(This is a post that I have been thinking about for months, it's a bit introspective though, so if you don't care about me, and just want to see thoughts about LL and SL and, skip below the break, but don't expect me to call up and sing you happy birthday next week.)
I should have read more superhero
comics as a kid. Those things were chock full of advice on how to
manage dual identities. Unfortunately, at that age I was encouraged
to read books without pictures (and play games outside instead of on
a Nintendo as a matter of fact), and never had the chance to learn
the lessons presented by the various brightly uniformed heroes and
heroines.
Now that I am old and wise, and get to
choose my own reading material, I am drawn by the gravity-like force
of my own geekyness to the comic book store. I am not a collector,
and I can't stand having to start reading a story from the middle, so
I tend towards the graphic novels and collections. My misspent youth
gives me very little in the way of navigating what is good, but
luckily, I have plenty of friends who can point me in the right
direction.
I tend to shy away from the standard
superhero story – they have their merits, but I distrust a universe
so cleanly cut into good and evil. I like the darker stuff that
started seeping into comics in the 80's – where the reader is
confronted with the possibility that the hero isn't so good, and the
bad guy might not be so bad. Comics where the line between freedom
fighter and terrorist is blurred. Stories where heroes become human,
and normal humans might get to be heroes.
I have a confession to make. I have a
mild mannered alter ego. Except he might not be so mild mannered.
That's kinda the problem. I' don't want to tell you who he is –
some of you might know, or think you know – I'd like to keep the
alternate in my ego.
Why do I have an alt? Well,
originally, Ben was the alt. I was immersed in the community before
I was ever offered a job at Linden Lab, and it was a time in my life
when the escapist nature of the virtual world was very attractive. I
made friends, and I created a space in this world that was a kind of
home. When I was offered the liaison position, no one knew exactly
what it entailed. At that point, the $L was worthless, but the world
was so small, it was easy to be famous. I requested that my alt name
become my linden name, ala Torley, or at least “Benjamin” which I
enjoy more than “Ben.” That didn't happen though (and at the
time, I was so awestruck by the company I would be working for, I
didn't argue.)
Inadvertently, I now had a second
identity (third, if you count the real world, but that is soooo 4
years ago). At first, I was free with revealing who I was, after
all, I was even more famous than before! Soon enough, I found that
it meant that the second life I had cultivated to that point was
suffering – I couldn't just log in to pursue my own projects, or
just socialize – I was always working. I don't think it was a
conscious decision to stop telling people who I was at first – I
just wanted to keep my freedom to “play.”
This created a few tensions. First,
some people knew who my alt was, but I didn't want them to pass on
the knowledge. Second, there were some people who I formed
friendships with who I did want to know. These tensions exist to
this day, and occasionally it flares up – if I “out” myself to
someone, it means that I have decided to trust them, and if I am
outed by someone else, I feel my trust is betrayed. There are a few
solutions to this. First, I can remove an identity. I can end my
alt, or I suppose, end my linden. I don't want to do that – I have
invested too much in both identities.
The second one is transparency – I
can tell you who I am, and make it public. This is something I have
wrestled with for a few years now. Even as I write this, I flip back
and forth between thinking it would be a good idea to tell everyone
and thinking it would be a bad idea to tell everyone. The benefit,
of course, is that it relieves those tensions, the cost is that it
makes my it harder to lead a normal second life. Of course, this is
only my personal level – Ben Linden is a public figure, and as
such, I need to consider the costs and benefits to both my Company,
and my Customers.
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