by Adam Fisher
Kevin Kelly: One of the design principles for The Well was to try to get as close to free as we could get. The idea was to see how cheap can we possibly make this, cheap for the user.
Stewart Brand: I priced it to be very inviting.
Kevin Kelly: We would bring the power to the people by having really cheap telecommunications. And that I think in some ways, that idea came from the hacker community, the Hackers Conference.
Stewart Brand: We made it easy to make conferences, and people would invent conferences. Anybody could start a conference.
Kevin Kelly: It was kind of a hack: The software was buggy, but sort of open and easy to modify.
Lee Felsenstein: All the people who had been at the Hackers Conference were offered memberships.
Stewart Brand: I wanted hackers inside the system, so we invited them in and writers, journalists, all got free accounts and that was our marketing. Initially it was just sort of friends of the Whole Earth Catalog.
Larry Brilliant: Ram Dass was on The Well. Wavy Gravy was on The Well. All the Seva people started using The Well. It was pretty cute.
Howard Rheingold: Stewart Brand brought together the environmental network, the people who were interested in community, self-sufficiency, communes, personal computers, tools. So it was really the meeting of those communities and this kind of ongoing party.
Larry Brilliant: And then the Deadheads started sharing audio tapes. They were digitized and available online, but the only way you could find the location online was to do it through The Well.
Kevin Kelly: And once they would come into the Deadhead conferences they would spill over. They would say, “Oh, you have a thread on gardening. Wow!” Or a thread on parenting, whatever. So they would come on to swap playlists and then they would go on to discover the rest of the world and become some of the most active contributors.
Fred Davis: It was like a hip pre-Craigslist thing where you’d hear about where a secret rave would be or who had tickets to the Dead concert or whatever. There was a real community, a cyberculture community.
Michael Naimark: You couldn’t even send a picture on The Well. It was text-only, and of course it was asynchronous: There was no live chat. But nevertheless a lot of us were on The Well if not hourly, then multiple times a day. After Atari collapsed, Brenda and I were putting together some grand plan for virtual reality—we were striving to make virtual reality experiences that felt just like being there—but the irony was that this little trickle of text that wasn’t even live gave us the greatest feeling of live-ness! It felt more live than any VR stuff we could possibly do.
Howard Rheingold: And it was all just words on a screen!
R. U. Sirius: These were just text-based bulletin boards, but in many ways they were superior to social media today. You had really great conversations with extraordinary people.
Larry Brilliant: Because it was Stewart, he attracted people who had these incredibly eclectic minds, and they were phenomenal writers, people who think in paragraphs. And the writing was fantastic!
Kevin Kelly: That made for a very literate salon-like environment where people who could write were writing—and writing well and writing very directly. So some of the best writing I think of that decade was happening on The Well.
Larry Brilliant: So just the opposite of Twitter.
Lee Felsenstein: The Well, for its first five years at least, was the San Francisco bohemian scene online, where you could join the roundtable of whatever-it-was. There was a whole bunch of roundtables. And in there were the people who were the ones you had read about and so forth. Or had firsthand connections with the people you read about. San Francisco had had such a scene since the nineteenth century. And here it came direct to your home at your fingertips.
Howard Rheingold: It was like there was a party happening in the walls of your house. You know, people were talking about serious things and exchanging knowledge, but they were also having fun.
Kevin Kelly: Stewart and I, we were living on The Well. This was the beauty of it.
Lee Felsenstein: It was an experiment. An attempt to infuse their culture into an online system. They were feeling their way, as anybody would have to, since it really hadn’t been done before.
Kevin Kelly: I can’t remember what the first conference was, but very quickly there was a conference about The Well itself, because we quickly learned that talking about The Well and the policies of The Well would kind of creep up in every single discussion. “Why can’t we do this? Why can’t we do that?” Because nobody knew anything. We didn’t even know we needed moderators! That was not even clear. That was not something we thought about before. Why do you need moderators?
Lee Felsenstein: They assigned me to moderate the hackers’ section of it.
Kevin Kelly: That became one of the biggest jobs that we had: people having to moderate the conversation.
Lee Felsenstein: And so I had to bust up some kind of paranoid discussion threads that mostly had to do with other personalities in the conference. A couple of times I had to jump in and say, “Now you are all making far too much out of this. There’s nothing there.” And, you know, “Calm down, for God’s sake.” It was worth the effort. But it took effort.
Kevin Kelly: These systems are natural amplifiers, and negative things are somehow easier to amplify or become much louder than positive things, there’s something about a negative amplification that just powers up. And so we saw these phenomena where small slights would be amplified into huge harm and pilings on, and people who were normally very civil would get sucked up into battles. And they would have what we call flame wars. It was sort of like a flame in the sense that the hotter it got, the more that would be sucked into it and burn.
Lee Felsenstein: We discovered early on about the tendency to flame. Hackers do that, of course. But we thought that was just a hacker thing and it turned out not to be.
Kevin Kelly: And we began to see trolls, although we didn’t use that term at the time, where there were people who were getting satisfaction out of starting fires or nudging people. They would do that over and over again just because they liked to see what would happen.
