In 1841, the British journalist Charles Mackay enjoyed quite a hit with his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, a history of popular folly that debunked everything from witch-hunts to the South Sea Bubble. More recently, in 2004, the American journalist James Surowiecki won a large audience for his book The Wisdom of Crowds, an internet-fuelled argument about collective intelligence. Somewhere between these two opposing poles lies an almost mythical nirvana, rich in vegetation and nightlife, which calls itself Second Life.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, you should be getting a little nervous. Surely someone has told you that forward-thinking people and companies of all kinds are heading there in droves. Or maybe you’ve read a feature article in a paper or magazine, in which a journalist grabs your attention by claiming they’ve been lap-dancing, flying around by waving their arms, or boogieing the night away in the company of a colourfully dressed minotaur, only to reveal - a little disappointingly - that they’ve been doing all this in a virtual universe only accessible on a computer.
There is no doubt that Second Life is the new, new thing. The most visually impressive of the new generation of social-networking sites that are fuelling a resurgence of commercial interest in the web, it has suddenly and brazenly tipped its way into the popular imagination. Second Life is, according to its website, “a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents” and a “vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity”.
New members are invited to create an avatar, or visual persona, which can be as weird or wonderful as their imagination allows. They then guide that avatar through three-dimensional landscapes in which they can chat - via a keyboard and speech-bubbles - to other avatars, purchase virtual land and teleport themselves anywhere they want to go. The result, according to one “travel guide” to Second Life, is “a world of endless reinvention where you can change your shape, your sex, even your species as easily as you might slip into a pair of shoes back home.”
Since opening three years ago, Second Life has grown with ever-increasing vigour. On the day I joined, Wednesday October 18, it claimed its millionth inhabitant. Only two weeks later, it had added another 200,000. All this activity is the brainchild of Philip Rosedale, a 28-year-old internet entrepreneur who was inspired to create a virtual universe by Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash. The book depicts a future in which much of people’s time is spent in a “metaverse” - or metaphysical universe - which Stephenson sees as the highly sophisticated successor to the internet and in which people communicate via their avatars, as on Second Life.
Rosedale and his San Francisco-based company Linden Lab govern Second Life in the sense that they “rent” land to new inhabitants (what began as only 64 acres now covers 20,000) and enforce a few simple ground rules. Other than that, their approach is laissez faire in the extreme. On a single day in Second Life, you can buy virtual clothes, fly a virtual plane, or even enjoy virtual sexual liaisons in marked areas. Some have likened it to a virtual version of the board game Monopoly, playing with millions of strangers. Don’t make the mistake, however, of telling a Second Life aficionado that this is all a game. There is, they point out, no over-riding objective or goal. It is much more lifelike than that.
But if Second Life is only an animated version of real life, what is it all for? The question is pertinent because, at least for those of us of a non-technical disposition, it is frustrating to work. Its interface can be intimidating for the uninitiated, and the maps that govern its virtual universe are difficult to read. It took me a full two weeks to learn how to adjust properly to Second Life, and then only with the help of a stranger I bumped into on the virtual street.
Though it is difficult to tell what Second Lifers do in their real lives - they are often cagey about personal details - the people I met seemed to be young professionals with vivid imaginations acting out their fantasies. One man I encountered, whose strapping avatar had the physique of a weightlifter, turned out to be a 27-year-old microbial ecologist from Liverpool. The value of Second Life, he told me, was that it offered a space “in which you can utterly control every aspect of your second life”. When I wondered aloud about the difference between his Second Life character and the real him, he got a little shirty. “What do you mean?,” he said. “The character... he’s really me. It would take an awful lot of effort to maintain a full extra persona.” In almost the next breath, he happened to mention that he had just signed up to be a dancer at a Second Life strip club for women. “It would take an awful lot of alcohol to wear a G-string in public in reality,” he admitted, “but I don’t mind so much when my nipples are pixels.”
Another interpretation of Second Life is that it is a virtual incubator for innovation and entrepreneurship. Second Life, its PR boasts, “is a fully integrated economy architected to reward risk, innovation and craftsmanship”. The economy has its own currency, Linden dollars, which can be bought and sold on LindeX, the official Second Life currency exchange, for real currency. (Exchange rates fluctuate, but remain relatively stable at 250 Linden Dollars to the US Dollar.) Trade works on the usual principle of supply and demand. Inhabitants can build anything they please (a house, speedboat, nightclub) with Second Life software tools, and they can then sell these goods on to other members for an agreed price. Building something worth having takes a good deal of practice (though lessons are offered for free by volunteers and Linden Lab staff) but you retain the rights to your digital creations.
If you have neither the time nor the patience to build anything, you can simply buy what you need from other residents. According to Linden Lab, thousands of Second Life residents are making at least part of their income from their virtual businesses - selling virtual land, clothes, jewellery, weaponry, or even sex. Innovations are plentiful, if eccentric - one Second Lifer, for example, is reported to have manufactured virtual glasses that enable players who don’t speak the same language to communicate. Another entrepreneur earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a real-estate mogul.
Thanks to a mutiny among some of Second Life’s first inhabitants (a virtual equivalent of the Boston Tea Party, by some fevered accounts), an early idea to tax residents on the objects they made was overturned. As a tax-free free-trade area with minimal regulations, Second Life has more in common with a kind of spirited frontier capitalism than it does with the collaborative, everything-for-free ethic of sites such as Wikipedia. Perhaps as a result, businesses of all kinds are falling over each other to raise their institutional flag on its terrain. For companies keen to show that they are on the futurological ball, a home on Second Life is a must. Everyone from Coca-Cola to Microsoft, Intel to Adidas, has moved in - Adidas, for example, has geared its presence around a marketing campaign to show off one of its new products.
The demographics are appealing for marketers: there are, according to Linden Lab, as many women as men on Second Life and the average age is 32. Toyota is selling virtual cars; IBM, which has plans for its own 3-D intranet, has paid one of its software engineers to hang out there and ad agency Leo Burnett is building an “Ideas Hub” where its global staff can meet and interact. In October, Sun Microsystems even hosted a “virtual news conference” in Second Life to flag up its new gaming strategy.
But it is not just money that people are looking for in Second Life; virtual talent is increasingly being hunted too. Greene & Heaton, the London-based agent for the likes of P.D. James and Michael Frayn, claimed at the end of October to be the first literary agency to open an office in Second Life. I tracked down that virtual office and its manager Will Francis, to ask whether business was trickling in. In a meeting in his swanky new workplace, Francis was big enough to admit that much corporate interest in Second Life is no more than a marketing gimmick. He pointed out, however, that it is very difficult to find gifted young writers simply by scanning newspapers and magazines, and that some of the writers’ groups on Second Life might throw up fresh sources of talent.
Some old names are already doing the rounds - Kurt Vonnegut visited Second Life to promote his new book and in August veteran rockers Duran Duran announced their intention to create a virtual island in order to perform live concerts. Politicians, too, are getting in on the act; Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, who briefly thought he might be in with a chance of securing the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, held a question-and-answer session there. Second Life also now has its first tabloid newspaper to sate the virtual population’s appetite for gossip, launched a few weeks ago by German publisher Axel Springer.
In the middle of October, the news organisation Reuters loudly announced that it had assigned a full-time beat reporter to Second Life. Adam Reuters, real name Adam Pasick, spends his day writing business and finance stories about goings-on there. In real life he is based in London’s Canary Wharf; in Second Life, where I caught up with him for a chat, he is based in a swish office which Reuters purchased on his behalf. The best things to get into in Second Life, Pasick tells me, are real estate, banking and retail. Stories he has broken include one which, at the end of October, disclosed that Linden Lab tipped off a group of long-time inhabitants before it announced higher fees for private islands, leaving the company vulnerable to the allegation that it had perpetrated a kind of insider trading. It subsequently and swiftly admitted its mistake. Pasick has also been tracking political developments; a guerrilla movement now stalks Second Life, he told me, called the Second Life Liberation Army, which is agitating in favour of greater democratic representation for SL inhabitants.
Second Life is not the only virtual universe to have emerged on the web in the past five years - other examples include Habbo Hotel and Entropia Universe. It is not even the biggest; it is dwarfed, for example, by World of Warcraft, which boasts 6.5 million members. Edward Castronova, an online gamester turned associate professor at Indiana University, calls these alternative universes synthetic worlds. In his book of the same title, he argues that these alternative universes have grown so powerful and their architecture so intricate that they are now in direct competition with our daily lives. As many of us begin to spend as much time in these make-believe worlds as the real one, Castronova sees the relationship between real and synthetic worlds becoming increasingly blurred, leading to clashes between the two.
Governments are beginning to recognise this. The fact that property is virtual, for example, has not been a bar to court cases being fought over its theft - earlier this year an American lawyer and virtual real-estate speculator on Second Life filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab for confiscating some of his virtual property. Neither does the absence of virtual taxation mean that there is no taxation to be paid in the real world. People who take cash out of virtual economies are already required to report their incomes to the Internal Revenue Service in America.
In the middle of October, a US Congressional Committee confirmed that it was looking into the possibility of how better to levy taxes on the virtual income from economies like that of Second Life. At the end of that month, the Australian Tax Office issued a stark warning to players in online games such as Second Life that if their virtual fortunes could be converted into real money they needed to declare it in their tax returns. In a recent article, the writer Steven Johnson (author of the book Everything Bad is Good for You) argues that a gravitational pull may draw all these virtual universes together, and that common standards will emerge to enable their players to jump seamlessly from one to another. The result will be an online experience of truly global proportions and a synthetic world with vast financial clout.
