This is where other virtual worlds have stepped up to the plate and provided solid solutions.

Linden Lab has released the web-on-prim, and they’ve got other very positive items for business coming down the pipeline this year. However, your article, Dusan, illustrates that the technology itself is insufficient to provide solutions. In the same way Facebook comes up with widgets and then misses the obvious things like protecting user security until screamed at by millions of Facebookers, Linden Lab delivers features and then misses out on how to implement items in user-friendly ways.

http://lalotelling.blogspot.com/2010/04/hey-rube.html

2. reinvention to a “real businessman” salvation?. no. not if the last 30 years of wall street and the silly valley have taught us anything. the cycle of government/populist reaction to criminal free for alls continues…but if technology DOES accelerate, then eventually the constant hum of criminality is all that we may hear.

The original hackers were a generation ago… it’s tommorrows hackers fueled by todays delusions, that are the challenge for others and finally they will see for themselves.

The real reality is that if you’re going to “be that way,” code is a narrative and a construct and a story geeks tell themselves too, that goes like this “We can control and perfect humanity”. And — we’re having none of it. And their code breaks down. And their narrative stinks. And they have no culture.

Why are you surprised that scientists don’t care about the humanities, and something like Coming of Age, Dusan? That’s an old story. It’s the Two Cultures story. It’s a story still unfolding, and in this chapter the scientists are crushing the humanities.

Hacker culture is criminal. There is nothing ultimately good about it. It’s role in the “creative destruction of capitalism” as they themselves describe it might be beneficial, might be harmful, might be both. They are not a recipe for civilization. You don’t say “Oh, forest fires are Nature’s way for creating space for new undergrowth and biodiversification” and then prescribe a forest fire in every glen. Of course not.

The people who actually succeeded with hacker culture overcame it very soon after they embraced it — Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps their essential criminal nature didn’t change, but they learned that they had to please their customers most of the time or they would fail. Hackers don’t care about pleasing customers.

Opensource isn’t a big win for anyone. It’s a shill, and its actual true devotees are exploited as big IT scoops up their hardwork or dual-licenses them into giving up their handiwork for free and for another’s profit. Everything about opensource is suspect. Opensource has a balloon payment with every contract.

The constant adulation of hacker culture and opensource and trying to apply these dubious methods of creating software that don’t even work so hot for the software on to other fields of human life are all self-discrediting. We all see their handiwork in all the evils of Second Life and its incubation of crime. The hope of SL and civilization is when the original hackers either depart quietly from the scene or reinvent themselves as real businessmen like Gates. Then they succeed.

right. but that’s either faith or delusional thinking. you choose.

LL is a business. Sure they talk about ‘improving humanity’ and all that sort of thing, but their aspiration is the Bottom Line. And it always will be – that’s how businesses work – that’s their paradigm. Even the concept of ‘brand’ is a part of that paradigm. Brands are about influencing public opinion and behavior. Nike IS about shoes. The ‘personal excellence’ angle is a sales tactic, not an aspiration.

Hacker culture works differently. It’s aspiration is progress driven by cleverness and quasi-anarchist ideals. This is why open source works very well as a concept. It works on those principles and for promoting them. It is also why crowd sourcing isn’t a really big win for businesses unless they put a lot of effort into managing the crowd. The bottom line isn’t an effective motivator in that paradigm.

We can’t expect LL as an entity to express the aspirations you are looking for – it’s not their goal (though I would guess that they’d gladly welcome it as a side-effect of paying their bills). Second Life as an ontological platform has been most successful when those who buy into that paradigm generate the aspirations. If we want this paradigm’s (or culture or cultural network or macro-culture or whatever you want to call it) aspirations based on how we live in Second Life, we have to be the ones to define them. And if we want SL to be the place for those aspirations, we have to be the ones driving that – with the understanding we are building on a platform we don’t wholly control and whose caretakers will always have a different agenda than us because their world works differently than ours.

They are selling Linden Lab a company that has a successful product called “Second Life”.

Its the same as Blizzard with the product of Warcraft. Activision purchased Blizzard. Up until now, Blizzard (a division of Activision) had control over the Warcraft franchise. There are now rumors that there are some personnel changes being made at Blizzard. The big chop up is coming.

All buy outs end with the big chop shop. They take what generates money and jettison the rest. That mainly means personnel.

What is fun to speculate about is who would be interested in Linden Lab, and who still has the extra funds to dabble in VR experimental communities. The main company I can think of is Disney. Then again, maybe a foreign buyer? Interesting possibilities.