New World Notes

Second Life's Strange Connection to Trump's Cryptocurrency Programs

Well, I wish this snarky meme I made last year, explaining Second Life's strange connection to the 2024 presidential election, was quaintly out of date, but that was sadly not to be. In the news from just the last few days, we have:

• Donald Trump Names XRP, SOL, ADA, BTC and ETH as Part of U.S. Crypto Reserve
• Donald Trump-Linked Firm May be Looking to Start NFT and Metaverse Platform

Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that these programs -- let alone Trump's re-election in 2024 -- would have never come into being.

As I explained last year when it still seemed like a fun, James Burke-ian, Connections-esque thought experiment:

Monday Memory: AI-Based Music Co-Created in 2019 by Robert Thomas from the LA Philharmonic's Massive Recording Archive

Similar to how Nettrice Gaskins was creating AI-based visual art years before Midjourney and such, adaptive music/sound artist Robert Thomas was leveraging machine learning last decade, including this amazing 2019 project for the LA Philharmonic:

"Parag Mital made a browser which let [us] search through hundreds of terabytes of material, to be able to hear different bits of different performances," he says. (Google Arts and Culture provided the technical backing.) Robert and his collaborators then took those clips and created a wealth of new sound files, then ran those through an audio analysis.

"[We] trained machine learning processes on that audio, and then tried to get it to generate new music." So for instance, in the soundtrack, you'll hear a segment from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But then, "it turns into a machine learning hallucination of the melody which goes somewhere else that Stravinsky didn't write."

Read about it here and watch the official video for the project below!

Monday Memory: There Have Been AI-Powered Helper Bots in Second Life Since at Least 2007

Here's a fun watch to start the week: My chat with Social Autopoiesis, one of the very first AI-powered bots to run in Second Life... from 2007.

And while Convai's new bots developed with Linden Lab promise to transform the virtual world, acting as helpers to confused users, it's worth remembering Social Autopoiesis was created by SL tinkerer Adam Brokken with similar ambitions:

Monday Memory: Fight Against Front National in Second Life Illustrates the Challenge of Extremist Expression in an Immersive Virtual World

Above: The face of Dr. King shines from the virtual sun upon an anti-fascist protest against Front National in Second Life

In early 2007, in the run-up to Martin Luther King Jr. day in the US, Second Life was wracked by protests against Front National, the leading far right party in France, which decided to set up an official campaign headquarters of the virtual world. The surrounding community, however, wasn't too happy with those plans:

The first night I arrived at the protest against the Second Life headquarters of Front National, the far right French political party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was ringed on all sides by protesters with signs to wave and statements to distribute. By the second night I came (this was late last week), the conflict had become more literal, for many Residents had armed themselves. Multi-colored explosions and constant gunfire shredded the air of Porcupine, a shopping island which FN had inexplicably picked for the site of their virtual world HQ, in December.

The server lag from so many people throwing up so much gunfire slows the battle to a slow motion firefight, but I manage to wade up to TonTonCarton Yue, who is strafing the FN building with a chaingun usually associated with an AC-130 gunship, than a political protest.

"Can I ask," I begin, "why are you shooting?"

"Because I hate Front National," Yue tells me simply.

"If you use violence, doesn't that reduce you to their level?" "I don't know," Yue answers, after awhile.

"I don't care. FN equals violence." And having offered that axiom, he returns his aim to the enemy, and unleashes another barrage.

And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, "rez cages" (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids' TV characters, and more... One enterprising insurrectionist created a pig grenade, fixed it to a flying saucer, and sent several whirling into Front National headquarters, where they'd explode in a starburst of porcine shrapnel.

The very fact that a metaverse platform is immersive and enables the creation of 3D content amplifies the challenge of creating a community that's free from anti-social behavior among avatars. Most other Internet communities only need to contend with toxic speech expressed in text and audio/video. In a virtual world, the toxicity can become a literal part of the world itself.

This very point was raised by the organized protesters, holding up Linden Lab's own community standards:

Monday Memory: An 85 Year Old Reports Physical Recovery After Using Second Life -- And a Powerful, Untapped Use Case of Metaverse Platforms

Similar to how an 86 year old Black blues guitarist convinced me of Second Life's (and by extension, all successful metaverse platforms) sustained power as a diverse creative community, the experiences of an 85 year old woman back in 2013 further convinced me of the importance of virtual worlds for senior citizens:

This is Fran, who plays Second Life as an avatar named Fran Seranade, and while that’s interesting in itself, many other senior citizens like her are known to be active in SL.

Here is the truly extraordinary thing: For over 7 years, Fran has been afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system afflicting millions around the world, including actor Michael J. Fox and sports legend Muhammed Ali. In Fran’s case, Parkinson’s has made it difficult for her to stand from a sitting position, and maintain her balance while upright. But now Fran reports she’s gained significant recovery of physical movement -- as a direct consequence of her activity in Second Life.

