Davos in Second Life: public engagement, Flavor of the Week or damage control?

Coming out of the first of many in-world interviews with some of the major personages attending this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I am left with the question, What's the point?

The WEF is an annual gathering of 2,000 of the most influential business and political leaders in the world to discuss important policy issues and to form partnerships on areas of common concern.  It has no international governmental or legal standing, it makes no decisions, treaties or agreements on behalf of its participants, it makes no claims of legitimacy or representativeness of the planet.  It's the most powerful coffee klatch on the planet.

So why should the organizers of the WEF care what the world thinks?

An enormous amount of effort is going into trying to show that the WEF is open to dialogue between the elites gathered there and the larger world.  They are using webcasts, blogs, and Second Life appearances to at least appear to be trying to engage a larger public in what goes on there. 

This is all well and good.  I'm all for using Web2.0 and virtual worlds to try and bring people together to talk about social issues of importance, such as those being addressed in Davos.  Looking at the WEF programme, there are like 50 sessions I wish I could attend.  Since I can't be there, I will have to settle for web-mediated participation.

But part of me wonders why the bother?  There are elite gatherings all over the world that make no effort to engage the public, from the Security Council to the G8 to the World Trade Organization.

One possible reason is the same reason that SLers and WOWers spent way too much time in-world: It's really fucking cool.  The Financial Times writes about how having an avatar is the "accessory of choice" for the muck-a-mucks in Davos this year.  Just because you're an Indian textiles CEO or a Minister of Agriculture for Luxembourg doesn't mean that you don't want to have a blinged out, totally ripped avatar with your name on it.  Arianna Huffington was clearly giddy at watching her avatar and hanging out in SL.  I remember the feeling.

WEF is just getting on the hype bandwagon that has been rolling for the past five months and doesn't look like its stopping anytime soon.

Photo by Ork_dot_ch, used with permission under a CC-license

Beyond the coolness factor, the cynical side of me thinks that the WEF organizers are just covering their ass. That is, all of these tech-enabled public engagements with the Davos forum are intended to mitigate against the public backlash against a bunch of old white powerful men meeting in a swanky Swiss resort to reorganize the world.  It's that kind of symbolism that creates the fuel for anarchistic, angry anti-globalization protests, like the ones I witnessed a couple of years ago in Geneva and in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

So the question for SLers is, are we being unwittingly co-opted into the WEF elitist agenda in our rush to get the biggest names to appear in-world?  Are we letting ourselves become the next opiate of the masses that keeps people from rising up and demanding less high-powered ski trips and more action against AIDS, global warming and genocide in Darfur?  Or are we using these technologies to challenge the power structures and networks that have largely been responsible for the mess our planet is in?

I don't know the answers. Part of me is just another fan-boy excited about meeting Peter Gabriel in-world tomorrow.  But another part of me wonders if we are all monkeys getting shocked into submission.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

Rik, are the rich and powerful of the world to be discriminated against, never to participate in Second Life?

You're wrong about the Security Council and you should know better -- the SC has public meetings and SC members meet constantly with NGOs and civil society in various forms. Now, they even make field trips to regions. I don't pretend this has the depth and breadth of American democracy and Congress or something, but it's incorrect to say that the SC doesn't engage with the public these days.

It sounds to me like you don't like the rich and powerful at Davos just because they're rich and powerful. That you're very ideological about it, and imagine a world made up of, I dunno, NGO activists in Birkenstocks drinking lattes only from organic beans grown by campesinos with perfectly equitable Fair Trade purchases or something. Don't you think the world is a bit more complicated than that?

If the rich and powerful gather in Davos, then you find ways to reach them with your campaigns. You don't say they aren't relevant, or that it's wrong to be rich and powerful and have a big world coffee clutch. Because they'll do that anyway.

Not everyone who is rich and powerful is evil; some do good. And that's why the Better World folks of SL wanted to be there.

[rikomatic]

Hi Prok!

Don't misread my post. I don't mean to imply that I think that the WEF is a bad idea, or that rich people are evil. Hell, by much of the world's standards I'm pretty rich and powerful.

I certainly think there's a role for getting powerful actors together from business, government and civil society to wrestle with difficult public policy issues. That's in fact what most of my career has been about.

