Imlisanen Jamir
A virtual world called Active Worlds went online in 1995, at a time when the internet in most of the world, including here in Nagaland, was barely a presence in daily life, and the idea of stepping inside a computer screen to walk through a three dimensional city was closer to science fiction than to anything a person could actually try. Yet that world still exists today. You can visit it right now, log in, and walk through streets and buildings that people constructed decades ago, in a platform most of the internet has forgotten, years before companies like Meta spent billions trying to convince the world that virtual spaces were the future and calling the effort the metaverse, as though the idea were new.
What makes Active Worlds worth writing about is not that it survived, but how it survived, because the how tells us something larger about permanence itself. Nobody at the company that owns the platform seems to have made a deliberate decision, at any point over these thirty years, to preserve it for the future. There was no plan, no funding drive, no committee formed to protect its history. What kept it alive instead was simpler and stranger: a small number of users paid just enough to cover the cost of running the servers, and that cost never rose high enough for anyone to be forced into deciding whether the whole thing was worth shutting down. Active Worlds did not survive because someone chose to protect it. It survived because nobody was ever inconvenienced enough to end it.
This is worth sitting with, because it runs against everything we assume about how things last. Inside the platform are cities called Alpha World and Horizon City, built the way any real town is built, with named streets and districts and buildings people spent real hours designing. Those cities have stood for decades without anyone in charge of maintaining them, the same way an untended field keeps its shape long after a farmer has stopped tending it, simply because nothing has yet come along to force a change. Some users even built memorials for friends who passed away, inside a place with no institution guaranteeing those memorials would remain. They have remained anyway, not because any authority protected them, but because no authority ever had reason to interfere.
Compare this to the things we build that are meant to last, our archives, our institutions, our public records, our tribal histories preserved through hoho records and community memory. All of these depend on someone actively choosing, year after year, to keep funding and maintaining them. That dependency is also a weakness, because anything that needs continual approval to survive can just as easily be the thing that loses that approval one year, through a budget cut, a change in leadership, or simple neglect of a different, more damaging kind. What took a generation to build can vanish in a single administrative decision.
The lesson from Active Worlds is an uncomfortable one, and it does not offer a method anyone could copy on purpose. The moment you try to build something meant to survive by being ignored, it becomes a project with a budget and a mandate, and therefore something someone could still decide to end. What outlasts us may not be what we fought hardest to protect. Often, it is simply what we forgot to destroy, and that should trouble us more than it comforts us.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
