Thomas Malaby has written a thoughtful, intellectual and engaging book that takes us inside Linden Lab and examines how their work culture influenced development decisions, and the community of Second Life Residents.
And while I fully intend to attempt a thoughtful, intellectual response, for today I’m going to forget all that and give you juicy, gossipy and entirely out-of-context quotes from the book that are unfair to a book that has far more weight than tidbits. But hey - Malaby is appearing on Metanomics this afternoon at 1:00 pm PST, so consider this advance back chat.
(P.S. Highlights in the text below are my own).
On “Cool Stuff”
On how coders chose projects to work on, how their ideas were received, and what motivated them:
“Of course, it bears mentioning that it can matter WHO labels something cool - such an assessment from Rosedale or Ondrejka carried a great deal of weight. The importance of possibly catching Rosedale’s attention and therefore his support with a “cool” idea was widely noted to me…One Linden put it to me as follows” “Phillip will get very excited about something without really seeing it through to its logical end.” Another Linden was more concise…”For Philip, it’s, ‘Look, something shiny!’ The company’s forward orientation, toward an uncertain future, grounded their guesswork in such aesthetic appeals, supplementing the other appeals to tools and to games.”
On Second Life as a Social Space
“In considering this early history, a number of things stand out. In Rosedale’s initial idea for what became Second Life, he did not anticipate how the space would become a social space. I asked in our interview whether they thought they were building a society. (Rosedale responds):
‘Given my background there was always a tendency to focus a little bit on the technical because I found the technical problems to be so fascinating involved with creating this. But I think as a person who had a lot of passion for the idea, I was always struck by the expressive and not so much societal elements, although I have to say: I think that a lot of the enthusiasm I have now for the kind of social change or societal change…to where it matters….I didn’t go in feeling like we’re going to make people’s lives better.’
On Being Creative & Consumers
“Content seems in Second Life particularly vulnerable to commodification, and the emerging distinction between content creators and consumers seems to stand in rather marked contrast to the exaltation of collaborative, technically skilled creativity that underwrites Second Life’s public face. Consumers are nonetheless obviously a boon to Second Life, and this was recognized around Linden Lab. Their purchasing of stuff…is the ongoing engine of Second Life’s economy. But there was little readiness to see this kind of action by users in Second Life as “creative” around Linden Lab, and there is a parallel here to a class of Linden Lab activity that, while essential and ongoing, could not qualify as creative. This speaks to the parallel range of jobs at the Lab and how they were viewed on a mostly unspoken scale from the very creative to the not creative at all and the ways employees felt they were judged based on their place in this classification system.”
OK….so more to come when I do a more thorough, thoughtful review - in the meantime, see you at Metanomics!
Read my comment here:
http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=1537#disqus_thread
Not sure I will be able to get to this, but in a nutshell, I think methodology that involves studying a company making social software without ever interviewing those impacted by it, who also shaped both the software and the company, strikes me as simply illegitimate. I find the concept of the “corporate ethnography” itself illegitimate; and for *this* enterprise even more so. I think you must bear down on this problem as part of the discussion of what is acceptable as academic study in and about virtual worlds, as you did in the previous debate with Beyers, etc.
Whatever the value of studying only the company, it’s a company decidedly not functioning in a vacuum.
Cory Linden said at one point that *one third* of the employees were made up of former residents, and not just people who had skipped in and out of SL as a sample, residents who were heavily engrossed and invested, many with big businesses and reputations.
The Lab went through a period then when they put in a lot of residents as staff — then dropped a lot of them. Today, it’s likely a much smaller percentage. But the reality is that the world and the resident community are an enormously important factor.
I have some other thoughts on the methodology and themes of his book - which is notably historic rather than a “current” view - but I’ll save those for later.
In the meantime, another quote:
“In my time around Linden Lab I felt it was always a hair’s breadth away from flying apart at the seams, and it still may. This is a vital point to keep in mind as we gauge the prospects for ludic bureaucrocies.”
Yes, I can’t wait to read the book, and I’ll come back after I read it. I don’t think Thomas’ answers today at Metanomics were adequate on my question.
nothing new.
just the virtual showing the reality of a culture/machine that should never be permitted to do anything but turn screws.
we have robot people runnning broken/half thought out machines, and now we gleefully ask to be robots in the system based on those half truths and the fear that we wont be part of the cool kids as defined by 50 years of advertising dogma.
BTW, the bit about the creatives — Lindens espouse creator-fascism when they don’t espouse technocommunism, they amount to the same thing. Consumers are sort of a necessary but expendable plug-in to their software development.
I can’t help feeling that everything we’re seeing so far from this book was visible in the forums debates in 2004-2005 before the forums were shut down.
If there was real science behind that book, it did not show itself during the interview on Metanomics. What I heard was a bunch of business gossip about Phillip’s model and how messed up it is because he once knew some hippies and how Stewart Brand is some kind of socialist, hippist, bad seed.
