The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future (Second Life)

The Atlantic ^ | The December 2017 Issue | Leslie Jamison

[2ndDivisionVet]

Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life.

Gidge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house with large glass windows overlooking a glittering creek, fringed by weeping willows and meadows twinkling with fireflies. She keeps buying new swimming pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The current specimen is a teal lozenge with a waterfall cascading from its archway of stones. Gidge spends her days lounging in a swimsuit on her poolside patio, or else tucked under a lacy comforter, wearing nothing but a bra and bathrobe, with a chocolate-glazed donut perched on the pile of books beside her. “Good morning girls,” she writes on her blog one day. “I’m slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning, but when I’m surrounded by my pretty pink bed it’s difficult to get out and away like I should.”

In another life, the one most people would call “real,” Gidge Uriza is Bridgette McNeal, an Atlanta mother who works eight-hour days at a call center and is raising a 14-year-old son, a 7-year-old daughter, and severely autistic twins, now 13. Her days are full of the selflessness and endless mundanity of raising children with special needs: giving her twins baths after they have soiled themselves (they still wear diapers, and most likely always will), baking applesauce bread with one to calm him down after a tantrum, asking the other to stop playing “the Barney theme song slowed down to sound like some demonic dirge.” One day, she takes all four kids to a nature center for an idyllic afternoon....

[linear]

Something about this article is profoundly depressing.

[stars & stripes forever]

[Something about this article is profoundly depressing.]

I know. VIRTUAL LIVING isn’t REALITY.

[cgbg]

OK, I admit it—never heard of this.

Very interesting article—with lots of ideas worth discussing.

Thanks for posting it.

[bravo whiskey]

Bless her heart. Given what she has to do all day and time limiting herself on line, it is certainly better than drugs or alcohol.

[backwoods-engineer]

Gidge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house with large glass windows overlooking a glittering creek, fringed by weeping willows and meadows twinkling with fireflies.

Reality for Democrats? And who is President in 'firefly' 'meadow' world? Hillary?

These people had better get real, because things are about to get real.

[Avalon Memories]

I had an active SL account for a few years, from 2009 to about 2013 or so. Its early promise fell apart for several reasons.

First, at the height of the severe recession, a lot of people were attracted to it as a way to make some real money. I'm among them.

But you soon learn the economics don't work. A very few people made some real money in the early days selling virtual land, but that collapsed pretty fast. You have to buy the virtual currency with real money, but the exchange rate always was stupid and the virtual market did not sustain selling huge quantities of something just to make small amounts of real dollars.

Second, the author of the posted article only brushes quickly past the XXX sexual garbage that infests SL. Literally any form of sheer depravity is practiced in virtual form. Pedophilia, rape, bestiality, BDSM, grotesquely sized and misshapen male and female body parts. Linden Lab tried to segregate the deeply pornographic aspects, but in truth, that's what sustains the platform.

Third, Linden Lab failed to keep up graphically. Today's video games are incredibly beautiful graphically, while SL is still blocky, laggy 2005 technology.

Fourth, the explosive growth of online games with really excellent offerings are like comparing a modern car to a Model T.

[Avalon Memories]

Politics as we understand it in the real world doesn’t exist in SL. There are no presidents, no governments except for Linden Labs terms of service. SL is pure fantasy, some of it pleasant, much of it ugly.

[Marauder]

I finally deactivated my Facebook account, and I don’t miss it a bit.