Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse is a gratifying deep dive interview with me in the Atlantic, for Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain free newsletter. Charlie and I plumb into the virtual world/metaverse topics I’ve felt strongly about in recent years, and it’s wonderful to get a chance to have the space to explore them in The Atlantic.

Here’s some of my favorite highlights in a much larger article, along with some links to the New World Notes posts I’m referring to.  

I’ve learned that, as humans, we take all of the big challenges of real life and the complex social structures of the physical world and they get re-created in weird ways in a digital, social space. Racism, for example, is an enduring issue and an interesting one in these worlds. There are very basic questions: If you can change your avatar to anything at all, what race would you choose?

What are some good examples of surprising things you’ve seen people do in Second Life?

[I]f you give a user community powerful enough creator tools, what they create in these worlds will be far more interesting than anything a major company can officially create…

One of my favorites is a mathematician who built a house that exists beyond three dimensions—a home shaped like a tesseract, a four-dimensional hypercube. If you walked through their house it would keep just regenerating in interesting ways and you’d walk through it eternally. It’s mind melting.

Philip Rosedale, one of the creators of Second Life, has mentioned that there are are 1,600 Second Life users who earn $10,000 or more a year selling virtual content. I know a few people on the high end who are making millions. And it’s not just Second Life; this is all happening now in Roblox and Fortnite and other places, too.

I’m still taken aback at just how little [the staff at Meta] seem to have learned from past platform iterations.

Also surprising is that Meta’s metaverse team has some Second Life employees on it, like Linden Labs’ former CTO. Another is the former Linden Lab employee Jim Purbrick. Right before Meta rolled out Horizon, he was warning the Meta team about needing guidelines for harassment on the platform, and it seems like the company kind of ignored him… [It] seems Meta is throwing money at the problem without throwing much wisdom at it.

[This new] metaverse hype wave is so similar to 2008. Everything’s being repeated now—the same news stories, the same assumptions, the same mistakes. During the 2008 hype, the tech was not ready for a mass market. Today, it has become a mass-market phenomenon with Roblox and Fortnite and other platforms. I think there are upwards of half a billion people who are now active users on a broadly defined metaverse platform.

Some more links after the break. First up — my answer on the mistakes being repeated now:

The tesseract Crooked House in Second Life — read about it here 

Definitely the harassment issues. But there’s also the constant stories of, So-and-so company created a store in the metaverse! This happened a lot between 2006 and 2008—you had Intel, IBM, American Apparel, Nissan, and NBC who all created spaces in Second Life. Brands made mistakes then and they’re making them now. 

I think, with somebody like Mark Zuckerberg, his assumption is that people just want to have their friends in real life doing virtual things. But that’s really missing this massive opportunity for this globally connected platform where you can interact with everyone. I see it right now with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of the first things I noticed was Russian content creators in Second Life promoting Ukrainian ones… And those relationships aren’t about national borders. I’ve found some of those gestures to be a poignant reminder of what could be possible.

One of the things you mentioned that drives me crazy is the hype around NFTs and crypto-based metaverses. I’ve kept harping on this idea that very few people are collecting NFTs in general. More people actually own content in Second Life than own an NFT—vastly more. And these NFT-connected metaverses like Decentraland have very tiny user bases mostly populated by people who’ve invested in it.

There’ve long been national-security concerns around metaverse platforms. In the early 2000s I interviewed a terrorism expert who told me jihadist groups at the time had been planning and trying to execute terrorist attacks in Second Life. A part of the Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA had investigators in Second Life to try and uncover plots. I imagine that after Ukraine, there will be concerns about platform roles in that conflict.  

You know, Facebook and Twitter actually do a better job keeping people hooked on them than the metaverse, at least right now… There’s a difference with a virtual-world space, because in virtual worlds you actually get a sense of immersion and a sense of interacting with a real person in another part of the world. It creates real human engagement in a way that social media, which creates this disorienting illusion of engagement, does not. 

I think the big battle going forward will be between these different platforms with different visions for what digital life should and could be. I just hope the human-centered ones win out.

And that’s just a very small excerpt — read the rest here!

Recommended laptop for SL/metaverse activity: