The Quiet Before, page 19
When things got confrontational on the WELL—moments of “thrash,” in their lingo—what helped, in addition to Tex’s watchful eye, was the architecture: flow mattered here more than anything else. There was always an incentive to reach equilibrium again, to keep lengthening the thread, inspiring a new topic. The prize didn’t go to the person blasting the largest flame, delivering the biggest insult. It went to the person who could move things along. “Mostly everyone tried to get at the truth of whatever a particular thrash was about,” wrote John Seabrook, a New Yorker writer who joined the WELL first as a silent lurker and then got swept up in the community, to sum it all up in a way that would “set everything right again.”
As time went on, adjustments were made to account for the dislocation that came from communicating virtually. Starting in 1986, for example, many of the participants began meeting up regularly in person; with long-distance calls to the modem still too pricey, almost everyone was local to the Bay Area. These gatherings, given the unpleasant name “fleshmeets,” started with a few regulars who wanted to buy coffee for Tex and the other admins. Some just longed to lay their hands on the mysterious VAX computer, the home for all their conversations, and listen to its hum. Soon there was a chili cook-off, meetings in Golden Gate Park, or once even a group trip to the circus. Words detached from physical form created opportunities for wild projection, as we well know, and it was odd at first to encounter someone you had sparred with online or whose wit had been a source of awe. But seeing everyone’s utter normalcy had the effect of bringing it all back down to a human scale. People learned, for example, that Tex was a close talker who usually gripped your shoulder to tell you what he had to say from three inches away. If they wanted to build an intimate, open connection online, they were learning, it helped to have a corresponding one in the real world.
But there was also a growing awareness that in certain cases what was needed was increased privacy. One conference, Women on the WELL, limited its admittance. The personal discussions here, about domestic violence, eating disorders, the struggles of balancing a career and a family, these could only happen away from the gaze and typing fingers of men. This adaptation, too, was critical—how inclusive or exclusive to be, what kind of talk could develop only in quiet spaces, and what needed the bustle of a crowd. For women, this concession made the WELL a particularly welcoming place. By the late 1980s, while women made up only 10 percent of people going online, they constituted 40 percent of the population of the WELL.
Anyone who entertained the idea of a virtual community in those very early days came eventually to the same understanding: there was the dream of it and the reality. If it helped people connect in new and wondrous ways, it could also detach people from social norms so completely that it undermined all the benefits of communing as a group. Stacy Horn, a recent graduate of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, built her own sister site to the WELL called Echo (East Coast Hang Out), filling her fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village with rows of stacked modems and a mess of telephone wires. She loved her forum, and it became a vibrant place, one for chatting about local politics, sharing dating stories, and arguing about plays or the city’s best pizza. But it also required constant moderation. Communicating in cyberspace, she wrote a few years later, “wasn’t going to bring peace and understanding throughout the world, tra-la-la-la. Cyberspace does not have the power to make us anything other than what we already are….It is a revealing, not a transforming, medium.”
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MARSHALL MCLUHAN, the media theorist, had a useful shorthand for describing what people tend to do when confronted with a new technology: “rear-view mirror thinking.” Faced with novelty, “we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
If you asked Tex and his fellow members of the WELL back then to describe the space they were inhabiting with their typing, they would draw on what they saw in that rearview mirror. In just one short article from 1988, Tex pointed to a number of different ways the WELL was imagined: as a “neighborhood pub,” “an electronic Greenwich Village,” “the electronic equivalent of the French salons during the Enlightenment period,” and “the kind of things coffee shops were supposed to be about.” But in the same way that a car was never really just a faster horse, talking online was not just a virtual café. No metaphor could really grasp what it was. And yet metaphor is perhaps the WELL’s greatest legacy.
The work it took to make the WELL a community was soon forgotten, lessons like the one Tex conveyed in that 1988 article: “It is possible to be more concerned with grabbing and holding the attention of the group rather than concentrating on the content of what is said.” Amnesia set in as the size of online talking grew. What was remembered and propagated instead was the ideal version of it, the fantasy of the always-open coffee shop with a table available for each and every interest and concern. And—crucial for our purposes—a place where people with radical notions could easily find others to join with them and imagine a new reality.
