by Adam Fisher
Andy Hertzfeld: Software, groundbreaking software, is at its most dramatic at the very beginning.
Kevin Kelly: Andy was jumping up and down, he was so excited. He was literally jumping up and down. And he was calling his hacker friends over and he wanted to show them something he had hacked up the night before.
Andy Hertzfeld: Switcher was written the day before.
Fabrice Florin: He had done a hack just for the Hackers Conference.
Andy Hertzfeld: I said that, but that was a lie. I wrote Switcher because there was a 512K Mac, not because there was a Hackers Conference.
Steven Levy: At that point the “Fat Macs” were just coming out.
Kevin Kelly: He was working on a Fat Mac, and something he calls Switcher allowed you to have more than one program open at once, and you could switch between them.
Fabrice Florin: Because before Switcher you had to basically open an application and then quit it and open another one.
Steven Levy: Basically Switcher was a way to hack multitasking on the Macintosh. Which you couldn’t do at all, no computer did that. No personal computer allowed you to do multitasking. So it was incredibly valuable.
Kevin Kelly: He’d just done it the night before: just pulled it out of his own brain! But the cool thing was seeing him explain it and show it off to other hackers and see that this was actually the currency, this was the dynamic. He was doing stuff and giving it out to everybody: “Yeah, here’s a copy of it.” And they were going to go and hack on it some more. It was just the very thesis that Steven was talking about in his book, this hacker ethic of sharing and building upon in an open-source sense and there it was. It was right there.
Steven Levy: It was just like endless demos and showing people things and cool stuff. They hooked up the games.
David Levitt: Amazing games no one had ever seen before.
Fabrice Florin: They were up until the wee hours just showing off stuff, discussing, hacking, teaching each other how to do stuff.
Lee Felsenstein: A lot of people had stayed up pretty late. And it was a hostel with these sort of pro forma beds that they were using with waterproof mattresses like in prisons.
Steven Levy: We were in bunks. It was cold at night.
Stewart Brand: What we knew was that hackers would be perfectly comfortable in low-rent circumstances—and they were!
Kevin Kelly: This was still early days, so they weren’t like the billionaires that they later would become. They were people who had real jobs and had some money. And they were camping out basically for a weekend.
Fabrice Florin: Then in the morning Stewart Brand went through the dorms and started kind of kicking the beds and saying, “Anybody who wants breakfast, now’s the time!” So you had all these droopy figures heading out to the little cafeteria.
That next day, the conference portion of the Hackers Conference started in earnest. There were no featured speakers: The whole point was to get the hackers talking to each other.
Fabrice Florin: We had different topics. I forget exactly what the topics were, but there’s one that’s an evergreen topic that’s still being debated today.
Steven Levy: The “hacker ethic” was a term I coined to describe what I noticed was a shared set of values that hackers of any generation all have. You know, the way they saw the world and the way they operated and what drove them. The way the hackers saw it was that information should be free. That’s what I tried to grapple with in Hackers: what that meant.
Stewart Brand: It was a discussion when the whole group was gathered. There was talk of free software versus commercial software.
Steven Levy: It was one of the first sessions in the conference—the session that launched a million other sessions. Every conference in the last twenty years has had at least one to ten sessions on that very subject. And here I was discussing it for the first time and probably with the best audience, the best participants. It was amazing to moderate, if you want to call it that, a session like that. Because it was so participatory. People were chafed and they all wanted to talk. Everyone wanted to get in on it there.
Doug Carlson (at the Hackers Conference): The dissemination of information as a free object is a worthy goal. It’s the way most of us learned in the first place. But the truth of the matter is, what people are doing has more and more commercial value, and if there’s any way for people to make money off it, somebody’s going to try to get an angle on it. So I think that it ought to be up to the people who design the product whether or not they want to give it away or sell it. It’s their product and it should be a personal decision.
Robert Woodhead (at the Hackers Conference): Tools I will give away to anybody. But the product? That’s my soul that’s in the product. I don’t want anyone fooling with that. I don’t want anyone hacking into that product and changing it—because then it won’t be mine.
Steve Wozniak (at the Hackers Conference): Hackers frequently want to look at code, like operating systems, listings, and the like, to learn how it was done before them. Source should be made available reasonably to those sort of people. Not to copy, not to sell, but to learn from.
Stewart Brand: Wozniak made the point that there’s a whole bunch of work creating a piece of software that does something useful and actually works well.
Steve Wozniak (at the Hackers Conference): Information should be free—but your time should not.
Stewart Brand: So, putting these things out for free is kind of nuts. And, I said, “Well, software—this kind of information—wants to be expensive, but it also wants to be free because it’s so easy to copy.”
John Markoff: It was a dialectic, right? Stewart is not a Marxist, but it was a very Marxist view of the information economy.
Steven Levy: It was a conversation, they were engaging. The whole thing was almost like a jazz improvisation. Just like building up in one of those long Coltrane songs or something like that.
Stewart Brand: I was really just restating something that was written down in Levy’s book as “the hacker ethic.”
