what to put under a corset in second life
Gidge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden business firm with large drinking glass windows overlooking a glittering creek, fringed past weeping willows and meadows twinkling with fireflies. She keeps buying new pond pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The electric 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 merely a bra and bathrobe, with a chocolate-glazed donut perched on the pile of books beside her. "Good morning time girls," she writes on her blog one day. "I'm dull moving, trying to go out of bed this morning, only 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 female parent who works eight-60 minutes days at a call center and is raising a 14-yr-old son, a 7-twelvemonth-old daughter, and severely autistic twins, now 13. Her days are total of the selflessness and endless mundanity of raising children with special needs: giving her twins baths after they take soiled themselves (they however wear diapers, and most likely always will), blistering absurdity bread with i to at-home him down after a tantrum, request the other to end playing "the Barney theme song slowed down to sound like some demonic dirge." One 24-hour interval, she takes all four kids to a nature middle for an idyllic afternoon that gets interrupted by the reality of irresolute an adolescent's diaper in a musty bathroom.
But each morn, before all that—before getting the kids set up for school and putting in viii hours at the telephone call middle, earlier getting dinner on the table or keeping peace during the meal, earlier giving baths and collapsing into bed—Bridgette spends an hour and a half on the online platform Second Life, where she lives in a sleek paradise of her own devising. Expert morning girls. I'm slow moving, trying to go out of bed this morn. She wakes upward at 5:30 to inhabit a life in which she has the luxury of never getting out of bed at all.
W chapeau is Second Life? The short answer is that it's a virtual globe that launched in 2003 and was hailed by some as the future of the internet. The longer respond is that it's a landscape full of goth cities and preciously tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rainforest temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs and trippy giant chess games. In 2013, in honor of Second Life'due south 10th altogether, Linden Lab—the company that created it—released an infographic charting its progress: 36 1000000 accounts had been created, and their users had spent 217,266 cumulative years online, inhabiting an ever-expanding territory that comprised almost 700 foursquare miles. Many are tempted to call 2nd Life a game, merely two years after its launch, Linden Lab circulated a memo to employees insisting that no ane refer to it every bit that. Information technology was a platform. This was meant to suggest something more holistic, more than immersive, and more encompassing.
Second Life has no specific goals. Its vast landscape consists entirely of user-generated content, which means that everything you run across has been congenital by someone else—an avatar controlled by a live human user. These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up, go married, and make money. They celebrate their "rez mean solar day," the online equivalent of a birthday: the anniversary of the day they joined. At church building, they cannot take physical communion—the corporeality of that ritual is impossible—merely they tin bring the stories of their religion to life. At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life summon rolling thunder on Expert Friday, or a sudden sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces, "He is risen." Every bit one Second Life handbook puts it: "From your point of view, SL works as if you were a god."
In truth, in the years since its acme in the mid‑2000s, 2d Life has become something more similar a magnet for mockery. When I told friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always followed the same trajectory of reactions: a bare expression, a brief flash of recognition, and and then a mildly bemused look. Is that still effectually? Second Life is no longer the thing you joke about; it's the thing you haven't bothered to joke about for years.
Many observers expected monthly user numbers to go along rising later on they striking ane million in 2007, but instead they peaked—and accept, in the years since, stalled at about 800,000. An estimated 20 to 30 percent are get-go-time users who never return. Just a few years subsequently declaring 2nd Life the future of the internet, the tech world moved on. As a 2011 slice in Slate proclaimed, joining a chorus of disenchantment: "Looking dorsum, the futurity didn't final long."
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Merely if Second Life promised a hereafter in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, oasis't we constitute ourselves inside it? Only information technology'south come up to pass on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter instead. As I learned more nearly 2d Life, and spent more than time exploring it, it started to seem less similar an obsolete relic and more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of u.s.a. live in.
Perhaps 2nd Life inspires an urge to ridicule not because it's unrecognizable, but because it takes a recognizable impulse and carries information technology past the bounds of comfort, into a kind of uncanny valley: not just the hope of an online voice, only an online body; not just checking Twitter on your phone, merely forgetting to eat considering you're dancing at an online club; not just a curated version of your real life, but a carve up existence entirely. It crystallizes the simultaneous siren call and shame of wanting an alternating life. It raises questions nearly where unfettered fantasy leads, as well as about how we navigate the purlieus between the virtual and the real.
Equally virtual-reality technology grows more advanced, information technology promises to deliver a more than fully realized version of what many believed 2d Life would offering: full immersion in some other world. And as our actual world keeps delivering weekly horrors—another mass shooting, some other hurricane, another tweet from the president threatening nuclear war—the appeal of that alternate world keeps deepening, along with our doubts about what information technology means to find ourselves fatigued to it.
