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The Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse
When a virtual journalist for a virtual newspaper reporting on the digital world ofan online game lands on the real-world front page of the New York Times, it just might signal thedawn of a new era. Virtual journalist Peter Ludlow was banned from The Sims Online for being a bittoo good at his job--for reporting in his virtual tabloid The Alphaville Herald on thecyber-brothels, crimes, and strong-arm tactics that had become rife in the game--and when the Times,the BBC, CNN, and other media outlets covered the story, users all over the Internet called thebanning censorship. Seeking a new virtual home, Ludlow moved the Herald to another virtualworld--the powerful online environment of Second Life--just as it was about the explode onto theinternational mediascape and usher in the next iteration of the Internet. In The Second Life Herald,Ludlow and his colleague Mark Wallace take us behind the scenes of the Herald as they report on theemergence of a fascinating universe of virtual spaces that will become the next generation of theWorld Wide a 3-D environment that provides richer, more expressive interactions than the Web weknow today. In 1992, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson imagined "the Metaverse," avirtual space that we would enter via the Internet and in which we would conduct important parts ofour daily lives. According to Ludlow and Wallace, that future is coming sooner than we may think.They chronicle its chaotic, exhilarating, frightening birth, including the issue that the mainstreammedia often conflicts across the client-server divide over who should write the lawsgoverning virtual worlds. Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy and James B. and Grace J. NelsonFellow at the University of Michigan, is the author of Semantics, Tense, and An Essay in theMetaphysics of Natural Language (MIT Press, 1999), among other books, and the editor of CryptoAnarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias (MIT Press, 2001) and High Noon on the Electronic Frontier(MIT Press, 1996). A freelance journalist, Mark Wallace has written widely on virtual worlds andonline games for a variety of publications, including Wired and The New York Times. He is the editorof leading metaverse blog 3pointD.com, and an author of Second The Official Guide.
- GenresNonfictionVideo Games
295 pages, Hardcover
First published October 19, 2007
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January 6, 2025
warning: extremely long review. my alter ego as a cultural commentator came out in full force here)
In 2019, the internet is not much like what we thought it would be back in the early aughts. Back in 2007 when this book was written, the big tech fear was that we’d all cease leaving our houses and only interact with people in the form of avatars in """hyperrealistic""" virtual worlds. (edit from january 2025: with the rise of AI and things like apple vision, this feels less ridiculous than it did in 2019.) (It feels insane now to think that the kind of graphics SecondLife would have had in 2007 would have been impressive.) Virtual reality felt like an inevitability, as did total anonymity. And then Facebook opened up to users without .edu email addresses and - it really did feel this fast - the world changed. Others have written at length of what the internet is today so I’ll save it, but no one could do what Facebook did: make our Selves our internet currency. We mostly moved our online social lives to social media, where we generally expect everyone to be who and what they say they are.
In the context of The Second Life Herald, this means that reading this book over 10 years later makes for quite the experience (hence this monster review). The confidence with which Ludlow declares that the Sims or SecondLife (which I’ll use as a stand-in for all MMORPGs, since it’s the titular one) is The Future is laughable. (That said, I wonder if Ludlow is one of the people who are still on SL or the Sims.) Equally laughable is the defensiveness with which Ludlow explains why and how people spend money - real money! - on games! Fast forwarding to 2019, where kids spend hundreds of thousands of their parents’ dollars on in-game purchases on Fortnite, spending a fixed sum to Purchase A Game feels almost quaint.
None of this was naive at the time, but man, it feels like it now. He’s so scandalized at practices we’re desensitized to. Sometimes Twitter (my stand-in here for "all social media") won’t boot a bad actor off the platform, despite flagrat ToS violations, and when it does it often feels too late or hollow - and no one is surprised. In 2007, we expected that companies would be on our side, because they... said so. In the intervening decade, we’ve stopped trusting. Were they always lying, or do we just know better now?
