Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  PERRY STREET

  When I first make contact with Stacy, she’s busy transferring Echo, which still exists, from one server to another. Moving a thirty-year-old online community is like transporting a sourdough starter: Echo is a living culture in a jar. Susceptible to the harshness of the outside world, it must be fed and kept warm in order to provide a link between the old and new.

  The big transfer falls on the same weekend Stacy and I are supposed to meet in New York. Late the night before our coffee date, I get an e-mail: the server move was a disaster, and she’s been working all day and night to fix it. The crisis might spill into tomorrow. An hour later she writes me again. All right, she begins. This move is going from bad to worse. We won’t be able to meet, after all. Apologetic, she sends me a few addresses: the original apartment, in Greenwich Village, where Echo’s servers first lived, and the Art Bar, just around the corner, a frequent Echoid haunt.

  I visit both places on a crisp fall morning. I’m not sure what I hope to see, or feel, when I lay eyes on them. Although bound by a physical backbone most of us hardly ever consider, the Internet seems to float, boundless, from device to device. The sum of its experiences can’t be revealed by any consideration of its infrastructure, and a cable tells us nothing about the conversations coursing through it. I stand on Perry Street, squinting as I hold the map on my phone up against the front door of the apartment building that once housed the city’s first social network, and to be honest, I don’t feel much.

  It’s a nice building. Like many in this part of Manhattan, it looks expensive, with windows framed by decorative moldings of lions and mythological griffins. The street is lined with spindly, leafless trees and iron streetlamps; bustling around me are athletic men with dogs, tourists cut loose from the pack, women walking with frozen yogurt, all oblivious to the significance of this place. Shouldn’t there be a plaque? We do that for buildings where poets and painters lived or died. Why not software and servers? I am suddenly moved by the idea: here lived Echo, where New Yorkers loved and laughed and complained and told one another just how much they hated themselves, and why.

  When we finally do get a chance to talk, Stacy tells me a story about Perry Street. She has an expressive Long Island accent cemented by three decades as a rent-controlled Manhattanite. When she speaks, you can hear the italics. Telling me about how her neighborhood has changed over the decades, she inflects at pointed intervals. “There were laundromats, delis, and all of that is gone,” she says. “I have to walk forever to get to the laundromat, which is a drag.”

  In 1990, back when Greenwich Village was still a neighborhood, Echo was still a server in Stacy’s apartment. Thanks to Al Gore’s information superhighway, however, business was booming, and since Echo’s modems relied on local telephone service, Stacy’s incoming requests were jamming all the phone lines in the neighborhood. The phone company was forced to provide Stacy with a dedicated line, but in Manhattan, cables run underground—the city is too dense and tumultuous for overhead telephone lines—and so New York Telephone dug up Perry Street, all the way from the local central office to Stacy’s doorstep. “It was this weird thing,” she tells me, “to see the streets of New York being ripped up for something that I was doing. Not only was it a proud moment for me, it was like seeing the future happening, and knowing that I was helping.”

  Stacy’s neighbors didn’t share her pride. Their service was being interrupted, their street torn to pieces. Stacy knew they’d thank her later, when Perry Street had the fastest Internet in New York City.

  f2f

  According to a systemwide poll conducted around 1998, 83 percent of Echoids said they met regularly face-to-face. Echo hosted monthly meetups at the Art Bar and a monthly softball game in Central Park. Stacy started a reading series for Echoids called Read Only; she organized public talks, a film screening series, and the Virtual Culture Salon, a bimonthly event copresented by the Whitney Museum. By the mid-1990s, New York’s “Silicon Alley” would be overrun with mixers, meetups, media events, and dot-com hype, but Stacy was the first person to link New York’s technology pioneers together. Echo was, as an editor of the online newsletter @NY wrote in 1996, “the bedrock of Silicon Alley.”

  Stacy never really saw it that way. Echoids didn’t network—they jammed, explored, went sailing. A group of Echoids got together monthly to divvy up a side of beef arranged for by a cohort upstate. Echo’s house band, White Courtesy Telephone, played regularly at Lower East Side clubs. When Echoids had poetry readings or open-mike appearances, they listed their gigs so others could show up. And after they got home, the first thing they’d do was log back on to Echo to swap stories. “The strongest virtual communities are not strictly virtual,” Stacy explains.

  If nothing else, real-world accountability made Echo civil: it’s harder to be cruel to someone online when you might run in to them on Monday night at the Art Bar. Echoids saw the whites of each other’s eyes regularly enough to know one another as people rather than usernames. Reconciliations were made over a beer or a friendly game of softball. For better or for worse, Echo was a community, and it took care of its own.

  When that didn’t work, Stacy stepped in. A moderator in every sense of the word, she went above and beyond to make sure people were getting along. If Echo was a small town, then Stacy was the mayor, sheriff, and the tourism bureau at once. She made the rules and enforced them. If somebody was being awful, she had the authority to give them the boot. “Stacy was more of an autocrat than these huge corporations can be,” Howard Mittelmark, a novelist who has been active on Echo since 1989, tells me. “She could finally say, ‘You—you’re fucking out of here.’”

