Q&A with Second Life journalist Wagner James Au, on crypto-based metaverses, companies such as Meta struggling to foster healthy metaverse communities, and more
The interview also sits directly on the fault line the New Yorker drew in January: whether the metaverse inherits today's privatized, financialized tech stack and echoes the development of play-to-earn games, or builds on the older, user-governed Second Life model Au knows firsthand. His crypto-metaverse questions put those two governance philosophies head to head.
First-order effects
Meta's community-health problem in Horizon Worlds gets an unfavorable benchmark: a two-decade-old world whose user-created economy and culture are the exact assets the newer platform is struggling to replicate.
Crypto-based metaverses get a credibility test from a credible insider, forcing projects built on token economies to answer for the play-to-earn dynamics critics have flagged.
Second-order effects
Competing metaverse projects now differentiate on governance rather than graphics — corporate walled gardens versus user-owned worlds becomes the axis on which Meta and its rivals are compared.
Coverage of the metaverse consolidates around a small set of reference points (Second Life, Horizon Worlds, play-to-earn games), which raises the bar for any new entrant claiming novelty without a community story.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the metaverse's defining competition is not hardware or reach but community governance, and the industry splits between centralized corporate platforms and crypto-based user-owned worlds — with Second Life's longevity as the standing proof that the latter model can sustain itself.
Regulatory and cultural scrutiny of virtual-world economies is likely to track the play-to-earn precedent the New Yorker flagged, making financialization the riskiest design choice for any metaverse operator.
The trend: The metaverse race is shifting from who can build the biggest virtual world to who can govern a healthy one, with Second Life's two-decade record as the benchmark every newer entrant is measured against.
Some of the early religions and digital technogy research I had done was on Second Life, and what we are seeing is not new but another iteration of the same damn thing we haven't fixed. https://twitter.com/...
what if the thing that a bunch of people are talking about as the next new big thing...isn't actually a new thing...and is already quite big...and all the new, flashy entrants are just making the same mistakes as before? https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ...
“Second life is still vibrant. There are about 600,000 monthly active users and about 200,000 daily active users after almost 20 years.” 😲 https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ...
This @cwarzel interview about the Metaverse with someone who's been studying Second Life for almost 20 years has so many insightful observations and lessons from the metaverses people are already engaged in. https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
“Remember, this is a world where you can fly and instantiate things from nothingness. Nissan or IBM opening a store there isn't very exciting.” https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ...
The bits about how younger generations actually think about spaces like Roblox and Fortnite are great, imo https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
“It's not the platform that matters as much as the community that is built around it.” @cwarzel interviews @slhamlet, a longtime Second Life reporter, for his newsletter, Galaxy Brain: https://on.theatln.tc/hWsVOLD
“I've kept harping on this idea that very few people are collecting NFTs in general. More people actually own content in Second Life than own an NFT—vastly more.” https://twitter.com/...
“Remember, this is a world where you can fly and instantiate things from nothingness. Nissan or IBM opening a store there isn't very exciting” — Second Life expert @slhamlet talks with @cwarzel https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ...
Great reminder by @cwarzel and @slhamlet that the metaverse is *at least* 19 years old and everything we're talking about today has already happened many times https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Today's newsletter is a favorite. I interviewed @slhamlet, who has been reporting from inside Second Life for 19 years. We talk about the current metaverse hype and how Facebook is speed running all of the metaverse failure of 2006-2008 https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ...
Wagner James Au (@slhamlet) has forgotten more about virtual worlds, the metaverse, and identity in XR than most people will ever know. This is a good read about the context of Meta and the Wider Web. https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/ ...