M Linden's SLB5 Speech: Any Apologies / Clarifications coming?

Not at all - don't assume. I was just making the comment that your analogy is flawed.

It is not obvious truth, it is an opinion. One that a lot of people also disagree with. Perhaps you should keep some of those *chill pills* back - you know just in case.

The "wild west" analogy is rather disquieting considering the First Nations peoples who were driven from their lands by the settlers. Very eurocentric.

I must admit its getting suburban round sl these days. Not too sure about this "academic" group that "built" our world. I doubt if they slaved in Gor or visited Dark Sims - they usually had questionaires to hand out for essay research. Hey, I have seen many of those recently ...

I saw Mitch with his alt BigJugs Midnight. No I'm just kidding Jeez! I hope there isn't a real BigJugs Midnight. I haven't really looked. I assume he uses an alt to stop getting pestered by Philip as soon as he logs in.

MitchK Linden is the one he's been using.

Well good, because it would be just way too sad for Linden Lab's best cheerleader to just have a completely blank profile.

I notice though that the born date for MitchK Linden is 4/9/2007. I'm still not overflowing with confidence that Mitch Kapor actually uses Second Life for any significant period of time, aside from the speeches.

*WAVE*

Well I personally blame Aspartame for:

a. For Making Linden management so dense at times
b. For Giving Mitch the lack of elegant speech skills that made him put together a bunch of inane analogies to create a paragraph that pissed off more than half the old-timers and content creator movers/shakers.
c. For making the past 2007 crowd that have since taken over the SLX forums so deluded and linden-tea drunk with optimism that they can not put down their pompoms for 5 seconds to hear us out.
d. For making me insane enough to think that coming here and posting my message would results in a linden reading it, deleting it, and finally posting something semi-apologetic on the Blog and ending this debacle.
e. For Desmond coming on here and making us look insane to the rest of the world like he ALWAYS loves to do by providing the only voice of reason left behind in SL
f. For Phoenix totally surprising me with his cool-headedness and thick skin and making me feel inadequate for letting a marginal linden's few words get to me..
e. And finally for the fact that I care at all about any of this.

Mitch is right, this is a sad sad worse than wild west vagabonds, settlers social misfits, the fringes of the society circle-pat on the shoulder-fest complete with oldies with goldies, disillusioned wannabees, stars, shakers, wannabe estate pimping managers, lindens in disguise, newbies with wide eyed enthusiasm, and a few users who must respond to every blog entry, every forum as the first response person -- you know who you are....

All of this is sad.... just sad.

And when it worked, when SL worked, it was semi justifiable like a bad diet coke addiction... but it no longer does --we are literally gathered around and arguing about a dead camel in the middle of the Sahara dessert.....

So now what?

I ask you

now what?

Well, I don't think Mitch owes anybody an apology.

He's not wrong that there are a lot of misfit toys in SL currently. I mean, what could be more marginal than griefers? Except possibly make-believe bankers, or erstwhile casino operators?

And he's not wrong that folks will bitch when the "frontier" gets "civilized." Remember the holy wrath of the bankers and casino operators? Even still there are folks who long for the halcyon days of yore when they could play relaxing games of "chance" (as far as they knew), and others remain intent on "investing" in vague promises of equity in imaginary virtual businesses.

As another example, consider the outraged response when LL began to offer enterprise-level support services for US$25,000/yr. That's just doing business, and the business isn't the 25K revenue--if anybody ever even signs up. Rather, it's another tick mark("Enterprise services: SecondLife +, Lively -" on some corporate PowerPoint deck. It's how the game is played.

Yet comments from the Pioneers would have it that those homesteading sheep-herders had fenced the very prairie!

All that said, I thought the speech itself was a stupendously unsuccessful bit of communication: the wrong message to the wrong audience at the wrong time. And a couple gadget-demo videos. It saddens me to think that this is what remains of Mitch's vision for SL. Only at the end, when the Linden Prize was announced, did I catch a hint that he remembered why he put so much into this, when it really was only a dream.

I was disappointed in the speech, at what was supposed to be such an uplifting event. Very poor word choices, in my opinion.

On the other hand, M Linden's latest blog post I found to be right on target. A partial "mea culpa" for the stability woes we've all been living through, and a ray of hope for the future.

Regards,

-Flip

Pragmatist.

Hmm.

I'm a pragmatist. I get on with things and deal with them in a pragmatic way.

Including building my life as a marginalised misfit with nothing to lose. Hey actually he's right. I don't have anything to lose - cos I take it all with me wherever I go. Only thing I have lost here is money, and when I look around at how little money I lost compared to some ... meh.

I think this speech was clumsy and it was offensive, in my view, because it just underlines how things are going.

CONFORM
CONSUME
OBEY!!!!

Can I have your stuff?

"I'm Brian, and so is my wife!"

On the other hand....guys. Who is Mitch Kapor, and why does what he said bother you so much? I read his speech, including the relevant portion, and I tried to get insulted by it, but couldn't. Granted, I'm not one of the "pioneers" he's talking about, but even trying to think about it from that perspective, it didn't do anything to me. Was this Mitch Kapor person directly involved with SL from the beginning? If not, who gives a toss what he thinks? Why should you care about him anymore than you would care about some newb who does nothing on the forums but prate about how much better WoW is than SL? Tell him he's a dork, maybe make fun of his name or something (seriously "Mitch Kapor" is a soap-opera name if I ever heard one), and just go on and play. 100L says you will never see this guy in-world, ever again.