Stewart Brand: People learned how to deal with trolls. If you respond to them, they will make the flame even brighter.
Kevin Kelly: So we had to deal with that. And issues about people wanting to remove what they had said and whether that was okay. And so there were all these things that are now very familiar dynamics that were completely new to us. And each one we had to address, and we were spending days and nights and evenings trying to manage these things.
Howard Rheingold: The Well had a policy that people should be who they are. And so you had to use a credit card, or otherwise go to the office and show some ID, to prove who you were. That was a good design decision.
Stewart Brand: I had seen a situation online where people behaved very, very badly, and I knew that even famous intellectuals would behave badly to each other if they were able to post anonymously. Based on that, I made it impossible to be anonymous on The Well. However, you could put on a handle, which would be sort of pseudoanonymous.
Kevin Kelly: We did have an anonymous conference. That was a true experiment, and that was driven much more from the users who said, “Can we have an anonymous conference?” And we said, “Okay.” We had no idea what would happen. Sometimes completely amazing stuff would occur in the anonymous conference, but in other cases this could be kind of scary and weird and creepy. People would confess to things or do stuff.
Stewart Brand: The anonymous conference was easy to set up with that software—and it lasted less than a week, because people immediately behaved absolutely viciously to each other. They pretended to be each other. They thought they were just spoofing, but actually it was mortally insulting stuff they were doing.
Kevin Kelly: We were asking ourselves, “What do we do about this? Are we legally liable?” And again that’s the kind of stuff that, at the board level, I was concerned with. I didn�
��t have an opinion about anonymity before the anonymous conference. But after the anonymous conference I had an opinion: It was not good.
Stewart Brand: So, The Well kind of grew and got a life of its own and established a certain amount of online practice.
Howard Rheingold: There was kind of a social policy: “You own your own words” was mostly about people had to get permission if they were going to quote you, but it was also about taking responsibility for your words.
Larry Brilliant: And the reason that The Well succeeded was because of those things—not because of the software, not because of the money.
Kevin Kelly: It was all new territory and it was very formative, because there’s very little that’s happened since that wasn’t present in the decade that The Well was running at its height. Almost all the things that we’ve now come to see as a marked characteristic of this time emerged then, and we were dealing with it for the first time.
Howard Rheingold: And in some ways it was a forecast of not just the best of what online community could offer but also the worst. You know, people who just like to snipe at you.
Kevin Kelly: This was years into it but at one point Stewart basically quit The Well, because as the leader of this enterprise—he really wasn’t the leader but as the figurehead—he was just getting trolled. He was getting pounded and harassed. And it was no fun and so he thought, No fun? I’m out of here.
Howard Rheingold: Stewart got irritated, and who can blame him? He created the place. A lot of antiauthoritarianism was projected on Stewart because he was Stewart.
Stewart Brand: There was a classic kind of gang-up thing that one continues to see, occasionally. And I just bailed at that point.
Howard Rheingold: It’s very difficult to get thrown out of The Well, especially for being an asshole. They have to argue about it for months. A lot of people, including myself, just sort of got sick of it.
Stewart Brand: In any community, new people show up, and they want to participate, and the old hands typically close ranks and sneer at the newbies. I should have known that would happen at The Well. We should have made it the case where part of your job as a member of The Well was to make new people feel welcome. We never did that. It was a part of what kept The Well from growing.
Kevin Kelly: After Stewart left, everything started to kind of get really big. This was the era of ISPs, and you had Pipeline and Echo and AOL, and it was clear that this was going to stick around. Some of them were growing fast. And so why can’t we grow fast? The problem was we were a nonprofit. Who’s going to invest into this nonprofit? And so that was the issue. I looked at it in different ways. Do we want to sell it? Do we want to turn commercial? What’s the point of that? So in the end it was like, No, I think we can be more useful being who we are. We could grow and we could make a lot of money, but a lot of people are going to do that. And that might have been the wrong decision or the right decision to make, but it was my decision to keep it sort of experimental.
Stewart Brand: It was never a commercial success. It may have paid its own way, just barely. What could be tried with this medium? That was the thing.
Kevin Kelly: Eventually it was sold to Salon, but it was really too late at that point.
Stewart Brand: It had great continuity and those people stayed in touch online for decades and all that. But it ossified…
Fabrice Florin: And a lot of the intellectuals that were sharing ideas on The Well went on to branch out into different areas. But you can really trace back a lot of the origins of this new movement to The Well. A lot of the folks were there.
Howard Rheingold: I remember I got a friend request on Facebook early from Steve Case and I said, “I know who you are. But why do you want to friend me?” And he said, “Oh, I lurked on The Well from the beginning.” So I think, yes, it did influence things.
Larry Brilliant: Steve Jobs was on it—Steve had a fake name and he lurked.
Howard Rheingold: Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Craig Newmark: They would all say that they were informed by their experiences on The Well.
Fabrice Florin: The Well was the birthplace of the online community.
