New World Notes

Prince Harry & Meghan Markle Spend First Week of Independence Looking at Art Made in Second Life

New World Notes has spent little or no time covering the British Royal Family over the last 14 years, but here we are: This Tuesday, a day before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced an official withdrawal from their royal duties, they spent some time looking at art made in Second Life.

Yes indeed they did:

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle took in Skawennati’s exhibit "Avatars, Aliens, Ancestors" on Tuesday while visiting Canada’s high commissioner to the United Kingdom to say thanks for the hospitality they received during their recent trip to Canada...

The show imagines indigenous life past, present and future. It opens with the video work Words Before All Else, in which Skawennati’s avatar recites the Haudenosaunee’s Thanksgiving Address.

“My avatar, who is named xox, is an extension of myself,” she said. “She allows me to go places I might not be able to go.”

The artist Skawennati is pretty amazingly ambitious, and makes amazing use of SL in her art. Here's a talk she did about it a few years ago:

Electronic Gaming Monthly Explores the Rise & Fall (& Semi-Rise) of Second Life Through Its Ancient Wiley Guidebooks

Interesting long read on Electronic Gaming Monthly covers the perennial "Whatever happened to Second Life?" story through a fresh angle: The five official guidebooks to Second Life published by Wiley, and the mass of contributors for wrote it. The author Mark Hill compares and contrasts the glowing words wrote or said back then, with Second Life as it is now. That includes SL co-founders Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka, though Hill mixes up Philip's real name with his avatar handle:

[T]he final two chapters of The Official Guide, “A Cultural Timeline” and “The Future and Impact of Second Life,” further highlight Linden’s own divided focus between SL’s core users and its media darling status. The timeline is introduced with overwrought claims like “‘I’m not building a game,’ Philip Linden once said, ‘I’m building a new country.’ And in many ways, the history of Second Life thus far resembles the first centuries of America itself.”

... Linden’s own hype reaches its loftiest with comments like “Imagine being able to access from SL from literally anywhere [with wearable computing], holding conversations across worlds, or overlaying your friend’s SL avatar on them when you see them in your first life,” and “What excites me the most about the future of Second Life is its potential to fundamentally improve the human condition.” Second Life may not have improved the human condition, but it certainly highlighted certain aspects of it. Terdiman referenced an infamous 2006 interview that was invaded by a horde of trolls wielding flying penises. 

... In an interview for The Entrepreneur’s Guide, Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka went further in painting a picture of Second Life as a corporate utopia. “Even with video conferencing, you can’t really get up, move around, pace. … And Second Life helps with [that]. You have place, embodiment, and a method for having real-world style conversations a la a cocktail party (i.e., multiple, parallel conversations). I think the first new opportunity is going to be helping companies that have dispersed work forces save money on recruiting, on-boarding, training, and collaboration. This is a lot like what IBM has said they are working on. But they are just scratching the surface.”

The article misses the chance to mention that both both Philip and Cory, while no longer working on Second Life, are still actively involved in virtual worlds and virtual world technology, Philip with his new startup High Fidelity and Cory (up until a few years ago), driving Facebook's acquisition of Oculus (for good and ill). But then again, the story of all those who started at Linden Lab and Second Life back in the earliest days and continue to work on reviving the old magic -- even if that means developing other virtual world platforms -- could be a whole other article in itself.

As for what Second Life still is now, DJ Nexeus Fatale and myself reflect on that, also for good and ill:

Listen: Longtime SLer Gidge Uriza Featured in Leslie Jamison's NPR Interview

NPR just featured an interview with acclaimed writer Leslie James, whose new book of essays Make It Burn, Make It Scream features an excerpt from her widely-discussed 2017 Atlantic Monthly story on Second Life. She reads an excerpt featuring SL veteran Gidge Uriza:

Linden Lab Denies Failure to Adequately Prevent Money Laundering, Sex Offenders & Ageplay in Second Life, as Alleged in Lawsuit -- Security Expert Plaintiff Replies: "[I have] Written Proof of Everything That I Am Alleging"

Wired just published a belated story on the wrongful termination lawsuit by a Muslim-American security expert that New World Notes broke last month, but it has some new information on the controversy -- including an official statement by Linden Lab:

The suit alleges company executives retaliated against her for flagging cybersecurity risks and potential violations of anti-money-laundering laws, child exploitation, and data misuse...

“While we will fight her alleged claims in court, we deny any allegations that the company has engaged in any illegal activity,” said Linden Lab spokesperson Brett Atwood. “Ms. [Kavya] Pearlman left the company on March 15 only after she was given the opportunity to improve her work performance. We look forward to all the facts coming out in a court of law,” he said, declining additional comment because of the lawsuit.

I just reached out to Ms. Pearlman, who stands by the security-related allegations in her lawsuit -- and says she has concrete evidence of her claims:

"Having written proof of everything that I am alleging," Ms. Pearlman tells me, "I look forward to discovery of fact and taking those facts to the court of law. Even Linden Lab knows, dismissing these allegations by citing some work performance issue of an industry expert on cybersecurity and compliance is yet another way of potentially attributing 'look away'. This is not new, it happens to security professionals raising security and privacy concerns, only in this case concrete proofs exist and truth is bound to come out."

Earlier this week, an anonymous tipster sent me a link suggesting (if not definitively proving) that at least one of the skilled game applicants is a convicted sex offender. Pearlman confirms that this is a legitimate concern:

"That a sex offender is potentially conducting skilled gaming is an example of Linden Lab ignoring [the] mandated Fincen rule of KYC ( know your customer)", as she puts it.

