ALSO BY LESLIE JAMISON

NONFICTION

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

The Empath;)' Exams: Essays

FICTION

The Gin Closet

MAKE IT

MAKE IT

ESSAYS

LESLIE JAMISON

Little, Brown and Company

New York Boston London

'

Sim Life

G idge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house overlooking a glit-tering creek, its lush banks lined with weeping willows. Nearby meadows twinkle with fireflies. Gidge keeps buying new swimming

pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The current

specimen is a teal lozenge with a waterfall cascading from its archway

of stones. Gidge spends her days lounging in a swimsuit on her poolside

patio, or else tucked under a lacy comforter, wearing nothing but a bra

and bathrobe, with a chocolate-glazed doughnut perched on the pile of

books beside her. "Good morning girls," she writes on her blog one day.

"I'm slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning, but when I'm

surrounded by my pretty pink bed it's difficult to get out and away like

I should."

In another life, the one most people would call "real," Gidge Uriza

is Bridgette McN eal, an Atlanta mother who works eight-hour days at

a call center and is raising a fourteen-year-old son, a seven-year-old

daughter, and severely autistic twins who are thirteen. Her days are full

of the daily demands of raising children with special needs: giving her

twins baths after they have soiled themselves (they still wear diapers,

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MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN

and most likely always will), baking applesauce bread with one to calm

him down after a tantrum, asking the other to stop playing the Barney

theme song slowed down until it sounds, as she puts it, "like some

demonic dirge." One day, she takes all four kids to a nature center for

an idyllic afternoon that gets interrupted by the reality of changing an

adolescent's diaper in a musty bathroom.

But each morning, before all that-before getting the kids ready for

school and putting in eight hours at the call center, before getting dinner

on the table or keeping peace during the meal, before giving baths and

collapsing into bed-Bridgette spends an hour and a half on the online

platform Second Life, where she lives in a sleek paradise of her own

devising. Good morning girls. I'm slow moving, trying to get out of bed this

morning. She wakes up at half past five in the morning to inhabit a life in

which she has the luxury of never getting out of bed at all.

W hat is Second Life? The short answer is that it's a virtual world that launched in 2003 and was hailed by many as the future of the internet. The longer answer is that it's a controversial landscape-

possibly revolutionary, possibly moot-full of goth cities and preciously

tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rain-forest

temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs

and trippy giant chess games. In honor of Second Life's tenth birthday, in

2013, Linden Lab, the company that created it, released an infographic

charting its progress: 36 million accounts had been created, and their users

had spent 217,266 cumulative years online, inhabiting an ever-expanding

territory that comprised almost seven hundred square miles composed of

land units called "sims." People often call Second Life a game, but two

years after its launch, Linden Lab circulated a memo to employees insist-

ing that no one refer to it as that. It was a platform. This was meant to

suggest something more holistic, immersive, and encompassing.

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LESLIE JAMISON

Second Life has no specific goals. Its vast landscape consists entirely

of user-generated content, which means that everything you see has

been built by someone else-an avatar controlled by a live human

user. These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up,

get married, and make money. They celebrate their "rez days," the on-

line equivalent of a birthday: the anniversary of the day they joined.

At church, they cannot take physical communion-the corporeality of

that ritual is impossible-but they can bring the stories of their faith to

life. At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life

summon rolling thunder on Good Friday, or the sudden illumination of

sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces,

"He is risen." As one Second Life handbook puts it: "From your point

of view, SL works as if you were a god."

In truth, in the years since its zenith in the mid-2000s, Second Life

has become something more like a magnet for mockery. When I told

friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always

followed the same trajectory of reactions: a blank expression, a brief

fl.ash of recognition, then a mildly bemused look. Is that still around?

Second Life is no longer the thing you joke about; it's the thing you

haven't bothered to joke about for years.

Many observers expected monthly-user numbers to keep rising after

they hit one million in 2007, but instead they peaked there-and have,

in the years since, stalled at about eight hundred thousand. And an

estimated 20 to 30 percent are first-time users who never return. Just a

few years after declaring Second Life the future of the internet, the tech

world moved on. As a 2011 piece in Slate proclaimed: "Looking back,

the future didn't last long."

But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend

hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven't we found our-

selves inside it? Only it's come to pass on Facebook, Twitter, and

Instagram instead. As I learned more about Second Life and spent

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MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN

more time exploring it, it started to seem less like an obsolete relic and

more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of us actually

live in. Perhaps Second Life inspires an urge to ridicule not because it's

unrecognizable, but because it takes a recognizable impulse and carries

it past the bounds of comfort, into a kind of uncanny valley: the promise

of not just an online voice but an online body; not just checking Twitter

on your phone, but forgetting to eat because you're dancing at an online

club; not just a curated version of your real life, but a separate existence

entirely. It crystallizes the simultaneous siren call and shame of wanting

a different life.

