Got Bot?

SecondLife is a hotbed of virtual microcapitalism and technology served up on a shining three dimensional platter. With it comes growth, anger and people playing limbo with business ethics - how low can you go? Some confuse the question of ethics with the a question of being a Luddite or not. Some say that they have the technology so it should be used any way that they see fit, some don't have that technology and disagree. Some just have no concern for the community which can glue a community together. It's all rather cool to watch and even participate in at different levels - part of the research I'm doing - but then things like the landbot dilemma come up.

But wait. I haven't explained what a landbot is, what it does, and why it's such an issue for so many. The picture, to the right, is NOT a landbot. That's me in my cool Furious astromech avatar (props) next to a land sale sign to create a snapshot for this article.

What A Landbot Is

A landbot is a modified SecondLife client which follows a script and purchases land. This can continue throughout the day - scripting it's way through lists, teleporting to the best deals and buying them. This is what real estate folks in SecondLife have been doing way before I came along, and what they will be doing into the future. It's a test of patience, judgement, fast decisions and good organizational skills.

It can be as complicated as a real job, I've found. Finding the buys is a big part of SecondLife real estate. The market pricing is pretty well controlled by unspoken understanding, so if you want to make money you have to find the better buys and price them to the market. That can mean sitting around twiddling your virtual thumbs or even popping off mid-conversation. Fast when fast, slow when slow, it isn't always easy finding deals.

But if you have a bot, you can sleep - cook dinner - whatever - and the bot will find the deals you set it for. So how does one get a bot?

According to someone who knows a bot-user, the person who wrote the bot spent hundreds of hours developing it using the recently open sourced SecondLife client. By itself, this could be seen to be an admirable feat in programming, though the question of whether the bots should be allowed wasn't properly addressed before it was created - and to date hasn't seen anything tangible from Linden Lab. Mutterings, accusations and - yes - action by residents has been taken, but Linden Labs has apparently been very hands off on the situation.

Not-So-Open-Source

One of the issues of the General Public License (GPL) remains the fact that anyone can modify code and, should they share the code, the same rights which they were given should be passed along to the user.

Hidden in there is the 'distribution', and for a while it was bounced around as to whether the software on web servers - being used - should also have the source code available to the users with the same rights. Generally speaking, the source code is available to users - I do it for a living - but sometimes there is a trade secret in the source code. To protect the trade secret, the code isn't distributed - a very common sense approach.

But here is a new twist on the GPL - that someone can use code, manipulate it, and use it in an environment to tilt the scales in the favor of themselves. In essence, they have taken but they have not given back - which is where BSD-like licenses and the GPL differ (and oddly, are called less free by those who prefer BSD-like licenses).

Landbots are an example of questions related to software licensing which still have to be addressed. Why drag open source into it? The same reason nuclear technology in Iran is in the news. If everyone has nuclear ability, no one feels threatened by a lack of nuclear ability. Mind you, I'm not necessarily for Iran having nuclear weapons - but if everyone in your neighborhood has the ability to wipe you off the planet, perhaps you might want to be on even footing? Open Source and Free Software level the playing fields, but eventually the playing field tilts in favor of the ones who take best advantage of the code.

As I asked one bot-supporter during discussion - why aren't land buying bots open sourced? And if they were open sourced and available for all - would there be as much of an uproar? I somehow doubt it.
Uproar

But you say, 'uproar?' Well, 598 results in Google. In the grand scheme of things, that isn't that much. The main people who are upset are the people who understand how virtual real estate in the virtual world of SecondLife work. And newcomers can't tell what it was like before landbots, so there's no frame of reference.

Still, there are those waging their own wars of technology against landbots - doing funny things such as cutting plots in funny ways such that they are useless (bot-bait), or teleporting bots back to their scrapyards, or what have you.
What is interesting is the fact that the community has started teleporting known landbots home. Is this some strange plot to keep carbon based life forms in the competition when buying land - an underground of people twisting their moustaches and saying that technology is a bad thing?

Reality check. It's a virtual world. So if there are any kooks out there griping about technology, they should turn off their computers, disconnect their electricity and curse the Romans for the whole running water issue which has plagued mankind for centuries. So - if it isn't technology, what are people griping about?

Use of Technology

Since man first walked upright - or got kicked out of the Garden of Eden (or perhaps both, if you consider placement of the Almighty Foot) - technology has been a fact of life. Blame it on opposing thumbs or disproportionately larger nerve endings at the top of our necks if you wish. It is a fact. Those with fire had an advantage over those without fire. Those with the wheel ran over people without wheels - this is becoming less of an option nowadays so people with wheels run over other people with wheels. It's a very messy thing for humanity.

Consider toilet paper. Great stuff. Everyone should have it, and most - we hope - do. Superglue is also a wonderful thing. There's probably a reason that superglue and toilet paper have not been combined. The fact that I wrote that may lead a part of the human race to discomfort since they didn't read the implicit disclaimer in this sentence. Yet if they do such a thing, it only really harms themselves - and provides us some cheap entertainment. If they combined the two and ambushed people with it, that would be something else altogether. Assault with an amusing weapon?