But I am simply questioning the knee-jerk "wowee" reaction to Davos participants appearing in SL. Yes, it's neat. But it's a far cry from actual public engagement. If they wanted that, they wouldn't be meeting in an exclusive Swiss resort within several layers of security.

[Prokofy Neva]

Rik, in fact, one theory for why this is worth bothering about, which I believe eightbar talked about, is that this safer form of interaction, where the famous can just parachute in for a few minutes, and not need layers of security or protection (or have to risk being smokebombed and have shards of glass from anarchist demonstrators), might actually be an interesting way to solve the problem of accessibility to the powerful.

For me, SL cannot even begin to take on the world's problems like Darfur or Iraq until it can solve some very, very basic problems inworld with its own organization and the lack of democracy and justice that people using the platform itself have vis-a-vis LL and its selected partners. The large corporate presence in SL, ushered in by the Lindens' long-time privileged residents at the top of the programming hierarchy, make a very stratified world.

I put in the question to Mitch Kapor why tier-payers who pay more than $10 million to the LL bottom line cannot have a seat on the board like the venture capitalists.

There's a troubling tendency to see that "politics" in SL is merely the mirror-reflections that somebody gets going in a kind of dramatic fashion by having a well-published demonstration on "Capitol Hill" against Iraq, or getting people to sound off nobly against the appearance of LePen.

But the real politics of SL are in the issues that might seem trivial, but have to do with how people behave, how they spend their time, how they interact each other, and how little consideration for their fellow man they show in SL, given all the griefing, banning, and sequestered country clubs. That reality demonstrating the contents of the human heart inworld day-to-day outside the hypervents is as valid a problem to work on as the abstraction of Darfur. Inworld that is responded to by people whose only outlet will then be to click on an email to Bush, who is not an obvious remedy to the problem other than to fund troops (which he's already done).

In your longer piece, you write, "demanding less high-powered ski trips and more action against AIDS, global warming and genocide in Darfur?"

Again, why this false apposition? People can go on ski trips. They can fool around in SL. I don't see that a Puritanical attitude toward their entertainment mode is in order. The reasons that problems like AIDS or global warming and genocide all exist aren't because someone went on a ski trip, nor if they ration their ski trips, they'll be able to add more milk to babies' diets in refugee camps.

Rather, the interesting problem is how to get people who go on skitrips to use some of their resources and connections in ways that might help. Will SL serve as a communication vehicle for them to do this easier? It seems from the Reuters interviews it might, but it's hard to tell - a lot more concerted organizing work might have to be done on this.

I guess I reject these sorts of shrill and facile ways to try to shame people who are wealthy and powerful into "doing something" -- the results that I see, such as really shocking amounts of money spent on mere awareness campaigning that leads to no actual delivery of aid monies, make me worry more.

I really think you need to dig deeper and ask: what is SL achieving? what is it for? Is it working? I'm tired of the worn-out media coverage of the same few charities being touted because they raised what is a handful of change by comparison to their RL activities.

So I look to you, who has been immersed in this non-profit world and studying new technologies to really be sincere and honest about WHAT is being achieved? Is making a cartoon mirror of a RL demonstration in Washington you didn't get to very effective beyond the first "gee whiz" news article?

So I share your concern about knee-jerk wowees. But I think it cuts both ways. We can be as skeptical about anti-war demonstrators who can't find a way to get a bus to their state house and sit in a virtual world and get the press to go "wow," as much as we can be skeptical about wealthy socialites playing in SL in Davos and saying "wow".

The hard question must truly be asked: did anybody affect real life in ways they couldn't have affected RL by merely working with the tools of RL?

[rikomatic]

Ay, there's the rub. That's pretty much the challenge that Matt Stoller of MyDD.com laid out at the National Conference on Media Reform to the Games for Change people: How are you leveraging real political power to effect change?

Well, Second Life has yet to have it's "Macaca" moment where it shows its ability to effect political change in ways that could not have been done using other media. But I think there will have to be lots of different kinds of efforts and experiments before this happens. I intend to be there -- helping, documenting, and publicizing -- when it does breakthrough.

Until then, we'll see lots of mirrors of RW political activity, like this virtual march on Capitol Hill. That's all good, in my book.