Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 7
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 decade following its launch, Second Life users spent $3.2 billion of real money on in-world transactions. The first Second Life millionaire, a digital-real-estate tycoon who goes by Anshe Chung, graced the cover of Businessweek in 2006, and by 2007 the GDP of Second Life was larger than that of several small countries. In its vast digital Marketplace, you can still buy a wedding gown for 4,000 Lindens (just over $16) or a ruby-colored corset with fur wings for just under 350 Lindens (about $1.50). You can even buy an altered body: different skin, different hair, a pair of horns, genitalia of all shapes and sizes. A private island currently costs almost 150,000 Lindens (the price is fixed at $600), while the Millennium II Super Yacht costs 20,000 Lindens (just over $80) and comes with more than three hundred animations attached to its beds and trio of hot tubs, designed to allow avatars to enact a variety of bespoke sexual fantasies.
Second Life started to plateau just as Facebook started to explode. The rise of Facebook wasn’t the problem of a competing brand so much as the problem of a competing model. It seemed that people wanted a curated version of real life more than they wanted another life entirely. They wanted to become the sum of their most flattering profile pictures more than they wanted to become a wholly separate avatar. But maybe Facebook and Second Life aren’t so different in their appeal. Both find traction in the allure of inhabiting a selective self, whether built 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 ideal home.
Bridgette McNeal, the Atlanta mother of four, has been on Second Life for just over a decade. She named her avatar Gidge after what the bullies called her in high school. Though Bridgette is middle-aged, her avatar is a lithe twentysomething whom she describes as “perfect me—if I’d never eaten sugar or had children.” During her early days on Second Life, Bridgette’s husband created an avatar as well, and the two of them would go on Second Life dates together, a blond Amazon and a squat silver robot, while sitting together at their laptops in their study at home. It was often 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 home as a refuge that grants permission. “When I step into that space, I’m afforded the luxury of being selfish,” she said, invoking Virginia Woolf: “It’s like a room of my own.” Her virtual home is full of objects she could never keep in her real home 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-green bikinis, Bridgette keeps a blog devoted to her daily “RL” existence 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 arrow. He lost most of one wing because of it and can’t fly. He’s kept safe here at this retreat we visited a few days ago. Sometimes I think the husband and I feel a little bit like him. Trapped. Nothing really wrong, we’ve got food and shelter and what we need. But we are trapped for the rest of our lives by autism. We’ll never be free.”
When I asked Bridgette about the allure of Second Life, she said it can be easy to succumb to the temptation to pour yourself into its world when you should be tending to offline life. I asked whether she had ever slipped close to that, and she said she’d certainly felt the pull at times. “You’re thin and beautiful. No one’s asking you to change a diaper,” she told me. “But you can burn out on that. You don’t want to leave, but you don’t want to do it anymore, either.”
Second Life was invented by a man named Philip Rosedale, the son of a U.S. Navy carrier pilot and an English teacher. As a boy, he was driven by an outsized sense of ambition. He can remember standing near the woodpile in his family’s backyard and thinking, “Why am I here, and how am I different from everybody else?” As a teenager in the mid-’80s, he used an early-model PC to zoom in on a graphic representation of a Mandelbrot set, an infinitely recursive fractal image that kept getting more and more detailed as he got closer and closer. At a certain point, he realized he was looking at a graphic larger than the Earth. “We could walk along the surface our whole lives and never even begin to see everything,” he explained to me. That’s when he realized that “the coolest thing you could do with a computer would be to build a world.”
Just as Rosedale was beginning to envision Second Life, in 1999, he attended Burning Man—the festival of performance art, sculptural installations, and hallucinogenic hedonism that happens every summer in the middle of the Nevada desert. While he was there, he told me, something “inexplicable” happened to his personality. “You feel like you’re high, without any drugs or anything. You just feel connected to people in a way that you don’t normally.” He went to a rave in an Airstream trailer, watched trapeze artists swing across the desert, and lay in a hookah lounge piled with hundreds of Persian rugs. Burning Man didn’t give Rosedale the idea for Second Life—he’d been imagining a digital world for years—but it helped him understand the energy he wanted to summon there: a place where people could make the world whatever they wanted it to be.
This was the dream, but it was a hard sell to early investors. Linden Lab was proposing a world built by amateurs and sustained by a different kind of revenue model—based not on paid subscriptions, but on commerce generated in-world. One of Second Life’s designers recalled investors’ skepticism: “Creativity was supposed to be a dark art that only Spielberg and Lucas could do.” As part of selling Second Life as a world rather than a game, Linden Lab hired a writer to work as an “embedded journalist.” This was Wagner James Au, who documented the digital careers of some of Second Life’s 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 Second Life, but offline was squatting in a condemned apartment in Vancouver. The building had no running water and was populated mainly by addicts, but Omega used a soup can to catch a wireless signal from nearby office buildings so she could run Second Life on her laptop.
