The utopian ideals that contributed to Second Life’s longevity as an online community may also have relegated it to a niche platform. Still, despite this miraculous diversity-or perhaps because of it-mainstream adoption of Second Life remains elusive.
Clicking on the user’s account, I realized that in real life he was Charles Bristol, an 87-year-old bluesman and the grandson of once-enslaved people, who’d lived long enough to play live music in the metaverse. Randomly visiting a virtual Bayou bar one day, I saw an avatar playing blues guitar, his appearance customized to look like a tall old Black man. Many of the profiles I wrote about avatars occurred by pure happenstance. I’ve talked to an Iraqi arts professor who excitedly logged into Second Life through his sputtering, postwar internet connection from the ancient city of Babylon a Jewish American woman who, with the help of her daughter, began logging into the virtual world to give lectures about surviving the Holocaust a young Japanese sex worker who, in between porn shoots, created in Second Life an eerie memorial to the nuking of Hiroshima the conceptual artist Cao Fei, who created an entire city in Second Life, and then-15 years before NFT mania- sold virtual real-estate deeds for her digital metropolis to bemused patrons at Art Basel. I’m always stunned to scroll through my blog, to review the people I met in Second Life as avatars. Rosedale’s dream of merging the metaverse with Burning Man succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. And I thought about it: What magical quality makes that happen?” Rosedale believed that allowing users to create their own content, along with highly customizable avatars, would also evoke a similar sense of serendipity.įor its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me to be the virtual world’s official “embedded journalist”-a roving reporter using a digital avatar in a white suit (my pretentious tribute to Tom Wolfe), impertinently asking members of the early user community about their virtual lives-ambitious collective art projects, savvy business ventures, the pixel sex they were having with the attachable genitals they inevitably created. “I was just blown away by the fact that I was willing to talk to anyone,” Rosedale once told me, remembering his time on the playa, “that it had this mystical quality that demolished the barriers between people. Read: The digital ruins of a forgotten future 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. Countless technologists who began their career in the 1990s were also inspired by that novel.
Developed by a company named 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. The reasons for the virtual world’s longevity are as paradoxical as they are inspiring, especially in this moment when traditional social media seems to be collapsing in on itself, or flailing for new relevance, even as the rise of generative AI promises an uncertain, discomfiting future. To this day, tens of thousands of people are logged in at any given time, inhabiting a digital world that’s more original than the corporate versions of virtual existence being offered by Meta and Apple. Nothing else is quite like it-Second Life is neither exactly a social network nor really a conventional game, which has both limited its mainstream appeal and ensured its longevity. It’s an example of how Second Life, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, continues to evolve, with a community that taps into new technologies for its own oddball purposes. The rabbit, the shop owner explained to me later, was meant to be a clerk, “but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale.” (AI, after all, has a tendency to make things up.) So the rabbit had been demoted to the role of greeter, chatting with customers about the nature of comedy, his own existence, or whatever else they cared to ask.īunnyGPT is among the first bots in the virtual world to have its “mind” wired to OpenAI’s large language model. He was standing alone in a virtual novelty store in Second Life, where he had recently been fired. The other night, I had an odd conversation with ChatGPT, made somewhat stranger because the AI’s answers came out of a humanoid rabbit idly sucking on a juice box.
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