F rom 2004 to 2007, an anthropologist named Tom Boellstorff inhabited 2d Life as an embedded ethnographer, naming his avatar Tom Bukowski and building himself a dwelling and office chosen Ethnographia. His immersive approach was anchored by the premise that the world of Second Life is simply as "real" equally whatsoever other, and that he was justified in studying Second Life on "its own terms" rather than feeling obligated to understand people's virtual identities primarily in terms of their offline lives. His book Coming of Age in Second Life, titled in homage to Margaret Mead's classic, documents the texture of the platform's digital culture. He finds that making "small talk about lag [streaming delays in SL] is similar talking about the conditions in RL," and interviews an avatar named Wendy, whose creator always makes her get to sleep earlier she logs out. "So the actual world is Wendy's dream, until she wakes up again in Second Life?," Boellstorff recalls asking her, so: "I could have sworn a smile passed across Wendy'due south … face as she said, 'Yup. Indeed.' "
In Hinduism, the concept of an avatar refers to the incarnation of a deity on Earth, among mortals. In 2nd Life, it's your body—an ongoing act of self-expression. One woman described her avatar to Boellstorff like this: "If I take a zipper and pull her out of me, that'due south who I am." Female avatars tend to be thin and impossibly busty; male avatars are immature and muscular; about all avatars are vaguely cartoonish in their beauty. These avatars communicate through conversation windows, or by using voice technology to actually speak with ane another. They motion by walking, flying, teleporting, and clicking on "poseballs," literal floating orbs that animate avatars into various actions: dancing, karate, pretty much every sexual act you can imagine. Non surprisingly, many users come to Second Life for the possibilities of digital sex—sexual practice without corporeal bodies, without real names, without the constraints of gravity, ofttimes with elaborate textual commentary.
The local currency in Second Life is the Linden Dollar, and recent exchange rates put the Linden at just less than half a cent. In the x years following its launch, 2nd Life users spent $3.two billion of existent coin on in‑globe transactions. The get-go Second Life millionaire, a digital-existent-manor tycoon who goes by Anshe Chung, graced the cover of Businessweek in 2006, and past 2007, the Gross domestic product of 2d Life was larger than that of several pocket-sized countries. In the vast digital Marketplace, you tin buy a wedding gown for 4,000 Lindens (just over $16) or a ruddy-colored corset with fur wings for just under 350 Lindens (about $1.50). You can even buy some other body entirely: dissimilar pare, different hair, a pair of horns, genitalia of all shapes and sizes. A private island currently costs almost 150,000 Lindens (the cost is fixed at $600), while the Millennium Two Super Yacht costs 20,000 Lindens (just over $80) and comes with more than 300 animations attached to its beds and trio of hot tubs, designed to allow avatars to enact a vast range of sexual fantasies.
The number of Second Life users peaked simply as Facebook started to explode. The rise of Facebook wasn't the problem of a competing brand so much every bit the trouble of a competing model: It seemed that people wanted a curated version of real life more than they wanted another life entirely—that they wanted to become their most flattering profile picture more than they wanted to get a wholly carve up avatar. But peradventure Facebook and Second Life aren't so dissimilar in their appeal. Both find traction in the attraction of inhabiting a selective self, whether congenital from the materials of lived experience (camping-trip photos and witty observations about brunch) or from the impossibilities that lived experience precludes: an ideal body, an ideal romance, an platonic home.
Bridgette McNeal, the Atlanta mother of 4, has been on 2d Life for just over a decade. She named her avatar Gidge after what bullies called her in high school. While Bridgette is middle-anile, her avatar is a lithe 20-something whom she describes as "perfect me—if I'd never eaten sugar or had children." During her early days on Second Life, Bridgette'south husband created an avatar as well, and the ii of them would go along Second Life dates together, a blond Amazon and a squat silver robot, while sitting at their laptops in their study at dwelling. It was frequently the only way they could go on dates, because their kids' special needs made finding babysitters difficult. When we spoke, Bridgette described her Second Life dwelling house as a refuge that grants permission. "When I step into that space, I'm afforded the luxury of being selfish." She invoked Virginia Woolf: "It'due south similar a room of my own." Her virtual home is total of objects she could never continue in her real domicile because her kids might break or eat them—jewelry on dishes, knickknacks on tables, makeup on the counter.
In addition to the blog that documents her digital existence, with its marble pools and frilly, spearmint-light-green bikinis, Bridgette keeps a web log devoted to her daily life as a parent. It's honest and hilarious and full of heartbreaking candor. Recounting the afternoon spent with her kids at the nature center, she describes looking at a bald eagle: "Some asshole shot this bald eagle with an pointer. He lost almost of one wing considering of it and can't fly. He'southward kept safety here at this retreat we visited a few days ago. Sometimes I think the married man and I feel a little bit like him. Trapped. Naught really wrong, we've got nutrient and shelter and what we need. But nosotros are trapped for the rest of our lives by autism. We'll never be free."
When I asked Bridgette near the allure of 2d Life, she said it tin exist easy to succumb to the temptation to pour yourself into it when you should be tending to real life. I asked whether she had ever slipped close to that, and she said she'd certainly felt the pull at times. "Yous're thin and cute. No one's request yous to modify a diaper," she told me. "Only you lot can burn out on that. You don't want to exit, but you don't want to do it anymore, either."
S econd Life was invented past a man named Philip Rosedale, the son of a U.S. Navy carrier pilot and an English language instructor. As a boy, he was driven by an outsize sense of ambition. He tin recollect standing nearly the woodpile in his family'due south lawn and thinking, "Why am I hither, and how am I different from everybody else?" As a teenager in the mid‑'80s, he used an early on-model PC to zoom in on a graphic representation of a Mandelbrot set, an infinitely recursive fractal image that just kept getting more and more detailed every bit he got closer and closer. At a sure indicate, he told me, he realized he was looking at a graphic larger than the Earth: "We could walk forth the surface our whole lives, and never fifty-fifty brainstorm to encounter everything." That's when he realized that "the coolest thing you lot could do with a calculator would be to build a world."
