When Stacy took her business proposal to the bank, “people just openly made fun of me. And looked at me like I was the biggest loser in the world to ever think that people would want to socialize via their computers.” She didn’t let it faze her. Instead, she took every penny of her savings and hit the pavement, determined to build Echo from the ground up. Every night, she went out into the city, heading where interesting people congregate: parties, art openings, museums, concerts. She ducked into bars. One by one, she approached strangers to pitch them on joining her fledgling online community. Some already had computer access, but few had modems, which cost more than $100 at the time. Stacy had to convince them “to do something which sounded to them, just like it did to the bankers, insane.”
Beyond money, there was the question of basic computer literacy: where The WELL ran on PicoSpan, Stacy built Echo in Unix, an operating system more familiar to programmers than the artists and writers she was courting. She tackled this problem with the same horse sense that inspired her street recruiting. Cool may be ineffable, but Unix can be taught. She started inviting new users over to her apartment in Greenwich Village for ad-hoc computer classes. Her students learned Unix commands and file structures within spitting distance of Echo itself, which was just a server and a stack of twenty-four-hundred-baud modems in Stacy’s living room, piled high on red aluminum shelves next to loose papers and toy figurines of Godzilla, Gumby, and Ed Grimley.
Where her technical abilities ended, friends helped out. A hacker calling himself Phiber Optik debugged Echo’s server pro bono; when he later went to prison for cybercrime, Echo users wearing Phree Phiber Optik buttons visited him once a week. Sometimes Echo would crash; sometimes things would get so bad that when the phone rang, Stacy and her handful of part-time employees would jump. Go away, they’d scream at the phone. We suck. But it was always fun. Stacy tucked toy surprises into bills, “like Cracker Jacks,” until a representative from the U.S. Postal Service buzzed her intercom and begged her to stop. She was jamming the letter machines.
Echo eventually outgrew its residential digs and moved into proper office space in Tribeca, a neighborhood Stacy had often roamed back when it was a “deserted, empty, time-tripping forgotten patch of Manhattan.” By 1994, Echo had two employees and thirty-five phone lines, and her user base had jumped from a few hundred interesting people she’d picked up in bars to a few thousand who’d read about Echo in the Village Voice and the New York Times. Stacy was starting to get press, and not a moment too soon—she’d nearly burned through her savings in the lean years.
She credits then vice president Al Gore for pulling Echo from the brink. “Clinton and Gore were just going around everywhere talking about the information superhighway,” she remembers. Gore was lobbying for national telecommunications infrastructure—his father, a U.S. senator from Tennessee, had sponsored legislation to build the Interstate Highway System a generation previous—in the form of his High Performance Computing Act of 1991. When that legislation passed, it was instrumental in the development of many key Internet technologies, but it also had a profound cultural effect: it brought the Internet to the water cooler. Suddenly, Stacy says, “people started having this sense that there was a thing out there that was important. And if they didn’t get in on the bandwagon, they were going to be left behind.” The national fear of missing out made Echo an easier sell. “You know that information superhighway you’ve been hearing all about?” she’d say. Well, Echo is a stop along the way.
Echo merged several social functions into one relatively easy-to-use platform, what we would call today a social network. Users logged on using their real names but could post messages in threaded “conferences” on a variety of subjects using whatever pseudonyms they chose. Echo provided e-mail accounts; “Yos,” real-time chats, popped up like instant messages, with three urgent beeps.
Stacy’s first users were playwrights, actors, and writers. “When computer people came online and saw we were talking about opera and not games,” Stacy explained in 2001, “they left.” Marisa Bowe, a longtime Echo user, remembers people on Echo as funny, snarky, and smart. “There was a contingent of people who would never be able to handle themselves at a party,” she says, “but it was online that you could see how brilliant they were.” They were artists, liberals, programmers—the kind “who could actually talk to people”—some media types, and a heavy nonreligious Jewish contingent: the New York intelligentsia. When Echo reached peak trendiness, it saw its share of celebrities, too, like magazine writers Rob Tannenbaum and James Walcott, the screenwriter William Monahan, and even John F. Kennedy Jr., who posted as “flash.” Stacy helped him set up his account in her apartment, as a thousand incredulous Yos pinged her screen.
