Do you know “Second Life”? This is one of the internet services which provide internet users “new life” in the virtual reality. Let me briefly explain about this service.

“Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the cyberpunk literary movement, and particularly by Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. (Wikipedia.com)”

You can get more info. from wiki, if you would like to. As far as I know, a lot of major retail companies (NIKE, Verizon, SONY….etc) already have tentatively started their business and many other business people are watching that world’s movement. I heard that there is a private user who already became a millionaire in the Second Life. That means the person also became a rich in the realy world becase currency in the Second Life (Linden, or L$) can be cashed to real money.

What I want to point out is that the human finally reached to create another world (but this is not “world” precisely becuase users’ actions are still restricted and have limit) and you can become any kind of person you want. In other words, I would say after capitlism voraciously ate whole physical world, they discovered “new frontier” as their final destination. Moreover, size of the land is limitless.

We are about to erase the line between virtual world and real world. What’s gonna happen if we completely erase that line? No one knows it. But I guess that at the same time, we are going to erase lines between gender, ethnicity, culture, identity, religion, and most of the ideological lines that we often struggle and often appreciate. Actually, it is your choice if this happen is good or bad for human. But we might not be “us” anymore after we erase the line. If I quote some words from Jean Baudrillard, it’s gonna be complete “camouflaged individuals,” chaos of “gender fluidity,” and “degeneration of the cinematographic illusion.”

 However, you don’t have to worry too much about the emergence of Second Life because, as i mentioned earlier, there is no ideology or philosophy exists (except capitalism), and users’ possible actions have limit. The service has not provided complete freedom to users yet. But we have to be aware, if once the service allows us to do anything in that virtual world (creating political, economic, and social systems or policies, establishing countries, starting wars, crimes, discrimination, religions, and more). Because I think that’s gonna be the first step to completely lose “us.”