By Prokofy Neva, Virtualtor
"Be the change you wish to see inworld." This is my modded motto for everyone. Do not wait for someone to fund you; do not wait for an audience; do not wait for the Lindens to change or do something; try yourself and only by doing will you learn. Virtual worlds are at too early a stage, along with even the Internet and AI which seem very old now, to be very effective at what they do, nor do they have sufficient guardrails.
That means get the cheapest account you can, the Plus, for $5.99 a month, 150L stipend, and 512 m2 land and get either a Linden Home or buy a Mainland parcel -- I would suggest the latter because you can put it in search and have commercial activity on a Mainland parcel, but you cannot do this in Bellisseria. And away you go, do your thing, expand beyond that ONLY if you can sustain the tier, have help, have customers/users.
I have a lot of time for Rolig's insights based on exactly doing what I suggest which is to observe and learn for years. But I have to differ on some key points because I have my own valid experience in SL for nearly 21 years now.
The Mistake of Versimilitude
Educators all made the mistake of demanding -- and getting discounted versions of same -- private islands and then hiring "solutions providers" (which the Lindens were eager to push on them) to build enormous RL campuses of pixelated "bricks and mortar" to try to make "versimilitude" for their RL place of learning as they felt this would be best. They didn't want to take avian creatures -- SL avatars -- and arrange them in a treehouse. They felt that would undermine the educational mission. Naturally these were all wasted funds and time, pretty much. Even those universities that put up modest buildings and made big sandboxes for their students to learn about and experiment with the platform failed because they couldn't get past the demand for versimilitude, which goes deep and is hard-wired in human beings (which is why we have Bellissseria, sneered at by Friends of Philip groupies, but which is really the Lindens' best product in their history.)
Nerd Wars and "Solutions Providers"
I found most insightful Rolig's points about the types of people who went into these projects which tracks with my experience. It's like the 10-year-old Wise Child who becomes the only one in the family who can fix the VCR and get it to work. People who were computer nerds or intrepid, or gamerz, would convince their department or even entire college into paying for an island but the real professors and leadership of that educational entity was only very loosely tethered to the project. That nerd who took over the edu sim would sometimes come with SL baggage, which is how I could get banned from a supposedly all-purpose general-public open NASA sim -- which qua NASA had no beef with me or my blog nor ever could have such a beef.
The people running commercial or educational sims relied too heavily on the "Solutions Providers" list and the "Big 6" and their own nerds, which results sometimes in disasters like Anshe Chung's live interview with Daniel Terdiman, a tech journalist at that time with CNET. Neither the Chung dynasty or the CNET dynasty actually controlled things like "autoreturn" or "ban tools" or "group-only tools" etc. Hired hands did, and disaster ensued.
No Reputational or Other Stake in the World
Some of the edu people -- usually not the Wise Child type -- did fear the adult content of SL and feared how their own faculy rules, academic reviews, bids for tenure, etc. might fare with such an undesirable climate -- and they weren't wrong. But some would claim to embrace the public -- then ruin their reputations seemingly uncaringly. As a Cornell University business prof did by touting an SL stock exchange as a "learning" experiment -- which was in fact ordinary SL hubris and fraud by a certain furry, and shut down by the Lindens. As a New York Law School prof found, even willing to call herself "Lawlita" (ugh) (tongue in cheek) found when her "Democracy Island" began to lose its shine after its initial opening to great media hype -- and, as one observer noted on a visit, became the site of two fornicating dragons one morning when the sim was empty and the tumbleweeds were tumbling. That prof went on to get herself on Obama's campaign team and got herself a tech job in the White House. Do you think she featured SL in her resume by then? Of course not, for lots of reasons.
Second Life aspired to be category killer for education, and then quite literally killed that category for themselves.
And it was their own Better Worldism and California Ideology along with that of their suitors and pets with the same usually left-leaning or libertarian philosophies of development who caused this.
They wanted to re-make the real world; they wanted a Better, virtual world; but they didn't accept the virtual world they had, filled with other people who did not share their beliefs.
