People in Your SL Neighborhood: Squatters!
I've been writing about a lot of very serious subjects the past few weeks. Mistress has suggested that when I'm feeling at an impasse on what to write, I should write about some of the more colorful people I've met in my now nearly 11 years in SL. While there are tons of things I could write about, I need to be a bit less formal this time around. Therefore, this week's entry will be the first in a set of occasional writings on such people.
Toda's topic is about squatters. Squatting is defined at Dictionary.com as "a person who settles on land or occupies property without title, right, or payment of rent.; a person who settles on land under government regulation, in order to acquire title." Dutch Sociologist Hans Prujit in his essay "The Logic of Urban Squatting" defined five types of squatters:
1. Deprivation based squatting -- people without homes and cannot afford housing who squat in what appear to be untended buildings. These people are absolutely deprived of the necessities of life and squat to have shelter.
2. Squatting as an alternative housing strategy -- people that are not necessarily economically deprived, but are more like drifters who squat in places temporarily, moving from place to place. This person is sort of the "living on the couch type" but rather than with the permission of a person, just "moves in" until they are moved out.
3. Entrepreneurial squatting -- uncommon in the United States but more common in Europe, this form of squatting provides unofficial infrastructure for people in poor areas, such as shopping, medical care, and even bars and movie theaters! While in the USA these kind of things would be closed down quickly, in Europe they seem to take a more lassiez-faire approach to this.
4. Conservational squatting -- a form of activist squatting, in which people will live in areas that are to be condemned and turned into new residential/commercial areas. The squatters force the hand of government away from tearing down what is perceived as a "historic" site as it is occupied by people. Again, this seems far more common in Europe, as Prujit gives only European examples in his essay.
5. Political squatting -- somewhat similiar to #4, but this type of squatting is not done simply to save areas, but is more intended to come into conflict with the State in order to make polticial points. In the USA, the examples of people that go to live in old trees such as redwoods that are to be cut down is a good example. It's not really that tree the activist is most concerned about, but creating a political point by chaining themselves to that tree.
Political squatting is a growing way to protest concepts of property, wages and other issues that the Far Left is very concerned about. There is even a symbol for squatting:
Political squatting is very tied to various Anarchist movements which decry the idea of "private property" and the enforcement by the government of such laws protecting "private property." It's always easy to argue these things when it's other people's property that is involved, I'd suppose. That said, the point of this post is not to get into the poltiics of squatting, but how it relates to Second Life and "land" in a virtual world.
In Second Life, I think Prujit's example #2, "Squatting as an alternative housing strategy" is the most common type of squatting. We really can't say that people are absolutely deprived of housing in SL as no one really needs "shelter" to remain alive in a virtual world. Having a house is a nice thing, but not a necessary thing. However, there are people who decide they are relatively deprived of housing (seeing others with houses and feeling they are deprived of something) and so go to squat on land not theirs.
Some of this squatting is probably unintentional. A lot of people don't seem to get the idea of property or privacy in SL, considering the number of folks that just walk into our houses in Diloba and Citrago. I'm sure that a good number of people just find land they figure is "open" and put their house down without really getting the idea they are squatters.
I've lived in Diloba now for over ten years, and over the years have we have had share of squatters move in. I need to preface this by saying that I keep a certain amount of my land open, mostly due to friends moving into areas and I want to be able to let them put items down. While some of the land is shut down and will return items rezzed on it, a good amount is open. This means that a couple times a week I go on a patrol and look for items that have been put down. Most of the time items are just prim litter, but a number of times I have found squatters.
The first time I found a squatter, it must have been 2008 or so. I had bought a large chunk of land on the north end of Diloba, and put up a set of megaprims to create a big, flat space. This area is now over where the Briar Rose Pub is. Anyway, most of this megaprim flat space was unused, and one day I logged in, checked my prim allotment, and found that almost all the prims are gone! I patroled around and found on the megaprim surface a huge house, fully furnished, with landscaping all around it, that was eating up 90% of the unused prim space. I walked around the house and was just amazed that someone had so elegantly furnished a house on land not theirs. Of course, I returned it all and banned the squatter, and sent him an IM telling him he was a squatter. He never returned my IM and never came back to my knowledge.
I've found that most of the time, squatters will not reply to an IM -- I guess they are either too embarassed or too flummoxed by having everything returned to say anything. A couple of times I got a "sorry" but usually no reply.
