Location: Second Life Home Page

There’s an image that often appears on the opening page of Second Life’s Web site: a very natty African-American avatar with his pals: a tough male biker and two devastatingly hot women.  It’s such a perfect visual summary of what most avatars try to attain in-world.

On face value, there’s nothing wrong with this preening, as long as we remember it’s just a virtual world or a game, depending on whom you ask.  Besides, who wouldn’t want to be this guy or his lover? On the one hand, he’s a great role-model of an empowered black man, albeit one made of pixels. On the other hand, what this image shows, as with celebrity avatars, makes me think darkly about the future.

I’m a pessimist by inclination, so I do not think we will adequately address climate change and a looming energy crisis in enough time to avoid some massive disruptions to our overloaded consumer economy and oil-squandering way of life.  I’ve written elsewhere about a global peak in oil production; it’s depressing business to consider that we’ll pay a lot more for gasoline in coming years no matter what we do, and no miracle fuels will let us continue our car-based, suburbanized lives.  If you want a peek, consider the work by a writer I know, Jim Kunstler.

We are in for a rough ride, yet as long as the power stays on, we’ll have our broadband infrastructure, Second Life, and its competitors to pull us into a place where, for pennies, we can escape any misery.  Americans love fantasy; when Jim attended a technology conference some time back, he noted that “By far the most popular presentation of the whole conference was the one on flying cars.”

Flying cars?  How about a light-rail network like the suburban trains we shut down in Richmond and elsewhere in the 1950s and 60s? How about real incentives to get commuters on buses, bikes, and foot before gas prices and rising oceans make all of it moot?

Are virtual worlds therapy?  Pernicious illusions keeping us from action in real life?  No idea, but I’ll stay in-world to keep recording what real people, the ones who’ll never own multi-million-dollar estates or supercars (flying or not) do to entertain themselves as things get worse for our poor planet and our fellow citizens. 

After all, movie theaters were packed in the Depression, my folks told me. For a quarter, a moviegoer could live vicariously as Bacall or Bogart, the avatars of that age, and still have enough left over for popcorn.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts

The Borg could not make humanity any stupider, Cecil!  Good work on your recent films, too!

Excellent article. Really excellent.  I was wise to assimilate you after all.

-C

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