Broad Band

by Claire L. Evans

  THE SOFT ECHO OF THE BOOM

  When Zapata, the fish-meal processing company, finally shut down Word, it did so very quickly. Nobody had time to save anything. Jaime had stolen a backup the last time she was in the building, but she got “fucked up and left it on the subway.” Marisa took a more enlightened approach. “I started thinking of it as being like those monks who make the sand mandalas,” she says. “They work for days and weeks to make this perfect thing and then the wind just blows it away.”

  A Web site ought never hope for permanence. Left untended, all bits eventually evaporate. On the World Wide Web, links rot—a consequence of its one-way hypertext design—images disappear, and any desirable URL not held on to tenaciously stands little chance of survival. Which is why if you go to word.com today, you’ll find a dictionary and not a magazine. The real estate is too valuable to host memorials.

  The early Web publications were replaced by more magazines, and then personal blogs, and eventually the social media platforms that hybridized magazine and community by selling community to the advertisers. As they disappeared, with them went hard-won triumphs in the new medium, what Alley businesspeople already called “content” back in the 1990s. As the editors of Suck.com, one of Word’s rival Web publications, wrote as they contemplated the disappearance of yet another online magazine in 2001, “We figured that in the end there’d be something left after all this effort . . . something, anything, rather than just this Krakatoa memory, echoing across an ocean whose smallness we’re just beginning to fathom.”

  The crash didn’t just gut an industry. It took down the generation of creative people who found miraculous employment doing what they loved, and who, in the process, defined the cultural parameters and interactive possibilities of the Web. The money survived—in some form, it always does. But the artifacts of the culture it briefly enabled are harder to find, especially without a map.

  You might wonder why anyone should care about the Krakatoa memories. Word has been off-line far longer than it was ever online. Jaime Levy’s floppies are sitting in her home office, although she’s working on getting them restored and hopes to show them in a museum someday. Echo, an anachronism in the age of big social, has become the Internet’s smallest local bar. These places, built by bright-eyed true believers, by women who were there right from the beginning and who didn’t make a dime for their labors, are just as important as the fortunes made and lost in the feverish speculation that transformed the Web from an academic swap session to the beating economic and cultural heart of our world.

  We should care about early online communities and publications, as we should care for their archives, because they were the places where the medium revealed itself. The financial bets being made on the sidelines are remembered because of their dark reverberation on the economy. But another bell tolled, and it still rings out, growing fainter by the day: the contributions of those who saw the Web’s potential right away. After all, the Internet’s only job is to shuttle packets of information from one place to the next without privileging one over the other. Our only job is to make the best packets we can. To make them worthy of the technology.

  Marisa Bowe made great packets, alongside her friend Jaime Levy. They played the Web for what it was: interactive, homegrown, human, funny. Stacy Horn took no greater pleasure than in filling her servers with voices. She helped people, especially women, get online. She and her Echo hosts taught themselves to manage the crowd and make sure everyone was heard, and they grappled with questions of gender, privacy, and responsibility online that we still haven’t quite answered. None of them got rich, and much of what they built has been erased in the slow erosions of the Web, like Word, is walled away from the Web, like Echo, or else is bound to media inaccessible to anyone but digital archivists with the means to replay them, like Jaime’s floppy disk magazines.

  This makes their achievements difficult to remember, much as the programs patched by women’s hands in the basement of the war theater a generation previous are difficult to remember, or much as the hypertext systems that could have become as important as the Web had they only been implemented on a larger scale are difficult to remember. These all exist in fluid configurations of time, relationships, and clicks. These all exist in relation to the ugliest things in our world: the trajectories of bombs, the frantic pursuit of wealth. But all of their efforts are artifacts, as the Web is a dynamic artifact, an endless conversation writing over itself again and again in the soft echo of the boom.

  Chapter Twelve

  WOMEN.COM

  The dot-com bubble began to inflate with the earliest home pages and Web magazines, and it didn’t pop until the Web went fully mainstream, right before 9/11. In those eight years, a technology that began as a networked hypertext system for particle physicists became the world’s gossip page, multimedia art gallery, and library, in a feverish burst of cultural activity the likes of which the world had never seen. No longer was the Internet the realm of computer scientists, academics, undergrads, and the occasional overworked librarian. It was a popular medium, as transformative as television and far more intimate, connecting disparate strangers one-to-one.

  But while the first generation of artists, coders, writers, and navel-gazers made meaning from the global communications network, something else happened, too: the Web became a commercial medium. Once Web enterprises figured out their business models and how to securely process credit cards, clicks turned to dollars, forging some of the most powerful companies in the world, companies that have since become titans in distribution, media, and even space travel.

