I find it more and more excruciating to blog about Second Life these days. I have never been a person able to just ignore the huge, gaping crater of charred earth at my feet and look beyond it to see the daisy covered hills. I’m not a Torley. When something’s on fire in front of me, I see the fire, and SL just continues to burn.

In the beginning (Philip said let there be light…) it was easier to be hopeful and positive; to have fun and ignore the flaws. After all, the idealists were in charge. Sure, the trains didn’t run on time, but that is often the price you pay for creative freedom being handed out on popsicle sticks. But then the Ooompa Loompas put on grown up hats and starting mouthing talking points about how they were in serious business and their decisions would reflect that.

Most of us in the real world were able to grasp the inevitable practicality of that move. Willy Wonka can only run the candy store for so long and then the wackiness has to be curbed, otherwise the lawsuits start over the kids being shrunk in the Wonkavision machines or getting turned into blueberries. So, while there was a sense of “darn, shucks, the idealists are gonna get phased out” there was also a sense of “well, at least the grown ups will fix things.”

Except the grown ups never showed up. And now we’re stuck with this adolescent clusterfuck of “who the hell is in charge here” and “will the real Linden Lab please sign in.” Meanwhile, the population has shifted from geek-minded technophiles to largely a shallow gimme-gimme generation. Which is not to say there aren’t wonderful people to encounter and enjoy; it just means that it’s hard to see the daisies through the fog of the charred vale.

I want to go back to the way I used to feel about SL. I want to blog about the things I like, be honest and a little critical to maintain a standard, but, for the most part, be happy about my playground. But it’s exhausting to pretend all’s right in the virtual world. Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’ve changed more than the subject matter, but I don’t think so. I’ve always been content to be frivolous while maintaining a side order of sarcasm and cynicism. My happy is always laced with awareness of the boundaries of that happiness. Moreover, most of my friends also seem to feel the same tugging negativity — that feeling that the good stuff is having a more and more difficult time competing with the bad stuff.

The consensus seems to be a frustration and aversion to investing any further energy in a product that makes no attempt to further itself. We’re all ready for the next big thing. We want to see something growing on the hill in the distance that will help motivate us to sludge across the charred vale. If that’s not possible, we just want someone to start running this place like an actual company and not the schizophrenic, nepotism-drenched teenager’s wasteland it is ever degenerating into.

Case in point: I was going to write this post about the ridiculous new XStreet policies, but I don’t even have the energy to pretend to be outraged anymore. It’s all so much “of course they’re fucking it up even worse, it’s what they do.”