What are the golas of Linden Lab?

I've been asking myself this question a lot lately. So I decided to refresh my memory on what LL has said, past and present, to try re-framing my thoughts. I did come across this Blog post which LL references on their own corporate page:

https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2006/11/06/the-mission-of-linden-lab

A lot of it is about investors (yawn) but there is some meat to it:



And of course the "what we will not do" section was interesting (bold mine):



Do you think LL has strayed from these stated paths?

This cracks me up... If we thought the real world was so *bleeping* interesting, we wouldn't be hanging around here in Fantasyland, would we?

I think most individual contributer Lindens are probably really cool people who just want to make a really cool world.

Corporate Linden is a different story. My biggest disappointment is that the age of transparency, proudly blogged about by LL management a year or so ago, is clearly dead, cremated and has had its ashes scattered.

/me thinks they've pulled a Mugabe. They're all too busy patting each other on the back to notice that the rest of the place is going to crap.

It certainly is an interesting coming together of concepts.....on the one hand, we have a "virtual world" that is, in theory, designed to be a fantastical mimicking of realty......on the other hand we have a corporate structure that has to achieve the golden rules of business....."stay open" and "make money".

LL has the infinite task of blending both ideals...... I can't even fathom a guess as to how they will continue to do both effectively. But they're dam brave for trying.

Linden Labs is creating gholas now?

yeah. banned people are brought back from the dead, made to serve their new masters.

Just don't get the axlotl HUD :/

I think they missed the turn off for Coolsville years ago.

That stated, they said they want people from any country, anywhere to be able to use SL. The easiest way for LL to achieve that is to hire Disney to redo the world in it's image....

Gotta figure out how to unthaw him first

Umm.. not that Disney. He actually allowed the death of Bambi's mom! LL doesn't want THAT!!!!

Linden Lab is not any different from any of the big online communities. They are not going to add restraints until forcefully persuaded by outside forces. We saw that with Facebook, YouTube and CraigList - and we have seen it here also many times.

So the Wild Wild West is not so wild anymore - as it becomes tamer and 'mimmicks' the real world - some will be more comfortable with SL - and some will be off to another Wild World that meets their immediate needs. Some can correctly read the writing on the wall - some remain oblivious until the bitter end - But LL's goals insist we become more civilized - which means restraints are surely going to continue to be forced upon us.

Ah, that's where the gholas come in.

I would say they are trying to spread their platform type so that it becomes the basis of the 3d web. As in, right now there are lots of compatible grids and one can access them with one viewer type.

In a system that was really "a close reproduction of the actual physical world we live in ", the terrain should be on the surface of a sphere, the land masses match the continents, and users shouldn't be able to fly or teleport. Avatars shouldn't be able to live underwater unaided. Users should be able to travel without any awareness of being handed off from one computer to another. No textures should be gray, and shapes should not be deformed while the texture that stores their geometry loads. Avatars would all be human, or perhaps real world animals, or lamps or cars.

I'd say they've not done a very good job of creating a close reproduction of the actual physical world we live in, both from inability to overcome technical obstacles and as a matter of choice.

I think there's a place for a virtual world that is to a much greater degree physically realistic, but I don't think that's really want anyone at Linden Lab really wants to make. I'm not sure there's really be much demand for a mirror Earth that didn't allowing cheating the laws of physics by teleporting. If there was such a place, there would need to be some mighty interesting recreational activities offered during the trips.

In a close reproduction of our physical world, objects would be made of smaller objects, and the laws that apply at different levels would blend together in a mutually causal way. The law of conservation of mass and energy would need to apply in order to produce a realistic result. Objects wouldn't be rezzed from nothing but instead be made from existing objects and materials already present in the world. There's be no "shift-drag-copy" in a physically realistic world.

I wonder if the "Second Life" referred to in "we will not restrict Second Life " is the Second Life virtual world operated by LL, the make believe world of Ahern, Cordova, and so on, or the Second Life Grid, the technical system that to some degree can and supposedly will be increasingly able to be used to create other virtual worlds independent from the grid where all our current avatars live.

SL is not an approximation of the world we live in now. It's an approximation of the world some of us might live to see if the Vingean Singularity comes about.

I think that honestly the goal of LL is to experiment with what a virtual world can be, and has to be, in order to work. I don't know whether or not they're profitable yet (has there been any indication of that?), but they're doing something that nobody has really done quite like this before, and want to expand it further without losing what's gotten them so far already.

I thought that the "enhancing capabilities" line was dropped from the mission statement a while back, though. The "creating a replica of the real world" was probably only added when they realized it was inevitable, since the real world is what people know how to relate to - and a lot of our appreciation of creativity will be keyed in to our past real world experiences.

This is what happends to any company that they let the lawyers take over.. it dies off

Those are interesting quotations. Thank you for posting. The cynical side of me, the part that has seen how LL operates now for a number of years, believes that the real goal of LL has very little to do with a creative parallell world or a community or any idealism at all. Instead, those values have been supplanted by a recognition that we, the "residents" of SL are of more value to them as a product to be sold to third parties than as a direct source of revenue.

Enter account verification with Zindra as the motivating factor to drive more residents to verify. You might argue and say, no no, Sweet, they have said they will not retain any personally identifying information.... except if legally required to disclose that information. One might ask how that would be possible if that information is not retained.

No, one need not be a conspiracy theorist to see how we did not prove valuable enough to LL as residents per se. But we are quite valuable as specifically identifiable real world consumers. The golden eggs were not enough. LL wants to roast the goose.

I do not believe LL has met the goals outlined in the quotations, not by a long shot. LL "listened" to resident concerns about these matters with a tin ear. The horizon of power has been greatly reduced. SL is a mess, yes, and there is much within it I do not admire. But it is OUR mess. It is capitalistic to a fault. It is democratic. It is often shallow, a seductive mirage.... but capable of touching us deeply. It is gorgeously wasteful, silly, absurd, astonishing, challenging, infuriating. It is perhaps the most anti-green one can be, though it breaks my heart to admit that. It is rather like getting on the city bus and reading the minds and hearts of every passenger there, all the preoccupations and obsessions and longings and weaknesses...and hopes, dreams, tender memories, the creative urge, the desire to make a name, to seek vicarious achievements. And that is what makes it so beautiful to me. But LL has chosen to take a dictatorial stance, applying order to this chaos from the top-down. Whether the result will be any less messy remains unknown. It will certainly be less beautiful. Our collective coup failed. LL has counted the ballots by their mysterious means and assured us this change was the will of the people. Perhaps in that, they are not so far removed from their goal of reproducing the 'real world'..... we just didn't know they had Iran in mind.

Now they are pretty big, I'd say money would be top of the list, this isn't always to do with turning on idealism, it's more just how things get.

Thanks for answering, I think you're the first to directly answer my question.

I don't know that your assertions are wrong or right. I *do* think there is a lot of idealism at play here but the question has always been what are those ideas? I'm still trying to ferret out that part. I would like to take LL at face value, but so many of their actions run counter to their stated stance. I am only left with the feeling they are hiding something sinister.