In 1999, just equally Rosedale was starting Linden Lab, he attended Burning Human being, the annual festival of operation art, sculptural installations, and hallucinogenic hedonism in the middle of the Nevada desert. While he was there, he told me, something "inexplicable" happened to his personality. "Yous feel like y'all're high, without any drugs or annihilation. You lot just experience connected to people in a manner that you don't normally." He went to a rave in an Airstream trailer, watched trapeze artists swing beyond the desert, and lay in a hookah lounge piled with hundreds of Persian rugs. Burning Human didn't give Rosedale the idea for 2d Life—he'd been imagining a digital earth for years—but information technology helped him understand the energy he wanted to summon: a place where people could make the world any they wanted it to be.
This was the dream, but information technology was a hard sell for early investors. Linden Lab was proposing a earth built by amateurs, and sustained by a unlike kind of revenue model—based not on paid subscriptions, simply on commerce generated in-world. 1 of Second Life's designers recalled investors' skepticism: "Inventiveness was supposed to exist a night art that only Spielberg and Lucas could do." Every bit part of selling 2nd Life as a globe, rather than a game, Linden Lab hired a writer to piece of work as an "embedded journalist." This was Wagner James Au, who concluded up chronicling the early years of 2nd Life on a weblog (still running) chosen "New World Notes," and so, afterwards his employment with Linden Lab concluded, in a book called The Making of 2nd Life. In the book, Au profiles some of Second Life'southward most important early builders: an avatar named Spider Mandala (who was managing a Midwestern gas station offline) and another named Catherine Omega, who was a "punky brunette … with a utility belt" in 2d Life, just offline was squatting in a condemned apartment building in Vancouver, a edifice that had no running water and was populated mainly by addicts, where she used a soup tin can to take hold of a wireless signal from nearby part buildings and so she could run Second Life on her laptop.
Rosedale told me nearly the thrill of those early days, when Second Life'south potential felt unbridled. No one else was doing what he and his team were doing, he remembered: "Nosotros used to say that our only competition was real life." He said at that place was a period in 2007 when more than 500 manufactures a day were written almost Linden Lab's piece of work. Rosedale loved to explore 2nd Life as an avatar named Philip Linden. "I was like a god," he told me. He envisioned a time to come in which his grandchildren would run across the existent world as a kind of "museum or theater," while most work and relationships happened in virtual realms like 2nd Life. "In some sense," he told Au in 2007, "I recall we volition see the entire physical globe as being kind of left behind."
A lice Krueger first started noticing the symptoms of her affliction when she was 20 years old. During fieldwork for a college biology class, crouching down to watch bugs eating leaves, she felt overwhelmed past heat. Standing in the grocery store, she noticed that information technology felt as if her unabridged left leg had disappeared—not only gone numb, but disappeared. Whenever she went to a physician, she was told it was all in her caput. "And it was all in my head," she told me, 47 years later. "Simply in a different way than how they meant."
Alice was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 50. Past and then she could barely walk. Her neighborhood association in Colorado prohibited her from edifice a ramp at the front of her firm, so it was difficult for her to go anywhere. Her iii children were 11, 13, and 15. She didn't get to run across her younger son's high-school graduation, or his higher campus. She started suffering intense pain in her lower dorsum and eventually had to take surgery to repair spinal vertebrae that had fused together, so concluded up getting multidrug-resistant staph from her time in the hospital. Her pain persisted, and she was diagnosed with a misalignment acquired by the surgery itself, during which she had been suspended "similar a rotisserie craven" higher up the operating table. At the age of 57, Alice found herself housebound and unemployed, oftentimes in excruciating pain, largely cared for past her girl. "I was looking at my four walls," she told me, "and wondering if at that place could be more."
That's when she establish 2d Life. She created an avatar named Gentle Heron, and loved seeking out waterslides—excited by the sheer thrill of doing what her trunk could not. As she kept exploring, she started inviting people she'd met online in disability conversation rooms to join her. Only that as well meant she started to feel responsible for their feel, and eventually she founded a "cross-inability virtual community" in Second Life, at present known as Virtual Ability, a grouping that occupies an archipelago of virtual islands and welcomes people with a wide range of disabilities—everything from Down syndrome to PTSD to manic low. What unites its members, Alice told me, is their sense of non being fully included in the world.
While she was starting Virtual Power, Alice besides embarked on a real-life motion: to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee from Colorado, where she'd outlived her long-term disability benefits. ("I didn't know you could practise that," I told her, and she replied, "Neither did I!") When I asked her whether she felt like a dissimilar version of herself in Second Life, she rejected the suggestion strenuously. Alice doesn't especially like the terms real and virtual. To her, they imply a hierarchical distinction, suggesting that one office of her life is more "real" than the other, when her sense of cocky feels fully expressed in both. Subsequently our first conversation, she sent me fifteen peer-reviewed scientific articles about digital avatars and embodiment. She doesn't want 2d Life misunderstood as a petty diversion.