Steven Levy: Information should be free.
Stewart Brand: My only addition to that was to take away the “should” and turn it into a “want.”
Steven Levy: He hacked me! That’s the way I put it.
Stewart Brand: “Information wants to be free” was the meme that got loose and went viral from that discussion.
Kevin Kelly: It was just another throwaway line at the time. There was no sense at all that this would become Stewart’s most famous saying. He’s said so many brilliant things over the years. I’m still surprised that this is what wants to be on his tombstone.
Stewart Brand: It’s giving information its own desires, I think, that makes people jump.
Steven Levy: It sort of sang in its own way and described something that was happening—and would happen much more on the internet, in a way that just made people grasp it.
Kevin Kelly: Maybe the reason why it was launched into prominence is because of what I call the zero price point option, the idea that free would become this huge economic model and would come to dominate much of the wealth that was being generated. There was maybe a glimpse of that there.
Steven Levy: Information wants to be free on the internet in particular.
Stewart Brand: The quote in full is “Information wants to be expensive and information wants to free, and that’s a paradox which will never go away.” And the quote keeps reviving, because that paradox keeps driving people mad. Ha-ha!
The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link
Welcome to the restaurant at the end of the universe
The Well started as an experiment in community, in publishing, in the future—all things that Stewart Brand was expert in. From a technology standpoint, it was little more than a glorified BBS (bulletin board system) hacked together from a few telephone lines, a couple of early modems, and a nearly obsolete computer from the seventies. Still, a broad swath of notables from Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisc
o Bay Area joined Brand’s primitive social network seeking, like him, to understand the new online world. What they discovered when they logged on was a bohemia and a frontier. That the Valley circa 1985 was also a bohemian frontier was no coincidence: The Well was Silicon Valley online. The Well attracted hackers from the Hackers Conference as well as Brand’s many high-flying friends from the disparate worlds of journalism, ecology, philanthropy, and business. Almost immediately The Well became the place to be in cyberspace and, in fact, is the place where the word cyberspace first acquired its contemporary meaning. Excited by the success of this new and very social medium, Brand was sucked in—and burned. He discovered that The Well had a darker side, too. Flame wars, trolling, cyberbullying: All the social media dysfunction that is so familiar today came as a disturbing shock in the mideighties.
Larry Brilliant: I knew Stewart Brand from the Merry Prankster days and the Hog Farm days.
Stewart Brand: It was mainly through the Hog Farm. Larry Brilliant had been there as a kind of a resident physician.
Ram Dass: He used to be known as Dr. America. The Hog Farm was a hippie commune in Berkeley, run by a fellow named Wavy Gravy.
Stewart Brand: And I also knew Larry Brilliant by reputation: what he had done suppressing smallpox in India, and eliminating it, eventually.
Ram Dass: It was very exciting stuff: You’ve got maps with pins of each case and you go with vaccination needles in jeeps and boats and you raid villages. It’s like a war!
Larry Brilliant: By then my Rolodex was pretty weird—Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy and the head of the smallpox program, UN diplomats, a bunch of rabbis and Catholic priests with eclectic backgrounds… And Steve Jobs.
Ram Dass: When it was over they all got depressed. They didn’t know what to do next.
Larry Brilliant: So Steve comes back from India, he starts Apple with Woz. I went back and finally got a degree in public health.
Ram Dass: Larry decided he’d start a foundation and get all of his buddies together—and he drew his buddies from all the different parts of his life.
Larry Brilliant: And often Steve would call me, I remember once I was in the middle of painting my fence in Michigan, and my wife said, “Steve’s on the line.” I rushed to the phone covered with paint, and he said, “Larry, I understand you’re thinking of starting a new organization?”
Ram Dass: The organization he called Seva, which meant “Society for Epidemiological Voluntary Assistance”—only he knew that it was also the Sanskrit word for “service.”
Ram Dass: And I said, “Yes, we decided we would tackle blindness, we’ve got money from the Dutch government to do it in Nepal, and we want to start it off with a survey—we want to do it the right way.” Hippies we might have been, but we were scientific hippies.
Lee Felsenstein: You could say you were a hippie and didn’t like technology, but what Whole Earth was telling us all and we all believed was that you are going to be using technology if you are a human. And so, as Stewart said, “We’d best get good at it.”
Larry Brilliant: And so Steve said, “Larry, I have just the thing for you. And—are you ready for this? I know the software that you can use to run your survey: It’s called VisiCalc, it’s an electronic spreadsheet.” To which I said, “What’s a spreadsheet?” And so we talked for about two hours, and finally this package arrives and we smuggled it into Nepal. This was the Apple II—serial number 12. They said, “What is it?” And I said, “It’s a typewriter!” And they said, “No problem—go in.” So I had that, I had one of the first acoustic modems, and I had all sorts of crazy software that Steve had sent me. And on the last day of the survey, after we’d finished the last case, the helicopter crashed, and it crashed in a town which was just impossible to get to. Nobody was hurt, they say it came down like an oak leaf, but the engine was totally destroyed—it had digested itself. So now I’m running a UN program, I’m a UN officer, my helicopter is down. So how do you get it out? Who pays for it? It had all the hallmarks of the dozens of other planes and helicopters that have crashed in Nepal and that are still there, thirty or forty years later. But I was determined to get it out, and so I thumbed through all the pieces of software that Steve had given me, and one of them was “Satellite Access.” So I put it into the Apple II, and managed to access the University of Michigan computer from Kathmandu, and I set up a computer-conference call—this became known as computer conferencing—and it included Senator Hatfield’s office, the Evergreen Helicopter Office in Oregon, the Seva office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the ambassador to India in New Delhi, the UN office in New York, and Aerospace Seattle’s office in Paris.