Philip thought that islands solved his civil society woes -- people would go on their own island, do their thing, and the Mainland would persist to be the Better World experiment, so to speak. But he left -- twice -- and the remaining Lindens made Bellisseria. Bellisseria *is* that Better World. It's just not the Better World YOU wanted because you saw Trumansville, or believe whatever you believe. Hell is other people; SL is other people, online.
Educators Did Not Disappear, But Declined
Except, you cannot say that then educators "largely disappeared" because of any of the factors you or I can cite. It's just that, oh, Harvard, or YourUniversity disappeared. Lots of OTHER colleges from countries like Canada, Peru, even Egypt at one point persisted, some with very compelling permanent educational diaramas and exhibits. I have tracked real-life country and language sims for some 20 years now and have the International Bazaar listserver of such locations which I update regularly (pick it up in Ross). Yes, I've seen a sad decline in universities, especially since the pandemic waned and in the last year. But there are still significant presences -- just not always on an open island; just not on an island *period* but on a 4096. I commend University of Rochester (New York State), near my home towns, for continuing to do its thing for many years on a mere 4096. That's how it has to be done.
To be sure, the college trying to teath dissection did not have enough haptic capacity to really make it viable; same with those trying to teach "first responding". Maybe some day; not yet.
LL "Educators"
Rolig mentioned how the Lindens helped to some extent but then not enough. I would argue that it was not their job to help. They helped enough by supplying that tax-free discounted island or tier cost if a college could present a non-profit 501-c-3 form or its foreign equivalent. In my view, by constantly pushing their "Solutions Providers" and "Big Six" developers' list instead of creating a climate for open bids, they harmed the effort, and did not help it -- but Silicon Valley is not an "open bids" kind of climate, it consists of much more insular networking, as does Silicon Alley in NYC, for that matter.
A key problem is that these Lindens were NOT academics and had no PhDs or track record of actual educational work. There may have been a few as there are even today but by and large, LL, which first relied too heavily on their own early-adapter user base for hires (a mistake, just like closed bids), attracted mainly tech people not in the humanities.
Education must include the humanities, and the humanities must be enabled to flourish in a virtual world, and it cannot be ceded only to technical and science education. Why? Because it has to be tethered to real life.
So...What you would get is a Linden who was the IT guy in a university department with grand ideas of Better Worlding as these types of people tend to acquire on their IRC channels and MMORPGs and such or figurers like Lessig. A Linden, who, because he once set up networking for actual PhD holders in X area of study or something, is now "an expert on education." I remember a Linden like that who tried to get us to STOP holding meetings of the Society for Virtual Architecture in Warmouth which was an utterly amateur thing precisely NOT made up of RL architects, although there were a few -- because he feared this would make SL less attractive to "real professionals" -- though he wasn't one himself. Bizarre.
That same Linden once, at a meetup, when we all sat having dinner in an outdoor cafe, told a tourist passing by who noticed his guru-like SL hand-eye swag necklace, said "We're from Second Life. You may not have heard of us yet. But soon everyone everywhere will know us." I mean, the illusions, the hubris, the sheer self-delusion -- you can't imagine how bad it was in the early days -- and how it frankly still persists. I mean, it's refreshing now to have certain young Lindens who run very business-like office-hours without having to crack a million jokes about "42" or "hippos!" or draw from insider chat at the IRC channel water cooler, but still, you know....
Those Lindens don't live in the World. OUR World. THE world, as it is, on the 28,000 servers. At least the earlier Lindens lived in the world more, on alts, at the very list, but also qua Lindens as well. Having an office hour is not living in the World.
No Stake in the Game and No Reality to Virtuality
This Linden also first tried to ensure that the contest to get a post-telehub infohub to develop around 2005 was first ONLY opened to architect students in some university the Lindens were then coddling in the hopes of big business. I personally found this the worst sort of virtualized real-lifism that in fact gives you the worst of both worlds -- a virtual educator without higher credentials enabled by virtuality, who then lords it over others as amateur as himself to promote what is old-fashioned credentialism of the worst type. Second life facilitates and accelerates such things as it did the "Stock Exchange".
The virtual worlds/games academic Edward Castronova said grandly at the "State of Play" conference in 2004 at New York Law School that the question wasn't "Can there be a virtual stock exchange?" but rather "why will you be using the adjective 'virtual' when in 10 years everything will be virtualized." Well, yes, and no. The RL stock exchange didn't hasten to SL; it may have virtualized a lot of things but it still exists as a meat-world phenomenon with a substantive value still retained in that aspect, although of course, some of the ills of capitalism like sped-up stock buying are caused by the Internet/virtualization. Philip said "I'm not building a game, I'm building a new country" in 2006, but Philip didn't mean his country to have liberal democracy, an independent judiciary, a regulated market, a free press, and many other good "country" things. The company LL would simulate "governance" -- a word they used literally up until yesterday publicly (although they began using it among themselves when they published job openings in Georgia) -- it is now watered/dumbed/restricted to "Trust & Safety" -- whatever THOSE terms mean. Feel the difference?
The idea that educators had to fear adult content was misplaced, was possibly artificially fueld by some who saw the whole venture as a boondoggle, especially before the Pandemic and Zoom. Educators could have locked islands. They could turn them invisible. No one need interact or even know they were there -- then as now. If they needed to make their islands public for whatever reason, they could still put group-only sections for class time or exhibits which they didn't want disrupted or griefed. THEY COULD HAVE DONE THAT.
THEY DID NOT. WHAT WAS THEIR PROBLEM?
If they imagined that they controlled their students leaving the island and going to adult clubs, well, sorry, they don't control their students private lives outside the campus even in a dormitory -- there's a limit. They can have their rules and curfews or what-have-you, but good luck with that in RL, let alone SL.
If you want, blame the nature of virtual worlds, along with the Internet and AI, for your inability to teach. Those who can't do, teach, as the saying goes. But...somehow good teachers persist in even the most humble and difficult settings and honestly, with the affordances of SL, if you can't teach, you are doing something wrong. Teach, already -- instead of simulating a Better World philosophy on your sim; instead of proseltyizing a belief system; instead of selling a product -- these are all off-putting approaches. Teach.
Librarians' Radical Intolerant Ideologies
The reason the adult content bothered educators was because of the presence of radical librarians and other Better World boosters -- Rolig confirms my sense that there were a LOT of these people. Librarians in the 1990s faced extinction. No one needed them any more as they used the Internet, email, looked up books on their own, sent for them online from other branches, even read books online -- this only became better, faster, fuller. The Dewey Decimal System, which I learned at my first job in a public library, was obsolete essentially starting with the very fact that librarians didn't know where to put "computer science" -- it wasn't in the 600s with the hard sciences and physical sciences -- they put it in the 100s along with philosophy where it ballooned and ate up several aisles in any library, dwarfing Plotinus. Nobody asks for books by their number -- the online user interface for NYPL masks that behind the hood, you use author or title. No one needs a librarian to do anything except stamp out books -- even finds were ended in NYS due to the pandemic. To be sure, librarians are supposed to "help with homework" and "help adults looking for jobs". But that's ridiculous. Many people of all ages use chatGPT and other programs now and even 10 years ago asked friends on Facebook or Twitter for help before they'd ask a librarian in RL.
Librarians, sensing all this with good reason, panicked and eventually morphed into the radical, left-leaning lifestyle intruders we see now -- which has only led to a backlash of books not being exactly "banned," but parents saying they are too explicit for the age group involved, or too sectarian on issues not in the mainstream and so on. Library Science was ALREADY becoming a playground for leftist sectarian at the dawn of SL -- it is now even far worse. Maybe eventually there will be a course correction. Libraries would seem to be the perfect thing for SL simply because people like having an "answer desk" and information they can pick up, sectarian or not. So in that sense, I think there is still a role for libraries but likely they will be sectarian, and if religious, tend toward the cultic because only those profiles will have the stamina and perserverance to deal with all of SL's problems and challenges to keep to their mission. I started a public library and I could never finish it so I started putting any public domain books I made into "Community Library" boxes in a few places. Few people get them.
