I love Second Life.
I say this as someone who rarely logs in. All of my friends who were super-into this early social world have long since moved on to better options like VRChat, or have been fully consumed by the levelling treadmill of First Life.
The incentive is gone, then, to wander around sims (the name for kilometre-squared parcels of land that Linden Labs rents out to users) and enjoy the true strangeness of an early shot at a metaverse whose failures were never learned from (or wilfully ignored by the quick-buck techno-elite). Well, almost. Every six months or so, I remember that SL exists, and I peek my head in to see what festivals and such are going on.
It's always pretty sparse. I rarely encounter any living soul at all.
Even a decade ago, realms like Second Life were already being emptied out. The promise of virtual commerce had long since evaporated; The Linden Labs dream of every major company staking a virtual presence in sims came and went in an embarrassingly short span of time.
The survivors tended to be the Unmarketables like furries or sex workers (or furry sex workers), but many sims still coasted along with the expectation of a wider audience, and I half wonder if their continuation is just a result of someone not checking their credit card bill closely enough to catch the auto-renewal.
Walking around SL today is much like sifting through the remains of Geocities sites accessed through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
And much like the fragments of sites from yesteryear, you find some truly interesting visuals.
"Heritage, not Hate!"
To be clear, the heritage of white Southerners in the United States is very much hate, and those who cling to that abominable history should rightly be mocked. I am amused at the places that heritage shows up at. I have a morbid fascination, you see, with hateful ideologies. I guess I just find something appealing about staring into the abyss. Those kind of people confuse me. They're so proud of that shit, and they will happily use whatever technology they can get hold of to express that hate as if we're not all snickering at them for being the dweebs that they are.
By pure chance, I found an enclave of sore losing in Second Life. I had logged out in some storefront months ago during a winter festival, and came back to a largely barren space that was now embracing virtual springtime. I took a stroll through the neighbouring countryside, and quickly ran across what appeared to be a small parcel for some kind of military party space.
There were vehicles--tanks and humvees--quietly resting on the grass, no scripts to cause them to speed away (though some would let you sit in them). A few military-style tents and barrack-like buildings were strung around the perimeter, interiors bare save for a handful of simplistic scripted store kiosks selling, among other things, anti-political correctness shirts, and a digital figurine of a cartoon Joe Biden holding a "Let's Go Brandon" sign.
Wait. "Let's Go Brandon"? It's the 2020s now. Second Life is a ghost town, yet someone actually put effort and money (albeit a tiny amount) into a shitty right-wing meme that they are now selling in Second Life, and when I was wandering around that winter festival several months back I do not remember seeing this little confederate party camp among the tinsel and lights.
No, this was recent. This was like walking a well-worn path in the mountains regularly, and then coming across the scat sign of a polecat in the middle of the trail.
Who are these people?