The Quiet Before, page 18
A few young women did try to keep the zine scene alive, but soon, in homes everywhere, the scratchy sound of a modem connecting to AOL could be heard. If girls wanted to reach out to one another, to commiserate and try to upend the status quo, they didn’t need to reinvent their own medium to do so. There was now a much faster way: just log on to the internet.
Interlude
CYBERSPACE
SOCIAL MEDIA AS we know it was born in a wooden shack in a shipyard in Sausalito. More precisely, it was born in the closet of that shack. Just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, not far from the rickety houseboats floating on the edge of the bay, sat a humming and vibrating VAX computer, the size of a small refrigerator, connected to a dozen modems. And in 1985, an eclectic group of Bay Area professors, engineers, freelance writers, and self-proclaimed futurists began dialing into those modems and talking by typing, at all hours of the day and night, about all manner of things: the worsening AIDS epidemic, their favorite Grateful Dead songs, the ethics of circumcision, the most useful UNIX commands. No one had done this before, engaged in this sort of disembodied, nearly instantaneous communication through writing. They soon began calling themselves a “virtual community.”
The description could easily apply to Peiresc’s web of correspondents or the links in the chain of the samizdat underground or the Riot Grrrls and their network of zines. These, too, were communities brought and held together through writing that allowed them to replicate, virtually, the warmth and energy that is generated when huddling together in a corner. What was different and suddenly completely new was the speed and scale of it.
The few hundred people who dialed into that VAX computer were not aiming to start a movement; they had no status quo they were aching to shatter. They just wanted to chat. In that sense, including them here represents a detour of sorts. But they saw themselves as just the first to test out these tools, and they were soon convinced that the tools themselves had revolutionary potential. Their ability to converse in this way mesmerized them as they watched the flickering green letters on a black screen accumulate, expressing personality, wit, genuine friendship, affinity for the same eccentric hobbies. It led to some big dreaming about what this space that was no real physical space at all—cyberspace—could be for, what it could achieve, what capacities it could offer its users, whether it had the ability as a medium to improve on all those petitions and local newspapers and manifestos of the past.
Inside that shack, a few feet from the VAX, sat John Coate, the hippie put in charge of managing this new community. He asked himself this question all the time, especially as his hours logged online grew: Was he witnessing the birth of a new source of power for anybody who wanted to upend the world? And his answer was always yes, but also no.
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ALL YOU’D HAVE to do is spend a minute with Coate to appreciate the idealism that was there from the beginning. In 1986, when he started at the WELL—which is what this conversation exchange was called—he was in his early thirties, tall and thin with feathered blond hair and a style of speaking that was so slow and sticky that he had earned the nickname Tex (which we’ll call him as well). He also really liked cowboy shirts. Tex had never used a computer before in his life when he showed up for his first day of work. His most obvious skill was knowing how to fix cars. But he had spent the past decade living on a commune in Tennessee called the Farm. This seemed to be the common denominator among the first employees of the WELL: they were former communards. They had all experienced the 1970s off the grid, forming new families and connections based on what they felt was more honest stuff.
People had been using networked computers to communicate for a little more than a decade by that point, but the existing forums were limited and lacked much imagination. ARPANET, the proto-internet, was open only to a small group of academics and researchers. For anyone else with the technical know-how, a small nerd archipelago of what were known as bulletin board servers existed, spots for local teenagers to discuss Star Trek. The WELL, as conceived, was to be capacious, embracing anyone who cared to enter and hang out and stay awhile. It would be as independent and quirky as a commune, its clearest antecedent, though one held together by telephone wires.
Its co-creator was Stewart Brand, well known in the Bay Area as a sort of new age impresario, who, in the words of the cultural historian Fred Turner, had become the hub of an idiosyncratic but auspicious network that “spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie homesteading, ecology, and mainstream consumer culture.” Where others saw in computers a bureaucratized future of punch cards and soullessness, Brand saw liberation, a tool for creativity and personal growth that could allow the individual to push beyond society’s constraints. He was best known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, a Sears, Roebuck for back-to-the-landers, which sold composting toilets, plans for geodesic domes, solar ovens, and a way of life that put great hope in technology. Brand was also, in his bones, an entrepreneur. If he had already seen himself as outfitting pioneers for the frontier, he was now looking to expand those boundaries beyond the physical, and maybe make some money doing so.
In 1984, Brand met a businessman named Larry Brilliant, who owned a company that sold a computer conferencing system called PicoSpan. Brilliant wanted to test out this new system, and he knew he could get a jump start if he handed the tools over to an established network. That’s what Brand had to offer. By the mid-1980s the Whole Earth Catalog had become the Whole Earth Review, a magazine produced on that dock in Sausalito. Together they decided to create the WELL; Brand, who had a knack for branding, got to the name after doodling for a few minutes. It was an acronym for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (a name Tom Wolfe could love). Brilliant would supply the $100,000 VAX computer and the software, and Brand, for bringing his Whole Earth cachet and his people, would be half owner and responsible for creating an electronic petri dish, an experiment to see if authenticity could grow through computers.
