Positive Liberty

In the virtual reality world of SecondLife, a virtual mosque is attacked by virtual fascists. The virtual trespassing — and the virtual desecration — leave the participants of SecondLife asking some hard questions about private property and online space:

Repeated requests to leave and reports of harassment to Lindens Labs, the owners of Second Life, came to little and eventually the owner of the mosque land electronically banned the most persistent FN visitor from the mosque parcel. It was a decision not without apparent consequences.

Thirty minutes after the ban, every avatar belonging to the two anti-Nazi groups on SL was electronically excluded from Front National land. The next day, on Muslim New Year, the mosque suffered multiple attacks, the first by two unknown avatars spouting anti-Semitic slogans and sitting on the Qur’an. An illegal script was then set off, which caused everyone inside the mosque to crash out of Second Life. The owner of the mosque, a professional artist in real life, had already decided enough was enough. On Sunday, he made the mosque accessible via a members only group. Everyone on Second Life who has visited the mosque recognises this as a tragedy. Like the synagogue, also produced by a real life professional artist, the mosque is one of those creations that helps define Second Life as an aesthetic medium, rather than simply a gaming one. Nazis, as we all know, are not just Islamophobes; they are philistines.

Sadly, there is insufficient evidence to link these latest attacks to Front National, or to prove that they were planned and organised by them. On Second Life, is it easy to create a ‘fake’ avatar using a different email address and anti-FN groups believe that this ploy is already in use by FN. In the last few weeks, there have been reports of traditional Nazi targets – blacks, gays, Jews – finding themselves the victims of ‘griefers’. As yet, no one can link all these attacks to FN, but the group remain the object of intense suspicion and indeed hostility from many people on Second Life. As an Officer for the new mosque group, I have found myself recruiting informers who frequent Nazi hangouts to make sure our group is not infiltrated by trouble makers. It sounds like a joke, but some Muslims view the Second Life mosque as a sacred space.

It’s elaborate recreation of an old, old political problem: the Hobbesian state of nature, in which no guarantees exist for the security of persons or property:

It is consequent also to [the state of nature] that there be no propriety, no dominion, no ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ distinct, but only that to be every man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in, though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.

Private property, protected under law, allows us to secure our long-term aspirations, our labor, our art, our spirituality, and our sense of self. Even in SecondLife.