Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

> Fourteen years on the
> Well has helped me become gracious as well as argumentative.

I'll drink to that.
  

    
I'm reminded of how hard it was to tell people what I did when I legitimized
my scary WELL addiction with a job here in the 90's.  It must have been
even weirder to explain in the 80s.

My family is of Sierra Club backpacker stock, back a century.  As a kid in
the early 50's when nbobdy knew about that stuff, I knew what it was like
to love somethign my classmates couldn't imagine.  So that gave me a 
family metaphor for the obsession.  I remember saying to my 
grandma, "Did you know computers can connect by telephone?  That 
seems boring, but people have created programs that let you use a 
computer and a phone to contact interesting people, and type in remarks
so that anybody in the group can tell the next story.  It's just 
like sitting around a campfire in the mountains and really getting to 
know the people you are hiking with."

It had to be much harder in 1985.  What did you tell people?
  

    
One of my earliest memories of the WELL was when Larry Brilliant
brought Wavy Gravy to the office when the WELL was just opening. It was
coming up on Easter and Wavy made a pithy post: 

Practice resurrection.
  

    
I remember saying we wanted to make a place where interesting people
in the Bay Area (it was dial-up at the time) could talk to one another
using their computers. People seemed to get it.
  

    
I'd never heard of email, or of the Internet, when I joined. I was at
UC Berkeley in 1989, doing a midlife career makeover. The OCF / Open
Computing Facility there was worrying about whether non-CompSci
students like me were welcome, and whether NSF Acceptable Use policies
were violated by a monster called Commercialism.

The CompSci guys I knew -- all-male, back then -- were not too
helpful, with my ignorant tech questions, and my non-tech curiousities,
and then one of them suggested The WELL. 

I spent the next 2 years here, ramping up fast on concepts & techspeak
& the idea of looking up books in foreign libraries as though they
were right next door -- all thanks to The WELL's endless patience and
wonderful good humor.

Then in 1992 we took our family to live in France for a year, and I
asked The WELL about that and it (he/she/they? -- they, I think) said
yes it could be done: I could connect in even from France. So, not just
those foreign libraries "going international" with this new stuff but
me, imagine... 

That took a lot of conceptual mind-bending for me, being on a Lyon
hilltop and having nextdoor neighbors in San Francisco invite me over
for coffee: having to tell them I was so far away. Then, a year later,
saying the reverse online to neighbors in Lyon. The Death of Distance
-- altho we all discovered that while some distances died, with all of
this, others were born. But all very exciting stuff.

If not for matisse and kayo (I'm sure she was here before 1996, I was
too) and a couple of dozen other WELLites, tho, for me it never would
have happened. I was so non-tech it hurts to remember -- still hurts --
and back then they nursed me through all the many complications of my
French connections, including "accents", always with that patience and
good humor.

Full career change for me as a result, too: great WELL help, and
occasional heated discussion, got me into "Internet consulting" and
teaching / lecturing / writing, and investing which got me out of my
previous 9-5+ office life. And last year great community action and
personal venting in a frustrating political year... Thanks for all of
it, WELL.
  

    
Nice story, Jack!  

And Matthew, good to see you here!  fig & hlr mention "Pegleg" above, 
and you appear in a cloud of magenta and silver smoke.  (OK, I take 
responsbility for my internal special effects and set design in this 
partially mutual movie, but I definitely got magenta with a silver lining.)  

Howard, you mention being cultivated by tex, and by seeing mmc as godlike.
I know you all cultivated other newcomers.  Who came through the doors
early on and just had to be a keeper?
  

    
Hinging. I dunno if he's still around. What an original. He was
clearly -- unusual. But he found his way around. And there were flashes
of brilliance in his word salad. 
  

    

> mmc as godlike

Anyone who can train a dragon to do the things he does is definitely
godlike.
  

    
Dooley!  Another silverback from year 1 arrives.
  

    
Wow, how ya doing, Dooley?

Who else was I glad to have as a member? Ramon Sender. Great name,
first off. His warm intelligence came across in his posts and I
remember always feeling comforted that there was at least one person
like that checking in regularly. He brought us Shady, the oracle, who
helped guide us through many trying times. When I got to meet him and
Judy and his accordion, it just confirmed what a cool guy he seemed to
be online.

And anyone who could get humor across without pissing people off was
more than OK in my book. I was glad to have Loca and his Weird
conference around, in its classic original Monty Pythonesque
incarnation. Once it grew fangs, it became more of a worry to my
playground monitor side.

Another unique thing about working at the WELL in those early years,
was that everyone in the workplace was logged throughout the day. When
one of us ran across a posting or conversation that was funny, or
especially interesting, or that represented trouble, they'd react out
loud and soon we'd all be "g"-ing to and "s"-ing to the location of the
remark. You'd get to laugh out loud spontaneously several times a day.