Sacred Places
Now let's come to Sacred Places, a listserve I also maintain. These are frankly more popular than educational sims but possibly far less possible in some cases than language-related sandboxes or hangouts or clubs. But still, religions and spiritual quests are popular among people searching for meaning in their Internet desert solitudes. The churches, Tibetan monastery and the one mosque we maintain have the most traffic of all the land preserve sites. They get the most donations, although not enough to sustain their tier. Still, a campaign to restore Notre Dame connecting to the RL campaign and another SL sim campaign; a campaign to help refugees in Gaza at the mosque -- these could produce enough to make a US $25 donation maybe every other month. People will make Linden donations who won't make dollar donations in SL, so it's worth it -- but the cashout fees are steep and almost make it not worth it, which is why I tend to link to RL pages for charities.
Deterrents to Educational Projects in SL
The problem with education and specifically religious education is not the high cost of sims, not the lack of competent Lindens, not the adult nature of SL.
While I maintain dozens of sacred places that are open to the public, I hardly ever rent them out or give them out for short or long stays anymore by this or that group because of three key factors in SL:
o They are griefed -- religion attracts secularists with lurid hatred for anything religious which they imagine is somehow going to affect their own personal lives. Instead, they cause havoc to others with their own rabidly sectarian beliefs and destructive behaviour;
o Small sectarian groups themselves take over the space and block others, quarrel with others, deny access to others -- and the landlord is not in a position to arbitrate these disputes. They overprim on group land.
o When something is free, the tendency in SL is ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE to TAKE AND TAKE AND TAKE, exhausting the good will, financing, and volunteer spirit of any landlord, nonprofit or even commercial entity. That's why I've deleted entire swathes of cheap or free communities for years and have to keep doing it. They are always overrun. There is always one person who takes the free or 25L spaces all for themselves under alts. I remember once enterprising club simply took advantage of the open rentals group and parked a huge club with vendors and DJ equipment and ran DJ parties until we could notice 25 people on a sim without even half that many actual tenants. Constant problem. Constant policing required IF like me you hold to certain ideas of open society, liberal democracy, accessibility for the poor, etc.
A certain percentage of the population of SL, even those who pride themselves on being "socialist" or "devout Christian" or "good Muslim" will trash, eviscerate, ruin every project you attempt; every reasonable rental; every good deed which yes, will not go unpunished.
People -- with their flawed human nature -- are why virtual worlds don't work. Not because there isn't PBR; not because there isn't a good ramp for newbies; not because islands are too expensive. It's because people are !@%!@^.
Thus whatever "educational" or "do-good" or "spiritual mission" you take on in the belief that it will be "easier" or "better" or you yourself will shine more in the SL setting, please be disabused of it instantly. In fact, it's harder -- and not because of Lindens not helping or discounting. In fact, it's harder, even if you put it on a 512 and not an island. In fact, it's harder, even if you get over your unfounded fear of intrusion of adult content and griefers -- you can control for that. It's because human nature is flawed; it may be redeemable, but you are not the one who is going to be doing that redeeming. If you believe in a Higher Power -- great, take your Higher Power to 175 prims and see how He or She does with said 175 prims or even 5000 on a homestead. Your Higher Power likely had Humble origins in a manger or a cave or something -- He/She will understand.
Again, Intolerant Net-Nannying
Finally, I'll never forget what REALLY turned me of the edu elites of SL. We need a new widow of Lenin, and a new educational elite lol. At a Boston meet-up in 2010, a movie about SL was shown, I forget the particulars. The movie featured three examples of typical SL users:
o a young woman who became very disappointed in her virtual boyfriend with whom she even Skyped every night when he began to ghost her and go back to his RL wife -- and that's when she concluded: "I'm real, he's virtual." Yes, never forget that in a virtual relationship.
o a young man who made himself a female child avatar (all too common) and went around doing various griefy and objectionable things and then got banned and then regretted it.
o a middle-aged Black single mother in Michigan with children who reveled in being able to run her lovely fashion store in SL with her design and entrepreneurial skills, and spend the morning in her bathrobe while the kids were in school.