Affectionately, Stacy called her users Echoids, after a catchphrase from the Yogi Bear cartoon she remembered from childhood: “Heavens to Murgatroid!” The terse, campy name was suitable for a group of East Coast wiseasses who thought of their online community as a virtual salon but weren’t above gabbing about TV. While The WELL’s founders, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, were both accomplished figures in the West Coast’s tech and cultural scenes, Stacy Horn was a “punk rock suburbanite-city girl who didn’t do a heck of a lot” until she started Echo. The difference between the two communities started there. “West Coast/East Coast, boy/girl, night and fucking day,” she wrote in 1998.
Journalists who covered Echo in the 1990s tended to focus on its uniquely New York flavor. “Sometimes newcomers don’t realize that if Echoids attack their views and mercilessly beat down their arguments without so much as saying hello, they’re not being hostile,” a 1993 Wired profile explained. “Far from it. It’s just that special New York way of saying, ‘Welcome to our world!’” The quintessential Echo thread was I Hate Myself. That’s where Echoids popped in, sometimes daily, to add to a growing list of their own trespasses: “I hate myself for being a fucking addict,” one user posted in February 1992. “I hate myself for letting my Chia Pet die,” quipped another.
AND NONE OF THEM WILL GIVE YOU THE TIME OF DAY
Stacy Horn had a catchphrase for Echo. She used it in print ads, and once the Web came along, she put it on the front page of the Echo Web site: “Echo has the highest percentage of women in cyberspace—and none of them will give you the time of day.”
Today, women dominate social networking platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, but almost no online services in the 1980s had a significant female population or made any effort to cultivate one. At the time Stacy founded Echo, the entire Internet was only about 10 to 15 percent female. But women made up nearly half of Echo’s user base. “My success was due in part to the fact that I was the only one trying,” she explains. Just as she had when courting her first users, she went up to women everywhere she went and conducted informal interviews about their online experiences. If they hadn’t had any, she asked what kept them from it, and when they answered, she listened. She made diplomatic entreaties to local women’s groups and gave the editors of Ms. magazine their own Echo conference, which exploded with frank conversations about menstruation and body hair that Echo’s men read in awed silence before creeping in with questions they’d probably been waiting years to ask. She started a mentoring program, and even made membership on Echo completely free for women in 1990.
Her advocacy was personal. While still in grad school at NYU, she’d worked as a telecommunications analyst for Mobil, the oil company. At work, she was responsible for making sure regional Mobil offices were linked to data centers in Princeton and Dallas. Once she woke to the possibilities of online networks, she brought her passion to Mobil. She was convinced that employees working on national data network installations would make fewer mistakes—that fewer things would fall through the cracks—if everyone could discuss what they were doing, as they were doing it, with one another, in real time. “We would have these meetings, where it would just be this long conference table with eve
rybody in corporate telecommunications,” she says, “and it was just me and a bunch of men. I would get up, and I would try to promote the idea of social networking . . . and every time I would do this, they would basically just try to shut me up. I just kept trying and trying and trying, and they would just shut me down.”
At the time, Hillary Clinton was lobbying to push health-care reform through Congress. Stacy watched her on the news, ducking and bobbing as rooms full of men tried to undermine her project. She looked so resilient. “She was a master at it, even then, just deflecting and not getting angry,” Stacy remembers. The image affected her deeply: if Clinton could deal with male indifference on a national scale, Stacy could prove her bosses at Mobil wrong. When Mobil moved her group’s offices to Virginia, she decided to stay in New York. Her severance payment covered the first Echo servers, and the experience became a bellwether for its culture. Stacy had been the only woman in the boardroom, and she was going to make sure she wasn’t the only woman in the chatroom.