Alice told me about a human with Down syndrome who has get an important fellow member of the Virtual Ability community. In real life, his disability is omnipresent, just on Second Life people can talk to him without even realizing he has Downward'south. In the offline earth, he lives with his parents—who were surprised to see he was capable of controlling his own avatar. After they swallow dinner each night, as his parents are washing the dishes, he sits expectantly by the estimator, waiting to return to Second Life, where he rents a duplex on an island called Cape Heron, part of the Virtual Ability archipelago. He has turned the entire upper level into a massive aquarium, so he can walk amidst the fish, and the lower level into a garden, where he keeps a pet reindeer and feeds it Cheerios. Alice says he doesn't draw a firm boundary between Second Life and "reality," and others in the community take been inspired by his arroyo, citing him when they talk about collapsing the border in their own minds.
W hen I initially envisioned writing this essay, I imagined falling under the thrall of Second Life: a wide-eyed observer seduced past the culture she had been dispatched to analyze. But being "in world" made me queasy from the start. I had pictured myself defending 2nd Life against the ways it had been dismissed as lilliputian more than than a consolation prize for when "first life" doesn't quite deliver. Simply instead I found myself wanting to write, 2nd Life makes me want to take a shower.
Intellectually, my respect deepened by the day, when I learned virtually a Center Eastern woman who could move through the world of 2nd Life without a hijab, and when I talked with a legally bullheaded woman whose avatar has a rooftop balcony and who could meet the view from it (thanks to screen magnification) more clearly than the world beyond her screen. I heard about a veteran with PTSD who gave biweekly Italian cooking classes in an open-air gazebo, and I visited an online version of Yosemite created by a woman who had joined Second Life in the wake of several astringent depressive episodes and hospitalizations. She uses an avatar named Jadyn Firehawk and spends upwardly to 12 hours a solar day on 2d Life, many of them devoted to refining her bespoke wonderland—total of waterfalls, sequoias, and horses named after important people in John Muir's life—grateful that Second Life doesn't ask her to inhabit an identity entirely contoured by her disease, unlike internet conversation rooms focused on bipolar disorder that are all about being sick. "I live a well-rounded life on SL," she told me. "Information technology feeds all my other selves."
But despite my growing appreciation, and my fantasies of enchantment, a certain visceral distaste for Second Life endured—for the emptiness of its graphics, its nightclubs and mansions and pools and castles, their refusal of all the grit and imperfection that brand the globe experience like the world. Whenever I tried to depict Second Life, I found it nigh impossible—or at to the lowest degree impossible to make interesting—considering description finds its traction in flaws and fissures, and exploring the world of 2d Life was more like moving through postcards. Second Life was a world of visual clichés. Goose egg was ragged or broken or battered—or if it was dilapidated, it was because that detail aesthetic had been called from a series of prefab choices.
Of grade, my aversion to Second Life—as well as my embrace of flaw and imperfection in the concrete earth—testified to my own good fortune as much as anything. When I move through the real globe, I am buffered by my (relative) youth, my (relative) health, and my (relative) liberty. Who am I to begrudge those who have found in the reaches of 2d Life what they couldn't find offline?
One day when Alice and I met up as avatars, she took me to a beach on 1 of the Virtual Power islands and invited me to practice tai chi. All I needed to exercise was click on one of the poseballs levitating in the eye of a grassy circumvolve, and it would automatically animate my avatar. But I did non feel that I was doing tai chi. I felt that I was sitting at my laptop, watching my two-dimensional avatar do tai chi.
I thought of Bridgette in Atlanta, waking up early on to sit beside a virtual pool. She doesn't go to scent the chlorine or the sunscreen, to feel the sun melt beyond her back or char her skin to peeling crisps. And even so Bridgette must get something powerful from sitting beside a virtual pool—pleasure that dwells not in the physical experience itself just in the anticipation, the documentation, the recollection, and the contrast to her daily obligations. Otherwise she wouldn't wake up at five:thirty in the morning to do it.
F rom the beginning, I was terrible at navigating 2d Life. Body role failed to download, my interface kept maxim. Second Life was supposed to requite you the opportunity to perfect your body, simply I couldn't even summon a complete ane. For my avatar, I'd chosen a punk-looking adult female with cutoff shorts, a partially shaved head, and a ferret on her shoulder.
On my first day in-globe, I wandered around Orientation Island like a boozer person trying to find a bath. The island was full of marble columns and trim greenery, with a faint soundtrack of gurgling h2o, simply it looked less like a Delphic temple and more than like a corporate retreat middle inspired past a Delphic temple. The graphics seemed incomplete and uncompelling, the motility total of glitches and lags. This wasn't the grit and struggle of reality; information technology was more similar a phase set up with the rickety scaffolding of its facade exposed. I tried to talk to someone named Del Agnos, but got nothing. I felt surprisingly ashamed by his brushoff, transported back to the paralyzing shyness of my junior-high-school days.
At my first Second Life concert, I arrived excited for actual music in a virtual world: Many SL concerts are genuinely "alive" insofar as they involve real musicians playing real music on instruments or singing into microphones hooked up to their computers. But I was trying to do besides many things at in one case that afternoon: reply to xvi dangling work emails, make my stepdaughter a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich before her last rehearsal for a production of Peter Pan. With my jam-mucilaginous fingers, I clicked on a trip the light fantastic poseball and started a conga line—except no i joined my conga line; it just got me stuck between a potted plant and the stage, trying to conga and going nowhere. My embarrassment—more than any sense of having fun—was what fabricated me feel implicated and engaged, enlightened that I was sharing the world with others.
