Quick summary:

A guy buys a Playstation 3. He then plays with the internal workings of the machine in order to get it to do even more stuff than it could before. Sony sues him for it… an action that, frankly, is hard to morally justify even if you can show paperwork that makes it legal to do so. Anonymous attacks Sony websites and starts harassing Sony executives.

In case you missed it: Sony is suing him for modifying a product that he owns. He didn’t “license” or “lease” or “rent” that product. He owns it. Apparently, that doesn’t mean what it used to, because even though he owns that product he isn’t allowed to do with it as he pleases. That’s like a food manufacturer suing you for distributing a unique recipe, or an auto part manufacturer suing you for using car parts in a different brand car.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Ars Technica recently covered the story with a focus on how people have been able to get information on these executives. To me, this focus is completely uninteresting. Detectives have been able to get personal information on other people since before electricity was discovered, and always will.

Others have focused on the specific actions of Anonymous, and whether “they” went “too far”. That’s a fun philosophical debate if you really want to kill a few hours, but doesn’t actually have anything to do with what happens next.

That’s the key: what happens next?

This latest round of attacks by “Anonymous”, the general banner for “whatever random people got ticked off enough to target Sony executives for being a bunch of jackasses”, is becoming par for the course. You can’t stop it. Anonymous isn’t an organization. It’s just the phenomena of a bunch of people acting out. They don’t know each other, they don’t “keep in touch”, and there is no leader. YOU are Anonymous.

So, if a corporation tries to hurt random people, the members of that corporation can expect backlash. This is the world we live in.

While I’m not crazy about “mob mentality” or “mob rule”, I understand why it’s starting to happen. After Enron demonstrated to the world that corporate executives are above the law even when they seriously harm people, the notion of random people being sued for doing things that hurt people only in the vaguest and most esoteric sense is more than the average Netizen is ready to handle. People who do real harm are immune to punishment, and people who do largely theorhetical harm are lynched by the system.

Since there is no government mechanism for maintaining the balance, mob rule rises.

I don’t have a solution to the problem, but I do know that we’ll see more and more of this. It will go a bit further every time. Executives responsible for random smack-downs on the public can expect more and more backlash.

For those of us that have nothing to do with this conflict on either side, expect to be caught in the crossfire. You will be able to do less on the Internet tomorrow than you can today in order to keep executives safe from being held accountable by Anonymous. Corporate services you wanted to use will go down occasionally due to Anonymous attacks. The trend will continue.

The solution? Maybe more transparency in the corporate structure, more accountability… or maybe a completely new model under which to build a business. Ah, but this is my stop folks… I’m not really the “ingenious solutions” guy, just the “understanding what the hell is going on” guy.

The TED Talk:

Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir – ‘Lux Aurumque’:

UPDATE: Eric Whitacre — Sleep (Virtual Choir 2.0):

http://www.ted.com Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on “external brains” (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves.

All hail the new flesh! Woot!

It certainly isn’t my place to argue with her and really, what’s a plebe like me going to add here? She nailed it. Or rather, she nailed us.

The only thing I suppose I could nit-pick is this notion of “slowing down”, which I hear echoed in everything from New Age and Zen to bleeding-edge technology conferences. People are spending an awful lot of time worrying about us becoming creatures that operate on a pure stimulus-response level, rather than thinking and creating ourselves.

This, I would argue, has nothing to do with technology. TV was demonized along the same lines. No, the problem isn’t the tech.

It’s the culture.

We live in a world where the wealthiest nations on the planet can’t be bothered to raise their own kids, or question the veracity of the nonsense that passes for news these days, or wonder if maybe there’s something to be concerned about when animals and insects are spontaneously dropping dead all over the globe. As long as we’re fed and entertained, we’re happy and content to take whatever we’re spoon-fed.

That’s not technology. That’s the sleep we’ve been slipping into as a people since my grandparents were born.

We Live in Public – 2008, 18A, 88 minutes

Ondi Timoner’s documentary chronicles a decade in the life of Internet pioneer Josh Harris, who instigated an “artificial society” experiment in which more than 100 artists lived under 24-hour surveillance in an underground compound in New York City. After FEMA broke up the project, Harris turned the cameras on himself and his girlfriend. Timoner’s provocative film (winner of the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance) includes clips from Harris’s projects as well as her own original footage.

