Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Cue the inevitable Sergeant Pepper music:  Twenty years ago today the 
Whole Earth Lectronic Link was tuning up, ready to begin to play!

The WELL opened up registration to the public on April 1st, 1985.  
It may be a misnomer to say that the community is 20 years old, since 
it took a little fermentation before complicated social glue began to
bubble up here, but the entire experiment began two decades ago, 
and it seems that it became captivating rather rapidly.   
 
We've discussed several books about The WELL and online communities 
in Inkwell in recent years, including a few by our two featured guests, 
but this time we're going to celebrate and dissect The WELL itself,
and look at the promise of online communities, networks and gathering 
places.  So let's take a break from the "what is your book about" 
format, and the designated discussion leader, and join into more of 
a casual round table and shmooze with Howard Rheingold and Cliff
Figallo.  
  

    
First, I want to say something about Howard and Cliff as authors and
experts.  I have loved and admired these guys and their online ascii
for many years.  They are two of a handful of people who inspired me 
to do whatever was needed to learn how to work in this realm, leading to 
my fourteen years working here. I could say a lot about my early 
impressions, but I wanted to get their input for a short introdution
that works for the general public as well as for those who know them.  
 
Howard told me that The WELL was really the gateway for his entire 
career and life work over the past twenty years.  Here's his skeletal 
list of where that career has taken him:
 
Howard Rheingold <http://www.rheingold.com> is the author of:
 
    Smart Mobs <http://www.smartmobs.com>
    The Virtual Community <http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/>
    Tools for Thought <http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/vc/book>
 
 was the editor of:
 
    The Whole Earth Review <http://www.wholeearthmag.com/>
    The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog 
    <http://www.well.com/user/hlr/mwecintro.html>
    HotWired  <http://www.hotwired.com>
 
 founded:
 
    Electric Minds <http://www.abbedon.com/electricminds/html/home.html>
    Brainstorms <http://www.rheingold.com/community.html>
 
 teaches:
 
    Toward A Literacy of Cooperation (Stanford) 
    <http://cooperation.smartmobs.com>
 
Howard was writing about culture and technology before signing up, 
and had published a book about PCs and online communications the 
previous year. He had previously explored BBSs and The Source, but 
joining The WELL different. He found it personally and professionally 
all-consuming almost as soon as he joined in August, 1985.  By 1987 he
wrote the first article to use the term "virtual communities" for the
Whole Earth Review, edited by Kevin Kelly.  (Yep, that Kevin Kelly.)
It took five more years before book publishers realized he was 
onto something.  You can see the discussion of that book, "The
Virtual Community,"  in <inkwell.vue.91> and his "Smart Mobs" 
in <inkwell.vue.166>        

Happy to have you here again, Howard.
  

    
Cliff Figallo was a founding member of both The Farm and The WELL who 
stuck around for years because he thought they were important and fun
enough. He says he met a lot of great people and learned a lot both 
times, in both places. Those are part of him now, and he continues to 
try to put what he learned to work. He says is SO over talking about the 
process and interface of online communities, social networks or whatever 
they're called this year, though he and Nancy Rhine wrote a book about
that just that a few years back and talked about it in <inkwell.vue.165>
 
Cliff is stubbornly attached to his conviction that online communities 
are essential to saving our collective species' ass, and thinks we 
should be doing more now and talking less. He continues straining 
his eyes and typing away, believing that solid reality can be impacted 
through his keyboard and monitor. He still lives twenty minutes up 
the bike path from the original WELL offices and still dreams of 
backpacking the length of the Pacific Crest Trail.
 
Here are some current projects and people Cliff's working with today:
Berkana Institute/Berkana Exchange (www.berkana.org)
WebLab (www.weblab.org)
Viewpoint Learning (www.viewpointlearning.com)
Trilogy (www.trilogyir.com)
American Health Inititative (www.americanhealthinitiative.org)
What Retirement? (http://whatretirement.typepad.com/what_retirement/)
CP Square (www.cpsquare.org)
 
When I asked Cliff for his comments he told me "the WELL's 
longevity has to be a testament to the durability, resiliency and 
flywheel effect of the community's early personal relationships, 
formed in times of stress and promise."

Good to see you here again, Cliff.  
  

    
Cliff, you mention stress (both ecomomic and social) and promise.  Howard,
you were hooked very early on, an experience a lot of us can relate to 
in later years.  What was different about this place, in an era 
with hundreds of little low-budget dial-up BBS scenes all over the
place?
  