The point is that just because you can do something doesn't mean that it is right. However, doing something that you can do doesn't necessarily mean that it is wrong. Doing something because there is no rule against it doesn't make it right, but what it does usually make is a rule or regulation. Somewhere in the past, it wasn't illegal to kill other people - something which plagues us to this day. Something happened and rules and regulations were created. There are instances where you are 'allowed' to kill, and society has pretty well defined these. Society is pretty good about understanding theft until you take away the medium from the property.

Society is pretty good about understanding technology when it benefits society. I've heard arguments for and against bots - some good, most bad.

Why Bots are in Question

As one bot-afficonado told me yesterday - their bot can get any land sales and beat any human to them. So this means that humans do not have a 'fair chance' when competing against bots. What it does in practice within SecondLife is allow the ones with bots to control the market. The same bot afficonado claimed that prices went down when the first bot was released. Whether the two things are connected is hard to say; there are a lot of factors involved in pricing.

Who benefits from Landbots? That is the crux of the question, and a subjective question it is.

Why Bots Exist

Bots exist because programmers wrote them because... programmers write code. But the code itself is not at issue. It simply exists. You can argue that it shouldn't have come into existence, and that steps should have been taken against it. But the bot still would have come. Why?

Because clicking around for land deals begs a better solution by anyone with a programmer's mind. It's sort of like the 'rat and cocaine' experiment, except a programmer would be the rat with a pendulum getting the cocaine. It just is. After the fact we can talk about morality and so forth - but honestly, morality is not the driving force for doing many things such as landbots. And it doesn't make the person who wrote them bad either - what can be bad is if it detracts from the experience of other residents (which it appears to be doing to some degree).

Bots Exist

I have a hard time tossing a programmer on the fire because they did what any person with an engineering mindset would do. 'Hey, this is boring. I'll just tweak some code...' However, I also have a hard time sitting down to write code or even pick my nose without considering the implications in a sense which goes beyond myself. I have no problems with rats doing cocaine for personal use - but if they start getting scales and ziploc bags, I start paying attention. Landbots are a bit of both in that they are used to trade pieces of land by gaming the system through scripts.

But no matter how I feel about it, bots are out there. I've found my own way around bots when it comes to such things, and have even automated a few things myself to tip the scales a little bit back to me.

Code Is Law

Code is law in an increasing way (go read Code: Version 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig). In a virtual world, much of what can and cannot do is governed by people who hired other people who consume flat foods and large amounts of caffeine behind doors that say "Do not tease the programmers, they will fling poo at you!"

And that means Code. At least 3 people I know of believe that Linden Lab should stop landbots when the implicit question hasn't really been addressed. Can Linden Labs stop landbots? Well, the patterns are easy enough for humans to recognize, but humans recognize a lot of things better than machines. Is it even practical to stop them? That 'solution' may be more of a problem than one might think. Perhaps you don't respond to 10 different questions, and you get tossed off the bridge like a Monty Python skit.

In essence, regulating landbots will mean regulating SecondLife real estate sales. Maybe an annoyingly hard to read thing will pop up where you have to type in some characters to buy the land? That's possible, but would be annoying (and may discriminate against people who are colorblind or legally blind). How do you regulate landbots with the least impact on the general public?

In the real world, many things are done by bots. But these things exist within a legal framework which society accepts - or changes.
Code is Law. Law is made by... who? In a virtual world, as discussed by Jack M. Balkin ¹:

...In virtual worlds, the relationship between platform owners and players is not simply one between producers and consumers. Rather, it is often a relationship of governors to citizens. Virtual worlds form communities that grow and develop in ways that the platform owners do not foresee and cannot fully control. Virtual worlds quickly become joint projects between platform owners and players. The correct model is thus not the protection of the player's interests solely as consumers, but a model of joint governance...

In SecondLife, the built in system to protect copyright enforces and is de facto law in SecondLife. The issue of landbots can be discussed intelligently - or less intelligently. At the end of the day, it comes down to bits and bytes for and against other bits and bytes. Behind these bits and bytes are human beings. Behind the laws and regulations are human beings. Behind the landbots are human beings.

So what we're really talking about is what human beings do to each other. Rules and regulations come about, but... in this and other things, the community and the governors need to hash out a plan. Done democratically, this doesn't bode well for the minority. Done bureaucratically, we may send some people in to design a horse and get an elephant. Likely the two will be combined to form a jackass with a long nose.

There is no easy solution. However, it would be comforting to know that at least someone near to the Code of the servers (*cough* Open Source *cough) would at least acknowledge the issue publicly. And that lack of acknowledgemet only demonstrates the sense in opening the source code to the servers. At least then people could switch to a form of governance and community involvement which suited their needs.

As for now, no one from Linden Lab has uttered the phrase ' Nothing to see here folks. Move along'. An official spokesperson didn't say that they were pondering it. And the community at large?

Yes, yes. The community is at large.

I should probably sleep soon. Competing with bots is very tiresome work. ;-)

¹ The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds (Ex Machina: Law, Technology, and Society), Law and Liberty in Virtual Worlds, Jack M. Balkin.