My first Medialoper assignment and I’ve already missed a deadline. Lopy, the Editor, e-mailed me last night to remind me that my story should be filed no later 5 a.m. this morning. By 8 a.m. my voice mail was full and I was ignoring Lopy’s frantic IMs. The general election isn’t until November 2008 — over 18 months away. Why the hell do I have a 5 a.m. deadline in April of 2007?

For the record, Linden Lab did a major upgrade yesterday and the grid was down much longer than expected. On top of that I’m still setting up my new compound in one of the most remote regions in all of Second Life. My hut is located on the Eastern edge of the universe (literally) and is surrounded by water as far as the eye can see (at least until a casino or strip club moves in next door). It’s the perfect environment for me to focus on covering a political campaign as strange as the one the 2008 presidential race is shaping up to be. These ludicrous 5 a.m. deadlines are no help at all.

By now you’ve probably heard that all of the leading Democratic presidential candidates have setup headquarters in Second Life. So far the media coverage of these campaigns has been muddled, skeptical, and occasionally mocking. For reporters who can’t tell the difference between a virtual world and a video game, there’s no clear reason for the campaigns to be here. Those same reporters are overlooking the fact that presidential campaigns are already a game, and moving that game into a virtual world full of sex-crazed furries and flying penises is simply a logical progression in the already weird history of American politics.

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If you’ve been exposed to any of the recent media hype surrounding Second Life you may have come to the conclusion that Linden Lab’s virtual world is some kind of unstoppable force. Second Life membership has accelerated to nearly half-million new signups per month, Linden founder Philip Rosedale seems to be everywhere at once (although it may just be his Avatar), and SL-celebrity Anshe Chung has practically become a household name (at least for readers of Business Week). With so much momentum and positive press what could possibly go wrong?

Oh, I don’t know, maybe something like a Federal investigation into online gambling in virtual casinos.

Of all of the vices that can be found in the Metaverse some translate better than others. Virtual drugs don’t work particularly well — unless you count Second Life as a drug. Virtual prostitution, as creepy as it seems, apparently works for a few people who can get past the possibility that their virtual date might actually be a construction worker in Peoria. Virtual gambling, on the other hand, is a prefect match for Second Life. Online gambling is already a well established industry, and for many, the added social element of a virtual reality world is apparently a big improvement over watching 2-D cards being dealt onto a flat green poker table.

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As is my sometimes habit, I ventured out into the real world this week to take the pulse of real people who use real new media. Nobody was paid nor bribed in the course of these discussions and all opinions reflected here represent the opinions of my (anonymous as they shun fame and fortune) focus group, expanded this time to include a few voices from the legal profession.

So here is what they’re saying out there in reality. Remember, real people with real money to spend on goods and services:

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Yesterday we told you about DuroSport’s new retail outlet in Second Life. It was everything we expected a DuroSport store to be — which was exactly the problem. DuroSport has become so predictable that even their failures no longer surprise us. But there is a new development that even we find quite surprising. DuroSport has just announced an exclusive partnership with the most highly respected content franchise in history: Star Trek.

Yes, you read that correctly. Star Trek. Starting today, Star Trek and DuroSport Electronics have partnered to release what they are calling “DeMastered” episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. The episodes are being made available exclusively through DuroSport’s new video download service called — predictably — DuroView.

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The first thing you notice is the boxes. The huge, huge boxes, piled high on top of each other from the floor to the airplane-hangar sized ceiling.

What, you wonder, could these gigantic boxes possibly contain? The only possible items are washers and dryers, refrigerators, sofa sets, even SUVs. Maybe a really huge television. But if you’re the DuroSport Electronics Corporation, then these impossibly large boxes contain your latest product: a portable virtual media player.

During the past year we’ve had more than our share of laughs over the ongoing foibles of the DuroSport Corporation. From the company’s unbelievably bad portable media player to an embarrassing t-shirt recall last summer, it sometimes seems like DuroSport can’t do anything right. As it turns out DuroSport’s problems are not the result of poor engineering and horrendous customer service. No, according to company officials DuroSport has been victimized by “the current technological limitations of reality.”

So what’s a consumer electronics company to do when reality lets it down? Open a store in the virtual world known as Second Life, of course.

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I’m wrong. A lot.

I fully admit it. I’m not an especially deep thinker, and I can’t predict the future for shit. Like everyone else, I was hoping for flying cars by now. Not to mention robots, though I suppose the longer we have to wait on that one, the better.

