Linden Lab chairman: Death to the techno-utopias!
By Adam Reuters
IBM’s Roo Reynolds digs out an interesting quote from Linden Lab Chairman Mitch Kapor, who is of course also the co-inventor of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In Bruce Sterling’s “The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier,” Kapor states:
“I’m very opposed to techno-utopias. Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it.”
The book predates the creation of Second Life, but the sentiment jibes with what Mitch (whose last name is pronounced KAY-pour, by the way) expressed in Davos last month:
“People tend to be idealistic about technoology and they harbour utopian fantasies that with the right technology everything is going to be all better. (But) people bring all of their stuff with them, all of their issues. The good, the bad, the ugly, the indifferent and the wonderful. They will take new forms and guises in Second Life … it will create new freedoms and huge new problems, we can’t even say what they are yet.”
