Jowls Are Available

This is a new article of mine in the new issue of The London Review of Books.  The whole thing can be found here.

Most religions suggest that we get at least one other go at being. Christianity offers an afterlife, Judaism suggests an altogether better existence once the Messiah arrives, while Hinduism and other Eastern religions try to deal with samsara, the terrible burden of having to do life over and over again until you get it right. But I don’t think any of them offer much help with the alarming notion of multiple worlds, which quantum theorists have arithmeticked to prove entirely possible. As far as I can understand it, Many Worlds Theory proposes that there are n zillion worlds like this one but marginally different, operating in parallel to the only world in which we think we exist. There you’re wearing pink kitten heels not Hush Puppies, there you had sausage for breakfast not muesli, there it so happened that you took a left turn not a right one and became a fashionistic, carnivoracious arch-criminal instead of the peace-negotiating, vegan, style wasteland you are in this world. We might each be living out all our possible lives, through all the variations of what we could possibly say or do, in an infinite number of worlds where everyone else is living out their variations, each at some weird angle to this one that my sorry, innumerate and spatially challenged brain is unable to comprehend. If this sounds like hell on earths to you then you probably haven’t signed up for Second Life....

Comments

[Bill Freese]

I have met people in Second Life who cannot imagine why anyone would waste a single moment there, since there is nothing interesting to do. Personally, I cannot find the time to do all the things I want to do there. I have half a dozen projects going, and a multitude of places I still need to visit. I have attended great presentations, seen marvelous sights, met wonderful people, learned a lot about my real life profession, and have yet to see a pole dance. I know they are there, but who has the time to waste on them.

In my home town, there are people who hate the place because it is so dull, and people who love the place because it is so fascinating. I'll bet your town is the same. In this way, Second Life is very much like Real Life. As for not finding "Socrates in the agora" in Second Life, well, that is one of the projects I hope to get to.
Bill Friis in SL

[Jenny Diski]

No. I just wandered around, hoping to come across interesting things. I used the search engine to try and find interesting things but it didn't help much. My trip was as a curious non-specialist tourist as Kim Flintoff suggests below. I wasn't doing an in-depth study of Second Life but visiting and responding to it as someone who had heard of it and just dived in, prepared to spend a couple of hours a day for a couple of weeks checking it out.

[SignpostMarv Martin]

Just curious, did you visit Svarga ?

[nigel]

Thanks for the great review. I'm looking forward to your review of WOW (that's World of Warcraft). I'm sure you and your readers will find comfort and deeper meaning where you can level up in prescribed and formulaic manner.

[Kim Flintoff]

Umm.. where does one start with such piously presented ignorance?

Your article may well serve your interests somehow - but it does little to paint a complete picture of what transpires within Second Life - a 3D persistent virtual world or MUVE - Multi User Virtual Environment.

I was hoping I might hear something about the various educational projects that are underway within the environment - or perhaps some of the interesting social research that is happening, or even some of role-playing games that occur, the business undertakings, the programming developments that allow experimentation with virtual eco-systems, the various performances or art exhibits that occur... Did you visit EduIsland, or EduNation or perhaps one of the more literary locales? Did you take time to investigate the projects looking at accessibility issues for visually impaired users? Did you look into the development of teaching and learning tools? Did you seek out islands that are drawing on non-realistic, non-literal metaphors? What of the libraries, the university campuses, the schools? Perhaps the locations run by Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Arcada (Finland), or even the egalitarian Open University from the UK?

…no??

.. I find no mention of any of these exciting and engaging projects - rather you seem to have deliberately sought out the most mundane of activities that are possible within the environment.

Did you talk to anyone working on the Diversity 2007 project? Or perhaps drop by the Transgendered Resource Centre? Or maybe you spent some time with Social Autopoiesis, one of the first fully-formed interactive NPC avatars in Second Life? Did you go to the building tutorials at the Ivory Tower of Prims to learn how to shape the world to create your own wondrous possibilities - or did you simply drop in like a tourist with little regard for local culture and heritage? Did you arrive in a world that draws on social constructivism and expect to be entertained without any investment of your own?

When you visit a new city do you immediately head for the red-light district? Perhaps this is a flawed approach to tourism that you have adopted, perhaps it might be better to visit some museums or art galleries before you go off seeking more base pleasures? Perhaps your predilections were not catered for?

Your review is ill-informed and presents a misguided, partial and misleading representation of activities within the Second Life environment.

I am happy to take you to some of the places you might find more edifying but I suspect your grandiose and supercilious attitude finds greater comfort in condescension than it does in open-minded exploration.

Look me up in world as Kim Pasternak.

Kim Flintoff B.A., Grad. Dip. Ed., M.Ed.

[Steven Augustine]

There is, presumably, one of these n-zillion worlds in which the sausage you have for breakfast has an old vaudevillian's face and is singing 'Mammy!' as you tuck into it. Something to think about?

[aidehua]

Thank you for that article in LRB. It had occasionally struck me that perhaps I ought to make some effort to find out about this second life business. Your write-up has saved me previous hours of cyber-faffing.

[Carl]

Second Life sounds like an Ouspensky novel.