When it launched almost two decades ago, ‘Second Life’ promised an environment where residents could carve out an existence without many of the restrictions of physical reality. Even gravity was optional in a world where you would simply make your avatar fly to wherever it needed to be.
Though ‘Second Life’ provided the ability to create a new virtual identity and all the looks to go with it from scratch, designing and making your own stuff is time-consuming even if it is easier to do in a virtual space where all the components are just bits of data. Many users opted to stick with 18th-century economist Adam Smith’s invisible hand and instead of DIYing their new life bought what they needed from specialist creators. With that came an economy.
In principle, ‘Second Life’ is a near-zero marginal-cost environment. As long as the servers can support it, you can copy its digital objects at will and pass them onto others freely. What is the price of an individual...