And this is how Tex got to be there: he knew how communes worked, and he knew how they could fail.
Tex had grown up in a prominent San Francisco family, but his life had swerved away from middle-class respectability in the fall of 1970, when he joined a group traveling the country like nomads in a caravan of converted school buses. They were following their spiritual guru, Stephen Gaskin, a man with a cultish hold on his flock. Gaskin’s philosophy was a mash-up of Zen Buddhism and countercultural pieties like veganism. He stressed the importance of marriage and childbearing—his wife was Ina May Gaskin, a pioneer of the home birth movement—but he also encouraged his followers to be in what he called “four marriage,” in which two couples committed themselves to each other as a form of egalitarian polygamy. Tex first got hooked on Gaskin when he saw him speak at a dilapidated theater in San Francisco, sitting cross-legged and blowing a ram’s horn to indicate that his lecture for the day was done.
The caravan experience was formative. The ten people on Tex’s bus, mostly strangers to one another, had to learn to live together. It wasn’t just a practical necessity. They believed they were remaking society. When a problem arose, they would have a session of “sorting it out.” These would be group confrontations, in which people were completely blunt about one another’s most minor faults. “We spent night after night talking to each other,” Tex told me. “We were going to tell the truth. We were going to be emotionally honest. Be open and see where that led. The idea was to try to have kindness when you tell people about their habits that you find annoying. It’s not enough to be okay with a process like that. You have to thrive on it. You have to be willing to hear things and change according to each other’s feedback. People who didn’t want it left.”
Behind this way of thinking and being was a kind of free speech absolutism. You let it all out, and the society that would emerge from this unfiltered directness would be stronger. Gaskin eventually led the group of three hundred that was part of the caravan to settle together on a plot of land, a 1,014-acre farm south of Nashville. They were building a new civilization—diverting water, building latrines, but also freezing in tents while constructing houses out of plywood and dealing with the occasional bouts of hepatitis. The Farm grew, and by the mid-1970s it had passed five hundred members, with many dirty children toddling around everywhere.
The same rules about total openness applied, but it got harder at scale. Gaskin allowed anyone to stop by and visit, and soon there seemed to be an endless stream of vagrant hippies, draft dodgers, and even mentally ill people showing up. One year there were twenty thousand visitors. This was an exercise in extreme tolerance, and Tex learned it well. All voices were welcome, even if it took patience to listen and stick it out and cut everyone slack. When the Farm set up satellite projects in the late 1970s, Tex threw himself into newer situations requiring these monk-like abilities, moving first to the South Bronx to help run an ambulance service, squatting in an abandoned building heated by burning old pallets and packing wood he found in defunct factories. Then he moved to Washington, D.C., to start a group home for Native Americans. All in all he calculated that throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, he had lived in fifteen different households with somewhere around two hundred people.
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WHAT TEX BROUGHT to the WELL was a faith that communication itself could be redemptive. He believed that this was the key to self-government, to making this new virtual community work. But he’d also learned what almost anyone learns when they dabble in such a human experiment: that success rests on the fragile balance between the needs of the individual and those of the collective, a balance that had to be monitored, calibrated, and recalibrated daily. It could be exhausting. But without that vigilance, without those rules, without a structure that pointed people toward productive deliberation, things could quickly go off the rails. He’d seen it. And when he left the Farm in 1982, it was largely because Gaskin, their leader, had turned into an authoritarian, demanding too much for the collective at the expense of the individual.
At the WELL, Tex found an environment seemingly built to withstand this tension. Some of it was intentional and some a happy accident. PicoSpan, the conferencing software, gave the WELL its basic form. It was created by an Ann Arbor programmer at the University of Michigan who infused it with his libertarian tendencies—a bias toward the free flow of talk—but also lent it the orderliness of an academic gathering. The WELL was divided into a series of “conferences,” each watched over by a “host,” and then further carved up into specific “topics.” The conversations were categorized, segmented, and supervised, but there was also room to continually shift the direction as every comment nudged the group along: the structure helped delineate and allow for focus, but within was freedom and individual initiative.
Brand also made a few crucial decisions. He had set the subscription fee low but not too low—eight dollars a month and then two dollars per hour to log on. If it was too expensive, users might write long, log on, deposit their posts, and then log off, preventing a more dynamic back-and-forth. It would result in competing and unreadable screeds—not a chat. But if it was too cheap, those who had time to stay online and banter all day would dominate, tying up the phone lines and annoying everyone.
The other inadvertently consequential choice Brand made was visible every time a user logged on to the VAX computer. A cryptic message would appear: “You own your own words.” This was a way to protect Brand from any liability. Its literal meaning was that you, the user, had copyright over every sentence you produced. But the disclaimer also became a kind of ethos: you were accountable, a citizen here with both rights and responsibilities. So seriously was this ownership taken that even three decades later Tex wouldn’t share old WELL archives until I promised not to quote them without getting permission from the authors—amazing to consider in our age of perpetual retweets. There was also no anonymity allowed. You could have a playful ID in parentheses, but your real name would be listed right next to it. If you wanted to delete your posts after they were written, there was a command for that, called a “scribble,” but it left a trace, showing you had eaten your own words. Just like in real life, you couldn’t pretend they had never existed.