Keep it digital and catch it on Netflix. It’s scary and awesome, although the ending is a little weak. The point, through, is this notion that we are all encouraged to make our lives public. It is the way forward. “Web 2.0″, “User-created content”, “Social media”, assorted buzzwords yadda yadda…

Now that we’ve lived with these ideas for a few years, the hipster movement makes sense. After all, you can’t be cool all the time, and in an age of constant surveillance and recording you’re bound to do something stupid that people will take notice of. As a result, people claim it was “supposed to be ironic”.

That, or your idiotic status update was “just trolling lololollol”… sure, we believe you. No, really, I’m not typing sarcastically or anything.

The older generation got flinchy about public perception by doing what they always do: hiding behind “professionalism”. The number of dry, sterile public profiles that tell you nothing about the person in question is staggering. People have thrown themselves into mediocrity enthusiastically in order to keep the all-seeing eye of the Internet from making them look like an ass. So, instead, they look ignorable.

Now, if “ignorable” is part of the job description, then your resume is perfect. For the rest of us, its time to just be guileless and let the chips fall where they may. Either you’ll run your business yourself, or you’ll let the world run it for you.

Which one has your best interests at heart?

Lady Gaga Telephone (Pomplamoose cover)

See also Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) – Beyonce. Hipsters are just loving this stuff. Ironic takes on popular songs make people feel so good about how very clever and “above it all” they are. Please remember to wear an expression that encapsulates focused disinterest or you’ll spoil it.

From a technological point of view, however, the above video represents how cheap and easy media has become to produce. Two people accomplish here what used to take dozens, using equipment that used to carry a prohibitive cost. A sign of the times, to be sure.

The issue I take is when people talk about us being able to do something fundamentally new here. Cheaper and faster, sure, but this isn’t actually anything new. The fact is that the same “hipster appeal” media can be produced without even using electricity:

Ukranian Polka Band playing “Hot N Cold”

Ok, sure, they’re not true hipsters because they sniggered before they started but it’s counter-balanced by the retro instrumentation. The point is that 20-somethings always consider themselves innovators by default, but pretty much always try to accomplish the exact same thing no matter what decade we’re in.

There’s a difference between new technology and true innovation.

While pop sociology isn’t what I’m primarily interested in, it’s necessary to point out that technological progress is having a ripple effect through the world of business at the moment. First websites, then email, then cell phones, and now smartphones have forced themselves into our daily lives whether we want them to or not.

Those seeking a competitive advantage often ask: “What are the kids into these days?” Many execs still feel scorched from missing the big scores of the dot-com bubble days, and want to know what’s being hyped as the next big thing before it gets forced down their throats.

This works itself out in both positive and negative ways: we sometimes find faster and cheaper ways of being productive, but we also occasionally spend time and money on things that are irrelevant. The real magic happens when we apply a little innovation.

Spinning Flax Into Gold

Take Twitter, for instance. When it first launched it was a waste of time. 90% of the content was completely useless, and only appealed to voyeur celebrity stalkers or friends who were enjoying a new way to chat. Since we were all so paranoid about missing the “next big thing”, however, massive resources were dumped into supporting the platform.

So many people had put their reputations on the line promoting Twitter that, with their backs up against the wall, they were forced to innovate. (Cue defensive technophiles rushing to the comments to tell me how unbelievably useful Twitter was even before it was released etc etc etc… guys, have a quiet moment of honesty with yourselves.) Eventually people figured out how to make it productive, shoehorning in social networking opportunities, hash-tag protocols for live on-location news updates, and quick polling for instant feedback.

The fact is that there was nothing inherently wonderful about Twitter. It was later innovation that turned it into a useful tool.

Here’s another great example: MySpace. Once the darling of the interwebs, everybody just had to be on it. Of course, then people realized that Facebook has a better interface, LinkedIn a more focused network, and custom made websites more flexibility. MySpace started to die.

How did it survive? Innovation. That MP3 player plugin, combined with some good deals with record companies, turned MySpace into one of the easiest and fastest ways for bands to promote themselves to an audience that might never listen to them otherwise. The built-in e-commerce system was a nice touch as well.

Virtual environments have the same issues. They can be a waste of time, or with a little applied innovation, the pivotal tool your business uses to create a serious competitive advantage.

The latest gadget will not save your company. Only innovation will.

Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.

One of the biggest challenges I have always faced in my efforts to broaden the appeal of virtual environments is the perception that they’re just toys. The public’s thinking is often that gaming is not a business application, and so by extension virtual worlds are just a game that isn’t all that much fun.

