Becoming an Avatar w/ Philip Rosedale
EPISODE #65
Summary
Founder of Second Life Philip Rosedale shares his thoughts on what virtual worlds can teach us about being human, the relationship between Second Life users and their avatars, and the challenges of building the metaverse using Web 3.0 technologies.
Guest Bio
Philip Rosedale is the Founder of Linden Lab, parent company of Second Life, an open-ended, Internet-connected virtual world and pioneering metaverse. Following Second Life, he worked on several projects related to distributed work and computing. Excited by innovations in these areas and the proliferation of new VR-enabling devices, he re-entered the virtual worlds space in 2013, co-founding High Fidelity, a company devoted to exploring the future of next-generation shared virtual reality. Philip rejoined Second Life in 2022, as Strategic Advisor, focused on helping to shape and build a better metaverse.
Show Notes
Transcript
Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.
On this episode, I speak to the founder of Second Life, Philip Rosedale.
"Inevitably as we get more powerful AIs, we are then going to have our first example of a sort of digital native. The AI in a virtual world will truly live there and belong to that world in the way that we belong to Earth. That fascinates me."
- Philip Rosedale, excerpt from the interview.
Philip shared his thoughts on what virtual worlds can teach us about being human, the relationship between Second Life users and their avatars, and the challenges of building the metaverse using Web 3.0 technologies.
Luke Robert Mason: Virtual worlds, and the people who inhabit them have long fascinated me. For many, becoming an avatar and exploring an environment of endless possibilities is extremely appealing. You can understand why. Lived reality can quickly become banal compared to a space in which you fashion a new identity, construct your own reality, and auto-generate new forms of meaningful existence. But today, with so much recent hype around the metaverse, the question of what sort of worlds we should create is often ignored.
With so much focus on Web 3.0 technologies which will then enable commerce in these spaces, few questions are being asked about what cultures, communities and forms of creativity will emerge as a result of human beings interacting on mass as their avatars.
Thankfully, Philip Rosedale has over 20 years of first-hand experience in observing the emergent properties that appear in the spaces between people when they are immersed in virtual worlds. Because long before Meta's promise of new horizons or a gold rush into Decentraland, there was Second Life, the platform that Philip founded in 2003. It is possibly the most enduring and successful experiment on what happens when people choose to create new societies through the use of digital spaces.
My first experience of Second Life occurred in 2010 at the University of Sussex, where then PhD student and former FUTURES Podcast guest, Dani Ploeger, and his colleague, Seda Ilter, hosted an academic conference titled, 'Reperforming the Posthuman'. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Warwick at the time and had travelled to Sussex in anticipation of seeing a presentation by the artist, Stelarc. I was studying for a performance art degree and had only recently been introduced by my supervisor, Dr Tim White, to Stelarc's unique experiments that ranged from robotic third arms to swallowable robots, to ears surgically implanted into the artist's arm. About six years later, I would become Stelarc's eyes as part of one of these artworks. More about that when he joins us as a guest on the show.
Back in Sussex, Stelarc was attending the conference virtually, from Australia, by performing as his avatar. He gave us a tour through his Second Life museum, a space that contained virtual renderings of some of his most iconic artworks, with walls adorned with virtual flesh. All the while his iconic laugh echoed in the space, contrasted against a mechanical 'ping'. It was a captivating experience.
But what caught my attention the most was something that Stelarc said during his presentation about the concept of a Third Life.
"What we need is a Third Life [laughter]. By that, I mean the inverse of what usually happens in second life, a human prompts his or her avatar. Imagine if your avatar was imbued with artificial intelligence, imbued with genetic algorithms, for example, or a neural net. Imagine if your avatar was someone autonomous. Imagine if your avatar wanted to form in the real world, accessing your physical body. This would be a kind of Third Life. Second Life is for humans to exist as avatars. Third Life would be for avatars to exist as humans in real 3D space and time [laughter]."
- Stelarc, excerpt from conference
This idea of a Third Life fascinated me. Not only could you control your avatar, but one day your avatar could have some form of control over you. I asked Philip about this possibility on this episode, and I think you might be surprised to hear his answer.
A couple of months after this conference, I had the chance to become an avatar myself by using Second Life. By chance, I met the University of Warwick mathematics professor, David Wood, also known by his avatar's name, Immaculate. He had built a Second Life island for the mathematics department at Warwick and was kind enough to show me how to enter, interact, and most importantly fly through space. I spent the next few weeks learning how to customise my avatar and visiting various destinations inside of Second Life, including Martine Rothblatt's Terasem island - a popular space frequented by the transhumanist community.
Eventually, in 2011, David allowed me to use the University's island to live stream my revival of Warwick's cyberculture conference, Virtual Futures, to Second Life Attendees. Although I didn't continue to spend long periods of time in Second Life, during my time there it was clear that this was a vibrant world full of a diverse range of people and possibilities.
Like many of us during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, I looked again to virtual spaces as an opportunity to connect with friends and colleagues. I even explored some of the new decentralised virtual worlds, powered by cryptocurrency. However, none of these metaversal experiences had the same sort of feeling I got from Second Life in the early 2010s. Partly because deep down, nobody really cared about building something truly long-lasting or meaningful in these worlds. They were just there interacting because they felt they had to be there. They had hedged their bets on the digital currencies underlying these platforms, so they felt the need to interact simply to justify their investments.
It's why Second Life offers us so much insight into how to design for digital interaction. It was for that reason that I asked my friend and mentor, Douglas Rushkoff, to introduce Philip and me. It's rare that I ask Douglas to help me secure a podcast guest, but Philip is truly the first real anthropologist of virtual existence. The spaces that he helped design tell us so much about how we might choose to live, interact and communicate in the future. For the next generation of these experiences to be meaningful, it's important for us to learn from the recent history of virtual worlds.
That's why I'm so excited to introduce Philip Rosedale to the FUTURES Podcast.
Philip, it feels like we've entered this age of metaversal madness. That's driven, predominantly by the promises of Web 3.0. In many ways, you've seen this all before. You know the real difficulty of building truly social virtual worlds. When you just look at the lay of the land, how far do you think we still have to go?
Philip Rosedale: We still have a way to go and there are still, I guess, what I would describe as science questions, science problems or R and D problems that are pretty fundamental to getting what I think many of us are imagining when we talk about metaverse. As you said, the promise of Web 3 - which is, for the most part, I think, an evolution of the kind of commerce, low-friction transactions and governance and ownership - although that's important to the future, it actually isn't the kind of fundamental science problems that I think we still face in getting all of this stuff working.
