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The World's Most Influential Online Community (And It's Not AOL)
It was a very public way to die. Public, that is, to the few thousand people on The Well. On March 25, 1995, Tom Mandel sat down at his computer and wrote:
It's bad luck to say goodbye before it's time to do so and there's no point in embracing death before one's time, but I thought maybe I'd sneak in a topic, not too maudlin I hope, in which I could slowly say goodbye to my friends here, curse my enemies one more time and otherwise wave a bit at the rest of you until it's just not time to do so any more.
I could start off by thanking you all, individually and collectively, for a remarkable experience, this past decade here on the WELL. For better and for worse-there were a lot of both-it has been the time of my life and especially a great comfort during these difficult past six months. I'm sad, terribly sad, I cannot tell you how sad and griefstricken I am that I cannot stay to play and argue with you much longer. It seems almost as if I am the one who will be left behind to grieve for all of you dying...
Mandel might have felt he owed a heartfelt goodbye to all the people he had wrangled with for nearly a decade. Perhaps he wanted to make amends with the many who considered him arrogant and obstinate; as one of The Well's most controversial figures, he had excited a great deal of scorn as well as admiration. But in truth, Tom Mandel was only doing what he had done nearly every day, and sometimes several times a day, for years: dialing in to a community where he had found a home unlike any he had ever known.
The Well, this communal dwelling, had begun in the spring of 1985 as a VAX computer and a rack of modems in a ramshackle set of offices in Sausalito, California. When Mandel had logged on for the first time that summer, there were only a few dozen people online with him. For a long while The Well was an intimate gathering, a place where nearly everyone held a stake in nearly every discussion that arose. It was also a remote, hidden place: the larger world was for the most part still ignorant of the alchemy that could result from pairing a computer and a modem. But by the time Mandel died, 10 years later, The Well had grown into a veritable Saint Mark's Square, with thousands of postings every day on topics ranging from the circumcision of newborns to the Gulf War.
Despite this growth and a conspicuous attempt, at least in principle, to be accessible to anyone with a modem, in reality The Well attracted a certain group of people: baby boomers in their late 30s and early 40s, smart and left-leaning without being self-consciously PC, mostly male, many with postgraduate degrees. They had come of age in the '60s, and in The Well they found something of a club. In the process, The Well became one of those cultural phenomena that spring up now and again, a salon of creative, thoughtful, and articulate participants who are interested in one another's stories in a self-absorbed, cabalistic way.
Mandel had been one of the most visible members of the club, and although he had actually laid eyes on only a handful of the other people, this was the place he wanted to go to die.
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History has already decreed The Well to be synonymous with online communication in its best, worst, and, above all, most vital forms. Though always small in overall numbers, its influence and recognition far outweighed any significance that could be measured by membership or revenues. The Well created a paradox: scruffy, undercapitalized, and armed with a huge amount of clout. It would become a harbinger of both the excitement and the concerns that would arise on the Net over the uses of electronic networks and virtual dialogs, free speech, privacy, and anonymity.
The intense connectedness fostered by The Well's relatively feeble technological base has been admired and studied far and wide as a model for the future of sophisticated networked systems. At The Microsoft Network, at AOL—with its multimillion-user base—and at countless other, smaller network providers, people analyze The Well hoping to divine the magic formula that made it so special, so captivating, so unique.
In truth, though, as with many great inventions, The Well was mostly the product of creative accident. It wasn't carefully designed or planned; it was born of a single idea, and then nurtured by a multitude of competing intellectual visions. Perhaps most intriguing, it began more as a social experiment than as a business proposition. In later years, this resulted in a great deal of confusion and conflict over The Well's goals. Its destiny, meanwhile, would come to hinge on the still-unanswered question: Can you build a community and a business as one and the same?
It all began over lunch. This particular meal occurred one late fall afternoon in 1984 in a restaurant in La Jolla, California, during a conference of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. Larry Brilliant, a physician whose career had been a mix of good works and business ventures, collared Stewart Brand, the leonine publisher of Whole Earth fame. Brilliant, a roly-poly man who had spent years in India on a campaign to eradicate smallpox, had a lot of ideas—and an eye for people who could help him realize them.
The lunchtime pitch to Brand went like this: Brilliant had a company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Network Technologies International, or NETI, which sold computer conferencing systems and had recently capitalized itself to the tune of C$8.6 million (US$6.3 million) on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Brilliant believed that computer conferencing was an idea whose time was coming. He had become convinced of this several years earlier, while presiding over an emergency electronic meeting called to discuss the extraction of a crippled UN helicopter from the Himalayas. But so far, the overall response to NETI had been tepid. This was a technology in search of people who could use it and help it come to life. Brilliant thought he could find that ready-made user community around Stewart Brand.
For his part, Brand was legendary in many circles for his farsightedness and his willingness to take risks. He was a starter of things, an intellectual pied piper with a knack for bringing together people from across a wide swath of disciplines. Most famously, in 1968 he had produced the Whole Earth Catalog, the big black paperback that was an ingeniously eclectic mix of tool recommendations, book reviews, essays, and illustrations culled from '60s counterculture. By the time he met Brilliant, Brand was presiding over the Whole Earth complex, whose flagship publication was the quarterly Whole Earth Review. Produced from offices on a Sausalito pier, the Review was less a magazine than an intellectual community, made up of like-minded liberals in their 30s.
Technology was familiar territory for Brand. He had chronicled the earliest days of personal computers in the pages of Rolling Stone, and in 1974 he had published a book titled II Cybernetic Frontiers. By 1984, Brand and a few others at Whole Earth had already gained some experience with a conferencing system called EIES (pronounced "eyes"), the Electronic Information Exchange System, built in 1976 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to test whether such conferencing could enhance the effectiveness of scientific research communities.
But Brilliant had no such grand agenda. His idea was just about as simple as it could be: take a group of interesting people, give them the means to stay in continuous communication with one another, stand back, and see what happens. NETI would supply the computer (at a cost of $150,000) and the software ($100,000), and Brand's Point Foundation, the nonprofit umbrella for his ventures, would become half-owner of the enterprise. Brand need only supply the people.
Brand was immediately taken with the idea. He dispatched Art Kleiner, a Whole Earth Review editor, to Michigan to work out the details of a deal while he brainstormed on the concepts. First, this thing needed a name. Brand took out a piece of paper and began playing with acronyms. Whole Earth, of course, had to be at the beginning. He jotted down WEAL, which had a nice ring to it, but didn't spell out anything obvious. Then he tried WEAVE, followed by WEB, and a dozen or so others. After the list was finished, he underlined a few of the candidates. One was WELL. It seemed right. A few doodles later he had the full name: The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. The playful apostrophe ("always worth having in a name," he insisted years later) was signature Brand.
Brand also formed some ideas about what he wanted The Well to be. They weren't entirely in synch with Brilliant's ideas. In fact, even before the VAX was installed, The Well was beginning to morph. Brilliant wanted to re-create the Whole Earth Catalog in computer-conferenced form—to take every item in the catalog, turn it into a topic for online discussion, and let people respond to it. Brand wanted The Well to appeal not just to the Whole Earth crowd but to a wider audience: he wanted hackers, he wanted journalists—Brand's impulse was to offer free Well accounts to reporters—and anyone else who might want to chime in. Moreover, while he wanted a system that attracted and catered to people in the San Francisco Bay area, he didn't want simply to clone one of the dozens of local BBSes already running in the region.
At the same time, he had a hunch that, in addition to electronic dialog, there should be a strong face-to-face element to The Well. (It was while on EIES that Brand had learned the value of online confrères having physical contact—a group of EIES regulars made a point of meeting offline as well.) He sensed that the most interesting possibility to arise from knitting electronic dialog into the fabric of everyday life would lie not in championing either the virtual or the human-contact model but rather in finding the place where they overlapped. "Brand had an awareness that you had to have that sense of the physical environment and the local culture and flavor for the community to work," says John Perry Barlow, who joined The Well in 1986.
But probably the most important of Brand's early convictions for The Well was that people should take responsibility for what they said. There would be no anonymity; everyone's real name would be available on the system, linked to his or her login. Brand came up with a credo that would, through the years, spark no end of debate: "You own your own words." That proviso greeted members each time they logged on. "I was doing the usual, considering what could go wrong," he recalls. "One thing would be people blaming us for what people said on The Well. And the way I figured you get around that was to put the responsibility on the individual."
Brand's first hire was Matthew McClure, as The Well's director. McClure and Brand had known each other for years; McClure had been the chief typesetter for the Whole Earth Catalog, but had left the Bay area in 1971 and spent 12 years in rural Tennessee on The Farm, Stephen Gaskin's intentional community—one of the few communes that had outlasted the fad. When McClure returned in 1984 with little money and few job prospects, Brand hired him to be assistant editor of the Whole Earth Software Catalog. When The Well started, Brand liked the idea of having a Well director who had lived on a commune. (Indeed, The Well was to become a professional haven for a handful of ex-Farm members following McClure's lead.)
McClure's Tennessee years had been spent in a tight-knit community that afforded few forms of entertainment besides getting into other people's heads. But he wasn't just a commune refugee. Like Brand, he had attended an élite prep school, then Stanford. Together, Brand and McClure chose the French literary salons as an intellectual model for The Well. It was to be a collection of "conferences," each devoted to a subject likely to spark lively conversation. Each conference would spawn any number of "topics," devoted to more specific discussions. And each conference would have a host, someone who could act as a latter-day George Sand in guiding, shaping, and monitoring discussions. McClure, who came from an upper middle-class family, had observed the civility with which people in his parents' sphere treated one another. "A lot of the challenge was figuring out what the online equivalent of that was," he recalls.
The Well had a few other models to rely on. Of course, there was the granddaddy, EIES. And in 1979, a conferencing system called Participate was designed for The Source, the first commercial online system. But those early systems were expensive—as much as $25 an hour during peak times. No one had yet tried to create a system accessible not just to researchers or corporate executives but to anyone who signed up. McClure played around with a spreadsheet, trying to figure out the absolute minimum The Well could charge users and still pay the bills. He and Brand decided on a monthly fee of $8, plus $2 an hour, with the novel idea of decreasing it over time.
Here, Brilliant had some stipulations of his own. Despite The Well's salonlike aspects, he wanted it to behave like a business. In fact, NETI required that McClure and Brand come up with a business plan, which they did, its numbers duly predicting revenues of $1 million by the third year of operation. But everyone knew this wasn't likely to happen—the cheap rates as much as made it impossible. Everyone understood implicitly that there was a major difference between this experiment and other, more businesslike conferencing systems: The Well was supposed to be accessible. The crowning principle, shared by both Brilliant and Brand, was to give online discourse the lowest possible threshold to entry.
Yet a contradiction to that credo was embedded in The Well's very anatomy. At the heart of the system was a piece of user-unfriendly conferencing software called PicoSpan. Almost as much as any human factor, it was PicoSpan that would give The Well its personality—at once open and unforgiving. Inspired by a program called Confer, PicoSpan was written by Marcus Watts, a young, libertarian-minded student at the University of Michigan who did occasional work for Brilliant's company.
Systems like Confer and PicoSpan pioneered the clothesline model of computer conferencing. Hang out a shirt, or in this case a topic within a conference, and users would post responses to it one after another, like a column of jotted notes hanging down into the grass. The beauty of this model was that it mimicked the way people actually converse in a group setting. Moreover, PicoSpan made it easy to trace the thread of a conversation—you could join at any point and still come up to speed quickly, because all the context was right there in front of you. And if you wanted to diverge from the main stream of the conversation, you could easily start a new topic in the conference.
PicoSpan didn't simply foster openness but forced it on users. The program was designed so that everyone who signed up would be invited to write a personal bio of any length to reside permanently on the system. Another feature, known—somewhat illogically—as "scribbling," allowed participants to delete their words after the fact. But the scribbled posting would appear as a new blank posting to everyone else in the conference. In other words, you couldn't erase your words without others knowing about it. PicoSpan revealed not just thoughts, but second thoughts. Also, postings didn't expire—that is, they didn't self-destruct automatically after a certain amount of time, as they did, say, on other emerging commercial services or on Usenet newsgroups.
For all its emphasis on openness, PicoSpan wasn't easy to use—a fact that made for a kind of hazing. Technical tyros viewed it as something to conquer. It demanded at least a rudimentary knowledge of Unix arcana, and, of course, everything was in text. By 1985, the Macintosh had been on the market for more than a year, and graphical interfaces were just beginning to catch on, but PicoSpan was to remain immovably command based. When Steve Jobs visited his friend Larry Brilliant in Ann Arbor soon after The Well began, Brilliant proudly showed off PicoSpan to the young entrepreneur. Jobs told Brilliant it was the ugliest interface he had ever seen.