We’ve also gotten a lot more prudish, or at least the owners have (legitimate liability issues with minors on these platforms, but also fear of bad policies like SESTA/FOSTA). These early worlds feel salacious and transgressive and new in part because they all hosted a roaring sex trade. Meanwhile, in 2018, Tumblr instituted a useless and ineffective porn ban that immediately became a meme, changed how people used the site overnight, was actively harmful and dangerous for sex workers to boot, and eventually erased over a billion dollars of worth. The internet in 2007 was a Wild West, which is snapshotted well in this book. It’s a world where we aren’t really sure if we should pull back on it or encourage sex work and general horniness, where a story of a boy disguising himself as a madam making his new hires describe potential sex in graphic detail isn’t one immediately condemned as sexual assault. (In fact, Ludlow’s refusal to at any point unequivocally say that this is Bad is frustrating. Given the book’s overall politics I’m not surprised to find a lack of condemnation here; it has a universally libertarian bent that I find discomfiting at times. More on this later.)
The thing is, this book isn’t just a relic, even though the fears of VR subsuming regular R are. Even though the internet has grown up a lot, plenty of the issues in this book are eerily relevant to today, and some of Ludlow's anger would have been well heeded by social media creators before it got this bad. There’s still abundant and growing tension between the users of a platform and the platform itself. Across all dissatisfaction with SL then and social media now, there’s an unspoken but palpable two-sided threat, a sort of mutually assured destruction: these communities wouldn’t run without users, but they are so integrated into our lives that we can’t run without them.
More relevant and thought-provoking is the question of how to police bad behavior, because that’s what gets to the heart of whether or not this is a "society," which is Ludlow’s continuing argument. The "if ‘the physics’ allow it, it must be okay" [paraphrased] attitude is much like the "free speech" defenses Twitter uses all the time. Until bad behavior started to undermine democracy, Twitter seemed happy to just let it proliferate unchecked! SecondLife had DDoS attacks, content theft, trolls; the logical conclusion is Twitter’s hate mobs and political interference. The song essentially remains the same. Where Ludlow loses me, though, is that he seems to suggest that "if the physics allow it, it must be okay" is a bad policy when it comes to content theft but not when it comes to someone creating a Nazi compound, in which case they have a right to be there because… they’re there. With the questionable advantage of living in 2019’s social media landscape, this seems like bullshit to me.
This is the central problem with his argument, (and also an apt time for my final disclaimer that I’m reading this twelve long years later and my personal politics are surely coming into play). He raises fascinating questions - do platforms have an obligation to their "citizens?" Are they governments? How much should the back end interfere, if ever? Is making changes unilaterally with little to no warning okay? Most importantly, since it’s really the question all these other questions are dancing around: is the internet real life?
Let me back up. After 1000 words already, I want to say that overall this book has a lot to recommend it and a lot that’s frustrating (for one, maybe because it’s an academic text, it’s way too long, and hiring and firing journalists simply isn’t the exciting plot he thinks it is; plus, his personal investment in the story and the lack of an outside perspective could be another whole essay). The most frustrating though is that Ludlow barely explores the questions he asks. It very much feels like he mostly wants to Be Right and complain about how he personally experienced SL. He’s big mad about Linden Labs overstepping but he’s equally big mad about them letting certain problems go.
I mentioned his seeming libertarianism, which I think is the source of this hypocrisy. At one point he uses an example of a briefcase bomber and says that even though one person might carry a briefcase bomb, the rest of us are still allowed to carry briefcases, whereas the user who created the server-overloading multiplying sphere meant that aspects of content creation were taken away from everyone. But he’s conveniently ignoring that in a society, the actions of the one do affect the many, often unjustly. Using his own example, we’re all getting searched invasively at airports (and music venues, firework shows, etc etc), because of a few incidents and resulting fear. We have all been forced to sacrifice privacy for broader safety, because of unilateral government decisions - and whether these specific examples are merited or willing, in general some regulation might be good. (Gun. Control.)
Much like libertarians I have encountered in real life, it’s unclear exactly when Ludlow thinks SecondLife should and should not function like a society. If Ludlow wants to treat SL as an anarchist world with absolutely no rules, then that’s what he’s going to get, but he has to deal with the system shutting down when a troll overloads a server, and gangs will terrorize people off their land.
