Philip's Blog

The Tao of Linden

Linden Lab has a different and better way of doing work.  It relies on the idea that if the level of transparency (everyone can see what everyone else is doing) can be made high enough, you can stop managing people by explicit authority or delegation.  Instead of being told what to do, you choose your own work by listening to your peers, making good strategic judgements, taking risks, and surfing a huge amount of information. 

As one of a very few pioneers in doing things this way, there is still a lot to learn.  We make mistakes.  But the things we have gotten right are impressive: Linden Lab has, in 6 years, had almost zero employee turnover, and our productivity, in comparison to other similar sized teams, is off the charts. 

Here is the first page of our internal handbook, designed to serve as an introduction to new team members:

Linden Dollar Economy Announcement

Linden Dollar Economy Announcement: Stipend Change for New Premiums, L$ Sales by Linden Lab, and LindeX Circuit Breakers

We are going to make several changes over the coming weeks in order to provide Linden Lab with more tools to manage the Second Life economy. Stability of the L$ economy reduces pricing problems for creators and consumers of in-world content. As we have previously announced, detailed information about Linden Dollar sources and sinks is always available at https://secondlife.com/currency/economy.php.

Third Anniversary Thoughts

Well it's been a crazy day with an event interrupted repeatedly by protests and problems.  We forgot to turn off rez/scripts in the stage where I spoke, and also couldn't get the audio stream to work, oops! 

Nevertheless, I am so very very happy that Second Life is three years old and growing fast, and that I have gotten to realize a childhood dream and be part of such a special company and community.  Here are some thoughts that I had prepared for the event and tried best to type my way through..

Country or Platform or Both?

Gwyneth Llewelyn has recently written a great and thoughtful blog entry, where she worries that 'mainland' SL will effectively  become a landscape dotted with huge colored cubes.  She says that all the 'content' of SL will soon be inside those cubes, and that the exteriors will be opaque because the owners of the content will want to be isolated.  She points out that P2P teleporting will speed this transition.  I think there is an unavoidable truth in this - people will naturally strive to strictly control their surroundings, up to and including the 'Truman Show' of Gwyn's vision, where one even paints the distant horizon line to suit (presumably the inner surfaces of her imagined cubes).  Sadly, as has been shown by things like suburban housing developments, humans will do this to their individual loss - for example living too far from one another or building high fences, and then bemoaning the lack of any neighbors to talk to.  I don't think that this is a future that we can avoid by imposing telehubs, because this urge is too powerful and SL is too open.  For example, devices like ROAM already allow people to easily circumvent any kind of forced local travel by rocketing into the clouds and moving at supersonic speeds to their destinations.  Moreover, as SL's code and protocols are increasingly made open, local operators of simulators will likely abolish telehubs in favor of direct transport (as is already done with 'sit teleporting' within land parcels).  The 'tragedy of the commons' will prevail:  attempts by Linden Lab to impose global rules designed to reinforce community/country will be overridden by personal or local economic interests.  So does this mean that the idea of 'country' is lost, and that SL will be like a collection of personal websites, each in it's own cube?

I'm not so sure.  I think the future of SL can be summarized as a set of questions about Gwyn's boxes:

How big are they going to be?
How many different people 'live' inside them?
Do they ever overlap each other?
Are there boxes inside of boxes?

Dr. Atomic

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new."

 

 

John Donne (1572-1631), Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God

It isn't often that I come in touch with a subject as big as Second Life, but this is certainly an example.  Over the last 2 weeks, I've seen 'Dr. Atomic' 3 times, which is a new opera created by Peter Sellars and John Adams and showing at the San Francisco Opera.  This isn't your standard tragic-love-story opera fare - it is a tense, riveting meditation on the hours and minutes that preceded the first testing of the atomic bomb in the deserts of New Mexico, 1945. 

"Jumping the Shark"

I was so delighted by this reference that I hadn't yet heard!  It refers to a Happy Days episode in which Fonzi jumps a shark on water skis, and the popularity of the series apparently slid southward at the same time.  As I can well imagine!  Did you know that Henry Winkler apparently rode a Harley into the first studio episode and then crashed it onstage because it was too big a bike for him.  Anyway, I digress.

The reference was made in suggestion that SL would face a similar decline as a result of the announcement we recently made about adding the ability for residents to purchase L$ from each other and put the charges on their credit cards directly, as an alternative to creating accounts on one of the several third party site that offer currency exchange.  The issue begs a deeper question, which is how Linden should decide on features which benefit the broad SL community but potentially compete with features or businesses created by SL residents. 

Speeding the StartUp

Second Life is a magical thing whose value and meaning to a person are varied and nuanced.  It is very difficult to summarize in a picture or sentence or paragraph.  Like New York or London, it is one of those things you just have to experience to understand.  We at Linden Lab been watching carefully how long it takes people in-world to really 'get' what SL is all about.  A rough measurement is that about 3.5 hours of in-world time is the average.

Deeper Beauty

I was asked to judge (along with our own Jeska Linden) a beauty pageant on thursday night.  The first place winner, for the 'talent' part of the program, rezzed a huge hot dog with mustard and flew it around the stage and above the audience.  One of the other contestants whipped out a period chicago row house she had modeled, which covered much of the stage.

Aside from the enjoyment of what it must have been like to see the world from the vantage point of Hunter S. Thompson,  it was cool to be present at another great example of what SL can certainly be:  Deeper.  Were we seeing just the girls, or some fantastic dance of collective human cognition? 

Vote!

Mitch Kapor turned me on the other day to a well known essay by R.H. Coase (there is a link to it here), which was written in 1937 about why companies should exist at all.  If market forces (free people setting their own prices for goods and services) generally produce almost perfectly efficient results, why do we see these unusual collections of people (Linden Lab for example) all agreeing to work together without any of the usual haggling, agreeing instead to a fixed wage and percentage of the company.  It is a fascinating question to re-examine in our age of hyper-communication, and one that is put in a particular spotlight by things like the feature voting page for Second Life that we put up today (if you are a SL resident, you can find it here)

Space Exploration

''This is Major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door.''

When I was little, I really wanted to adventure into space. I bet a lot of people wanted to do the same thing, and that a good number of people still do. The movie industry does a great business selling us dreams about space. I can still remember lying inside a wardrobe box in my basement, ready to lift off, surrounded by knobs and buttons I had drawn around me on the carboard. So what is it that is so appealing about space? Why do we all want to be astronauts? In 1999 after I had left RealNetworks to begin the work that would become Second Life, I was interviewed for an article about what successful tech entrepreneurs were doing with their lives, and I told the guy that I wanted to get back to building rocket ships. It was a general answer – I didn’t mean that I actually was going to try to win the X-Prize or something, but just that I was now free (per the article, at least financially) to go after the greatest dreams that I could imagine.

Now, 5 years later, I am convinced that in a strong sense I have really achieved what I had dreamed of as a kid and what I said in that article. The way we did this was by building the space, rather than the spaceship. Instead of trying to get out of orbit, we at Linden Lab instead built the place that such a ship would travel into. I think that the most compelling aspects of space exploration – the things that drew us all to it as kids – are in Second Life, or even in some sense are Second Life.