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The Well went online in March 1985, from a space carved out of Whole Earth's dilapidated offices, nestled among the houseboats off Sausalito's piers. A technician from NETI arrived, set up the system's password file, installed PicoSpan from tape, and showed McClure how to set up a conference. McClure christened the first one "General." "Have a good time," the technician said as he left. "Let us know how it works out." And there it sat—the VAX, a half-dozen modems, and six phone lines.
McClure shared an office with someone from the Whole Earth Software Catalog. His computer, a Compaq, sat on a piece of white plywood board; he cadged a stenographer's chair from the Whole Earth office. It was high tech in the middle of funk, and funk wasn't the ideal setting in which to launch a cutting-edge enterprise. The building had no insulation to speak of, and the roof leaked. In the summer the office was an inferno, and in the winter the temperature indoors dipped into the 50s. The computer room, a modified closet, was just big enough for the disk drive and CPU cabinets. A window-mounted air conditioner—the largest unit Sears sold—cooled the VAX.
For the first few weeks, The Well's users consisted of McClure, Brand, a handful of people from Whole Earth—such as Kevin Kelly, then editor of Whole Earth Review and now executive editor of Wired- and a few from NETI who were helping to seed it. Conversations in the one General conference focused on The Well—what it should be, how it should be structured, what other conferences it should sponsor, and how it should grow.
On April 1, The Well opened its doors to the wider public, with little advertising beyond a squib written by Brand that appeared in Whole Earth Review. The response was gradual but steady. More conferences emerged. McClure started and hosted Pub, a hangout devoted to badinage rather than any particular subject matter. Word continued to fan out from the Whole Earth quarter, and that summer and fall a few hundred people signed up.
To be on The Well in 1985 was, even in the technically hip Bay area, to be that rare person for whom a modem was just another tool. Owning one that transmitted data at 1,200 bits per second put you on the cutting edge. The Macintosh had 128K of memory and no hard drive. Most personal computers were DOS-based. MCI's email service, MCI Mail, had recently come on the market, but it had nothing to do with bringing people together in groups. The university-centered Arpanet was a closed society whose members had little awareness of what a few people in Sausalito were doing. Moreover, Arpanet—and the Internet that was quickly supplanting it—was an experiment in the technical problems of computer networking itself. Studying the cultural effects of bringing people together online wasn't on Arpa's agenda. Small BBSes were around, but they had about them the whiff of a lonely nerd's hangout. Although The Well had no shortage of shy Unix hackers, something about it felt different.
"The kind of ecology that we wanted to build on The Well was intelligent people with diverse interests who were sufficiently outgoing and extroverted that they would be naturals in the medium," McClure recalls. "I don't think we had an a priori knowledge of exactly what it was going to turn out to be, but we had a pretty good idea about what its potential was and how to manipulate it into realizing that potential. And a lot of that manipulation was by staying the hell out of the way at the right time. The Well didn't just evolve, it evolved because we designed it to evolve."
Members were encouraged to submit ideas for conferences of their own; if McClure liked the idea, a conference was born. Joe Troise, a Whole Earth writer with expertise in European cars, started an automotive conference. Someone else started a gardening conference. PicoSpan also supported private conferences, which were invitation-only and unlisted. The notion was that if you wanted to start a business, you might invite a few partners to join you in a private conference, or if you were planning a surprise party, you might want to set up a private conference temporarily.
David Hawkins, a lay minister living in San Francisco, logged on for the first time one day in late August 1985, using the login (dhawk). A few hours later Tom Mandel, a futurist at the Menlo Park-based consulting organization SRI who was recovering from back surgery, signed up, too. Soon after joining, Dhawk told McClure that he'd like to host a conference on sexuality. McClure was wary of the idea, but Dhawk assured him the conference would be conducted with great decorum. He opened it with six topics. Things stayed slow until someone started Topic 7, called "Is the Sexual Revolution Dead?" which generated more than 100 responses in a week.
Mandel started a conference called Future. His job at SRI involved helping corporations with scenario planning, but his interest in futurology extended far beyond the utilitarian role he was able to play at work. The Future conference allowed him to puzzle through bigger questions, such as the future of socialism, the future of California, and fin de siècle ponderings. It was an instant hit.
As word spread about the quality of conversation taking place on The Well, more people arrived. Hackers, among others, began their own Macintosh and Telecom conferences. McClure, whose passion was Unix, started a Unix conference. The VAX itself, as a Unix machine, was an immediate draw to local hackers, many of whom just wanted to go in and play. For a long time McClure defended their right to do that, even when they slowed things down for others. In their day jobs, these same people may have been billing strangers $60 an hour for technical advice, but they were happy to help people on The Well for free. And occasionally the tinkerings of the hackers benefited The Well, as when Andy Beals wrote the Send command, which went a step beyond the standard electronic mail already offered. With Send, a message popped up on the recipient's screen within seconds, as long as he or she was logged on. It made messaging even more instantaneous on The Well. Now there were three levels of communication: PicoSpan conferencing, email, and Send.
It took a particular type of person to feel at ease with the medium. Facility with language helped. Fast typists had an edge. And there was an art to posting. The best posts were neither long-winded nor so brief as to be cryptic. One of McClure's guidelines was to keep posts to 22 lines, or no more than a screenful. "I figured that it was rude to make people pay to read unnecessary verbiage," he recalls. "There are very few ideas that you can't get across in a screenful of information. And if you can't, well then you're not really trying very hard." It was not unlike writing office memos, or postcards. "Either you had that kind of instinct or you didn't," says Jon Carroll, a San Francisco newspaper columnist who did. And for every post to a lively discussion, there were probably half a dozen other related email discussions swirling around it.
A large part of the attraction was that The Well offered the freedom of projecting whatever personality you wished, along with the intriguing possibility of highlighting subtle variations of your character. Users adhered to Brand's true-names rule, but at the same time most people created an electronic persona that was, to use MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle's term, "coextensive" with their physically embodied one.
It was in McClure's Pub conference that people first began playing with their pseudonyms, or "pseuds," which were descriptions of users. While the login, which appeared in parentheses, was unalterable, the pseud that preceded it could be changed at whim—and some people changed them constantly.
Pub was where people started having real fun:
Wavy Gumbo Ya (dooley) Tue Jan 7 '86
Oh god!. . . I must be coming on. . .all my pixels have eyes and my Hercules Card is squeezing GKS primitives out all over my non-selectric keyboard and my sweaty hands. h a n d s (they've never looked like this)(I can see right through them to the goupy geometrics melting on my keyboard) <—S-P-L-A-A-T-T— |~!15W01 Oh no! (fear pierced him) is this unixland? Where no halcyon, DOSile breezes blow? Where all beer tastes like Henry's? {{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{bum trip}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} So, what the hell. . . pass the nitrous tra la set the controls for the heart of the sun ya a a a a a a . . . . . . . and give me clouseau. . . . . . . . . ~@^0!0W501 STACK OVERLOAD
Albert Hoffman (hlr) Tue Jan 7 '86
That's what I call getting out your ya-ya. OHMYGOD DELETE DELETE BLEEP BLEEP—NOBODY TOLD ME I COULD END UP IN NON-VON-LAND!
Sammy from Sandoz (hlr) Wed Jan 8 '86
Hey, gang: Ever notice that everything is connected to everything else? Or did somebody gum up my neurotransmitter binding sites again? This is the planet Altair of the beta-carboline galaxy, no?
Peg Leg (mmc) Wed Jan 8 '86
Yeah, Sammy, it's all connected. Hard-wired. Or just wired, depending on what part of the hallucinogen/speed continuum you're on. 'Course, that doesn't mean nobody's messed with your neurotransmitters, 'cause that's half the fun, seeing how the drugs interact with the people and the gum and the neurons and ... a-h-h-h-h-h-h ... the SYNAPSES! Or is that some kind of metasynaptic variable?
The Bus Driver (mandel) Wed Jan 8 '86
So, what happen's, Peg Leg, if I eat this Shell Cube?
Peg Leg (mmc) Wed Jan 8 '86
Well, Mr. Driver, it's one of those things ... ingestible substance with unpredictable side effects depending on the personality of the ingestee. For you, I think it'd probably make the road a bit wobbly for a while, undulating, don'tcha know. And chances are you won't sleep for a few days, but other than that you'll probably enjoy it. Not near as bad as the hell cube next to it.
The Bus Driver (mandel) Wed Jan 8 '86
Please, Peg Leg, call me Bus; there's no need to be so formal...Your prescription reminds me of the time when I was driving down Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki having a fine old time absorbing some Orange Sunshine in the intertices of what was left of my brain. I came to this red light, stopped, waited, but when the light turned green, the damn road got uppity and split into 9 different branches. Not only that...it split into 9 vertically arrayed branches. Naturally, I managed to take the right one, and that's how I figured out that I'd passed my test as a Bus Driver.
Howard Rheingold, a Bay area writer who is now proprietor of the online site Electric Minds, lurked for a while at first. "One of my earliest shocking experiences on The Well was to find that people in the Whole Earth conference were discussing a book I had written. One person offered a negative opinion, and I immediately got the idea that The Well consisted of this tight little cabal of Whole Earth types." Then Rheingold made his first post—a description of tarantula sex, to the Sexuality conference. The response was enthusiastic. He was hooked. He started a conference called Mind, a spin-off of his writings on how the mind works. "The Well took over my life," he says. "It's this territory where you know your behavior is somehow obsessive and taboo in the Protestant sense, that you should be working, that there's something sick and dehumanized about spending time doing this, but you also know that it's sociable, and you're doing it together. That was the unholy attraction of it."
For one thing, The Well established its own rhythm. Soon enough, you could predict who might be on when. Just logging on at 4 a.m. to see who else wasn't getting any sleep could be a comfort. Of course, everyone knew that and weren't going to replace the real thing. At the same time, as Well member Tom Portante once put it, "talking with people you might or might not consider befriending in any other context was its own seduction." You couldn't see what anyone else was wearing or hear what their voices sounded like, but in a way, absent those trappings, the isolated prose revealed something still more intimate.
For a lot of people, five or six hours a day online was as good as their social life got. If the wired world was a response to the breakdown of physical community, then this wasn't such a bad place to be. And some people were turning to The Well precisely because they could avoid real life encounters that way. These people, who might be too timid to strike up a conversation with a bank teller, became animated and voluble online. "A lot of people didn't know what they were looking for until they found it on The Well," observes Cliff Figallo, another alumnus of The Farm, who built the original computer closet for the VAX and became user 19, with the login (fig). Fig, who began as The Well's comptroller, was shy by nature and afraid at first of typing something that might be criticized or laughed at or, worse, ignored. "When you post something it's like standing up at a public meeting for the first time," Fig says. But he discovered that his experience mirrored that of others: "When people made a good connection, they found that they could follow up on it easily and get some momentum going, get deeper, get loose."
Ramon Sender Barayon, a San Francisco writer and musician and the son of a well-known Spanish novelist, had been on EIES but found it a bit too intellectual. "When I logged on to The Well for the first time, I did a lot of cussing and muttering because of PicoSpan," Barayon recalls. "But then I felt the energies on The Well. It reminded me of the Open Land communes I'd been to in the 1960s. The tribal need is one our culture doesn't recognize; capitalism wants each of us to live in our own little cubicle, consuming as much as possible. The Well took that need and said, 'Hey, let's see what happens if we become a disembodied tribe.'"
Patrizia DiLucchio learned about The Well from a magazine article while she was spending her days in front of a computer, working on her master's in public health. Years later, she posted her first impressions:
I fell in love. Instantly, effortlessly, irretrievably. With the WELL. So here's where all the brilliant people have been hiding out, I marveled. Because all my life, I'd felt like a misfit. While other people talked about sports and mileage and the adventures of their favorite sit com characters, I longed to talk about books and ideas. I mean I could talk other-people-ese with the best of them (I'm good at dialects) but I longed for people whom I didn't have to translate, with whom I could speak my own language. The WELL abounded with these people. Although it never quite dawned on me at this stage that they were people. More like penumbra.
Pre-Forrest Gump aphorisms and shorthand snippets floated around The Well by the hundreds: "There are no mistakes, only lessons." "'There' is no better than 'here.'" "Plate o' shrimp"—meaning an eerie coincidence. AIDS or carpal tunnel syndrome or the Iran-contra scandal—whatever your interest was, there was perhaps no better place on earth than The Well for seeing what other people had to say about it. Maybe the debates did grow quarrelsome or repetitive, but at least you were guaranteed to see every possible point made, every conceivable solecism pointed out.
On The Well, there were no filters—how could there be when PicoSpan's assumption was that everyone should be heard? The parallel assumption was that Well users would be level-headed modem owners—a rather loose parameter, to be sure, but one that was meant to promote a certain level of reasonable discourse. And for about a year, it did. But in 1986, with membership at around 500, the first disruptive element arrived: a new user named Mark Ethan Smith, whose login was (grandma). Initially, Smith seemed another articulate, thoughtful poster, whose contributions to Jokes and Pub and to Rheingold's Mind conference were written with an edge and wry wit. The newcomer also proved to be an unusually prolific poster: Smith's Commodore 64 could generate 10,000 words a day with no apparent effort. But before long, some unsettling patterns started to emerge. Smith, convinced that the male sex lay at the root of civilization's woes, thrummed on the themes of dead-beat dads, bigamists, exploitive male bosses, pimps, and rapists—and advocated the establishment of a women's free state. Rheingold recalls Smith's obsession with Lise Meitner, the Austrian nuclear physicist who had, Smith maintained, actually discovered nuclear fission while her contemporary Otto Hahn got the Nobel Prize for it. And Smith did not take kindly to anyone who disputed these matters.
As it turned out, Mark Ethan Smith was a woman—a middle-aged Berkeley resident who lived in near poverty and resented what she saw as her exploitation by rich male hippies. She was open with others on The Well about the fact that she was a woman, but apparently she was taken with the identity-shifting, role-playing possibilities the medium allowed; she preferred to be referred to as a man and lashed out at those who did not comply with the request.
One of the people Smith had it in for most was Tom Mandel. Smith pegged Mandel as a classic oppressor and inveighed against him at every turn, while for his part, Mandel took pleasure in taunting her. Typically, another Well member would begin by defending her to Mandel and end up becoming yet another target of her attacks. She became known for her multihundred line flames. In his effort to help, Howard Rheingold even went so far as to invite Smith to his house and introduce her to his family. (He recalls that, with graying hair shorn to a buzz cut, "she looked like a little old Jewish grandmother in male drag.") But when Rheingold posted something that transgressed a tenet of the Mark Ethan Smith theology, he too started getting flames in his mailbox.
Dhawk, who had encountered Mark Ethan Smith before, on other bulletin board systems around the Bay area, told McClure that she was trouble and should be thrown off. McClure's response fixed in place The Well's threshold of tolerance for years to come: he told Dhawk he believed Smith should be allowed to stay; he could work with her.
If anyone could have got through to Smith, it surely would have been McClure, who had seen about 15,000 random visitors a year come through the Gatehouse, the initial stopping point for anyone who ventured onto The Farm's 1,750-acre property in Lewis County, the poorest part of rural Tennessee. Stephen Gaskin and 300 San Francisco hippies had started the commune in 1971 believing they were creating a lifestyle that would revolutionize the world. They gave up their worldly possessions. They lived off the land. There were no rules on The Farm, there were only agreements. Jobs were held tenuously. By far the highest cause for Gaskin's followers was to be spiritual and, in addition to living together harmoniously, to do good work for the world beyond The Farm's boundaries. Passers-through had included escaped prisoners seeking refuge, people on bad trips, assorted lost souls with any of a variety of psychopathologies. To embrace strangers and see their problems through to resolution was McClure's specialty.
Beyond that, McClure believed Mark Ethan Smith was an interesting problem to observe within The Well's grand experiment. Smith was masterful at reading the system and manipulating it. McClure called her a vibes magician. "We were building a little culture here, and somebody came in and saw how it worked and just played it like an instrument," he recalls. "Just because she was obnoxious and had strange ideas didn't mean that she shouldn't get to play."
There was another consideration as well: Smith was a huge provider of food for thought and was completely, if predictably, outrageous. The more lively the discussion, the more people stayed logged on. Her outbursts were, in short, good for business.
By the summer of 1986, The Well was increasingly suffering from technological stress that could be addressed only by a cash infusion. The choice of the VAX had probably been Stewart Brand's biggest mistake. In theory, it could support 40 simultaneous calls, but once eight or so people logged on at the same time, traffic barely inched along. Post something to the system and you might not see it appear for a good two or three minutes. But a new computer was out of the question—The Well was now officially losing money. Not tens of thousands, but thousands. Brand had removed himself from the picture; he was writing a book on the MIT Media Lab and running a series of small conferences on organizational learning for Royal/Dutch Shell Group, AT&T, and Volvo. In Ann Arbor, NETI's accountants and board members were suggesting to Larry Brilliant that he write off what had become a nearly $400,000 investment in The Well. Brilliant recalls a board meeting at which "most of the financial types said, 'We've got some serious partnerships, with AT&T, GE, and Arthur Andersen. And then this bunch of hippies in San Francisco. We should dump the hippies.'"
Feeling the pressure, McClure recruited John Coate, yet another returnee from The Farm, to help shore up The Well's business side. Coate, who came from an old-line San Francisco family, was one of the most affable people McClure had ever met, and by hiring him for the newly created position of Well marketing director (at $10 an hour), McClure hoped to lure more subscribers. Unfortunately, Coate didn't know the first thing about marketing or computers. What he did know, and care passionately about, was community-building on the model of The Farm, which he had joined at age 19 and stayed with for 12 years.
Within a few months of Coate's arrival, McClure left to work at a computer programming company. Cliff Figallo was tapped to replace him, and it fell to Fig and Coate—who used the login (tex), so nicknamed by friends because he was tall and slow-talking—to cope with the controversy surrounding Smith. It was growing more heated, in part because Smith had taken to calling Well members at home to complain about the way she was being treated. Other members were saying that she was destroying their community. Recalls Fig: "We looked at each other and said, 'They're calling it a community. Wow.'" Tex now sat for hours at a time with the telephone receiver pressed to his ear, just letting Smith vent offline. Like McClure, Tex thought his time on The Farm would prove useful here. "We had no TV on The Farm, just kerosene lamps," he says. "It was just us and our hard work and our kind of vision and ideals and propensity for picking around in each other's psyches. We spent extraordinary amounts of time just yakking with strangers we were putting up." But they found that The Well environment was somehow more impervious to their efforts; it seemed that Smith could not be contained or appeased. Finally, in October 1986, Fig told Smith he was suspending her account indefinitely. (She soon turned up on Usenet, referring to Tex, Fig, and Mandel as "Nazi penis worshipers.")
In time, there were other altercations and other people who left, usually of their own volition and always very publicly. But invariably—and this was one of the defining characteristics of The Well—it didn't take long before they were back. Smith's account, however, was taken away for good—she was the first person on The Well to be so expelled. Though she never returned, she left a lasting mark. Years later, Mandel maintained that if there was indeed some sort of Well community, two things had helped create it, and the first of these was the group encounter with Mark Ethan Smith.
"One by one, each of us early conference hosts and more visible posters would come to get mugged by good old MES," Mandel recalled, "and we used to call each other and giggle and cry and scream about it. Sharing advice about how to deal with this Major Cyberthreat to Sanity—or so she seemed at the time—did drive a lot of us to talk on the phone and exchange mail and figure out what the fuck to do."
The second cohering factor was The Well office parties, inaugurated in September 1986, when Well regular Maria Syndicus and a few others decided to have a party for Fig and Tex one Friday afternoon at the Sausalito offices. It was the first time most members had met in the flesh, and pretty much everyone later observed that the shapely personalities projected electronically bore scant resemblance to the people who showed up. By and large, they were what Brand once described as "a portly keyboarding group," perhaps not completely at peace with their bodies, or themselves, or each other. In fact, some headed straight to a computer and logged on.
Yet soon the parties were a monthly tradition. As Brand had predicted, something happened when people met each other in physical space, something that both fed off and intensified their closeness online. The Well defied current notions about virtual community in that it wasn't one—entirely. In fact, the community probably wouldn't have thrived solely in virtual space. Problems that arose online got worked out offline, and vice versa. The login prompt was the membrane through which people passed back and forth. Early on, it was possible to log on to The Well from outside the Bay area, using commercial packet-switching systems—but some people found that the distance was a handicap. Jon Lebkowsky, who logged on from Austin, Texas, said he felt his posts were more or less ignored until he went out of his way to travel to the Bay area for a Well party. It was the fact of face-to-face contact, not so much the quality of it, that made the difference.
But the real magic happened when people wandered outside their usual haunts—when the technical people wandered into the cultural conferences and the literary people became regulars in the Macintosh and Unix and Telecom conferences. The Well parlance for this was to "go over the wall." And at no time did more people go over the wall than after the Deadheads arrived in the spring of 1986. Recalls David Gans, a local author and musician: "I came to The Well with Mary Eisenhart and Bennett Falk to start an online community for Deadheads. The GD conference took off like gangbusters."
Every week, Gans went on his radio show, the Deadhead Hour on San Francisco's KFOG, and said, "If you want to interact with other Deadheads, join The Well. You don't have to be a computer person, just a person with a computer." Soon their conference was the busiest on The Well and the biggest revenue producer; in fact, by 1987, it was responsible for between one-third and one-half of all Well activity. Traffic spiked with news of a Dead concert on its way to the Bay area, or of a turn in the unpredictable state of Jerry Garcia's health.
Fig, who recalls the windfall as "the first instance of people going out and getting computers and modems just to get on The Well," soon discovered that all Deadheads weren't necessarily itinerant flower children floating around the entrances of Grateful Dead concerts. They were also professionals from Silicon Valley earning upward of $60,000 a year—members who, over time, would be "assimilated" into the larger culture of The Well. And they weren't necessarily locals. Although long distance Well Beings—as Well users often referred to themselves—were a distinct minority, they were often prolific posters, especially the Deadheads. One long distance Deadhead was Bernie Bildman, an oral surgeon who lived in Birmingham, Alabama:
Bernie Bildman (bernbb) Fri, Jun 5, '87
Just removed 4 complete bony impacted wisdom teeth, began at the opening refrain of "Scarlet Begonias" from 3/1/87. The last suture was placed when Jerry began the first 'Long distance runner..' from 'Fire on the Mountain.' Ta Da!!
Dan Rubin (djr) Fri, Jun 5, '87
Bernie, if you benchmark your procedures to particular Dead songs, you should let your patients bring their own tapes. I'd hate to be in your chair for a Dark Star procedure based on Live Dead and have you pop in a tape of the '84 Greek version, scrambling like hell to finish before it's over. :-)
David Gans (maddog) Fri, Jun 5, '87
Imagine a "Friend of the Devil" root canal, 1970 or 1987. Bernie Bildman (bernbb) Sat, Jun 6, '87Great idea you've given me, maddog. I've decided to 'sell' my oral surgery not only by type of procedure, but also by GD song title. Each procedure will have a Dead song associated with it, the song should of course be 'related' to the kind of surgery it is, and the time of procedure must fall in a general way, within the time frame I need to 'perform' the job. A Playing in the Band extraction would of course be more expensive than Around and Around one. Dancing is allowed by both patient and oral surgeon, that is if the poor fellow can get out of the chair in the middle of his Valium sedation!
The popularity of the Grateful Dead conference helped give The Well a financial boost. By December 1987, with a user base that had grown to 2,000, it had turned a small profit. Fig wrote to the board of directors that he was convinced "a system based almost completely on mutual random interaction can sustain itself."
Being director of The Well was, Fig once said, a bit like being the justice of the peace or the town constable. Such was the way Fig and Tex, whose job as marketing director had expanded to include conferencing management duties, conducted themselves. They made a sharp pair. If a discussion got ugly, they were able to turn things around by cajoling and persuading. Every six months or so a full-blown crisis would occur—over politics, an objectionable posting, or someone's hurt feelings. They would help resolve the crisis, and life would go on, often better than before. It seemed a necessary force of nature, like a periodic brushfire that works its destruction to seed nutrients into the soil. Some users sniffed at Fig and Tex, calling them "process queens," but even those people respected the pair's commitment to the cause. (Observes one Well user: "A society is judged by how it treats its dissidents, and The Well treated its dissidents very well.")
The Well had an uncanny knack for provoking arguments. The dynamic was sometimes frenetic, always reactive. People who started out attacking an idea often ended up attacking each other; even its least confrontational posters often found themselves snared into a heated debate. At these moments, The Well was a Roman circus gone overboard. Quiet spectators who came to watch armor-clad gladiators such as Tom Mandel pound opponents to a virtual pulp would suddenly find themselves pulled into the fray. Rhetoricians might square off in displays of grandiloquence, but a good deal of the time all the well-crafted satire, backstabbing witticisms, and literary fireworks served little purpose other than to incite still more verbiage and draw more people in.
"We spent a lot of days during those years wondering why we were putting our heads through this wringer, why we should care what these people think, why we should be involved in this weeklong debate," recalls Tex, who as conferencing manager was there all day long, every single day. "But the experience was invigorating even when it was exasperating. Since there wasn't anyone but us and there wasn't any real money and nobody cared anyway except for us—the users and the staff—I really didn't spend much time thinking about any alternatives besides making The Well be the best thing it could be. That was my nonstop attitude for a solid five years."
Recalls Fig: "We were conditioned to respond to the Community Imperative—the need to build and maintain relationships between people and to preserve the structure that supported those relationships. I also became aware, largely through Tex's dogged insistence, that those relationships were the only 'product' we had to sell. It became our thing; a living, breathing collaboration that Tex and I could recognize as having real community characteristics. We knew we were making history on some level."
Fig and Tex came to be known as a composite phenomenon, "figtex," and this phenomenon inspired some of the greatest acts of community on The Well. When Phil Catalfo's 7-year-old son Gabe was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia, members sat vigil with (philcat) and posted reams of support. When Isaac, a much-loved teenager, couldn't afford to attend the private school of his choice, people chipped in to help his mother come up with tuition. When Mike Godwin, an outspoken member who was not universally liked, lost his worldly possessions in a moving-van fire, friends and foes sent him books from their own libraries to replace his lost volumes. It began to dawn on people that this was the sort of thing that happened in a small town. The response to need in this community, at once inseparable and separated by worlds, became extraordinary. When one member developed a liver disorder in New Delhi and fell into a coma, a group was organized, within days, to line up the blood-filtering equipment needed to save her life, then to have her flown back to a hospital in the US. One Well Being described this as "love in action." In the process, some people in the Spirituality conference invented "beams"—good vibes, essentially, or, as one person put it, healing prayer sent by request. Beams weren't a substitute for other therapies, but an augmentation, a way to ask for comfort without having to use the word prayer. The more cynical Well members dismissed beams as a New Agey concoction, but a lot of people believed in the effectiveness of beams the way they believed in the effectiveness of Tylenol.
The Well community was at its supportive best when, one day, a member named Maurice Weitman found his biological mother.
Some news from North Berkeley... after over twelve years of searching, and almost forty years of wondering, I've located the woman who gave birth to me and then relinquished me for adoption. Early this evening, I found her name in the Riverside, CA phone book. She's 69 years old. She's my mother. Even though I just learned her name about two years ago, I've always carried a mental image of her. I'm in a bit of a daze—rushing and reeling. The next step, one that I've thought of for many years, is to call her and, as gently as possible, tell her who I am. This is one of the most amazing moments in my life. I've felt every possible feeling and visualized every possible outcome over the years, and I'm now within hours and ten taps on a phone of hearing her voice for the first time in forty-four years. It might be an interesting Mother's Day. Or maybe not.
Warren Sirota (warren)
Good luck, Maurice. I've got my fingers crossed and my breath baited (maybe that's why it smells like fish...)
Ten little taps!
Michael Zentner (mz)
go for it mo ! Yes, yes, yes! Make that call! I'll be happy to come over and hold the handset for you if you need both hands to dial.
Many blessings, buckaroo. Have no expectations, and abundant expectancy.
Howard Rheingold (hlr)
Mo got through to the person he has been trying to reach. They agreed to talk at 1:00. So direct your good thoughts to Mo at that time. And if you want to join the Wellbeam, read the intro (response 0) to item 228 in the mind conference.
Maurice Weitman (mo)
Yeah, I spoke with her for a minute or so. Didn't mention anything about adoption or mothers, just that I had something personal to talk with her about and is this a good time. She said her daughter was going to be calling between 11 and 1 and she wanted to keep the line clear until then. She asked me to call back at 1. She sounded really sweet and friendly and clear. I have a sister!!! Yikes. I'll be back here in a few hours.
Thanks for your support.
david gans (maddog)
My thoughts are with you.
John Coate (tex)
Mine too.
Jetboy (mandel)
Best wishes, Mo.
Mary Eisenhart (marye)
From me too.
Ramon Sender Barayon (rabar)
Yayyy mo! Something wonderful's going to happen!
Jetboy (mandel)
Something wonderful's going to happen! Hmmm...has HAL just taken over the VAX750? That was a very familiar line.%-)
Kathleen Creighton (casey)
Best wishes-what a great day!
Hank Roberts (hank)
God Bless.May the love folks here feel for you be redoubled many times over.
Maurice Weitman (mo)
Thanks, gang. As of ten minutes ago, there was still no answer. I'm trying every fifteen minutes. I'll let you know as soon as I connect.
Maurice Weitman (mo)
So she said "Oh my god, I died and went to heaven." And then it got better. You can't imagine how happy I am. She hadn't told her husband about me, so she couldn't talk very much. We spoke for about twenty minutes (I've recorded the conversation) and she said all the things I'd hoped she would. And more than I'd dare hope for. She said that she'll work out telling her husband as soon as she figures out how. She sounds wonderful. She said she takes really good care of herself, so we'll be together for a long time. She asked if my parents were still alive, I told her they're both dead and she said "Don't worry, you're gonna have more family than you'll know what to do with..." and "you're gonna be loooovvved!!!" She said she thought about me millioins of times and she was so sorry that she couldn't keep me, but things were lots different then.
She's gonna call me at 9:30 tom'w am. After we hung up, I called my friend Virginia who's the director of the adoption group PACER. She's been the moving/guiding/pushing/supporting influence in this process for the past four years. And in the middle of telling her how wonderfully it went, my momma called back and said "He went out to walk the dog and I wanted to hear your voice again" and we spoke for another few minutes until he came back in and she had to hang up. and so do I. Thanks again, all.My love is spilling over to you all.
One of the numerous responses read, "Thanks for giving us the blow-by blow as it unfolded. Just like being there!" Someone else wrote, "Maybe a printout of this topic will serve to introduce her to your Well family."
\—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
The Well turned a small profit again in 1988, but the sluggishness of the system was so vexing that Fig and Tex wondered if it could survive much longer. They were saving to buy a new computer—hoping that The Well wouldn't grind to a standstill before they could afford it—when Tex and Kevin Kelly, a board member, came up with the idea of asking subscribers to volunteer to pay substantial amounts of their bills in advance. Their reasoning: You'll pay this amount anyway and if you pay now, you'll get a machine with faster response. The idea was floated in the News conference, and the response was overwhelming. Within six weeks, The Well raised $28,000 and, together with a $30,000 bank loan, bought a Sequent computer.
In May 1989, The Well hired its first customer support employee. By the end of that year, the staff had grown to six.
But life was not all beams. If Fig and Tex functioned as justices of the peace, Tom Mandel, a more or less continuous presence online, personified the community's whip-smart provocateur. He bullied, jeered, one-lined, and pontificated his way around The Well. He was seldom just plain offensive, at least in the early years. He had a keen sense of humor, and his challenges were friendly more often than not, though he took pleasure in needling people. (When Gail Williams, The Well's conference manager, posted in the Environment conference that every blade of grass could be considered sacred, she recalls that he responded, "I keep stacks of these posts precisely so that you can never run for public office.")
Articulate and strong, he had a knack for stepping in when a discussion flagged. His most noticeable trademark was a low threshold of tolerance. He didn't generally let his posts get personal, confining his critiques to people's ideas. But privately, in follow-up email, he could turn vicious. Still, many people on The Well respected him. Not only was he widely read, but he read carefully. And on a "good keyboard," as he put it, he could type more than 100 words per minute.
From the moment he first logged on to The Well, as simply (mandel), he posted voluminously. He posted in a dozen conferences, several times a day. Many Well users thought he was on constantly, and some days he was. The Well, recognizing that Mandel was a strong contributor and a good conference host and that others were paying to read what he wrote, gave him a free account. He was a wide-ranging generalist, dropping into Drugs, Future, Science, Sexuality, Books, Science Fiction, and Movies. In the Drugs conference, he once started a topic called "Sex on Acid." It seemed he'd start a topic about nearly anything that popped into his head: "Have You Ever Saved Someone's Life?" (Mandel had, in a heroic plunge into a river to pull someone out). "Best and Worst Memories of the Sixties." "Great Operas on CD."
He was a frequent contributor to the Weird conference—started by John Hoag—which was often described as The Well's id, a more free-form version of Pub. Everything was permitted; whatever silliness came into people's minds was the next thing they typed. Hoag himself described it as an ASCII performance stage, a pressure valve, and "a place to post nonsense and profundity without having to decide which is which." Weird was The Well's free zone, and there was nothing anyone could do about it except choose not to go there.
Mandel reveled in getting people to open up and remove themselves from their normal realms. In July 1986, this had given him an idea for a new conference. He asked Howard Rheingold to cohost it, and they called it True Confessions. The ground rules were that no critical responses were allowed and most definitely no flaming. You could respond to someone's deeply personal revelation, but only to urge him or her to continue. It would be a place to reminisce and daydream and let it all hang out, with no exact equivalent in real life.
True Confessions was a breakthrough for The Well. People found themselves talking about their first high, their wildest acid trip, their religious revelations, their worst fears. No one was terribly concerned with privacy. Tex and Fig and McClure talked openly for the first time about their years on The Farm. Mandel revealed pieces of his own past. He told of having been adopted by well-to-do department-store owners who moved to Honolulu when he was 5, of his stint in the Marine Corps, and Vietnam, of having graduated from the University of Hawaii with one of the nation's first degrees in futurism. He didn't talk much here about his work at SRI as a futurist—or, as he put it, a professional forecaster; for that, he went to the Future conference. He also spent a lot of time in the Health conference, complaining about this sore throat or that head cold. It was there that people learned he had had a serious bout of pneumonia some years earlier. Somehow it seemed appropriate that back surgery had first brought him to The Well.
Although not many of Mandel's Well colleagues knew it, he was a creature of contradictions. His bachelor's condo in Mountain View was so slovenly that even his friends couldn't bear to visit, yet he often dressed for work in finely pressed suits by Armani and Zegna, custom-tailored to his small frame. He could be a rigidly demanding and self-disciplined intellectual, yet he indulged a compulsive and hedonistic streak. (He smoked two packs of Benson & Hedges Ultra Lights a day—a real-life habit that would have put off many a Well Being.)
Mandel's most curious contradiction may have been that he spent 10 years as an avid member of The Well, all the while not only resisting but outright rejecting the idea that this was in fact a community. If he supported The Well conferences, he was ultimately a supporter of the status quo, a pragmatist interested in how the world actually worked rather than how any idealist or visionary dreamt it might work. He took on The Well's peaceniks so consistently as to make it a spectator sport. "By being against the nice police and touchy-feely crowd, he sort of became a fixture," says Gerard Van der Leun, (boswell) on The Well and a friend of Mandel's.
On the other hand, without admitting to an ounce of community spirit Mandel accepted Fig's invitation to join The Well's volunteer "Kill" crew. One of the technical problems users frequently ran into was that of the "hung session"; this happened when The Well's computer failed to recognize that a user had disconnected from the service and continued to tie up the line, inflating the user's bill. The Kill crew was a select group of half a dozen or so Unix-savvy power users who monitored the system during off hours. They searched for long idle times, armed with a Kill command that could terminate users' sessions.
Mandel seemed to flourish in an atmosphere that permitted a certain kind of abandon but didn't demand much in return. Already in his 40s, he had never been married, had always lived alone, and professed a lifelong aversion to commitment. But for several years, he had been involved with Maria Syndicus, who worked in the office next to his at SRI as a research analyst. Mandel's love affair with Syndicus was to be the single most important emotional entanglement of his life. It would both disarm and enrage him, and, inevitably, it would extend to—and complicate—his relationship with The Well.
Syndicus was introduced to The Well in May 1986, after she noticed Mandel sitting in front of his computer more than usual. She asked what he was doing. At first he didn't want to tell her, and when he did he wasn't eager to have her join. He wasn't telling any of his other colleagues about it, either. He seemed to enjoy the separateness.
But Syndicus wasn't deterred. She retrieved a modem from the SRI storeroom and figured out how to get logged on. She chose the login (nana), a nickname she had had since childhood. Once she had gotten the lay of the land, she sent Mandel email. He responded graciously, even humorously. "I think he wrote back something like, 'There goes the neighborhood,'" she recalls. At first, Nana stayed put in the Parenting conference (she had two sons from a previous marriage), but eventually she went over the wall, to Mind, Sexuality, and True Confessions. Because of her login, people online took her to be a kindly grandmother, and someone suggested she write a Well advice column on being a parent. Nana quickly found that she possessed all the right stuff for The Well; her postings were at once terse and effective. "I used to say about The Well that it was a place where I could pluck the brains of 50 of my best friends before breakfast," she says. "And it was lunch, dinner, and midnight snack to boot. A feast for the mind and the soul. I'd be in the office, working, and at the same time, posting in conferences, sending email, and having a conversation in Sends. I'd be at home, cooking dinner, and logging on to check what was new. Relationships developed fast and furious, ideas spread like wildfire. I never laughed so hard, argued so passionately, soaked up so many new ideas. The Well made me run on high."
Mandel and Nana flirted in subtle ways in the public conferences, but for the most part they didn't advertise their attachment. Instead, they sent each other dozens of email messages and Sends every day. Their desks were on opposite sides of a common wall; when Nana heard the white noise of Mandel's modem connecting with Sausalito, followed by furious typing, she would log on, too. If something especially interesting was happening, one of them would bang on the wall. It went on that way for years.