Notably, the Wired article reports that another former Linden Lab staff member confirmed to the magazine the existence of a likely "smoking gun" memo from the company's former chief compliance officer, one that's mentioned in Pearlman's lawsuit,; in it, she raised these issues, and a related one -- that the existence of age players (i.e. simulated pedophilia) in Second Life remains a constant problem that the company has not sufficiently addressed. It's a problem the CCO reportedly acknowledges in the memo:

Cajsa Lilliehook Profiled in ECLIPSE Magazine

The latest issue of ECLIPSE magazine has a fun and much-deserved profile of Cajsa Lilliehook (starting at page 51), and if you've been touched by her many blogs and articles over the years (basically every active SLer has by now), you'll want to know more about her. Find out how she discovered Second Life, and more about the real life woman behind the avatar. For instance, in addition to writing about virtual fashion and culture for New World Notes and her own blog, It's Only Fashion, she also publishes a high active book review site, and a single-serving recipe blog. (Featuring a baked eggs with kale and bacon dish that looks seriously delish.)

Has Second Life Been Fully Gentrified? Thoughts from My BBC Interview

Pictured: A steampunk city in SL from 2008; a Kim Kardashian ad campaign using SL from 2018

Here's the full episode of BBC's The Digital Human which expands on the short excerpt I featured last week. The show's larger topic is gentrification of the Internet culture and online communities, which often lose their unique character as they become more mainstream and commodified. I talk about how this happened to some extent during the 2006-2008 hype wave, when MTV and other companies became (briefly) interested in Second Life as a marketing platform, and how SL culture has greatly changed since then. For the original early adopters, I say:

They had this unique beautiful thing that existed basically only there on the Internet; they built these really beautiful intricate steampunk experiences and they had the fashion to go along with it... [but] there really was a feeling that they'd lose that uniqueness. That's at least partly right: The Second Life culture that existed in the beginning is still there but it's really been crowded out. Kim Kardashian recently did an advertising campaign using Second Life avatars and it was not actually surprising because the avatar fashion and styles [popular in Second Life now] had started to look more and more like a Kim Kardashian aesthetic, a cheesy virtual version... For a lot of the original users, I think they could feel that they'd sort of lost that unique spark that they had.

This isn't to say there's something intrinsically wrong with a Kim Kardashian style if that's your thing, just that it's so inescapably pervasive across all media -- even now in virtual worlds which once offered a respite from all that. And that might just be inevitable now that virtual world culture has become mainstream (hello, Marshmello), but hopefully we'll start to see the cultural influence flowing in the other direction more often.

Oh, in case you haven't seen the 2008 steampunk city tribute I mentioned above, it's still on YouTube here:

I Tell the BBC About the Culture War in Second Life During the Iraq War

Here's a fun new segment from a BBC podcast called The Digital Human, in which I tell longtime Internet culture reporter Aleks Krotoski about the "War of the Jessie Wall" in Second Life, which you can read more about here. (Also briefly mentioned is this story about a virtual mansion built by someone while homeless in real life.) I believe this is a segment to a much larger episode, but in any case, hope you enjoy, and see you next Monday!

Dutch Readers: Second Life Retrospective Featured on Netherlands' VPRO

Here's a long new article on a frequently recurring subject: "Will Second Life Life Get a Second Life?" Written by Hans van Wetering for VPRO, which I gather is kinda sorta the NPR of the Netherlands, I offer some comments and Bryn Oh art is featured. It's in Dutch ("Krijgt Second Life een tweede leven?"), so if you're a reader fluent in that language, we'd be grateful for a general summary in Comments. Here's the starting paragraphs:

 

LA Times Features Anthropologist's US Government-Funded Study of How Virtual Worlds Affect Disabled Users

Good LA Times write-up of Tom Boellstorff, the UC Irvine Anthropology professor who's been exploring Second Life since 2004 (and full disclosure, became an IRL pal along the way). The Times' focus is on Tom's latest work, which is funded by the US government, and focuses on the many disabled people who use virtual worlds like Second Life:

Boellstorff and co-researcher Donna Davis of the University of Oregon got to know about 200 disabled players. The researchers found the virtual world provides a way for the mentally and physically disabled to socialize and forge meaningful relationships. “We so often hear about the dark side of technology,” Davis said. “But I think that Tom and I have found that there is a bright side. People can connect in these virtual spaces in really important and meaningful ways.”

Boellstorff’ has received $277,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation since 2015 to research how online environments affect social interaction, self-awareness and the disabled experience. Boellstorff, who is writing a second book on his new research, hopes that his research will cause technology developers to pay heed to the issues of disabled people when creating virtual reality products.

“This is an important thing for these CEOs to look at,” Boellstorff said. “Over and over again, if you look at the history of technology, often the tech gets developed assuming the consumer is able-bodied."

Well said. Much more on the LA Times site here. Tom's work, of course, has been featured on NWN many times, including:

Kim Kardashian Personally Requested Her Second Life Avatar-Based Social Media Campaign, Says SL Creator

SL avatar pics by Liz Milan West featured on Kim Kardashian's fragrance line Instagram

Twentysomething make-up artist Johnathan Ramirez was recently checking his online messages, when he saw one from someone who was somewhat familiar: Kim Kardashian. This, he tells me, is how the social media campaign featuring Second Life avatars promoting Kardashian's new fragrance line came to be.

"Kim reached out to me herself about a fun project," says Ramirez, who's known as Liz Milan West on Instagram, and lizzylo1212.xue in Second Life and on the SL Marketplace. Apparently Ms. Kardashian saw his SL fashion pics on Instagram or elsewhere. "She told me that she loved my work and had a super fun idea she wanted me to be apart of."

From there it was a matter of working with her social media staff on creating it: