Re: [mmox] mmox Digest, Vol 2, Issue 86

["[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>]

>   - Access to world data decoupled from any notion of an agent or avatar travelling there (otherwise you would never be able to see what's on the other side of a portal or boundary before travelling).
   - World transitions decoupled from any geographical layout or topology (otherwise you would never be able to teleport by landmark or address).

>We don't mandate any specific *policy* of course, so a particular world may allow only one particular method of entry.  The protocol itself however does need to provide the above two functions as *decoupled mechanisms*, otherwise more general movement between worlds is blocked.

No. It doesn't. There's no technical exigency that mandates it; only an ideological one.

Once again, I do want to point out where these radical, Extropian-type of ideological convictions are intruding and mark that point as a point where the individual and his or her rights begin to be eroded by online virtual worlds and where all kinds of problematic issues emerge.

Having the ability to "access world data" without having to present as a presence in that world, as an individual account, means that all kinds of entities can scrape, search, invade, spy on, monitor, etc. worlds and the avatarized people in them without accountability or constraint. While server-side, possibly providers see them log on as a discrete account, they wouldn't present inworld in that fashion, thus being at an advantage in some ways over others and opening up problems of privacy and of manipulation of media.

I'm also troubled by the constant scramble away from geographical contiguity, when in fact you can have both geographical contiguity and the teleport/landmark. The Croquet portals are also world-destroying as they also make geography "conditional," or constantly involve peering into other spaces without presence, causing disruption of scenes, with the treatment of each scene as infinitly breakable and therefore all deconstructed a la Derrida. 

Contiguity is part of what creates community, and in fact involves accountability through persistence and visibility. You can have wormholes and portals but you don't have to strip out the substrate of contiguity to achieve it.

Prokofy Neva


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