If Mandel scorned the notion of community, Nana embraced it wholeheartedly. She was especially moved by how attached everyone—many of whom had never met—became on The Well. "I would have walked through fire for these people," she recalls. "I had never experienced this kind of closeness with so many different people all at once." She was also the more social of the two. Mandel seldom went to Well parties; at one of the few he did attend, he showed up in disguise. (One Well regular who met Mandel sans disguise said he suggested a cross between Jeremy Irons—mustachioed, dark, and slender-faced—and Glenn Gould—temperamental and eclectic.) He wasn't a recluse; in fact, he had a wide and varied circle of friends, several of whom had no acquaintance whatever with computers in general or the online universe in particular. But Mandel liked to compartmentalize life, with everyone sticking to their assigned categories—except him.
\—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
In May 1989, Nana posted to the Health conference that she had discovered a lump in her breast; soon after, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy, followed by a brutal course of radiation and chemotherapy. In the midst of this, Mandel announced their engagement in the News conference. The couple was congratulated all around.
But it was too much for Mandel. Perhaps he panicked, those who knew him said; he was, after all, genuinely frightened by any kind of serious illness. He suddenly backed away, and Nana had to rely on others for support. At times, Tex, Rheingold, and other friends from The Well took her to the hospital for her chemotherapy treatments. Hurt and disillusioned, Nana called off the engagement, but she left it to Mandel to announce the breakup on The Well. He did so, unceremoniously.
Having turned away, Mandel now turned against Nana. She was on sick leave from work, and they no longer saw each other or spoke offline. But online, he went on the attack. He began visiting the conferences she went to, and he sent her vicious email. "It was a constant bombardment, all of it bile," Nana recalls. Finally, she appealed to The Well management for relief. Dhawk, now The Well's sysop, installed a program that examined Nana's incoming mail and redirected any from Mandel to the bit bucket. In short order, Mandel found a way around the program. Now nasty Sends were raining down on her; her only recourse was to disable the Send feature.
Matters only worsened when Nana began seeing more of another Well member she'd known for about a year, whose login was (tictock). For his part, Tictock appeared to enjoy flaunting their relationship online. Although he had hitherto confined his travels to the Boating and Recovery conferences, he began showing up in the Future conference, further infuriating Mandel.
Few people at SRI knew of Mandel's distress. No one there knew that when his office door was closed, he was on The Well, stalking Nana. The divisions in his life were becoming very convenient indeed: he was losing his grip, and The Well provided him with an auxiliary space, where, it seemed, he could safely go crazy. Here was an example, in sharpest relief, of the license granted by such an online venue, a place where anyone could act out in ways they never could in "real" life. Mandel wasn't sidestepping reality so much as augmenting it. Online, he was uncontained; he was expressing anger and pain and everything else that, for whatever reason, he felt but could not express to Nana's face.
Even the question of whether Mandel knew what he was doing took on a new shading in light of this unique environment. The Well had long given him the ability to alter and modify his identity, to fragment himself in ways he couldn't have done nearly so easily, if at all, offline. In this way, the system fostered what Sherry Turkle, in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, calls the "multiple and fluid" self. According to Turkle's theory, online experiences can "help us to develop models of psychological well being that ... admit multiplicity and flexibility. They acknowledge the constructed nature of reality, self, and other."
Mandel might have been, according to this model, the perfect postmodern human being. Yet something was wrong. He was wreaking havoc and ignoring the impact of his actions online. He was trapped in what Turkle calls "the crucible of contradictory experience," the netherworld of online dwellers, on the boundary between the real and the virtual. "Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion," she writes. "It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk."
Mandel's erratic behavior attracted a good deal of The Well's community like bloodhounds to the scent. They tracked each turn of events avidly, and from the snippets of actual information they received, they pieced together a breathtaking array of perspectives, interpretations, and judgments. Soon, the entire affair was becoming everyone's personal Rorschach blot. The reaction to Mandel and Nana became a window into the medium's potent ability to magnify, embellish, and project.
How different was this from neighbors gossiping over the back fence about their own closed, self-referential sphere? For one thing, the medium was text. Not since the days when people corresponded daily by letter had the written word carried such freight in quotidian life. For another, the communications on The Well often generated, through their very intensity, the type of hurt feelings usually reserved for familial disputes; such was the fallout from this strange intimacy The Well provoked—at once public and solitary.
The Well's founders may have thought they knew what they were aiming for, but now they were discovering that the project was fragile in unimaginable ways. Beginning with Mark Ethan Smith, and now here, at this inglorious pass with Mandel, Fig and Tex found themselves bending what flimsy rule structure there was to encourage people to adapt to one another's eccentricities. As Stewart Brand once put it, "The theory going in was that everybody plays until we find out what is unplayable behavior." The staff's active efforts to promote tolerance stretched the system's capacity, Fig recalls, "to absorb the extremes of individual behaviors." But how far could it bend before breaking? The experiment was exhibiting a certain Frankensteinian quality; the very forces that gave the community its vitality were threatening to become its undoing.
Then Mandel went over the edge: he began using the Kill program against Nana, extinguishing her sessions whenever she logged on. This was far more heinous than any deed of Mark Ethan Smith's, yet Mandel's was also a more sensitive case than Smith's, because he was part of the clan. He was considered sufficiently important to The Well's success that, a few months earlier, the board of directors had invited him to join. He also belonged to Stewart Brand's Global Business Network, a loosely organized think tank whose private conference on The Well had as its members dozens of industry élites and sundry intellectuals from around the country. And for years, Mandel had generated not just words but controversy, which generated business. He literally provoked people to participate. Still, killing Nana's sessions—effectively violating her right to be a Well citizen—was an act impossible for Fig and Tex, to say nothing of Mandel's fellow board members, to brook. It was seen as a monstrous betrayal of the trust of The Well community (not to mention an abuse of the power vested in him as a member of the select Kill crew).
Brand, who had taken notice of the uproar, stepped in and, together with Fig and the rest of the board, deliberated over what to do about what was now referred to simply as the Mandel Incident. In late October 1989, Fig told Mandel his account would be suspended for an unspecified period. Curiously, Mandel sounded almost relieved. He asked if it would be all right if he took a day to clean out some of his old files. Fig consented.
When Fig next logged onto The Well, he found that the entire Future and Weird conferences had disappeared. Using his power status, Mandel had nuked both conferences in their entirety. Years of conversation had been deleted. It seemed the ultimate betrayal of community spirit and sent shock waves through The Well.
Mandel's Well account was suspended, but he wasn't gone. A day later, Boswell got a Send from someone he initially didn't recognize: "Peek-a boo!" Perhaps in anticipation of just such a reprisal, Mandel had long held a ghost account—tagged to a local Mail Boxes Etc.—which he'd paid for with a money order.
Incredibly enough, within days, The Well's management began to think about allowing Mandel to return. The conditions of reinstatement were the subject of extensive negotiations among Mandel, Fig, and Tex. (The contents of the Future and Weird conferences, meanwhile, proved to be unrecoverable. As Dhawk explained to users, "Our tape drive was broken for quite a while, and the one backup we had before that was messed up by a power failure. This came at a bad time as far as backups were concerned.")
A topic got started in the Hosts conference, and a typical Well thrash ensued. Some people called for having Mandel write a statement of remorse. Others questioned the sincerity of anything he might agree to write. Nearly everyone wanted to know every detail of the negotiations.
Matt Scruby (mattu) Wed Nov 8 '89
One thing has been missing during this whole debacle: A Statement.
There have been accusations, postures, topics, vituperative responses, more accusations. Since press conferences and Q and A topics aren't going to cut it, how about a statement of management position?
Simply saying that "We'll allow ....... until ...." doesn't clarify anything, it further muddies the waters. If an unstated policy is to be enforced, then this is destined to happen more frequently as the WELL grows.
Eugene L. Schoenfeld (zerotol) Thu Nov 9 '89
I have assumed that e mail was for private messages, similar in most ways to snail mail except for the obvious. What would have occurred if Mandel had sent Nana the same messages through the U.S. Post Office. Would she have had any way to stop that mail? I know not what Mandel e-mailed Nana, but assume the content was hostile and insulting.
If his e-mail was not threatening, or otherwise illegal, I am alarmed that it could be intercepted and stopped, distressing as it must have been to Nana. Did she have grounds to obtain a restraining order against this kind of harrassment? If not, the winds of freedom blow freer through U.S. Post Offices than the WELL offices.
Also alarming was Mandel's trashing parts of the WELL.
I gather that Mandel believes he should be restored now to his previous status on the WELL. I believe this is unrealistic.
David Gans (tnf) Thu Nov 9 '89
At this point I think Tom Mandel can rot in hell until he cops to some of his stupid behavior.
John Hoag (loca) Thu Nov 9 '89
I wonder, is it legal to write, "FUCK YOU" on the outside of an envelope mailed through the Post Office?
Howard Rheingold (hlr) Thu Nov 9 '89
How about sends? To my way of thinking, receiving repeated, obnoxious sends would be a far more serious disruption. I can see a strong case that a recipient can choose to delete mail without reading it. But sends are right there in your face. On the one hand, it can be very annoying and even frightening if you get barraged by nasty sends. On the other hand, I don't want to set nochat because I do enjoy receiving sends from other people. I'm speaking hypothetically, here. Nobody is bothering me. Just trying to think this out
David Gans (tnf) Thu Nov 9 '89
I don't really want Tom to rot in hell.But I do want Kevin Kelly to show his face.
Bob Jacobson (bluefire) Sun Nov 12 '89
...negotiations are fine but first I would like to hear an expression of remorse on his part. This isn't a matter of revenge but rather the need for Tom to acknowledge that he violated the group's mores, prior to his promising to abide by them again...
A mere expression of remorse would hardly do, Bluefire, since we'd have no way of knowing its sincerity. He could easily lie. Even the Hillside Strangler expressed remorse. No, we must have some way of being sure he's *really* sorry for what he did. I, for one, will not be satisfied until he has been made to act out his remorse in some convincing way. Perhaps if he were to go down on each of us, that might do. Or, if some of us think that to be in bad taste, perhaps we could put him in stocks at the next WELL party and pour various liquid refreshments over his head.
*Then* we could be certain that his remorse was genuine. And this should definitely happen, I agree, before any negotiations are undertaken for his return.
BLOOD is what we really want, isn't it? Hell, let's just kill the scumbag.
Jef Poskanzer (jef) Mon Nov 13 '89
Faugh. Another topic to be ignored.
I just wish I could convince fig and tex that they can ignore this bullshit brainless hand-wringing too. It would let them get on with the important business of managing the WELL.
Tina Loney (onezie) Mon Nov 13 '89
I sure wish that intelligent people didn't feel compelled sometimes to use phrases such as "bullshit brainless hand wringing" when all they need to do is express disagreement....
Heavenly Host (jrc) Wed Nov 29 '89
And there's the question that decent Americans dare not ask:
What about tictock?
Sharon Lynne Fisher (slf) Wed Nov 29 '89
I'm more interested in nana, but apparently I'm in the minority.
Howard Rheingold (hlr) Wed Nov 29 '89
You are not alone.
John Coate (tex) Wed Nov 29 '89
She'll be back. She's had her final chemotherapy treatments, has three more radiaiton treatments to go..then she's going to Germany for a month. I told her she still has a lot of friends here.
jeff berchenko (jb) Wed Nov 29 '89
she is very much missed.
Amid all the online argument, Mandel and Nana somehow, quietly, got back on speaking terms. Fig reopened Mandel's account in late November; he resurrected himself swiftly and efficiently, posting to every corner of The Well as if nothing at all had happened. A few months later, in a decision based on "good behavior," Fig went on to restore Mandel as the host of Future, though his free hours were now limited, to 45 a month. "I think he learned his lesson," Fig posted. "And if he didn't, he will be outta here so fast it will make his head spin."
\—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
By the late 1980s, even as its creative core remained at roughly 200 original members, The Well's membership grew to 3,000. If the ability to project an engaging personality through the filter of flat ASCII text was a talent few people truly possessed, it was clear that there were plenty who wanted to try. The grand experiment seemed to be working, despite the ups and downs.
Brand's decision to offer free Well accounts to journalists had turned out to be one of his savviest moves. Over the years, dozens of newspaper and magazine articles were written about The Well, a business with roughly the cash flow of a convenience store, so that by 1990 The Well had become a force whose influence was wildly disproportionate to its size. A discussion that started on The Well had a way of bleeding into the larger world; it would be taken up and then written and talked about in more mainstream forums. As a result, many ideas generated on The Well became pivotal in the history of cyberspace, including the naming of cyberspace itself—it was in a Well posting that John Perry Barlow first took science fiction writer William Gibson's term and applied it to the present. After reading another Barlow post, about a visit he'd received from the FBI, Mitch Kapor redirected his private jet to land in Barlow's small Wyoming hometown one day in May 1990, and the two spent an afternoon sketching out a plan to start the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Harper's Magazine chose The Well as its venue for a December 1989 electronic forum on hackers.
