Second Life Safari: Room 101 vs. Anshe Chung

Thanks to the Author

Q&A with Anshe Chung, virtual philanthropist

 

Contribute’s Janet Rae-Dupree created a digital “self” — an avatar called Scoop Raymaker — to enable her to explore Second Life and interview its first philanthropist, virtual real estate tycoon Anshe Chung. Rae-Dupree was typing into Second Life from a PC in Los Angeles; Anshe Chung’s real-world persona, Chinese businesswoman Ailin Graef, was typing into Second Lifefrom her computer in Wuhan, China. They met in a virtual art gallery in Second Life for a recent interview. What follows is an edited transcript of that other-wordly exchange:

Second life: unreality check

It doesn’t look like much, at least not from the outside. A pair of double doors on a quiet San Francisco street leading into a converted warehouse. The low morning sun casts shadows across the street, accentuating the edges of the surrounding buildings and making everything look sharper, more real. Once inside the double doors, though, reality effectively ceases to exist. Here there is no death, no disease, no pain, no gravity and no sex – or not as we know it. Here you can be anyone you want to be. Nine years ago a brown-haired, bug-eyed, boundlessly enthusiastic man in his late twenties called Philip Rosedale founded a website called Second Life. The principle behind it was simple enough. Using the latest technology, people would be able to enter a virtual world. There, they could create a new identity for themselves – an avatar. If they wanted to change sex, that was fine. If they wanted to have two heads and a tail and give themselves a silly name like Aurora Lunarsea, that was fine too. There were no limits, except the limits of users’ imaginations, and next to no rules.