Rosedale told me about the thrill of those early days, when Second Life’s potential felt unbridled. No one else was doing what he and his team were doing. “We used to say that our only competition was real life.” He said there was a period in 2007 when more than five hundred articles a day were written about their work. Rosedale himself loved to explore Second Life as an avatar named Philip Linden. “I was like a god,” he told me. He envisioned a future in which his grand-children would see the real world as a kind of “museum or theater,” while most work and relationships happened in virtual realms like Second Life. “In some sense,” he told Au in 2007, “I think we will see the entire physical world as being kind of left behind.”
Alice Krueger first started noticing the symptoms of her illness when she was twenty years old. During fieldwork for a college biology class, crouching down to watch bugs eating leaves, she felt overwhelmed by heat. One day while she was standing in the grocery store, it suddenly felt as if her entire left leg had disappeared—not just gone numb, but disappeared. Whenever she went to a doctor, she was told it was all in her head. “And it was all in my head,” she told me, forty-seven years later. “But in a different way than how they meant.”
Alice was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of fifty. By then she could barely walk. Her neighborhood association in Colorado prohibited her from building a ramp at the front of her house, so it was difficult for her to go anywhere. Her three children were eleven, thirteen, and fifteen. She didn’t get to see her younger son’s high-school graduation, or his college campus. She started suffering intense pain in her lower back and eventually had to have surgery to repair spinal vertebrae that had fused together, then ended up getting multidrug-resistant staph from her time in the hospital. Her pain persisted, and she was diagnosed with a misalignment caused by the surgery itself, during which she had been suspended “like a rotisserie chicken” above the operating table. At the age of fifty-seven, Alice found herself housebound and unemployed, often in excruciating pain, cared for largely by her daughter. “I was looking at my four walls,” she told me, “and wondering if there could be more.”
That’s when she found Second Life. She created an avatar named Gentle Heron, and loved seeking out waterslides, excited by the sheer thrill of doing what her body could not. As she kept exploring, she started inviting people she’d met online in disability chat rooms to join her. But that also meant she felt responsible for their experiences, and eventually she founded a “cross-disability virtual community” in Second Life, now known as Virtual Ability, a group that occupies an archipelago of virtual islands and welcomes people with a wide range of disabilities—everything from Down syndrome to PTSD to manic depression. What unites its members, Alice told me, is their sense of not being fully included in the world.
While she was starting Virtual Ability, Alice also embarked on a real-life move: to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee from Colorado, where she’d outlived her long-term disability benefits. (“I didn’t know you could do that,” I told her, and she replied, “Neither did I!”) When I asked her whether she felt like a different version of herself in Second Life, she rejected the proposition strenuously. Alice doesn’t particularly like the terms real and virtual. To her they imply a hierarchical distinction, suggesting that one part of her life is more “real” than the other, when her sense of self feels fully expressed in both. She doesn’t want Second Life misunderstood as a trivial diversion. After our first conversation, she sent me fifteen peer-reviewed scientific articles about digital avatars and embodiment.
Alice told me about a man with Down syndrome who has become an important member of the Virtual Ability community. In real life his disability is omnipresent, but on Second Life people can talk to him without even realizing he has it. In the offline world, he lives with his parents—who were surprised to see he was capable of controlling his own avatar. After they eat dinner each night, as his parents wash the dishes, he sits expectantly by the computer, waiting to return to Second Life, where he rents a duplex on an island called Cape Heron. He has turned the entire upper level into a massive aquarium, so he can walk among 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 have been inspired by his approach, citing him when they talk about collapsing the border in their own minds.
When I first began working on this essay, I imagined myself falling under the spell of Second Life: a wide-eyed observer seduced by the culture she had been dispatched to analyze. But being “in-world” made me queasy from the start. I had pictured myself defending Second Life against the ways it had been dismissed as little more than a consolation prize designed for people for whom “first life” hasn’t quite delivered. Instead I found myself writing, Second Life makes me want to take a shower.
