New World Notes

Readings: Why The Fight for Real World Racial Equality is Just as Crucial in the Metaverse

It's a common misconception that virtual worlds are a safe escape from our offline prejudices. This is sometimes true but often not the case. In fact, the anonymous nature of metaverse platforms and other virtual worlds can make expressions of racism worse - especially when avatars are based around a realistic human model. Our best hope is being aware of that reality, and preparing for it.

Here's some New World Notes readings on theme:

Monday Memory: Metaverse Artist, Grieving For Her Dead Husband, Recreates Him as an Avatar

First published in 2008, "The Husband That Eshi Made" is an essential New World Notes story of how the virtual world can connect us with people in the material realm, even long after they're gone: 

[M]emories of her late husband] wracked her in the grocery store, on the second anniversary of Glenn’s passing.  Since then, Eshi had become a metaverse artist of some acclaim, creating a concert hall made of light, and an evening gown made of fire, among other wonders.  Which is probably why her next stop after the store was her computer. 

“I felt so powerless and alone,” as she recalls, “that I told myself, ‘You know, it might be a sick thing to do, a pathetic thing to do, whatever-- but if I cannot have this guy in real life, I will MAKE him in Second Life.'”

His widow re-created him as best she could-- rather, Eshi Otawara remade herself, transforming her avatar to look like her husband.  And when she was done remaking him, she took Glenn on a tour through Second Life.

She took him skydiving in Straylight. She took him to Ruta Maya for a butterfly ride. “I get to do things with his pixel body that he'd be doing if he were alive,” as she puts it.  She even gave him a flat belly, something she’d known he’d wanted for some time. “I am sure he was cracking up in whatever form he exists now,” she says. 

I ask Eshi what it’s like to become the avatar version of Glenn.

“Like he is hugging me,” she says. “I miss his face most. I used to stare at him all the time.”

Read the rest here.

Monday Memory: How the Metaverse Illustrates the Limits of Libertarianism

With a certain tech billionaire currently railing against companies including Apple withdrawing their ads from Twitter, it's a good time to remember a fairly related story from 2007-2008 -- when Linden Lab began to pivot away from its libertarian approach to governing Second Life content:

In 2006, for example, Philip Rosedale refused to intercede against Ginko, the SL bank with a high rate of return, which many Residents accused of being a Ponzi scheme.  That same year, in response to Residents protests against age play (i.e. simulated avatar-based pedophilia), Robin Linden said it would be forbidden "[i]f this activity were in public areas"-- implying that it was still permissible in private.  Casinos and other gambling institutions, of course, were rampant over the land.

The reversals started last year, continuing into this one: 

Monday Memory: Greenies Showed How to Do Metaverse Marketing Right -- With Community Creator Participation & Genuine Delight (2007)

I recently mentioned how IBM's presence in Second Life led to an unexpected backlash, so here's a classic example of metaverse-based marketing done right -- "Greenies", an SL sim rendered in a giant-sized apartment users could explore like tiny ants:

[Greenies is] from a small British development company called Rezzable, which plans to use it for retail and events.  But where SL sites for large corporations like Dell, Sun, and Reebok attract but a few hundred visitors, Greenies is, with little official promotion, already bringing in several thousand visits per week. 

To make it a true Second Life experience, you need to bring your own sense of manic fun: explore the place with two Transformers, say, then a dancing fly and a silent crow on a WWII fighter plane, then maybe later on a flying hotdog, with reggae music streaming around you all the while.

But make no mistake, Greenies is still part of a company project-- just a rare one where the company's marketing demands don't choke out any possibility of genuine delight. 

Greenies was the site of a successful L'Oreal campaign, with giant-sized renditions of the real life product situated in the apartment. (Pictured at right.)

Two other things that made Greenies notable as a case study:

It hired creators from within the Second Life community, people who knew the tools best and how to make experiences that were maximally delightful.

And it also incorporated other real life brands into the experience in an organic way: 

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:

Monday Memory: How Suzanne Vega Singing in Second Life in 2006 Helped Shaped the Virtual World's Culture

When Caroline Mimbs Nyce of The Atlantic asked how much Taylor Swift is like the Metaverse, the question seemed pretty bizarre at first -- but then got us talking about Suzanne Vega performing in Second Life, the first platinum-selling artist to do so in any metaverse platform. While's Vega's appearance did help inspire a rush of other real world brands appearing in SL, it also helped shape Second Life's culture going forward, cultivating it as a virtual world popular with women and indy creators. I have to think if another, very different artist had performed in 2006, Second Life would have evolved in another direction. 