Such an unclear viewpoint isn’t helped by the muddy waters of a limitless world. It’s true that in real life, we are allowed to carry briefcases, but if you have been apprehended and the state carries out its punishment, there is absolutely no equivalent to the ease with which an SL bad actor can just borrow someone else’s credit card and return. (There’s also no equivalent to the ability to - on a whim - change your appearance or species or ignore gravity.)
I think there’s a middle ground between that unrestricted playground and a regulated-but-free virtual society but he doesn’t bother to seek one, which leaves me skeptical of his ability to objectively discuss the issues of online worlds and their restrictions - a question that in the last decade no one has solved despite mounting urgency, as hidden underbellies of the internet rise to the forefront and spawn real-life consequences. Refusing to engage with a reality that necessitates curbing troll behavior and maintaining safety for users, in favor of whining about his personal experience with SL, undermines his quest to validate these worlds as legitimate forms of social interaction. It’s too bad, because we really do need guidance now more than ever.
In 2019, the internet is not much like what we thought it would be back in the early aughts. Back in 2007 when this book was written, the big tech fear was that we’d all cease leaving our houses and only interact with people in the form of avatars in """hyperrealistic""" virtual worlds. (edit from january 2025: with the rise of AI and things like apple vision, this feels less ridiculous than it did in 2019.) (It feels insane now to think that the kind of graphics SecondLife would have had in 2007 would have been impressive.) Virtual reality felt like an inevitability, as did total anonymity. And then Facebook opened up to users without .edu email addresses and - it really did feel this fast - the world changed. Others have written at length of what the internet is today so I’ll save it, but no one could do what Facebook did: make our Selves our internet currency. We mostly moved our online social lives to social media, where we generally expect everyone to be who and what they say they are.
In the context of The Second Life Herald, this means that reading this book over 10 years later makes for quite the experience (hence this monster review). The confidence with which Ludlow declares that the Sims or SecondLife (which I’ll use as a stand-in for all MMORPGs, since it’s the titular one) is The Future is laughable. (That said, I wonder if Ludlow is one of the people who are still on SL or the Sims.) Equally laughable is the defensiveness with which Ludlow explains why and how people spend money - real money! - on games! Fast forwarding to 2019, where kids spend hundreds of thousands of their parents’ dollars on in-game purchases on Fortnite, spending a fixed sum to Purchase A Game feels almost quaint.
None of this was naive at the time, but man, it feels like it now. He’s so scandalized at practices we’re desensitized to. Sometimes Twitter (my stand-in here for "all social media") won’t boot a bad actor off the platform, despite flagrat ToS violations, and when it does it often feels too late or hollow - and no one is surprised. In 2007, we expected that companies would be on our side, because they... said so. In the intervening decade, we’ve stopped trusting. Were they always lying, or do we just know better now?
We’ve also gotten a lot more prudish, or at least the owners have (legitimate liability issues with minors on these platforms, but also fear of bad policies like SESTA/FOSTA). These early worlds feel salacious and transgressive and new in part because they all hosted a roaring sex trade. Meanwhile, in 2018, Tumblr instituted a useless and ineffective porn ban that immediately became a meme, changed how people used the site overnight, was actively harmful and dangerous for sex workers to boot, and eventually erased over a billion dollars of worth. The internet in 2007 was a Wild West, which is snapshotted well in this book. It’s a world where we aren’t really sure if we should pull back on it or encourage sex work and general horniness, where a story of a boy disguising himself as a madam making his new hires describe potential sex in graphic detail isn’t one immediately condemned as sexual assault. (In fact, Ludlow’s refusal to at any point unequivocally say that this is Bad is frustrating. Given the book’s overall politics I’m not surprised to find a lack of condemnation here; it has a universally libertarian bent that I find discomfiting at times. More on this later.)
The thing is, this book isn’t just a relic, even though the fears of VR subsuming regular R are. Even though the internet has grown up a lot, plenty of the issues in this book are eerily relevant to today, and some of Ludlow's anger would have been well heeded by social media creators before it got this bad. There’s still abundant and growing tension between the users of a platform and the platform itself. Across all dissatisfaction with SL then and social media now, there’s an unspoken but palpable two-sided threat, a sort of mutually assured destruction: these communities wouldn’t run without users, but they are so integrated into our lives that we can’t run without them.