How did this happen? According to her, she originally used Second Life just as a fun way to socialize, but “[a]fter awhile I began to identify with my avatar and feel like I was actually doing what she was doing.” On one occasion, she played with some tai chi meditation animations for her avatar (that’s her below), and this was a turning point:

“As I watched her,” as she tells me through e-mail, “I could actually feel the movements within my body as if I were actually doing tai chi in my physical life (which is not possible for me).”

This remains one of the most promising aspects of Second Life and virtual worlds in general, though much more research is needed.  Tom Boellstorff, Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine and Donna Z. Davis (PhD), an Assistant Professor at University of Oregon, initially brought the story of Fran's recovery to me, along with a tantalizing theory of how avatars can help this transformation:

Monday Memory: In 2012, Academics Found Many Enjoy Virtual Experiences Over Real Ones. By 2014, VR Leaders Were Trying to Put That Into Practice.

"We're Not Ready For An Era Where People Prefer Virtual Experiences To Real Ones" is a classic post from 2012, citing an important just released study:

Co-authored last year by leading virtual world academic Edward Castronova [it] suggests that people get more happiness from being in Second Life than they do from good news in their real life. In other words, as he wrote on his blog, "Second Life is providing a big chunk of life satisfaction, just as big as the factors that previous researchers on life satisfaction have found were the 'biggies,' like health, employment, and family relationships."

It calls to mind a scene in The Matrix (watch above) where Cypher, a guy who enjoys eating virtual steak even if it doesn't exist, decides to betray his real life friends in exchange for an even more luxurious virtual life. AI representative Agent Smith promises to make that happen.

"I think few MMO/virtual world players would make as stark and serious a choice as Cypher did," I observed back then, "but at the same time, we are already well acquainted with many who do sacrifice aspects of their real life for their virtual one -- jobs and chores skipped, friends and loved ones ignored, so some of us could spend just a little more time socializing or gaming in a 3D digital landscape that doesn't strictly exist."

I'd argue that it's a false choice, since we often enhance real life friendships in virtual worlds, or just as important, can form new friendships that transcend distance, national origin, and other accidents of our birth. And metaverse platforms enable many of us to make some or most of our real life income from our virtual world content.

But looking back, the wild thing is many in the virtual world/virtual reality industry willingly took on that Agent Smith role, offering to pacify the poor of the world by giving them a better virtual life. As I wrote in my book:

 

Monday Memory: Charles Bristol, the Metaverse Bluesman Who Changed the Course of My Career

Video by Toxic Menges

From Charles Bristol's Metaverse Blues: 87 Year Old Bluesman Becomes Avatar-Based Musician In Second Life (2009):

When Charles Bristol was born in 1921, the electric guitar did not exist, and slavery was a living memory still, related to him by grandparents who worked beneath the lash themselves. But as fate would have it, Mr. Bristol would nonetheless live to see a black man made President, and perhaps just as unexpected, see himself made into an avatar, so he could extend his decades-long music career into something called the metaverse.

Second Life became Mr. Bristol's latest venue thanks to another blues musician, known in-world as Etherian Kamaboko,, who lives near him in North Carolina.

Accidentally coming across Mr. Bristol playing blues changed own my career course:

Monday Memory: What a Young Woman Learned by Roleplaying a Sexy Male Avatar

In 2010's "What Rebecca Learned By Being A Second Life Man" recounts a young woman's experience roleplaying as a hot male avatar in the virtual world dating scene: 

... she had her own challenges in this male form: "I kept thinking to myself, 'How do guys talk? What am I suppose to say?'"

Again, her solution was to reverse engineer the social dynamic: "I went over to Franks Jazz Club, and chatted it up with a few of the women there, trying to remember the same conversation starters that the various players in my past had used on my main female avatar."

With the women she tried this on, as a Second Life male, she had more success: "I got a variety of responses from the women at the club, ranging from 'Buzz off!' to 'Why thank you, I would love to dance with you.'"

Her male patter worked really well in one particular case, a woman she danced with at the jazz club... The lines worked so well, the woman began giving her free clothes, effectively trying to make Rebecca's Second Life male even more attractive. "I could tell she was becoming attached, so I told her I had to log off."

Apparently crushed by Rebecca's male, the woman persisted, sending her several offline Instant Message. But Rebecca decided not to respond, or explain who she really was. "I think telling her the truth would have freaked her out."

Read the rest here!

Metaverse Memory: My Story of a Man Who Built a Virtual World Museum to Hold His Dying Father's Art

From "Sander's Villa: The Man Who Gave His Father A Second Life" (2011):

As death approached, the artist’s son did an extraordinary thing: He began to build a place that would live on after his father, made with particles of light. That is to say, Sander Vos logged into Second Life, and made a gallery of his father’s work in digital 3D.  

“I started building a 3D version of one of his drawings, ‘Villa Insight’ in Second Life, while he was ill, because building makes me calm in a way,” Sander tells me. “I had to think practical all the time, like: How on earth am I going to make this little ink bottle with prims? And I was busy with him at the same time, ‘cause it was all about him of course."

Read the rest here.

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: