New World Notes

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:

Monday Memory: This Second Life Dress Was Auctioned Off for $1700

All the recent hype over NFT-based virtual art* speculation reminded me that Second Life, as usual, anticipated that trend well over a decade ago -- for instance, this dress by acclaimed designer Eshi Otawara which was sold in 2008 at auction for L$460,000, roughly $1700 in USD, with all proceeds going to benefit the annual Relay for Life in SL, a community-run campaign sanctioned by the American Cancer Society. That wasn't even the most paid for a virtual item in Second Life, for in 2006, there was a L$600,000 bid (around $1850-1950 at market rates) in an auction of a pink Dominus Shadow muscle car, donated by engineer Francis Chung.  

Sad to say little of the NFT craze is going to benefit a good cause like that but at least (as Nettrice Gaskin eloquently explains) it does offer a new revenue stream for under-represented artists.

*If you're still wondering WTF is even an NFT, here's a fairly funny explainer from SNL:

Monday Memory: NBC Once Owned a Virtual Times Square in Second Life -- So a Child Poverty NGO Installed a Homeless Kid There to Beg for L$

Writing about the new homeless camp in Hangars Liquides last week reminded me of another instance of virtual homelessness in Second Life as a political statement -- back in 2006, at the peak of SL hype, NBC (yes as in the actual Saturday Night Live/The Office/30 Rock etc. TV network), owned a Second Life sim modeled after the company's headquarters in New York, even holding a Christmas tree lighting event there like they do in the real world every year.  But when I visited the sim, I came across a figure who'd be sadly familiar in real Manhattan, but was brilliantly out of place in the virtual world -- a homeless kid squatting on the sidewalk, begging for change:

It had been built to promote the television network owned by General Electric, but last night when I went to take a screenshot of their New York City ice rink and their lit-up Christmas tree, he was already there, silently using NBC's site in Second Life for a purpose of his own.  I said hello several times, but the thin frail kid said nothing-- though if you clicked on his cardboard box, an automated message told you he was collecting Linden Dollar donations for a Spanish NGO to help the real world's poor.   (And if you're going to do that in an online world, why not do so in a virtual recreation of the world's richest city?)

Read about it here, and watch the NGO's trailer for the project below. I really miss these moments of serendipity and ideas clashing with each other in the virtual world -- reminding us that Second Life wasn't always just a shopping and fashion social game, as it mostly seems to have devolved into now.

Monday Memory: That Time Meghan & Harry Spent Their First Week Of Freedom Looking At Second Life-Based Art

Yesterday's blockbuster Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan and Harry, in which the Duke and Duchess of Sussex revealed the rampant racism she suffered that led them to leave Britain, also led to the most unlikely overlap with Second Life. The couple first moved to the British Commonwealth of Canada, a bid to continue representing the royal family while escaping the gravitational pull of the bigoted UK tabloids (and at least one racist member of the royal family itself). Which is why one of their first public tours was a visit to the native artist Skawennati, who uses Second Life as her medium:

That her work is being seen by a couple from the royal family of a country that once dominated indigenous people across the globe, in the very moment that they are seeking independence from that family, partly motivated by that country's prejudice against the wife, who hails from a former colony... could inspire a new work of art in itself.

More here when it happened, in January of last year. Good video documenting the SL-based art of Skawennati below:

Monday Memory: How Second Life Roleplay Wound Up in Hot Tub Time Machine With John Cusack & Clark Duke

Listening to The Office podcast about the 2007 episode where Dwight and Jim play Second Life reminded me of another appearance by the virtual world a few years later -- in Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), starring John Cusack along with Craig Robinson and Clark Duke. (Both of whom, funny enough, also starred in The Office.) In Hot Tub, Duke is Cusack's geeky nephew, who apparently is obsessed with playing in one of SL's many dark urban roleplay communities, like the infamous Crack Den (think Grand Theft Auto Online but with hardcore sex), but is stuck in the game's prison, doing hard time.

When the movie came out, I got to talk with Steve Nelson, the SL creator who worked with the filmmakers on the machinima for the SL scenes:

Monday Memory: One of the Best Second Life Machinimas Ever Made

I mentioned this machinima last week in another post but it deserves a post of its own: "Watch the World" by Robbie Dingo (aka Rob Wright). Created in 2007, it remains one of the best machinimas in Second Life ever made, because it beautifully illustrates the dynamic content creation that remains unique to Second Life, and weaves it with a classic folk song about another, slightly more famous artistic innovator: 

Monday Memory: When MLK's Face Shone from the Second Life Sun

Gone a decade or so ago after an update to the environmental system, the face of Martin Luther King Jr.'s face once emanated from the surface of Second Life's virtual sun on this day of the year, to celebrate the civil rights icon's birthday:

In honor of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a special sun is made to arc across the grid of Second Life today.  If you look close enough, you'll see it's inset with the face of the man who was so untimely cut down, when far too much of his work remained.  In his country, the world beyond, and, perhaps, in worlds he never could have imagined.