Much of the intellectual history of digital communities could be found on The Well. Howard Rheingold started the Info conference to discuss communication technologies and virtual community, and within six weeks the conference had generated 300 pages of discussion. The Well also became an important source of early information for breaking news. In the Telecom conference, reports were filtering in about the first-ever BBSes in the Soviet Union and Estonia.
But for all the attention The Well was getting, the business itself wasn't growing. Fig tended to The Well much as his parents had taught him to keep a personal checkbook: try to make slightly more money than you spend, and keep a reserve. Then again, as Fig saw it, running The Well wasn't about running a business anyway. It was about participating and trying to make The Well a good experience for people, the still-inadequate hardware notwithstanding.
Throughout 1991, service suffered a string of maladies: disk crashes, unpredictable backup schedules, telephone line noise, poor modem performance. The Well's user-bought Sequent computer had insufficient memory, and new connections were needed to support a system that had now grown to serve 5,000 subscribers.
The figtex era ended in late 1991, when Tex quit in frustration. He had spent thousands of hours just "being there," smoothing over differences, persuading people to stay when they threatened to leave. He had hosted 61 Well parties. Not only did he feel that all of that had gone unappreciated by The Well board, but its members had criticized him for playing electronic counselor at the expense of the business. When he wrote a six page letter to the board outlining his views of The Well's future needs and no one acted on it, Tex decided it was time to go. Besides, someone named Bruce Katz had recently entered the picture, and Tex had an uneasy feeling about him.
Katz, a multimillionaire who built the Rockport shoe empire, was casting about for a new venture. As Katz describes it, he "fell backward" into The Well. He became a member in 1989 and joined a private conference run by the Global Business Network, though he never roamed much beyond it. In the summer of 1991 news had spread that NETI, Brilliant's company, was about to go under—in a grand irony, after spinning through the millions NETI raised for technology investments, one of the few that endured was the zany, hippie-run virtual community in Northern California. Katz bought NETI's half of The Well for $175,000, and a new spot on The Well board was created.
After years of no investment, deep pockets were welcomed. But since Katz owned just half the business—the other half was still owned by the starving nonprofit Point Foundation—he decided he wasn't going to put in much money as yet. He signed a note to The Well for $50,000 to upgrade the Sequent.
Despite the hedging, Katz's investment company, Rosewood Stone Group, came up with a three-year projection that envisioned The Well reaching 16,000 subscribers by the end of 1994. And why not? Katz argued. After all, America Online, which started in the same year as The Well, now had 100,000 subscribers and annual revenues of $21 million. At Katz's urging, the board proposed putting Fig on an incentive plan—his yearly bonus would be based on technical benchmarks, profit, and number of users.
One such benchmark was connecting The Well to the Internet. Since 1987, The Well had been one of the few access points the general public had for getting Internet email—mail with the @ sign. You could get Internet email if you had a university or corporate account, or if you paid The Well $10 a month. Board members had for years been pushing for a full-strength connection, which would make The Well one of the first BBSes to offer industrial-level Internet access—with FTP and gopher.
There were some definite advantages in service to look forward to as well. Without a bona fide Internet connection, Well mail was sent in and out of the Net through a store-and-forward system called UUCP—Unix-to Unix Copy Protocol. The Well stored up all of its outbound messages, and then at some prearranged time it would dial in to another Unix system and transfer messages to it. The messages sat there until the same thing happened from that Unix system to another, and so on, until each message reached its destination. It could take days for a message to reach someplace far away.
But The Well staff, in its conscientiousness, was concerned because commercial enterprise on the Internet's NSFNet backbone was prohibited, as outlined by the federal government's "acceptable use" policy. However poorly it was performing (and though it was 50 percent owned by a nonprofit), The Well was a commercial service provider. Another worry was that a doorway to the Net would bring about dramatic cultural changes, that clueless flamers would arrive from Usenet, and that The Well would become the object of system cracking. Mostly, however, the staff was concerned about the technical effects a connection would have on system reliability. No one had extensive experience with routers or TCP/IP. In fact, the staff was still busy upgrading the pool of buggy modems.
For the most part, the insidious by-products of a Net connection failed to materialize, but a host of technical problems did, consuming the staff's energy for months. The Sequent, not yet upgraded, was further strained by the Net connection, which proved to be a huge resource hog. In January 1992, the first month of Internet access, The Well experienced what are sometimes called "packet storms," arising from faulty router configuration. The system regularly slowed to a crawl and crashed several times a week. Although matters had stabilized and the Sequent had been upgraded by April, public debates now raged on The Well over the board's unwillingness to spend the money to fix things. For a year, Fig had been lobbying to hire a technical manager. When the board told him the business couldn't afford one, he asked for permission to raise the $10 monthly fee. That request, too, was turned down.
Fig decided to follow Tex out the door. "I am too much identified with the permissive and accommodating attitude that has been part of The Well's growth to preside over a more restrictive régime," Fig wrote to the board in his resignation letter.
Before leaving, Fig found a successor in Maurice Weitman, login (mo), who was hired as general manager at $75,000 a year. (By the time he left, Fig was earning $54,000.) Though respectable, the pay was about half of what Mo could have made at a similar job elsewhere. He was an experienced hand at computers and business. It was Mo's loyalty to The Well that drew him there. And he seemed a good choice. He was not just on The Well but of The Well. He had been one of the first to sign up in 1985. He was well liked and trusted. He had hosted the Jewish and Berkeley conferences, as well as the Adoption conference—everyone remembered the moment he found his biological mother. He knew The Well and he loved it.
Mo took charge of a situation that had been frustrating Fig for months. "The techies were out of control—they just weren't doing their job," he recalls. "The Well's size, and the level of technical expertise that was needed to support it, outstripped their level of competence." To bring some technical rigor to the business, he hired a technical manager. He also succeeded in raising the monthly fee to $15.
But Mo lacked the infinite patience of Fig and Tex. He was also a bit more censorious; he even kicked off a disruptive member without much compunction. And when someone posted a scathing rumor about the sexual proclivities of the psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, Mo removed it, to great uproar among Well members. "I thought I had a responsibility to the owners of The Well not to allow someone to be so blatantly libelous," he recalls. "Some First Amendment absolutists like Barlow really got on my case. I didn't feel good about it, but I was trying to walk the line between keeping a business going, protecting the owners, and saving the community."
\—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
By the time Mo took the helm, Mandel had been back online for three years. He and Nana watched each other's comings and goings on The Well; she now lived in Boston, working at a consulting firm, and their relationship seemed to be more manageable at this safe distance. Until the day Mandel told Nana that, although he wasn't interested in marriage, he didn't want her to date anyone else, and she refused to comply. "Other people go set fires or kick the cat," Nana says. "Tom went out and did something on The Well."
On July 5, 1992, he logged on and executed a mass scribble over the next three days. The mass scribbling tool had been written a few years earlier by Andy Beals in a burst of anger at The Well. Mass scribble allowed you to easily erase all your comments in a topic, no matter when they were written. This time, while Mandel erased only his own postings, he cast a wider net across The Well, far beyond his earlier targets of the Weird and Future conferences. This time, he went from conference to conference and deleted nearly everything he had posted in each one.
Mandel had been posting almost hourly for years; his conversations wove through most corners of The Well and its history. While it was true that, in the end, people owned their own words and were free to do with them as they pleased, even one person's deletions left Swiss cheese-like holes in The Well's collective memory. (Mass scribbles were rare, but two years earlier, a Well Being named Blair Newman had executed one, after which he'd committed suicide. Newman's death—which morbidly highlighted the continuity between the virtual and physical worlds—was the first in the community of active members of The Well.)
Recalling Mandel's large-scale destruction, Phil Catalfo says, "When someone trashes their online oeuvre, it is a sad, even tragic, thing to watch. With Tom, it was as though he were trying to immolate himself online. This is very difficult territory, and I don't think the online world is very close to grasping it yet."
Then, as if annihilating his contributions to The Well weren't quite satisfying enough, on August 4 Mandel started a topic in the Weird conference called "An Expedition into Nana's Cunt." First, he equipped the expedition "team" with clothing for all weather and terrain, oxygen mask and tanks, cameras, food and water, and a first-aid kit. He added cruel touches to the equipment list, such as "bad electronic music to revive unconscious Deadheads." Once the topic got rolling, some of the diehard posters to Weird chimed in, but for the most part people sat back and watched, some in horror, others in amusement, as Mandel unfolded the topic, hour by hour, most of it consisting of lengthy, minutely detailed entries in the expedition "log."
Within a day, email and phone calls of protest began arriving. There was some suggestion that Nana could sue The Well. Others defended the topic. John Hoag, who had started the Weird conference, suggested the expedition topic was either "jejune, angry nonsense, or weird genius." Significantly, this debate took place primarily in private discussions; spleen-venting may have been celebrated, but public criticism of a topic on the ground of poor taste was considered tantamount to censorship—or, worse, cluelessness.
When Patrizia DiLucchio, a friend of Mandel's, did post:
This is a really viscious and mean-spirited topic, you know? I mean,m I realize I'm being terminally unkool to mention the fact but there it is...
Mandel dismissed her with this:
Ah, an expert on the subject. But not a member of the expedition.
Various female staff members gathered in person to discuss what to do about the topic. Conference manager Gail Williams sent mail to Nana, asking if she'd like to see the topic frozen. Nana responded that free speech was free speech and she had no intention of curbing it. A couple of people asked Boswell, the host of Weird, to freeze the topic anyway, but he refused.
Williams picked up the telephone and called Mandel at work. She characterized it later as one of the most emotional phone calls of her life. "He told me his behavior was called for in his view, and he didn't care whom it affected," she recalls. And the topic continued.
Two days after it had started, Rheingold posted a mild protest:
Well, I always figured Weird to be a freefire zone, and if you can't take it, you don't have to participate. I've had my whacks here. Of course, having been asked to tone down my Mandel-parodies because they were hurtful, and knowing that most people here didn't know that, I do think it is only fair to note that many of the people participating in this topic are probably unaware that there is a subtext to it that can, indeed, be interpreted as vicious and mean-spirited. Not that I would want to tame weird or censor anybody or anything. Just thought it might help to clarify things.
Which prompted Mandel to respond:
There are always subtexts. On with the expedition.
Finally, a handful of Well Beings began spamming the topic with huge volumes of text, some of it nonsensical, some of it one-line phrases of protest, pasted over and over. The spell was broken. On the third day, Mandel froze the topic without further comment, leaving it as a read-only document. As before, he settled back down. And as before, over time he and Nana patched things up—to the point where they now even saw each other occasionally.
\—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
By 1994, though officially not on the Internet, AOL was gaining a name for itself as a great online innovator. The company was striking deals with large publications to present their content in electronic form. Magazines were also beginning to think about ways to nurture that online presence, and they cast an eye toward The Well for guidance and talent. Time recruited Mandel as a consultant to help with its AOL online forum—because if anyone knew how to keep a discussion going, he did.
Back on The Well, no one paid much attention to the unassuming topic Mandel opened in the Health conference on September 18, 1994. He called it "Local Bug Report." In any case, no one was surprised, since he always caught the first cold or flu of the season and faithfully reported in. (Mandel's pseud in the conference was generally Doctor Lecter.) This time Mandel complained of an upper respiratory infection.
This one is going around the office (Menlo Park) and hit me Friday night: mild sore throat, which goes away after 12-24 hours, accompanied by mild fever (I don't have a thermometer handy, but I'd say 99-100 F) and followed by the usual URI mess. Ugh.
Donna L. Hoffman (prof) Sun Sep 18 '94 (16:47)
URI mess?
Doctor Lecter (mandel) Sun Sep 18 '94 (17:10)
Upper Respiratory Infection. Lungs-to-sinuses clogged up with gunk, which fortunately has not yet turned green.
Donna L. Hoffman (prof) Sun Sep 18 '94 (17:50)
Well, do keep us posted.
jane (jknorr) Sun Sep 18 '94 (19:41)
Jeez. After seeing the topic header, I was all set to whine about my flea problems.
Doctor Lecter (mandel) Sun Sep 18 '94 (20:09)
That too!
Donna L. Hoffman (prof) Mon Sep 19 '94 (05:17)
You must be feeling better then.
Doctor Lecter (mandel) Mon Sep 19 '94 (08:16)
A little. Still congested but I suppose I may live.
Within a couple of weeks, Mandel's cough had gotten so bad that he reported he hadn't had a cigarette in six days. This was a landmark event. "That's great, Tom!" responded a member named Flash Gordon, The Well's resident MD, who then posted a lengthy handbook he had written for kicking nicotine. "Could we stay on topic, please, and dispense with the quitting smoking advice here?" Mandel snapped back.
Two weeks and a couple of doctor visits later, as others reported full recovery, Mandel was still feeling fluish.