In Hinduism, the concept of an avatar refers to the incarnation of a deity on earth. In Second Life, it's your body: an ongoing act of self-expression. From 2004 to 2007, an anthropologist named Tom

Boellstorff inhabited Second Life as an embedded ethnographer, nam-

ing his avatar Tom Bukowski and building himself a home and office

called Ethnographia. His immersive approach was anchored by the

premise that the world of Second Life is just as "real" as any other,

and that he was justified in studying Second Life "on its own terms"

rather than feeling obligated to understand people's virtual identities

primarily in terms of their offiine lives. His book Coming of Age in

Second Life, titled in homage to Margaret Mead's classic about adoles-

cent girls in Samoa, documents the texture of the platform's digital

culture. He finds that making "small talk about lag [streaming delays

in SL] is like talking about the weather in RL," and interviews an av-

atar named Wendy, whose creator always makes her go to sleep before

she logs out. "So the actual world is Wendy's dream, until she wakes

up again in Second Life?" Boellstorff recalls asking her, and then: "I

could have sworn a smile passed across Wendy's face as she said, 'Yup.

Indeed.'"

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LESLIE JAMISON

One woman described her avatar to Boellstorff as a truer manifesta-

tion of her interior self. "If I take a zipper and pull her out of me, that's

who I am," she told him. Female avatars tend to be thin and impossibly

busty; male avatars are young and muscular; almost all avatars are

vaguely cartoonish in their beauty. These avatars communicate through

chat windows, or by using voice technology to actually speak. They

move by walking, flying, teleporting, and clicking on "poseballs,"

floating orbs that animate avatars into various actions: dancing, karate,

pretty much every sexual act you can imagine. Not surprisingly, many

users come to Second Life for the possibilities of digital sex-sex

without corporeal bodies, without real names, without the constraints

of gravity, often with elaborate textual commentary.

The local currency in Second Life is the Linden Dollar, and recent

exchange rates put the Linden at just less than half a cent. In the decade

following its launch, Second Life users spent $3.2 billion of real money

on in-world transactions. The first Second Life millionaire, a digital-

real-estate tycoon who goes by Anshe Chung, graced the cover of

Businessweek in 2006, and by 2007 the GDP of Second Life was larger

than that of several small countries. In its vast digital Marketplace, you

can still buy a wedding gown for 4,000 Lindens (just over $16) or a ruby-

colored corset with fur wings for just under 350 Lindens (about $1.50).

You can even buy an altered body: different skin, different hair, a pair of

horns, genitalia of all shapes and sizes. A private island currently costs

almost 150,000 Lindens (the price is fixed at $600), while the Millennium

II Super Yacht costs 20,000 Lindens (just over $80) and comes with more

than three hundred animations attached to its beds and trio of hot tubs,

designed to allow avatars to enact a variety of bespoke sexual fantasies.

Second Life started to plateau just as Facebook started to explode.

The rise ofFacebook wasn't the problem of a competing brand so much

as the problem of a competing model. It seemed that people wanted a

curated version of real life more than they wanted another life entirely.

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MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN

They wanted to become the sum of their most flattering profile pictures

more than they wanted to become a wholly separate avatar. But maybe

Facebook and Second Life aren't so different in their appeal. Both find

traction in the allure of inhabiting a selective self, whether built from the

materials oflived experience-camping-trip photos and witty observa-

tions about brunch-or from the impossibilities that lived experience

precludes: an ideal body, an ideal romance, an ideal home.

Bridgette McNeal, the Atlanta mother of four, has been on Second

Life for just over a decade. She named her avatar Gidge after what

the bullies called her in high school. Though Bridgette is middle-aged,

her avatar is a lithe twentysomething whom she describes as "perfect

me-if I'd never eaten sugar or had children." During her early days

on Second Life, Bridgette's husband created an avatar as well, and the

two of them would go on Second Life dates together, a blond Amazon

and a squat silver robot, while sitting together at their laptops in their

study at home. It was often the only way they could go on dates, because

their kids' special needs made finding babysitters difficult. When we

spoke, Bridgette described her Second Life home as a refuge that grants

permission. "When I step into that space, I'm afforded the luxury of

being selfish," she said, invoking Virginia Woolf: "It's like a room of

my own." Her virtual home is full of objects she could never keep in

her real home because her kids might break or eat them-jewelry on

dishes, knickknacks on tables, makeup on the counter.

In addition to the blog that documents her digital existence, with

its marble pools and frilly, spearmint-green bikinis, Bridgette keeps a

blog devoted to her daily "RL" existence as a parent. It's honest and

hilarious and full of heartbreaking candor. Recounting the afternoon

spent with her kids at the nature center, she describes looking at a bald

eagle: "Some asshole shot this bald eagle with an arrow. He lost most

of one wing because of it and can't fly. He's kept safe here at this retreat

we visited a few days ago. Sometimes I think the husband and I feel a

63

LESLIE JAMISON

little bit like him. Trapped. Nothing really wrong, we've got food and

shelter and what we need. But we are trapped for the rest of our lives by

autism. We '11 never be free."

When I asked Bridgette about the allure of Second Life, she said it

can be easy to succumb to the temptation to pour yourself into its world

when you should be tending to ofiline life. I asked whether she had ever

slipped close to that, and she said she'd certainly felt the pull at times.

"You're thin and beautiful. No one's asking you to change a diaper,"

she told me. "But you can burn out on that. You don't want to leave,

but you don't want to do it anymore, either."

S econd Life was invented by a man named Philip Rosedale, the son

of a U.S. Navy carrier pilot and an English teacher. As a boy, he

was driven by an outsized sense of ambition. He can remember standing

near the woodpile in his family's backyard and thinking, "Why am I

here, and how am I different from everybody else?" As a teenager in the

mid-'80s, he used an early-model PC to zoom in on a graphic represen-

tation of a Mandelbrot set, an infinitely recursive fractal image that kept

getting more and more detailed as he got closer and closer. At a certain

point, he realized he was looking at a graphic larger than the Earth. "We

could walk along the surface our whole lives and never even begin to

see everything," he explained to me. That's when he realized that "the

coolest thing you could do with a computer would be to build a world."

Just as Rosedale was beginning to envision Second Life, in 1999,

he attended Burning Man-the festival of performance art, sculptural

installations, and hallucinogenic hedonism that happens every summer

in the middle of the Nevada desert. While he was there, he told me,

something "inexplicable" happened to his personality. "You feel like

you're high, without any drugs or anything. You just feel connected

to people in a way that you don't normally." He went to a rave in an

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Airstream trailer, watched trapeze artists swing across the desert, and

lay in a hookah lounge piled with hundreds of Persian rugs. Burning

Man didn't give Rosedale the idea for Second Life-he'd been imagin-

ing a digital world for years-but it helped him understand the energy

he wanted to summon there: a place where people could make the world

whatever they wanted it to be.

This was the dream, but it was a hard sell to early investors.

Linden Lab was proposing a world built by amateurs and sustained by

a different kind of revenue model-based not on paid subscriptions,

but on commerce generated in-world. One of Second Life's designers

recalled investors' skepticism: "Creativity was supposed to be a dark art

that only Spielberg and Lucas could do." As part of selling Second Life

as a world rather than a game, Linden Lab hired a writer to work as an

"embedded journalist." This was Wagner James Au, who documented

the digital careers of some of Second Life's most important early build-

ers: an avatar named Spider Mandala (who was managing a Midwestern

gas station ofiline) and another named Catherine Omega, who was a

"punky brunette … with a utility belt" in Second Life, but ofiline was

squatting in a condemned apartment in Vancouver. The building had no

running water and was populated mainly by addicts, but Omega used a

soup can to catch a wireless signal from nearby office buildings so she

could run Second Life on her laptop.

Rosedale told me about the thrill of those early days, when Second

Life's potential felt unbridled. No one else was doing what he and

his team were doing. "We used to say that our only competition was

real life." He said there was a period in 2007 when more than five

hundred articles a day were written about their work. Rosedale himself

loved to explore Second Life as an avatar named Philip Linden. "I was

like a god," he told me. He envisioned a future in which his grand-

children would see the real world as a kind of "museum or theater,"

while most work and relationships happened in virtual realms like

65

LESLIE JAMISON

Second Life. "In some sense," he told Au in 2007, "I think we will see

the entire physical world as being kind ofleft behind."

Alice Krueger first started noticing the symptoms of her illness when she was twenty years old. During fieldwork for a college biology class, crouching down to watch bugs eating leaves, she felt

overwhelmed by heat. One day while she was standing in the grocery

store, it suddenly felt as if her entire left leg had disappeared-not just

gone numb, but disappeared. Whenever she went to a doctor, she was

told it was all in her head. "And it was all in my head," she told me,

forty-seven years later. "But in a different way than how they meant."

Alice was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of fifty.

