In the Atlantic, longtime Internet activist and scholar Ethan Zuckerman takes textual fisticuffs to Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Metaverse ambitions, going through the long evolution of the technology like an avuncular Bane. ("Ah you think the Metaverse is your ally? You merely adopted the Metaverse. I was born in it, molded by it.") Because Ethan's hands-on history with the Metaverse started as a developer in the 90s, and features a long stop at Second Life:
When Linden Lab launched this metaverse in 2003, there was a brief burst of enthusiasm where otherwise serious entities, such as businesses and universities, bought and built out their own islands in Linden’s proprietary world. (Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, now the Berkman Klein Center, had its own island.) The learning curve to build objects in Second Life was steep, the universe was populated haphazardly, and the Second Life client demanded a very fast computer and a very patient user. But pioneers in the space saw beyond these limitations and envisioned a system that was so emotionally compelling that journalists and activists would be forced to engage with it to reach audiences.
I was invited to the Metaverse Roadmap Summit in 2006 to see some of these “serious” Second Life spaces. The one that finally caused me to lose my shit was Camp Darfur, an exhibit designed to help metaverse explorers understand what Sudanese refugees were experiencing when they were displaced from their homes. Of course, this was Sudan as understood through the eyes of well-meaning Bay Area techies, which meant it featured a roaring campfire surrounded by wooden tree stumps where you could sit and contemplate the horrors of genocide. Given that women routinely walked miles from barren, tree-free desert camps to collect firewood, risking assault and rape in the process, it seemed like the sort of detail you’d want to get right in simulating the refugee experience.
I vividly remember Ethan losing his aforementioned shit on the topic, because I was onstage at the Metaverse Summit when SL's Camp Darfur project was discussed. (I first blogged about it here -- pic of the notorious campfire above.) I was more interested in the group of Green Lantern roleplayers who protected the camp from griefers, but Ethan's objections to the project itself were painfully on point, a lesson in how easy it is for us to lose sight of what actually matters amid our ebullience over new technology.
Ethan also gets into the challenge of Second Life's poor branding, a theme I also keep coming back to:
Second Life also needed rebranding. Its user base stabilized around 1 million monthly users, and a significant percentage of those users visited the metaverse to experience its thriving kink scene. Digital bondage gear is a lot cheaper than leather and metal, and cybersex among consenting adults is safer than intercourse. Virtual sex spaces make sex more accessible for people for whom shyness or physical difference could make going to a club or party impossible in real life—they are a genuinely useful service. But they are not a replacement for the “flat” internet that the Berkman Center and other institutions thought they were investing in at the time.
Facebook (Meta I mean) has separated its metaverse for work product (Horizon for Workrooms) from its metaverse for socializing/gaming (Horizon), so may avoid some of the branding taint that hurt Second Life. Then again, what happens when Horizon for Workrooms experiences its first reports of sexual harassments during VR-based meetings, because you know that's coming soon if it hasn't happened already.
Anyway, much more here for a long and entertaining read of Metaverses gone wrong.
Heh, nice overview of virtual world history & failures here ).
Posted by: Lex4art | Tuesday, November 02, 2021 at 02:49 AM