The other night, I had an odd conversation with ChatGPT, made somewhat stranger because the AI’s answers came out of a humanoid rabbit idly sucking on a juice box. He was standing alone in a virtual novelty store in Second Life, where he had recently been fired. The rabbit, the shop owner explained to me later, was meant to be a clerk, “but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale.” (AI, after all, has a tendency to make things up.) So the rabbit had been demoted to the role of greeter, chatting with customers about the nature of comedy, his own existence, or whatever else they cared to ask.

BunnyGPT is among the first bots in the virtual world to have its “mind” wired to OpenAI’s large language model. It’s an example of how Second Life, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, continues to evolve, with a community that taps into new technologies for its own oddball purposes. Nothing else is quite like it—Second Life is neither exactly a social network nor really a conventional game, which has both limited its mainstream appeal and ensured its longevity. To this day, tens of thousands of people are logged in at any given time, inhabiting a digital world that’s more original than the corporate versions of virtual existence being offered by Meta and Apple.

The reasons for the virtual world’s longevity are as paradoxical as they are inspiring, especially in this moment when traditional social media seems to be collapsing in on itself, or flailing for new relevance, even as the rise of generative AI promises an uncertain, discomfiting future. Developed by a company named Linden Lab, Second Life was inspired in part by the metaverse as first described with biblical specificity in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash: a massive virtual world created by its users and connected to the real-world economy. Countless technologists who began their career in the 1990s were also inspired by that novel. But Linden’s charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, added to this geeky conception a distinctly bohemian muse: Burning Man, the orgiastic art festival held every year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

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“I was just blown away by the fact that I was willing to talk to anyone,” Rosedale once told me, remembering his time on the playa, “that it had this mystical quality that demolished the barriers between people. And I thought about it: What magical quality makes that happen?” Rosedale believed that allowing users to create their own content, along with highly customizable avatars, would also evoke a similar sense of serendipity.

For its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me to be the virtual world’s official “embedded journalist”—a roving reporter using a digital avatar in a white suit (my pretentious tribute to Tom Wolfe), impertinently asking members of the early user community about their virtual lives—ambitious collective art projects, savvy business ventures, the pixel sex they were having with the attachable genitals they inevitably created.

Rosedale’s dream of merging the metaverse with Burning Man succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. I’m always stunned to scroll through my blog, to review the people I met in Second Life as avatars. I’ve talked to an Iraqi arts professor who excitedly logged into Second Life through his sputtering, postwar internet connection from the ancient city of Babylon; a Jewish American woman who, with the help of her daughter, began logging into the virtual world to give lectures about surviving the Holocaust; a young Japanese sex worker who, in between porn shoots, created in Second Life an eerie memorial to the nuking of Hiroshima; the conceptual artist Cao Fei, who created an entire city in Second Life, and then—15 years before NFT mania—sold virtual real-estate deeds for her digital metropolis to bemused patrons at Art Basel.

Many of the profiles I wrote about avatars occurred by pure happenstance. Randomly visiting a virtual Bayou bar one day, I saw an avatar playing blues guitar, his appearance customized to look like a tall old Black man. Clicking on the user’s account, I realized that in real life he was Charles Bristol, an 87-year-old bluesman and the grandson of once-enslaved people, who’d lived long enough to play live music in the metaverse.

Still, despite this miraculous diversity—or perhaps because of it—mainstream adoption of Second Life remains elusive. The utopian ideals that contributed to Second Life’s longevity as an online community may also have relegated it to a niche platform. To encourage as much free-form user creativity as possible, Linden Lab adamantly refused to market Second Life as a game. That effectively made the virtual world uninviting to gamers (who subsequently moved on to Minecraft and other popular sandbox games), while leaving new users confused and adrift. At the same time, this lack of consumer categorization excited a disparate coterie of academics, artists, and other nonconformists who became regular denizens of Second Life—but who might have refused to join had it been positioned as a mere video game.   

The utopian paradox even extends into how Second Life was developed by employees at Linden Lab. Under the idealistic direction of Rosedale and his CTO, Cory Ondrejka, the start-up operated with a no-managers, “choose your own work” policy, cheekily dubbed the “Tao of Linden.” Their creativity thus unleashed, Linden developers wound up adding a farrago of persnickety features to the product with little unifying direction that might create a seamless, user-friendly experience. To this day, the Second Life application resembles a massively multiplayer online game welded to a 3-D-graphics editor duct-taped to a social network crammed into an ancient television remote with infinite buttons.

But the program’s very complexity became a kind of initiation rite. Some 99 percent of new users would quit, overwhelmed and aggravated, most within their first hour in the virtual world. Those who stayed long enough to learn how to use the software—usually guided by a patient “oldie” community member—found themselves welcomed into an exclusive club. Second Life quickly became a small enchanted city with an eccentric but charming citizenry, surrounded by a brutal desert that few dared cross. Linden Lab, in other words, had inadvertently re-created the Burning Man experience a bit too thoroughly.