Each fourth dimension I signed off Second Life, I was eager to plunge back into the obligations of my ordinary life: Pick up my stepdaughter from drama class? Check! Reply to my department chair about hiring a replacement for the faculty member taking an unexpected leave? I was on it! These obligations felt existent in a way that Second Life did non, and they allowed me to inhabit a particular version of myself as someone capable and necessary. Information technology felt like returning to the air later on struggling to notice my breath underwater. I came upwards gasping, desperate, ready for entanglement and contact, set up to say: Aye! This is the existent world! In all its vexed logistical glory!
When I interviewed Philip Rosedale, he readily admitted that Second Life has always presented intrinsic difficulties to users—that it is difficult for people to get comfortable moving, communicating, and building; that there is an "irreducible level of difficulty associated with mouse and keyboard" that Second Life "could never make easier." Peter Gray, Linden Lab's senior manager of global communications, told me about what he called the "white-space problem"—having so much freedom that y'all can't be entirely sure what you want to do—and admitted that inbound Second Life can be like "getting dropped off in the eye of a foreign state."
When I spoke with users, however, the stubborn inaccessibility of Second Life seemed to accept become a crucial office of their narratives equally Second Life residents. They looked back on their early embarrassment with nostalgia. Gidge told me about the time someone had convinced her that she needed to buy a vagina, and she'd ended upward wearing it on the outside of her pants. (She called this a archetype #SecondLifeProblem.) A Swedish musician named Malin Östh—one of the performers at the concert where I'd started my abortive conga line—told me about attention her first Second Life concert, and her story wasn't so unlike from mine: When she'd tried to get to the forepart of the crowd, she'd ended up accidentally flight onto the phase. Beforehand, she'd been certain the whole result would seem simulated, merely she was surprised by how mortified she felt, and this fabricated her realize that she actually felt like she was among other people. I knew what she meant. If it feels similar you are dorsum in inferior high school, then at least it feels similar you are somewhere.
One woman put it similar this: "Second Life doesn't open itself up to you. It doesn't paw you everything on a silverish platter and tell you where to go next. It presents y'all with a world, and it lets yous to your own devices, tutorial exist damned." But in one case you've figured it out, yous can buy a m silver platters if you want to—or buy the yacht of your dreams, or build a virtual Yosemite. Rosedale believed that if a user could survive that initial purgatory, and so her bond with the globe of 2d Life would be sealed for good: "If they stay more than four hours, they stay forever."
N eal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, featuring a virtual "Metaverse," is oft cited as Second Life'southward master literary ancestor. Just Rosedale bodacious me that past the time he read the novel he'd already been imagining Second Life for years ("Just inquire my wife"). The hero of Snow Crash, aptly named Hiro Protagonist, lives with his roommate in a U-Stor-It unit, only in the Metaverse he is a sword-fighting prince and a legendary hacker. No surprise he spends so much time there: "It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It."
Hiro's double life gets at one of the core fantasies of Second Life: that it could invert all the metrics of real-world success, or render them obsolete; that it could create a radically democratic space because no one has any idea what anyone else's position in the real world is. Many residents of Second Life understand information technology equally a utopia connecting people from all over the world—beyond income levels, beyond disparate vocations and geographies and disabilities, a place where the ill can live in salubrious bodies and the immobilized can move freely. Seraphina Brennan—a transgender woman who grew up in a small coal-mining customs in Pennsylvania and could non afford to begin medically transitioning until her mid-20s—told me that Second Life had given her "the opportunity to announced as I truly felt within," because it was the first place where she could inhabit a female body.
In The Making of Second Life, Wagner James Au tells the story of an avatar named Bel Muse, a classic "California blonde" who is played by an African American woman. She led an early squad of builders working on Nexus Prime, i of the first Second Life cities, and told Au that it was the first time she hadn't encountered the prejudices she was accustomed to. In the real world, she said, "I have to make a skillful impression correct abroad—I accept to come off dainty and articulate, right away. In Second Life, I didn't accept to. Because for once, I can pass." Just this anecdote—the fact that Bel Muse institute respect more readily when she passed as white—confirms the persistence of racism more than information technology offers any proof of liberation from it.
Many Second Life users meet it as offering an equal playing field, free from the strictures of class and race, but its preponderance of slender white bodies, near of them outfitted with the props of the leisure class, simply re-inscribe the same skewed ideals—and the same sense of "whiteness" equally invisible default—that sustain the unequal playing field in the first place.
Sara Skinner, an African American adult female who has always given her avatars skin tones like to her own, told me the story of trying to build a digital black-history museum in a seaside boondocks chosen Bay City. Another avatar (playing a cop) immediately built walls and, eventually, a courthouse that blocked the museum from view. The cop avatar claims information technology was a misunderstanding, merely so much racism refuses to confess itself as such—and it's certainly no misunderstanding when white men on Second Life tell Sara that she looks like a primate after she rejects their advances; or when someone calls her "tampon olfactory organ" because of her wide nostrils; or when someone else tells her that her experience with bias is invalid because she is a "mixed breed."
Au told me that initially he was deeply excited by the premise of Second Life, particularly the possibilities of its user-generated content, only that most people turned out to be less interested in exercising the limits of their creative potential than in becoming consumers of a young, sexy, rich world, clubbing like 20-somethings with infinite money. Rosedale told me he thought the landscape of 2d Life would exist hyper-fantastic, artistic and insane, full of spaceships and baroque topographies, but what concluded up emerging looked more than similar Malibu. People were building mansions and Ferraris. "We first build in a place what we most covet," he told me, and cited an early study by Linden Lab that institute the vast majority of Second Life users lived in rural rather than urban areas in real life. They came to Second Life for what their concrete lives lacked: the concentration, density, and connective potential of urban spaces; the sense of things happening all effectually them; the possibility of existence part of that happening.
