3pointD.com

I’ve had a ton of stuff to transcribe and clean up from notes I took at the Second Life Community Convention last weekend. The latest is this keynote speech given by Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, in which he explains some of his personal motivation for setting out to build a metaverse, and talks about the early days at Linden Lab and the moment at which user-created content became the watchword of his virtual world. “As a kid, I was really into the way things worked. I was just always dreaming up things to do,” Rosedale told the crowd. “I always wanted the world to be LEGO somehow.” The real world isn’t all that LEGO, but the virtual world of Second Life arguably is.

“Think about this keynote, I was troubled by what to say, especially given the degree to which everyone knows what’s going on. One of the points Mitch made was about openness and about the future and where this is all going. It’s clearly getting really big, although I’m not going to waste any time on those numbers.”

“What’s critical is that the magic of the comunity is already here with us today. It feels to me at least like we’ve made it. The real content development, the stuff you all are doing, is now happening. A couple years ago it was very much this tabula rasa in which we believed that people would come. It’s easy in a sense to sort of see the future.”

“This idea of openness made me think. In this odd sense, Second Life is still this thing made by this one company, and it’s rapidly evolving into this enourmous set of demands and ideas and communities. Clearly, in the future it’s all going to be open: open systems, open protocols, open sources.”

“For this thing to work and become global in the way that the Internet became global, it’s going to have to become much, much bigger than us, to the point that you won’t have to listen to us, and you won’t have to worry about what me and Cory are saying. But for now you do, and it’s sometimes an uncomfortable realtionship, I know. You do have to have this situation in which you rely on us to do the right thing.”

“I would like to tell you a story I’ve told so many times, but often to investors and poeple in the press who sometimes don’t write down the wwole thing, so you probably haven’t heard it. It’s about my background and how I came to all this, and from my perspective why it was an interesting thing to do.”

“In my house where I grew up, when I was un junior high, I was struck by the desire to have my door in my bedroom go up, like on Star Trek, and so I got up — I grew up in San Diego, we had an attic — I got up in the attic and cut three of the roof joists, which was not a really good idea. The roof of my bedroom sagged a little bit, and I always wondered, being a pretty engineering-oriented little fellow, what would happen if someday the house fell down.”

“So I put a garage door opener in the attic, with a button I would hit and the door to my bedroom would go up and down. It was super cool.”

“Another time, when cable TV came in, my parents still had one of those old antenna clicker things that you used to turn the antenna on the roof, and I liked the clicker thing, so I got on the roof and put a big acoustic dish on roof, so I could turn it around and listen to what the other kids were saying on the street.”

“The third story about me as a kid, not that you need to hear any more at this point, is about the time I wanted a car, like all people do when they’re 16, but my best ideas was instead of getting a car, out of the back of Popular Science I was going to get a hovercraft kit and build myself a car-sized hovercraft, which I got halfway about through in the backyrad, and then it sat there and slowy rotted through, much to my parents’ displeasure.”

“So this was me as a kid, I was really into the way things worked. I was just always dreaming up things to do, although for the most part I was not able to do them all that well. The garage door thing was not such a clever idea, but in my mind it was so cool. So you see where I’m going with that. I always wanted the world to be LEGO somehow. I just wanted to make things as a kid. I know that that’s something that just stayed with me all the way to today.”

“As I got older, I got better at these things, particularly when computers came around, I just wanted to use computers to build stuff. I used to make my teachers stop and let me do impromptu show and tells about the latest gadgets I was working on. Another early influence that many people here can probably connect with was that I learned to program computers more as a tool. I thought of a comptuer more as a hammer. It was never very elegant, I just wanted to do something cool with it.”

“I remember learning assembly language in junior high, I had read this amazing Stephen Wolfram paper on cellular automata, and it was very easy to implement one of these scrolling up sceren things in BASIC, but it was so slow, so I learned assembly language programming so I could write it in that so it would go faster.”

“So I had all these automata streaming down the screen and you could just imagine that there was this inifinty of things under there. I loved complexity, self-organizing systems, big out-of-control systems, I just thought those were fascinating. And there seemed to be somehow a way to use computers to do this next thing.”

“As I got better with computers, I started my little software company in high school, I did more and more programming. I was fascinated with virtual reality, but I was struck that none of this virtual reality stuff, though it was amazingly well imagined, no one was actually doing it. There were really two things that kept this all from working. There was broadband, and 3D didn’t really work on computers yet. As it turned out, those two things got fixed in 1999. Broadband was on its was to infinity, and NVIDIA released its Geforce 2 graphics card.”

“So I left Real Networks knowing this was happening. I came back to San Francisco from Seattle and started programming and playing around in this little office on Linden alley in Hayes Valley. The first thing we did was simulated water. That and proceduralism and automata was a big early exciting element of Second Life. I loved the mystery of this sort of huge forest, this big, evolving forest where you had no idea what was there. People would pay just to walk in and see what was in the forest.”

“The idea was one of the formative ideas that drew some of the early engineers to Linden Lab. We were all geeking out on what would happen if we could make this immensely complex procedural world.”

“What was missing, the last piece of it, the piece that really brought us to the modern era of Second Life, if you will, was that we had this board meeting late in 2001. We had a lot of things working, we had some interesting bits and pieces of Second Life working in 2001, and we had a board meeting showing off the capabilities of Second Life. But at that time thought of the capabilities as the structure by which stuff could be made. We thought of it as something that would be constructed and then experienced.”

“So we were showing off all this crazy cool stuff, and then we got done with the demo and wanted to go on to how the business is doing and how much money is in the bank and stuff like that. There were seven of us at the time. Cory and I were in the meeting, there were several others in the meeting and several others in the room, and I said to everybody else, Why don’t you guys just goof off and make stuff, which really was not part of the demo, the intent of making stuff.”

“So there was just a field, and there was a bunch of eyeballs, which is what our avatars used to be, just big eyeballs, and I just said, make stuff and we’re going to talk and you guys will be background entertainment for us.”

“What happened was, we were watching the background, and we realized this city was emerging, very, very fast, it was this incredible thing. We all started getting drawn more and more back to the screen. We started talking about it, and a snowman showed up, Andrew built a snowman, and I don’t know if it was broken at the beginning, but then somebody else built a sort of burning man, with a bunch of small snowmen bowing down to the greater snowman, and so you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas in which two people could paint that way at the same time, much less three or four or five.”

“That was this moment of change in that board meeting where we said, you know, it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s actually about people making things together. What’s going to come out of this is cities and intention and collaboration and community, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which is allows people to do things together.”

“So after that we really turned to this idea of what we would have to do to let everybody come in and do this thing together. After that, it’s all kind of a blur.”

“Now is this odd time. You’ve probably all heard me talk about the event horizon of content creation, and how that even horizon is expanding. The rate at which people are building stuff in Second Life is at the point now where no one in this room could experience all of it in real time. There was a point where you could, but a couple of years ago or half a year ago, that point was passed. The content is now moving faster than all of us. It’s a fascinating experience to be part of a phenomenon like this.”