Umm. Maybe I missed the irony? If not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor, including "Kapor is also Chair of the Board of Directors of Linden Lab"--and it's actually more than that. He wasn't just a major early angel investor, but also is said to have made significant contributions to the original vision that became SecondLife.

Okay, but I still don't see why what he said should be all that upsetting. Fine, being on the board of directors means he has some influence in what happens to SL, but reading the whole speech again, I don't see one whit of "disappointment" hiding in his choice of words. He describes many (not all) of the earliest SL users as fringe, in his opinion. So? Again, what does his impression of SL's early userbase as "fringe" have to do with absolutely anything at all? Chairman or not, I'll reiterate my wager.

That question is surprisingly easy to answer by Googling his name and doing just a very few minutes of reading.

You seem to have mistaken me for someone with common sense. You would do well to be less assumptive in the future.

I think Dakota knew who Mitch Kapor was. The point was why do we get upset by him calling us fringe or marginal. Of all the bad things I've been called in my life, and some by people I truly cared about, I just can't work up the energy to care what Mitch kapor thinks about a group of people I belong to. Even if he really meant what his words implied - that we are a bunch of geeks and losers with no friends, what do I care? I know who I am. I'm mostly happy being me, and the things that make me unhappy about me are none of Mitch Kapor's business. I guess I have things that upset me in my life that are more important than what some mega-rich computer dork thinks about the Second Life citizenry.

He says they are overly represented. That doesn't mean EVERYONE is one. Feel free to count yourself as the one who isn't a misfit, if that makes you feel better. wah wah...

I'm glad to be Misfit, even though I work in Silicon Valley and have a Real job and a Car and live in an actual house and pay taxes.

A Misfit, and PROUD of it!

That is how I took it as well. I'm a newcomer compared to many of you, but I don't consider myself 'mainstream' by any means. And even with the 8/2006 join date, the evolution in SL culture is crystal clear. When I first arrived, there were many more amazing builds built for the joy of creation and self-expression. When I started strangers still said hello to each other and open chat was used constantly. SL did feel like 'The Wild West' in that most of the residents were rugged individualists. And I love that!

And yes, those types were over-represented, in that as SL courts suburbia and corporate America, there goes the neighborhood. It's all strip malls, strip joints and hippie pay.

My favorite post from the blog was a title espousing the 40 percent growth. I was tempted to go to the comments and write:

"You say that like it's a good thing."

Mac actually gets credit for finding this, it is a good laugh and I love the Comment by Razorcut Brooks:

http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2008/07/new-torley-lind.html#more

YOU'RE WINNER!

Just in case you're not trolling:

Mitch Kapor is one of the most visionary entrepreneurs in the world of Information Technology. He founded a little company you might have heard of called Lotus Corporation, which was later acquired by IBM. He was also the developer of Lotus 1-2-3, which was THE industry standard spreadsheet application until the advent of Microsoft Excel.

He was one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has worked with some guy named Philip Rosedale in various capacities for quite a few years. He's also been chair of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003.

I recall listening to him address the SLCC gathering in San Francisco in August 2006 when he speculated on the future of SL based on his 25 years of experience dealing with the ups and downs of the computer and software industries. He pointed out that any new idea tends to be met with skepticism, and Second Life is no different.

He recounted a number of similar personal experiences, including the time when a representative of MIT told him that the personal computer was a “useless toy” that would never be useful on any serious level (1979), a venture capitalist refusing to consider investment in an Internet-related business (1993), and a senior member of the FCC discounting the idea of music being streamed over the Internet (1995). He compared these to those who say that SL is “just a game,” adding that when SL was in the embryonic stage, a number of potential investors criticized the idea of a virtual world, saying that “It’s been tried and failed,” that “there’s no market for online games” (which he points out is doubly untrue, by virtue of the fact that 1) there is such a market and 2) SL is not a game), and that “users will not create their own online content” (how untrue SL has proved THAT to be!).

So yes, I would never discount anything that Mitch Kapor has to say. You'll eventually discover that he's pretty much right about everything he says regarding computers.

P2

I bet he can't hit a curveball though.

I find CEOs and "visionaries" (and others in similar categories) to be a lot like psychics. Sure, given a long enough track record, they hit a few out of the park, but they also have a LOT of unmitigated "strikes" and "foul balls". Stuff that really contrasts with their real hits.

Mitch is undoubtedly a cool guy, and *has* (emphasized) done some amazing things, no doubt. However, all that should buy is my ear; the message still is subject to the same levels of skepticism on cutting-edge topics as anyone else in the industry, including the local computer tech down the street, mainly because it is little more than weather prognostication.

Mitch also has no real excuse to talk to the public using buzzwords and meta-geekspeak. He was one of us "little guys" once, too, ya know. I think the fact that he has forgotten that hurts his image and our perception of his take on things more than anything else.

I was not trolling. However, at the risk of -oclasting your icon, are YOU marginal and disaffected, like the Great Mitch Kapor says you are?