    
The WELL had such diverse roots, while most BBSs at the time were very
focused in their interests - more like clubs. The WELL's members could
talk about current technology and past shared experiences with sex,
drugs and rock'n'roll. If I hadn't been able to recognize the
sublimated hippie heritage among many of the early WELLers, I'd have
been completely lost and ineffective.

Compared to most of what was happening in narrow-focused BBSland, the
WELL's conferences reflected an uninhibited expansion on one system of
perspectives on life, science, current events, spirit, entertainment
and vocation. The fluidity of Picospan allowed them all to flow and
moosh together. And the WELL had its own ongoing version of small town
soap opera politics and psychodrama to keep everyone enthralled,
outraged and tickled.

I went to a BBSCON conference in Colorado once, when BBSs and other
online communities were just beginning to discover their common ground
- both socially and technically. The WELL felt more like a university
compared to the vocational schools of the traditional BBSs. We were the
oddballs. But the oncoming freight train of the Internet was about to
transform us all.
  

    
What else was different about the WELL? We figured that the people who
signed up and joined it would determine its interests. Our role in
managing it was more to encourage social interaction, friendliness, and
an open, uninhibited tone. One of the first conferences Matthew opened
was called the Pub, and he aliased himself as Pegleg, as I recall. It
was a place for pure jive. There was plenty to be serious about, and we
had plenty of very smart people who could post intelligently about
topics devoid of humor. 

Remember, Matthew, Tex and I came from over a decade of communal live
where our living situations often begged for an excuse to laugh. When
you first get online, especially when it's the first time for most
people, it's disorienting - you don't know how your writing is going to
come across. You tend to be serious and a little paranoid. You need 
some assurance that intentionally typing something silly is not only
OK, it's welcomed.
  

    
The mixture of humor and substance is a hallmark of the place at its best.
By the way, most of the very early content has been lost to early disk space
crunch, as you know, but the pub has been kept as an easter egg, to use
a time-appropriate bit of computer jargon.  It's tucked away and fun to
read back though.  (For those who are logged in, go to the <pub.> )

It's got a "Star Trek Bar" sense to it in that people were posting 
requests for ficticious drinks and substances, and reponding as if under
the influence of mysterious intoxicants.  Five years later, when I signed
up, I had a feeling of a sort of contact high at times.  I think If I'd
looked back through the pub then I might have appreciated the way
imagination was expressed early on, and where it took the local culture.
On the other hand, it's not so unusual for today, when roll playing and
goofing around are ubiquitous.  The pleasure then as now is in seeing 
smart, talented people -- or people you know well -- being creative. 
It's a little time machine.

I'm sure the complete novelty of the online medium for so many of
the early participants was a strong factor in unleashing all that
playfulness.
  

    
I had been an avid BBSer for a while -- the mists of time cloud the
exact interval -- before I happened on the WELL. In fact, in one of
those BBSs named "Skateboard," I met one of my early mentors on the
WELL, the late David (dhawk) Hawkins. It was a one-line BBS, so you had
to try for a while to be able to log on. And as I recall, there was
only one thread/topic! But it was great fun, and we actually got
together ftf at a Chinese restaurant from time to time. 

But the WELL was a big, blooming, buzzing,
university-salon-community-prank-in the making. The breadth and level
of conversation was stunning -- as well as the sense of "we're building
this new thing, whatever it is, together." That, and the Whole Earth
mystique -- Stewart Brand and Art Kleiner and Kevin Kelly were actually
posting.

I was an early devotee of the Pub and pegleg. I remember very clearly
dropping in on Matthew at the Gate Five Road home of the WELL/Whole
Earth Catalog/Whole Earth Review. It was a pilgrimage. Like many
others, I had been inspired by the Catalog, and the community that
created the Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review seemed
like a mythic land to me -- like that commune in Tennessee where all
those hippies in schoolbuses had gone to create their own society. I
accompanied Larry Gonick, the cartoonist, who had some art to drop off
at the magazine. I went down the hall and introduced myself to Matthew.
I think Hugh might have been sysop then. He showed me the Vax and the
modem bank. All those lights blinking on and off were people posting!
This was a whole vast new universe compared to a one-line BBS!

