Second Life is a Crystal Ball

I've always bothered with Second Life, which is for some, nothing more than a kind of goofy and exasperating wonky 3-D chat room, because I always felt instinctively that it has inside it, coiled like a kind of spring, the future. Or futures. Scenarios of what will happen with technology and people down the line. Not in some kind of mystical woo-woo fashion, but merely because Second Life is an emergent-behaviour panopticon. I don't think necessarily it is planned this way -- I'm not sure even the clever Lindens are smart enough and grounded enough to be effective conspirators -- but it *is* that way simply because it is a cocktail of people and technology and online management of crowds.

Many things are prefigured in Second Life. Long before anyone knew what Twitter was or tweet gurus, we saw the desperate marketing firms barrel into Second Life trying to find some advertising capacity for their lumbering, failing corporate clients, we saw the hype, the ecstasy, the fantasy, the search for the guily parties, and then...the islands with the big cement stadiums and the tumbleweeds. All of this is coming and going now on Twitter, to the point that you even find articles asking if Twitter is in fact like Second Life (it isn't, because Second Life isn't even like Second Life, the way it is portrayed, yet by and large, we can accurately talk about a bubble and a hype leading to numerous "try-mes" and "bye-mes".)

The current 4chan rebellion against AT&T, which may have temporarily blocked its image sites for cause, i.e. child pornography or other unlawful material, or due to evil corporate censorship, depending on whom you believe, was prefigured a long ago in 2006 when the b/tards spinning off from under the W-hat overcoat (like Russian literature out from Gogol's overcoat) were crashing the grid, and Philip banned some 30 ringleaders permanently, and people like me who documented their griefing and proved that it wasn't just all just high-spirited pranks and "art", were then mercilessly targeted. Yes, maybe history first appears as tragedy and then as comedy, or maybe it repeats over and over again as comedy and finally absurdity, but while many people are wondering what the hell a "4chan" is, people in SL knew what it was 4 years ago.

If you wanted to get a glimpse up into the future of how newspapers would be destroyed, or other businesses unable to transition online and keep value, you could watch the Copybot controversy of 2006. One could argue, in having this debate, whether in fact SL merely mirrored in concentrated form what was happening in RL in those same years in the music industry with song downloads and piracy, and speeded it up then, or whether SL still can be viewed as an incubator of future events that has its own useful trajectory that you can watch to see how something like digital value pans out.

Even the University of Michigan has now studied the birth of memes (in this case the giving of gestures) and seen how it traverses along social networks.

There are a thousand things you could be studying in Second Life, whether it is how disputes are resolved, how protest emerges and dissipates, how corporations manage people online, how people communicate and adjust their goals and compromise -- and lots of other separate tributaries of things like prototyping a car engine or a medical procedure, and they're all happening in SL -- yet largely unstudied.

Of course, you wouldn't have missed the trajectory from Beth Noveck's "Democracy Island" and Creative Commons kiosks and articles with questionable collectivist ideas nurtured at least in some part in SL and State of Play, which originally captivated the Lindens (and then lost them), and then her rise to the White House (although arguably most of this activity occurred in other settings). Let's just say that you don't have to have a perfect "fit" for everything you want to say about the SL prototyping machine to acknowledge that SL is useful for prototyping. (And may even do things like...that scary time Angela Talamasca's 3-D scene changer, Jessica Ornitz's terraforming, and then a real-life pictures on a news site...all came about sequentially in time as if interrelated. But they weren't *causally* related...right? Right?! lol)

The point isn't that SL synthesizes and *causes* these events, merely that because it is an accelerated virtual community with people immersed in changing technology, it prefigures them successfully. Basically it's a kind of barium chamber or accelerator or something which enables speeded-up enactment of future stuff so you can see it better. Philip Linden always used to talk about SL as this machine to prototype and accelerate your business, and enable you to flop hard and learn while remaining anonymous so as not to suffer, but it's bigger than that, because it prefigures and runs through simulations of wider trends and adaptations to technology than just somebody's one business.