Mason: Well you so wonderfully describe the virtual slash metaverse experiences. You describe them as consisting of two elements. One: three-dimensionality and two: the ability to make the internet a live experience. What is it about the combination of those two elements that make these experiences, the most important thing, I guess - meaningful?
Rosedale: It's a great way of putting it. I mean, talking about those two things. The metaverse, I think of as being these two discrete things. One is the transition to 3D. The other is the fact that the internet presently doesn't have people there. It's not a live experience. Getting to that live experience is the other piece. As you say, when you talk about the combination of those two things, what you're really talking about is creating a space where the average person would be comfortable communicating with other people in.
As a subset of that, I think the most important one is something like what you and I are doing right now, where what about when two people don't know each other and they're sort of sitting down together for the first time? I think that problem is this one that is still a science project. We know that it works in real life, but in every other medium - online, technology-mediated mediums - it's hard. We've just gone through three years or approaching three years, of COVID, which actually demonstrated the problem for us. Not good news, but it kind of showed us in stark relief how difficult getting people in a room together online is.
Mason: Even the interaction now, to your point, I'm staring at my questions off to one side of the screen. I'm staring at your face just off to the other side of the screen. There's no ability to have eye contact. To do that, I have to look above the screen into the camera. It does feel like this very odd experience that would almost be made easier if we were able to get rid of all these things and pull ourselves into something like an avatar.
Rosedale: You know, I think what you just said is such a good thing to pause on, you know. Those of us like you that have had to have intimate, engaging moments with other people online have actually had to kind of train to do it. You just demonstrated that by looking up at the camera. I know, like you, I'm always amazed when I see somebody who is really nailing that. It seems like they're almost people who are expert level, who just know how to look right into the camera and then seemingly not need to look anywhere else. I think that demonstrates this fundamental problem which is that we're either willing to go to extraordinary lengths in terms of training or suppressing disbelief, to communicate with people online.
But most people are still choosing to basically not do that, which is what I'm saying we've learned from COVID. I always say this funny thing. I always say, "Do you remember those few sad, happy hours with your friends that you tried to use Zoom for in March of 2020, and April?" Everybody laughs when I say that because they all do. We were all like, "Oh, okay. We'll just have drinks at the end of the day on Friday with our friends, and we'll just use Zoom." We tried that a couple of times, and we all did. We didn't keep doing it. I always say, "Why not? Why was it so bad? Why was that so hard?" I think that really captures the problem. I think most people are either not willing to go into an online space, especially not one where there are strangers, or people like you and I in our work are forced to go through the process of accommodating the unusual nature of the online experience such as doing a video recording like we're doing right now.
Mason: I was always fascinated during the lockdown experience. My flatmate had a much higher tolerance than I did. He used to do poker nights online, on Zoom, and he'd start at 9 pm at night and go until 3 am in the morning. There was alcohol involved so that helped, but he would have six of his friends who weirdly enough only lived just down the road. They would all come together and they would do this thing around social gaming. It was the social gaming element that kept them engaged. Each would have their own music playing in their own room, and their own lighting. People started to get crazy. They would bring a party-style light to light up their backgrounds every time they got a good hand at poker or won the poker round.
It fascinated me that people can have that sort of tolerance because coming out of these podcast interviews, there's often this moment of relief where I get to switch all of the lights off and get to push the microphone away. Every single time I finish a podcast, I have to go for a walk to process what was said. It's not until you do the editing process that you actually hear, again, what was actually being said, because you're so conscious of the fact that you are, I guess, creating the content at this moment in space and time. It's not just about being in the space for the sake of being in the space.
I guess that was the wonderful thing about Second Life and all of these virtual worlds. It's the promise of being comfortable to just exist in virtual worlds. That point of just allowing yourself to be - that's difficult to get right, isn't it?
Rosedale: Exactly. You know, the way that Second Life allowed you to be, to your point, was it basically said, "We're going to give you these two very easy things to do." Just when you're talking about hanging around and communicating, which was: one, you're going to actually talk with text. Then you're going to move an avatar with your arrow keys and you're going to be able to sit down next to somebody and you're going to be able to look at their avatar while typing to them. It turns out that that is not a stressful experience. It doesn't have that weird thing like what you and I are going through when you're trying to balance between reading your notes and being present to the person. You didn't have to do that with Second Life because you could just look at that chat window in the screen, and you didn't need to keep managing your eye contact. Of course, you couldn't see your own face looking back at you.
Right now, it's fun for both of us to describe our situations as practitioners of this. I've got my Google window up over the self-view of myself so that I can't see myself.
Mason: Well I have my notes over me, so...
Rosedale: It's so funny that we're both doing that. I have the same thing. I have some thoughts here over my face. That's because looking at your face is this weird downward spiral where you become less and less present as you consider whether your hair is good. Then you become disturbed. God, I can see how I'm not looking at the camera. I should look at the camera.
In Second Life, you didn't have to do that, you know? You don't have to do that. You talk. Some people talk about 30 per cent or 40 per cent of the time. You type, and then you move your avatar around. That's comfortable and it really feels good in a group, too, which is the other thing that is great. But not everybody - and in fact, only a minority of people - are comfortable with doing that all the time; really making it their life. I think that tells us something, too. Second Life is a community for the last 20 years now of about a million people, and not bigger. The reason for that is that it gives you a second life, but it asks you to make trade-offs that are pretty serious.
Again, in the time of COVID, and to an extent with virtual reality, we're all now getting a chance to confront that same question which is: are you willing to give up your body, your facial expressions, your non-verbal communication? Are you willing to give that up to get something that you really want or need, or value? For most people, still, the answer is no. They're not willing to give up that verbal communication, and of course, that's why you and I are in this liminal space where we're struggling to do it well, but of course, we know it's still hard.
Mason: What do you think it is that unites the average Second Life user? Is it a form of escapism from a problematic reality that they're having to deal with in the real world? Or is it the possibility space of being able to do pretty much anything that their imagination will allow them?
Rosedale: One of the things that are so wonderful about Second Life is that it's very diverse. There isn't one answer that is a silver bullet, here. But people are in Second Life, as I said because they're willing to largely give up their real life and their real bodies in exchange for an avatar and the world of Second Life. They're doing that for a variety of different reasons. For one, for example, would be some type of physical difference or disability that makes the use of the avatar really functional for them. That's an example.
Another one might be age. It's amazing. There are many people who are old enough that they're beginning to be challenged by their bodies in Second Life, but of course, they're able to be young and kind of normalised, I guess, by becoming an avatar. There are a lot of different people.
Another one is people who live in rural areas where their ability to engage in face-to-face communication is very limited. They fill in the lost time by communicating as an avatar.
