Philip Rosedale, Second Life founder, wandering evangelist, and noob-haired avatar, has a guest column on BBC in which he says that the ‘coolest’ technology is “anything born from the right we should all have to innovate.”
Now, frankly, I like Philip when he’s floaty and his eyes gaze off in the distance. I remember when I met him at the Virtual World conference he had that faraway look that I either associated with someone who’s so visionary that they’re always paying attention to the horizon, although maybe he was looking for the restrooms or any means of escape. I suppose he might have been worried that I was going to corner him about rental rates or something.
In any case, I’ll stick with the rather romantic notion that Philip believes all the stuff about magic, about uploading his brain to the Grid, the Singularity, and will remain grateful that he showed the wisdom to let someone else actually run the place (and I’ll continue to be patient that we’ll actually start to see something REALLY tangible as a result).
In the BBC article, Philip waxes about innovation:
“Giving people licence to develop, to build, is incredibly empowering and the root of real innovation. This grid model is all about democratisation of innovation and now as a society we have to look at how we take that and make it truly democratic by engaging with the digitally excluded.”
And Philip is following the “change the world” trend that’s taking over all the brain space of the Web 2.0, techy, bloggy types out there now that there’s less money available in the venture capital space, I suppose - might as well spend the spare time thinking about something useful. For Philip, it’s all about powering the world, and in so doing empower them to innovate:
“At a time when the West is looking at alternative fuel and power supplies for reasons of cost and ecology, the developing world is nearing an opportunity to embrace decentralised power generation as a means to survive and thrive and ultimately to innovate.
The global talent pool is set to boom as incredible minds start to look at world problems through fresh eyes and start to envisage the ways in which technology can make a difference to their lives and their surroundings.”
Now, we work with a group, OHAfrica, that supports HIV treatment in Lesotho. And one of the lessons we’ve learned from them is the caution that technology and innovation can also be paternalistic: just because technology allows YOU to Twitter, doesn’t mean you should be pushing it on aid workers in the developing world.
But I’ll let Philip get all dreamy for a bit. And what I DO like is the following quote:
“But beyond the big picture stuff it was often the tiny, almost imperceptible tweaks which people made to the virtual world that got me most excited.”
Because as I’ve noted elsewhere, the Courage to Create doesn’t need to be monumental, it can be incremental, and is based on the fundamental truth that we all have talents, and having the right and ability to use them is tranformative.
I may be too much of a cynic, but this rhetoric reads to me as very close to ‘Let them eat tofu.’ Rhetoric has context, it is uttered in a place and time and for a reason.
The outgoing president of a certain large republic in North America has a famous habit of setting up an outrageous proposition, assigning it to his opponents, and then attacking that proposition despite its considerable variance from what his opponents were actually advocating.
Who argues against the right to innovate? No-one. What does the right to innovate mean? Making new stuff that works? When did the enterprise Philip Rosedale chairs last do that? But if the speech is actually about the right to cause land panics it makes considerably more sense, and can be critiqued.
RightAsRain Rimbaud unpacks it better than I ever could:
I like floaty as much as the next guy, but LL’s chair and LL’s CEO need to get way past floaty real soon now.
[…] also Dusan Writer about Rosedale’s BBC-column! Roland […]
@ Alberik:
I don’t disagree. On the other hand, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that the further away Philip is from the actual “running of the Grid” the better. Let him fantasize about cell panels on roofs or whatever.
(By the way, on that topic, one of the issues with this type of thing is that the technology is often stolen and salvaged for parts. There is difficulty putting communication infrastructure in many places because phone wires are stolen, stripped, and sold as scrap. Why he thinks that solar panels on roofs won’t face the same challenge I have no idea).
Let Philip gaze off in the distance. He’s no longer part of Second Life, as far as I’m concerned. He talked about getting his hands into innovation again, such as the viewer, and then they outsourced it. We are seven days shy of it being one year since Philip last blogged - and at the time, he promised to blog monthly.
He’s living in his own reality. If that isn’t true, I’d love to hear what he’s doing, how it impacts the Grid, why we should care.
All of which places the onus on M.
You ever hear the 100 Days theory of the Presidency?
On the theory that you establish a tone, systems, focus, and deliver tangible results in your first 100 days in office. If you fail to do this, you’ve set a context for your subsequent work.
How do you think M did his first 100 days? He’s now at about 180 days “in office”. With Philip wandering off fantasizing about solar panels, it’s in his hands really.
[…] forgotten about this until this morning’s post on Philip’s infatuation with solar panels and other real life […]
@Dusan
I have no idea about M because he says so little to the community that it is impossible to judge what he’s doing. He appears to have done nothing to improve the FOAD style of LL’s customer relations. There are no real signs of improvements to the UI. The land panic does not speak well of his engagement with the customer base. His promise to talk with customers on the SL forum followed by his total silence was incomprehensible.
Did he intend to honour the forum promise and then forget?
There’s been speculation on the forum that LL is under financial stress, perhaps because of the increase in the price of short term money, and this has forced the increase in the renamed Openspace price and the invention of the new Narrowspace sim. When a company behaves this incomprehensibly, and offers a rationale this vacuous, it is reasonable to assume they have reasons that they cannot admit publicly admit. Every day of M’s continuing silence contributes to that fear.