Naturally, it's kind of nauseating to think that the JIRA isn't just some silly fanboyz passtime with simulated Linden concern for bug-hunting, but a 5-alarm accident going somewhere to happen in real life -- like, of course, Beth's and the other goverati's methodologies for moderating website, which are insidiously controlling and an alarming signal about the vulnerability of the First Amendment.

So what other things are unfolding in Second Life that we will see...somewhere? on or off the Internet?

Are people going to be wearing goggles with HUDS and translations and image overlays inside them?

Comments

[Cherowolf Redgrave]

".. Second Life is an emergent-behaviour panopticon". Well said Prokofy.

[Magggnnus]

"Are people going to be wearing goggles with HUDS and translations and image overlays inside them?"
yes. and that was clear even before SL came around ;)

[melponeme_k]

" Philip Linden always used to talk about SL as this machine to prototype and accelerate your business, and enable you to flop hard and learn while remaining anonymous so as not to suffer, but it's bigger than that, because it prefigures and runs through simulations of wider trends and adaptations to technology than just somebody's one business."

Yes but I think he had even further ambitions for the platform.

Second Life, I think, is a kind of dream state. It has consequences on the psyche. In it, people can play act behavior then take it into RL. The studies have already started about it...avatar self worth bleeding into RL. It can be therapeutic.

But it can also be maladaptive. I see people falling into these strange RP environments.

The door swings both ways.

Philip Linden was aware of that effect almost from the beginning. Its another Snowcrash idea meme.
Whoever grabs hold of virtual worlds in the future will have control over the dreams of humans.

[cube3]

forget cystall balls,;)
do you all get the "golden globes" on the side banner google ads asking one to "start the jouney now my lord?"

evony mmo/virtual world game.lol

kinda sums up all the futurism..;)

[Darien Caldwell]

Yes, I get those ads, they look pretty lame, and I can't imagine anyone actually playing them, but I suppose someone must be. I wouldn't consider them the future though. There's always been free games around, any that are good don't stay free for long though.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

".. Second Life is an emergent-behaviour panopticon."

That's kind of depressing, if true. Recall that the Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's design for a prison.

(And just what is a "barium chamber"?)

[Prokofy Neva]

Well, no, the Panopticon concept preceded Bentham. That is, he got the idea from his brother's prison, and the word itself -- I'm not sure it originated with him, although it does seem to be a made-up word out of Greek roots.

In Russian, the phrase, said with an exclamation point, "panoptika!" means "totally absurd thing visible for all to see" -- and Russian picks up a lot of French phrases from the days of the nobility and then the exiles, and it would be interesting to see tracing all this if it was used from French borrowing BEFORE Bentham came up with the prison idea.

I don't like the idea of emergent behaviour. I don't favour it as a concept which is often used by smug Lindens to justify doing nothing, or according will and power to technology separate from but in alignment with their own will.

Tekkies accord a religiously mystem power to "emergent behaviour" which is often just "griefers figuring out how to abuse something you didn't foretell".

A barium chamber is a barium chamber. A chamber with barium in it. Where stuff happens. it's science fiction, you should know that.

Barium also makes stuff show up. That's why in the hospital people are given barium drinks to swallo to see if their appendix burst, etc.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

W-Hat is not connected to 4chan by the way but the somethingawful forums, if you had bothered to check their FAQ at http://w-hat.com/faq

[Alex Dimitriades]

".. Second Life is an emergent-behaviour panopticon."

Philip et al. would certainly love this to happen but for the moment Second Life functions more like an "oligopticon" than a panopticon.

If we want to search for developed and mature panoptica, we don't need to look any further than the local governments, the internet service providers, or services like Google and Facebook.

[Prokofy Neva]

One of the common forms of propaganda that w-hat/b-tard/4chan etc constantly engage in is to come on forums and tell everybody that they are not connected. You can often tell who are their "agents of influence" and "useful idiots" by watching who comes on to tell everyone indignantly that they are "not related" and "get your facts straight".

Of course they are connected as anyone can see. Second Life in fact is a good place to see all their connections. It's just a form of disinformation and distraction.

As if you can trust the forums of a griefer group that constantly lies and propagandizes and distracts about their status lol.

[Doubledown Tandino]

Since when has a crystal ball been right?