People come to Second Life with a lot of different needs, but the one thing they all have in common is a willingness to really commit to being an avatar. It's not just Second Life, but many other companies and now metaverse companies are kind of taking on, first hand, this same problem. I think they're realising what a hard problem it is. If you're not getting rich in the metaverse then you're left with what the real reality of it is. It's a space between people. You, therefore, need to be engaging with people and wanting to do so, wanting to create new friendships, wanting to create new connections; to be willing to go into these metaverses and virtual worlds.
Mason: There was something very revealing you just said there - "Commit to becoming their avatar." That assumes that their interaction with their avatar is an extension of themselves. They see some form of reflection in their avatar. It's not a third person in their life. It truly is a part of them. How true do you think that is?
Rosedale: Not only am I sure that it's true, but there's been a big body of academic work in the last 10 years that has validated that. Things like the Proteus effect which was the name given to some studies done by, I think, first Nick Yee and then Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford. They studied the fact that when people take on an avatar - when they choose to live in Second Life, and they looked at some other worlds as well - there's evidence that what happens is they take back into the real world the experimentation that they do as an avatar. Therefore, surprisingly - or perhaps surprisingly for some - people tend to become more like their avatars. They use the avatar as a kind of tool to enable them to change in personal ways or physical ways, that they weren't able to before. That's one of the wild examples of what you get out of it. But again, it's the older, wiser me now. I caution us to remember that it isn't something that the average person you pull off the streets of New York or something is going to be willing to do. If you are willing to do it, yeah, the experience of becoming an avatar and then having that avatar be digital and more of a co-constructed thing.
People misunderstand a lot of the time. They have this idea that Second Life or the virtual worlds - or sometimes virtual worlds, this is true - that Second Life is kind of like escapist in the sense that you can have it any way you want. Your avatar can be anything you want and your life experience can be anything you want. That's completely not true, because Second Life is populated with other people who are going to push back on you in exactly the same ways that other people do in the real world. Your avatar's identity, the place that you live, the friends that you have, and the neighbourhoods that you hang out in are all part of an experience that is scrutinised by the other people that are there. I don't know if I'm making that clear, but the experience of there being others around you and connected with you very much makes it not an escapist experience but a challenge to be there, in the same way, that the real world is.
When you go to college, you are made. Your reality is made by the many new friends and roommates and whatnot that you have as a new college student. Of course, your identity is fundamentally altered by that experience. I would say that going into Second Life is a very similar thing. When people choose to go in there, they've got to go in there as a new avatar and they are then shaped by their experiences with others. It's a fascinating thing.
Mason: Well you couldn't say the same about some Web 2.0 platforms, for example. Very few people are shaped by Twitter other than that it makes them slightly angrier. I just think that's captured in the language of everything you were saying there. You have a social media profile but you are your avatar. This idea of ownership. Something that is external to you versus something that truly feels like that extension of you. Do you think that's going to be a challenge for some of the big tech Web 2 companies who are thinking about moving into the metaverse? That the user just doesn't have the fundamental change state in their mind, of how this experience is going to be, at the core, extremely different?
Rosedale: Yeah, I mean tech and life versus, say, Twitter, versus something like Facebook groups or something like that, or Instagram. These are all mediums that are specifically, I would say, they are spaces between people. There's a book about Second Life. It's specifically about architecture in Second Life called 'Space Between People'. I always loved that expression - ‘space between people’. If you think about Twitter as a space between people or Instagram as a space between people - exactly. It's the same thing. The nature of the space mediates the nature of the communication.
Fortunately, Second Life - well, strangely and happily - Second Life has a kind of stark contrast to the last 10 years of social media. Second Life has been a good experience for people. By good, I mean that they have grown by it. This is almost universally true. Again academics have studied it. I have the emails. People that come into Second Life report that they became friendlier, they became more open, and they went through life changes that were positive. Obviously, as we've all seen lately, going on Instagram or going on Twitter is not the same thing at all.
But it's the nature of those spaces between people that influences the outcome. If you add a lot of delay to communication - latency - if you make it more asynchronous, of course, human beings become very different. Asynchronous communication is not something that we've ever known, historically. Every moment of geological time in which humans have been on this earth has been face-to-face communication. In the last 10 or 20 years, we've suddenly had the opportunity to communicate without that. When you shift us to asynchronous where you don't read the comment on the Twitter post until 5 minutes later or 5 hours later, people are not kind. They don't strike a balance. They don't regard themselves as having hurt someone who is standing right in front of them. The difference in the medium and the design is critical.
Then you can do things like advertising where you can actually intentionally cause harm. There are, I think, ways those spaces can work that are even worse than asynchronous. They're actually actively causing people to dislike each other for profit, which is what we've got with something like advertising on Facebook or YouTube.
Mason: That's the wonderfully egalitarian promise of virtual worlds, as exampled by Second Life. They don't rely heavily on behavioural modification algorithms. The big tech advertising model really just breaks in these virtual spaces. Do you feel that virtual spaces offer a more ethical way to navigate social relationships online? Do you think the desire to apply some of these Web 2.0 design elements as new virtual worlds are appearing in the market will fundamentally be their downfall?
Rosedale: I certainly think, just as you said, that virtual worlds in general can offer a kind of neutral substrate that is as much as possible similar to real life. At least we can start with real life as an example where people are generally civil and good to each other. People face-to-face, as we all know - even in the world we're in right now - almost a hundred per cent of the time, people who are face-to-face help each other out with things and don't hurt each other.
Of course, a small percentage of the time they hurt each other and of course, we're all shocked and upset by that, and we should be. We've got to spend time thinking about how not to have wars. But the number of people, as an example, in a given year as a fraction of the human population that die as a result of violent conflict is just an enormously small number. I think that virtual worlds, therefore, by replicating the real world, can create a neutral environment where people are genuinely good to each other, just like in the real world.
As you said, there are really just two companies. It's really just Facebook and Google that in the last, what, 10 years now, have gone astray from that kind of neutral substrate model. I think the internet, in many ways - well the internet has been lots of experiments - but there have been lots of neutral, lifelike experiences, like Second Life. Like even Zoom, frankly. Zoom has its problems, but it's not actively causing harm. Surveillance advertising as demonstrated by primarily Facebook and Google definitely does cause harm. I guess the exciting human moment that we're in right now is around whether we can walk away from that, given that it's such a big money maker for, as you said, these Web 2.0 companies.
But again, it's really just two. It's really Facebook and Google that comprise. They're the anchors of that ecosystem, that surveillance advertising ecosystem.
