Some social media readers were skeptical over last week's post highlighting Linden Lab veteran Gene Yoon's policy paper on virtual currency addressed to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen. One reader snarkily suggested that that amounted to saying, "I was responsible for managing the currency used as commodity for pixel furries to use at strip clubs on a platform called Second Life".
While amusing, this snark misses some import history of Second Life, and virtual worlds in general -- especially now.
As Gene puts it:
"In a time where cryptocurrency has gone from zero value to almost a trillion dollars in the space of a dozen years, one would hope that people would understand that digital assets are real assets. Second Life was a truly remarkable window into the future, and the management of its economy was in fact a fantastic early look into the promise and perils of digital currency.
"Sometimes I think that the people who used SL the most are in some ways the least able to see just how remarkable it was. Perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. But as William Gibson said, the future is unevenly distributed, and if you were lucky enough to be using SL in the mid-aughts, you got a preview into many aspects of online life today. I'll always be proud of my work in SL and all that my colleagues and the community taught me. I learned at least as much if not more from Linden Lab than I did anywhere else, and I'm grateful for that."
All of that seems obviously true for me -- but then again, I'm thinking back to ancient history (by which I mean 2004):
One reason Second Life attracted so much media interest in the first place is it was a major subject of State of Play, a widely-covered New York Law School conference of scholars (mainly from the fields of jurisprudence and economics, most of them from top/Ivy League universities) devoted to studying MMOs and virtual worlds, and what we could learn by studying their policies and internal economics. The founder of the conference, Beth Simone Noveck, went on to join Barack Obama's "Innovation Agenda" group, tasked with drafting "a range of proposals to create a 21st century government that is more open and effective; leverages technology to grow the economy, create jobs, and solve our country's most pressing problems."
But again, that is ancient history by Internet standards, and since then, the top virtual worlds are not just a microcosm for society, but now, are larger in population size than most real countries. Given how much current policy makers seem to be scrambling and playing catch-up to understand virtual currency now, I suspect many of them could learn from that original, pioneering research -- and people like Gene who helped craft policies back then.
Image credit: The State of Play Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds, edited by Beth Noveck (now at NYU) and Jack Balkin of Yale.
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