The author never once talked about his methodology or his approach or his hypothosis or his conclusion. He just gossiped and appeared a bit horrified at the loosy goosy Californianess of it all. Oh my stars, where were there gantt charts?!! Faint and swoon.
For crying out loud, there are any number of Silicon Valley (or Seattle or Massachusettes) companies that had messy beginnings. BFD. The proof will be in the pudding. Does the thing make money for the investors? Yes or no? If Mr. Business author is all about the business, that should be something he talks about. Instead we get this gosh oh golly, isn’t their business model odd, kind of fainting spell.
Grow up. The people behind Linden Lab took a particular approach to the business. They have been profitable since day one. Why all the hand wringing?
Well, Thomas Malaby is a transplanted Harvard man who is now at the University of Wisconsin — so yeah, all that tuti-fruiti Cali stuff is pretty weird, as it is for most of us, and that’s ok, he’s right to single that cultural affectation as essential to understanding the whole Linden gestalt.
I’m waiting to read the book, but I’ve already made known my concerns about methodology.
The idea that “Linden Lab was profitable from the beginning” isn’t at all supported by the facts, easily found in the Lindens’ own interviews in the press. They had to lay off workers and go through a terrible crunch in 2003; they didn’t declare themselves as profitable until along about 2008. And they plough their profits back into the business, which is a method that I, for one, question if you are claiming to “be profitable” — it’s not clear that the hippie investor really get all that much from it, because they are the types who are rich anyway, and this projects isn’t even among their main projects, and they are far more interested in influence and power and the ability to spread their California Ideology than they are in actual cash profit.
Thanks for the comments, folks. I really enjoyed appearing on Metanomics. I’m eager to hear what you think of the book, Prok. By the way, do you also hold Tom Boellstorff accountable for not interviewing Lindens and not doing research at Linden Lab for his book about Second Life? That just strikes me as an inconsistency, but maybe I don’t understand your criticism fully.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say again that this is not a “corporate ethnography.” It belongs squarely in the long tradition of ethnographies of organizations. How is the project of doing ethnographies of organizations illegitimate? It strikes me as one of the few ways we can pull back the veil on institutions that are often deeply invested in remaining cyphers.
I agree about the old and new. I wouldn’t be surprised if a good analysis of the forums in 2004-2005 could have yielded many similar insights. As you note, this is a cultural logic that informed Linden Lab (and, in my opinion, many other companies). From one point of view, if one has recognized it (as you have Prok), it’s not surprising. I think the really dangerous thing about it is in fact how few have recognized it, however.
In any event, and responding to some other comments here, I understand that some viewers/readers, like Cranky above, will not approach the work on its own terms (the silly notion that science requires hypothesis testing rears its ugly and ill-informed head once more). For those that do, hopefully it will contribute to situating virtual world makers within some important histories.
Thomas Malaby said: “By the way, do you also hold Tom Boellstorff accountable for not interviewing Lindens and not doing research at Linden Lab for his book about Second Life?”
I have just finished Boellstorff’s book and am eagerly awaiting yours. It could be said that you two have been looking at two sides of the same coin. What would be REALLY interesting now is if you two were to compare notes. I’d be very interested to see where the mismatches are in the ways these two communities view Second Life (and I think if either of you had chosen to examine “the other side of the coin” to any extent in your research it would be difficult to see any mismatches that were there). What about doing an “In Conversation” event together inworld? I’d come!
I can understand why social scientists p**s off “real” scientists (hehe). Coming from an arts background, but with a keen interest in hard science topics (A-Life, complex adaptive systems) I cannot take ethnographic methods seriously as _scientific_ research. However, there are other types of research which are equally valid (IMHO), and which provide different sorts of knowledge, not readily accessible via the scientific method. Whereas I can’t take ethnography seriously as science, I think it is a powerful methodology when considered as craft-led research (a subset of practice-led research) (the craft in this case being writing). I am wondering how much ethnographers do themselves a disservice by trying to insist they are scientists. Science isn’t all of human knowledge and the world would be a dull place if it was.
p.s. I thought it a dreadful shame that on this edition of metanomics Robert Bloomfield chose not so much to connect-the-dots as to push his fundamentalist augmentationist agenda. This paragraph in particular filled me with dread …
Robert Bloomfield said: “But how much can we learn about people from the way they dress? Is that woman really a man? Maybe we can tell. Group membership and other profile data would also seem to provide a lot of useful information that we can use to identify who’s who. In the end, the Reynard Program will help the sincere among us in two ways. By helping us uncover tricksters and perhaps more importantly, by helping us devise new ways to establish our reputations and our credentials more reliably within the rather unusual sphere of Virtual Worlds, and Second Life in particular. And, by the way, don’t be surprised if later this year you see researchers in Second Life asking you to fill out surveys that will help them correlate your real-life characteristics with your Second-Life behaviours, profile data and other information from the World. I hope that you will all cooperate with them, as this is a research program that I think can really help all of us. But, one caution, before you provide any personal information: double-check their credentials.”
A week after reading this, my jaw still hasn’t undropped enough to write a civil response (but I’ll be back when it has).
spin x