To successfully participate in this community, you had to offer an interesting personal anecdote, make a provocative interjection, or expand the discussion in some way. The stars of the WELL understood this. They were good writers who could translate a quick spoken repartee into text. But they were also conversationalists—demonstrably interested in what others had to say, acknowledging their contributions, and prodding the talk along. You got attention not by saying something that would silence all chatter and turn others in your direction but by contributing in an amusing or thoughtful or useful way to the flow.
Maybe the most distinctive feature of the WELL from our perspective today was the role of the host—“fair witness” was the original title as dictated by the creator of PicoSpan, and coincidentally the same term used on the Farm for people who brokered peace when interpersonal matters got messy. “Host” was ultimately chosen in order to stick with the model of a French salon that Brand imagined. He had George Sand in mind. For every conference, there was one person, remunerated with a free subscription, who oversaw the various strands of conversation. As Howard Rheingold, an early and avid WELL devotee and popularizer of the phrase “virtual community,” put it, hosts on the WELL had the same role as party hosts in real life: “to welcome newcomers, introduce people to one another, clean up after the guests, provoke discussion, and break up fights if necessary.” Rheingold, a Bay Area writer with a Groucho Marx mustache and a thing for colorful Balinese shirts and panama hats, was a good example of the kind of person drawn to the WELL. He had taken a special interest in how computers could expand knowledge and human experience, and on the WELL, where he would spend countless hours, he discovered what he called “a group mind, where questions are answered, support is given, inspiration is provided, by people I may have never heard from before, and whom I may never meet face to face.” He had fiddled around with other bulletin board servers, but nothing quite replicated the transcendence and camaraderie he found on the WELL.
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THE CONFERENCES on the WELL became intense little places for people to obsess together. In 1986, there was an influx of Deadheads, the tie-dyed, tripping tribe of groupies who followed the Grateful Dead, one of the last authentic remnants of the 1960s counterculture. They had been led to the WELL by David Gans, a musician who hosted a weekly hour of radio devoted to their jams (a show he has continued to host for decades). It was a ready-made virtual community that constituted itself in parking lots outside concert venues, and many of the band’s original followers, hitting middle age, were professionals with access to computers. Now they could hang out together all the time. “The community just dug itself,” Gans told me. I spoke to him in Albany, New York, while he was on tour with a Dead cover band, Gratefully Yours. “We became this giant thing. We’d argue over set lists, we’d complain about the repetition of songs, we’d worry about Jerry Garcia’s health. Everything a community does with the object of its affections and with itself, we did.”
Tex’s job, he learned, was to oversee it all, provide the guardrails so the conversation could keep moving forward without interruption or bad feeling. It demanded a near-constant gauging of civility. The WELL even had a special private conference, called Backstage, where the hosts could talk with Tex and the other admins about any issues that might come up, a talk-it-all-out approach borrowed from the commune. Topic #103 from Backstage, in February 1998, “Temperatures Are Rising,” is a good example. One host worried, in post 33, that “responses to controversial statements, like (rag)’s use of ‘girl,’ or the capital punishment discussion in mind, are getting more and more assertive.” But he wasn’t too concerned. He said he read this more confrontational tone as “a sign that our mutual trust has built up to the point where we no longer feel the need to coddle…we are more free to express our feelings in somewhat forceful terms.” The following post, 34, disagreed. “The heat can put off people who don’t have the same background we do,” the host noted. “For example, (shibumi) remarked this evening that the recent brouhaha in tru has made him reluctant to post there.” (In this exchange, “mind” and “tru” are two different conferences; quoting from the WELL is tricky, because each post was embedded in long streams of chatting, full of callbacks and inside jokes.)
When he started the WELL, Stewart Brand said, “the theory going in was that everybody plays until we find out what is unplayable behavior.” But it was not always easy to determine what counted as productive conversation and what was a distraction or even a form of sabotage. And as Tex was learning, the fact that it was a faceless medium made things even harder: in order to reap the benefits, it took an enormous amount of work and supervision.
Tex even found himself kicking out a troll, though that term wasn’t being used outside fairy tales yet. Mark Ethan Smith, who went by the username (grandma) and had a gender-fluid identity, preferring not to use any identifying pronouns, became a domineering and vitriolic force on a number of conferences. Smith’s hobbyhorse was the inherent evil of all men, posting thousands of rageful words a day, attacking and biting. If anyone responded to the provocations, Smith would only grow more incensed and then claim to be the victim. Tex, after spending hours on the phone trying to talk to Smith and then to others who had been offended by the barrage of anger, made a decision to bar Smith from the WELL. This was the corollary to all the idealism, one that would be forgotten once people began getting nostalgic about the early online world. Back then, too, the realization came quick: cyberspace needed bouncers.
