Making a Metaverse That Matters

Afterword: Where in the Virtual World the Platforms and People from This Book Are Now

Philip Rosedale continues to advise Linden Lab on the future of Second Life, though lately he's set his sights on a somewhat more ambitious goal: using what he's learned from the economies of metaverse platforms to solve global economic inequality in the real world:

“I want to give people something like the Linden Dollar but just as an iPhone app that they basically can use to buy and sell anything from each other,” as he put it to me in a February 2023 call.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, Rosedale created an economic simulation that showed him a frightening thing: “Even with people in a small community trying to look after each other, you will basically end up with a kind of a natural, almost a thermodynamic problem, where some randomly chosen people will basically just end up getting more and more money.”

He sees that in the state of the real-world economy: “If you recognize that the economic system we have is so broken, the only safe assumption is we're going to have a violent revolution, as has been had many times throughout history.”

Some metaverse platforms might help with inequality, he believes, but then again, others will not: “Roblox is a lottery you're not going to win,” as he puts it, echoing concerns raised in Chapter 4. “You can't go into Roblox and say, ‘I'm gonna make my living in here.’ Maybe you can go into Second Life and say that.”

His new project, called FairShare (www.fairshare.social ...