30 second then 10 second timer1/2/2024 Second Life did not replace the internet in this way. No need for a thousand logins and passwords: in this Internet World theme park, each of us could embody a single body and consistent identity.Īn avatar of Mark Zuckerberg at a virtual Meta Connect event in 2022. One might walk from, say, eBay marketplace to YouTube cineplex or take a virtual Uber from the great library of Wikipedia to the twin towers of TikTok and Instagram. Definitions vary, but most experts agree the metaverse is, put simply, the internet made metropolis: an immersive, contiguous representation of data and the active user communities within. It remains both the first and the most successful manifestation of a so-called metaverse, a compelling if somewhat imprecise term coined by American writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. While Second Life’s world was viewed by many as rudimentary and its inhabitants eccentric, in hindsight it represented a bold, pioneering experiment, launched while Facebook was still a website for rating the attractiveness of Harvard students. Transactions and withdrawals were subject to a tiny fee, which contributed to the cost of server maintenance – a revolutionary, influential business model. The world used its own currency – the Linden dollar, withdrawable into local currencies – to establish a global, user-to-user economy. Someone claiming to represent the far-right French National Front joined in (their HQ was the site of virtual clashes with anti-racism demonstrators in 2007). The US universities MIT and Stanford established faculties in Second Life. The retail outlet American Apparel opened a virtual store on a private island called Lerappa – “Apparel” spelt backwards – selling costumes for avatars. Some used their space to stage art exhibitions and theatrical performances others built kink palaces. While in cities like New York or London you might never own a flat, in Second Life you could design, build and inhabit a mansion. Renters could build whatever they wanted on their turf. IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a “region” of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month. It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was “the first big-league CEO” to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – “the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds”. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Palmisano’s trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. Palmisano’s physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier. They had come to hear IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City.
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