  “A woman started the business, half the hosts were women, so just my doing that alone gave everything a different feel the minute you logged in. They felt more comfortable.”

  Banishment was reserved for only the worst offenders. There’s an entire chapter in Stacy’s book devoted to what Echoids called “the Fear”: that feeling of horror a truly objectionable person sows with their behavior online. Echo had a Nazi once, and its share of sexual harassers. Marisa Bowe remembers an episode in which a young guy—“who thought he was, like, really subversive”—posted about incest in every Echo conference. Stacy forbade ad hominem attacks, and since the incest posts weren’t directed at anyone in particular, they didn’t violate Echo rules. Marisa found them as upsetting as vandalism. “When the world that you’re in is made purely of speech,” posting offensive material just for the sake of it is “like you’re bombing the buildings.”

  All of this should be familiar today. The Internet’s still got its share of Nazis, trolls, and stalkers. And a social network that folds seamlessly into everyday life feels like a natural idea. That’s what all our social networks do now: we invite our friends to parties on Facebook, and we show them what they’re missing through photo and video stories. We follow one another’s travel schedules, love lives, and pets on social media, moving with ease from real life to online life, blurring the boundaries between the two and often mistaking one for the other.

  But Stacy understood early on just how important people are to the network; as Echo’s final authority, she nurtured discussion and enlisted Echoids to lead conversations in their fields of interest. These “hosts” had carte blanche to engineer the particular cultural atmospheres of their conferences. “Echo is Echo because of the hosts,” she wrote in 1998. “The relationships we have are formed by what we tell. Hosts get us to tell each other everything.” In order for Echo to thrive, Horn realized that it needed a core base of vocal, participatory users. Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier—a book about virtual communities that completely omits Echo, incidentally—documents this strategy at work across the network, from a BBS in France with paid “animateurs” culled from its most active users to The WELL hosts in his own backyard. “Hosts are the people,” he wrote, who “welcome new
comers, introduce people to one another, clean up after the guests, provoke discussion, and break up fights if necessary.”

  We’re all hosts now, the comment fields below our Instagram and Facebook posts our own personal conferences. But the more formal convention continues as well: Reddit, the so-called “front page of the Internet,” is a glorified bulletin board system, and each subreddit—which Echoids would call a conference—has its moderators, who make editorial decisions and lead conversation. Communities like Facebook and Twitter have moderators, too, although the role is no longer practiced by deputized users. Instead, paid employees, working in obscurity, often abroad, manually remove offensive content and respond to claims of abuse and harassment. That these after-party cleanup duties would become more important than the party itself is an inevitability of scale. It’s what happens when you invite everyone on Earth.

  As a rule, every conference on Echo had a male host and a female host; the pair, in exchange for free access to the service, would keep things civil and interesting. That half of Echo’s hosts were women was, again, a conscious effort. Stacy called it “cyberaffirmative action.” It was essential to her that when women dialed into Echo they’d see other women in the thick of it. Knowing they were not in the minority, and that their administrators were not all men, encouraged women to post instead of lurk, and in that way they became part of Echo’s culture. The men had to hear them. “I heard women talking about things that I wouldn’t normally hear women talking about,” says Howard Mittelmark, “talking about men in ways that they wouldn’t usually share with me.”

  At its peak, Echo had around forty-six thousand users. More than half were lurkers. Even today, most people are lurkers: on social media platforms everywhere a vast silent majority listens, reads, and keeps to itself. It’s the social dark matter of the Internet, the force holding us all together. Those who did post actively on Echo—about a tenth of Stacy’s subscribers—were the diehards. They were the hosts, the contrarians, the pot stirrers, the core group. Although Echo still exists, tumultuously but successfully moved over to a Linux server not long ago, only a fraction of that core group remains.

  Like any family, the remaining Echoids have gone through a lot together. There has been at least one Echoid death. Echoids were among the earliest to discover how difficult it is to mourn someone when their words remain, like ghosts, in the machine. Two decades of conversation represents a staggering amount of emotional equity: time spent arguing, riffing, making nice, making opinions, and flirting. Echo has had its share of romances, and many Echoids went all the way to cybersex in the service’s private corners. And then, of course, there is the internecine drama of affairs gone south.

  But Echoids share a larger cultural history, too. During O. J. Simpson’s infamous 1994 Bronco chase, while most of America watched the helicopter footage on the news, Echoids were posting their immediate reactions in real time. Stacy shares part of this thread in her book, Cyberville, and it reads exactly like a group of people live Tweeting a major cultural event a decade before the invention of Twitter. Echoids called it “simulcasting,” and it came naturally to the medium. They did it during the Oscars, during Anita Hill’s testimony at Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On September 11, 2001, Stacy ran to her keyboard at precisely 8:47 A.M. and typed: A PLANE JUST CRASHED INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER.

  On Echo, discussions ranged high and low. People shared the contents of their fridges, their purses, and their pockets. “The hottest topic for a while was a discussion about shampoo,” Stacy wrote. “Shampoo! Who would want to talk about shampoo? And yet the conversation is oddly revealing.” Details like these humanized the words on the screen: here were New Yorkers living their lives, eating and complaining and washing their hair, while the world carried on around them, as it does around us all.

