Linden Lab, then and now: Tools, policy, self-perception and anthropology

During 2005, sociocultural anthropologist Thomas Malaby performed an ethnographic study at Linden Lab. Not of Second Life and its users, per se, but of Linden Lab itself, as a key component in the collective structure in and around Second Life.

Malaby found an organization whose actions, functions, and effects were frequently at odds with those which its employees and managers believed it to have. In the years since his research, now documented in his book, Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life, the Lab has performed a 180 in some areas, but have their perceptions of themselves as an organization, and as an agency actually changed?

Linden Lab has always thought of itself as transparent, open, internally democratic and free of office-politics. Of course, ask pretty much any staffer under circumstances that are likely to get you an honest answer (we find that the liberal application of alcohol works pretty well), and they'll admit that from their own perspective, Linden Lab appears to be none of these things.

Actually, any Linden or ex-Linden staffer who feels in a mood to talk about work is highly unlikely to break any confidential agreements, but they will talk your ear off about office politics. It's often hard to get them to stop, frankly.

This is in line with the Lab's corporate values (item five: No politics). As we've observed in the past, items on a corporate values statement are generally the things the organization sees itself as performing poorest in. Otherwise, there's not generally any need to mention it.

Number four on the list (Be thoughtful and transparent) is itself somewhat belied by the Documentation team's underground-famous and extremely funny video, poking fun at other staff members and all but begging them to communicate. We don't have a link for that one, but copies of the video are still circulating in some places (particularly as parcel streams in Second Life itself, though never for very long), and it's a telling (if hilarious) look at Linden Lab's internal lack of communication and transparency.

Following closely on the heels of griping about company politics is griping about an endemic lack of openness, transparency and communication. But if you ask an employee directly if they believe that the company is those things, they say yes, despite the lack of their experiencing it personally.

The Linden Lab of 2005, of which Malaby writes, favored the provision of tools, believing themselves to have little (and need little), if any, influence over the development of Second Life, while at the same time being quite like a giant slumbering in your village. Every least move and scratch of the slumbering behemoth shifts structures, and sends people running hither and thither. All the while, the giant dreams that it is apart from that tiny world.

Tools, therefore, were considered value-neutral, means of solving public-policy problems. Simply give the users more tools, and let them sort these things out themselves. You can read more about that from Dusan Writer. The idea of value-neutrality in tools is a valid one, but not when you need to insert a screw, and all that you're given a choice of hammers.

Where we part ways with Dusan, is in the notion that the Lab's preference of tools over policy still prevalent, now, some years later.

Indeed the provision of tools that address problems in one way or another have been drying up for some time, with an increasing focus on policy instead of tools. We're not really sure if it is ultimately more or less disruptive per-capita than the old tools-oriented focus, but it certainly has far more reaching impact in absolute numbers.

This is an area where we've seen a 180 degree shift in Linden Lab's operations, but we're really not certain that the Lab necessarily sees itself (as an organization) all that differently to how it did in 2005.

Linden Lab used to try to maintain the most hands-off approaches possible, which resulted in nobody really knowing where Second Life was going.

These days, by contrast, the Lab is very hands-on, but we're still not sure where things are going – or indeed if anyone knows.

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