Inside Second Life

It's not just getting off that turns early adopters on, though. It's the bigger evolution at play, the serious and significant transformation of the Internet from something to surf, to a place you hang. "The Web is a lonely place in lot of ways," says Giff Constable, general manager of the social media agency, Electric Sheep, "What's powerful about Second Life is the social aspect, the sense of togetherness."

Second Life's financial backers include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Pierre Omidyar of eBay, and Mitch Kapor, the Lotus founder who helped spark the PC boom in the 1980s. "Virtual worlds will be as important as, and eventually merge with, the Internet," Kapor promises. If this is sounding like the Internet in 1995, it's supposed to. But there's one key difference this time around. Unlike the Web, Second Life is controlled by one evangelical dude, Rosedale. And as the creator of this brave new world, he's starting to feel like a God.

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"I realized this is like the Greek pantheon," Rosedale says, and he's thinking about creating an avatar in his image. "I like the idea of being a young Apollo. All marble. Like I'm made of stone."

Rosedale grew up the brainiac son of an English teacher and Navy pilot, the latter of whom Rosedale describes as "like the Great Santini. He'd make us play barefoot in the gravel to toughen us up." In the tiny town of Hollywood, Maryland, Rosedale's parents enrolled their bright boy in a Baptist trailer school, where a 26-year-old pastor preached fire and brimstone. As soon as he could write, Rosedale decided to copy the Scriptures. "I was like, 'I'm going to transcribe like the monks,' " he says, " 'I'm going to rewrite the Bible.' "

By middle school, his religious conviction shifted to a place where he could really be the ruler of his own universe: his computer. Rosedale had a life-altering epiphany one day when he was goofing around with math modeling programs on a friend's PC. With a few strokes, he discovered, he could create simulations of the real-world inside his machine. "I remember just turning to my buddy, and saying, 'It's all in there!,' " he recalls. " 'This is like outer space!' " "God is in the machine," as he now likes to say. "The Code is law. The Code is God."

To escape the pressures of his parents' bitter divorce, Rosedale began constructing a fantasy world from spare parts. He spent hours at his computer, installed a mechanical Star Trek door in his bedroom, made a hovercraft in his backyard. "I thought it was a good way to meet girls," Rosedale says. At school, he seized any opportunity to convert his classmates into technophiles. His best friend, Brock Wagenaar, recalls the time Rosedale went on a tear at school about the science of the atomic bomb (still an obsession of Rosedale's today). "He was very good at preaching, if you will," Wagenaar says. "He really likes to hear himself talk." Rosedale put that skill to use when, while still in school, he had a job selling used cars. "It's an interesting aspect of Philip," Wagenaar adds. "Not to sound negative, but he believes his own bullshit."