  Commercialization changed the Web for everyone. It had an indelible effect on the kinds of sites being built, and on the nature of the content being distributed there: less “my name is Lisa and here’s my dog” and more Pets.com. Where Echo managed to remain community focused by charging for its service, one of the few ways that social platforms and content sites make money on the Web—and today, in social apps—is by turning their users into the product, selling demographic information and targeted ad space to advertisers. Bubble Web sites like Word, kept afloat in the swell of new money, were forced to fold without a long-term business plan. But other Web sites, more eager to apply traditional media advertising models to the Web, thrived for a time.

  Few of these tell a clearer story than women.com. It’s one that spans a decade, streaking across two coasts and the Internet’s most dramatically transitional years, the story of a grassroots feminist community, the first online destination explicitly for women, which grew into one of the most spectacularly successful media companies of the bubble years. In the process, it became a symbol: first a stock ticker, then a cautionary tale, and finally an avatar for the very soul of the Web.

  WOMEN’S WIRE

  It starts back on the West Coast, with Nancy Rhine, the former communard who left her hippie roots to homestead online at The WELL. By the early 1990s, her frustration with the BBS boys’ club had become a fever. Posting in The WELL’s women-only conference, she began talking about “wanting to get an online community started that was focused on stuff that was particularly of interest to women: women’s health, or FDA loans for women-owned businesses, or mothering, or anything. Because we’re interested in everything.”

  In that conference, she met Ellen Pack, a New York transplant with a business degree and a nest egg. Ellen had moved to Palo Alto with a startup and settled in Silicon Valley. Nancy lived out in Marin, the opposing pole of the Bay Area’s techno-social world, but they found common ground in the idea that women deserved a corner of the Internet all their own.

  At the time, there were female-centric spaces online, but they were fairly proscribed, like Echo’s invite-only WIT conference and the similar conference on The WELL where Nancy and Ellen met. Women made up only a very small percentage of Internet users. Ellen and Nancy were willing to bet they were just waiting for the right opportunity to come online, the right number to di
al. They sketched it out together, and Ellen bought the servers. Their network, the Women’s Information Resource Exchange, WIRE—renamed Women’s WIRE after a legal dustup with Wired magazine—launched to a founding group of five hundred members in October 1993, becoming the first commercial online service explicitly targeted to women.

  They designed it to be as approachable as possible. Women’s WIRE ran on relatively user-friendly BBS software called First Class, with a graphical point-and-click interface and plain English typed commands. New users were courted by direct mail: the Women’s WIRE brochure, covered with images of Renaissance naiads, exhorted women to sign up and “access information and resources instantly, discover new heroes, tell your stories, vent your frustrations, get advice, in short . . . get connected.” If they sent away for a starter kit, they’d receive a floppy disk and some noncondescending information about how to set up their modem, and they could always call Women’s WIRE customer support—all women, naturally—if the directory names, baud rates, and disk densities proved inscrutable.

  Nancy and Ellen received immediate media attention for their effort. “The day we launched we got a front-page, above the fold, article in the Merc”—the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily paper—Ellen remembers, and “it was like: ‘Women Build Site to Keep Out Cyberbores.’” The headline was actually more unbelievable: WOMEN AIM TO BUILD AN ON-LINE WORLD THAT EXCLUDES BOORS, CYBERMASHERS. Ellen was horrified by it. “I remember being devastated,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, they totally misunderstood why we built this.’” Nancy and Ellen didn’t start their women’s network as a safe space for a fragile population of online newbies. It wasn’t a fortress designed to keep out bullies—or God forbid, cybermashers. It wasn’t even anti-male: men would eventually make up 10 percent of Women’s WIRE users. Rather, “it was much more of a positive place,” says Ellen. “It was not like we needed a protected island, it was like, holy crap, there’s so much we could do with this. Let’s do this.”

  Women’s WIRE users quickly realized the power of immediate access to a community of women. The service hosted domestic abuse resources, contact information for female members of Congress, listings for educational financial aid, professional organizations, and women-owned businesses, and transcripts of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s speeches. In public forums, users shared advice with one another—not the “how-to” of rarefied experts and magazines, but the more personal “how I . . .” that we now see on support forums everywhere online. In 1994, when a draft of the Clinton administration’s health plan was revealed not to include obstetricians and gynecologists as primary caregivers, two Women’s WIRE users sounded the alarm and organized a “phone assault on the White House.” Three days later, they posted a victory notice—it had worked. Some twenty years before social media clicktivism, Women’s WIRE subscribers mobilized an online community to take real-world action for change.

  Women’s WIRE had an office, a carpeted second-floor space on a working-class street in South San Francisco, halfway between Marin and Palo Alto. The staff was all female: there was Phyllis, a lapsed Mormon who ran IT; Roz, who’d later become a Buddhist priest; and Susan, with a PhD in linguistics. Nancy hosted face-to-face user meetups in the common space, and when the media came knocking, Ellen and Nancy would pose for photographs in the tawny hills above South San Francisco, holding each other close as the restless winds blew their hair and the tall grasses sideways toward the sea.

