All the neolibs in 00s suddenly deciding that Second Life was going to be the absolute biggest thing ever was really surreal, and the fact that we barely talks about it even more so.
Between like the late 80s and Facebook or so, there was a general assumption that that's what social media would be; a virtual world with 3d graphics where everyone would have avatars that would interact with eachother and do anything they were currently using 2D websites for. Second Life took off, but there were quite a few others that got significant investment between the 90s and 2005.
As recent as 2015 or so I remember seeing someone advocating a VR browser that generated 3d representations of websites, that you could interact with or talk to other users avatars like in VRchat/NeosVR.
Boomers chain-smoking while they roleplay as real estate agents. Screeching at me like a bat colony if I went near their virtual white picket fence. It was like Nextdoor meets Snowcrash.
how? genuinely curious
So I'll lead in with the observation that Second Life isn't unique. Activision Blizzard was headed up by a CIA operation's manager until very recently. And we can all guess how those individuals managed to make that particular lateral move.
But Second Life was much weirder. It got released back in 2003, around the same time as a bunch of 2nd big generation of MMOs and was generally regarded as a flop. Despite that, it got a ton of political attention. Case in point a number of Democrats set up Congressional Offices in Second Life and several of Obama's speeches were held there.
At first, this just looks like out-of-touch olds doing old out of touch things. But once you start looking at who was behind Linden Labs - a project bankrolled by Paul Allen, with former executives from Electronic Arts, eBay, Disney, Adobe, and Apple collaborating on the project, its incredibly clear that this platform was an early effort at staking out online space in some kind of bizarre real estate / intellectual property play. Pretty much screams CIA cut-out, even before you watch high ranking folks in the government spill into the lucrative online gaming worlds that would run laps around Second Life.
this depends entirely on how much value you put in attending virtual concerts and/or doing weird sex stuff with other people who have horny avatars
Even as all that goes, Second Life was a flop. Everquest and Ultima Online and even fucking Runescape ran laps around it. There was no real reason for this platform to exist, much less get the attention that it received.
I remember reading about this shit in fucking 2005, and then nothing for 15 years.
Why am I hearing about it now?
Lmao did you get this after I mentioned it in the previous thread about the VR metaverse shit that's being planned?
Haha it was a good thread, I enjoyed it.
I'm looking forwards to the absolute complete and total utter failure that the Metaverse will be.
I found this in the same little book library as the prince Andrew book
just downloaded second life to do a lil bit of trolling but now i have a new fetish, thanks :angery:
