The Ephemerality of Second Life

I have a little bit of a formal training in the (Western) Classics, and a longer self-training as an amateur. This means I regularly deal with texts that look like this:


This is West's Iliad (Teubner). The top of the page is the text of the poem itself. All the stuff on the bottom is called a "critical apparatus," and gives other evidence about what the text could look like — alternate readings found in other manuscripts, how other authors quote lines from the poem, etc. The apparatus represents the entire history of the survival of the Iliad as a text. The transmission isn't perfect — as the size of the apparatus attests — but in general we have a decent handle on the history of the text over time, even if there are always gaps.

We have nothing remotely like this for the web, which rots away at an amazing pace, even with things like Archive.org valiantly trying to fight off the entropy. Our entirely digital ecosystem is insanely fragile, far more than paper and parchment. For Second Life, this is all even more the case — everything is entirely transient.

Transience is an important quality of life. Without the passing of the old, the new could never happen. But there is in humans a strong tendency to preserve at least some of the old. Without an archive mechanism, it is entirely possible all the work that went into Second Life could just disappear one day, the victim of some random business decision. I don't think this is imminent, but it is a reality to consider. All that will remain is some of the social connections people made, and a lot of (digital) pictures.

All of this dwelling on transience is due to a visit I made a few days ago. I periodically check out old landmarks I've kept to make sure they still go where I think they do. Of course, some have to be pruned as sites go away. The one I visited a few days ago was a concert venue used by Torben Asp for years, his Open Arms Cross Church (OACC).

There were plenty of times when I went for years visiting SL only on Sunday mornings to catch Torben's usual live set. Torben himself passed in September 2022, and in the last few months the land on which he performed for so many years finally passed hands. All that's left now is memories and an inactive group for show announcements. For some reason, I never took a picture at OACC, which I now regret.

Oscarton Forest Park sunrise

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