By then she could barely walk. Her neighborhood association in Col-

orado prohibited her from building a ramp at the front of her house, so

it was difficult for her to go anywhere. Her three children were eleven,

thirteen, and fifteen. She didn't get to see her younger son's high-school

graduation, or his college campus. She started suffering intense pain

in her lower back and eventually had to have surgery to repair spinal

vertebrae that had fused together, then ended up getting multidrug-

resistant staph from her time in the hospital. Her pain persisted, and

she was diagnosed with a misalignment caused by the surgery itself,

during which she had been suspended "like a rotisserie chicken" above

the operating table. At the age of fifty-seven, Alice found herself house-

bound and unemployed, often in excruciating pain, cared for largely

by her daughter. "I was looking at my four walls," she told me, "and

wondering if there could be more."

That's when she found Second Life. She created an avatar named

Gentle Heron, and loved seeking out waterslides, excited by the sheer

thrill of doing what her body could not. As she kept exploring, she

started inviting people she'd met online in disability chat rooms to

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join her. But that also meant she felt responsible for their experiences,

and eventually she founded a "cross-disability virtual community" in

Second Life, now known as Virtual Ability, a group that occupies an

archipelago of virtual islands and welcomes people with a wide range

of disabilities-everything from Down syndrome to PTSD to manic

depression. What unites its members, Alice told me, is their sense of not

being fully included in the world.

While she was starting Virtual Ability, Alice also embarked on a real-

life move: to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee from Colorado,

where she'd outlived her long-term disability benefits. ("I didn't know

you could do that," I told her, and she replied, "Neither did I!") When

I asked her whether she felt like a different version of herself in Second

Life, she rejected the proposition strenuously. Alice doesn't particu-

larly like the terms real and virtual. To her they imply a hierarchical

distinction, suggesting that one part of her life is more "real" than the

other, when her sense of self feels fully expressed in both. She doesn't

want Second Life misunderstood as a trivial diversion. After our first

conversation, she sent me fifteen peer-reviewed scientific articles about

digital avatars and embodiment.

Alice told me about a man with Down syndrome who has become

an important member of the Virtual Ability community. In real life his

disability is omnipresent, but on Second Life people can talk to him

without even realizing he has it. In the offiine world, he lives with

his parents-who were surprised to see he was capable of controlling

his own avatar. After they eat dinner each night, as his parents wash

the dishes, he sits expectantly by the computer, waiting to return to

Second Life, where he rents a duplex on an island called Cape Heron.

He has turned the entire upper level into a massive aquarium, so he

can walk among the fish, and the lower level into a garden, where he

keeps a pet reindeer and feeds it Cheerios. Alice says he doesn't draw

a firm boundary between Second Life and "reality," and others in the

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LESLIE JAMISON

community have been inspired by his approach, citing him when they

talk about collapsing the border in their own minds.

W hen I first began working on this essay, I imagined myself

falling under the spell of Second Life: a wide-eyed observer

seduced by the culture she had been dispatched to analyze. But being

"in-world" made me queasy from the start. I had pictured myself de-

fending Second Life against the ways it had been dismissed as little more

than a consolation prize designed for people for whom "first life" hasn't

quite delivered. Instead I found myself writing, Second Life makes me

want to take a shower.

My respect deepened intellectually by the day. I talked with a legally

blind woman whose avatar had a rooftop balcony from which she could

see the view (thanks to screen magnification) more clearly than she

could see the world beyond her computer. I heard about a veteran with

PTSD who gave biweekly Italian cooking classes in an open-air gazebo.

I visited an online version of Yosemite created by a woman who had

joined Second Life in the wake of several severe depressive episodes

and hospitalizations. She used an avatar named J adyn Firehawk and

spent up to twelve hours a day on Second Life, devoted mostly to

refining her curated digital wonderland-full of waterfalls, sequoias,

and horses named after important people in John Muir's life-grateful

that Second Life didn't ask her to inhabit an identity entirely contoured

by her illness, unlike internet chat rooms focused on bipolar disorder

that were all about being sick. "I live a well-rounded life on SL," she

told me. "It feeds all my other selves."

But despite my growing appreciation, a certain visceral distaste for

Second Life endured-for the emptiness of its graphics, its night-

clubs and mansions and pools and castles, their refusal of all the grit

and imperfection that make the world feel like the world. Whenever I

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MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN

tried to describe Second Life, I found it nearly impossible-or at least

impossible to make it interesting-because description finds its traction

in flaws and fissures. Exploring the world of Second Life was more like

moving through postcards. It was a world of visual cliches. Nothing

was ragged or broken or dilapidated-or if it was dilapidated, it was

because that particular aesthetic had been carefully cultivated.