J onas Tancred offset joined 2d Life in 2007, afterwards his corporate-headhunting company folded during the recession. Jonas, who lives in Sweden, was graying and middle-anile, a bit paunchy, while his avatar, Bara Jonson, was young and muscled, with spiky pilus and a soulful vibe. But what Jonas constitute most compelling about Second Life was non that it let him role-play a more attractive alter ego; it was that Second Life gave him the chance to play music, a lifelong dream he'd never followed. (He would eventually pair up with Malin Östh to form the duo Bara Jonson and Costless.) Jonas started playing virtual gigs. In real life he stood in front of a kitchen table covered with a checkered oilcloth, playing an acoustic guitar connected to his reckoner, while in Second Life Bara was rocking out in front of a oversupply.
Before a performance ane night, a woman showed upwardly early and asked him, "Are you whatsoever good?" He said, "Aye, of course," and played one of his best gigs all the same, just to back information technology up. This woman was Nickel Borrelly; she would get his (Second Life) married woman and eventually, a couple of years later, the mother of his (real life) kid.
Offline, Nickel was a younger woman named Susie who lived in Missouri. After a surreal courtship total of hot-air-airship rides, romantic moonlit dances, and tandem biking on the Great Wall of China, the pair had a Second Life nuptials on Twin Hearts Island—at "12pm SLT," the electronic invitations said, which meant noon Standard Linden Fourth dimension. During their vows, Bara called it the about important day of his life. But which life did he mean?
Bara's Second Life musical career started to take off, and somewhen he was offered the gamble to come to New York to make a record, ane of the first times a 2nd Life musician had been offered a real-life record deal. It was on that trip that Jonas first met Susie in the real world. When their relationship was featured in a documentary a few years later, she described her starting time impression: Human, he looks kinda old. But she said that getting to know him in person felt similar "falling in love twice." How did she stop upward getting pregnant? "I can tell you how it happened," she said in the documentary. "A lot of vodka."
Susie and Jonas'southward son, Arvid, was born in 2009. (Both Susie's and Arvid's names take been changed.) Past so, Jonas was dorsum in Sweden because his visa had run out. While Susie was in the delivery room, he was in his order on 2d Life—at showtime waiting for news, and and then smoking a virtual cigar. For Susie, the hardest part was the mean solar day after Arvid's birth, when the infirmary was full of other fathers visiting their babies. What could Susie and Jonas do? Bring their avatars together to melt a virtual breakfast in a romantic enclave past the sea, holding steaming mugs of coffee they couldn't drink, looking at bodily videos of their actual babe on a virtual television, while they reclined on a virtual couch.
Susie and Jonas are no longer romantically involved, just Jonas is nevertheless part of Arvid'due south life, Skyping frequently and visiting the States when he can. Jonas believes that part of the reason he and Susie accept been able to maintain a strong parenting relationship in the aftermath of their separation is that they got to know each other so well online before they met in existent life—that 2nd Life wasn't an illusion but a conduit that immune them to understand each other amend than real-life courting would have.
Jonas describes Second Life as a rarefied version of reality, rather than a shallow substitute for information technology. As a musician, he feels that Second Life hasn't inverse his music but "amplified" it, enabling a more than straight connection with his audience, and he loves the mode fans can blazon their ain lyrics to his songs. He remembers everyone "singing along" to a cover he performed of "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm," by the Crash Test Dummies, when then many people typed the lyrics that their "mmm"s eventually filled his entire screen. For Jonas, the reality and beauty of his creations—the songs, the baby—have transcended and overpowered the vestiges of their virtual construction.
O f the 36 1000000 2d Life accounts that had been created past 2013—the most contempo data Linden Lab will provide—only an estimated 600,000 people nonetheless regularly use the platform. That'due south a lot of users who turned away. What happened?
Au sees the simultaneous ascent of Facebook and the plateau in Second Life users as proof that Linden Lab misread public desires. "Second Life launched with the premise that everyone would desire a second life," Au told me, "only the market proved otherwise."
Only when I spoke with Peter Gray, Linden Lab's global communications director, and Bjorn Laurin, its vice president of production, they insisted that the problem doesn't lie in the concept, but in the challenge of perfecting its execution. The user plateau simply testifies to interface difficulties, they told me, and to the fact that the applied science hasn't yet advanced enough to deliver fully on what the media hype suggested 2nd Life might become: an utterly immersive virtual globe. They are hoping virtual reality can change that.
In July, Linden Lab launched a beta version of a new platform chosen Sansar, billed as the next borderland: a three-dimensional world designed for use with a virtual-reality headset such as Oculus Rift. The company'due south organized religion, along with the recent popularity of VR in the tech world (a trend that Facebook's purchase of Oculus VR attests to), raises a larger question. If advances in virtual reality solve the problem of a cumbersome interface, will they ultimately reveal a widespread desire to plunge more fully into virtual worlds unfettered past glitches, lags, and keyboards?
