“I don’t like to walk around with lots of money”

The bank scare has the Germans running to the bank this morning. In the main office of JT Financials they are standing around and all the talk is about how much money they have in the bank, how much they may be able to pull out, and in general how bad SL is regulated - one girl even thought LL should have translators present “before offering their product in Germany”.

JTF, in a statement on the website that is clickable in-world, states that it switched off the server and is working on a plan to pay everyone back. Thing is, not everyone reads English and their in-world sign leads to the main page of SL Reports which had, at the time I was there, a much less clear statement from BCX on it’s front page.

One girl contacted me with a question and told me she had lost a lot of money earlier in another such event - I am guessing she meant Ginko. I told her outright she was damn stupid to try and put her money in a bank again, but she told me she didn’t like to walk around with lots of money.

Excuse me? I walk around SL all day hauling houses, cars, boats, airplanes, tons of clothing, jewels, watches, gimmicks and money. It is not like someone can just rob me like that. Banks in SL offer no added safety at all - quite the contrary I should say. Unregulated banks offer nothing but promises which cannot be enforced.

Unless you want to earn interest, you do not need a bank in Second Life. Your money is safer on the servers of Linden Lab than it is in the hands of someone playing bank in his spare time. Deposit money in-world in any bank - the viewer will tell you that you paid someone, after which LL assumes that person owns the money. You can only hope they’re good folk - but we’ve all been sent Nigerian scam letters before so we know the world is not a happy little lalaland.

If you don’t want to walk around with lots of money despite this, you should stop trying to earn it. And if earning money is what you are in Second Life for, then you’re a pretty dumb businessperson to dump it all into the account of some unknown person posing as a bank. I suggest you go back to flipping burgers.

The Metaverse, Internet 2.0, a virtual world - my ass. As long as I can call myself a banker, a doctor, a lawyer, a notary, a CEO, a policeman - and play at being one, Second Life remains a game. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Managers’ Disease in the Metaverse

Last night I had my introduction to the new Orientation Station of the Metaverse Mentors and it was fan-tas-tic. Dirk was funny, Savannah was nice, a lot of my friends were there and we were all hand-picked individuals for a very special task. I sat there and felt, well, hoodwinked.

I don’t like corporate drivel. I used to work for a Japanese firm which wanted us all to believe we were part of the same ‘family’ of happy little forklift drones and pallet pushers. It’s a managerial disease based on the belief that you can, and have to, talk people into enthousiasm. It may work for a lot of people but it doesn’t for me – quite on the contrary I should say.

When someone tells me that I was hand-picked after two days in the Second Life Mentor job – which means basically that you help people by pointing them to your experienced colleagues – I know I’m talking to a manager. The kind of guy that would tell you to call your problem a ‘challenge’. The kind of guy that would tell you that you’re part of a very special group of people when you know all your fellow drones came from temp agencies, just like you, and show up only because they want bread on the table.

In this case we don’t get paid, but they seem to have simply recruited whatever Second Life Mentors they could get their hands on. I mean, they also asked someone who uses violence against peaceful demonstrators and insults his colleagues, all while wearing the Mentor tag. And he, then, could have been part of that ‘hand-picked’ group endowed with special powers of freezing and banning on the Metaverse complex, ‘because we trust you’.

It is a great orientation course they have set up – no doubt about it. It’s beautiful, it’s very comprehensive, it is much better than Linden Lab’s confusing Orientation Islands. It also has an altogether more serious look, unlike the Disneyesque castles and volcanoes Linden Lab offers.

But please – if you want me to trust you, talk straight. Spare the predictable managerial babble for the gullible. We get enough of that from a lot of Lindens already.

Orientation Station