Mason: What I love about you, Philip, and the way in which you speak about these virtual spaces, these virtual worlds, is the fact that value to you means something completely different. These virtual worlds teach us about what we value as human beings and they amplify certain values over others. Yet Web 3.0 and the push towards the metaverse seem to put value purely in that financialisation bubble. It's purely about speculative economics as opposed to creating something together. What do these worlds and what do the interactions within these worlds teach us about our values in the real world?
Rosedale: My first reflection on that is cryptocurrency and Web 3. Some of the worlds that we've seen people building almost kind of starkly make a point that we all - or at least a lot of us - already knew, which is that capitalism made perfectly frictionless and anonymous. It's almost like capitalism taken to its insane science-fiction extreme. Unsurprisingly, I think for most of us, can be a pretty destructive thing. Although yes, yes, yes. It reduces friction and allows any transaction to happen. In the limit of just allowing any transaction to happen, you get a bunch of really bad outcomes.
One of the things that I've written about and blogged about, and actually done some math - my background is physics and I've done some simulation of this - is that if you start everybody off with an equal amount of money and then you allow them to engage in purely financial exchange transactions - buy and sell things from each other - you actually, even without having banks or evil governments or anything like that, you actually get all the money ending up in one person's pocket like a poker game, quite rapidly.
Amazingly, there's a wonderful Scientific American article on this called, 'Is Inequality Inevitable?' from 2019. Surprisingly, I think, for a lot of us - even myself when I started modelling it - that is a kind of law of physics. It's a kind of thermodynamic reality that if we allow capitalism and if we allow free markets to operate without anything else if we basically create a virtual world that is just a free market like you said, what happens is dramatic poverty and a small number of people having all the money. It's kind of a mathematical law. It's not the property of people being mean or anything like that. Very well-intentioned people, you end up with one winner. Just the same as you end up with one winner in a poker game, even when all the players are roughly equally skilled.
Mason: That was the challenge you were dealing with largely with Second Life, wasn't it? There's this speculative question of if you give someone a sandbox virtual world, whether they'll become a creator or whether they'll just purely be a consumer. It feels like, and I still understand that Second Life has managed to strike that balance. There's still a velocity of exchange in Second Life. Part of the reason for that - you've spoken and written so beautifully about this - is the fact that it was never based on speculative economics. The thing that really destroys these decentralised Web 3, metaverse experiments is the fact that when someone buys their virtual space, it's a speculative asset. They're hoping that Steve Aoki or Snoop Dogg will move next door.
That was never the case with something like Second Life. Instead, it's about creating utility. If you bought your virtual land, you would build something on it or you would create something and you would add to the value of that land, not just sit on your empty island floating above it in the hope that that land would become more expensive due to the way in which the - I guess the Linden Dollar in the case of Second Life - worked. The Linden Dollar wasn't based on crypto and because of that, it worked in a virtual world. That was the joy of it.
Rosedale: Yeah, I mean the way you put it is good. I would say that if you think about virtual land...actually, I think Apple stock, if you think of the stock of a company, or Tesla stock - let's pick an even more funny example - can be thought of as being based on a tuner. In one direction of the knob, you have the actual utility of the space itself, which as you said is if your virtual world is appealing and your friends come by then there's value because there you are with your friends. More people come and you're having a fun time, and you're all listening to music like in Second Life. Okay, that land is worth something because tomorrow there will be another party. That's the perfect utility side of it.
Then there's the speculation side of it. It's like having every piece of virtual land or every public company stock comprised of a portion that is real utility. In Tesla's case, they make cars and you can buy a car. Then there is a portion of it that is just speculating on the likely future and the greater fools. If there are people coming in that believe it's worth more, they'll pay more for it, and if you hang onto your stock it'll become worth more.
Just as you said, you can turn the knob all the way that way which we've seen with some of the Web 3 land sale stuff, virtual land. You turn the knob all the way to speculation and you have this very ugly situation where everybody is just trying to flip property and scam each other, and hope for the greater fool to buy their property from them. It can be done both ways. Second Life really stands out, as does, say, IBM or something historically right, as an example of a case where the value of land in Second Life is largely driven by whether people show up there, and what you've built.
The other point, as you said, separable from that, is the value of a virtual currency. As many people, probably - it's a complicated and interesting thing, but as you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum are cryptocurrencies, as are many of the other cryptocurrencies, where there is only a fixed number of units of the currency, forever. What that causes is if there is any kind of increasing interest in using it, the price of the currency in the open market will go up. As we've seen with Bitcoin and Ethereum, fortunately, that means that they then cannot be used as a currency. When given the choice to spend them on milk, or a TV set, or an experiment, we will choose to instead hold onto them and not spend today, with the hope that we'll be able to buy more tomorrow.
Yeah, obviously this is kind of Economics 101, but with Second Life, we regulated the amount of currency in circulation so that it would remain constant in value. We were actually able to do that, I think, for reasons that make sense. We were able to do that somewhat better than, say, real-world governments do. We have gotten less static. We did a fairer, I would say, job of printing money and distributing it than governments did. We did a much fairer job than cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency intentionally doesn't print any more money, and that creates a failure case that any economist could have told you in 2008 before Bitcoin started.
Mason: Well, do you think there are some learnings there that need to be communicated more widely about why the Linden Dollar was so incredibly successful, in many ways?
Rosedale: Well, I mean as we touched on earlier, even disregarding the dollar, the first thing about Second Life that's important is that it genuinely allowed people to use their own creative skills to build things of value. There are a lot of talks - generally, people will use the acronym UGC for user-generated content. They'll use it broadly to mean environments, platforms and spaces where people can make things of value. That is a really big container. Within that UGC container, there's a lot of stupid stuff.
Again, speculation. If you hand out 10 golden raffle tickets that attach to some unknown thing in the future, you're going to get a speculative exercise. It's incorrect to say that the person who's hustling one of those tickets and selling it to somebody else is a creator or is part of the 'creative economy, as I hear said a lot lately. Second Life, on the other hand, by actually offering people building blocks and a toolkit that allowed them to make stuff so completely devoid of any currency, actually allowed people to be creative and therefore to participate in an open market in which you could see who could make the more amazing hair for avatar - to cite a specific example. It's really important that you create a sandbox, and then as you said, it's important that you create a means by which people can engage in trade. That's where the Linden dollar came in. We were just trying to do the thing that any community would do.
I always give this thought experiment, lately: if you were stranded on a desert island with 5000 other people and you were never going to leave - it was a big island or whatever with a good number of resources. If you were stranded with a whole bunch of other people, you'd all sit down and have this conversation about: how will we enable trade. Somebody wants to be a podcasting luminary host, like you. Somebody else wants to be a doctor. The question is, how do you allow people to do those different specialised things? The way you do that is by creating money. The problem is you've got to create the money and use the money in a way that is fair for everybody. That's kind of the...I guess that's the part we took on with the Linden Dollar. We had to make a fair playing ground for people to be creative.
