 Thanks. Thanks everyone for coming. So as she said I'm the author of making a second life So I should give you some audio visual references just to understand what I'm describing in the book That is what second life looks like. It's an online virtual world And so it's on the internet and you download it and you install it and you create an avatar Avatar is your alter ego and you can create basically whatever you want it to be in second life And it's a user created world. So all the objects that you see in this image The buildings and so on are in the clothing are created by the users of second life And this this world was created by a company called Linden lab and they're based here in San Francisco Actually, they started in Hayes Valley on Linden Street where a blue blue bottle coffee is right now as a startup now They're a huge company of about 400 people but They started and the original idea was sort of to create a utopian world and a place where if you Log in with the software you can kind of create whatever Identity you want to make and really start to create a society from scratch and I was a technology writer for Wired and Salon and some Other places and they were telling me about it way back in 2003 and as they were telling me about what they had in Mind about this whole place that you can go in and sort of Recreate your identity they said well maybe you could write for us because we're kind of forming a new society And we want someone to go in and talk about what's happening And so to me it sounded sort of like an embedded journalist So it was sort of a embedded virtual journalist And so that's actually my my avatar there and I wear a white suit in kind of a tribute to Tom Wolf And so I'd go in and I'd start talking to people and see what they're doing and you know a lot of times They're just socializing using it to have parties and big dance parties a second life was inspired a lot by a burning man So there's kind of that burning man spare a lot of naked fun parties and things like that great art installations and so on So that's what I did for the first three years of second life's existence And that what that's what the book is about but really what to me the book is about is What you can kind of recreate from scratch, you know with your identity and The parts of our human nature and human culture that are kind of going to go with you Into what sometimes called the metaverse and you know, so you learn a lot about yourself. I think and about humanity Hopefully so this is this is a story from the book about a person I interviewed that's her avatar there the blonde avatar and As as you see at the bottom now She's a black avatar because you can change what's called a skin a skin is like a body tattoo And you can buy and sell these in second life And so you could literally change your race of of of your avatar that you control. So let me talk about her This is a story I wrote called the skin you're in Normally Erica there Ian's avatar is blonde in California tan Nothing less than the archetypal white girl of the world's dreams Recently her friend chip midnight asked her to model his latest skin Not an unusual request since midnight is a long-established master of customized avatar skins that residents make buy and wear When they're gonna when they're going for a look that Linda labs own interface can achieve She'd wear midnight's latest skin around second life to build up word-of-mouth and generate sales I've been throwing my new stuff to take for a spin midnight explains to me She's very social so she's a good way to get feedback viral marketing in other words at its most immersive But when she wore one of midnight's recent skins it also became as Erica tells me almost a black like me thing She's referring to the landmark 60s book in which a white man attempts through painstaking But not very convincing makeup to experience life as an african-american This is because midnight's latest skin Happened to be the skin of a staggeringly photorealistic attractive young african-american woman Someone akin to say tennis star Serena Williams set to avatar form Many gasp in admiration when they're in appeared in public in her midnight skin Some however did not she found that out after she randomly teleported into a location where a couple of avatars were standing around One man took a look at her and announced look at that and word bitch another said great They're gonna invade second life now She spent three months in the skin of a black woman some of her friends shied away She believes then there were she adds the guys that thought I was an easy lay for lack of a better term She was astounded at the reaction, especially when an avatar's racial appearance is changeable with a single mouse click Other reactions were more muted a Couple of close friends in second life simply stopped talking to her and when they randomly ran into each other greeted her with a polite chill You know how you interact and something changes and no one tells you Another friend framed their problem with her in a uniquely paradoxical query like when he got to go back to being you Darian told me some of her black friends in real life They were black about her experience in midnight skin and they were not surprised at how I was treated at all She says as it happened some of them are also residents of second life and play as white avatars Some of them because there were no there were no good black skins available. She explains others because they just felt more accepted that way And though she didn't alert the Linden company to the racist speech directed at her She had street justice schemes of her own cooked up She waited for the right moment to spring it on one of the men who aimed the hated racial epithet at her Listen, she tells me laughing. I waited till he was with a group of his buds I went in and thanked him for the wonderful virtual sex and left I mean thank them as a black lady you betches. He says she says chuckling They're congratulating him till he denied it most vehemently Which only got them asking why showed him for the bigotty was Which was really the larger lesson she learned in her three months within midnight skin Showed me who are the good people who are the fakers? That is a good thing to know Being black is the limit litmus test for the virtuous. I ask yes, she tells me. Thank you