Relatedly, Taylor Swift's massively massive fanbase (229 million followers on Instagram alone) has many tens of millions of gamers/metaverse users. Which is why I said:

Second Life's Early Growth Problems Exacerbated by Rise of Facebook, Ironically Enough (Comment of the Week)

Left to right: Linden Lab's Robin Harper and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, along with  the CEOs of MySpace and LinkedIn (Commonwealth Club, 2006)

Good point from reader Martin K, adding to Cory Ondrejka's analysis of why Second Life hit a growth plateau during the peak of media attention between 2006-2008:

The other trend that SecondLife was facing around 2007 was Facebook on PC (and social media in general). If you look at google trends for "SecondLife" and "Facebook" in the years 2006 to 2008, Second Life's peak in 2007 is dwarfed by Facebook: (Remove "Facebook" from the search to see that the time range actually includes Second Life's peak.)

Instead of a virtual community of strangers, Facebook was offering a connection with your real-life friends, relatives, and their lives. Compared with that, Second Life wasn't standing a chance. I can't help but thinking that there is a lesson to learn for Horizon Worlds and other metaverse apps.

This is true. I recall how much excitement Facebook generated in its early days. For many people, it was the first time they were in something like a near-real time virtual "space" with others, even though avatars were just thumbnail pics of people they knew IRL.

Which also brings us to a Monday Memory: Back in 2006, Second Life was generally considered to be the future of socialization online. To the point where a Linden Lab VP shared a stage at a San Francisco Commonwealth Club forum on the topic, “Online Personas: Defining the Self in a Virtual World”, with some college kid named Zuckerberg:

Monday Memories: The Story of the Second Life Beanstalk, Featured in The Wall Street Journal's New Podcast

One of the highlights in the Wall Street Journal's new podcast series on the founding of Second Life is when the reporter visits Steller Sunshine's beanstalk, the oldest user-made object in Second Life. And you can still visit and try to claim it yourself:

[Click here to teleport]

Created on March 13, 2002, over a year before Second Life even existed, it was imported from the pre-Beta Linden World. I told the story of its creation in my first book, The Making of Second Life:

Monday Memory: Before Mesh, Amazing Avatars Walked the Virtual World

Latest addition to my New World Notes Classics archive (bottom right column) is my interview in 2007 with Tasrill Sieyes, who tells me about turning Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase into a Second Life avatar:

 I was showing someone my abstract avatars that I have made, and they mentioned that making a 3D form of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” would be great... [S]he loves the painting and after seeing my other work she wanted to see what it would look like transformed into SL form...

It is an interesting feeling [being this avatar]. Kind of... freeing. I am not bound by the normal limits of anthropomorphic avatar.  And I can think far more artistically. I don't know [why], to be honest. I don't think too much about how my various bits of art make me feel, I just let them make me feel, and let it wash over me.

More here, and see also my interview with the creator of this amazing exoskeleton. Created before the coming of mesh and mesh-enhanced avatars in 2012 or so, they illustrate how diverse and innovative Second Life avatars used to be.

Monday Memory: My 2014 Interview With the Late Ebbe Altberg After He Became CEO of Linden Lab

With the Second Life community and the wider industry still processing the passing of Ebbe Altberg, I went back to read my first interview with him in 2014, shortly after he became Linden Lab's CEO. It's particularly moving how he discovered the virtual world through his son:

Though he is Linden Lab’s new CEO now, one of Ebbe Altberg’s first experiences with Second Life occurred over 10 years ago, and as it happens, actually involved a violation of Second Life policy. It was around that time, you see, that Altberg’s son fell in love with Second Life, and became an avid builder there. Which is usually a fine thing, but here’s the problem: Altberg’s son was a young teen at the time, and back then they were strictly not allowed:

“So yeah, he was underage,” Altberg admits now, “so SL booted him correctly.”

Altberg convinced then CEO Philip Rosedale to be lenient, but by that time, Altberg’s young son had become a well-known content creator in Second Life... Despite all that, Ebbe's son stayed engaged in Second Life for a couple years, and even co-founded an in-world design company. And being among the first explorers of Teen Second Life, one of that world’s original islands was even named after the avatar of Ebbe Altberg’s son. And Ebbe Altberg watched all this amazed: “For a kid to have this experience so early was fantastic,” as he puts it now.

Another interesting point is how he saw VR/XR devices as a potential savior to Second Life's waning  user/revenue growth: