I Wrote About Second Life's Unique 20 Year Longevity for The Atlantic!

"There Will Never Be Another Second Life" is a new essay I was thrilled to write for The Atlantic to mark the virtual world's 20th anniversary. Hope you read the whole thing, but here's some key highlights:

The reasons for the virtual world’s longevity are as paradoxical as they are inspiring, especially in this moment where traditional social media seems to be eroding in on itself, or flailing for new relevance, even as the rise of generative AI promises an uncertain, discomfiting future. Developed by a company called Linden Lab, Second Life was inspired in part by the Metaverse as first described with Biblical specificity in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash: a massive virtual world created by its users and connected to the real world economy. Countless technologists who began their career in the 1990s were also inspired by that novel. But Linden’s charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, added to this geeky conception a distinctly bohemian muse: Burning Man, the orgiastic art festival held every year in Nevada’s Black Rock desert...

For its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me to be the virtual world’s official “embedded journalist”—a roving, avatar-based reporter wearing a white suit (my pretentious tribute to Tom Wolfe), impertinently asking the early user community about their virtual lives—from ambitious collective art projects to savvy business ventures to the pixel sex they were having with the attachable genitals they inevitably created.

Photo of Mr. Bristol by Russ Roberts/Etherian Kamabuko.

Many of my avatar profiles occurred by pure happenstance. Randomly visiting a virtual Bayou bar one day, I saw an avatar playing blues guitar, his appearance customized to look like a tall old Black man. Clicking on the user’s account, I realized that in real life he was Charles Bristol, an 87-year-old Bluesman and the grandson of once enslaved people who lived long enough to play live music in the Metaverse.

The utopian paradox even extends into how Second Life was developed by employees at Linden Lab. Under the idealistic direction of Rosedale and his CTO Cory Ondrejka, the startup operated with a no-managers, "choose your own work" policy, cheekily dubbed the Tao of Linden. Their creativity thus unleashed, Linden developers wound up adding a farrago of persnickety features to the product with little unifying direction that might create a seamless, user-friendly experience. To this day, the Second Life application resembles an MMO game welded to a 3D graphics editor duct-taped to a social network crammed into an ancient television remote with infinite buttons.

But the program’s very complexity became a kind of initiation rite. Some 99 percent of new users would quit, overwhelmed and aggravated, usually within their first hour in the virtual world. Those who did stay long enough to learn how to use the software—usually guided by a patient “oldie” community member—found themselves welcomed into a rare, exclusive club. Second Life quickly became a small enchanted city with an eccentric but charming citizenry, surrounded by a brutal desert that few dared cross. Linden Lab, in other words, had inadvertently recreated the Burning Man experience a bit too thoroughly.

Read the rest here. Hopefully I make it clear that while there will never be another Second Life, it has many potential successors, and will always be role model for making a well, metaverse that matters. 

Comments

[Luther Weymann]

Just finished Hamlet’s Atlantic piece. Very nice literary work about SL.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

I wish I could read it, but don't have an Atlantic sub. I thought the excerpt captured the spirit beautifully, however. SL was a big part of my life for quite a few years... and I guess, I was a small part of its story as well.

[Valentina Kendal]

Congratulations Hamlet!

[Markopolis Balhaus]

Very nicely done.