Leslie Nassar 1973-2016

No one has a bad word to say about Leslie Nassar, now that he is dead. (See Helen Razer at Crikey for a more traditional obituary.) He is a man made famous for saying bad words about other people, so this is unusual. Those who were lucky enough to know him, work with him or follow him on social media through his long and storied career know that when he cut you, it's because you deserved to be cut. For everyone else, the word I'm seeing most often to describe him and how he acted towards others is "lovely", which brings to mind the way Paul McDermott calls someone a "lovely feller" in a soft voice, like he's reciting The Sentimental Bloke. That is perfect.

I got to know him in the year 2001, when I joined the community of an epochal computer games forum called PlanetCrap. He went by the nickname of szcx back then, IIRC because he preferred those keys to the usual wasd configuration when playing shooter games with a keyboard. Most of the denizens of that forum were European or American, with szcx and I just about the only regular Aussies. I first met him in 2002, which is where I took the above picture. In that community, he was always an intelligent and nice influence, but could take the fight up to trolls and villains as much as anyone when the need arose.

Even back then Leslie was liable to get into trouble. He went to Portland, Oregon for work on a visa sponsored by his employer, but went over the border to Canada to try to renew it after his employer lied to him about his status... only for the Canadian authorities to dob him in to the US Department of Homeland Security for overstaying his visa, and get him shipped to a detention centre in Seattle. After three weeks of incarceration and what amounted to torture, he was deported to Sydney. Hopes that he might emigrate to the US to join his American partner were dashed for a long time.

As a man to meet and talk to, you wouldn't meet a more agreeable conversationalist. He was always interested in what you were doing, empathetic to your life's trials and tribulations, and obviously had a mind as quick as the latest computer chip, and sharp as the blades he shaved his head with. He was very well connected, though of course later he burned some of those bridges with the @fakeStephenConroy controversy that saw him gain his first taste of instant public notoriety but then get blackballed nearly out of the digital industry when certain Telstra executives held a grudge against him. Thankfully, he landed on his feet with a contract with Victoria Police, which meant he had to move down to Melbourne where he lived a stone's throw from my place in Brunswick.

We hung out more in those times. By that stage his first daughter had arrived, who turned out to have a one-in-a-million syndrome similar in some ways to Downs, meaning his family needed lots of quality medical help which at the time would have been outrageously expensive in America in the pre-Obamacare era. Even if he could get a visa and/or citizenship, the cost of supporting his child made the thought of moving to America out of reach.

America's loss was Australia's gain. Many other people know more about his work at the ABC setting up podcasting, at Q&A with TweeVee TV and the viral sensation that was @DeptOfAustralia and I'm sure that history will be well documented elsewhere. I knew him by that point as a friend and business mentor, at a time when I really needed both. As such, he was a constant source of positivity and a perfect foil for radical ideas, even when his own family was under threat from external forces and the danger of his professional radicalism was so present in his personal life. His fearlessness was not false bravado. He could speak with authority on how to construct a life as an anti-Telstra tech terrorist, something I shared with him in my business.

Leslie's death hits me particularly hard because he was a fellow traveller in life. He is the same age as me, and we both built young families later in life after long periods as lone wolves. I only wish I was nearly as talented has he was, in both a technological and comedic sense. I am only pretending to be an ubergeek, really, and when I try to run some of the same sort of funny material as he does, I tend to come off as a nasty smartarse whereas he could always make it sound like it was from the heart (because it was). He may have been a boy from the working class suburbs of Adelaide, but he always had more class than most of the rest of us put together.

It sounds like Leslie's latest project, Wrangling Cats, was more of a lifestyle business. He had finally got to move back to America, in Idaho where his in-laws lived, and it seemed like he had figured out his life and what made him happy and secure. That is what makes it all the more tragic, that his life was taken away so senselessly by a 20-year-old kid driving home drunk on a Saturday morning (whose life has also been ruined now, BTW). There were more than 30,000 road deaths in America last year, about 10 deaths per 100,000 of population. The equivalent figure for Victoria, where we have spent so much energy minimising deaths like these, is around 3.5 per 100,000. Leslie had so much more to give, primarily as a father and husband. What a waste of human potential.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters of eight, three and one years. If you would like to donate to a fund for his family, his most recent business partner set up a GoFundMe page. It's the least any of us can do.

#Gamergate, #cuckservative and racism against Adam Goodes

View image | gettyimages.com

There is a line that can be drawn, a lineage that can be traced, between a number of recent primal screams emanating originally from shadowy ranks of white male recidivism.

• The #gamergate movement, which is a reaction by openly misogynist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male gamers, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like Reddit, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-sexist criticisms of game industry and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not sexist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The #cuckservative movement, which is a reaction by openly white supremacist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male American conservatives, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos on sites like 8chan, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of conservative political and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.
• The mass booing of Adam Goodes, which is a reaction by openly racist males against what they see as attacks against the identity of white male Australians, started by a cadre of hardcore drongos at AFL games, gaining momentum as it gathers up tenuously related non-racist criticisms of sporting and media elites, gradually building into a mob where the majority are not racist, but the masses give credence to the movement started by a vocal and unrepresentative minority.

In all three cases, there is a core of horrible people who perform anti-social acts with stated justifications that any reasonable person would find abhorrent, but the majority of participants in this anti-social behaviour use the argument that they don't share the horrible beliefs of the fringe members of the group, thus they shouldn't be tarred with the same brush.