My respect deepened intellectually by the day. I talked with a legally blind woman whose avatar had a rooftop balcony from which she could see the view (thanks to screen magnification) more clearly than she could see the world beyond her computer. I heard about a veteran with PTSD who gave biweekly Italian cooking classes in an open-air gazebo. I visited an online version of Yosemite created by a woman who had joined Second Life in the wake of several severe depressive episodes and hospitalizations. She used an avatar named Jadyn Firehawk and spent up to twelve hours a day on Second Life, devoted mostly to refining her curated digital wonderland—full of waterfalls, sequoias, and horses named after important people in John Muir’s life—grateful that Second Life didn’t ask her to inhabit an identity entirely contoured by her illness, unlike internet chat rooms focused on bipolar disorder that were all about being sick. “I live a well-rounded life on SL,” she told me. “It feeds all my other selves.”
But despite my growing appreciation, 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 make the world feel like the world. Whenever I tried to describe Second Life, I found it nearly impossible—or at least impossible to make it interesting—because description finds its traction in flaws and fissures. Exploring the world of Second Life was more like moving through postcards. It was a world of visual clichés. Nothing was ragged or broken or dilapidated—or if it was dilapidated, it was because that particular aesthetic had been carefully cultivated.
Of course, my aversion to Second Life—as well as my embrace of blemishes and shortcomings in the physical world—testified to my own good fortune as much as anything. When I moved through the real world, I was buffered by my (relative) youth, my (relative) health, and my (relative) freedom. Who was I to begrudge those who had found in the reaches of Second Life what they couldn’t find offline?
One day when Alice and I met up as avatars in-world, she took me to a beach on one of the Virtual Ability islands and invited me to practice tai chi. All I needed to do was click on one of the poseballs levitating in the middle of a grassy circle, and it would automatically animate my avatar. But I did not 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 Gidge in Atlanta, waking up early to sit beside a virtual pool. She doesn’t get to smell the chlorine or the sunscreen, to feel the sun melt across her back or char her skin to peeling crisps. Yet Gidge must get something powerful from sitting beside a virtual pool—pleasure that dwells not in the physical experience itself but in its anticipation, its documentation, and its recollection. Whatever categories of “real” and “unreal” you want to map onto online and offline worlds, the pleasure she finds in going to Second Life is indisputably actual. Otherwise she wouldn’t wake up at half past five in the morning to do it.
From the beginning, I was terrible at navigating Second Life. “Body part failed to download,” my interface kept saying. Second Life was supposed to give you the opportunity to perfect your body, but I couldn’t even summon a complete one. For my avatar, I’d chosen a punk-looking woman with cutoff shorts, a partially shaved head, and a ferret on her shoulder.
On my first day in-world, I wandered around Orientation Island like a drunk person trying to find a bathroom. The island was full of marble columns and trim greenery, with a faint soundtrack of gurgling water, but it looked less like a Delphic temple and more like a corporate retreat center inspired by a Delphic temple. The graphics seemed incomplete and uncompelling, the motion full of glitches and lags. I tried to talk to someone named Del Agnos but got no response. I felt surprisingly ashamed by his rebuttal, transported back to the paralyzing shyness of my junior-high-school days.
On that first day in-world, I teleported to a deserted island where there was supposed to be an abandoned mansion and a secret entrance to a “bizarre circus in the sky,” but all I found was a busted lifeguard station perched on stilts in the sea, where I was (once again!) ignored by a man who looked like a taciturn cross between a WWF wrestler and a Victorian butler, with a silver-studded dog collar around his neck. I ended up falling off a wooden ledge and bobbing in the gray rain-pocked waves, under a permanently programmed thunderstorm. This wasn’t exactly the frustration of lived experience, in all the richness of its thwarted expectations, but something else: the imperfect summoning of its reductive simulation. It was like a stage set with the rickety scaffolding of its facade exposed.
Each time I signed off Second Life, I found myself weirdly 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 real in a way that Second Life did not, and they allowed me to inhabit a particular version of myself as someone capable and necessary. It felt like returning to the air after struggling to find my breath underwater. I came up gasping, desperate, ready for entanglement and contact: Yes! This is the real world! In all its vexed logistical glory!
At my first Second Life concert, I arrived excited for actual music in a virtual world. Many SL concerts are genuinely “live” 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 too many things at once that afternoon: reply to sixteen dangling work emails, unload the dishwasher, reload the dishwasher, make my stepdaughter a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich before her final rehearsal for a production of Peter Pan. The concert was taking place on a dock overlooking an expansive bay of sparkling blue water. With my jam-sticky fingers, I clicked on a dance poseball and started a conga line—except no one 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 made me feel implicated and engaged. In wondering what other people thought of me, I felt acutely aware—at last—of sharing a world with them.
