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2. TOOLS OF THE GODS
- Cornell University Press
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It is Friday lunchtime at Linden Lab in mid-2005, and everyone is filing into the kitchen area to partake of the company-provided weekly lunch, an occasion frequently cited by Lindens as a key site for generating company solidarity. This sense of belonging is accomplished, they acknowledge, not only through the act of eating together but also through the shared experience of viewing demos of “secret projects,” hearing addresses from Philip Rosedale, and similar, somewhat ritualized activities (for example, new employees may be asked to take a taste from a jar of very, very spicy hot sauce known as “The Man”). As people queue for today’s repast (assorted deli sandwiches), I am in the middle of a conversation with another member of the QA (quality assurance ) team (not the fashion maven) about the vagaries of academic publishing and my own at the time somewhat pessimistic view of the prospects for publishing ethnographic work on technological production . “Fuck ’em,” says a passing Linden, in his inimitable style of utterance , one that combines non-negotiable assertion with a challenge to his listeners to inquire further. “What’s that?” I ask, smiling. “Fuck ’em,” he reiterates, and continues by concisely condemning the longestablished system of academic publishing to the dustbin of history. 2_TOOLS OF THE GODS T O O L S O F T H E G O D S _ 4 7 They’re dinosaurs, he says, and he tells me simply to publish the work myself, on the Web. If it is worthy work, he suggests, it will have an impact. His point made, he moves on. This brief exchange points to a prevailing—though by no means unanimous—and politically charged disposition toward technology, creativity, individuality, and control that I encountered frequently around Linden Lab. Here I was offered a clear way to proceed in my own situation: via the tools for online publishing available (ostensibly) to all, I could take control of my work and its dissemination without any assistance from an institution. The value of that work would be determined by its reception in a world imagined as a level playing field populated by other individuals pursuing their enlightened selfinterest . Given a moment’s pause, we might find it just a bit odd that someone working for an institution that wields an enormous amount of brute technical control over a space with thousands of users would so readily dismiss the contribution of institutions. But this sentiment was by no means uncommon around Linden Lab (although its delivery here was unmistakably individual). To sort out the foundations of this point of view we must delve into the historical and political context of Second Life’s creation; that is, how Linden Lab was itself politically situated, and how this manifested itself in its work practice as Lindens went about building, maintaining, and expanding these new domains for a digital society. (-: :-) While there is a modernist tendency to characterize new (and notso -new) technologies as isolated from politics—as value-neutral— scholarship (including a number of excellent contributions from journalists ) has made clear that some of the most important developments in computing and networking technology in the United States were inextricably linked to political and more broadly ideological interests. Works by journalists (Kidder 1981, Hiltzik 2000, Waldrop 2001, Markoff 2005) and, more recently, academics (Thomas 2003, Turner [54.90.167.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:24 GMT) 2006) are helpful in filling out the historico-cultural landscape from which computers emerged, particularly in the San Francisco Bay area. Specifically, these works reveal how the development of these technologies and their makers’ aspirations for them were inextricably linked to general attitudes about authority that characterized the postwar period in the United States. Important work on the current open source software movement has revealed how its members are the contemporary inheritors of these ideas (Coleman 2004, Kelty 2005). Their strong assertion of software as a form of free speech “underscores ideas of individual autonomy, self-development, and a value-free marketplace for the expression of ideas” (Coleman 2004: 510), while stridently denying any specific political claims in what Coleman calls a “political agnosticism ” (509). A common theme of these works is a remarkable and mutually con- firming combination of a deeply held skepticism toward “top-down” decision making—with a corresponding resistance to (and even resentment of ) the institutional control of technology—and a deep faith in the ability of technology to provide solutions when made widely...