Rosedale stepped downwards as CEO of Linden Lab in 2008. He told me he thinks of himself as more of an inventor, and he felt that the visitor needed a improve manager. He isn't disappointed in what Second Life has get, merely he, also, sees the horizon of future possibility elsewhere: in full-fledged virtual reality, where he tin can "build planets and new economies." His electric current company, High Fidelity, is working on creating VR applied science then immersive that you actually experience like you are present in the room with someone else.
Au told me that he has noticed a recurrent hubris in the tech world. Instead of learning from mistakes, people and companies do the same affair over and over again. Is this the story of Second Life—the persistence of a tech-world delusion? Or is the delusion something more than like prophecy? Is Second Life the prescient forerunner of our time to come digital existence?
When I asked Rosedale whether he stood behind the predictions he'd made during the early years of Second Life—that the locus of our lives would go virtual, and that the physical world would showtime to seem like a museum—he didn't recant. But the reverse: He said that at a certain point we would come up to regard the existent world as an "primitive, lovable place" that was no longer crucial. "What will we do with our offices when we no longer use them?" he wondered. "Will we play racquetball in them?"
I pressed him on this. Did he actually think that certain parts of the physical world—the homes we share with our families, for example, or the meals nosotros savour with our friends, our bodies leaning close across tables—would someday end to matter? Did he really believe that our corporeal selves weren't key to our humanity? I was surprised by how rapidly he conceded. The sphere of family would never get obsolete, he said—the physical home, where we choose to spend fourth dimension with the people we love. "That has a more than durable existence," he said. "As I call back yous'd hold."
A licia Chenaux lives on an isle called Bluebonnet, a quaint forested enclave, with her husband, Aldwyn (Al), to whom she has been married for six years, and their two daughters: Abby, who is 8, and Brianna, who is 3, although she used to exist 5, and before that she was viii. As a family unit, they live their days as a parade of idyllic memories, often captured equally digital snapshots on Alicia's blog: scouting for jack-o'-lantern candidates at the pumpkin patch, heading to Greece for days of swimming in a pixelated body of water. It's like a digital Norman Rockwell painting, an platonic of upper-centre-grade American domesticity—an utterly unremarkable fantasy, except that Abby and Brianna are both child avatars played past adults.
When Alicia discovered in her early 30s that she couldn't have biological children, she barbarous into a lengthy depression. Simply Second Life offered her a risk to be a parent. Her virtual daughter Abby endured a serious trauma in real life at the historic period of eight (the specifics of which Alicia doesn't experience the need to know), so she plays that age to requite herself the chance to alive information technology better. Brianna was raised by nannies in real life—her parents weren't specially involved in her upbringing—and she wanted to be role of a family in which she'd go more than hands-on parenting. Perhaps that's why she kept wanting to go younger.
Alicia and her family are part of a larger family unit-role-play community on Second Life, facilitated by adoption agencies where children and potential parents post profiles and embark on "trials," during which they live together to see whether they are a expert match. Sara Skinner, the would-be founder of the 2nd Life black-history museum, told me almost parenting a four-year-old son played by a homo in the armed forces deployed overseas: He often logged on with a patchy connexion, but to hang out with Sara for a few hours while his service flickered in and out.
Sometimes adoptive parents volition go through a virtual pregnancy, using "nativity clinics" or accessories chosen "tummy talkers"—kits that deliver everything you need: a due date and trunk modifications (both adjustable), including the choice to brand the growing fetus visible or not; play-past-play announcements ("Your baby is doing flips!"); and the simulation of a "realistic delivery," forth with a newborn-baby accessory. For 2d Life parents who go through pregnancy after adopting in-world, it's understood that the baby they are having is the child they have already adopted—the process is meant to give both parent and child the bond of a live birth. "Really go forenoon sickness," ane product promises. "Get aches." Which means being informed that a body-that-is-not-your-corporeal-torso is getting sick. "You take full control over your pregnancy, have information technology EXACTLY how you want," this product advertises, which—as I write this essay, six months into my own pregnancy—does seem to miss something central to the feel: that it doesn't happen exactly how y'all want; that information technology subjects you to a process beyond your control.
In real life, Alicia lives with her swain, and when I enquire whether he knows about her Second Life family, she says, "Of course." Keeping it a secret would exist hard, because she hangs out with the three of them on 2d Life nearly every dark of the week except Wed. (Wednesday is what she calls "real-life night," and she spends it watching reality tv with her all-time friend.) When I ask Alicia whether she gets different things from her ii romantic relationships, she says, "Absolutely." Her boyfriend is brilliant just he works all the fourth dimension; Al listens to her ramble endlessly about her solar day. She and Al knew each other for two years before they got married (she says his "patience and persistence" were a major part of his appeal), and she confesses that she was a "total control freak" about their huge Second Life wedding. In real life, the man who plays Al is a chip older than Alicia—51 to her 39, with a married woman and family—and she appreciates that he has a "whole lifetime of experiences" and can offer a "more conservative, more settled" perspective.
After their 2d Life wedding, everyone started asking whether Alicia and Al planned to have kids. (Some things remain abiding across virtual and bodily worlds.) They adopted Abby iv years ago, and Brianna a year later, and these days their family dynamic weaves in and out of role-play. When Brianna joined their family unit, she said she wanted more than "merely a story," and sometimes the girls volition interrupt role-play to say something virtually their real adult lives: guy problem or chore stress. But it's important to Alicia that both of her daughters are "committed children," which means that they don't accept alternating adult avatars. While Alicia and Al share real-life photos with each other, Alicia told me, "the girls generally don't share photos of themselves, preferring to go along themselves more childlike in our minds."
