New World Notes

Watch: Second Life Featured in Secret Meeting in Apple TV's Morning Show!

As many eagle-eyed SLers have noticed, Second Life is featured in a pivotal plot point in the final episode of Season 3 of Apple TV's The Morning Show starring Jennifer Anniston and Reese Witherspoon. Watch the clip above if you don't mind possible spoilers, in a scene featuring Stella Bak, played by Greta Lee.

"One of the main characters (with definitely a geeky past) went into Second Life trying to get in touch with a friend in hiding," SLer Wildstar explains to me. I'm grateful for the explanation, because none of the available episode recaps seem to mention this scene. And it's definitely Second Life, with the footage even featuring the official logo in the top left.

This is actually a dramatic illustration of a situation that does often happen -- for one reason or another, people go off the mainstream Internet radar of social networks and communication apps, and maintain social connections through SL or another virtual world.

Sometimes that's done for reasons of corporate skullduggery (as in this show, I guess) and other anti-social behavior -- but even more often, for very legitimate purposes. It's a phenomena I mention in the book, illustrating the importance of keeping avatar identity separate from our public facing social media by default:

I Wrote About Second Life's Unique 20 Year Longevity for The Atlantic!

"There Will Never Be Another Second Life" is a new essay I was thrilled to write for The Atlantic to mark the virtual world's 20th anniversary. Hope you read the whole thing, but here's some key highlights:

The reasons for the virtual world’s longevity are as paradoxical as they are inspiring, especially in this moment where traditional social media seems to be eroding in on itself, or flailing for new relevance, even as the rise of generative AI promises an uncertain, discomfiting future. Developed by a company called Linden Lab, Second Life was inspired in part by the Metaverse as first described with Biblical specificity in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash: a massive virtual world created by its users and connected to the real world economy. Countless technologists who began their career in the 1990s were also inspired by that novel. But Linden’s charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, added to this geeky conception a distinctly bohemian muse: Burning Man, the orgiastic art festival held every year in Nevada’s Black Rock desert...

For its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me to be the virtual world’s official “embedded journalist”—a roving, avatar-based reporter wearing a white suit (my pretentious tribute to Tom Wolfe), impertinently asking the early user community about their virtual lives—from ambitious collective art projects to savvy business ventures to the pixel sex they were having with the attachable genitals they inevitably created.

UK Guardian's Second Life 20th Anniversary Article Features 20-Something Popstar Aufwie -- And This Excellent Cover Art

Enjoyed reading this long UK Guardian feature on Second Life's 20th anniversary by Simon Parkin, who also does excellent reporting on gaming culture for The New Yorker. Far as I can tell, this is the first major media story marking the 20th year of SL, though it definitely will not be the last. (Modesty forbids mentioning another). 

Simon chats with me about the virtual world, goes in-depth into Philip Rosedale's second thoughts on Second Life, and (I'm glad to see) spends some time on Aufwie, a young and rising popstar who helped fuel his rise through SL:

New York Times Features Creator of Second Life's Famed Tesseract House. Who Wants to Help Rebuilt It?

"A New Puzzle Turns Earth Into a Rubik’s Cube, but More Complex" is a fascinating New York Times story about Professor Henry Segerman, who's been creating fun and mind-bending mathematical sculptures and 3D puzzles for years. I've featured several of them on New World Notes (see below), but the Times missed what could be Segerman's most brain-melting sculpture ever:

The "Crooked House" in Second Life, inspired by a classic science fiction novel about a tesseract house with infinite rooms (watch above). 

Sad to say, the Crooked House no longer exists in the virtual world, but reached on social media, Henry tells me he'd be happy to help rebuild it.

So: Anyone have room to host a tesseract house? Let us know in Comments, and let's try to make it happen.

As for how the house has infinite rooms, here's what it looks like when you pull the camera back:

Second Life Avatar Featured in Legendary Opera House -- On The Continued Cultural Reach of the Virtual World

In case you missed it over the holidays, the New York Times' story on the use of contemporary art displayed in major opera houses casually mentions that "the Chinese-born multimedia artist Cao Fei is showing a female avatar — a dystopian, pale-white head so imposing that signs have been put up all over the [Vienna] opera house to alert spectators to its presence."

That avatar is actually China Tracy from Second Life -- she still has an active account in SL, look her up! -- who's been showing up in Cao Fei's art projects since 2007:

In a really great early machinima (watch below):

Listen: Part 4 Of The WSJ's Podcast, "How To Build A Metaverse", On the Dwight Schrute Fallacy & Why Second Life Really Matters

"Second Life's vision of the Metaverse has endured..." Listen to the latest and final episode in the Wall Street Journal's episode on the rise and fall (and rise) of Second Life:

• Stream on Spotify here
• Get it on Apple Podcasts here
• Stream on the web and read the transcript here
• Links to Part 3 here

Telling the story of Linden Lab's disastrous attempt to turn Second Life into a space for corporate meetings and my post-mortem for that, the episode (and series) somewhat ends on a rather abbreviated and ambiguous note, with Philip Rosedale acknowledging the real world as being more irreplaceable than he originally suggested, and host Annie Minoff finding value in its power for people to explore their identity and alternate lives. That last point is true (and moving), but I do think it misses the many other applications of the metaverse beyond "having a second life".  (Again, the name Second Life itself continues to frame things that can be more limiting than enlightening.)

