Making It or Breaking It

by Jeffery Whitman

“There's the slow way and the very slow way.”
What else could I say, standing in the plaza in San Francisco,
where the camping trolley seats don't pay out,
where the lag makes everybody walk, run, fly in place;
legs and arms flailing like so many cartoon characters falling in a dream,
and she so innocently asked, “How do you make money here?” 

It was an unexpected question and it  made me think…
no one would ask that in a MOO fourteen years ago,
not in that first second life. 

There was no San Francisco hussle, Charms swindling SLP Bonus Slots waiting
for you to pay in your hard earned lindens so a well-timed, bad-luck crash
could steal all your future winnings.
Like always, my bad luck is someone elses good. 

Now here we got real life concerns… protesters with their placards
with their real life problems.
“No More Lag,” “No More Crashes,” “Second Life Sucks,”
and that's why they keep logging back on to buy Gucci and live
like Las Vegas and have the bodies and sex
they wished they had back at that other life. 

But there's an underground here too.
It lurks just beyond the forming-before-your-eyes horizon,
In the middle of that forming-before-your-eyes now,
which materializes after you do.
It's not all fluff and flash, sparkling Barbies and buffed out Kens.
Or even weirded out Goth Star Wars Punk fantasies.
There's an inner matrix more real than the real
and networks sprout faster than the fruit on money trees for newbies,
and NGOs have their islands too and you can learn a lot at Camp Darfur,
or find the all in the none and peace and answers at a Green Tara Temple. 

You can internationalze your friend pool while breaking time zone barriers
and subversive librarians still give their information for free.
You can join a real revolution, fighting and winning byte by byte
with the tools of a new brave world:
scripting and building, building and scripting,
opening the pie, create there and edit here with the ease of blue red green
and investing it all in a Kerouakian virtual IT.
Creating a word, spreading a world,
threading IT together and just like making lindens,
there's the slow way… and the very… slow… way.