For Christmas in 2015, Al gave Alicia a "pose stand up," which allows her to customize and relieve poses for her family: she and Al embracing on a bench, or him giving her a piggyback ride. Many of Alicia'southward blog posts evidence a photo of her family looking happy, oftentimes accompanied by a note at the bottom. One such note reads: "Btw, if you want to buy the pose I used for this picture show of usa, I put it upward on Market." In ane postal service, below a photograph of her and Al sitting on a bench, surrounded by snowy trees, cuddling in their cozy winter finery, she admits that she took the photograph after Al had gone to bed. She had logged his avatar back on and posed him to become the photo only as she wanted.
To me, posing illuminates both the appeal and the limits of family unit role-play on Second Life: It can exist endlessly sculpted into something idyllic, only it can never exist sculpted into something that you have not purposely sculpted. Though Alicia's family unit dynamic looks seamless—a parade of photogenic moments—a deep office of its pleasure, as Alicia described information technology to me, seems to involve its moments of difficulty: when she has to stop the girls from grouse about costumes or throwing tantrums about coming home from vacation. In a blog post, Alicia confesses that her favorite time each evening is the "few minutes" she gets alone with Al, but even invoking this economy of scarcity—appealing for its suggestion of obligation and sacrifice—feels like another pose lifted from real-world parenting.
Last twelvemonth, Alicia and Al adopted two more children, but found information technology problematic that the new kids wanted "and then much, so fast." They wanted to call Alicia and Al Mom and Dad right abroad, and started proverb "I love you so much" from the very beginning. They had a desire for intense, unrelenting parenting, rather than wanting to weave in and out of function-play, and constantly did things that demanded attending, like losing their shoes, jumping off the roof, climbing trees they couldn't go down from, and starting projects they couldn't terminate. Basically, they behaved more than similar bodily kids than similar adults pretending to be kids. The adoption lasted only 5 months. There's something stubbornly beautiful near Alicia's Second Life family, all iv of these people wanting to live inside the aforementioned dream. And at that place's something irrefutably meaningful nearly the ways Alicia and her children have forged their own version of the intimacies they've been denied by circumstances. But their moments of staged friction (the squabbling, the meltdowns) also illuminate the claustrophobia of their family's perfection. Perhaps Second Life families court the ideals of domesticity too easily, effectively curt-circuiting much of the difficulty that constitutes family life. Your virtual family volition never fully reach beyond your wildest imagining, because information technology's built just of what you could imagine.
O ne evening during the earliest days of my 2d Life exploration, I stood with my husband outside a barbecue articulation in (offline) Lower Manhattan and asked him: "I mean, why isn't Second Life but as real as 'existent life'?" He reached over and pinched my arm, and so said, "That's why information technology's not equally real."
His point wasn't simply about physicality—the ways our experiences are bound to our bodies—just almost surprise and disruption. And then much of lived feel is equanimous of what lies beyond our agency and prediction, beyond our grasp, beyond our imagining. In the perfected landscapes of Second Life, I kept remembering what a friend had once told me well-nigh his experience of incarceration: Having his freedom taken from him meant non but losing access to the total range of the world's possible pleasure, just too losing access to the full range of his own possible mistakes. Perhaps the cost of a perfected world, or a world where you can ostensibly command everything, is that much of what strikes usa every bit "experience" comes from what we cannot forge ourselves, and what we cannot ultimately abandon. Alice and Bridgette already know this, of course. They live it every solar day.
In 2nd Life, equally elsewhere online, afk stands for "away from keyboard," and during the form of his ethnographic research, Tom Boellstorff sometimes heard residents saying that "they wished they could 'go afk' in the actual world to escape uncomfortable situations, but knew this was not possible; 'no ane ever says "afk" in real life.' " This sentiment inspired what Boellstorff calls the "afk test": "If y'all can go 'afk' from something, that something is a virtual world." Perhaps the inverse of the afk test is a decent definition of what constitutes reality: something you lot can't become afk from—non forever, at least. Philip Rosedale predicted that the concrete earth would become a kind of museum, merely how could information technology? It'southward too integral to our humanity to ever go obsolete, too necessary to our imperfect, aching bodies moving through it.
Did I find wonder in 2d Life? Admittedly. When I saturday in a wicker chair on a rooftop balcony, chatting with the legally bullheaded woman who had built herself this house overlooking the crashing waves of Cape Serenity, I found it moving that she could meet the world of Second Life better than our own. When I rode horses through the virtual Yosemite, I thought of how the woman leading me through the pines had spent years on disability, isolated from the world, before she found a identify where she no longer felt sidelined. That'south what ultimately feels liberating near Second Life—not its repudiation of the physical earth, but its entwinement with that world, their fierce exchange. Second Life recognizes the means that we frequently feel more plural and less coherent than the world allows us to be.
Some people telephone call 2d Life escapist, and ofttimes its residents argue against that. Simply for me, the question isn't whether or non 2d Life involves escape. The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universal, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life e'er involves reckoning with the urge to carelessness it—through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, or hard drugs, or adultery, or a smartphone screen. These forms of "leaving" aren't the opposite of accurate presence. They are simply one of its symptoms—the way honey contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/second-life-leslie-jamison/544149/
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