I asked Matthew if I could get free WELL time for hosting a conference
-- it cost $3/hr when I joined, and a struggling writer with
multi-hundred-dollar  WELL bills was getting some heat from his wife
about this new drug-like habit. I was concerned that hosting would eat
up too much of my time. Matthew said, with what I later realized was a
Mephistophelean gleam in  his eye, that "some hosts spend less than an
hour a week." So I started the Mind conference. 

I was probably spending two-three hours a day on the WELL in the Fall
of 1985. I had a one-year old daughter and was trying to make a living
as a freelance writer. It was definitely a guilty pleasure. Without a
doubt, a strong motivation for writing about the WELL was to prove to
my wife that it was a source of income as well as a time sink.

I didn't get to know Cliff for a while, and Matthew was a godlike
figure whose every word of praise made my day -- I remember that when I
wrote a book review for the SF Chronicle, he sent me unsolicited email
in praise of it, and I was floating all day. But it didn't take long
for Tex to start checking me out. I'd get sends from him. Then when I
first moved to Mill Valley, he started visiting me at my house, which
was only a few minutes from Sausalito. Why was this guy cultivating me?
Then I started noticing that I wasn't getting billed for my WELL time
AT ALL, and got mysterious smileys from Tex when I asked about it. 
 
  

    
Oh yeah, early WELLer Hoover Chan was also a member of Skateboard
  

    
Don't get me started!

The first WELL party I went to was at the home of Lila Forest in San
Rafael. There were all these strange faces there -- and I knew that I
knew many of them. We all have that sensation at our first WOPs, I'm
sure. I met dhawk that night. Lila Forest was a Sufi. She left the SF
Bay Area and the WELL -- it still required a long-distance call to
Sausalito. When she left, she asked if anyone wanted to take over
caring for her Tibetan monk. Tsultrim Gyaltsen was a young novice at a
monastery in India. She sent him $100 a year to pay for his food and
support his studies, and they exchanged letters. So I took over. I've
been corresponding with him for 20 years now! He's no longer a novice.
;-) And I raised his stipend to $200. ;-)
  

    
I remember first seeing Howard as he came in one day to visit Matthew.
Didn't have a clue who he was, but the Whole Earth offices attracted a
wild variety of folks. I had my head down, either doing the Point
Foundation's books or putting together the billing program for the
WELL or formatting files to be uploaded to the typesetter for the
second edition of the Software Catalog. I was hanging on by my
fingernails to any job Whole Earth had for me. I'd helped do the
remodel of the office space. I'd built the small, odd-shaped room that
would be the air-conditioned home of something called a Vax 11-750.

That time in my life was a personal crucible. Matthew had left the
Farm at least 6 months before me and he had a headstart on getting
adjusted to life in uncommunal America. I'd arrived in California from
the Farm flat broke, with 5 kids and a marriage on the verge of
collapse. When the WELL was founded, my home life was in turmoil. And
once I took over Matthew's job, I had not only sole custody of my kids,
but the responsibility of running a cutting edge business rapidly
burning through its initial cash loan. I lived in Bolinas, a 40-minute
drive over dangerous winding roads, and I could not handle the standard
startup regimen of coming in early and working late.

The Farm had left a bitter taste in my mouth, but the remaining
idealist in me embraced the idea of working for Stewart Brand, and
between living in Bolinas and working at Whole Earth, I was blessed
with "halfway houses" to buffer the culture shock. The daily volleyball
games at the office were a godsend, and the people working at 27 Gate
Five Road were a great bunch, working for little in a funky little
building, but exploring some of the most important knowledge in the
world.

Matthew and I occupied one of the bigger partitioned spaces in the
Whole Earth office, just across the hall from the "Vax closet." This
was an awkward space to get into and to be within, with its solid-core
door mounted the only way it would work, intruding rudely into the tiny
office nextdoor to it. You'd open the door and a blast of white noise
would hit you - fans for the CPU, fans for the huge Fujitsu hard disks,
and the blower from the Sears Roebuck window-mounted air conditioner
that tried valiantly to offset the heat being generated by the computer
gear. The Vax was the size of an industrial washer, and the rack
holding the disks was the size of a narrow refrigerator. You had maybe
two feet of space to move in surrounding them with their tangles of
cables and phone wires. If there were two of you in there, you had to
suck in your gut to fit and yell to be heard.

Hugh, our first sysop, came as part of the deal from NETI, who paid
the lease on the Vax and its peripherals. Hugh was a big guy - a big,
young, smart (and smart-ass) guy who had an even harder time fitting
behind the Vax than the rest of us. Hugh knew everything I didn't, and
I had to get on the right side of him for him to let me in on the
secrets of Unix and the Vax.

