Steven Hornik's Public Library

I think we’re usually buying little dreams. We not only buy food and shelter, but when we choose styles or when we buy clothes with any kind of fashion, when we decide how we’re going to have our hair cut, we’re all, in a way, buying virtual goods because their importance exists only insofar as they are interpreted by other human beings.

Second Life is not a virtual goods platform, and it’s doesn’t have a business model based on user-generated goods: it is, instead, a fully contained prototype of a version of the future in which technology has continued to take us in the direction of limitless choice in how the world we live in is constructed, how we decide to interact with each other and the content that we choose to consume.