This was the vision of John Perry Barlow, sometime Grateful Dead lyricist, writer, thinker, and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an early organization established to defend free speech online. It was on a post on the WELL that he first used “cyberspace” to describe their virtual gathering place, borrowing a phrase from the science fiction writer William Gibson. And a few years later, in 1996, Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which remains the purest distillation of the dream, one that grew out of his own experience on the WELL. There was no mention of Brand’s design choices or the hosts or Tex’s guiding hand (and kicking foot, when people needed to be thrown out). Instead, for Barlow cyberspace consisted of “transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications”—a pure community built through talking, what the Farm, too, was supposed to be. It was an “act of nature,” one that “grows itself through our collective actions,” a “world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Just like the hopes of those hippie homesteaders looking for a better, more democratic society, Barlow’s fantasia ignored all the exertion and interventions necessary to make any of it even close to possible—the responsibility that on the WELL was always understood as the necessary flip side of freedom. It soon became all freedom. Eric Schmidt, the then executive chairman of Google, pointed lovingly to Barlow’s declaration as a dream that “has been realized” in a 2015 op-ed in The New York Times. As he saw it, “The Internet has created safe spaces for communities to connect, communicate, organize and mobilize, and it has helped many people to find their place and their voice.” Whether this is really true is the question we will turn to next. But what Schmidt seemed to miss was that these spaces were purposefully designed and that how they were built and how they were managed would determine how useful they could actually be and for what. “It’s just a tool,” he wrote, as flippantly as someone who would call a hammer and a saw the same thing. “We are the ones who harness its power.”
As for the WELL itself, it couldn’t keep up. By 1991, it had reached five thousand users. Service wasn’t great. Every day seemed to bring a new technical problem, with the system periodically crashing or modems stalling. Tex still oversaw a rich Backstage conversation, and by his count in his five years there he had hosted sixty-one WELL parties and spent thousands of hours on the phone talking people out of quitting, smoothing out hurt feelings, or just listening to rants. Users continued to be passionate. At one point, in 1988, the sluggish VAX had to be replaced, and they collected money themselves to acquire a new Sequent computer, “like switching from a Schwinn to a Rolls,” Rheingold said. It was a striking moment. They set the rules for their own governance, possessed their own words, and now even had a stake in the silicon body that contained, as Rheingold put it, “the beating heart of the community.”
But there was constant pressure to figure out how to make this work as a business. A subscriber service for playing interactive games, first started in the mid-1980s and renamed America Online in 1991, already had tens of thousands of users. Its founder, Steve Case, had been hanging out on the WELL, picking up ideas, and by the mid-1990s, AOL, now complete with “chat rooms,” would see its subscribers jump into the millions. The WELL, which had loomed so large in those early years as a model for the future, became a tinier and tinier island, soon microscopic in size. In 1994, the World Wide Web suddenly took off. In January of that year, there were roughly seven hundred websites in existence. At the end of that year, there were just over ten thousand.
By then, Tex had decided to quit. Managing this whole community alone, even with its relatively small size, had become exhausting. “I was so tangled up with everybody I was kind of losing my bearings a little bit,” Tex said. “On our commune we were kind of quasi Buddhists, and the objective was always to get unattached, to rise above things, to not get too caught up in praise and blame. And suddenly I’m enmeshed in a system where there was some kind of praise and blame coming my way, every day. I would go to bed at night after a while almost in a fetal position. It was socially exhausting. I was absorbing a great deal from people, and it was expected of me that I would not lose it.”
But that was only part of it. Those users most invested in the uniqueness of the WELL could see what was coming. It was difficult to imagine scaling it up in size and maintaining the intimacy and the many mechanisms that had allowed it to flourish. But getting bigger was necessary to keep it viable in the crazily commodifying web. “The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities,” Rheingold prophesied in 1993. “What we know and do now is important because it is still possible for people around the world to make sure this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us.”
These days Tex lives on a couple of acres of land in Mendocino County in Northern California. He’s had a career in local media, helping the San Francisco Chronicle start its first website and then running a community radio station. He is still wistful about the WELL. But he has no illusions that there was any magic at work back then. He knows what it took. “Flower children that we were,” he told me, “we believed we could bend technology to our will.”
Chapter 7
THE SQUARE
Cairo, 2011
THE PHOTOGRAPH THAT started it all was of a broken face, an image so stomach churning, so terrible in its implications, that you had to either look away or gasp in terror. The face belonged to Khaled Said, a young computer programmer from Alexandria, Egypt, picked up by policemen in a cybercafe one day in the early summer of 2010 and then beaten to death in a nearby stairwell. Though the authorities alleged Said was a big-time thug and drug dealer who died by choking on marijuana he was trying to conceal, his middle-class roots and education made the claim immediately suspicious. Why the police stopped him that day is still unclear; his parents later said he had in his possession incriminating video evidence of corruption. Whatever the reason, nothing could explain his face.