Ed Wood (mandel) Tue Oct 18 '94 (15:15)
Into the diagnostic mill to figure out what's causing the symptoms as well as two spots on the chest xray.
Maria Syndicus (nana) Tue Oct 18 '94 (16:57)
flash gordon, md (flash) Tue Oct 18 '94 (17:09)
spots? yes; spots?
Ed Wood (mandel) Tue Oct 18 '94 (17:34)
Spots: two small blotches (infiltrate of some sort) in each of my two remaining right lobes, near where the major tubes (bronchia?) come into the lobe.
As measured against a baseline x ray of nine months ago.
Could be anything and could go away by themselves. I go for sputum tests later this week, and the lab will look for bacterial, fungal, and mycobacterial infections... plus of course tumor cells. I'm betting on a viral or bacterial pneumonia, those being the easiest problems to deal with. I figure that's only fair because the last time I had to make this bet, the outcome was close to worst case. So the universe owes me one; let's see if it pays up.
What happened next has been likened to living in a large, rambling boardinghouse and having something godawful happen in a remote room. People felt the reverberations, even if they spent all their time in Parenting or Books or Genx, and they found themselves heading straight to Health, where Mandel, whose path they might never have crossed, had just announced that he had lung cancer. He presented the news dispassionately, as if he were reporting the five o'clock traffic report:
The sputum tests came back from the lab showing adenocarcinoma, which is one of the four major types of lung cancer. I will now undergo a series of tests to determine if I am a good candidate for surgery, which is the recommended course of action for adenocarcinomas and providese the best path to survival. If I am a good candidate for surgery, I'd imagine I'll go in to the hospital within a week or two and have my right lung removed.
Sympathy arrived in a flood; depending on how you viewed it, the show of warmth and support for the irascible Mandel had the ring of either genuine concern or shameless hypocrisy on the part of people who had been Mandel's most visible detractors.
Mandel was logged on to The Well as his doctor delivered the diagnosis over the telephone. So was Nana. Still on the phone with his physician, Mandel sent her mail with the news. She asked in return mail if she could call him, and he replied "Yes." That evening, she left a message on his voicemail: "Honey, I think it's time that we finally get married." By the middle of December, she had packed four suitcases and moved back to the Bay area to be with him.
As word spread on The Well of Nana's return to the man who had vilified her, some people expressed shock bordering on anger. Though many must have been alarmed that Nana would resume such a turbulent relationship, the real cause of their distress may have had more to do with their own relationship to The Well: Mandel and Nana's on-again, off-again affair had come to seem the property of the online community. Well users had settled in with the couple's story the way devotees of a soap opera do, and they were accustomed to the same kind of total familiarity with the plot line. Though no one could have articulated it, the notion that Mandel and Nana might have a life off The Well seemed somehow unimaginable, and wrong. ("If something didn't happen on The Well, it didn't happen at all," Nana once quipped.)
Mandel's cancer, it turned out, was inoperable. This news, too, he reported with surprising calm. The more he was at home, the more he was online, both on The Well and on America Online, helping run Time's electronic version. He struggled to maintain his online standards—he prided himself on impeccable posts, free of typos and spelling errors—but now he was beginning to slur. The next few months were a steady march of status reports, pep talks, and beams. In March, Mandel and Nana announced plans to marry within a few weeks. Mandel was still posting elsewhere on The Well—in Current Events, about a Republican Congress and the approaching 50th anniversary of V-J Day. He was still picking fights with a few of his nemeses.
Richard Clark (rclark) Mon, Mar 20, '95
With the gassing of the Japanese subway it becomes quite apparent that no urban area is safe from retribution by fanatics from contries that have suffered the wrath of the American War Machine or American foreign policy. Considering, too, that there are 50,000 Gulf War veterans who are suffering the ill effects of poisening such as this, one wonders how enthusiastic Americans will be for continuing incursions by American forces in other countries.
Tom Mandel (mandel) Mon Mar 20 '95
Oh boy, a topic in which rclark starts by first embracing very shaky data from the Gulf War, then goes on to inflate it to the maximum scenarios, and THEN goes on to roll over and play dead in front of assumed terrorism threats.
I don't know where you were when it happened, Richard, but I would have thought that the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York already got the point across.
Even Mandel's reprehensible expedition topic was forgivingly conjured again in the Weird conference:
(ernie) Wed Mar 29 '95
Meanwhile, in weird 2325, some of us are taking matters into our own hands and descending into Tom's lungs where, armed with picks, shovels and high-pressure single-malt hoses, we will scrub them clean as a whistle. Experts in guided visualization techniques and speleology are needed now-bring your hardhats!
A day earlier, Mandel's doctor had told him the cancer had metastasized throughout his body and had reached his brain. He had anywhere from three weeks to three months to live. He sat down that night and posted the news, ending with: "I ain't nearly as brave as you all think. I am scared silly of the pain of dying this way. I am not very good at playing saint. Pray for me, please."
A Well Being who had never gotten along with Mandel responded with a burst of total honesty:
your friendly striped (tigereye) Thu Mar 30 '95
mandel, you've never been anything but a jerk to me. Your simplistic and misguided assessment of my politics alone made me wonder whether you had your full quotient of marbles. However, several years ago we met in person and I had such a strong presentiment about your perilous health that I never took a word from you personally. In a way, I've been sending you beams all along (even better 'cause I know you hate 'em) by not taking offense (except for those ignorant comments about China in the politics conference...). I wish I had said something to you about taking care of yourself—as though you would have paid the slightest attention to me! I wish also I had gotten to know The Other Sides of Mandel. Now I'd like to hold your virtual hand. I am so sad for you. Yes, we're all in this together.
Mandel, in short order, responded:
The Real Tom Mandel (mandel) Thu Mar 30 '95
Adele, you can shovel your self-aggrandizing sentiments up you wide ass sideways for the duration as far as I'm concerned. You are are definitely NOT in this together, except in the merest sense of belong to the same species.
By this point, anything Mandel did or was exposed to—visitors, too much talking, even a particular food—could set off a bronchospasm. Nana urged him to rest. Being online so much, she suggested, could be a strain. But he told her that being online made him feel "whole." All that counts online is your mind, and his was as sharp as ever. "It makes me feel that I'm healthy and alive," he said.
April 1 was the wedding day. Nana drove Mandel to the home of friends. While others pushed him in his wheelchair into the house, she rushed ahead to prepare the inhaler so he could breathe. The ceremony was small and brief, and the newlyweds returned home shortly afterward. When they got home, Mandel logged on and read the congratulatory posts of the day to the My Turn topic. He had enough strength for this in reply:
The Real Tom Mandel (mandel) Sat Apr 1 '95
Thank you all, for your prescence and affection.
In the middle of the night, Mandel had a severe bronchospasm. He was taken to the Stanford University Hospital. His friends came and sat in the hall, and Nana allowed them in one by one. On The Well that day, some speculation ensued over why he wasn't logging on. He did log on after that, but now he lurked. An old friend of his, Ian Tilbury, had flown out from Kansas to say goodbye. He knew nothing of The Well, had never seen anything like it, and recalls thinking, as he and Mandel read posts in the My Turn topic, that the whole thing was off the rails: "It was crazy—so-and so saying how much they had hated him, but now they didn't." Mandel and Tilbury began to laugh. "He was totally proud of the fact that he could have pissed off that many people in one place."
Mandel died early in the morning on April 5, 1995. He was cremated, and per his request, his ashes ended up in the waves off a favorite surfing beach in Hawaii. But he had also given careful thought to the fate of his virtual remains. While he left the rights to all his online writings to Nana, he also devised a scheme with a Well friend named Bill Calvin for programming a Mandelbot, an agent that would pop up at random on The Well, posting to conferences with prefabricated, entirely characteristic quotations. Mandel had chuckled at the thought. A week before he died, he posted this to the My Turn topic:
I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I've done online in the five months since my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn't going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocate us. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew on-line... I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn't really have to leave... Large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space.
\—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
One of the first things Bruce Katz will tell you on meeting you for the first time, particularly if the conversation turns on his involvement with the world of technology, is that he built a computer at age 13. This, and the fact that he won a national science contest as a teenager, are pieces of information he imparts with pride.
Katz in fact came of age in the shoe business. His father, and his father's father, owned and operated their own footwear concerns since 1930, when Katz's grandfather founded the Hubbard Shoe Company in Rochester, New Hampshire. Under Katz's father, Hubbard mutated and evolved into Highland Import Company. Katz's own entry into the shoe business had all the marks of a dutiful son stepping into line. But, not the sort to rely on succession, the younger Katz never aspired to inherit the family business. In 1969, he left Cornell in his senior year. Katz had studied engineering physics in college yet was reluctant to pursue any career. After bumming around the country, he joined his father's business in 1972 and drove from retailer to retailer in a Volkswagen truck, hawking the company's shoes.
Universally cherished for their walking-on-air comfort, running shoes had all but annihilated the casual shoe market. Katz, famous among friends for having "an idea a minute," had a good one: if he could develop a casual shoe with the comfort of a running shoe, he might carve out a portion of the shoe market for himself. After a year working on the problem, he came up with Rockport Walkers. Sales at Highland soon doubled. Then Katz threw himself into the promotion of walking as a desirable form of exercise. He jazzed up and distributed an old tome titled The Complete Book of Exercise Walking. He sponsored city walks and walks across the country. Sales soared. Walking was now a fitness craze. By 1986, Katz had taken his family's sleepy import business, changed the name to Rockport, and increased sales to some $100 million.
At the same time, the trajectory of the computer industry was arcing at an even more impressive rate. "DEC had its own gate at the Boston airport," he recalls. "I was thinking I was in the wrong business. They're having so much fun and they're building like crazy and it's a boom."
In August 1986, Katz declared steadfastly, if disingenuously, to the trade publication Footwear News that he had no intention of selling his company and had even spent the past three months pursuing the possibility of going public. One month later, the sale of Rockport to Reebok for $118.5 million was announced. Delivered from the shoe business at age 40, Katz left for California with the intention of going to art school, learning to play the piano, and investing in the computer business in some way. He never enrolled in art school, and he dropped piano after one lesson (the teacher reprimanded him for putting a cookie on top of the piano when he sat down to play). He spent several years as a computer industry hanger on, attending élite conferences as an observer and mingling with members of the digerati. He was also active in the Social Venture Network, a fraternity of progressive-minded businesspeople.
By late 1993, when he was approached by the Point Foundation to purchase its half of The Well, Katz had decided it would be fun to own a small, hip Sausalito computer business. Moreover, he thought he knew and understood The Well. It seemed to him a perfect fit.
Katz enthused about The Well's potential. "He had a lot of the social goals that others on The Well and running The Well seemed to have," says Barlow, whom Katz later invited to join the board. "He was trying to nurture community. And he saw this as a way toward his own personal slice of the computer industry."
Katz acquired the Point Foundation's stake in January 1994. This time, he paid $750,000, more than four times what he had paid for NETI's half in 1991. With Well membership now hovering at around 8,000, Katz embarked in earnest on a spending spree. The Well staff moved from its overcrowded offices to roomier, spiffier, cedar-shingled quarters closer to downtown Sausalito. A new space had been in the offing for a while, but nothing quite so upscale as this. Katz christened the new office The Well Studio and put a great deal of thought into how it should be laid out. He filled it with custom-built furniture, including a mahogany conference table and matching chairs of deep-green leather. He installed more powerful equipment and high-speed phone lines.
Of all the people who might have bought The Well and provided the cash infusion it needed, Katz was not a bad pick. Still, a number of people on The Well believed from the outset that Katz represented the antithesis of its sensibility. He seemed to them to stand on the wrong side of a divide that yawned ominously between those who understood, appreciated, and cherished The Well, and those who didn't.
In the midst of the cosmetic overhaul, Katz was pointing The Well in directions that reinforced these trepidations. His first goal was to increase The Well subscriber base. He thought this could be achieved, in part, by creating separate regional Wells around the world, each with its own singular character. But the reaction was fiercely negative; the Well community accused Katz of wanting to build an empire of McWells.
"The Well is not your standard investment," says Elaine Richards, aka (booter), a longtime Well Being and former Well employee. "Unlike a shoe company, you can't call The Well an inanimate object. I don't think Bruce quite grasped how peculiar it was. It's this really undefinable package. He didn't understand the emotional needs of this seething commodity he suddenly had on his hands."
And Katz didn't hang out on The Well nearly as much as the regulars did, or bother to learn much about what made it tick. (When one user noticed Katz was online one night, she shot a friendly Send his way—he responded in email that he hadn't yet learned the Send command.) With few exceptions, he made little effort to involve the core of The Well's users into the process of determining the organization's future. What they saw instead, from the sidelines, was Katz ricocheting from one plan to the next.
