Second Life is to me what MySpace is to my grandparents.

This weekend, they referred to it as MyFace or MyPlace. MySpace just wasn’t clicking with the septuagenarians. In response to a recent report they must have seen on Dateline or 60 Minutes or the like, they drummed up a quick plan to wipe out the internet of sexual predators by “censoring MyFace.” Not kidding.

And I’m not even kidding when I tell you that SecondLife is to me what MySpace is to my grandparents. It isn’t that I think we can save the world by passing laws that make Second Life a safer place for our children to inhabit online. It’s the ocean that separates me from even bothering to care what Second Life is about.

Now my grandparents would be happy to learn that a new “virtual environment” has emerged for Second Life. It is called www.vles.com, and it represents “The virtual Lower East Side.” And I could not think of anything lamer. Everything about it so “cool.” The Bands. The clubs. The whole environment is just swimming in a big pool of coolness. And it’s all branded, either by Vice, who seems to have provided much of the preliminary, up front content, and MTV through Viacom. Of course, none of that is really obvious. In fact, the virtuality of the environment comes across as virtually unchanged, or “ridiculously realistic,” as the only tip off that this is a marketers conception is through the ads and copyright information.

I’m not lamenting the lameness of Vice and MTV here. I am just completely baffled by the interest in such a thing. Who wants to spend their time on the internet in branded game like fantasy environments built to emulate reality? How do you have any kind of authentic experience? How do you get shit-faced with your friends over $5 beer/whiskey combo deals at Lotus, or throw up on the sidewalk outside the matzo factory on Rivington? Maybe you can get drunk somehow on Second Life. Perhaps there’s no hangover, and that’s why people do it.

A few years ago, I drove my grandparents around the Lower East Side on a Friday night. My grandmother’s mother had lived on Allen Street when she first arrived in this country, when the street’s median was a row of outhouses. When I was a kid, we used to go there for cheap socks and underwear at a store run by hasids. Now the old sock and underwear store closed its doors, and opened up a shop online. How cool would it be if they set up a link to their site from www.vles.com?

Second Life is to me what MySpace is to my grandparents.