That I would end up in the Director's chair of this operation a
year-and-a-half after its launch was about as conceivable to me as
being invited to be an Apollo astronaut. But that's typical of the
Whole Earth story. Stewart blessed the idea because he trusted Matthew
and he recognized the relationship between social chops learned on a
commune and the social savvy required to build an online community.
Stewart was a scientist who loved to hypothesize and experiment. I was
scrambling to invent a job I could hold on to, that would support my
family. Before long, I began to love it.
 
  

    
One of Stewart's great virtues has always been his knack for picking
the right people, then letting them do what they want to do. And I
think his  absence from the WELL when he was writing The Media Lab had
a lot to do with the "inmates running the asylum" atmosphere.
  

    
I agree. It was a similar time to when Stephen was in jail during the
Farm's fourth year. That provided enough psychic room for people to try
stuff that would have been possible with him around.

Matthew did what I've ever since advised all of my online community
clients to do - he assembled and nurtured a great core of initial users
and allowed them the freedom to begin a series of interesting
conversations, in which they got to know each others' "licks" just as
musicians do who jam together for a while. 

During that first year, the WELL found itself to the extent that its
members understood the turf. It was an imperfect infrastructure, with
plenty of potholes, service outages, bad signage and odd echoes, but it
was also liberated territory, and those defects could be worked around
in pursuit of mind food and entertainment.

When Tex came to work with us, we felt like the Three Amigos. Matthew
was one of the first friends I'd made on the Farm, when our buses were
parked in the same section of woods. I'd lived with Tex and his family
in our Farm "embassy" in Washington, D.C. We'd hung and mudded
sheetrock together, gone through a bout of hepatitis together, and we
knew how to laugh stuff off together. He'd been fixing Peugeots and was
new to keyboards, not to mention computer networking, which made him a
good one to lead other newbies through the learning trials required to
use the WELL. His natural folksiness soon proved to be an even greater
asset to the WELL community.

We all three agreed: the WELL would NOT be like the Farm. There would
be no infallible authority figure. And even if there had to be an
ultimate decision-maker, community deliberation would have to take
place before decisions would be made. It was a business, but it had to
be a community, with improvements over the commune model we'd
experienced. We'd seen the deterioration of the Farm under the hovering
influence of Stephen, its founder and "teacher." Stewart was
fascinated by our Farm experience and strongly resisted the teacher
role at Whole Earth, but it's hard for such a visionary to avoid being
recognized as a teacher by people who consider themselves to be his
students. And it's hard for a founder to not express his druthers about
his creation. But our intention was to allow the WELL to be a
self-creating entity and hope it would make enough money to keep
going.
  

    
Of course I meant to write "that would have been IMPOSSIBLE with him
around."
  

    
The ghosts have been awakened. Just starting to write about this has
conjured spirits in my mind. Thoughts of dhawk, casey, mandel, and rab
are entering my mind, seemingly unbidden, as I go about my other tasks.
As so many people testified at his memorial, dhawk had this quiet way
of taking newcomers under his wing and showing us the ropes. I know
that Cliff has written about this before -- the geekiness of PicoSpan
and Unix made it necessary for old-timers to teach newcomers the ropes.
And that turned out to be important. Casey used to smack me around so
much about the "community" business. Over the years, I've come to agree
with much of what she was saying -- and yet, she was also one of the
secret sharers who took so many newcomers under her wing. And toward
the end, she was certainly a beneficiary of quiet community outreach.
  

    
It's true...community-shmoonity...who knows what that word *really*
means. In some sense, it's just the people and their social
relationships. Power to the people! It didn't mean that everyone liked
everyone else; that surely wasn't the case. I've often talked about the
WELL as a sustainable ecology, with a balance of different types of
complementary, symbiotic and parasitical organisms making a stable
whole.

Sometimes the hassles between different characters would be as
entertaining as a good TV sitcom. Some of the most maddening people
were also the most endearing. As Tex called it, the WELL was the
commune you could go home from. And as we often advised members, "Log
off, shut down and take a walk outside." It didn't have to become
another vexing part of your life unless you invited it to be.

But the fact that it mattered to so many people is what made it so
real to so many of us. I, of course, had another concern, which was
that the social fabric could be worn through by too much friction. And
that a single individual could cause so much friction that the core of
the community would abandon us. And that I'd have to look for another
job. There weren't a lot of job openings for online community managers
in those days. (Not that there are today.)
  