More relevant and thought-provoking is the question of how to police bad behavior, because that’s what gets to the heart of whether or not this is a "society," which is Ludlow’s continuing argument. The "if ‘the physics’ allow it, it must be okay" [paraphrased] attitude is much like the "free speech" defenses Twitter uses all the time. Until bad behavior started to undermine democracy, Twitter seemed happy to just let it proliferate unchecked! SecondLife had DDoS attacks, content theft, trolls; the logical conclusion is Twitter’s hate mobs and political interference. The song essentially remains the same. Where Ludlow loses me, though, is that he seems to suggest that "if the physics allow it, it must be okay" is a bad policy when it comes to content theft but not when it comes to someone creating a Nazi compound, in which case they have a right to be there because… they’re there. With the questionable advantage of living in 2019’s social media landscape, this seems like bullshit to me.
This is the central problem with his argument, (and also an apt time for my final disclaimer that I’m reading this twelve long years later and my personal politics are surely coming into play). He raises fascinating questions - do platforms have an obligation to their "citizens?" Are they governments? How much should the back end interfere, if ever? Is making changes unilaterally with little to no warning okay? Most importantly, since it’s really the question all these other questions are dancing around: is the internet real life?
Let me back up. After 1000 words already, I want to say that overall this book has a lot to recommend it and a lot that’s frustrating (for one, maybe because it’s an academic text, it’s way too long, and hiring and firing journalists simply isn’t the exciting plot he thinks it is; plus, his personal investment in the story and the lack of an outside perspective could be another whole essay). The most frustrating though is that Ludlow barely explores the questions he asks. It very much feels like he mostly wants to Be Right and complain about how he personally experienced SL. He’s big mad about Linden Labs overstepping but he’s equally big mad about them letting certain problems go.
I mentioned his seeming libertarianism, which I think is the source of this hypocrisy. At one point he uses an example of a briefcase bomber and says that even though one person might carry a briefcase bomb, the rest of us are still allowed to carry briefcases, whereas the user who created the server-overloading multiplying sphere meant that aspects of content creation were taken away from everyone. But he’s conveniently ignoring that in a society, the actions of the one do affect the many, often unjustly. Using his own example, we’re all getting searched invasively at airports (and music venues, firework shows, etc etc), because of a few incidents and resulting fear. We have all been forced to sacrifice privacy for broader safety, because of unilateral government decisions - and whether these specific examples are merited or willing, in general some regulation might be good. (Gun. Control.)
Much like libertarians I have encountered in real life, it’s unclear exactly when Ludlow thinks SecondLife should and should not function like a society. If Ludlow wants to treat SL as an anarchist world with absolutely no rules, then that’s what he’s going to get, but he has to deal with the system shutting down when a troll overloads a server, and gangs will terrorize people off their land.
Such an unclear viewpoint isn’t helped by the muddy waters of a limitless world. It’s true that in real life, we are allowed to carry briefcases, but if you have been apprehended and the state carries out its punishment, there is absolutely no equivalent to the ease with which an SL bad actor can just borrow someone else’s credit card and return. (There’s also no equivalent to the ability to - on a whim - change your appearance or species or ignore gravity.)
I think there’s a middle ground between that unrestricted playground and a regulated-but-free virtual society but he doesn’t bother to seek one, which leaves me skeptical of his ability to objectively discuss the issues of online worlds and their restrictions - a question that in the last decade no one has solved despite mounting urgency, as hidden underbellies of the internet rise to the forefront and spawn real-life consequences. Refusing to engage with a reality that necessitates curbing troll behavior and maintaining safety for users, in favor of whining about his personal experience with SL, undermines his quest to validate these worlds as legitimate forms of social interaction. It’s too bad, because we really do need guidance now more than ever.
May 2, 2008
Well, this was interesting. And not *quite* as lurid as the cover makes it out to be. One of my doctoral classes centered around the effect of virtual worlds and so I found this fascinating, especially about 10 years post that class. Second Life has exploded in that time.
