The thing Second Life seems to lack is a public infrastructure. In the real world this sort of thing has to be addressed through taxes and cordoning off of public land. Public services don’t bubble up from the ground. Volunteerism can be powerful, but it’s rarely reliable. I’m very curious about whether it’s even possible for a public sector to develop in Second Life. I do think the public sector is necessary for a healthy civic life because otherwise access will tip toward those with the resources to buy in.

I’ve been in SL for 2 years, it’s a pioneering technology, it’s had its rough spots but the main problem it has faced IMHO isn’t even technological but social: the main people shaping its agenda — and thereby the agenda for the whole Metaverse and the 3-D virtual Internet of the future by default — are decided sectarians, often of the hard left of utopian right or wacky techno Kool-Aid variety, with even various social-fascism or communist doctrines abounding. The liberal middle spectrum is absent, and people like you are missing the opportunity to be present at the dawn of an exploding revolutionary phenomenon.

The business model is the way it is because of the ideologies of the founders and early adapters, it lurches from communism to social Darwinism to harsh Reaganomics all in one model, with its various aspects, precisely because the people running it tend to be tekkies without a lot of education or exposure to the humanities, political philosophy, discussions about the classics, etc. They didn’t say, hmm, how can we design an equitable world and a civil society in a democratic and liberal civilization? They just concentrated on the mechanics of building it and letting people come and leaving it open — that was a good thing but it will become in fact closed the more the extremist ideologies are allowed to take root.

Like Russia or Chile or anyplace undergoing upheavals or transitions, the civic space of Second Life has to be created by the people who take an interest in it and are affected by it. It doesn’t spring full blown from the sky. The people who were early adapters tended to be geeks and MMORPG gamers, and then later, some socializers from other games like The Sims Online or There, and they were rather short on ideas of how to build communities other than to follow formulas like “let’s get up a posse and shoot everybody else” or “my family right or wrong”. As it fills up, more educational institutions like Harvard and businesses like America Apparel have begun to establish a presence and will affect how the world gets made.

I totally agree with your concept of the exploitation of crowd-sourcing, what I myself call “crowd-serfing”. There’s been a great deal of that. But there’s also the satisfaction of starting a business, working at it, seeing it grow, having it pay off and being reimbursed for the heavy expenditures of land tier — that’s something I’ve been able to do.

In theory, virtual spaces like Second Life could do a lot to remove or mitigate “rankism”. Of course, they also contain within them the ultimate of rankism, the god-like powers of the programmers and owners of the servers have made the creator class the highest rank of all, and that’s where outsiders need to get to work, or the next century will be ruled by them and it’s not going to be pretty.