theatlantic | People use terms like “majestic,”
“spectacularly vacant,” and “post-apocalyptic” to describe real-life
ruins. There’s an entire subculture around images of once-splendid
buildings, now left to rot and decay. I’m a quiet fan of these urban
explorers, people who devote time to poking around abandoned buildings
or “haikyo”—and,
if they’re lucky, uncovering stories about the people that once resided
there. And because I’ve spent so much time inhabiting digital rooms
myself, I often think about how time decays digital structures. I
imagine all of the strings of text that have come before or after mine
that similarly disappeared into the void. But what happens when those
spaces stick around, as in a virtual world—when they can’t physically
decay?
When Second Life launched in 2003, the world was captivated by visions of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
come to life. The virtual world isn’t a game--it’s a venue, a platform,
a plot of undeveloped land, a blank canvas, an open world. Users make
of it what they will.
In 2006, an avatar was featured on the cover of Business Week magazine
as part of an interview about a million-dollar land management
business. People were swept up in a great wave of excitement and
possibility. Universities and corporations flocked to build huge
structures, including full-size stadiums and digital recreations of
their real-life buildings.
But that was nearly 10 years ago. I wondered:
what happened to all of those buildings? Were people still making use of
them? So I logged in. The world of Second Life,
it turns out, is not abandoned. Estimates put the current active
user-base around 600,000 members; in its heyday, it boasted between 60
and 80 thousand simultaneous logins. There are often a handful of people
in most of the spaces you’ll visit, but it’s easy to find privacy. Here
and there are signs that point to its lack of people: “space for rent”,
“band wanted.” But the sheer variety of environments, and the obvious
care that people put into them, remains stunning.
There are moments in Second Life where
the artifice is obvious. Not just when it’s loading, building up the
world from flat planes to polygons to intricate, textured shapes—but
when you realize that everything is pristine, unlike real-world
counterparts. It brings to mind the words of Philip K. Dick describing
the detritus that’s started taking over the largely-abandoned cities in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
There’s no kipple in Second Life; no tumbling, ivy-covered walls, or pools of stagnant water, no gum wrappers or cigarette cartons slowly disintegrating.
Removed from organic decaying processes, the
only ruins in this world, including simulacrum of piles of dirt and
construction vehicles, are ones that have been deliberately built and
placed there by a designer. But despite its empty spaces, the world
still feels full of possibility, perhaps specifically because it’s all
still standing strong, so many years on. It’s not abandoned; it’s simply
waiting.