The implications of these worlds (SL, The Sims Online) as societies in their own right with functioning monetary systems, social strata, and crime are both intriguing and horrifying. The author is a philosophy professor and I totally get why he finds this fascinating. I guess my one criticism is that I found the economic angle very persuasive, but I grew a little tired of hearing so much about it. I wanted, more, to see the book concentrate on the ethics of situations in these virtual spaces. I also would have liked to have seen some of the tabloid itself (copyright issues? legal issues with TSO?)
Anyway, I just found this on the new nonfiction shelf and overall, I'm glad I picked it up!
The implications of these worlds (SL, The Sims Online) as societies in their own right with functioning monetary systems, social strata, and crime are both intriguing and horrifying. The author is a philosophy professor and I totally get why he finds this fascinating. I guess my one criticism is that I found the economic angle very persuasive, but I grew a little tired of hearing so much about it. I wanted, more, to see the book concentrate on the ethics of situations in these virtual spaces. I also would have liked to have seen some of the tabloid itself (copyright issues? legal issues with TSO?)
Anyway, I just found this on the new nonfiction shelf and overall, I'm glad I picked it up!
Read
January 3, 2022*DNF*
This book is a loving and geeky exploration of early online communities, but he gets lost in the trees and gets quite rambling and repetitive. I quit reading because I felt like I had gleaned everything the book had to offer by about a fourth of the way through. The gist of it is that online worlds offer an opportunity for players to participate in the creation of games-within-the-game and new mechanics, and the creators of the games have little understanding for this, often shooting themselves in the foot by limiting these opportunities or trying to cash in on them in clumsy ways. He also argues that MMO's are more than games because they offer opportunities for social structures, connections, and things that resemble societies to organically form within them.
This book is a loving and geeky exploration of early online communities, but he gets lost in the trees and gets quite rambling and repetitive. I quit reading because I felt like I had gleaned everything the book had to offer by about a fourth of the way through. The gist of it is that online worlds offer an opportunity for players to participate in the creation of games-within-the-game and new mechanics, and the creators of the games have little understanding for this, often shooting themselves in the foot by limiting these opportunities or trying to cash in on them in clumsy ways. He also argues that MMO's are more than games because they offer opportunities for social structures, connections, and things that resemble societies to organically form within them.
February 12, 2019
Interesting MMO anecdotes. General bashing on corporate incompetence. Very circular in nature: the author is fascinated with the concept of how online lives are interwoven with the physical world, and how this will only become a more tangible phenomenon as technology advances, but it's like he's out there to preach about it. Good read if you already are interested in group dynamics between corporations and users in MMO's. Otherwise, too niche.
April 19, 2008
This book was written by a University of Michigan (go blue!) philosophy professor who just absolutely cannot get over how cool he is. It's the story of a newspaper he founded in order to report on happenings in The Sims Online, and which he later moved to Second Life. A lot of interesting anecdotes about events and behavior in these games, although his tone regarding them is sort of strange...like he's too happy to be part of such an interesting club to really be objective. I also wish he'd spent less time talking about Sims Online -- although I guess the progression from Sims to Second Life helps illustrate his point that things are getting more and more interesting in these online spaces, and we should try and secure free speech rights for our avatars.
May 24, 2008
Somewhat interesting book about trends and political machinations in online games. Although the title would have you think that this is about Second Life, it's really mostly about The Sims Online.
The way that people use massively multiplayer "life sims" in ways that the developers didn't intend is kind of interesting, although this book gets bogged down a little too much in the author's evangelism and openly biased account of his experience living in these games. It's unfortunately not as interesting as, say, Castronova's writings on group dynamics and economics in online systems.
The way that people use massively multiplayer "life sims" in ways that the developers didn't intend is kind of interesting, although this book gets bogged down a little too much in the author's evangelism and openly biased account of his experience living in these games. It's unfortunately not as interesting as, say, Castronova's writings on group dynamics and economics in online systems.
March 12, 2010
Amazingly interesting. I started with Charles Stross's Halting State, which I barely understood. Then got on Second Life, and then got to this book, which perhaps I should have got to first. Never mind.
July 1, 2016
It is hard to get behind a work that is self-righteous, but working under the guise of unbiased, anthropological investigative work.
January 17, 2008
Fascinating and also clueless...
February 14, 2008
This book, while I think interesting, is so long winded that I skipped many-a-paragraph.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews