{"id":7203,"date":"2023-06-12T06:58:03","date_gmt":"2023-06-12T11:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.zoha-islands.com\/?p=7203"},"modified":"2023-06-12T06:58:03","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T11:58:03","slug":"who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zoha-islands.com\/blog\/who-needs-the-metaverse-meet-the-people-still-living-on-second-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Who needs the Metaverse? Meet the people still living on Second Life<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s grand vision for an online existence has been laughed off as a corporate folly. Meanwhile, those still existing happily on a virtual world launched 20 years ago may be wondering what all the fuss is about \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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O<\/span><\/span>n 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM\u2019s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano\u2019s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier. Palmisano\u2019s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was \u201cthe first big-league CEO\u201d to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life \u2013 \u201cthe most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds\u201d. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a \u201cregion\u201d of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (\u00a3134) a month<\/a>. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf.<\/p>\n

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The pitch proved attractive. While in cities like New York or London you might never own a flat, in Second Life you could design, build and inhabit a mansion. Institutions followed. Some used their space to stage art exhibitions and theatrical performances; others built kink palaces. The retail outlet American Apparel opened a virtual store on a private island called Lerappa \u2013 \u201cApparel\u201d spelt backwards \u2013 selling costumes for avatars. The US universities MIT and Stanford established faculties in Second Life. Someone claiming to represent the far-right French National Front joined in (their HQ was the site of virtual clashes with anti-racism demonstrators in 2007). The world used its own currency \u2013 the Linden dollar, withdrawable into local currencies \u2013 to establish a global, user-to-user economy. Transactions and withdrawals were subject to a tiny fee, which contributed to the cost of server maintenance \u2013 a revolutionary, influential business model.<\/p>\n

While Second Life\u2019s world was viewed by many as rudimentary and its inhabitants eccentric, in hindsight it represented a bold, pioneering experiment, launched while Facebook was still a website for rating the attractiveness of Harvard students. It remains both the first and the most successful manifestation of a so-called metaverse, a compelling if somewhat imprecise term coined by American writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Definitions vary, but most experts agree the metaverse is, put simply, the internet made metropolis: an immersive, contiguous representation of data and the active user communities within. One might walk from, say, eBay marketplace to YouTube cineplex; or take a virtual Uber from the great library of Wikipedia to the twin towers of TikTok and Instagram. No need for a thousand logins and passwords: in this Internet World theme park, each of us could embody a single body and consistent identity.<\/p>\n

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An avatar of Mark Zuckerberg at a virtual Meta Connect event in 2022.<\/span> Photograph: Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n

Second Life did not replace the internet in this way. And even at the height of its popularity in the late 2000s, it attracted only around a million monthly users \u2013 a fraction of the number enjoyed by some online video games (the makers of Fortnite claim a consistent 80 million) and far fewer than would be necessary to sustain a business such as, say, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. But the dream of a coordinated manifestation of websites and users, built on current technologies (VR headsets, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and all) and opening unprecedented opportunities to virtual landowners, marketers and advertisers, has persisted at the highest levels of corporate Silicon Valley, up to and including Facebook\u2019s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg first outlined his vision for the Metaverse, the \u201csuccessor to the mobile internet\u201d, in 2021. According to Nick Clegg, Meta\u2019s president of global affairs, the project would take a decade to revolutionise the way we browse the web. But less than two years and $36bn later, the project has stalled, with little to show for it<\/a>. User numbers for Horizon Worlds \u2013 Meta\u2019s first draft of an interconnected world entered via a VR headset \u2013 have steadily declined during the past year. According to internal documents,<\/a> most visitors do not return after the first month and a feature to reward users who have created content within Horizon Worlds generated just $470 globally in revenue in its first year. Zuckerberg recently announced 21,000 redundancies and hinted that all Meta employees may soon be required to return to physical offices, a rather self-sabotaging policy at a company committed to erasing the distinction between the physical and digital. As it sheds employees and investor focus impatiently shifts to the get-richer-quicker possibilities of generative AI, the vision fades. Almost every<\/a> national<\/a> newspaper has run a variation on the article: \u201cWhatever happened to the metaverse?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n