My lives are in collision. I am in the process of moving in both worlds.

I wish we had inventories in our RL lives. Just go into each room, click, take, and make it go away until we need it. Conversely, imagine if moving in SL were as arduous as it is in RL, with each item persisting inworld with a corresponding weight, and the need for an appropriate sized storage container when not being used or displayed. As much as we shake our fist at Linden Lab for the things that hassle us in Second Life, be thankful they weren’t sadists when it came to storing objects … and say a little prayer that Oz isn’t reading this right now and making notes.

I’ve been priding myself on minimizing my personal ‘real world’ belongings, and I’ve managed to convince myself that I now own next to nothing at all. Now that I’m having to sort – yet again – through my ‘meager’ RL inventory, I’m realizing how far I still have to go to truly call myself a minimalist.

As for SL, the sim I’ve been living on with Ella is slated for deletion as the owner goes on indefinite hiatus from the grid. We’re presently living on the original 512sqm parcel that she’s owned since before we met, as we decide what we’re doing next.

I’ve been trying to decide what to say about Linden Lab’s announcement that SL9B won’t be taking place on dedicated sims this year. It seems that every year, LL detaches itself just a bit more from … well, us. It’s one more bit of cultural heritage being discarded, like the discontinuation of last names; an arbitrary judgment made with apparently no thought given to how it would affect the community.

Yes, I’m having a really difficult time with the word “resident” right now – in both worlds. Similarly, the owners of the complex where I’ve lived for the past five years seem to have given up on the concept of ‘resident community’. In the span of five years, I’ve gone from loving my life here, to staying for the sake of everything being within walking distance, to finally giving up entirely and leaving.

It takes a lot to get me to the point where leaving is less of an inconvenience than staying put – and I wonder just how many people in Second Life are at that crossroads? How many creators haven’t left, simply because at least some money is still coming in, enough to pay tier and have a little spending money left over? How many estate owners are maintaining their sims solely out of respect for the residents living there? How many people are running out of “just one more thing” to push them over the edge?

I’m not to that point in Second Life – not yet – but every decision like this just underscores for me how Linden Lab as a company provides nothing else, really, except a platform. Second Life continues to thrive (or limp along, depending on your perspective) in spite of LL, rather than because of it. Of course, without the platform, there’s nothing; but without the user-created content, there’s less than nothing.

This is not to imply that there aren’t LL staffers still excited about Second Life. I have to say, though, that actual Lindens are conspicuous by their absence inworld. It wasn’t uncommon a few years ago to regularly meet Lindens at everyday events, or at any of a number of regularly scheduled Office Hour meetings. Or just wandering around like the rest of us, seeing what the community was up to.

Prior to the death of the Teen Grid, TeenSL bloggers lamented on their blogs that they had been abandoned by the Lindens, left to fend for themselves among griefers and militias in a virtual “Lord of the Flies”. Now it seems that the one remaining major Linden-sponsored event has all but been abandoned by the Lab. I suppose it will still take place, if enough people with their own land can muster up the team spirit to organize events. It’s just not going to be the same, though, and I don’t suspect that we’ll see many – if any – Lindens at any of the satellite events that actually do coalesce.

Granted, there are other places one can go outside of Second Life. There are some small-but-thriving communities of dedicated individuals committed to keeping the virtual-world dream alive outside of SL, but it’s not like we can simply pack up our belongings and move them to another grid. It becomes a matter of starting over from nothing at all. Our inworld snapshots, our lovely wardrobes, our favorite dances, our art collections, our pets, our beautiful furnishings – and most of all, our friends.

While I’m certainly not to that point yet, I certainly no longer feel like a “resident”. Like the apartment complex that has been my RL home for as long as SL has been my virtual home, I feel like just another customer. Stay or go, either way, it doesn’t matter much at all to the management.

That said, I still love Second Life despite it all. I love it for my friends, first and foremost. I love it for friends who don’t know me at all in the physical world, and yet have done more, shared more, and sacrificed more for me than most of my friends in ‘real life’.