At first Wael Ghonim couldn’t believe what he was looking at—and then he began to cry. “His lower lip had been ripped in half, and his jaw was seemingly dislocated,” was how he described what he saw in the photo, which had been taken at the morgue by Said’s brother. “His front teeth appeared to be missing, and it looked as if they had been beaten right out of his mouth.” Ghonim was a twenty-nine-year-old marketing director for Google who had grown up in Egypt but was then living in Dubai as part of the company’s efforts to branch out in the Middle East. What he saw in that photo was the most visceral, bloody illustration of what he had come to resent and fear about his homeland: the arbitrariness with which power was wielded. That someone, someone very much like him, could just be picked up off the street and beaten to death with total impunity was horrifying.
From his faraway office, he had already tapped into the growing dissatisfaction of a minuscule Egyptian dissident movement contending with a stagnant economy and a forever president whose “temporary” Emergency Law—suspending due process while emboldening the police—had been in place for thirty years. But this was different. This was a face. He knew there was a whole class of Egyptians who would also see themselves in Khaled Said. As Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, an image of violence inflicted was “an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged?”
These were the questions that gnawed at Ghonim. And he decided to use his particular skill set to respond: he started a Facebook page. He had been spending a lot of time that summer on the site, which just the year before had introduced its Arabic interface. Seemingly overnight, the number of Egyptian users had jumped from 900,000 to 5 million. Ghonim gave the new Facebook page a simple, blunt name: “We Are All Khaled Said.” Familiar with the site’s functionality, he chose to make it a “page,” rather than a “group,” so that any future posts would automatically show up in the feeds of those who had “liked” it. He also decided to remain anonymous. His first post was a rat-a-tat of anguish: “Today they killed Khaled. If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.”
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GHONIM NEVER SET OUT to be a revolutionary. He had no more fervent dream as a teenager than to one day work for Google, a company that, as he put it, “embodied who I was as a person.” His family was part of a wave of middle-class Egyptians who couldn’t afford to stay in their own country during the 1980s, and so Ghonim spent part of his youth in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as a doctor. In college back in Egypt he was drawn to two worlds that he would try for a time to combine: Islam and the internet. He had briefly joined the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement, officially outlawed for decades, that acted as a vast secret society and offered a sense of belonging. The internet, Ghonim first encountered in a cousin’s bedroom in 1997 (excitedly clicking on the website of the Library of Congress, of all places). The moment was “magical.” He liked the control it gave him. “I find virtual life in cyberspace quite appealing,” he would later write. “I prefer it to being visible in public life. It is quite convenient to conceal your identity and write whatever you please in whatever way you choose.”
An ambitious young man, with the rectangular glasses of an architect and a mess of curly black hair, he graduated with a degree in computer engineering and then an MBA in marketing and sales from the American University in Cairo. A series of start-ups followed, including one called IslamWay that collected audio recordings of religious sermons and recitals of the Koran. And by 2010 he had fulfilled his dream and was working for Google, running marketing outreach to the Arab world.
In just the first day, 36,000 people followed the new We Are All Khaled Said page, and 1,800 commented. Within a week, it would eclipse all of Egyptian Facebook. Ghonim had started an emotional feedback loop, and he kept stoking it. “The day they went and killed Khaled, I didn’t stand by him,” read one of his posts. “Tomorrow they will come to kill me and you won’t stand by me.” He used words like “blood” and “martyr” again and again and, most critically, “us” and “them.” There was a sense of righteousness, a community rising up around the need for vengeance—Ghonim later said he was writing in “a language closer to my heart than to my mind.” And those reading him then commented and liked and shared. It took only a few days for the page to reach 100,000 followers, many of whom started contacting the anonymous admin over email—he had set up an account for this—offering their own thoughts and pictures for him to post on the page. One woman emailed an ultrasound photo of her fetus with the words “My name is Khaled, and I’m coming to the world in three months. I will never forget Khaled Said and I will demand justice for his case.”
Who were these people liking the page? Young, disaffected Egyptians like Abdelrahman Ayyash, who spoke to me from his exile in Istanbul. When he first saw We Are All Khaled Said, the tumult of emotion from so many directions felt to him like a “game changer,” he said. Even if Facebook was a recent development for Egyptians, the internet was not new for people like Ayyash. And it was his experience talking online that had primed him and so many others for this moment. His family, from the Nile delta city of Mansoura, were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was on the Brotherhood’s primitive online forums that Ayyash first explored the new medium. These were, it should be said, closely monitored, and any mention of the Brotherhood itself was immediately deleted. Ayyash soon lost interest.
