]
Via Perspective‘s excellent post on those suburban loonies UKIP’s foray into the online environment Second Life I found that the Dutch Socialist party (who both Martin and I support) are doing the same:
Second Life Amsterdam, Real life Dutch parliamentarians:
[Centraal Station again, but with a lot of geographical changes]
Event publicist Wild Winger (seen above in rainbow-hued wings) sends along the details: “In the following three weeks, Dutch politicians Zsolt Szab? (VVD), Arda Gerkens (SP), Bert Bakker (D66) and Ad Koppejan (CDA) will be campaigning in Second Life as well as in real life. With the elections to be held on November 22, they are visiting locations in SL that are frequented regularly by Dutch people, from where they will hand out election flyers. The Members of Parliament will also tour projects in SL dealing in the field of health care and education. All of the participants recognize the importance of virtual worlds like SL: ‘Such worlds are becoming more and more realistic and, consequently, the impact they have on people and society increases, too. Politicians should be aware of this development.'” Their appearance in Dam square appearance is scheduled for 4:10-4:30am SLT.
These developments may be inevitable, but I doubt I’m ever going to get my head around why anyone thinks it advantageous in any way to exist in a virtual world like Second Life when all it is is a simulacrum of this one. What is the point of having a virtual world in which the conditions can be anything, anything at all that mathematical modelling allows, but which just replicates the meatworld you’re actually existing in? What a bloody waste of time, effort and bandwidth.
To bring RL money and politics into such a virtual world seems to negate the whole point of the exercise. If a socialist party wants to experiment in virtuality, why not create a socialist world on their own server somewhere to see how theory works in practice? Seems to me that’d be a lot more productive than canvassing Second Life denizens, most of whom can’t vote for them anyway. I’d’ve thought any actual electoral returns the SP get from SL’d be minimal. The only pointof it is for the PR value, but who wants to get lumped in with xenophobic losers like UKIP?
I can see why they’d canvass in SL if it were for a SL election: I suppose even virtual worlds must have a government – but the campaigning in SL is not aimed at SL government, it’s meant to affect a RL election. If it’s leftist geeks they want to reach, there must be better ways than this.
Personally I’ve never been a big MUD fan and Second Life does not appeal at all so perhaps I’m biased. I’ve always though that if I want greed, crime and political shenanigans I can get them here in spades.
Mind you, if someone wants to create a real human-accessible Infinite Fun Space, I might be persuaded to reconsider that stance.
Read more: Netherlands, Holland, Amsterdam, Dutch politics, Dutch elections, Second Life, Socialist Party, Political campaigns