Mason: I guess the success partly has less to do with the code and more to do with this wonderful word: emergence. It feels like emergence is the key to Second Life. These emergent properties, as you've so wonderfully spoken about in the past. I just wonder, was emergence always part of the DNA from the beginning? Did you know that the way in which the success of these worlds would be defined would be through the human scale? Putting people in and allowing them to take, I guess, more than a decade to work out what the model is for existence in these spaces.
Rosedale: I'm showing you my forearm right now, which has on it a tattoo. The tattoo says, "Cohesion, separation, alignment." For those in the computer graphics industry, they'll smile when they see that because the tattoo on my arm is the rule by which birds flock. Those rules create that beautiful, emergent behaviour that you see when you see a flock of birds. They have these incredibly gorgeous patterns and there's YouTube clicks of these things called murmurations of starlings, where thousands of birds when they get together, the patterns that emerge when those birds fly are just moving. They're spiritual when you see them. They come from these very simple underlying rules.
Yes. The idea of using simple underlying rules to create emergent behaviour was more than anything that drew me to the very idea of virtual worlds as a kid. I was interested in physics and then when I got into programming, I just had the good fortune of happening onto some examples such as these bird rules that were easy for a kid like me to try on the computer. When I saw the emergent patterns and the complexity that resulted from these very simple rules, I became convinced that that was something that I wanted to spend my life working on. It was so moving to see birds flying on a computer and realise that those simple rules underlie the beautiful things we see, even in the real world.
Mason: Well are the things that we're learning from these virtual worlds? These, I guess, mini-experiments that are being done every single day from how people are interacting and the emergent properties that are arising from those interactions. Are there things that we can learn and then bring into the real world? If these are experiments in, I guess, post-vital living or experiments in mini-societies or alternate possibilities for the real world, could governments and policymakers look at some of these islands and communities and go, "You know what? Maybe that's the way to run a country in the physical world."
Rosedale: You know, there are some groups in the early years of Second Life that were doing precisely what you're saying - and still are. It started happening quite early on when people would try different forms of governance, different forms of communal living, different models for collective ownership of assets and things like that. In Second Life today, for example, there's a large group of people who love sailing - real-world sailing. They've built these very accurate sailboats that simulate sailing in the same way that you might use a flight simulator to simulate flying. In doing that, they had to create these very large connected tranches of land that had waterways. In doing that, they had to build and collectively own these waterways and spaces, and then agree as to how they would behave within them and things like that.
There are a lot of experiments going on in Second Life and in virtual worlds, as well, about how do we govern ourselves. I guess one of the hopeful things I would think about is that as we go into these virtual worlds that have a little less risk in them - we can't actually die there, so we can harm each other with words but we can't harm each other physically - they do create a rich experimental ground for trying new forms of governance. I think we will find that.
I mean, I hope that Second Life, in some small way says, "Hey, you don't have to go all the way to the crypto way of printing money. You can actually do something that's kind of like the way a government works, but everybody ends up being quite happy with it." I think that's one example of something we did in Second Life.
Mason: That's what I find so fascinating - not about entering the virtual world but the virtual world having effect on the real world. One of your observations was how virtual worlds accelerate timescales. They accelerate everything we do. How true do you feel that has been and in what way do you think those rules enable us to bend, break, or change reality?
Rosedale: As you say, I think speeding things up and just letting a lot of flowers bloom - a lot of experimental flowers bloom - is the fundamental thing that virtual worlds do. The other thing is they let us be riskier by taking the cost of risk down a little bit. They kind of open our hearts as people often say these days, that we're more receptive to each other because our inhibitions are taken down a little bit by the virtual world. It's fundamentally a very rich experimental space.
I do think we're going to continue to see things. For example, there was this book that was released, I think on the fourth of July, 'The Network State'. It was a really, really interesting book. I think it's controversial because he takes a very pointed, philosophical perspective which is unnecessary. It's not bad or good, it's just additive to the baseline statements he's making, which is that we now have the technical tools to rebuild the nation-state in a variety of ways, that is different from what we've historically done. The nation-state of history has been a geographic collective. It's been all the people within a certain boundary in the real world, with a monopoly on violence as people say. It has had, typically, a single national currency. It's had certain requirements with respect to transparency and disclosure, and identity.
The nation-state of tomorrow, I think, will partly be a result of experiments in places like Second Life where you've got all the building blocks to try creating a different kind of nation-state, and to see how a group of people wants to form its own identity and create rules for themselves. You have the crypto-anarchist perspective which is: there should be no rules and there is nothing but the individual. I think that's obviously nonsense but it's a worthy experiment to be jumping into, which we've been doing. Then there are just all these other variations.
I think in the end, what we get to is this idea of: how do we come together in groups in a way that is best for us. The real world has given us the country and now we can try some other possibilities. I think what's likely and hopeful is that the world is going to stay stable enough for us to build digital nation-states of some kind. I was often quoted with Second Life as saying, "I'm not building a game, I'm building a country."
Mason: Well I mean it does feel that way. America, in many ways - and this is coming from a Brit - America was the do-over country. It was the new frontier. The States were designed to be a multitude of small different experiments in governance. As the federal government has taken over the US and we realise there's nowhere to go after you've gone all the way to California, it does feel like the next frontier in virtual space. It's a place to play, where the stakes, thankfully, are so much lower. You can't colonise virtual space because there's nothing there other than algorithms.
Rosedale: That's right.
Mason: So it's a much safer space to engage with. Then if done well, it can have a massive impact on our belief actually what's possible. I think that's why voices like yours, Philip, are so important. You have such a breadth of knowledge. If done well, there's such an opportunity. If done poorly, it could ruin the whole thing. It does feel like with all of the excitement around Meta or metaverses, we could end up doing it very poorly and we could all end up just seeing this thing as a conference room simulator.
Rosedale: Yeah.
Mason: That's where the experiment ends. That's my greatest fear for this.
Rosedale: Yeah, I mean there's so much packed into what you just said. I think that first of all, as you said, we can create new land, if you will, in virtual spaces. We can then go into that land in some ways similar to our, say, moving West in the United States. The thing that is hopeful though is that we can do that without a coloniser's mindset where we view the experience as depriving those who were there before us from their rights and their resources. Instead, we can truly look at the collective experience as being co-creation and moving into a tabula rasa.
