Matthew Ball: belief

Transcript context

…Second Life — the older version of a kind of metaverse. Better or worse than we used to think? Do we look back and it’s like, “Wow, they were so far ahead of their time,” or do we look back and it’s like, “They really didn’t do very much with that one”? I would say underrated because the number of strange, emergent behaviors on that platform are undercovered. Why? Because not enough of us used it, and in fact, if you compare it to most metaverse-style platforms today, there was a very laissez-faire approach. The “government” didn’t actually intermediate transactions. You and I could make a direct purchase. You could create a business, and much like the US government, they don’t really know it exists. They just know that you’re paying tax, so to speak. That led to all of these strange outcomes. There was a point in time in which most of the citizens actually rebelled, claiming that the tax rate was too high. So, because of how open it was, and because of the early adopters to virtual worlds in 2003 to 2006, you had a very strange collective of users. There are a lot of odd lessons that today’s platforms seem actually devolved, not evolved, from. Sex in the metaverse — are we expecting too much or too little from it?…

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