Kevin Kelly: This was the dawn of bulletin board systems.
Larry Brilliant: There was no e-mail, remember.
Howard Rheingold: On a BBS, there was one thread, and you had to wait for the person who was online to get off-line so that you could log in.
Larry Brilliant: And using store-and-forward asynchronous communications, we were able to get the engine—which weighed maybe a couple of tons—flown in. We put it on the back of a jeep and rode it through the jungle to the downed helicopter, where we had three or four men acting as a hoist. We changed the engine and flew the helicopter out. That was 1979 or 1980. It was pretty cool, and I’d never seen anything like that before. I’d never seen anything happen like that in the UN where a broken helicopter could be repaired and flown out seventy-two hours later! So a reporter from Byte magazine, who heard about it, called me and did a story in Byte about computer conferencing. And I then used that, when I got back to Michigan, to create something we used to call DEO—Distributed Electronic Office. This is 1980, 1981.
Kevin Kelly: When I got a modem in the early eighties it was a big “a-ha” moment for me. Because I started to explore bulletin boards in the evening and there was something happening, something really important happening. It was different than anything else I encountered. Something odd was happening there. There was this tone of voice. I mean there was this sensibility and people were talking in an informed way about stuff that they were interested in. There was this sort of underground aspect to it. There was this community aspect to it. I was an old hippie and was very suspicious of technology. I owned a bicycle. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t really own anything. I was sort of not so interested in what we called technology, which was like cars and factories. That’s what technology was. What I saw when I plugged the computer into the modem was a much more organic version of technology. It was much more Amish-like. It seemed more appropriate. It seemed humane. There was something very robust and biological about it. And Stewart noticed that, too.
Larry Brilliant: And then Steve Jobs happened to come to Ann Arbor. He stayed with me, and he had given me the first $5,000 to start Seva, and I started to hit him up for some money to analyze the data from the survey, and he said, “Well, show me what you’ve done.” And I showed him Seva-Talk, and I showed him how we could talk to each other all over the country, and then when I asked him for the money he said, “Look, Larry, instead of asking me for money, why don’t you take your own fucking software, make your own fucking company, make your own fucking money, endow your own fucking NGO, and get rid of blindness yourself! I’ll help you. I’ll help you build what you’ve got into a company, and find you investors to take it public.” And he did, and that’s what happened.
Ram Dass: The company he started was a software computer company. What it does is set up conferencing through computers. The first beta-test site was the Seva Foundation.
Kevin Kelly: Larry is a very entrepreneurial guy.
Ram Dass: The stock of the NETI Corporation endowed the Seva Foundation.
Larry Brilliant: Then I said, “Stewart, I took this company public, I have some money, how about we do a joint venture?” This is how The Well got started.
Stewart Brand: Larry wanted a Whole Earth Catalog teleconference of some sort, basically an online version of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was a lover of the Whole Earth Catalog
, I guess.
Fabrice Florin: The counterculture movement idolized the Whole Earth Catalog, which symbolized this kind of holistic view of the world.
Stewart Brand: I said, “I’d be interested in working on that. What do we get?”
Larry Brilliant: I said, “I’ll give you some technology and a couple hundred grand, and you provide the customer base, the family, the community, you run it, and we split it fifty-fifty?”
Kevin Kelly: So we started The Well in 1985.
Fabrice Florin: The Well stood for “Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link.”
Stewart Brand: I had seen online teleconferencing. And I had seen things that had made it wonderful and things that had made it terrible, and there were also bulletin board systems around at that time which had also established a certain amount of behaviors that were wonderful and not so wonderful. So, based on those experiences, we designed what became called The Well to reflect what had been learned about online discussions at that point.
Kevin Kelly: What Whole Earth wanted to do was to try out the experiment of what happens if you open this up to ordinary people. How does it all work? No one had really opened this up to the public beyond what CompuServe and Prodigy were doing—very controlled, minimalist systems.
Fabrice Florin: Stewart Brand recognized very early on the importance of computers for information sharing, and so very early on he wanted to be able to serve his community with the right tools that would allow people to communicate and share ideas effectively.
Kevin Kelly: Whether it was ever articulated or not, what Whole Earth was doing was trying to make it work in terms of governance, best practices, cultural nudges, pricing…
Howard Rheingold: Part of it was not trying to shape it, enabling the shape to emerge. Letting the people there make whatever it was.