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Using the world’s 3-D creation and coding tools, the community quickly built a veritable multiverse of items and experiences spanning nearly every conceivable genre and avenue of human interest (an evening gown made of fishhooks; a self-generating steampunk city in the sky; a tesseract house with no beginning or end). And because users could also sell their creations in Second Life and exchange the world’s virtual currency for USD, thousands of local 3-D artisans created successful small businesses, many of them servicing the sprawling avatar-fashion industry. The most well-known Second Life–based brands took on celebrity status; at the very high end, grassroots creators in this and other virtual worlds pulled in millions of dollars. It also created another reason for staying: Long-term Second Life fashionistas typically have spent many thousands of dollars on virtual fashion items in their inventory.

Alongside all that commerce and creativity, I noticed the rise of powerful subcommunities in Second Life that would be difficult to replicate in the real world, or even with traditional social media. The trans community, for example, is remarkably large in the virtual world, comprising about 500 registered groups, people from around the globe in search of a secure place to exhibit their identity; some are so battered by transphobia in their offline lives that they save expressions of their full self for the gender customizations of their Second Life avatars. And as the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, I started noticing military veterans—separated by distance, social pressure, and battle wounds—informally meeting together as avatars to discuss their PTSD and other painful topics. As the director of a veteran-support organization once put it: “I know Marines that say that Second Life is working when nothing else has.”

They are not alone. I’ve seen similar communities spring up in many other, newer virtual worlds. By my estimate, more than 500 million people are active community members within platforms that roughly fit what Stephenson described in Snow Crash—especially VRChat, a kind of next-generation successor to Second Life. Many of these metaverse communities may have a longevity similar to Second Life’s, thriving apart from the algorithmic sirens of social media and the reckless growth of generative AI. We may briefly enjoy conversing with ChatGPT-powered bunnies, but ultimately we yearn to connect with real humans behind the avatars we meet.

In the June 1940 issue of The Atlantic, the iconoclastic Black American author Richard Wright responded to a review of his recently published novel, Native Son, that had appeared in this magazine the month prior. Wright’s rebuttal, titled “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” took his reviewer to task for a great many critical misreadings, most involving his characterization of the novel’s murderous protagonist, Bigger Thomas. But among the most arresting lines was an observation wholly removed from Chicago, where Native Son is set, and Mississippi, where both Wright and the critic, David L. Cohn, were born. After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is not beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die here, always resisting the attempts of Anglo-Saxon tourists and industrialists to introduce racial hate and discrimination.”

Wright’s view of racism as a uniquely American inheritance would recur through much of his work—most intensely in “I Choose Exile,” an unpublished but later resurfaced 1951 essay in which Wright waxed poetic about France (“above all, a land of refuge”). Wright was by no means the first Black American creative figure to find artistic freedom and relative safety only after leaving the United States. Paris played host, and later home, to Josephine Baker and other Black American performers, as well as James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith. The city looms large in the Black intellectual history of the 20th century, and for many on this side of Y2K, the prospect of finding freedom overseas remains as alluring as ever.

Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, a new book by the historian Tamara J. Walker, contextualizes the eternal conundrum of Wright’s work and politics by focusing on a different phase of his elective exile. Walker’s book constructs a lineage of Black Americans nurturing creative ingenuity through migration, making the case for freedom of movement as a companion to the freedom of expression. But it also elucidates the complex ways that anti-Black racism manifested both within the United States and in the countries where her subjects sought (and sometimes found) refuge. For example, Wright spent 1950 in Buenos Aires, then referred to as “the Paris of the Americas,” where the first film adaptation of Native Son was being shot. Unlike his travels in Paris or Mexico, his experience of Argentina was “one of the darkest times of his life,” Walker writes, and was rarely referenced in his own work. By situating his experience within a larger tradition of Black exodus, Walker paints a more nuanced portrait of the mordant literary figure—someone whose prescience, born partly of exile, still troubles the literary canon.

Of the loose cadre of Black expats living on either side of the Seine, Wright was certainly the most sanguine about his years in Europe. The author wrote about his time in Paris with breathless enthusiasm, maintaining until his death in 1960 that “there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!” Both Baldwin and Gardner Smith, however, rejected Wright’s view of Paris as a racial utopia, even as they both found some measure of comfort and success there. Not long after Wright’s death, Baldwin published “Alas, Poor Richard,” a sorrowful account of their fractured friendship in which he criticized his erstwhile friend and mentor for idealizing a country that “would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports.”  

Walker, an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College of Columbia University, takes up this contradiction in her book: Each chapter of Beyond the Shores relays the story of one or two people (many of them artists of some kind—authors, singers, pianists, filmmakers) who traveled to one or two places during a specific decade. Their journeys take them to some expected vistas (Paris, London, post–World War II Germany) as well as to destinations with far less scholarship on Black American presence: Đà Nẵng, Kabondo, Kisumu, Yangiyul. In a chapter focusing on Ricki Stevenson, an American journalist turned tour guide in modern Paris, Walker underscores the enduring truth of Baldwin’s civil-rights-era critique. The multigenerational presence of Black people from African and West Indian nations once colonized by France began in the 17th century, when they were trafficked as human cargo. That many white Parisians would welcome an upwardly mobile American auteur in the early 20th century didn’t mean racial tolerance was inherently embedded in French society, as evidenced by the rising popularity of the far-right National Front—and its “calls for the eviction of non-white immigrants from France” and treatment of “French-born Arabs and Blacks as noncitizens”—in the 1980s.

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Subjects are introduced in chronological order, with Walker making deft connections across chapters and narratives by mapping changes in policies, movements, and prevailing social attitudes in the United States, as well as in the other countries. The chapter about Richard Wright’s time in Argentina, for example, lays out how the threat of political and financial backlash from the United States kept other nations (including France) from hosting film adaptations of Native Son. The censorship followed Wright outside American borders: Spanish-language translations of the film were titled Sangre Negra, or “Black Blood,” rather than Hijo Nativo, which might have engendered more audience identification with its protagonist.

The first chapter points the reader toward the Washington, D.C.–born singer and actor Florence Mills, who made her Paris debut in 1926, when she was 30 years old. By then, Mills had been performing for two decades across the United States, earning rave reviews in productions such as the all-Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along. But Mills knew that Broadway success would not carry her to Hollywood, as it had for white actors. When the impresario of Blackbirds, the revue she’d been headlining, signed the cast up for a Paris run, Mills took a chance on moving to the city where she’d heard of more opportunities for Black singers, vaudeville acts, and cabaret performers.

Upon making her debut in France, Mills immediately drew comparisons to Josephine Baker, whose influence on modern cultural production is ubiquitous. But in recounting Mills’s years in Europe, Walker expands upon that narrow resemblance. Part of what makes Beyond the Shores so satisfying is Walker’s vivid depictions of the environments that her subjects entered when they immigrated. Their stories are rendered not solely through what they produced, but also through what they saw, what they ate, what they must have felt. Walker describes the pillars of diasporic nightlife that earned parts of 1920s Paris the nickname “French Harlem,” where “patrons could dance to Martinican biguines, which derived from the folk songs of the enslaved, Senegalese orchestra tunes that included elements of Cuban music that traveled to African airways and migrated to France, and even some African American jazz.”

View of American author Richard Wright as he walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, France, 1959 (Gisele Freund/Photo Researchers History/Getty)

In such a setting, Mills and her fellow performers could move through everyday life—and toward bigger stages—without being hobbled by the crushing weight of Jim Crow. The Black press in America took note: One headline from the New York Amsterdam News read, “Colored Artists Holding Sway and Being Treated Like Human Beings by the French.” Walker takes care to complicate such assessments, enumerating the organizations in France that were fighting anti-Blackness on their home turf even as American performers garnered acclaim. And of course, Mills’s time in Paris was not without moments of overt discrimination, especially when a local economic downturn led to an influx of white American patrons at bars and cafés. Walker approaches these points of difficulty with empathetic rigor, as she does with moments of discomfort between Black Americans and other Black people they encountered in their travels. The American passport functions, in some instances, as a totem of whiteness: “In Nigeria, locals alternately called African American Peace Corps volunteers ‘white black’ and ‘native foreigners,’” Walker writes, “while Cameroonians referred to one volunteer as a ‘Black white woman.’”

With each story, Beyond the Shores builds a canon of Black creative expression that crosses both temporal and geographic barriers. “Bringing Florence back into the mainstream spotlight does more than simply renew attention to her remarkable life and career,” Walker writes. “It’s an opportunity to remember that Baker was just one of countless African American performers who made their way to the City of Light, left indelible marks on its cultural landscape, and turned it into a destination for new forms of music, dancing, and cross-cultural mingling that would be felt for decades to come.” Walker threads Beyond the Shores together with excavations of her own family’s journeys too: In the book’s prologue, she explains how hearing about her grandfather’s service abroad in World War II prompted some of her earliest childhood questions about Black migration. As others’ stories unfold, so does her own, giving the book the feel of a travel memoir without ever losing the gravity of a historical compendium. The interplay deepens the book’s storytelling; by observing the past through the lives of others, she seems to suggest, we can imagine an alternate vision of our own future.