Katz's ideas came large and small. All of them cost him money. One short lived plan was to recruit teenage "cyberscouts" and send them door-to door to sign people up for The Well. More important, he wanted to explore alternatives to PicoSpan. The World Wide Web, together with new point and-click interfaces such as Mosaic, was providing a new means of navigating the Internet. Katz believed The Well should offer something similar. With the idea of building a graphical user interface to the Well, Katz hired a programmer and sank tens of thousands of dollars into the project, but he came to realize that it was too steep a challenge in the face of competing efforts. At around the same time, he also hired a trio of young engineers away from Sun Microsystems, set them up in offices in Palo Alto, and put them to work designing a full-screen menu that would sit atop PicoSpan. Katz wanted the début of this product to coincide with a big marketing push. It shipped for a couple of years before fizzling out.
What did eventually result from Katz's investment forays was Engaged, a graphical, point-and-click Web-based system for threaded conferencing. But Engaged was slow and, compared with the familiar PicoSpan, foreign. He may have been correct that Web-based conferencing was the future; he may have been convinced that the arcane, command-driven PicoSpan should recede into the background. But he was in the distinct minority. The response among users was nearly unanimous: they jumped down Katz's throat for forcing Engaged down theirs. Maybe PicoSpan was a pain, they argued, and maybe its reliance on text limited what might be done on the Web, but PicoSpan belonged to the culture of The Well.
What Katz had loved about the shoe business was this: "You say, 'How do you like your Rockports?' and they say they love them, and they start going on about their shoes." When he bought The Well, he wanted the same response. Instead, members remained wary and distant. And worried. They complained that Katz was using them and The Well in his search to do something meaningful with his life. He hadn't bought The Well because he was truly interested in it, they claimed, but because it would grant him membership in the computer industry clique and enhance his own self image. He had done the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Katz was hurt and baffled by the resentment. He was one of them, he insisted, citing his postcollegiate hippie experiences. "The fact is that in 1969 I came out here and I lived in the Haight in my truck," he says. "I traveled around. I painted house numbers on curbs. I lived in Berkeley. I went to all the rock festivals. I took all the same drugs. So I kind of felt like these were my people."
Rockport, he maintained, had been really nothing more than a "very successful hippie moccasin business." But because of his success, he said, he was unjustly cast as the Evil Capitalist. He'd been accused of buying himself a mayorship, while he liked to think of himself more as the water commissioner. If he's the water commissioner, Well users responded, why isn't he drinking the water?
This was a difficult bunch to please. They fostered an air of proprietorship. Then again, was that so wrong? After all, Katz was buying not so much a collection of equipment and a conferencing system as a psychological database: he was buying thousands of personalities and the 1.3 billion words those personalities had generated over the 10 years of The Well's life. These were people who didn't collect a paycheck from Katz and didn't have to agree with him on anything. As Gail Williams once put it, Katz made the mistake of thinking he owned the place.
One Friday afternoon in September 1994, Katz fired Mo, with little explanation, and put himself in charge of the workaday Well. Later, he claimed Mo had been incompetent in handling the business, but some suspected he had ousted Mo for not being enough of a yes man. Whatever the merits, when word got out a firestorm ensued, and Katz was roundly attacked. Well Beings demanded that he explain himself. He did so in a 118-line, 1,500-word-plus combination apology and muddled manifesto. "This has been one of the most painful few days of my 20-year working career," he said at the outset, then continued:
By Friday night when I left the office at 6:00 pm I felt so emotionally wiped out that I could barely drive home. This was no silicon valley Friday afternoon sacking. This was the culmination of 6 months of agonizing over a difficult situation involving working associates whom I both like and respect. Days like Friday make me wonder why I would chose to do something that is requiring such an enormous personal sacrafice from myself and my family to effect. The answer is that I believe in the power of this new emerging media and believe that it is one of the bright hopes that we have in reinvigorating a civil dialogue that is the foundation of a free democratic society.
He went on to offer his account of the firing:
Maurice and I had been at loggerheads for a long time about what needed to happen on the technology and software develpment side and the events that were beginning to take place within the working team of the company had gone from counterproductive to worse. I had to make a decision on how to deal with this and it was my conclusion that having two people trying to run the same company was not going to work.
But the most revealing part of Katz's memo came near the end, where he gingerly challenged The Well's credo of openness:
I do not believe that anyone is better served by a clinical dissection of the many details of what happens in the course of running a business and the dynamics that transpire between individuals. I am very fond of Maurice and it was emotionally devastating for me to have to go through the day on Friday.
Please understand tht this is all I am willing to say about this. I do not believe that everyone knowing everything about everyone is a necessasry condition for community.
Not exactly pithy or witty or powerful. Sincere, but weak. In other words, hamhanded at the whole business of posting. Which was the rating some people gave him—many of them posting ad hominem jabs in return—while others responded sympathetically. When it was over, the topic had generated 1,839 responses. (Katz later printed out every single post and had the collection hardbound in black as a macabre personal trophy.)
Before long, a group of malcontents, many of them from the group of original Well members, split and formed The River, a Well alternative that proposed to run itself as a co-op. In a display of zero confidence in Katz, these people referred to The River as their lifeboat.
Worse, The Well didn't begin to prosper as Katz thought it might—and should—have. Then he did something very intelligent. In early 1996, he hired someone else to run the company. The new president, Maria Wilhelm, was made to order. Charming and articulate, Wilhelm had grown up in San Francisco, and her family had been prominent in city politics. She was a talented writer. She had climbed the ranks of Time Inc. and left People magazine, where she was chief of correspondents and later editor of new media, to help Time create Pathfinder, the company's Web presence. She had a fresh MBA, and not from some second-tier school, but from Columbia. She was hooked into the digerati. Moreover, she was tough. Had Katz commissioned Philip K. Dick to create a Maria Wilhelm, the invention would have fallen short of the real thing.
One of the first things Wilhelm did after settling into Katz's office was write her bio. Gail Williams had urged Wilhelm to do this posthaste, as bios were an important yardstick by which new Well members were judged. Katz had never bothered to write one, and this oversight was one of the many strikes against him.
With Williams standing behind her, Wilhelm wrote:
Snakes. So, I was asked in fourth grade, by a singularly sweet nun, a Sister Huburt, what I wanted to be. Ahh, the big question, still unanswered. "A herpetologist," I responded. I still know the difference between hemotoxic and neurotoxic snake venom and just which serpentine creatures pack a sizable punch. Ask me. Much too soon to tell if current endeavors and interesting avocations are at all related. Yes, I did have a snake, a Reticulated Python named Zanzibar Rolling Twitch. I'm sorry to report that his name was changed to "Snakey" by the creative folks at the Randall Junior Museum in San Francisco when he took up residence there a decade or two ago.
Signals arrived from the community that Wilhelm was approved of. In keeping with her bio, her posts were playful and funny and literate. In contrast to Katz, she didn't seem to care if people liked her or not. Still better, she was willing to write off a social life. She had decided to make The Well her life.
Most important, she was serious about saving The Well. She and Katz decided to divide the business into three parts: the "legacy" Well, as Katz called it, which was essentially the collection of Well conferences; an Internet access provider called Whole Earth Networks; and a software arm called Well Engaged, to sell customized versions of the Engaged conferencing system. Wilhelm thought that if anything could generate some real revenue, it was Well Engaged, which would demand most of her attention.
That summer, Katz took off for a month-long painting course at the Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado, and spent the rest of the summer visiting friends in Europe. By the time he returned in the fall, the new businesses had been formed, the ISP staff had been moved to the Whole Earth Networks offices in San Francisco, and Wilhelm had sold licenses for Engaged to Playboy, The Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, and Warner Bros. Music Group. Things began looking up.
But even as business was improving, there was concern that if Well Engaged didn't make it—if the market for graphical conferencing systems proved as limited as skeptics suspected—or if Katz got tired of losing money, he'd tip the whole place into bankruptcy and simply cut his losses. \—- ~;-};-)(;-0/;-) —-
Hardcore Well Beings have been bemoaning its imminent demise for years—people were complaining in The Well's second year that it was growing too large and impersonal. But recently there have been undeniable signs of expansion-related stress. The proliferation of private conferences (the number of private conferences now far exceeds that of public ones) has stripped The Well of its open, bare-all soul; while the concept of private conferences is attractive, they have had an eviscerating effect overall. As Well users break off into smaller groups, the net result is atomization. One symptom of this materialized with a steady drop in attendance at Well parties; the bigger and more diffuse The Well got, the less people felt like socializing.
For his part, Katz has grown increasingly bitter about his hostile reception by The Well community. Almost from the start it was rumored that Katz was thinking about selling The Well.
In early December 1996, frustrated after a fruitless attempt to reach customer support at Whole Earth Networks, John Perry Barlow took a brief stab at orchestrating a user buyout of The Well. He sent email to a small circle of old-timers suggesting the idea, but one by one, those on Barlow's email list made it clear they wanted nothing to do with such a scheme. "A user-owned Well would be a wonderfully terrible thing," responded Kevin Kelly, who is still a board member. "Keep me out of it."
Then Maria Wilhelm began thinking about what it would take to buy The Well herself. She wasn't so sure she wanted, or had the technical chops, to continue running Well Engaged, essentially a software company. The Well proper—now 10,000 members strong—was a different story. Since her arrival, Wilhelm had been eager to concentrate on it full-time. If nothing else, The Well possessed what everyone in the cyberworld was now pursuing: brand recognition. She thought it could become the official home for specific, intense, and intelligent conversation, just as it had become the online gathering place for the nation's Deadheads. In that spirit, she would take The Well back to its roots, to its unpretentious beginnings. And start from scratch.
The community Wilhelm planned to take with her was somewhat nonplussed by the notion of her as its leader. For after the initial good impression, Wilhelm, too, had fallen from grace. Well users liked her but didn't necessarily trust her. They attributed to her a certain shrewdness, an adeptness at posting and negotiating matched by little to show for her eight months in charge. One longtime user called Wilhelm's style "that aikido thing"—referring to a talent for deflection. And, in a familiar refrain, people questioned her motives for wanting to buy The Well.
Wilhelm asked Katz just before Christmas what he thought of her as a purchaser. She had trouble extracting an answer. For weeks, he put her off while he explored other potential buyers. In early February 1997, she tracked him down by cell phone at the San Francisco airport, on his way to the Indian Ocean for a rendezvous with Juliet, his 63-foot sailboat. Katz told Wilhelm he'd be willing to sell The Well to her.
Katz, who has invested several million dollars in The Well, would presumably want to recoup at least a portion of that in a sale. Ironically, as The Well's price tag progressively inflates, its underlying value as a business enterprise is harder than ever to gauge. What does it mean, for instance, that The Well is now often mentioned in the past tense, while at the same time imitators take it as their model in attempts to build financially viable communities in cyberspace?
In fact, the idea of The Well is in some ways more potent than the actuality. Most Internet entrepreneurs seeking to create a similar community (that is, create a place that will get people to keep coming back) have never actually been on The Well. The image they have of it is formed from a few fabled incidents, such as The Well's outpourings of help and concern in the face of illness. These start-ups give little thought to the deep issues of identity that make The Well what it is. In addition, many mistake it for an entirely online entity, forgetting the vital role that real encounters played early on in the cohesion of the Well community. Nor do they explore the struggles between business and community interests that have punctuated so much of The Well's history.
These entrepreneurs brandish the term community building as if it is a simple matter of putting up a chat space on a Web site. They copy the visible patterns established by The Well—such as its model of linear, threaded conversation—believing that if it happened once, it can happen again.
That's what Brilliant thought at the beginning, though as it turned out NETI never had much success selling its own conferencing system. Some of those who helped build The Well have held out that hope, too. Tex went on to run The Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner's Web site, where he installed a Web-based conferencing system. Fig went to GNN, an Internet service provider owned by AOL, to try the same thing. (When AOL shut down GNN last fall, Fig struck out on his own, advising Web service providers on "social architecture.") With venture funding and the help of some Well friends, Howard Rheingold started Electric Minds, for which he licensed The Well's Engaged software.
But whether The Well can be re-created is doubtful. Even The River hasn't gone very far, in part because those who started it have never broken off entirely from The Well. Like all natural systems, The Well was dependent on the conditions under which it began. The same could be said for the culture at the origins of the Net itself. Go back to the beginnings of Arpanet and you find a handful of people with roots in academe who embedded their quirks and idiosyncrasies in that culture, quirks that will always be there, no matter how many people come later.
The Well is, after all, a boiled-down, concentrated essence of what people love and hate about the Net: community and intelligent discourse on the one hand, wackos, poseurs, and flamers on the other.
Yet even if Wilhelm should fail in her salvage attempt, even if The Well itself should disappear, its mystique will continue to exist in the minds of people searching for a reason to venture into cyberspace. Forty years from now, The Well may be remembered only dimly, or not at all. But it will have left behind a lasting imprint on our culture, as we will be left with the lush promises it whispered into our ear.