She didn’t always win. When Aliza Sherman—the developer who thought her computer was talking to her the first time she went online—signed up for Echo, she couldn’t wrap her head around the culture of the place. Like Stacy surrounded by Deadheads on The WELL, it just wasn’t a fit, so she canceled her account. Stacy called her personally. “This is Stacy Horn,” Aliza remembers her saying, “I saw that you were leaving, we need more women here, don’t leave, what can I do to make it easier for you?” Later, Stacy sent her a letter. Aliza left Echo anyway, but she kept the letter. It’s a physical reminder of a time when every woman online made a difference.
Stacy’s ex-husband used to describe her as five feet of Buddha nature, an immovable force for good in a changing world. “In those days,” Stacy writes, “journalists wrote that I started Echo to provide a safe place for women on the Net. Bite me. I wanted to get more women on Echo to make it better.”
EMBRACEABLE EWE
Echo’s biggest conferences—Culture, Media, Death—were like Greek agorae in cyberspace: open public assemblies where anyone could be heard, provided they spoke loudly enough. Although these conferences were often the first stop for new users and wizened Echoids alike, Stacy knew that even the most democratic public spaces have limitations. “I talk differently when I’m with my choir friends, I talk differently when I’m with my drummer friends,” she explains, “and if I’m in a group of all women there are things that I’m going to say that I won’t say in a mixed-gender group.” If Echo was going to be an extension of the real world, fulfilling a variety of emotional needs, it had to have both common areas and private spaces.
This is one of the most interesting, and most prescient, aspects of its design. Sometimes we love to grandstand to an audience of strangers at a party, but we might share more personal opinions over dinner with five or six friends. Those two ways of communicating aren’t mutually exclusive; in fact, having both makes us whole. In the landscape of present-day social media, there’s just as much action in private Facebook groups, Slack channels, group text threads, and direct messages as there is on our public feeds. We need private space online; Stacy recognized this truth early. If someone in a public conference was being annoying, for example, regulars were more likely to want to take the party back to their place than they were to log out entirely.
Stacy built the possibility for private conferencing into Echo from the outset, and Echoids ran with the idea: there was a private AA group for recovering addicts, and one for users under thirty. The sex conference was twenty-one and over. The Biosphere, named after the hermetically sealed biological experiment in Arizona, was private for the sake of being private. Another, Women in Telecommunications (WIT) was the female-only corner of Echo. This one was Stacy’s baby, and she policed it strictly, granting Echoids access to WIT only once she’d spoken to them on the phone to ensure, as best she could, that they were women. An imperfect process, but regardless a layer of real-world scrutiny hard to imagine today.
WIT was Echo’s powder room, the place where female Echoids sneaked off and talked among themselves, vacillating between sex advice and politics, dating and personal trauma. In a thread called “Is Someone Bothering You on Echo?” they’d report instances of abuse and harassment and compare notes about online creeps. Not everyone liked WIT; some female Echoids found it cheesy, antithetical to the dark humor that had drawn them to Echo in the first place. With Stacy’s blessing, a couple of them started BITCH, an invitation-only hangout for girls with attitude. Some called it “WIT with a leather jacket.” Marisa Bowe, who “detested the syrupy nicey-nicey BS of WIT” compared BITCH to a “sleazy dark dive in the very lower very east side.” If Echo was a digital overlay of New York, then every corner of the city had to have its analog somewhere, and sometimes a girl just needs to get a drink, talk trash, and blow off some steam. Stacy set up a similar conference, MOE—Men on Echo—for those guys excluded from conversations on WIT and BITCH. This quieted cries of preferential treatment for women, but it left transgender Echoids in the lurch.
The problem didn’t become apparent until 1993. That’s the year Embraceable Ewe, a trans woman, requested access to WIT. Nobody quite knew what to make of it. The question was new in cyberspace, and female Echoids took to WIT to share their opinions. Some said let her in. One agreed, on the condition that she avoid the conversations about PMS; another questioned why the same condition wouldn’t apply to a postmenopausal woman. Still others argued that WIT was a space for women who were brought up female, and that a trans woman, having benefited from the systemic advantages of the patriarchy for at least some of her life, wouldn’t share that history. The conversation became a sprawling consideration of gender in cyberspace, the first of many to come. Somebody suggested starting another private conference for trans women. “Shades of separate but equal,” worried Stacy.
Echo was a stronghold for New York lefties and artists. It had an LGBT conference, Lambda. It’s jarring to read about how fiercely Echoids debated the Embraceable Ewe question, because it reveals just how much understanding of the trans experience has changed in the last two decades. But another factor at play that might be invisible to contemporary readers is an ongoing context of female impersonation. The text-based Internet’s social spaces were rife with gender crossing, and with the shortage of women online, men posed as women with regularity. Aliza Sherman discusses this phenomenon in a first-person account recorded for the Women’s Internet History Project. “Back then it was just so odd: so many men pretended to be women online. They would have these websites and you would think they were female, but they were actually men posing as women. I’m not going to go into the possible reasons for that, but it was really hard to find actual women with websites.”
The phenomenon stretches back to some of the earliest social spaces on the Internet, text-based fantasy games called Multi-User Dungeons, or Multi-User Domains. On MUDs, gender play was encouraged; most MUDs provided a long list of gender options for new characters. Pavel Curtis, the designer of one of the most well-known social MUDs, LambdaMOO, observed that its most sexually aggressive female-presenting characters were often played by men “interested in seeing how the other half lives, and what it feels like to be perceived as female in a community.” The media theorist Allucquére Rosanne Stone called this “computer crossdressing.” In a 1991 paper, she cites another example: Julie, a beloved message board personality who turned out to be a middle-aged man. The false Julie had been mistaken for a woman the very first time he went online, and he was so fascinated by the way that women speak to one another in the perceived absence of men that he kept up the charade for several years, building an entire fictional persona for his feminine alter ego. This was a regular occurrence on BBSs, Listservs, Multi-User Domains, and other chat platforms throughout the 1990s.
“On the nets,” Stone writes, where “grounding a persona in a physical body is meaningless, men routinely use female personae whenever they choose.�
� This cut both ways, of course. In the relative obscurity of the textual Internet, anyone could try on a new identity, which had its creative advantages, and allowed a great many people the firsthand experience of previously invisible gender dynamics in a group setting. Women could choose male aliases in order to avoid undue attention or harassment, and trans people were able to express their gender identities safely and freely. However, one practical effect of all this computer crossdressing was that the few women online had a much harder time finding one another.
For many Echoids, the subtext of the Embraceable Ewe debate was, unbelievably, this: that if a trans woman joined WIT, she’d be followed by men “pretending” to be women. It wouldn’t matter who Embraceable Ewe was or whether she deserved a safe space herself, because the floodgates would be open. “I didn’t know what to do,” Stacy tells me. “My fear was that if I let her in, all these men would start saying ‘I’m a woman, let me in,’ and how would I know who was a woman who was not?” Stacy wanted to allow for as many forms of communication on Echo as possible. Within WIT, that meant a place without male voyeurs.
“I felt like the George Wallace of cyberspace,” she wrote. Unsure how to resolve the problem, Stacy told Embraceable Ewe she could have access to WIT once she’d had her gender reassignment surgery. She retracted the mandate a few months later—and to this day regrets ever making it—but Embraceable Ewe left Echo anyway. In the following years, several other trans women joined. The community grew more familiar with their identities. Echoids who had been clueless about the trans experience began to understand. “Cyberspace makes it easier to hear people out,” Stacy wrote. Trans Echoids shared their stories, pushing back: Why should an expensive surgery be required to prove who you are? What authorizes the medical establishment to determine gender? Echo adapted its policies. “Echoids were only able to reach a tentative understanding and agreement . . . through a lot of words, volumes and volumes, over years of time,” Stacy wrote.
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