Many of the episode's highlights were featured in New World Notes stories over years; here's some resources for more reading:

Listen: Second Life Tries to Go Mainstream in Part 3 Of The WSJ's Podcast, "How To Build A Metaverse" -- And What I Wrote at the Time

Streamable above or at the links below, part 3 of The Wall Street Journal's "How to Build a Metaverse" podcast mini-series just went up. Featuring Jeska, Daniel, and Yoz Linden, along with Electric Sheep Company founder Giff Constable, it tells the story of Second Life's entrance into mainstream awareness, with a whole episode on CSI: New York, major companies entering the world, and the every-recurring problem: How do I use this thing anyway, and what's even in the point? 

• Stream on Spotify here
• Get it on Apple Podcasts here
• Stream on the web and read the transcript here
• Links to Part 2 here

At the time, my concern wasn't so much on scalability, but that marketing campaigns and big brands. were overshadowing the grassroots creative community. Which as I wrote on GigaOM at the time, defeated the purpose of big brands even being there:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

Fashion companies have it even harder. A thriving homegrown industry of avatar clothing design (free of production costs and overseas mass production) already exists, largely ruled by housewives with astounding talent and copious amounts of time, and since the designers are popular personalities in Second Life (whose avatars become their brand), they enjoy– and frankly deserve– the home team advantage.

Faced with such talented competition, smart marketers should concede defeat, and hire these college kids and housewives to create concept designs and prototypes that re-imagine their brands merged to existing SL-based brands which have already proved themselves in a world of infinite possibility.

There is of course much more to the story behind the episode, some of which was featured here at the time:

I Tell CNN Why Realistic Avatars Bring Real Prejudice to the Virtual World

"Virtual body-shaming: Why the metaverse won't fix our IRL beauty standards" is a thoughtful CNN article partly inspired by a New World Notes story from 2017, about full-figured avatars protesting a fat-shaming Second Life store. I largely lay the blame on the arrival of mesh-based avatar enhancements, which placed a premium on realistic human appearances. Because the more realistic human avatars become, the more our offline prejudices around physical appearance are provoked. As I told reporter Oscar Holland:

"Up until then, there was definitely much more tolerance for diversity of avatar types... But putting a premium on highly realistic, beautiful avatars amplified existing prejudices that we took from the real world into the virtual world." For those users whose avatars fall "outside the norm," incidents of harassment still happen "all the time," Au added. "Anyone with a large avatar is going to get at least a few nasty comments."

It's the reverse side of the "Proteus effect" first observed and coined by researcher Nick Yee: The more attractive our avatars, the more confident the avatar's owner becomes. But by the same token, the more those attractive avatars are realistic, the more our real world biases can come roaring into the virtual world.

 

Here's the full article I wrote back in 2017, excerpted below:

Listen: Wall Street Journal Launches Epic Four Part Series on Second Life!

Been looking forward to this for months (it's been that long in the making, I did my 2 hour recording with the podcast team in July) -- The Wall Street Journal's podcast on the founding of Second Life:

We’re in a metaverse déjà vu moment. Companies are spending billions of dollars creating new metaverses, imagining a 3D virtual future. But there’s a metaverse that’s already been around for decades. In this world, people have started businesses, built homes and fallen in love as avatars. In a new four-part series from The Journal, producer Annie Minoff heads back into that largely forgotten metaverse – Second Life – to tell the story of the metaverse we already have and what it can reveal about the one that’s coming.

Stream on Spotify above, or listen or read the transcript for Part 1 here; also available on Apple Podcasts here.  

France's Le Monde Remembers the Fall of Second Life's Biggest User-Run Bank & The Limits of Virtual World Libertarianism

French-fluent readers, the great Le Monde of France has a new article on a famous old story from the virtual world economy, part of a larger series on the topic: Comment Ginko Financial, la plus célèbre banque de « Second Life », s’est écroulée -- i.e. "How Ginko Financial, the most famous bank in “Second Life”, collapsed".

Ginko, as longtime readers may remember, was an SL-based financial service offering incredibly high interest rates to users, attracting high skepticism over its management and cash liquidity, not to mention allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme, until Linden Lab finally shut it down.

As I discuss with Le Monde reporter Florian Reynaud, the Ginko case was another lesson for Linden Lab on the limits of libertarianism. Florian also managed to get an official statement on Ginko from Linden Lab, but it's very broad -- because,  he tells me, the Lindens don't have anyone still employed there who even remembers that far back.

Read the Linden Lab statement below along with an English excerpt (albeit with a mediocre translation from Google):