But it is possible to do all that with a coloniser's mindset, which is terrible. As we talked about before, fighting over a cryptocurrency that's going up in value is exactly what creates that kind of negative outlook where we feel that we have to survive only by stealing from others. The opportunity with virtual worlds is to see it exactly not that way and to realise that we can co-create a larger space that we can then all share. We have to figure out - again touching back on why people go to Second Life, which is for each other - we have to figure out how to share that space together. That's where, as you say, the promise and peril comes in. If, for example, we're sharing it by surveilling each other and then exploiting each other through advertisements, that's a great example of a very, very bad dystopian outcome. But yeah, I think there's an opportunity to do it right, and I think Second Life shows at least one example of being able to do it right.
Mason: It always fascinates me that in Second Life, you didn't necessarily have a home or a property, or a starting place. Yet some of the promises of - again, I'm trying to avoid mentioning the company - but in some of the live demos we've seen in the last year, you have your homestead. That's where you select your clothes and spend most of your time, and where you interact with others. It's not about that, really. It doesn't feel like it should be about that. It should be about this co-creative experience. If it's truly going to work, it has to be done from the bottom up. Again, the egalitarian thing about Second Life was, here are the tools to build and you guys work it out. Allow for the immersion properties just to be.
When you do that, it feels like folk are very quick to emulate or simulate what they see in real life. I've always wondered whether that was because you needed a way in which to make people feel comfortable in these spaces. Or, it was a design of physics, or if it was a failure of imagination. A lot of these spaces are trying to emulate real worlds. There are gravity simulations, and there's physics there. You're a bipedal body with two arms and a head. We never go truly weird. If we wanted to build another world, what about a world that would melt? Why do all of these worlds have to feel so incredibly familiar? Is that an engineering issue? Is that the fact that with the physics models that create these virtual worlds, you have to start somewhere and it helps - that feeling of being there? Or do we just need to let the imagination run wild and see what we can truly create outside of anything we've experienced in lived reality?
Rosedale: That's great. I used to get asked a lot, and I think in my rasher, younger years I'd sometimes be mean and say, "That's a dumb question." People would ask me, "What surprised you about Second Life?" I'm kind of like, "For heaven's sake. Look at what it is. It was pretty much designed for everything to be surprising." What did surprise me is just what you said. With a toolset which would enable people to create almost anything, people - statistically speaking, and surprisingly to me at the outset - created things that were from the real world.
The example that I always think of would be - because we all as human beings know these two artefacts - would you rather, in a virtual world, drive around in a Lamborghini, or a Landspeeder from Star Wars? I always thought the Landspeeder would be the choice because it can kind of fly. It would be spectacularly imaginative and wonderful to build strange spaceships or starships, or whatever. Yet, the thing people built first was the Lamborghini. The reason for that, though, and what I can understand, I think, is that we subconsciously cannot keep ourselves from valuing most of those things which we have seen most before. Cultural artefacts like Lamborghinis, or Rolexes or whatever are things that we have come to value in the real world and so our first, I think, instinct is to rebuild these things in the virtual world.
I used to say that Second Life is kind of - again, it's very large and diverse - but statistically, Second Life is the average of all our dreams. What it must look like. I used to say this, "What it will look like is the average of all of our dreams." The average of all our dreams is Malibu. It's Los Angeles, California.
Mason: People need weirder dreams.
Rosedale: Exactly. Do you know what we did see though? People start with Malibu and then get weirder and weirder after that, which I think is wonderful. Inevitably we build first what we knew before in these virtual worlds - of course, this is true for even radio as a medium, or something - we started with the structure, the rituals and the things we knew before. Then we eventually go beyond that. Again, as you said it's a time machine. Hopefully, we can be more urgent. We can get people to get out there and get stranger and more imaginative a bit earlier than they might in the real world.
Yeah, weird alternative anatomies. We can just be a slime mould, sushi or something entirely, entirely other. There was one idea that I wanted to run by you, which I first heard from an artist friend of mine and a friend of the show. It's this idea of not just Second Life, but Third Life, which is the melding of AI with avatar-based lives. The artist was Stelarc - the performance artist Stelarc. He's done a lot of artistic experiments with platforms like Second Life. He would always bemoan the idea that when you log off, you no longer exist in that reality. In his mind, a third life would be where avatars - these extensions of you - know enough about you from your behaviour inside of those platforms or elsewhere that when you sign out, your avatar can then take over. It can continue to navigate the virtual world; continue to live your life and make decisions or perhaps even make friends on your behalf. By the time you sign back in, you would have made a friend that you in the real world, or you in Second Life, would actually want to spend time with.
The question would be whether it was two AIs becoming friends, or a human and an AI becoming friends. Do you think perhaps that's the future of this? Will we port an element of our identity and allow it to live independently of us, to do experiments on our behalf inside of these worlds? We sign out, and then we sign back in and we find it in some sort of virtual strip club and we're like, "What are you doing!?" and they're like, "Well I'm part of you, so you tell me what I'm doing here."
Rosedale: Well, first of all, let me thank you and say we go now into one of my very favourite kinds of philosophical excursions which is the melding of artificial intelligence with virtual worlds. That's one which is lately taking up a lot of my time. I've had a real interest - alongside simulation - I've had a real interest in the mind. Of course, as AI has continued to grow as expected, it's come to a point where AI is powerful enough now to be somewhat like us and soon to be beyond us in a number of ways that we're already seeing. This topic is just absolutely near and dear to me. There are so many things to say about it.
One imagined experiment is what you just said, which is what if an AI that inhabits your avatar in the world kind of learns from you and then continues on without you in the world. I think that's very likely to happen. I think there are good and bad possible outcomes to that. I think the ethics of keeping people alive after they're dead so that they can be visited in virtual worlds is very fraught. I don't think that's an easy one to even start into. I think that an AI pretending to be you are going to homogenise your behaviour in one of the ways that have been dangerous. Social media is making us all into beautiful people living beautiful lives, so that's changing what we really are in the medium of Instagram into something that's not just not true, but more importantly, is just boring. We're all becoming the same. We're becoming the same beautiful person on Instagram. I think there's risk to that.
Ranging afield to like you're saying about AI, one of the things that has interested me the most historically has been that the avatar was always something different than the rules of the world. What I mean is Second Life has physics. You can roll a ball down a hill in Second Life and it really will roll down the hill. You can't not have it roll down the hill. The laws of physics are unbreakable in Second Life in the same way that they are in the real world.
