Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: Social Structures, Social Upheaval
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Above: From a video by Travingel Camus once wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." And the Internet replied: lol no Remember Monument, the incredible VRChat world which has no other purpose than to gather together and build an infinite, Tower of Babel-like edifice into the sky? The construction is still happening now, but with an…
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Originally published on my Patreon here A recent SL influencer video (watch above) provoked a mini-firestorm within the SL community, and that's no surprise, as it alleges that highly popular in-world shopping events are unfairly controlled by gatekeeping "cartels", among other hyperbolic descriptors. I've heard similar complaints for years, so it's worth airing another perspective…
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Since no post about virtual pro wrestling is complete without a follow-up about the AI-driven death of the Internet as we know it, here's a provocative new Philip Rosedale essay predicting just that, in what he dubs the Ultraviolet Catastrophe: AIs are now easily able to create accounts, establish IP addresses, and send plausibly important…
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New on my Patreon: Prisqua Newell's latest video (watch above) has provoked a mini-firestorm within the SL community, and that's no surprise, as it alleges that in-world shopping events are unfairly controlled by gatekeeping "cartels", among other hyperbolic descriptors. I've heard similar complaints for years, so it's worth airing another perspective — in this case,…
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My report on the state of the Second Life economy in 2025 is almost ready to read on my Patreon, but meantime, here's an equally important report from my anonymous survey of SL merchants. One of my open questions to them was: If you could tell your SL customers one thing, what would it be?…
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Seed, the highly ambitious MMO long in development, was conceived as a high-minded "rebuild society from scratch" planetary colonization sim, with players even able to create their own constitution. (Pioneering Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig helped develop the political framework for them game, the first MMO he's consulted on since advising Linden Lab on Second…
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Image by Susanne Drechsler Since the flat avatars of Project Mesh Revolution have provoked quite a lot of buzz – but also, a fair amount of anger from SLers who were expecting a standard mesh body — here's an apropos excerpt from Making a Metaverse That Matters. While many people in the virtual world industry buy the…
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Originally published on my Patreon Longtime SLer Ciaran Astral was in a hopping club last Sunday when they realized an unexpected thing: Though surrounded by upwards of one hundred avatars, they were dancing and socializing in a space free from lag. (Watch above!) "It was amazing," as they recall it now. "I remember saying to someone,…
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Since writing about Primfeed's survey on whether AI-enhanced images should be allowed on the social media site, the vote continues to lean heavily on No. One challenge, however, is that "AI" is still broadly or loosely defined. As SL creator Jennifer Fluffington comments: We need to define more what is considered 'AI' to be allowed…
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Primfeed recently became the most popular website focused on Second Life not owned by Linden Lab, and so inevitably, the "Flickr-for-SL" social platform is now a flashpoint for the key controversy among SLers: Whether AI programs like LLM-powered NPCs like those from Convai and Gen AI platforms like Midjourney should exist in the virtual world…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 