Hell, when I first heard about text-messaging, I scoffed. Scoffed, I tell you! I even remember whennish and whereabouts I was: walking down the Embarcadero in 2000 with my supervisor at CNET, a fellow who was much more on top of cutting-edge technology than myself. He was telling me about something called text-messaging, which was either just introduced in America or was about to be, but was all the rage overseas. I was five stubborn years away from even considering a cell phone, and text-messaging sounded like the most impractical thing ever. Words on a cell phone screen? And typing them via the number pad? Puh-leeze. As if.

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According to the “Anshe Chung is a millionaire and you aren’t” press release, Ailin Graef was born and raised in Hubei, China, but is currently a citizen of Germany. Please make a note of that fact, as it will be on the quiz.

The story so far: sex sells, and nothing sells like sex. It’s the oldest profession in our world, and the the most popular in Second Life. The preponderance of sex workers is one of the few things about Second Life that genuinely makes sense to me, once I wrap my brain around the fact that people consider sitting at their computers and wanking and/or typing dirty while making their avatars do quasi-erotic calisthenics qualifies as sexy. It feels like cheating to me—if you’re going to do, do it for real—but that’s just my own disconnect between meatspace and polygon-based environments. When I make the leap of faith, then sure, yes, absolutely. If it’s a make-believe world in which you can do whatever you want, and you’ve harbored fantasies of whoring, then why not? It certainly results in some entertaining debates, as the self-appointed protectors of Biblical morality desperately wag their fingers in disapproval. Are certain types of sex immoral, as has been suggested? To paraphrase Woody Allen: yes, if you’re doing it right.

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To say that I spend every waking moment online would be inaccurate. Sure, I’m online whether at work or at home, with the same screen configuration at both: Gmail window in the upper left corner of the screen, minimized but visible enough to see if there’s a new email or chat request, SecureCRT in the bottom left, just enough showing to see if there’s a new message. That’s also how my laptop looks when I’m at a wifi cafe writing, which is how I spend most of my quote-free-unquote time these days. But it isn’t just the waking moments, because even when I’m asleep, I’m still downloading stuff. Someone was kind enough to post the Bob Dylan Hybrid SACD box set in .flac format to alt.binaries.sounds.lossless, and it’s taking a while to get ‘em all, as you can well imagine. Thank goodness for DVD-R.

So I’m online in one form or another at any given moment, and when actually in front of a computer usually have a chat or three happening. Oh, right—my cellphone is usually somewhere within my field of vision, lest I get a call or (even more importantly) a text message and miss it. For all of that, I don’t interact much with strangers, and I classify a stranger as someone I’ve never met in meatspace. I don’t participate in online forums or message boards even what few mailing lists still exist, and unless it’s a means to a specific end (like an offer of a gig, which usually comes via email), I almost never correspond or chat with anyone I don’t know in real life. What I do online is all about supplementing my offline life. (And, of course, piracy. Arrrr!)

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We at Medialoper take pride in surfing the hemorrhaging edge of cultural analysis, so I’ll be blunt: sex sells.

Especially celebritarian sex, famous pretty people associated with products which may or may not be related to the source of their fame. I still don’t get what Catherine Zeta-Jones has to do with cellular phones, but whenever I walk by a T-Mobile store or see their ads in a magazine, there she is. (Maybe if I watched television and saw the commercials it would make more sense, but I don’t want to know that much.) Though it helps, fame is not required. Like, there’s an auto shop at 10th and Howard in San Francisco called Smog Queen. On their sign is a faded head-and-shoulders glamour shot of what I’m guessing is a porn starlet. The Queen of Smog, no doubt. The sheer gall of it cracks me up every time I drive by. Empirically, what does a hot chick have to do with a smog check?

Not a damn thing. By my math, that’s exactly as much a hot chick has to do with virtual real estate in Second Life. Not that a hot chick can’t do smog checks or sell virtual real estate—they can be found in both fields—but if you create the association in the consumer’s mind, it’s unlikely to hurt sales.

Which brings us to Anshe Chung, the Second Life persona of one Ailin Graef.

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Adam Reuters née Pasick may be buried deep within the unlinked subdomains of the venerable, unclawable Reuters (sure to be alone with the cockroaches after Medialoper has faded to virtual dust), but closer to the surface of visibility is Wagner James Au. His New World Notes blog is linked slightly below the fold of secondlife.com, with a heroic avatar headshot and the questionably hyphenated blurb “Wagner James Au reports first-hand from Second Life.”

Au writes less about business profits climbing and more about the actual culture of Second Life. Oddly enough, “Au” is not representative of the Au Corporation, but, rather, the man’s actual last name. So the reporter primarily covering meatspace (Adam Reuters) gets his identity subsumed, while the self-described embedded journalist (Wagner James Au) gets to use his real name. There’s some comfort in knowing that irony is the primary motivating factor in both universes.

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