The effort has been to help people see that a virtual environment has nothing at all to do with gaming, and is often a very practical solution to real world problems. Slowly this understanding is growing.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that the fun factor of virtual environments does play a part. I got involved with Second Life because I’m a gamer, despite it not actually being a game. The intuitive connection exists.

While my primary outreach strategy is currently the Virtual Worlds Keynote series, I’m beginning to realize that I need to start using gaming as a framework in my future planning. Gaming strategies lead to much better ROI than traditional project management. If I can find a way to leverage existing human instincts, rather than my current policy of educating people to overcome what their instincts are telling them, I’ll get further, faster.

The seeds of some new ideas are starting to germinate… but I’d love to hear your ideas, if you’re willing to offer them. I’ll give a +1 Vorpal Sword to the best one.

What really strikes me about this is that she was able to find many big open featureless areas. Large deserts with a small oasis in the middle should be the exception, not the rule. Having said that just look how smoothly this platform runs. This is an entrepreneur’s dream project, if someone out there can find the funding to pick it up. With proper marketing there’s no reason this world couldn’t own the teen and tween demographic, even in the face of vSide and IMVU.

Here are a couple of other fan-made videos from the world to illustrate the point: a Prom in There.com Prom and an exploration of just one of the dozens of fun things to discover, in this case an ancient tomb.

• Myst Online is back! Why does this mean anything? Well, it failed twice. The game just isn’t financially viable. The creators, however, just switched the lights on and aren’t even worried about making any money out of it. That’s how cheap it has become to run these things!
• Apple gets a patent for a 3D shopping destination! Apple fans are fanatical. We have now officially bought ourselves a few million supporters of 3D environments.
• Layoffs Won’t Stop Project Wonderland – The latest from a GigaOM affiliate blog about the Wonderland team’s determination, stating that the project has enough momentum to carry it forward without any need for Oracle’s help and a number of companies are taking a serious look. Isn’t this exactly the kind of thing we started seeing just prior to the first dot-com bubble?

These are three specific examples, but in general I can tell you that there’s more virtual worlds news trying to cram itself through my news reader than ever before. I’m also hearing a lot of behind-the-scenes chatter of some huge announcements coming this summer. Brace yourself folks, 2010 is going to be a big year for virtual worlds.

—

Want some hard facts, but don’t want to go through hundreds of articles to find it? I can’t blame you. Here, chew on these PDF links:

• BP Improves Online Collaboration, Reduces Costs With Protosphere – A straight-forward case study.
• Engage! Exhibit Hall Cheat Sheet – A list of companies who are selling virtual goods and reaching out to people at a physical conference.
• The Enterprise Immersive Software Decision-Making Guide – Great if you need a quick overview of what’s out there.

About TechSoup’s Nonprofits In Second Life, Nonprofit Commons project. Learn more about how nonprofits are making a real-world difference through virtual world work.

Kudos to Draxtor Despres as well for his video work; genius as usual.

1. Whiteboard - Being able to sit in a room with a bunch of other people and talk online is great, but being able to pop notes up about what people are saying and draw quick sketches (without having to learn to build please…) would be a game-changer for many people.
2. PA System – Just being able to designate certain people as temporarily “holding the mic” would make large meetings much more feasible. Having no session controls over voice has caused a number of calamities and driven more than one client to other applications.
3. Separate the 2nd Floor – This means establishing separate audio channels on top of one another; say, one for the 1st floor and one for the 2nd. People want a lobby downstairs and an office upstairs, and they want their conversations to be private in both places. The lack of functionality here means some strangely stretched out designs.
4. Real Names – Face it: the naming convention was a cute idea in the beginning, but it just seems idiotic to corporate users. Let us use our own names over our heads.
5. File Transfer Between Avatars – People have files. They want to share those files between each other. PDFs, PPTs, and VCFs are the most commonly requested that I hear about. Let us pass files to each other without breaking immersion and fiddling with email. It doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, just a simple drag/drop http transfer call would do. Integrate a little of the existing browser code with a spot on the option wheel for “Send File” and you’re good.

I just had to spend three minutes removing “this is huge”, “obviously”, “why isn’t this already done?”, and “please!” from the entries… cut the blog entry’s length in half.

And no, I’m not going to the Jira and there’s no possible way I’m asking my clients to go in there. The Jira is a nice bug tracker, but that is not how an enterprise-level piece of software gets designed.

Ok… I’m stepping off the soapbox…