Larry Brilliant: All that goes back to Steve giving me the computer, letting me use it in Nepal, the experience I had with his software to access the satellite, and then coming back and Steve seeing what Seva-Talk could be. We showed it to hundreds of people and nobody saw anything in it. Steve got it immediately.
Fabrice Florin: And Stewart basically gave the technology a set of values and ethics that all the developers could share. They already had their own hacker ethic, but he helped to amplify it and bring people together. And then it became big business, and it was hard for intellectuals to be the primary driving force anymore. It became the businesspeople who started driving it. Which is understandable given the scale and scope of what happened. It just became too large for intellectuals to hold.
Reality Check
The new new thing—that wasn’t
Virtual reality is Silicon Valley’s next new thing. Facebook and Google (not to mention Microsoft) are making huge bets on the technology and battling to control its future. Hollywood has jumped on the bandwagon, too: The best VR content is now showcased every year at the Sundance Film Festival. But VR is not as new as it seems: It germinated inside Alan Kay’s research lab at Atari. The lab collapsed when Atari did, scattering Kay’s people across the Valley, but a young, dreadlocked, programming prodigy, Jaron Lanier, continued the research on his own dime. His original goal was to revive an old dream. Like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, Lanier wanted to create a computing environment that was immersive, flexible, and empowering. The difference was the interface. Engelbart invented the mouse. Alan Kay added the desktop metaphor. And in Lanier’s iteration, one donned goggles and gloves and stepped into virtual reality. Lanier actually coined the phrase. And the whole point of this new, all-enveloping interface was to be able to program the computer from the inside.
There was just one problem: Once people got inside the computer, virtually no one wanted to code. There was a whole world in there, a cyberdelic Disneyland just waiting to be explored. Lanier thought he was building a next-generation programming language with the corresponding next-generation graphical user interface, but what people experienced was something a lot more fun. VR was The Well’s cyberspace made real. Taking advantage of the ensuing limelight, Lanier swiftly assumed a more Jobs-like role and marketed the heck out of his virtual reality machine, but in the end, the cost of an E ticket was just too high.
Jaron Lanier: I had already been working on virtual reality stuff in garages in Palo Alto before I went to do the Atari Cambridge thing. We did all kinds of weird experiments, all very funky and all short-lived. Tom came up to me after one of my talks in the early eighties.
Tom Zimmerman: I met Jaron at a Stanford electronic music concert at night in the outdoors. And I told him I had this glove.
Jaron Lanier: I said, “Oh, what does it do?” And he says, “Well, it’s got continuous sensors.” “Oh my God! We have to talk.”
Tom Zimmerman: I had invented the dataglove between graduating MIT and joining Atari Labs.
Jaron Lanier: There were a lot of people who had done sensor gloves of one sort or another for, like, hearing-impaired applications or different things, but nobody had actually made a glove to my knowledge that had continuous sensing before. And so lightning fast I introduced him to a bunch of the other people who were kind of in the circle—including Young Harvill and his wife, Ann Lasko.
Young Harvill: Jaron had a house with Daniel Kottke, and we rented a house across the street from Jaron.
Dan Kottke: Jaron was a lean and trim game programmer when I met him.
Young Harvill: He was finishing a game called Moondust that was for the Commodore 64. It was a success and he did well with it.
Tom Zimmerman: What was cool about Moondust was it was probably one of the first nonviolent games. And the goal was just to create a visual-acoustical orgy of eye
candy and sound, which was kind of a nice goal. It was this game where you were a little spacecraft and there’s like dust and you have to surround the dust and corral it and then it just, like, explodes! So I think that spoke well of Jaron, and his life-affirming nature.
David Levitt: Zimmerman may have introduced Jaron and I. We had all this overlap in our interests with music. We resonated. We had a lot of the same ideas. People called us “the twins” because I had dreadlocks then, too.
Jaron Lanier: So about my hair. I gave up combing it at a certain point because it was taking over my life, and so I basically had three options. I either would spend all my life on hair care, I’d shave it off, or I’d just let it do what it wanted. And I just felt that of those options the laziest was the one I chose.
Young Harvill: Anyway, he was just coming off finishing this game.
Howard Rheingold: There was the personal computer, and video games were a big cultural splash. And so at the time people were beginning to ask, “What’s the next thing?” Because things at that time seemed to be happening quickly. Although at the time I don’t think there was any talk of virtual reality.
Jaron Lanier: Dan Kottke would kind of bring prerelease Macs home wrapped in towels on the back of his motorcycle and things would happen. The first MIDI program that I’m aware of was made on a prerelease Mac that Dan had snuck out of Apple.
Dan Kottke: I did that MIDI interface. It seemed like an exciting thing.
Tom Zimmerman: And then Jaron started getting into this programming language idea.
Jaron Lanier: I had a lot of money come in in ’83 because this one game of mine called Moondust was quite successful.
Tom Zimmerman: And Atari blew up, so at some point Jaron said, “I’m forming this new company. Why don’t you join me?” This was a lot more exciting to me, because it centered around making the glove that I had been developing for a while. And so I joined him, and that was the start of VPL.
Jaron Lanier: I believe VPL was incorporated in ’83.