American Madness

I started playing Second Life (SL) this weekend. For the uninitiated, Second Life is a virtual world where users can do pretty much anything you do in the normal world. Users (residents) can buy property, build houses, start businesses, buy services, host events, chat with others, modify their appearance, etc.. Generally the laws of physics and societal norms that govern SL mirror the real world, however there are some important exceptions. Residents can fly and teleport, and I don’t believe residents ever get hungry, thirsty, tired, injured, or dead.

One of the interesting aspects of SL, especially for the non-gamer, is that residents can buy Second Life currency, Linden dollars (L$), with real world currency on the LindeX currency exchange. Linden dollars can then be used to purchase goods and services in the SL world. Even more interesting is the fact that people actually spend real currency to purchase Linden Dollars. The LindeX data shows that the current exchange rate hovers around L$270 / US$1.00.

As in the real world it is difficult to make the cold hard cash (Liden Dollars) in SL. It seems that the most lucrative profession is as a Second Life marketer in the real world. Residents get L$2000 for every member referral who becomes a premium subscriber. Designing items for the virtual world can also be quite lucrative, and the world’s oldest profession seems to flourish as well. However, there is also a bit of a welfare system in SL and users receive a certain number of Linden Dollars per week just for logging in.

I’m still waiting for my check, but my stipend is supposed to be L$400 per week. This isn’t to shabby considering that an entire virtual apartment building can be purchased for L$6000. Also, I’d actually make US $1.50 per week off the Linden dole, if I sold my Linden Dollars for U.S. dollars at the current exchange rate. With the injection of real cash, this virtual world becomes a lot less virtual, but until the exchange rate gets a little better, it’s still a game to me.

Regardless of the financials and all the marketing hype, the looming question still remains, ‘why would anyone want to spend significant amounts of their real and very short life in a virtual world?’ Judging by the list of the most popular places in second life the draw is mainly sex followed by gambling. The Reuters, CNET, Wired spaces were totally dead when I stopped by.

I don’t think I’m going to be spending much more of this life in Second Life. I judge all internet phenomena based on whether they make my life better, and I just don’t see SL doing this. SL interests me mainly as a tool for facilitating discrete tasks like building a park, modeling human behavior, or holding a meeting (though video conferencing seems more practical). The media companies who are tripping over each other to setup shop in SL are over excited about the marketing potential of the platform, but who can blame them. Their job is to live in the moment and virtual worlds make for great headlines.

Eric Rice has a good post on all the real difficulties that SL is now facing including a customer rebellion over customer service and increased prices, as well as emerging competition in the metaverse marketplace. I’m not sure what companies like Crayon think they are going to do in Second Life that they can’t do in the real world. No doubt, they got lots of links from their recent dual launch in both the real world and in SL. However, I think that after a couple months hanging out in SL, Crayon will soon realize that they could be doing more productive things in the real world and on the real internet.

Okay, it’s back to reality for me folks.

I was against reading the World is Flat from the beginning. I get enough of Friedman’s globalization cheer-leading in his New York Times column. I also spend most of my working days studying terrorism and radical Islam so the idea that globalization is somehow triumphing over religion, ethnicity and regionalism is something of a non-starter. But having taken a pre-marital pledge to lose thirty pounds, I found myself in need of an audiobook for the treadmill and thought I could at least knock this endless topic of dinner party conversation off my list.

Now an hour and 20 minutes into the updated and expanded 15 hour marathon, I am already struggling. Freedman buys into one of my pet peeves since 5th grade. He contends that Columbus set out to prove the world was round. According to historians, most people in 15th century europe did not believe the world was flat. What Columbus set out to do was discover a new route to India. This journey, of course, was interrupted by running into the “New World.”

Freeman, however, goes one step further and actually suggests that Columbus did prove the world was round. He only could have done this if in fact he had made it to India. Discovering the Americas in no way proved that the earth is a sphere. I won’t get into why the metaphor is bad in the first place, but here’ a link to one of the funnier book reviews I have ever read.

The author, Matt Taibbi, had some vague fear when he first heard about the book: “Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.”

Taibba goes on to explain the difference between a level playing field and a flat world and tears Friedman a new… “The significance of Columbus’s discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the “flat world” into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.” Read the whole thing for a good laugh.