One thing that struck me – just as a nebulous impression, mind you – was that Bagge's attitude toward Second Life and similar virtual worlds resembled Tom Wolfe's fatuous perspective on teen sex in his 2000 essay anthology Hooking Up.
I got Hooking Up as a hand-me-down some years ago, and there's some interesting stuff there (I especially enjoyed the description of the founder of Intel). But the eponymous essay was pretty naive – Wolfe seemed truly surprised that all the young 'uns seemed to be doing it nowadays.
The folly of the young may be thinking that they invented sex, but the folly of the old may well be that they think they were the last ones ever to do it.
There's a little bit of this that comes through in Other Lives. Bagge seems to be looking at Second Life and saying, "Wow, look how mixed up notions of identity become in online virtual worlds!" But I suspect we've already reached the point where most people would just say "So what?" to that.
It was twenty years ago when Lt. Barclay first got holo-addiction on Star Trek: The Next Generation; right about the time Buddy Bradley moved to Seattle. How's that for a dated concept?