I recently chatted with Samantha Cole of Vice for her article "The Corporate Metaverse Can’t Compete" and am kicking myself for forgetting to mention the wackiest example of emergent social behavior in a corporate-sponsored metaverse experience — that time IBM's official campus in Second Life was flooded with labor protesters from IBM's Italian branch, including a sign-waving banana:
Most of the activity seemed to be concentrated on the IBM Italia region on the corporate campus– unsurprising, since the protest is over a paycut impacting Italian workers of the company. In any case, they continued streaming in, and the leaders kept count of unique visitors. At the end, the Uni Global Second Life spokesman told me they'd counted 1850 in all.
What IBM management thinks of all this is still unclear; I talked to several staffers on campus during the strike, and they declined comment. A senior IBM staffer watched the protest from a distance, but when I asked to take a screenshot, he promptly vanished into the metaverse aether.
IBM's Second Life presence wasn't just a marketing/PR stunt; thousands of employees used it for remote meetings every week; IBM staff were also behind a ultimate unsuccessful attempt to make Second Life interoperable with OpenSim. Instead of engaging with the avatar protesters, which would probably we the wiser path, I later found out from an IBM staffer that they were under strict orders not to engage with them at all.
In any case, the takeaway for companies now: If you do plan to have a metaverse platform presence, prepare for this and even more chaotic user-driven events to happen there.
More from the Sam Cole article:
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