Of course, my aversion to Second Life-as well as my embrace

of blemishes and shortcomings in the physical world-testified to my

own good fortune as much as anything. When I moved through the real

world, I was buffered by my (relative) youth, my (relative) health, and

my (relative) freedom. Who was I to begrudge those who had found in

the reaches of Second Life what they couldn't find offiine?

One day when Alice and I met up as avatars in-world, she took me to

a beach on one of the Virtual Ability islands and invited me to practice

tai chi. All I needed to do was click on one of the poseballs levitating

in the middle of a grassy circle, and it would automatically animate my

avatar. But I did not feel that I was doing tai chi. I felt that I was sitting

at my laptop, watching my two-dimensional avatar do tai chi.

I thought of Gidge in Atlanta, waking up early to sit beside a virtual

pool. She doesn't get to smell the chlorine or the sunscreen, to feel the sun

melt across her back or char her skin to peeling crisps. Yet Gidge must

get something powerful from sitting beside a virtual pool-pleasure

that dwells not in the physical experience itself but in its anticipation, its

documentation, and its recollection. Whatever categories of "real" and

"unreal" you want to map onto online and offiine worlds, the pleasure

she finds in going to Second Life is indisputably actual. Otherwise she

wouldn't wake up at half past five in the morning to do it.

F rom the beginning, I was terrible at navigating Second Life. "Body part failed to download," my interface kept saying. Second 69

LESLIE JAMISON

Life was supposed to give you the opportunity to perfect your body,

but I couldn't even summon a complete one. For my avatar, I'd chosen

a punk-looking woman with cutoff shorts, a partially shaved head, and

a ferret on her shoulder.

On my first day in-world, I wandered around Orientation Island like

a drunk person trying to find a bathroom. The island was full of marble

columns and trim greenery, with a faint soundtrack of gurgling water,

but it looked less like a Delphic temple and more like a corporate retreat

center inspired by a Delphic temple. The graphics seemed incomplete

and uncompelling, the motion full of glitches and lags. I tried to talk

to someone named Del Agnos but got no response. I felt surprisingly

ashamed by his rebuttal, transported back to the paralyzing shyness of

my junior-high-school days.

On that first day in-world, I teleported to a deserted island where

there was supposed to be an abandoned mansion and a secret entrance

to a "bizarre circus in the sky," but all I found was a busted lifeguard

station perched on stilts in the sea, where I was ( once again!) ignored

by a man who looked like a taciturn cross between a WWF wrestler

and a Victorian butler, with a silver-studded dog collar around his neck.

I ended up falling off a wooden ledge and bobbing in the gray rain-

pocked waves, under a permanently programmed thunderstorm. This

wasn't exactly the frustration of lived experience, in all the richness of

its thwarted expectations, but something else: the imperfect summoning

of its reductive simulation. It was like a stage set with the rickety

scaffolding of its facade exposed.

Each time I signed off Second Life, I found myself weirdly eager

to plunge back into the obligations of my ordinary life. Pick up my

stepdaughter from drama class? Check! Reply to my department chair

about hiring a replacement for the faculty member taking an unexpected

leave? I was on it! These obligations felt real in a way that Second Life

did not, and they allowed me to inhabit a particular version of myself

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as someone capable and necessary. It felt like returning to the air after

struggling to find my breath underwater. I came up gasping, desperate,

ready for entanglement and contact: Yes! This is the real world! In all its

vexed logistical glory!

At my first Second Life concert, I arrived excited for actual music in

a virtual world. Many SL concerts are genuinely "live" insofar as they

involve real musicians playing real music on instruments or singing

into microphones hooked up to their computers. But I was trying to do

too many things at once that afternoon: reply to sixteen dangling work

emails, unload the dishwasher, reload the dishwasher, make my step-

daughter a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich before her final rehearsal

for a production of Peter Pan. The concert was taking place on a

dock overlooking an expansive bay of sparkling blue water. With my

jam-sticky fingers, I clicked on a dance poseball and started a conga

line-except no one joined my conga line; it just got me stuck between

a potted plant and the stage, trying to conga and going nowhere. My

embarrassment, more than any sense of having fun, was what made me

feel implicated and engaged. In wondering what other people thought

of me, I felt acutely aware-at last-of sharing a world with them.

When I interviewed Philip Rosedale, he readily admitted that Second

Life has always presented intrinsic difficulties to users-that it is hard

for people to get comfortable moving, communicating, and building;

that there is an "irreducible level of difficulty associated with mouse

and keyboard" tha

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