To me, as repugnant as some aspects of these figures were, they were within the realm of real human experiences that despite their virtual setting, were useful learning experiences. I felt especially the Black mother was to be commended and here was a virtual world actually providing that kind of real boost for people that RL does NOT.
But the educators present en masse who always came to these meet-ups in the hope of further proseltyzing their beneficial missions could not get over net-nannying all these people to death -- even the female entrepeneur. (This was pre-DEI. Would a DEI climate have improved this reaction? Nope.)
What about her children? Why was she in her pajamas? Why didn't she get a "real" job? What a loser those others are that they can't find a date or meaningful experiences in RL? And on and on. They said this about *my tenants* and *my people* and the *SL I loved for its freedoms* so honestly....
Their net-nannying was so rabidly prudish; it was so church-lady without being church and while masked with lefty cultural norms, was as sectarian and intolerant as the worst cults of some religions. It appalled me. The movie was a good movie. It captured SL the way it is in fact for many. It captured the problems of it but the potentials. Yet these Better Worlders could not see it. THEY were the problem with the lack of educators in SL -- not SL. You don't blame the books in the library or the shelving or the front desk for a bad professor. SL is a platform. It has potential. Certain cadres of people who seize the mindshare and the assets -- particularly in universities today in the US which are blatantly capitalistic hedge funds and investment opportunities barely-cloaked as educational institutions even as the teachers in them are often Marxists -- they are setting the norm and creating the weather around this. Don't let them.
Over the years, I would have a few educational and religious groups from RL rent my spaces or take the free places available to hold events -- especially in the early years of COVID. I could count them on two hands because most people want their own space, are afraid of other people's public spaces, and want a lock down, which I refuse to give them. THAT is also the exigency for would-be Worlders, better or not, in SL -- either you lock down your space or you have a public space, or a mixture. So either you enable a few people to enjoy your locked space more intensely, or you enable a lot of people to enjoy your lite offerings on a casual asynchronous basis. I personally have chosen the latter path.
How Educators Could Succeed - by ChatGPT with Light Redaction
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Start Small and Affordable: Opt for a basic Plus account ($5.99/month, 150L stipend, 512 m² land). Choose a Mainland parcel over a Linden Home for commercial activity and search visibility. Expand only if you can sustain the tier and have support or users.
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Act Independently: Don’t wait for funding, audiences, or Linden Lab changes. Experiment and learn by doing, as virtual worlds like SL are still evolving and lack sufficient guardrails for large-scale educational projects.
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Avoid Overbuilding for Versimilitude: Resist replicating real-world campuses with expensive private islands or hiring “solutions providers” to build pixelated replicas. Simple setups, like sandboxes or modest builds, are more sustainable and effective.
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Leverage Existing Platforms: Use a small parcel (e.g., 4096 m²) for educational activities, as demonstrated by institutions like the University of Rochester. Avoid costly private islands unless absolutely necessary and financially viable -- your own audience is small and the SL audience will be even smaller!
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Manage Adult Content Concerns: Use group-only sections, locked islands, or invisible settings to control access and prevent disruptions from adult content or griefers. AND recognize that student behavior outside your SL space is beyond your control, as in real life.
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Engage with SL’s Community: Learn from long-term residents and observe SL’s internal "world" culture to understand its dynamics and "the realities of virtuality." Avoid relying solely on Linden Lab’s “Solutions Providers” or "guidance" as they may not align with your own educational goals.
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Incorporate Humanities: Ensure educational efforts include humanities, not just technical or scientific subjects, to tether virtual learning to real-life relevance. Avoid ceding SL education to tech-focused approaches or sectarian librarian ideologies.
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Prepare for Human Challenges: Anticipate issues like griefing, sectarian disputes, or exploitation of free resources. Implement strict policies and active moderation to maintain open, accessible spaces without allowing individuals to dominate or disrupt OR make them unattended, but safe, by making them asynchronous on sufficiently-griefing-deterrent areas.