The laws of physics stop at the skin of the avatar. The avatar - and by the way, this is true both in virtual worlds like Facebook's Horizon. The virtual world with people wearing VR headsets makes this all the more true. The world is typically running some sort of laws of physics of its own and has things that live wholly within the world. The ball rolling down the hill in Second Life is truly part of Second Life. That ball is on its own. It is evolving forward according to the rules of Second Life which is this shared rules set. Everybody has to abide by the fact that the balls can roll down the hill, but the avatar is this really weird transitory thing where it is being animated - puppeteered if you will - by a human who is outside the simulation and is not subject to the laws of physics. Of course, there are good aspects to this. You can't kill someone by killing their avatar, right? Thank goodness. But there's a certain lack of reality in that breaking of rules. This is one of the things that I've been fascinated by.
Just as you say, inevitably as we get more powerful AIs, we are then going to have our first example of a sort of digital native. The AI in the virtual world will truly live there and belong to that world in the way that we belong to Earth. That fascinates me - that we're going to see things which are alive and intentional, and are fully contained within these simulations; living things that are there. I think that the collision between us and them - if you will - is going to be fascinating and uncertain. How do we engage with artificial lifeforms that not just live in virtual worlds, but are part of their reality in a way that we aren't?
Mason: Because they're part of their reality, I've always found them more authentic. We've got this rise of the virtual influencer, like Lil Miquela. She's a product of the platform of Instagram and she's a virtual avatar that is existing a life that is purely fictional and purely virtual. The reason I find her more authentic is that she is a product of that medium. Human Instagram influencers are manipulating their face through filters and not only that, they're manipulating the reality around them. They're putting rainbows in the sky. There are pink filters on reality. They're taking something that is real and morphing it into something completely other.
If anything, I would trust a virtual entity perhaps more, because it is a product of that virtual world; that virtual reality.
Rosedale: Exactly. I mean, well put. I think that there will be authenticity, if you will, whether it's good or bad or whatever - let's see. There will be a sort of authenticity to the virtual beings that truly live in these worlds, that we won't have. I think there's this great danger of AI being harmful to us because we as human beings have this hubris that is undeserved and we're going to discover that really quickly in the next few years. To think, for example, that I can never be manipulated by an AI, I mean come on. We know those days are over.
I also worry more broadly than just virtual worlds, I worry, can humans interact with AIs that are so much smarter than them and that can easily manipulate humans? It'd be like us and our animal pets. Probably the animals might harbour the illusion that they can outsmart us, but it isn't true. To us, pets are very easy to manipulate. Humans are going to be very easy to manipulate for AIs. Where's that going to go?
Mason: Having heard everything you've just said there, I do have to ask: flying. Was that just a practical way to get around or was there something more significant to the idea of being able to get off the ground? As a kid, I remember seeing Peter Pan. It was one of the first theatre things I ever saw. Obviously, it's on wires, but Peter Pan flies. I remember the first time I used Second Life which I think was in 2010 or 2011, the minute I could fly I was like, "This is it. This is what I've been waiting for since I was five years old." What was that piece? Was it purely a transportation system which made things easier for the engineers? Or was there something more philosophical and hopeful going on there?
If you go and look at Second Life today, you'll notice that when you fly, your avatar has a particular animation that it also does. Those who know Second Life well can see it in their heads right now. It's kind of a trinity from The Matrix sort of animation. In the mid-kick where the arms are outstretched the body is kind of floating like a God or something. That was very intentional. I don't know if you remember how Superman flew. He kind of had that one arm forward and one arm at his chest. We actually spent so much time flying because it was such a spiritual experience.
When demonstrations were going badly in the early days of Second Life - which happened a lot because of bad bandwidth, slow computers or whatever - I was presenting Second Life to a journalist or something who was writing about it. If things were falling apart and not working so well, and they weren't understanding the world, I would reach over the journalist's shoulder and I would hit the 'F' key which is 'fly'. The avatar would rise up off the ground into that animation and I'd press the arrow key forward, or I'd tell the journalist to. They'd hear the wind in their ears, which is another thing I personally worked on quite a bit - the actual physics of the wind in your ears. Everybody would suck in their breath. They'd be like, "Ahh. Oh. That's cool." That idea of being able to freely move as if you were underwater or as if you were a bird is really powerful. I wouldn't say I completely understand it, but it was very intentional. We wanted it to feel great.
By the way, we didn't want you to teleport everywhere. I could talk about that for hours too. The idea of jumping instantaneously, however, from one point to another, is actually undesirable for a variety of reasons. It surprises the people. It's unfair to the people who are in the position you're arriving. You're kind of surprising them. We discovered this even more with the VR headsets. It's very upsetting to you if I basically teleport you - even a few meters by the way, from one place to another as some VR games do - your brain has a kind of map, literally. You have these neurons that are quite literally spaced as a grid in your brain. Moving along a line through that neurological space is vital to our sense of presence; our sense of being in a space. Teleporting breaks that illusion. It rattles you out of the flow-like sense of moving continuously through space. It's a really interesting thing. That was another reason why we wanted to make flying work well because we wanted flying and walking to be the preferred means by which you got around and teleporting to be less frequent.
Mason: That's so interesting. I never thought about that, but yeah. The teleportation piece does break the place illusion. It jars you out of existence in that time and space at that moment, in that space. One thing you famously spoke about was the idea of digitising everything - the goal to digitise the world. Does that still remain a north star for you, whether with Second Life or otherwise? Are there some things you came to realise that it's just impossible to digitise? There are some things that are just so tricky or fuzzy, that we'd never be able to place them into virtual worlds. Or as an engineer and a physicist, is it hard for you to not see reality as code, now?
Rosedale: So I think that's great. I would say that the younger me who was talking to people in 2006 about Second Life, I did say that we should digitise everything - that that was the goal. I would say now after 20 years of thinking about it, I don't agree with that anymore. One of the reasons people say they want to digitise everything is to digitise friction. Somebody - maybe me, or somebody - needs to write a book called 'Friction' to basically talk about the utopian idea of making everything frictionless. It's this utopian nonsense that is not, in fact, the endgame we strive for. For example, we have only a limited ability to take in information. That means you do want friction around some things. Some stuff, you want to come to you more slowly. Some stuff, more quickly.
The goal that I had about digitising everything - I think that was a youthful, well-intentioned but utopian perspective. I think that particularly, for example, being forced to share the world's natural resources with each other is a kind of game, if you will, that is very important and inherent. It is a very important part of the human experience. If you seek to digitise everything so that none of us has any limits on what we're doing, I don't think that's a world we want anyhow. Our experience as human beings is to share the world with each other and to do so in a way that is mutually satisfying.
I think that a lot of the 'digitise everything' - even the spirit which I said 20 years ago - was kind of, "Hey, shouldn't we all be able to get away from each other and not have any responsibilities?" or something like that. I think that's not true. I've come to a much greater reverence for the limits of the world. I kind of think the thing you do now with technology is to say, "What are the right kinds of friction?" How do we build virtual worlds that are hard in the right ways and easy in other ways. I think with the benefit of, say, 20 years, I can try to do that in the future better than I did in 2006.
