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Chapter One

Touching Knowledge

From Virtual Reality to Real Company

If Second Life becomes an integral part of the Internet's next evolutionary stage, it's still quite possible that few will remember Linden Lab, the company that nurtured it in the early years. (Ask people who came of age in the twenty-first century if they remember Netscape, creator of the first commercial Web browser; expect blank stares.)

Building the metaverse wasn't even the company's main goal when it began operations in 1999, in a warehouse on Linden Street, a narrow alley in San Francisco's Hayes Valley. Like many parts of the city during the Internet's first boom times, the street teetered between gentrification and drug-addled squalor. On one end of Linden were upscale restaurants serving the arrogant young mandarins of dot-com excess; on the other was an unattended parking lot with a clientele who often slept in their cars. Linden Lab's immediate neighbors were wholly appropriate for the world that would eventually emerge from their servers: a dubiously grungy auto body garage and a fetish boutique.

Into this unlikeliest of spaces came Philip Rosedale, clutching the keys to his shabby new office. He'd just left his position as chief technology officer of Real Networks—then the Net's audio streaming software of choice—and plowed a million dollars of his own money to build . . . well, at the start, that part wasn't exactly clear.

Born in 1968, Philip Rosedale is tall and lanky, with a triathlete's build and the cheeky, boyish good looks usually associated with Hollywood teen idols. (To rib him on that front, some of his waggish employees once cut out a photo of Rosedale from a magazine profile, glued it into a collage of teeny-bopper stars from the eighties, then tacked the mess to the bulletin board at the company's front entrance. For months afterward, visitors to Linden Lab would get their first glimpse of the CEO as a disembodied head floating amid a montage of Mark Hamill, Michael J. Fox, and Emilio Estevez.) Rosedale has light-colored eyes, and during his rhetorical crescendos (which are frequent), they go wide with a kind of wonder that gives anything he's saying an aura of the inevitable or the evangelical, or both. He is prone to flights of gratuitous cosmology, though it's clear he sees these as directly related to the day-to-day of running his company. Then again, it sometimes seems like conversational judo to dodge oncoming practical questions by flipping them into the stratosphere. (A Second Life subscriber once asked him where Linden Lab was going as a corporation, and Rosedale answered by first talking about the birth and expansion of the entire universe.) Whether it's everyday chat or a bout of ontology, however, Rosedale's honorific of choice is generally "dude."

He spent his earliest years in Maryland, the oldest son of a U.S. Navy carrier pilot who later retired to become an architect and an English major who left her teaching position to raise Philip and his three siblings.

"For a little while, because there was no good public school," Rosedale recalls, "I went to a born-again Baptist school, no kidding, in trailers, in single-wides, in Hollywood, Maryland. And it was so interesting because they just . . . preached fire and brimstone, and it was crazy, and it scared the crap out of me."

For a time, it turned him into a pint-sized proselytizer. "So I would go around and ask people, ‘Have you been born again?' So I think that actually helped me critically examine the world around me in a really profound way . . . I [later] realized, this is driven by people, this is not driven by some fundamental truth . . . But it left me with a kind of appreciation of deep thoughts and meaningful things. I just think I kind of had to take that and make my own some sense of it at some point."

Traditional religion discarded, something still kept him yearning to visualize the absolute.

"I can remember standing in the backyard near the woodpile," Rosedale recalls. "Looking into the woods, I can remember thinking, ‘Why am I here, and how am I different from everybody else? What am I here to do? What is my purpose here?' But I don't think I thought it in a real religious sense . . . I always had this strong [sense of], ‘I want to change the world somehow.'" Thinking back on it now, Rosedale wonders if this was the ultimate origin of Second Life, when he began feeling about for a goal that would match that insight.

His experiences with computing would turn that sense of wonder in a practical direction. As an early teen, he read about a single-cell simulation conceived by theoretician Stephen Wolfram, intended to demonstrate how complexity could emerge from nature if a cell reproduced through very simple rules. Rosedale got Wolfram's simulation working to his satisfaction in 1982 on an Apple computer owned by his aunt and uncle in Santa Barbara. Starting with a single pixel, the Wolfram program quickly transformed the monitor into a starburst of activity.

"You can see the pattern evolving," Rosedale recounts, "so when you get something growing, it's like a little Christmas tree going down the screen. So I looked at that, and I [thought], ‘Oh my god, you can simulate . . . anything.'" That intuition was enforced a couple of years later, when he and a friend tinkered with a Windows program that displayed Mandelbrot sets, mathematical constructs that seem, at a distance, to be a single crystal form but as you keep magnifying, reveal layers of thriving intricacy. Once again, he saw the richness and variety of life, simulated through an elegant flourish of code.

Unlike most computer programmers, whose creativity is entirely consumed by the digital, Rosedale maintained a loop into the real world; he had a yen to tinker and reshape it. As a kid he wanted his bedroom door to slide up and down, like in Star Trek, so he got out some tools and made it so. Which is why his parents came home one day to discover that he'd not only taken his door off its hinges but had gone up into the attic, cut a deep groove through the ceiling, and attached it to a pulley system, instead.

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Excerpted from The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World by Wagner James Au, Wagner J. Au
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.