    
Frankly, the friction wore me down over the years -- after a decade,
the same old predictable feuds became tiresome. And I didn't like
having to be thick-skinned regarding the people who were on MY case in
order to handle self-disclosure. So I stopped disclosing. Undoubtedly,
I should have learned to care less about what some turd thought of me,
made more judicious use of the bozofilter, and refused to rise to the
bait or get sucked into the thrash. The River thrash was kinda
terminally fatiguing for me. But that was so much later. Those first
years -- the first decade, really -- was such a love-fest, even with
the feuds and flames.

I came to the WELL because of Mary Eisenhart's MicroTimes article,
BTW, and Mary also dragged my ass to a Grateful Dead show -- after a
twenty year absence from GD shows -- and got me into that whole part of
 the community. Oh man! Another ghost! Mudshark!
  

    
The BIG ghost of Blair just snuck up to kick my ass. How could I
forget? Now there was a quintessential character. 
  

    
It's great to be marking the Well's 20th anniversary! I can testify to what
Howard said, about going to a Well party and feeling that connection to
people whose faces you'd never seen. I felt my own city of Oakland
transformed... I'd sit at the sidewalk tables at Royal Coffee, looking at
the other folks there, and think, maybe some of these people I already know
on the Well. I've also learned to think, maybe this person is very different
inside from what I think based on their appearance. Fourteen years on the
Well has helped me become gracious as well as argumentative.
  

    
I think that by 1986, I was easily spending six hours a day on the
WELL, multitasking with whatever writing I was supposed to be doing. I
probably wrote 500-1000 words a day for my bread and butter work and
4000 words a day on the WELL. Whenever I found out something new, I
rushed to the WELL to report it. 
  

    
Yeah, thinking of Blair is a heartbreaker. He was one of those
maddening but endearing characters who, for me, got caught in the
squeeze between eccentricity and business. I had to cut off his access
cuz he refused - or just couldn't get it together - to cut down his
disk space usage. That sounds so funny to say these days when disk
space is almost as cheap as the air we breathe. 

And every time I use my Tivo to record a program I think of Metaview
and the pre-VCR contraption he was inventing to record programs
automatically on video tape. 

For those of us willing to lay it all out there for strangers to see
and get to know, those ghosts - gone in their prime - are a bit
haunting. In some way, I feel that I was involved in their deaths.
  

    
It's sad.  I remember a wrangle with crunch about nonpayment for something
that is dirt cheap now:  access while in Europe.  Billing and collections
is the hardest part of being vile management. On the other hand,
subscription payment allowed us to survive the bubble and bust of
1999-2000.  Advertising was not ready for prime time at the time, and
didn't give advertisers much for their moeny, and WELL people hated the
idea of it anyway.  That was so lucky for us.
  

    
There was KJ, who was, I recall, rather caustic online, who started
dying, and let it be known that she was losing her sight and didn't
have  family around. I can't recall how many people got involved in
sitting with her in shifts, reading to her and talking. I know I did a
few shifts. And I recall the irony that Cliff Stoll did at least one
shift -- he who wrote, very soon after that, about the bogosity of
online relationships.

The funerals were very much rites of passage for the community, as
Barlow pointed out at the first one -- Blairs.
  

    
Those first years of the WELL were nothing but ascii text scrolling up
the screen. No graphics. No using the mouse. No links (except in terms
of Picospan's linked topics), and only the most sophisticated users
understood or took part in file transfers. The WELL was, for most of
its users, their entire online universe. The online world beyond the
WELL was made up of BBSs and the fragmented pieces of what would soon
be the Internet. Sure, some people had accounts on CompuServe, the
Source, EIES, the early platform-specific ancestors of AOL and even
Prodigy, but I spent my first couple years almost all day looking at
little green words moving up a black background on the tiny screen of
my Compaq luggable PC.

These days, when I can edit and upload hi-res photos in minutes and
Google gobs of information about anything in known creation, take part
in four conversations at a time, and move shit around at speeds that
were once inconceivable, I have deep and humble appreciation for how
fast the toolmakers were able to advance the medium and catch up with
Doug Engelbart's vision from so long ago. 

Why I remember <spit> when you had to walk 4 miles to school through
the snow every day....you younguns don't know how good you got it.
  

    
Keep telling stories. I'm lovin it!
  

    
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