Second life, Third Life economic practice and my third of a life

by Fran Ilich <fran@eyebeam.org>

I logged into Second Life at the beginning of 2007, somehow around the web 2.0 rush wondering what was behind the hype of a web 3.0. And remembered not being too attracted by it, no matter how hard my overclocked computer and I tried. The reasons were simple: in the 90s I came to the conclusion that VRML was missing the mark completely on where the Internet should go: virtual reality as cyberpunk novelists envisioned it hadn’t happened and the Web, Usenet and even the BBS were much closer to Cyberspace when it came to what counted: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Thanks again, Gibson.

The other reason was, I felt by being a mac-user in Mexico City I had missed my moment for MMORPG, and although I had been very attracted to Everquest, it arrived too late to the Mac and the one time I could have bought it I ended up passing the opportunity, not to mention that Active Worlds has been a Windows-only universe. And so, when Second Life peaked I felt my space in Cyberspace was somewhere else, yet I opened an account like millions more to be in tune and aware of the Zeitgeist. For me the experience was like being in a 3d version of a chat room server, with infinite possibilities to meet bored teenagers, to endlessly start conversations with avatars wearing deceiving bodys, and to fight back the force of a vacuum luring you into spending hard-earned pesos to be converted into USD and then Linden Dollars just to buy virtual goods, while outside of the Second Life virtual world, the Internet was somehow heading into an unknown direction: some corporations fighting to abolish net neutrality, countries pushing to have it nationalized, and many people taking the path of Creative Commons & information sharing, while struggling to find brokers who could monetize their labor a la Google Adsense, in order to find means for substenance and a political economy outside of corporate labor. And in the meantime Second Life had already created its own private money, a currency that could only be used within its networks but that it was being traded and creating the first virtual billionaires like Anshe Chung, who was pushing further Linden Lab’s concept of social life (one not unlike the one lived by the global suburbanite families of The Sims).

So during the week of Berlin’s Transmediale in 2007, Pit Schultz and I wrote a manifesto about Networked Theatre of the Opressed and organized an event within Second Life, with the participation of Diana Mccarty and other Nettimers. And then rapidly moved on. Enter 2011 when I arrive to Eyebeam and was asked during the interview the same question I’m always asked: Is the Diego de la Vega cooperative media conglomerate a game? Is it virtual? Is it on Second Life? And I had to explain that it actually only used the Internet as a tool, and that other than that it was focused on material conditions through the use of that blurry abstraction known as money. And a few weeks later when I came back to sign my contract, I stumbled upon The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse by Peter Ludlow and Mark Wallace (it was a recommendation by Roddy Schrock), and the book actually made me consider using Second Life, but I quickly blocked the impulsed and opted for the idea of using OpenSimulator. But in the end I used neither and only adopting the language by describing it like this: “Diego de la Vega™ it’s a coin-operated cooperative media conglomerate where real people work a thirdlife, creating a virtual industry thru network connections in order to produce material results in the real world”. A description I would use when talking to outsiders, curators and potential new investors of Spacebank (someone offered to invest her trust which was 1M+, and a writer who was researching alternative currency was also interested in investing an important amount). I also noticed that when I explained the nano-macro-economy of the Digital Material Sunflower as if it was a game, people in the USA were more inclined to like it, something that ended up costing me a few discussions and even a customer, with people already involved in the DMS nano-macro-economy and who thought of what they were doing as social activism (if not directly economic insurgency), and were not keen to become players of any kind of game or simulation. Where as for me, it was just words, as both descriptions offered the same results when actions were performed correctly. A little after this, I took part in a panel organized by Dr. Henry Jenkins, where I presented the project for the first time as a digital material virtual world. And then by the end of 2011 it seemed to me that the Internet at large had become fully virtual, portraying a reality that was operating in a game of mirrors that oftenly confused what happened within networks like Facebook with life in the global streets. Right then I decided to become absent a la Don Quijote of earlier times and got lost in a virtual world instead of diving into Occupy Wall Street (even as much as I felt attracted and distracted by its banking project to which i own the domain name): waiting for the moment to become material again and fight back just as the Old Man from Los Altos. In the meantime Diego de la Vega co-op inmersed itself in Second Life using my old 2007 avatar: in any case its numbers were already telling stories and weaving an own narrative of engagement and relations, and so to play a little Alternate Reality Game loosely based on Cyberpunk 2020, could be the basis for fresh oxygen and maybe even new blood for tactical and pragmatical utopian action. And so, little by little, I became addicted and it became harder for Diego de la Vega co-op to focus on its actual Real Life missions until it decided to kickstart its Partido CyberPunk initiative in order to have a proper Central Committee within Second Life. After that came an investment fund focused on Virtual Real Estate that would allow the co-op corp to develop an in-world utopian community  and continue working within the secret agenda of Another World is Possible, while having any cash excedents invested into either a slow money or solidarity agriculture fund. And so our bittersweet third life goes on.