…in a decade’s time, I would expect that the grid might be a bit prettier or bigger, but in general, not terribly much different than now. Either technically or socially.

And that’s a good thing.

Sure, we can talk about shadows or mesh or this or that technical shiny thing, but the culture has largely been established. And will be passed on, propagated, refined perhaps, but let’s face it ~ it’s already pretty well entrenched. The digital West was won, already, and the age of drugstore cowboys has begun.

With that comes some very powerful benefits. Stability. Familiarity. Widespread use. Deep investments into personal identity, and reliability from a business perspective.

Someone wisely said that the future is here now, just unevenly distributed. All of us here now are living in the common man’s future. We are just rather used to it already, but it’s going to be sparkly new for a lot of people, just as it is, for a very long time.

And i cant think of much worse than the EBAY methods of Meg Whitman becoming anything close to how a democratic government should work.;)

Thank you very much for this introspective. It is easy to forget sometimes why we are here doing the things we do. With the departure of Philip and other founders at Linden Lab, the future of Second Life seem to get murky. M does seem to have a vision for the company. I just wish they can articulate it as well as you do. These are my favorite lines…

“Second Life can help to improve the human condition because it helps us to see what that improved future might look like, and because it empowers us to believe that we can have some sort of control over our individual destinies, that life and this time has given us rare access to the gift of creation, and what is creation if not our ability to mirror, improve, comment upon or construct reality, to change our futures?”