Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Web Site for Million Dollar Skin Labs

Cyberpunk writer William Gibson described not only a Matrix in which all humans interacted in the near future, thus giving us the term “cyberspace,“ but he also described real-life makeovers—extreme ones—by those hungry for celebrity. Here’s a line or two from his short story, “Burning Chrome”:

I went out and looked for Rikki, found her in a café with a boy with Sendai eyes, half-healed suture lines radiating from his bruised sockets. She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling Ikon Eyes.

Tally Isham: the celeb of choice for a slowly decaying world propped up by the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace.  People can buy her eyes, have surgery to look like her, put “stimsims” into a little virtual-reality console and become her.

Gibson has claimed on various occasions that he wanted to warn readers about the power of media, and then some readers wanted to build his dystopian future. Now, thanks to Million-Dollar Skin Lab, we are a step closer. Second Life residents can buy look-alike skins of Brad Pitt, Angelia Jolie, and—ugh—Paris Hilton.  The work is good, though I don’t think they got the Brad Pitt quite right.  Still, it’s stunning to see yet another cliche of science fiction realized in this world of ours, appearing first in Second Life.  When, one wonders, will the type of makeover one sees at River City Tattoo merge with extreme cosmetic surgery, so people will come out re-made? 

It’s as scary to me as it is inevitable.  One thing I’d bet: Million-Dollar Skin Lab will soon be forced to take celebs’ names off the skins.  I know that in another branch of geekdom, action figure collecting, celeb-lookalikes often go by different names, because—any lawyers out there?—a name can be protected like a brand, but one cannot copyright one’s face.

Yet.

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