I stay for the real heart that beats inside each and every one of them.

That’s something that Linden Lab can’t take away.

As any writer knows, there is no substantial money to be made in works-for-hire in the “real world” anymore. You have web portals everywhere, paying starvation rates to writers who are desperate for work, to write articles on subjects for which they likely have no passion whatsoever and likely serve no other purpose than to drive traffic to advertising.

Linden Lab is a consistently profitable internet company, despite what every lazy journalist says to the contrary. Over the course of almost nine years, membership and tier rates have remained static despite steadily declining costs for hosting, racks, and bandwidth. And yet, the cost of maintaining an estate sim is still $3612 per year – $3540 in monthly sim fees, and $72 for the annual fee required to own an estate – and even more if you have to pay VAT. Multiply that by the number of estate sims, and it’s easy to see that, despite some attrition, Second Life remains a very profitable business.

Now, consider that Linden Lab is asking members of their own customer base to write what will essentially be “official” articles for their website – articles intended to promote and attract attention to their core product. Linden Lab knows that there is no advertising agency that can write about Second Life as effectively as their own passionate userbase. The purpose, clearly, is to draw in new residents and to engage fledgling newbies who are still getting their feet wet – promotional literature, with an eye toward upselling goods and services which will increase their profitability as a company.

So ponder for a moment that the invitation is for writers who use SL to write promotional articles about Second Life. Further, this will be content exclusively for the use of Linden Lab, and which Linden Lab reserves the sole right to edit as it sees fit prior to publication.

That’s perfectly okay, but expecting it for free seems … fine, if Linden Lab were a non-profit organization. Don’t get me wrong, if the Lab can find people willing to write for free, more power to everyone involved. I do believe, though, that you often get what exactly you pay for. It’s not unreasonable to ask Linden Lab, upon acceptance of an article, to pay the L$ equivalent of a dollar or two – that’s what inworld publications have done for years. To accuse a writer of being greedy because they want to be compensated for their work is ludicrous. You may as well heckle shopkeepers for charging money for the fruit of their labor, or DJs or singers or musicians for having tip jars. Second Life is a micro-economy. The money that most of us earn inworld goes right back into the SL economy – whether it’s clothes, or rentals, or land tier, or premium fees.

Let’s not forget that Linden Lab bought out Xstreet SL, then bought OnRez – Xstreet’s only true competitor – and shut it down, then set about to implement a plan to charge a L$99 per month fee per freebie item offered by content creators using Xstreet. For a particularly generous designer who made and offered, say, 100 items for free on Xstreet, had it been implemented it would cost that creator USD40 per month to give things away for free on Xstreet. Ultimately, Linden Lab didn’t follow through on that “Roadmap”, in large part due to shopkeeper backlash. However, it’s safe to say that Linden Lab can afford to pay for things when it wants to (anyone remember Avatars United?), and it will certainly collect money when it sees an opportunity to do so.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that when the company reaches out for exclusive, original content from residents, that the talented writers of Second Life would anticipate some sort of compensation for their work – especially if they lose final creative control of that work once it becomes the property of Linden Lab.

As with any decision that Linden Lab makes, of course there are going to be some who are against it, no matter what it is. But disagreement is not necessarily a bad thing. Neither is the occasional altruism. However, let’s not kid ourselves – there is plenty of altruism in Second Life. Love it or hate it, the “freebie culture” is quite often a shining example of altruism on the grid. It all comes down to who truly needs the generosity the most.

If you want to donate free articles to Linden Lab, then do. But don’t insult those who might feel their talents are worth a dollar or two each from a corporation that can not only afford it, but is able to pay them with virtual currency that they create out of thin air.

And for the love of God, don’t tell them to “leave if you don’t like it here”. If Second Life were nothing more than a cult of like-minded people who agreed about everything, it would be a hideously boring experience.

Thank goodness it’s not.