Mason: I think that's so important for people to hear, because when folk today talk about digitising everything, really the only reason to do that is to stick it on the blockchain so that every single object and thing that you own - whether in lived reality or otherwise - has some sort of numerical code attached to it.
Going back around to this more simplistic way of dealing with these virtual spaces, that's what I love about what you did with High Fidelity in 2013. You realised that sometimes, less it actually more. High Fidelity is this incredible spacial-audio-based experience. What did you find that was so unique about sound, other than visuals or the need for virtual avatars that also gave the human brain that feeling of being there? It also gave - I guess to use the name of the company - a High Fidelity experience for an individual.
Rosedale: I think sound and our ability to stand in a circle around a fire - the campfire is this fundamental element that we've all rediscovered in the age of VR - standing in a circle facing each other as a group and then communicating is this fundamental human experience.
The thing that makes that work in spatial audio... because spatial-audio lets you just talk in the same effortless way as you always have done before. As you know, technically what happens is we move the sounds of the other people's voices around in space, which is this hard math problem that we've done very, very well at High Fidelity. We basically present the sound of another person's voice over there, at that place where they're standing, perfectly. What that enables is for everyone to talk comfortably and not have to mute themselves and unmute themselves, and do all of that stuff. On Zoom, or on a telephone call or a conference call, if two people talk at the same time, they both have to stop, wait and start again because you don't understand either one of them. That's because when you hear sound coming from the same point in space of two or more people, your brain can't understand it.
The simple thing we took on - which turned out to be a lot of math and a lot of code but as you said, as an experience, it's very simple - is just to make the sound work correctly. Spatial audio is a requirement for future virtual worlds in which we can collaborate.
I think as we touched on at the beginning with regard to the minority of people who are willing to go into Second Life, for example, we're still not there yet. Even the audio by itself is not quite sufficient to mediate interactions between strangers. You still need some non-verbal information, perhaps some eye contact and gaze information. I think that's probably going to get solved, but we still don't quite know the science that we're going to have to figure out to make it magically happen. Yeah, spatial audio allows people to come together and solves this problem of just being able to talk at the same time, which is so vital to human beings.
Mason: Well the wonderful thing is there is an entire next generation of young individuals who might be able to solve some of these problems. They might be better equipped to solve some of these problems because of tools like Roblox and Minecraft. Are you excited for this next generation of future-builders, having seen some of the projects that they're doing in these spaces?
Rosedale: I really am. I watched my kids, for example, build Minecraft and was very inspired by it. My kids were able to, as early teenagers...people stop using systems like Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite at about 14, at about the point where they become mature and begin to become adults. In the time before that when they're younger than that, the way that kids use these buildable environments - these plastic environments - to play together and communicate is very inspiring. I think we are going to see qualitatively different systems that are built by the kids that are becoming developers today. Their way of manipulating the world around them is just different and new. We're going to really see that play out.
I do think, though - as a sidenote - that it's still important to recognise those late teenagers today, as a particular cohort, are actually very demanding of authenticity in communication. They don't use avatars for live communication. They don't use filters for live communication, by the way. They force FaceTime or Discord audio live with no modifications on each other. I think they're actually doing that as a reaction to all the nonsense, all the Instagramming and all the made-up lives that we've been kind of doing over the last decade.
I would say that cautiously, the kids are not the ones that are going to use avatars and virtual worlds yet, but they're going to build the next generation of worlds to their own needs. I don't think they're going to flood into the Web 3 virtual worlds. Those are not what they're going to want. But I think we may see them build something beyond that.
Mason: The ability for this stuff to go towards a smartphone, for you, that's the key. Not virtual reality headsets. I was fascinated to learn that.
Rosedale: Yeah. You know, I think that famously, Facebook missed mobile. They managed to kind of get back on the horse by buying a bunch of companies and stuff. For Second Life, the transition to mobile was much harder. We never made it, because I think that the window of the mobile device - historically especially, as you said, in the age before the vast amount of computing and things like facial recognition that we have on these devices now - the in-between time it really reduced the liveness and sense of being that you kind of has with virtual worlds in VR headsets or on large 2D screens.
The smartphone is this different target that I think none of us knows how to build for yet. Again, I'm sure that the younger people that are coming of age now as developers are going to build new things for us.
If you want to change the world in a positive way with virtual reality or virtual worlds, you're building for the smartphone. You need to remember that the number of people worldwide who have got fancy computers with GPUs is not anywhere near the global population. It's 10 or 15 per cent of it or something, at best. If you're going to really change the world, you need to pick up that smartphone and figure out how you're going to do community, belonging, togetherness, emergence and communication through it. I don't think anybody quite knows that yet.
Mason: So Philip, this is the FUTURES Podcast so I have to ask you to just for a second, look into the future. If I was to ask you what virtual experience you hope someone might soon build, or what form of immersion you hope you might get to experience, what might that actually be in the future?
Rosedale: Going to school. Ready Player One is a film that everyone talked about a lot. The book and the film differ in a very significant way. The book gives you the critical piece of backstory that legitimises the whole virtual world that you see in the film. That backstory is school. The idea in the book is that the real world has collapsed - particularly the United States as described in the book - in a way that the kids have to go to school with VR headsets. As a result, they build connections. They build deep and lasting connections with kids with whom they went to school and whom they can then go on adventures. The film basically sadly skips that whole backstory and then presents a kind of dystopian vision of a horrifically financialised and very shallow game-like world.
What lies behind that is this idea of going to school. I would say that the way in which - whether on smartphone devices or whatever - the way in which the world can be changed and I think is likely to be changed next in the future is that we really will be able to go to school in virtual spaces. I think once we can do that, that is both one: a positive thing if we can provide equal access to all. The experience of studying something together with other people in virtual reality - in a virtual world - is going to be completely revolutionary. Second Life still has many, many colleges and schools experimenting in different ways with it. I think we all sense that something is going to pop up here, at some point. VR is going to get good enough. There are going to be breakthroughs with virtual worlds and smartphones that enable us to go to school with other people in a class. Personally, I still point to that and I think that even more practical in the near term, that's likely to be something really big that we're going to see.
Mason: Well Philip, it feels like you've certainly schooled me on virtual worlds. On that absolutely fascinating note, I just want to thank you for being a guest on the FUTURES Podcast.
Rosedale: Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
Luke Robert Mason: Thank you to Philip for revealing the impact that virtual worlds can have on society. You can find out more by visiting Rosedales dot com, forward slash, Philip.
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