  But despite their shared goals, Nancy and Ellen were as different as two founders could be. Nancy, two decades older than Ellen, had deep roots in community building, online and off-, and came from a world of hippie self-reliance and the consciousness-raising culture of second-wave feminism. As a reflection of those values, the original Women’s WIRE system index included information about abortion, women’s studies programs, and lesbian parenting, as well as a direct link to groups like the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and the National Organization for Women (NOW). The way she saw it, Women’s WIRE was a radical network, a space for and by a feminist community, which incidentally included its share of men. She imagined a network of voices, anchored by a group of founding subscribers who would “foster diversity . . . people with something to contribute, personally, intellectually, or through their involvements.”

  “I liked the community piece, when you’re sharing useful information,” Ellen remembers, “but I wasn’t as much of a community person, for community’s sake.” She was of a new generation of entrepreneurial feminists, with her eyes on the boardroom. As a user, she was more interested in straight information; she wanted to get answers from newsgroups and databases, rather than through the more imprecise channels of anecdotal sharing. As a result, Women’s WIRE had two distinct poles, both an Information Resource and an Exchange. The balance between these two priorities was uneasy. Women’s WIRE’s publicist, Naomi Pearce, remembers an ongoing disagreement about the nature of the medium. “We had this big raging debate about: Is the Internet about information or is it about community? And I’m looking at this whole argument, going, duh. Both. At a certain level of intensity in an either/or argument, the fact that it has reached that intensity is the indicator that the right answer is and.”

  For fifteen dollars a month and an hourly connection fee, Women’s WIRE subscribers enjoyed access to both: there were daily headlines and newsgroups, but users also accessed e-mail, resources hosted by women’s organizations, and sections dedicated to “herstory,” finance, technology, parenting, and education, among other topics of interest to women. Hangout, the general forum welcoming newbies into Women’s WIRE’s ongoing conversation, became the service’s traffic magnet. “I used to feel like women at home raising their kids would get really isolated,” Nancy says. “Where is the quilting bee? Where’s the agora? Where’s the town square where we’re all hanging out?” As she monitored the chatter, she congratulated herself on her instinct: just as she’d expected and hoped, the quilting bee had moved on-screen.

  Many early digiterati believed that online conversation would flatten differences between people. After all, few technologies have cleaved words from flesh so thoroughly as the Internet. Perhaps computer conferencing would create a “civilization of the Mind,” one proponent went so far as to proclaim, a place where race, gender, ability, and class would finally become immaterial. The reality was quite different. As Stacy Horn learned in her years running Echo, people brought everything with them into cyberspace: their social conditioning, their hard-won truths, and all their baggage.

  Women’s WIRE, as a rare example of female-dominated cyberspace, was proof. Where The WELL had been a free-for-all for jocular intellectuals, a Wild West rewarding conversationalists willing to own their own words and stick to their guns, dialing Women’s WIRE felt like visiting another country. With its inverse user demographics—90 percent female, 10 percent male—the tone of conversation was widely deferential and supportive. The WELL “had a lot of alpha males posturing,” Nancy says. But the women on her service “were so polite and nice to each other that sometimes we had to stir it up in order for it to be an exciting conversation.”

  WORKING ON A ROCKET SHIP

  Nancy Rhine and Ellen Pack were running Women’s WIRE out of their South San Francisco office the first time they saw the Web. It was 1994, the year the first Web browser, Mosaic, ceded to the successor, Netscape, which would soon become the standard for early true believers on both coasts. Like AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, and Delphi, all subscription services cut off from the hypertext Web, Women’s WIRE was at a crossroads: they could hope that their existing service could sustain itself, or they could redesign everything for the Web.

  This wasn’t the obvious choice it might seem to be today. The Web was clearly important, but it was risky. Staking a claim there would mean abandoning the thousands of paying subscribers they already had. And in the dial-up days, Women’s WIRE was beholden to nobody save its subscribers. Nancy
explains to me that it had been possible, before the Web, to run a successful business and a successful community at the same time. In fact, one reinforced the other. “The original model had been how long people stay online,” she tells me. “You wanted community because that kept people engaged.” It’s worth noting that modern-day social media giants have come around to this perspective, albeit on a much larger scale; when Facebook introduced private groups in 2010, it was to capitalize on the deeper ties forged in interest-specific online communities, which have become engines of user engagement for the platform. As New York magazine put it in 2017, “Facebook is good because it creates community; community is good because it enables Facebook.”

  Back in the early Women’s WIRE days, however, Ellen was less inclined to see the inherent value of online community—sustainable as it may have been, it was not lucrative. She’d come to Silicon Valley with an MBA, and saw Women’s WIRE as a startup like any other. She was keen to build something larger than a carpeted second-floor walk-up in South San Francisco could contain. In 1994, the year the Web broke, Ellen started rooting around the valley for venture capital to lay the groundwork for a Web play. “I always wanted to make this into something big,” she tells me.