New World Notes

My New Metaverse Book Has a Cover & New Title -- Please Pre-Order!

Excited to reveal the cover of my upcoming book cover and its new title: Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For. Set to publish next June -- Second Life's 20th anniversary -- I hope you consider pre-ordering now. (Lovely stocking stuffer for the holidays?)

• Pre-order on Amazon here.
• Pre-order on Barnes & Noble here.

The original title, Why the Metaverse Matters, has been tweaked to better fit the times. It already matters to the half billion+ people heavily active in multiple metaverse platforms. The goal now, in my view, is to better explain the vision's origin, how it's been realized in Second Life and other pioneering platforms -- and how it can be cultivated as a beneficial place for one billion+ people more. After writing about that topic for 19 years, I have some opinions there.

Monday Memory: When IBM's Metaverse Campus Was Flooded With a Labor Union Protesters Including a Large Angry Banana

I recently chatted with Samantha Cole of Vice for her article "The Corporate Metaverse Can’t Compete" and am kicking myself for forgetting to mention the wackiest example of emergent social behavior in a corporate-sponsored metaverse experience -- that time IBM's official campus in Second Life was flooded with labor protesters from IBM's Italian branch, including a sign-waving banana:

Most of the activity seemed to be concentrated on the IBM Italia region on the corporate campus-- unsurprising, since the protest is over a paycut impacting Italian  workers of the company.  In any case, they continued streaming in, and the leaders kept count of unique visitors.  At the end, the Uni Global Second Life spokesman told me they'd counted 1850 in all. 

What IBM management thinks of all this is still unclear; I talked to several staffers on campus during the strike, and they declined comment. A senior IBM staffer watched the protest from a distance, but when I asked to take a screenshot, he promptly vanished into the metaverse aether.

IBM's Second Life presence wasn't just a marketing/PR stunt; thousands of employees used it for remote meetings every week; IBM staff were also behind a ultimate unsuccessful attempt to make Second Life interoperable with OpenSim. Instead of engaging with the avatar protesters, which would probably we the wiser path, I later found out from an IBM staffer that they were under strict orders not to engage with them at all.

In any case, the takeaway for companies now: If you do plan to have a metaverse platform presence, prepare for this and even more chaotic user-driven events to happen there.

More from the Sam Cole article:

The Atlantic Asks Me How Much Taylor Swift is Like the Metaverse -- Spoiler: More Than You Might Think!

Above: SL Cosplay Taylor Tribute by Kylie Quinn

"Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse" is a totally random interview with Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic I just did, and it starts with a left field premise that winds up with some fairly interesting ways of thinking about the topic. Some favorite excerpts:

Nyce: How important is VR in this? Is that “and”—as in “VR and other devices”—really operative there?

Au: No, no, no. That’s another thing that drives me crazy: the assumption that it has to be in VR. In the book, Stephenson even mentions that it’s mostly just the wealthy who use VR headsets, and regular folks just use a regular computer.

Metaverse platforms exist. The biggest one is Roblox, followed by Fortnite. To be a true Metaverse with a capital M, you would need, like, 15 million people or more in the same virtual world at the same time. And we’re not there yet. We’re close.

This is something that's not discussed much, but think it's worth keeping in mind: In Neal Stephenson's original vision of the Metaverse, the Metaverse has an average concurrency twice the population of New York -- i.e. about 15 million people. We're close to that now. (Stephenson himself was surprised when I pointed that out.)

Then I get to compare Taylor Swift's progress on the Metaverse against what Mark Zuckerberg is doing:

Listen: I Talk About Metaverse Art, AM Radio & Cao Fei for ArtNet's Podcast

What Is the Metaverse? And Why Should the Art World Care? is a new-ish episode from The Art Angle, the podcast from acclaimed art world news site ArtNet. I had a great time (despite an allergy flare-up) talking with host Tim Schneider, who interviews me alongside art curator Tina Rivers Ryan and artist Sara Ludy, whose SL-based art I briefly covered here.

