19
Apr
I’m about 3 1/2 years late for this, which is no problem, because I’m always late for anything, but it’s been in 2007 when my hero William Gibson made his first (and only) appearance in Second Life, reading from his then latest novel “Spook Country” and talking to the audience afterwards. Now, Gibson wasn’t impolite – I’ve never seen him say a bad word about anything, and he’s always very careful about chosing the right words – but he did in retrospect say that Second Life’s “top-down hierarchy” wasn’t just as appealing to him.
This is not Linden Lab’s fault, nor is it the fault of the SL userbase; it’s simply a result from the corporate environment which made it “be like Disneyland”, whereas, as Gibson says, “the ones I cooked up were always in the backroom of something else, like, in my novel Idoru, there are virtual worlds that kids had broken into abandoned corporate or virtual websites and, in the basements, in the back rooms, they created whole universes of stuff, so they don’t have to pay for it. And that’s a much more appealing fantasy to me…”
I think for the regular reader it’s already clear which technology fits Gibson’s description today. We don’t even need to break into abandoned networks, we can run it in our own basements, backrooms, anywhere. And really, it’s not going to be the corporations, the commercial grids, that will define the culture of this our metaverse, but rather the vibrant and living subculture of bohemiens, of pirates, of artists, musicians, coders, builders and explorers, who are running this on their own machines, out of love, and for the thrill of being there.
And that’s why I don’t believe in grids, as popular as they are right now. In the end, given sufficient simplicity to install (and really, all it takes is a snappy GUI slapped over the OpenSim codebase that will make it run out of the box), most people will run their hypergridded sims on their home computers, because – well, do you really need a sim up and running 24/7 just to invite your friends over? Probably 80% of all broadband connections can handle a few avatars visiting, and anyone who can run a SL viewer on their computers also has enough horsepower to run a few opensim regions on it.
And just as I’m known for always being late, I’m known for never rounding up my postings well, which probably has to do with my never-getting-my-point-acrossness, so maybe I shouldn’t write everything that just went through my mind. But I’m excited about the metaverse to come, and I love the company I keep. Let’s make some really cool shit in our basements.
Comments
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John Waugh on 04.20.2011
Love this piece Vanish. Reminds me somewhat of those entering The Otherland .. because I feel too that “home” grids are where the whole thing is moving despite having initial problems with establishing a world “in a friend’s basement” and then having it connected to OSGrid and the hypergrid.
But now it is there it feels wonderful even though most of my “real” work, if one can call it that takes place on regular grids and visit SL for social networking…. and of course to get ideas.
Cheers Johnnie Waugh/Wendt
PS Keep up the good work.
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