In any large political grouping, there are going to be fringe elements inside the "big tent". Nationalist skinheads vote Liberal, feral communists vote Labor, and these actions are perfectly acceptable and do not invalidate the party's platform as long as the minority doesn't dictate policy. In the case of these extra-institutional movements, however, the actions that the majority take are the same as the hardcore. How are we to tell the difference between those with criminally anti-social motivations and those who have "normal" reasons for acting like morons?

Unfortunately, this dilemma doesn't seem to worry many of those in the majority who are acting as useful idiots providing cover for the extremists. I have been involved in some very heated discussions trying to argue such people around in the case of the Goodes crisis, and I am sure the same kinds of conversations have been happening all over, both on and off the Internet, in the past week. It's a smorgasbord of bad arguments defending the indefensible, as Russell Jackson only skimmed the surface of the other day.

One of the many ways we are lucky to have been born in the Lucky Country is that despite all the talk of multiculturalism, we are largely still a very monoculturally Anglo-Celtic society, and aren't forced very often to confront our own prejudices like this. You only have to look at America where hatred towards Hispanic immigrants and black urban youth is dominating mainstream political discussion, or in England where UKIP only grows in popularity, or Europe where a member country like Hungary can fall under the grip of an openly fascist regime and barely an eyelid is blinked. In comparison, we lost our minds for weeks on end when a man asked a question on a TV program. Our privilege as Australians, let alone white Australians, is almost too massive to comprehend.

The glue binding all these movements together is identity politics. The extremists are white, male and western, and the people they are trying to recruit to their thinly veiled anti-social reactionary causes share much of their identity - this demographic has been labelled in various countries as "frat", "bro", "lad", "chav" and "bogan". While the majority may not profess to share the extremists' politics, the functional differences between them and the fringe are blurred if they take part of the same activities.

In this context, it is supremely difficult to educate a certain type of young white man about the nature of his privilege, because so much of his self image is bound up in believing he is right about everything, even those things he actually knows very little about. Hopefully it's not going to take a tragedy for these otherwise intelligent, empathetic and compassionate citizens to see the light.

Elder Scrolls Online's Dodd-Frank economy

I am always fascinated by the market economies built inside multiplayer computer games to exchange virtual goods among players, and the recently released Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) has some interesting twists on usually accepted norms.

As a MMOG (massively multiplayer online game), ESO follows in the footsteps of Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft (WoW), as well as more recent iterative efforts like Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3. In all of these games, the fantasy milieu of swords, staves and sabatons has to include a way of crafting and trading the tools of the medieval swashbuckling trade in the fictional world of Tamriel.

Without going deeply into the history of such things, the crucial point here is that in the most successful of these games, WoW, the economic system had evolved to a point where there was a universally accessible "auction house" (AH) for ethereal items which acted in much the same way as globalised stock markets do in the real world. You could put your imaginary halberd up for sale on the AH in WoW and if it was priced competitively, it could be sold in a matter of seconds to one of millions of customers browsing newly listed goods in real time. An analogy can be drawn with the high frequency trading systems on the "real" Wall Street, which have revolutionised the financial sector in recent years. The HFT systems behind the AH were developed over many iterations, to streamline the processes and ensure the broadest and most efficient market possible.

Now comes ESO, which seeks to reverse some of these innovations as discussed in the fanbase's Tamriel Foundry forums. Instead of a global AH, trading is only possible face to face, or in guilds of a maximum of 500 members. You can only be a member of five guilds, so instead of millions of potential trading partners, you can only max out at 2,500. In addition, instead of the best items in the games being rare drops from powerful boss monsters which would drive demand on the auction house, each and every player can conceivably make the best items themselves by spending time levelling up their own crafting skills.

Why would Zenimax, the developers of ESO, seek to turn back history like this? The reaction of one ESO player to the whiners illustrates the reasons:

What’s hilarious too is the fear mongering from the AH banker wannabes.

“This will ruin the game” “the game will be unplayable!” ect ect.

REALITY CHECK: No auction house in favor of trading and crafting means PLAYING THE GAME IS THE MOST REWARDING ACTIVITY and sitting around and flipping items (ie not really playing) IS NOT.

Get that through your wow heads. You don’t deserve to be rich sitting in town like a silk swaddeled merchant, if you want to be rich you have two options:

1. Do something! Go be an adventurer.

2. Create something! Be a master crafter.

Or do both,

The adventurers drive the economy needing gear, they supply mats and demand. The crafters foster the economy by creating gear, they supply mats demand and items.

Where does a AH flipper fit into this system exactly? They don’t. They are a parasite that creates nothing but inflation and raises the price (workload) for both crafters and adventurers through the illusion of convience, which is easier to click through but costs twice as much gold, ie workload on the real players.

If you want to sit in one place and click through one menu while creating nothing but more work for other players you do not deserve to be powerful or rich, you deserve to be ostricized for the parasite you are.

This economic design by Zenimax reminds me of the Dodd-Frank reforms on Wall Street after the global financial crisis, which were passed to put a handbrake on the speculators who caused the crisis. You could argue about how successful Dodd-Frank has been, but we're talking here about intention. Just as Dodd-Frank was an attempt to encourage economic actors to abandon speculation in favour of investment in the "real" economy of making things, ESO has carefully planned its guild trading system to reward those who play the game of fulfilling quests, slaying monsters and storming keeps, rather than the meta game of playing the markets.

That is not to say trading is dead in ESO, far from it. The meta game now, such as it is, is to find the best trading guild - or perhaps in the longer term, to find the best guild for player versus player combat which nurtures its master crafters for the benefit of the rest of the guild. This kind of mercantilism is possibly more genuinely medieval than the HFT systems of WoW, but will it hold up over time? Only those playing in Tamriel have the power to complete that destiny.