  Stacy recently donated all of Echo’s archives, its twenty years of unbroken conversation, to the New-York Historical Society. “Someone in the twenty-second century and beyond is going to look back and have this treasure trove of history,” she tells me, genuinely proud. Echo’s legacy might not be what it predicted about the future of social media—although it did predict basically everything—but what it will reveal about its past. It provides an account of how real New Yorkers lived, unvarnished by the passage of time. There’s a reason Stacy’s book about Echo is called Cyberville: Echo was an elective community reached through keyboard and modem. It had its hotshots and hierarchies, its cops and its creeps. Not everybody got along, but most stayed for the camaraderie. They were citizens of a city within a city where you were only as good, or as alive, as your words.

  Stacy Horn originally sold Echo to New Yorkers as a local stop on the information superhighway, but the highway was built through town. Echo became like one of those rest stops on the scenic route, full of characters and self-published histories. People wander in every once in a while, but mostly it’s off the map, somewhere in the collapsed space between the Internet’s past, a Wild West of homesteads, and today’s app-centric Internet, which is many things but certainly not a conversation where anyone writes for free, or freely. Echoids get on the highway sometimes to visit big cities like Facebook and Twitter. For all the action in these glitzy new metropolises, it all feels eerily familiar.

  To join Echo today, you fill out a form on the Echo Web site and wait for Stacy to send you a new-user packet in the mail. Mine took a week. It contains a welcome letter, return-addressed Echo Communications Group, which begins with an exhortation—“Thank you and congratulations! You’re about to join an eclectic, opinionated, slightly dysfunctional community called Echo!”—before moving on to the caveat: “We use this totally retro software that we haven’t upgraded in forever and getting around on Echo is not like getting around on the web. But hang in there. It’s worth it.” The enclosed instructions might be millennial-proof.

  Echo is still a BBS, which means it’s not on the Web. Rather, it’s accessed via telnet, a protocol that allows me to dial Stacy’s server directly. This requires opening Terminal, a command-line application that serves as a kind of text-based window into the operating system, and summoning Echo with a typed command:

  $ ssh claire@echonyc.com

  The Echo welcome packet also includes a cheat sheet of Unix commands, and mastering those takes an afternoon. I am ostensibly savvy about these things, but using Echo feels like how hacking looks in movies. Eventually I get the hang of it: typing j mov to join the Movies & TV conference and sh 222 to read the two-hundred-and-twenty-second item posted there, I read Echo’s ongoing Star Trek discussion, which spans a decade. When I type O—as in “who is online?”—I discover the handful of people here with me in Stacy’s server, where there are no advertisements and no clickbait. Using Echo feels like slicing a knife through the desktop metaphors, through the illusions, through the cloud. It’s a pure channel, the skeletal core of social media.

  For those of us raised on the semantics of the World Wide Web, systems like Echo are deeply unintuitive, because the Web is our only frame of reference for how the world’s digital information is traveled. Even after all I’ve learned about Echo’s world of text, while I’m connected to it, my fingers keep drifting to the trackpad, so hardwired am I to point-and-click interfaces. Echo is not on the Web—Stacy couldn’t afford to make the leap back in 1993—and its “totally retro software” feels shockingly unfamiliar. With no links, nothing to click, and no URLs, it’s missing something fundamental to the modern experience of communications media, something so intimately familiar that many people don’t even notice it’s there. If we’re all fish in the online sea, Echo is missing the water. It’s got no hypertext.

  Chapter Ten

  HYPERTEXT

  When we say the words “Internet” and “Web,” we often mean the same thing: the force, larger than nature, that emanates from our screens. But “Internet” and “Web” are not interchangeable; as
we’ve learned from Echo, people were connecting online for decades before graphical Web pages appeared on the scene. They dialed directly into each other’s machines and into host computers to exchange files and post messages, as on Echo or The WELL, or they participated in commercial online services like AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. Before the Web, when people talked about the “Net,” or “going online,” this is usually what they meant. Many of these ad hoc networks interacted with, and eventually coalesced with, the infrastructure of the Internet, which finally hit critical mass when the ARPANET’s successor, the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, gave way to the network we use today, with the appearance of commercial Internet service providers, in 1994.

  It was a great complication. Early maps of ARPANET were easy to read: a few nodes placed in America’s academic and military capitals radiating in straight lines of wire and fiber. As the amount of nodes increased, the maps grew busier and the straight lines multiplied, softening into wide curves to accommodate their multitudes. Finally, the geographical background disappeared from Internet maps, and the network itself went sovereign. Today, a map of the Internet is a tensile, crazy, fractal thing; it resembles a beating heart, a web of synapses, a supernova.

  On top of all this sits the World Wide Web, a network of interconnected visual pages built in a shared language called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. “Hypertext” is not a word we use frequently today, but much of the Web is built from these hypertext documents: structured pages of text, images, and video dotted with clickable links connecting individual points to one another. Those connections don’t just influence how we navigate the Web—Google built its empire on a search engine that brought up Web pages with the highest number and quality of hypertext links—but how we communicate with one another, and ultimately how we understand the world.