It's more than likely that Linden Lab the developer who added it no longer works at the company, and just as likely that none of the developers now working for the company even remember that it did. But it's worth remembering today, and everyday, in hopes this special sun is brought back again.

Fascist Leanings of Trump's Most Extreme Followers Already Evident in Their Online Behavior Back in 2016

As the United States takes stalk of the violent riot of Trump supporters at the Capitol last week, led in part by people wearing Nazi shirts and carrying Confederate flags, I thought back to the behavior of Trump supporters in Second Life before the 2016 election -- mobbing the virtual HQ of Bernie Sanders, for instance. And not just to troll his left-leaning Second Life followers, but to confront them with a clear symbol of hate:  

“There is a picture I managed to capture of one of the flags spewing from a particle dispenser at HQ,” Sanders support group member Macaria Wind tells me, handing over an image file of a Trump swastika. “Left there by one of Trump's supporters when no one was around.”

Racist behavior like this led to at least one Trump group being expelled from Second Life and their private island, aptly called The Wall, where they had rezzed a massive version of the Nazi Party's eagle-headed Parteiadler. Online activity like this was eerily similar to that on other sites where Trump's most extreme supporters congregated, including Reddit and 4Chan. At the time, Trump supporters in Second Life (as with other online sites) insisted this fascist behavior was simply a bad apples anomaly, or meant ironically, or both. The events of last week definitely show this justification to be tragically, horribly wrong: As it turns out, there were more than enough bad apples to threaten democracy itself -- and far few of their members to stop them.

Monday Memory: A Doctor Recreates Hallucinations of Schizophrenics in a Virtual World

Above: In one hallucination, text on a poster would change, when you walked closer to it. 

When I first read the study suggesting that VR might help prime people to have more lucid dreams, it immediately seemed credible to me. For one thing, extensive VR use often shapes my own dreams. For another, it immediately reminded me of an experiment from back in 2004, when a medical doctor/programmer recreated the hallucinations of real schizophrenics in Second Life:

The concept of creating a visual recreation of a purely internal experience originated with Baldwin’s colleague Dr. Peter Yellowlees, an Australian psychiatrist who often treated his patients in the Outback remotely, via video conferencing. This inspired his idea to visualize the hallucinations associated with schizophrenia, a mental illness that afflicts some one percent of the population (mostly people in their teens and 20’s). To determine what they hallucinated, Yellowlees compiled interviews with his patients, to draw out specifics. What kind of voices? How many voices? Like a police sketch artist of the mind, an artist drew out the visual descriptions, and Dr. Yellowlees integrated the results into a computer mockup. The first attempt was produced on a Silicon Graphics machine, and took nine months to build from scratch. ("Which doesn't look anything as good,” Nash promises me, as we begin the tour, “as what you're about to see.") By contrast, Baldwin put his Second Life version together in some three weeks...

Things change, as you approach them, but the shift is subtle. A poster suddenly shifts to contain obscenities; a single word in a newspaper headline suddenly becomes the only word you see. A bookshelf seems to contain nothing but volumes about fascism. And most disturbing to me, a bathroom mirror which contains your reflection becomes, when you come closer, a bloody death mask. The man in the mirror is actually a model, but the hallucination is based on the testimony of a schizophrenic who stopped shaving, because when he looked in the mirror, he’d see his corpse staring back at him. (And when you get close enough to the sink, you hear the strains of bagpipes— because this is the music the man heard too, when he glimpsed his own death.)

One of the goals with the project was to give people personal insight and empathy for people with schizophrenia. As a graduate student training to be a therapist put it to me:

Monday Memory: That Time a Former Governor Made a Whistle Stop Appearance in Second Life as Part of His Potential Presidential Campaign

August 31, 2006: Read my interview with now-Senator Mark Warner here. His SL appearance came at a time when Democratic insiders were considering whether the former Virginia governor should be their "fallback" presidential candidate in 2008, should Senator Hillary Clinton’s presumptive ascension as the party’s choice for President in 2008 ever fell through. (Funny these insiders hadn't yet considered who'd actually go on to become their candidate.) A few months after the SL event, I was lucky enough to meet Warner in person and found him an impressively knowledgeable politician with a keen knack for grasping and synthesizing competing opinions. When we shook hands, one of his assistants reminded him of the Second Life event, and he grinned broadly, saying something like, "Wow that got us lot of a buzz, didn't it?"

Warner's virtual world appearance in Second Life was covered by multiple news outlets as a novel (if strange and geeky) thing for a potential political candidate to do. Fourteen years later, the fact that Joe Biden had an official campaign headquarters in Animal Crossing scarcely merited much notice -- now, virtual world appearances by well-known cultural figures are taken for granted.