The spin round the quarterly stats do not encourage confidence either. The statement that premium membership does not matter because LL pays out in stipend what it makes in premium payments is simply weird. That statement could be true only if premium memberships were not paid in RL cash and the stipend paid in LL play money.
So, M’s performance could be judged as good, but really badly communicated. Or it could be judged that his performance as CEO is of a par with his performance as communicator. Time will tell.
How do you think M did his first 100 days?
(shakes head)
Is it still possible to call a mulligan and call up Grace McDunnough?
er…no one scream koolaid in not crowded lindenworld:
from the BBC excerpt in the word’s of the eraserheaded hero of the metaverse:
“What does the future of the internet look like? It looks like a world map where even the furthest corners of the planet are able to get online because of the decentralisation of power generation.
What technology is getting me excited right now? Electricity.”
Dusan, I hate this liberal guilt over Web 2.0 and new media tools and their crying because the third world doesn’t have them and they “shouldn’t push them on the third world”. Good Lord, even in the poorest African countries people have cell phones that are central even to their economy and move money around and people go 30 miles to use the Internet. They don’t berate the North or West because they don’t have these tools, they will get them, as they develop the rest of their societies. I don’t get the huge guilt trip over Web 2.0, when there wasn’t an equivalent over the original Internet itself. People just went about trying to put it in where they could. They didn’t sit around wringing their hands and saying “I won’t go on the Internet until everybody in the Third world has it, and I won’t shove it down their throats”. So its graphics and bandwidth intensive? That will change, and is already changing, and eventually it will either slim down itself or there will be slimmer variants.
As for Philip’s rantings, I remain somewhat unimpressed. I’m one of the digitally excluded. I can’t build to save my life in Second Life and I can’t Photoshop. Do I now get a grant from Philip? I mean, seriously, that’s whack. Again, as countries develop, they lay all this on, it comes in time, just like any other medium.
The “right to innovate” strikes me as a strange, and not legally grammatical locution. People have the right to free expression, or the right to receive and impart information across frontiers. That’s all. If you start talking about “the right” to innovate, you imply states have to grant this in some positive way by payouts, or you imply non-state actors like companies can take it away or something. It’s just plain weird.
Then this idea that these fresh thirdworld minds are going to come at problems in some special innovative way that will be feted just because it’s “the third world”. I mean, Jesus, people are people. Do you think there’s a special Third World way to look at the problem of people shitting in their water supply? or burning up their fossil fuels and polluting their air? Either you believe science is universal, or you don’t. It’s not like there is some special magical perception conferred on people in undeveloped countries that will now be forced upon us, and everbody else has to make way.
I find this sort of fanciful talk about the third world to come from wealthy Americans who haven’t really spent much time *in* the third world, or they’d be less romantic, and “get it” better about why countries don’t develop.
@ Prok - What I’ve learned from the OHAfrica folks is NOT to assume you know what someone else needs. They decided that we had the expertise in Canada (medical knowledge, systems knowledge, etc.) to help set up an HIV clinic in Lesotho. And first, we do: the level of training at the time in Lesotho, the lack of physicians, etc. meant there was a benefit from transferring knowledge.
What was interesting about it was that the attempts to transmit knowledge, which included Web-based approaches, didn’t work as well as just saying “OK, these are the things we know and have access to, how do you want to use them”.
The reason the project was so effective was that the response was: “send some physicians over here to help” which meant getting an on-the-ground perspective of the issues. It wasn’t a technology issue, it was a people one.
What’s interesting is that of the physicians and others who WENT, the ones who were successful were the ones with the humility to say “I’m at your service” rather than “Here’s how it’s done” - the latter didn’t understand the cultural context and were generally ignored.
On this basis, I don’t see a difference between the developing world and the rest of it: there are people with knowledge or resources, and there are other people without it. It’s not much more complicated than that.
And like the rest of the world, the solution usually isn’t the application of technology because, well, because it’s there, but rather facilitating listening, because often the most intractable problems don’t have technology as their solution - often it’s something simple.
So my tendency is to agree with you: the idea that we take a backpack full of laptops and solar panels or whatever and like Johnny Appleseed dispense technology in our wake seems to me to be paternalistic and misguided.
Having said that, this doesn’t discount the desire to make a difference, whether it’s in the developing world or around the corner: You tell me know I could be useful to you, and I’ll respond with whatever I know and will try to bring whatever resources I may have at hand.
It’s likely we’ll both realize there were things we didn’t know we didn’t know, but those things are less about what “world” we come from, or how good our graphics cards are, and more about, as you say, just being people.
[…] has been waxing philosophical about the virtues of, um, electricity. And the Lab has been supporting research at MIT in which a […]
[…] Six months ago Philip Rosedale handed over the operational tiller of Second Life to Mark Kingdon, formerly of Organic, so that he could focus on vision, and technology, and electricity. […]
[…] 14.11.08: Philip Rosedale: We Have the Right to Innovate […]