But what will we do there? If digital utopias such as Second Life are supposed to tip us a few hints about how their inhabitants would like to live in everyday life, it is telling that much of it seems to be fuelled by illicit virtual sex. Cajoled by my editor to experiment with the more libidinous side of Second Life and unable to get lucky while ambling around the place, I manfully walked my avatar into a sleazy-looking club and attempted to strike up a conversation with two scantily clad women.
To my surprise, my opening gambit - “You two ladies need any company?” - met with success. “Looking good for a newbie,” leather-clad Laura typed, but it rapidly became apparent that she and her suspender-wearing friend Shaylah were in business too. Like the microbial ecologist I had met several days earlier, these were erotic dancers in search of tips. Claiming to be one of those punters who likes to talk, I asked both Laura and Shaylah who they were in real life. Shaylah told me that she was a Texan while Laura owned up to being a hairdresser from Shropshire.
When I asked what they liked about Second Life, Laura mentioned the shops and Shaylah told me that it was possible to “meet someone and fall in love”. Given the camaraderie that had developed between us and my looming deadline, I decided to ask if either of them wanted to have sex with me. Laura immediately offered to “give me the full works” in return for L$1,200 upfront - about $5 in real money. Things quickly came unstuck. For one thing, I had neglected to buy any virtual genitalia, which came as a disappointment to Laura when I took off my pants.
For all its faults, Second Life does succeed in pushing the internet experience into three garish dimensions, and makes most previous attempts to build an alternative universe on the web look like black-and-white television. But for all the hype that surrounds it, the stampede among the media and the business worlds to kneel at its altar is a little puzzling.
Only about half of Second Life’s listed inhabitants actually use it more than a few times and only 10,000 Second Lifers are online at any one time. Many have likened Second Life as a digital successor to the utopian ambitions of California’s 1960s hippies, but there is precious little utopian ambition about the place. Perhaps this is only fitting. Stephenson’s Snow Crash is laced with satire and black humour, and the future it imagines is one in which America’s economy and government have collapsed and its citizens have retreated into a lonely alternative universe in which they do little but hang around.
The microbial ecologist turned stripper I met there, though a huge fan of the Second Life, joked that most of it was about “sex and shopping”. As easy as it is to make a little money out of Second Life, it seems more difficult to take friends out of the place. He told me that he had made many new contacts here, but admitted that he had not spoken to any of those people outside of the Second Life environment.
If Second Life and synthetic worlds like it really are to be our lab for experimenting with the future, they have a long way to go. At its worst, I found the experience of being in Second Life - endlessly hanging out, walking around looking in vain for something worth doing, trying rather awkwardly to make conversation with total strangers and computer geeks - a little soporific.
With its illicit sex, endless boutiques and long stretches of boredom, Second Life reminded me less of any utopian or dystopian vision and more of how people used to think of life in the suburbs - full of secrets and intrigue punctuated by fitful attempts among strangers to get to know one another. Second Life is still a work in progress, and will perhaps blossom. In the meantime, and before you invest too heavily in a second life, my advice is to make sure you’ve exhausted the possibilities of the first.
SECOND LIFE FOR BEGINNERS
GETTING STARTED
Second Life is a three-dimensional online world. To enter it, you first sign up on the website (www.secondlife.com) and create a username, choosing a basic look for your avatar (for example, Girl Next Door) which can be refined later. Second Life provides software tools (much like Photoshop) to tweak anything from the tip of your nose to the tint of your skin. More advanced bodily requirements, such as genitalia, have to be purchased. Basic membership is free, but you can also pay for premium levels of membership that give you a financial allowance and property rights.
GETTING AROUND
Adventures in Second Life can be conducted by either walking, flying or teleporting your avatar, using videogame-style graphics and the computer mouse and cursors. At any time there will be dozens of events in Second life where you can party, attend fashion shows and art openings or just play around and chat.
A Second Life map shows you different areas of activity, or you can view upcoming events on the search page. To talk to other Second Lifers, you press a “Chat” button and communicate as you would with instant internet messaging. It will not be clear if the person has chosen an avatar faithful to their real-life appearance and profession - unless you ask probing questions.
MONEY MATTERS
Second Life has its own internal currency, Linden dollars. They can easily be bought or sold on LindeX (Second Life’s official currency exchange), or other third-party sites, for real currency. The current rate is about 250 Linden dollars (L$) to the US dollar.
GETTING SETTLED
Owning a plot of land is simple and cheap - it allows you to build, display, and store your virtual creations, as well as to host events and businesses. If you want to earn your keep you could get a job - occupations already include tattooist, casino operator, private detective and pet manufacturer. Retail businesses of all kinds are thriving on Second Life, selling everything from virtual clothes to virtual weapons. Your business plan need not be limited to your Second Life; at least in theory, for example, you could prototype a fashion line there, and then - having raised some money from impressed investors - go on make a real-world version.
