THE PUBLIC DEBT OF DIGERIDOO

A unique solution to the high cost of higher education...

For awhile there, he could put himself through college by floating the tuition with his credit card, and with his job selling refrigerators and such at a department store chain. But when one thing led to another (as they're often apt to do), Lordfly Digeridoo found himself $4000 in debt, with no immediate means to pay off his creditors.

This is usually the part in the story where the broke college kid sucks it up and goes back to his parents, hat in hand. Instead, Digeridoo (who does in fact have a hat in SL, except it also functions as a calculator, a helicopter, and other useful devices), put a proposition before his fellow Residents:

"[B]asically, an unsecured, long-term L$ loan given by the community at large. The only collateral I'm able to give is my good standing within the community (or perceived one, anyway)."

It was a simple proposal: people would loan Linden Dollars to him, he'd keep a running tally of who gave what, and use that to pay off his college tuition. And when things were turned around for him, he'd pay people back in the order they paid him. It's an experiment in the trust and generosity of a social network that only really exists in a virtual world. ("I could in fact take all this money and throw it into the stock market or something, cackling insanely as I sip tequila in Bermuda," he acknowledged in the Forum post announcing his scheme. "It IS an unsecured loan, after all".) But Digeridoo has been a Resident since 2003 (ancient, by the world's standards), and a well-established SL architect. Perhaps because of that-- or just the general fungibility of virtual currency for random acts of whimsy-- within two days, he's collected over $700 in loans.

"[P]eople have been wiring me money to help me fend off the debt in real life," he tells me, amazed. "Yes, dozens of people from Second Life, many of whom I've never met. If anything I've learned there's either a lot of lurkers on the Forums, or word of mouth spreads fast." To keep things transparent, he posts the running tally of donations in his SL profile. "Seeing as the public is donating, it only fits to have the number displayed for the public," he says.

Once he's stabilized, he plans to start paying off the community of loaners with Linden Dollars. Much of those funds will come from his in-world businesses-- prefab homes, land development, and the odd custom buildings, assignments he does for the L$ equivalent of US$20-30, usually. (He may even auction off some of his old buildings, like the famed Digeridoo Tower, which now exists only in his inventory.) As it happens, he's also applied his SL building skills in college, as a Urban and Regional Planning major-- such as an assignment to build a scale model of Rome's Piazza Novona.

For all that, however, Lordfly Digeridoo believes the time has passed when someone like him could earn a full income as a creator in Second Life.

"I've been obsoleted by the content developer teams," he says. "Remember back in the day in SL, 2003 or so? The world was small; almost everyone had a small niche they could fill, and fill it well. When I started, that niche was custom builds... I had virtually no competition for at least six months. Simply nobody else was building homes for people on a case-by-case basis."

Not so now, he believes.

"[W]e've got gigantic economies of scale going on," he speculates, "or at least the beginnings of such. Who's going to hire a broke college kid to develop a sim or a large area when they can just hand it to Bedazzle or someone with an architecture degree?"

Besides which, he hasn't been too happy with recent clientele, who've demanded to know why he doesn't sell "McMansion" prefabs, or customers who insist on having a virtual home with a virtual bathroom.

"[B]uilding clients who can't fathom living in a house without a working toilet," he says, "so they demand space and design requirements for real life amenities that are a) pointless in SL, and b) expensive. There's a small minority of people like me who build with SL in mind: open spaces, open floorplans, no superfluous extra rooms, designed with the camera in mind, keep the toilets out kthxbye."

So he keeps at his college studies, hoping for graduate school and a better job outside SL. Once he's settled his current debt, that is.

"At the latest, I'm hoping to have them paid off within 6 months," Digeridoo tells me. "I'm a stubborn guy, Hamlet. Once I set my mind to something it's done eventually." He grins. "Hence me slogging through college without proper financial backing."

He's been surprised at some of the Residents who are helping him along now-- not just those who don't know him at all, but all those who know him well, and share a mutual dislike.

"There's been quite a few people who I've had visible sparring matches on the Forums, or who otherwise I wouldn't exactly consider us 'cordial', giving me boatloads of cash," he says. "I've found myself extremely humbled by the generosity of people, and yeah, I've been hanging off the Forums a bit lately."

The Linden Dollar college fund of Lordfly Digeridoo is still accepting loans. But while they are loans, they're designated interest-free.

"I didn't want people able to 'invest' in my personal financial misery," he explains. "We have credit card companies for that, after all."