It was three weeks ago that my virtual world disintegrated. I had been struggling with a digital littering problem in my Social Simulation Research Lab and I wanted to automate the cleanup process. As the home of my PhD research is the virtual world of Second Life, I need to ensure that my online space looks professional and tidy so any potential participants who visit will instantly recognise my good intentions. I'd spent days lining up little planks of wood, straightening out the interactive books on the shelves and placing the windows just so. All that I needed to do, I was assured, was flick a little switch and foreign objects would be removed. I flicked. Then everything disappeared.

You mustn't underestimate how much time I'd put into this place. I was so proud. I had taken people on guided tours. I had spent hours indexing the resources. More pressing, an in-world educational newspaper was doing a write-up on the library the next day and I was anticipating a tsunami of attention from the academic community. Unfortunately, all this was moot. At that moment it was gone.

A few days later, after I'd cobbled together what passed as a shadow of the former lab, a Second Life-wide controversy exploded. The CopyBot hack (The duplicitous inhabitants of Second Life, November 23) wreaked havoc on the economy, threatening mass closure of the tens of thousands of businesses which produce the real-life livelihoods of many of its commercial property owners. I admit that at the time the potentially devastating effects didn't faze me; an automated replication of in-world properties sounded just what I needed when my virtual space experienced cosmic meltdown. But the more I hear about it, the more excited I get about the implications. Second Life has reached a philosophical crisis and the result is potential civil war.

The formerly libertarian landscape has been overrun by rampaging nouveau-capitalists. They want centralised governance and stern economic ruling. Everyone is a potential thief. Fingers are being pointed and, in some extreme cases, avatars are being attacked. The digital idyll has become a world of accusations, violence and bitter political dispute.

And so, once again, the real world comes crashing in. Sooner or later, most online communities reach this crisis point because the ideals of the founders are replaced by regulations demanded by the different types of people who interact in them. We shouldn't be surprised; what we do when we interact online is replicate the social practices we are familiar with offline. Inspired by this milestone, I'm going to add a wing to my new lab. And inside will be a shrine to CopyBot, the little hack that transformed Second Life into a real world.

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