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A version of this article was published in TIME’s newsletter Into the Metaverse. Subscribe for a weekly guide to the future of the Internet.
In 2007, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale made a bold proclamation: “The 3D web will rapidly be the dominant thing and everyone will have an avatar.” Considering the success of his creation, it wasn’t an altogether far-fetched idea. Second Life—a virtual world in which participants can explore fantastical landscapes and build their own mansions, forests and spaceships—was reaching the crest of its popularity, with hundreds of thousands of active residents and a self-reported $500 million in GDP. Second Life appeared on the cover of BusinessWeek; presidential hopeful and Virginia Gov. Mark Warner gave a town hall, with his avatar sporting a blocky suit and red tie. Brands like Reebok and Dell invested in virtual stores, preparing for a new era of sales and marketing. Rolling Stone referred to it (skeptically) as “the future of the net;” The Guardian proclaimed: “Today Second Life, tomorrow the world.”
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Does any of this sound familiar? It’s hard not to look back on the frenzy around Second Life in the mid-aughts and see parallels to the discourse around the metaverse these days. Rosedale and other Second Life optimists often used identical rhetoric to crypto idioms today: He called Second Life “the Wild West,” compared its growth to that of the early internet and foresaw the “entire physical world as being kind of left behind.”
And then Second Life stopped growing. It wasn’t uncommon for users to struggle for hours on-boarding into the world, only to find themselves wandering around ghost cities with empty storefronts. Reuters—which made a big fuss of opening a bureau in Second Life in 2006—pulled out about two years later; brands abandoned their posts. As we look back on Second Life a dozen years after its peak, it’s less a transformative cultural lynchpin than the punchline of a scene…
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Source : time