Last year I found two squatters. One had put up a skydome above the Diloba Pool complete with a gaggle of sexbeds. I guess this person was planning to have orgies. I sent all his stuff back and banned him, and heard nothing when I sent him an IM. Also last year some folks had put up several homes just to the west of the Art House, and I returned those. One sent me a quick "oh, sorry, didn't know that this was your land" but the other two again said nothing.
Now for two of the more amusing tales of squatting.
Shortly after I met Sassy, so this was 2009, I logged into SL on a Saturday night, started patrol, and found that a large number of prims were missing. At that time I owned the land to the west of Sassy's treehouse (it's now occupied by the house with the strange island in the sky floating above it, for reference.) I found all the items on that piece and returned them. Turned out some fellow had put up a furnished skybox there. A minute later two naked avatars fall out of the sky, one male and one female, the male wearing the largest prim penis I've ever seen. The guy comes right up to me and says in chat "YOU JUST RUINED MY SEX!"
I burst into laughter in First Life...this was just way too amusing. To have this naked d00d with a huge penis, who had squatted on my land, screaming at me...but not over the fact I'd ended his squatting, but I'd ruined his SEX! I could barely breathe I was laughing so hard. He kept going on about how it was so rude of me to ruin his sex....so I just banned him. The female avi only giggled a couple times and then disappeared. I guess they found some other place to resume the sex I'd so rudely interrupted. And I didn't get an invite to come along! The HORROR! :P
The second one I will recount is a bit more disturbing. This was probably around 2010, but all these dates sort of blend together over the years. This time, my routine patrol found a bunch of prims near the roller rink up in the sky. I fly up to around 2000m and find a person has rezzed a platform, a house and a barn. Again, the house is furnished with some rather nice (for that time) BDSM furniture as well as more vanilla stuff.
It was the barn that was the most interesting. I didn't find animals in the barn, but instead four female avatars, naked, and chained to the walls. Three of them were AFK, but the one there said that "Master" had selected them to be his "animals," and they were to stay in the barn until he showed up, selected one or more of them, unchained his selections, and then brought them to the house for sex/BDSM activity. Then, after the scene, they were chained back in the barn. They were not allowed to log out their avatars, and as he came on at a certain time, they were required to be there to service him as he wanted.
This apparently had been going on for a while, and the one I was talking to said they had been moving around from place to place a lot. Apparently, Master Barnyard (not his name, that's what I called him) was doing Prujit's "squatting as an alternative housing strategy" for some time, going from place to place with his menagerie of sex slaves.
I explained to her that they couldn't stay here and that I was going to have to return all their stuff. She sighed and said she understood. I also asked her why she was staying with this guy, and she just gushed all about how wonderful he was, how he had found them alone and brought them together, and how she loved living with her Master and her sisters. One of the other females suddenly came out of AFK and echoed the first's sentiments about how wonderful Master was, etc. I told them that squatting was rather rude and that he wasn't doing them any favors this way. I said they might want to suggest to Master Barnyard that he simply get some land so they don't have to keep moving all the time. The second girl said she had suggested that, and then Master had "whipped her for giving an unwanted opinion." Nice guy.
At that point I returned all the stuff and banned him. I didn't ban the slaves -- rather I said they were welcome to use Diloba as a home base if they wanted to get away from Master Barnyard. Neither of them, nor the two that were AFK that I sent IMs to, seemed to think that was a good idea. They all disappeared by the next morning.
A couple days later I get Master Barnyard in my IM box, SCREAMING at me for "Daring to return his items." He said he saw in my profile I had a pick about BDSM, that I knew NOTHING about BDSM, that I was a horrible girl, and that I was supposed to ask him to please remove the items. Futher, he also was clear he had right of refusal to remove anything, and finshed off that I was "a clueless, submissive bitch that needed to be in the barn with the others!"
I was flabbergasted at this. My entire retort was "you do understand that you are insane?" He then really let loose with every vulgarity you can imagine, cursing me and my family six generations back, and I could tell he was a second away from a stroke in First Life. I just muted him at that point.
I never heard from the slaves again, so I have no idea what happened after that. I can only surmise as they were rather ignorant of the abuse they were suffering at the hands of Master Barnyard, they went with him to the next "squatting as an alternative housing strategy" spot, until they got kicked out again. Kinda sad, but what can you do?
Such are the joys of living a virtual life...you get to meet d00ds with huge penises (not Donald Trump) and folks like Master Barnyard and his gaggle of animals/slaves. C'est la Vie Deuxième!