Here's Highlights & Reference Links from My Chat on Second Life & the Metaverse With Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic

Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse is a gratifying deep dive interview with me in the Atlantic, for Charlie Warzel's Galaxy Brain free newsletter. Charlie and I plumb into the virtual world/metaverse topics I've felt strongly about in recent years, and it's wonderful to get a chance to have the space to explore them in The Atlantic.

Here's some of my favorite highlights in a much larger article, along with some links to the New World Notes posts I'm referring to.  

I’ve learned that, as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space. Racism, for example, is an enduring issue and an interesting one in these worlds. There are very basic questions: If you can change your avatar to anything at all, what race would you choose?

What are some good examples of surprising things you’ve seen people do in Second Life?

[I]f you give a user community powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be far more interesting than anything a major company can officially create...

One of my favorites is a mathematician who built a house that exists beyond three dimensions—a home shaped like a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube. If you walked through their house it would keep just regenerating in interesting ways and you’d walk through it eternally. It’s mind melting.

Philip Rosedale, one of the creators of Second Life, has mentioned that there are are 1,600 Second Life users who earn $10,000 or more a year selling virtual content. I know a few people on the high end who are making millions. And it’s not just Second Life; this is all happening now in Roblox and Fortnite and other places, too.

I’m still taken aback at just how little [the staff at Meta] seem to have learned from past platform iterations.

Also surprising is that Meta’s metaverse team has some Second Life employees on it, like Linden Labs’ former CTO. Another is the former Linden Lab employee Jim Purbrick. Right before Meta rolled out Horizon, he was warning the Meta team about needing guidelines for harassment on the platform, and it seems like the company kind of ignored him... [It] seems Meta is throwing money at the problem without throwing much wisdom at it.

[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now—the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes. During the 2008 hype, the tech was not ready for a mass market. Today, it has become a mass-market phenomenon with Roblox and Fortnite and other platforms. I think there are upwards of half a billion people who are now active users on a broadly defined metaverse platform.

Some more links after the break. First up -- my answer on the mistakes being repeated now:

The tesseract Crooked House in Second Life -- read about it here 

Definitely the harassment issues. But there’s also the constant stories of, So-and-so company created a store in the metaverse! This happened a lot between 2006 and 2008—you had Intel, IBM, American Apparel, Nissan, and NBC who all created spaces in Second Life. Brands made mistakes then and they’re making them now. 

I think, with somebody like Mark Zuckerberg, his assumption is that people just want to have their friends in real life doing virtual things. But that’s really missing this massive opportunity for this globally connected platform where you can interact with everyone. I see it right now with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of the first things I noticed was Russian content creators in Second Life promoting Ukrainian ones... And those relationships aren’t about national borders. I’ve found some of those gestures to be a poignant reminder of what could be possible.

One of the things you mentioned that drives me crazy is the hype around NFTs and crypto-based metaverses. I’ve kept harping on this idea that very few people are collecting NFTs in general. More people actually own content in Second Life than own an NFT—vastly more. And these NFT-connected metaverses like Decentraland have very tiny user bases mostly populated by people who’ve invested in it.

There’ve long been national-security concerns around metaverse platforms. In the early 2000s I interviewed a terrorism expert who told me jihadist groups at the time had been planning and trying to execute terrorist attacks in Second Life. A part of the Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had investigators in Second Life to try and uncover plots. I imagine that after Ukraine, there will be concerns about platform roles in that conflict.  

You know, Facebook and Twitter actually do a better job keeping people hooked on them than the metaverse, at least right now... There’s a difference with a virtual-world space, because in virtual worlds you actually get a sense of immersion and a sense of interacting with a real person in another part of the world. It creates real human engagement in a way that social media, which creates this disorienting illusion of engagement, does not. 

I think the big battle going forward will be between these different platforms with different visions for what digital life should and could be. I just hope the human-centered ones win out.

And that's just a very small excerpt -- read the rest here!

Recommended laptop for SL/metaverse activity:

Comments

[Martin K.]

> There’s no small-town feel with Horizon, like there was when people were first coming into Second Life.

I might be wrong, but from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3YC3JiTFk , I got the impression that there is a (small) group of creators in Horizon Worlds who are forming the kind of community you are missing.

> These crypto metaverses put the speculation before the community. Meta is sort of doing the same thing by openly saying they want to give people Oculus headsets and scrape their user data, including what people are looking at, in order to do advertising. Right there, once again, they’re putting the monetization right up front, before the community.

It's worth noting what disaster Meta's early attempts at advertisement in VR were ( https://uploadvr.com/facebooks-head-of-vr-responds-to-ad-criticism/ ). But if they don't figure it out within the next couple of years, their whole metaverse ambitions might be in danger.

Of course, it's an open question whether Meta's VR monetization strategy has to be based on advertisement. It's also an open question, what role Horizon Worlds will play in Meta's VR monetization strategy. One might hope that Horizon Worlds itself will never make enough money to be relevant for Meta and that they keep it alive for other reasons (like Microsoft keeps AltspaceVR alive).

[irihapeti]

Hamlet said: ".. It (virtual-world space) creates real human engagement in a way that social media, which creates this disorienting illusion of engagement, does not. I don’t mean to sound utopian here, but in a virtual world context, everyone has an equal footing to start that they don’t have when they are on many social media platforms. ..."

I like this answer

Expanding on this a bit, some thoughts

A thing with Second Life. Linden Lab doesn't provide any inworld acclaimation mechanisms for residents to acclaim ('fan') other residents. There is no Like button on the resident profile page. The number of inworls contacts (social media contextual nearish equivalent: followers/subscribers) that a resident has, is not published on their profile. Nor does the Second Life inworld have a mechanism to publicly award or display, activity and/or reputation points

What reputation a resident may gain with other residents comes from their work. Reputation which is typically spread thru word of mouth - personal contact or thru forum and blog posts. Reputation that requires effort from both parties, effort that is not publicly recorded (acknowledged) on the resident's public facing profile

This not only starts out Second Life residents on an equal footing, it also in the main, keeps the residents on an equal footing

Which is not a bad thing, when the sense of egalitarianism that underpins comunity based virtual worlds is to be maintained

I think Linden Lab gets/understands that for a virtual world to survive over the long term then egalitarianism has to be baked in. And on occasion when Linden sees that Second Life residents, thru the mechanisms of the Second Life platform, are straying too far from this sense of an egalitarian community then Linden makes changes to the platform to reel in the straying

[Iggy 1.0]

Like irihapeti, I too liked this:

It creates real human engagement in a way that social media, which creates this disorienting illusion of engagement, does not.

That is what large corporations do not understand. I suppose they see VWs with user-generated content as Facebook plus avatars. Why these deep-pocketed firms did not study the history of the last hype cycle is beyond me…says something about corporate myopia.

Luckily, there is no hype in academia about new VWs now, to match the brief interest of 2008-10. If the tech matures with a UI easier than SL’s and a use-case for building simulations could be made, interest could grow.

[Bloodsong Termagant]

is it possible to contact you in-world (within second life)?

there's an issue with the metaverse(tm) and vr hype that i haven't seen addressed anywhere, and i'd like to send you some notes on it.

[Valentina Kendal]

Congratulations Hamlet!