Here's some highlights (though of course the whole thing is a good listen):

• 4:25: History of the Metaverse starting with Habitat in the 80s, ActiveWorlds in the 90s; flowing into its origins in Snow Crash, and my working definition based directly on the novel. From that I talk about Snow Crash's early influence on Second Life, to the founding of Second Life and my writing in it, and the first metaverse hype wave in 2006-2008, when major universities and companies put stakes in the virtual world.
• 13:45: I talk about the art world of Second Life, from the Flickr photographer community that Cajsa covers so well, to acclaimed artists Cao Fei (aka China Tracy) and AM Radio (aka Jeffrey Berg)
• 24:00: My take on blockchain-based metaverse platforms, and the categorical mistake I believe they're making.
• 32:20: The valuable social potential of the Metaverse, versus social media. Fellow guest Tina Rivers Ryan points out some serious potential downsides which I also happen to agree with. I've written frequently, for example, about avatar-based racism that is also problematic in the virtual world.
• 40:15: Second Life's influence on current metaverse platforms, especially VRChat.

Cao Fei's first SL art project below, the machinima I.Mirror, along with links for more reading, and highlights from AM Radio's career:

Listen: I Chat About the Future of Music on Metaverse Platforms With Water & Music -- Annotations & Links Below!

Wagner James Au · The Metaverse & Music -- Wagner James Au w/Water & Music

Starting around 7 minutes in, here's audio from my Twitter Spaces chat last week on the Metaverse and music with Water & Music, a music business research DAO collective, spinning off on this huge research paper they just published on the topic (and that I was interviewed for). After the group's intro, our conversation starts at about 15 minutes in. 

Some highlights by time code:

NEWS: My Next Book, Why the Metaverse Matters, is Coming Out for Second Life's 20th Anniversary!

I've been wanting to make this announcement for months, and now I finally can, through this scoop from Dean Takahashi on VentureBeat:

For a guy who was an embedded journalist inside the virtual world of Second Life, this whole metaverse thing is a ride around the merry-go-round again.

And so Wagner James Au, who previously wrote a book on his Second Life experiences, is now writing a book dubbed Why the Metaverse Matters: From Second Life to Meta & Beyond, A Guide by Its First Embedded Journalist.

In an interview with GamesBeat, Au said his focus is on the metaverse user communities, especially the grassroots creators, which make these platforms meaningful. He will explore the continued influence of Second Life on the evolution of the metaverse platforms, and uncover the mystery of Second Life...

Much more here -- and much more soon on New World Notes. I fully plan to keep blogging as the book takes shape, creating what's essentially notes and thoughts that will shape the final product. That also means relying on the feedback of you, you excellent readers, who have been an incredibly smart and supportive community that I continue to learn from. So thank you all for helping make this possible!

I Talk About the Depiction of the Metaverse in Movies/TV on the CBC -- What Are Your Favorite Versions?

Pretty fun article. Unfortunately, my favorite metaverse-meets-the-movies story didn't make the cut: When a rising tech CTO watched The Matrix for the first time in 1999 with his friends, he left the theater somewhat bummed.

"That," he told them, "is what I wanted to make."

And that man's name? Philip Rosedale.

My favorite lines for the CBC article:

The Inevitability of Virtual Sex, Technical Debt & Other Things Metaverse Platforms Could Learn from Second Life

"What can the Metaverse learn from Second Life?" is a good new story for UK publication Engineering & Technology from freelancer Hilary Lamb, delving into the lessons that new metaverse platforms could learn from Second Life. For instance, technical debt: 

‘Second Life’ is notoriously clumsy, with lag and lumpy framerates that put something of a damper on the virtual orgies. Some of this is on account of technical debt accrued early at Linden Labs – which cannot be righted without sacrificing vast quantities of user-generated content – but it also points to the challenge of generating high-poly content in the metaverse.

I chatted with Hilary for the piece, talking about that and other topics -- including, of course, those virtual orgies:

I'm Giving a Webinar on the Metaverse Next Week Friday -- Register to Attend Live for Free!

Click here to register for free to attend a Zoom webinar on That M Thing in a conference hosted by Canadian non-profit org CPAC (Chinese Professionals Association of Canada), which kicks off April 29 at 6:30pm PT. I'm preparing a slide deck now covering a range of topics, including how to define the Metaverse, Second Life's role in shaping it, mass market and niche use cases, and common misconceptions around the technology.

Is there any particular topic around virtual worlds and the Metaverse that I should also cover? If so, please suggest in Comments below!*

Today at 3:30pm PT: I'm Doing a Open-to-the-Public Zoom Lecture on the Metaverse for the University of Miami -- Link to Join Below!

Update, 3/11: Zoom link/access details below:

Topic: Virtual Media Management Association Meeting on Monday, April 11, 2022

Time: Apr 11, 2022 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 916 6233 8941

One tap mobile: +16465588656,,91662338941# US (New York)

I'll try to cover the topics mentioned in Comments below; feel free to add more of your own!