The Metaverse is made by imperfect people with conflicting interests, but more than anything, it exists because user communities make it real. Rarely, however, do these communities act in solidarity to improve their own virtual world for the good of all.
Angry YouTubers often post rants complaining about a platform's new policy change or feature update, but they are usually ignored, or not even noticed amid the Internet's constant churn.
Small disorganized groups of users sometimes lash out at the platform's corporate owner in a way that doesn't help their cause but does threaten the overall health of their own community. We saw that with the Steam review bombing of VRChat featured in Chapter 7. While the startup's cofounders moved quickly to address the protest's legitimate concerns, the protesters’ use of unfairly poor reviews hurt VRChat's growth and reputation on the world's largest game/VR distribution platform.
The need for focused activism by metaverse communities on behalf of metaverse communities has never been greater. User creators devote much of their lives to laboring on user-generated content that disproportionately profits the company owner; everyday users are often preyed upon by trolls and predators and don't feel sufficiently protected by the company. (Just to name a few of many concerns.) Government bodies or class action lawsuits may eventually step in to force change, but not usually before tremendous damage has already been done.
There's a better way to be an activist in the Metaverse. I've seen it play out myself.
Also, it was pretty hilarious.
Twenty years ago, at the start of my metaverse career, I witnessed a user uprising that changed the shape of Second Life and, by extension, the future of metaverse platforms to come. Second Life being Second Life, it was led by a humanoid cat abetted by a pro-wrestling supermodel and a teenage kid with a gang of dancing rats.
In its earliest period, Second Life operated on a monthly subscription model, with users getting a weekly stipend of Linden Dollars, a land allotment, and an allotment of objects they could create on their property. Create more prims than range allowed, and the company deducted some L$ from that user's account—in effect, a “tax” on excessive building. By doing so, the company hoped, it would discourage poorly optimized construction that contributed to server lag, which hurt everyone's enjoyment of the world.
These intentions backfired with beautifully catastrophic results.
Because as the tax policy was imposed in the late summer of 2003, a group of dedicated Second Life users were already hard at work creating “Americana,” a kind of sprawling immersive theme park dedicated to iconic American locations: Fenway Park, Route 66, the Washington monument, and so on. But because the “prim tax” did not offer any exemptions for collaborative, group-based building projects, the Americana group suddenly found itself volunteering to create interesting content that benefited Linden Lab—and being taxed for their efforts.
So when I visited Americana after a barrage of frantic, late-night messages, it was already in open revolt.
The Route 66 gas station had been set ablaze by an insurrectionist midget in giant shoes, who stood there at 2 a.m., gleefully shooting off seditious fireworks while several flag-waving rats danced at his feet. And everywhere, giant tea crates: the Washington Monument had been buried by a stack of giant tea crates; the center of Fenway Park, buried under a pyramid of crates; Washington Monument, barely peeking out behind a pile.
The metaverse-based Boston Tea Party did not end there. Across the world, signs and billboards took up their cause; emblazoned on signs and billboards bristling from homes and lawns and cyberpunk alleys were the words “Born Free—Taxed to Death!”
While no one enjoys paying their monthly subscription fees, what bolstered the revolutionaries’ protest was their charge that Linden Lab had failed to keep the vision it promised on its website and ads, and above all in its official slogan, “Your world, your imagination.” What the tax system offered was not a world of freeform imagination, but a platform where stringent limits were set on that creativity.
The tax revolt frittered away after some weeks of protest, gently smothered by the embrace of Linden Lab, which took pains to publicly praise the protesters. But the uprising inadvertently exposed a near-fatal flaw in the company's operations: Its revenue model was so unfair, it provoked an organized revolt with virtual arson and gratuitous tea crate stacking.
But the revolt also indirectly encouraged the company to move away from the subscription model, and take what was a radical leap for the time: End monthly subscriptions, and instead, sell Second Life users plots of virtual land and charge usage fees for their regular maintenance. It led to the first sustained virtual real estate boom of any mainstream metaverse platform, and continues to be influential to this day. Consciously or not, the blockchain metaverse platforms I cover in Chapter 6 bear the DNA of this policy move, and therefore, to the Second Life community tax revolt.
This policy protest is among the earliest (and the most visual) to convulse a metaverse platform, but it's far from the only one. Most of these later protests, however, quickly fall beneath the social media churn, unnoticed, and don't lead to actual platform change.
Following are lessons I take from Second Life's 2003 tax protest that dedicated user communities might want to draw from today.
Second Life's tax protest hit before the advent of Twitter, but it did occur during the rise of blog networks (the Twitter of the time), enabling news to quickly spread to a relatively small but often influential following. Had my reporting on the uprising not been featured by the Yale Law School blog and on Terra Nova, a group blog popular with virtual world/gaming academics, developers, and reporters, it would have likely fallen far beneath the surface of wider attention.
Since then, the scale of attention has completely changed. Metaverse platforms are no longer projects for niche technology startups, but massive companies worth billions of dollars, most of them publicly traded on the stock market.
This makes any significant uprising of community members a potential news item both for technology and business reporters, both of whom treat Twitter as their virtual news desk and tip hotline. Drawing their attention could make all the difference. A virtual tree falling in the forest doesn't make any sound in the Metaverse if no one's on the same server, and a metaverse platform controversy doesn't exist until The New York Times asks the corporate owners about it.
The Second Life revolutionaries’ declaration was directed against “Mad King Linden”—decidedly not any actual, specific individual with Linden Lab. This was partly done (as its leader told me later) to prevent the protest from seeming like a personal attack against Linden's employees. This also made Linden Lab far more likely to fully listen to the grievances, without defensiveness or suspicion that the movement was really just an aggregate of personal grudges against them ginned up to seem like a revolt.
With the giant tea crates and exploding rockets, the Tax Revolt was very much a Second Life phenomenon, fully leveraging user-created content and the improvisational play inherent in a metaverse platform. It's why so many SLers were eager to participate, or hang back as amused but still-engaged spectators—and why many Linden employees happily joined in the fun.
In 2003, Second Life's population was mostly from the United States, so modeling the virtual tax revolt after the American colonists’ resistance to British taxation had a unique emotional power for most of the community—and for most people reading about the revolt on technology news sites. And because it was directly associated with a major real world historical moment, anger over what was fundamentally a subscription policy suddenly took on an epic, transcendent appeal.
What ultimately drove the revolutionaries, and led them to essentially succeed, was their belief that Second Life’s tax policies were betraying its own vision as an improvisational, collaborative, community-minded world. Most other metaverse platform companies have similarly high-minded mission statements with lofty ideals—check their websites, I promise you it's somewhere there.
Weeks after it started, the Second Life tax revolt began to generate a backlash (some users even dubbing themselves “Linden loyalists”), while infighting among the activists was threatening to undermine its general goals. But public statements by the company acknowledged that their message had been received. That was enough for the activist leaders to present their followers with a verifiable win and wind down the protest with dignity.
It occurs to me, having written this based on a protest that happened on a metaverse platform, that these guidelines probably apply equally well to real world activism. Your reality mileage, however, may vary.