HiPiHi

» see hipihi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The virtual world moment of 2007 arrived here as coverage rather than as a place. i was twenty-three and at university on a ttnet line, and Second Life was something i read about the way you read about a city you are not going to visit. Turkey had no version of it and showed no sign of wanting one. China built one anyway.

HiPiHi was founded in Beijing on 17 April 2006, though Xu Hui and Rao Xuewei had been circling the idea since October 2005. Xu had been named one of China's ten internet heroes back in 1999, which mattered more than it sounds, because it meant the project arrived with credit already in the bank. Angel money came in that August. Alpha testing started in December 2006 and the beta opened on 19 March 2007 to about ten thousand people.

The pitch was almost word for word the one out of San Francisco. A world as rich and complex as the real one, created and owned by the people living in it. HiPiHi pushed the ownership language further than Linden Lab ever did in its marketing: residents were described as the gods of the place, and the company's public writing kept returning to reputation systems and asset rights as the foundation everything else would have to sit on.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

For about eighteen months it worked as a story. Newsweek came through, and so did the English-language tech blogs. The framing never changed: here is the Chinese answer to Second Life, and here is what happens when a country that filters its internet builds a place where people can say anything. The company's answer was that the rules inside were the rules outside. Nothing against the government, nothing about Taiwanese or Tibetan independence.

The wider public beta opened on 21 April 2008 and updates kept coming for a while after it. Reported user numbers got as high as forty thousand, which is a real figure for a client you had to download and then learn how to move around in. It is also not a country of thirteen hundred million.

~ the fall ~

What is missing from the record is any ending at all. The blog and the announcements stop in early 2011, right after a post marking the fourth anniversary. There is no acquisition and no closure notice anywhere on the record. Somebody kept the machines running for another year and a half after the writing stopped.

In August 2012 the servers went quiet. The domain was gone by December. For a few years afterward hipihi.com resolved to a placeholder of a few hundred bytes, and then that went too. A virtual world that had been written up as evidence China could build its own internet did not fail loudly enough for anyone to bother writing the second article.

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