OFFSHORING SECOND LIFE

Linden Lab's latest user stats include a fascinating tidbit, first unearthed by Celebrity Millionsofus, who used them to compile a list of active users by national origin, then listed these on the blog of Millions of Us (a sponsoring partner of NWN.)

Here are the first ten countries where Second Life Residents are most active, based on the average number of minutes they spend in-world per day, per user:

• 161 - Cayman Islands
  
• 132 - Indonesia
• 130 - Netherlands
• 128 - Canada
• 122 - United States
• 122 - Korea, Republic of
• 116 - Russian Federation
• 109 - French Southern Territories
• 104 - Antigua and Barbuda
• 103 - Martinique

A lot of smaller nations, and a few you might not expect-- a localized version of SL has only recently been released to the South Korean market, for example, and it already boasts 1018 power users.

Second Life's most active Residents, however, are from a country you'd easily recognize, if you read a lot of thriller novels.

Located in the Western Caribbean and a prime destination for scuba divers, the Cayman Islands are a sovereign territory of Great Britain, with a tiny population of some 45,000.  But it's mostly known as the world's center for offshore banking and business, the place where companies and wealthy investors from around the globe have their offices and savings, so they can take advantage of the country's low taxes and minimal regulation.  (As of 2005, an incredible 70,000 companies are incorporated there.)  This encourages a belief that it's a nexus for money laundering and other criminal activities-- it's where Tom Cruise's law office spirits away mob money, in The Firm-- but for what it's worth, an IMF report notes that "the overall compliance culture within Cayman is very strong, including... [that] related to anti-money laundering obligations."  In any case, it is where a lot of people from around the world have a lot of their money stored away, when they don't want their own governments taxing or otherwise regulating it. Indeed, besides tourism, managing this activity is the Caymans' only main industry.

And last month, this is where 36 Second Life Residents were, going in-world some 2.7 hours a day, more than Residents from any other country.  (Other nations in Celebrity's most active thirty are also known for being offshore bank/tax havens-- Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, and Netherland Antilles, among others.)

Maybe they're all just tour guides and secretaries who like to play Tringo and dance, in their off hours.  But it's entirely plausible to assume at least some of them are in there converting large sums of Linden Dollars to US Dollars and thence to KYD, the Cayman Islands Dollar.  (And if they are, I'd hasten to add, there's no reason to suspect anything illegal or unethical.) 

No, the point I'd make here is a different one. Over the last several decades, the Caymans have existed as an artificial appendage to the global economy, a country that thousands of corporations call home-- even if their headquarters is a mere mailing address.  (And here's a good place to note that corporations are themselves a kind of avatar, a fictitious entity authorized by governments to conduct business as if they were a person.) 

So now, with our active Cayman Residents, the circle of economic unreality is almost surely complete: real money is converted into the currency of a virtual world, which is then converted back into the real money of a semi-virtual country, where it becomes the assets of a company that only exists as a post office box by the Caribbean sea.

Pictured:  Cayman island of Second Life (not affiliated with RL Cayman Islands.)

Comments

[Stacey Sugar]

I know one player from Cayman Islands :D

[Laetizia Coronet]

In yer FACE Canada - the Dutch have beaten you! :P

[Alexander Burgess]

LOLZ, Laetizia! TY for that; needed it.

[rikomatic]

Oh great, now that the cat is out of the bag, where am I going to hide my ill-gotten Lindens?

Hehe Hamlet — now *that's* speculation... :)

Sometimes the answers are much more trivial than that :) The number of technologically-savvy people on those islands, as a percentage of the overall population, is considerably higher than the rest of the world. This also means that they are more likely to spend much more hours, on average, on the Internet. Why is that so?

The average user logging in to Second Life is, these days, close to the "mainstream" — not a computer expert, not an Internet guru. They have also a lower attention rate — they need to juggle between "figuring out a complex interface", getting enough things on SL to interest them for hours and hours, and, well, all the rest of the things that take your spare time — mostly, TV ;)

So as SL becomes more and more mainstream overall, it means that it'll gather more people, but they won't use SL as lot — it'll be something you just have there, installed on your computer, and competes for your limited attention.

On the other end, small (tiny!) countries, far away from the "mainstream" 21st century user with all those attention-seeking devices and things surrounding them, will have a much higher percentage of SL addicts/computer geeks, and these will obviously be a lot of time online. Also, these countries will have less mainstream users overall. So this is just an artifact of statistics.

So why is Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, or the US so up on the scale? This is again another statistical artifact. A "mainstream" user on any of these countries is, in fact, someone with a quite high level of computer-related expertise (even if they are not computer experts). This means that even what would be a "mainstream user" on other countries is, for these countries, someone who uses regularly a computer for entertainment purposes.

My bottomline is that statistical artifacts don't always point to an explanation based on semi-legitimate uses of SL ;)