"Second Life" is an ominous code-word of sorts in today's meme_world.
The meaning, however, depends on which clique one happens to be a part of- presently... gamer-dude. Hey, they may call it a Playstation nowadays, but how long till it morphs into a forced-work-station? That, my friend, is what the trickster excels at: the double and triple-cross of making 'control' seem voluntary. Here is the plain vanilla story with following speculation, partially regurgitated. http://www.ddj.com/blog/portal/archives/2007/04/playstation_mee.html For present purposes, the following piece of wordy bogosity will not even consider the implications of second-life as they relate to religious dogma. There is plenty of info and dis-info on that subject elsewhere, yet it is all definitely entangled together as a prophetic view of a new collective identity: a NWO, so to speak. For the computer gamer, the second-life concept refers to the next generation of "virtual world" applications, such as the 3D Internet. Not just "SimCity" on steroids, but way beyond that level of visual crudeness. It will better than the best Pixar movie imaginable, and with human characters (avatars) so real that no one can be sure of what/who is real, and and what is not - and all done "on the fly", according to the whims of the game participants. This is on schedule for 2010. To the millennial alarmist or conspiracy theorist, on the other hand, "Second Life" could refer to an enabling technology for a kind of "Matrix" scenario, in the years following 2012, not unlike the movie ... which will result in a (possibly voluntary) type of future enslavement by machines of our own creation. It may appear to be voluntary, but the choice will like be that or nothing, so to speak. The irony is that the former field (computer games) will probably be seen as one of the major technological stepping stone for the later. A rapid advance towards a hidden goal requires an innocuous mass market, with lots of profit incentives, for quickly pushing the development of enabling-tek towards what could be a hidden goal (tyranny)... unless that kind of "everlasting life" is attractive to your tastes. Part of a trickster master plan, it would seem - since what is one person's tyranny is another's nirvana. And now for a good one: the Matrix in the context of 'alternative-energy' ... ROTFL- since in the eponymous movie, and perhaps as a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor, the remnant human population was said to be enslaved merely as "batteries" i.e. an energy source for a future energy-depleted world. Ironically in the NWO, and in the ultimate vision of human destiny: paradise is both eternal physical life, but of a type which has no correspondence to what the individual thinks is happening. It is 'tank life' - being hard-wired into a mainframe, and may end-up being be similar in appearances to the movie- i.e. an immobilized, enslaved, but totally "happy" and content population ... yet with a divine purpose which is a bit more sinister (than batteries). Why? Why not just destroy us all? Well, almost every serious Futurist who looks at AI concludes that the one and only thing which computers of the future will not be better at than humans is that special kind of creativity which is found in a tiny percentage of artists, inventors, writers, musicians, theorists and so on. The remaining 99.99% of humanity is just along for the ride, worker-bees who fill in the gaps made possible by a tiny segment of creative individuals. Is it poetic justice that this arty population of thinkers will be the future occupants of the matrix-tanks ? or, as gruesome as that sounds at first - at least there is a future for them, as for the other 99.99% of our species, they will likely share with dinosaurs the title of 'former dominant species' ... museum displays at best - at least according to those alarmists who would try to read much into cultural trends. Well, today's advance towards that vision of the NWO isn't much more threatening than the headline: PlayStation 3 meets the mainframe -- but it's still ominous to some. The deal in the article above is that IBM announced a project that integrates many of the near-teraflop cell processors (developed along with Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console) into an IBM mainframe. To what end? According to IBM - and assuming that they are not already under trickster control - it is for the purpose of creating a future hybrid that is fast and powerful enough to handle the new generation of "virtual world" applications - i.e.: second-life. ... or else, it this another piece of an emerging picture-puzzle - a real game we can now call "Evolutionary-Jump". On NPR recently there was an update on a non-invasive brain-computer interface technology, which already offers more control than once thought possible. A brain-computer interface (BCI) translates electric signals detected from the scalp or other stimuli into a command structure which the computer understands, and vice versa. It offers the same precision and speed as electrodes surgically implanted in the brain, but it had been widely assumed that only invasive devices could control complex activity. http://www.news-medical.net/?id=6745 Which brings to mind the continuation and logical progression of other prophetic visions seen in film-art: which are the subject of two remarkable but overlooked cinematic masterpieces - "Strange Days" and "Brainstorm". Fortunately, there is both a benign and a tyrannical vision of where it all could be leading. More later - on a more inviting kind of future-tek paradise. Sorry, guys, the 72 virgins is out. But Mr Smith can probably arrange something like that for your tank, if you prefer... Jones