But life wasn't all rosebuds and lollipops - there were the dreaded
Hung Modems to deal with. Modems sucked. Modem manuals and
documentation sucked. Modem advice sucked. Sure, there were answers -
there HAD to be answers. But weeks, months would go by with modem
problems popping up like Wack-a-Mole as we shifted their order in the
phone hunt, rebuilt RS-232 cables, replaced phone cables, recycled and
struck sharply the recalcitrant and infernal contraptions. 

I tried to describe what I was doing to my parents and they were
almost as baffled as when I told them 15 years earlier that I was a
"householder yogi" on the Farm. 

"And what is YOUR son doing now?" Sorry, Mom.
  

    
Correction:

Everyone on the staff was not "logged" throughout the day. They were
logged-IN throughout the day.

I'm so used to using WebCrossing, where I can edit my lousy first
drafts. Maybe it's time to go back to a telnet login with vi.
  

    
Definitely Loca's Weird conf was a funny, funny, fun, warm milestone.
And yeah, Weird grew fangs later, and it wasn't so funny and fun.

Another ghost just drifted in: Artcomtv. Carl. Another original. And
who  could forget Das Casino -- the online and offline versions?
  

    
<35> Who remembers early modem speeds -- <fig>? -- I think I have
something which went 1200bps still sitting on a shelf around here,
somewhere, maybe even slower. The WELL is from life-before-DSL, even
life-before-Web, I tell my kids, and they don't believe me.
  

    
There was a time when the Vax was slower than a 1200 baud modem. You
could log in, go get a cup of coffee, and when you came back, your
first Well screen would finally be loaded. 
  

    

300 baud was my speed reading the Well when I first logged on.  I could
actually read posts as they scrolled up my screen.
  

    
Imagine reading through today's spam quota -- I get hundreds per diem,
now -- at 300. 

Things have gotten better but they've also gotten worse: no spam at
all, back in the 80s.
  

    
I remember that things changed for me when I went from 2400 baud, which 
was as fast as I could read online without having to pause, to something 
faster. At the slower speed, I did tend to read things all the way through 
and be more involved. It was an odd artifact, and I'm sure more speed 
affected other people differently (and I have no desire to return to 2400 
baud - the world has gotten too big).

The big thing for me that was different then was that the medium was 
different. We didn't yet realize how much online community was just 
another adjective-modified of the general wonder of "community". Some 
people thought that being able to involve people from around the world in 
a community opened utopian doors. It didn't. People didn't change. On the 
other hand, the ability to create a discussion around subjects that 
mattered, but for which you could never gather enough people who cared 
passionately into the same room without some special conference and travel 
was a wonder, and still is - I think it explains part of what is so neat 
about blogs today.
  

    
I found my way here in 1990, having been fascinated with the culture of the
Whole Earth deal.   Jon Carroll had hyped the Well in his Chronicle column,
and buying a modem (whatever the hell that was) seemed like a good idea.
After 15 years of nonstop travel in a band bus with a built-in family, I was
finally home and at sea, simultaneously.  And Jon made the idea of virtual
friends very inviting.

The first thing that struck me was how welcoming the Well was.   The second
thing was how smart the people were.   And how original and usual.   Really
early on, matisse invited me to join a bunch of wellites for a nude
exploration of the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium.   I had no idea you
could actually do that.   And the partying wasn't just virtual.   People got
together live.   And I was even supplied with a phrase that described the
experience.   I'd found my tribe.
  

    
Been away on a sort of unanticipated sabbatical but I'm still here too.
I came in through the Grateful Dead door that so many others did.  It
was January 1987.  I'd been on BBSes for three years but nothing really
clicked like the Well when I first logged in.  For one thing, within
about 10 minutes someone named 'tex' was sending me some kind of message
on the screen.  Said he knew me.  Tex?  Oooooh!  One of the Farm folks
I met in 1980 during our ill-fated effort to pull off a serious anti-
nuclear rally in DC.  (Long story there too, it rained buckets and
then three days later the weather was gorgeous for Jerry Falwell's
Washington for Jesus rally, which really ushered in the Reagan era
and the whole mess our country is in now.)

The Deadhead part of the Well is a fascinating story that deserves its
own history at some point.  Many who were not actively part of it knew
about the ferment and the waves of users it brought to the Well, but
unless you were directly participating the sense of building a national
clubroom which had overlaying online and real-life relationships,
conversations and experiences was to me unprecedented and remarkable.
There were so many great times, but the one that stands out clearest
was October 1989, when a bunch of us west coast Wellheads were in a
diner in New Jersey on the off night of the tour, getting ready to
watch the World Series, and suddenly half the people in the room *had*
to log in to find out what was happening back where their families
were dealing with the earthquake.  The Well was the only place to find
out what was happening in near-real-time.

But the Well's Deadhead scene was just one of many exceptionally lively
parts of the mosaic.  The intertwined history with the Coev/Whole Earth
side of things has been underplayed as well, I think.  The proximity
of the two enterprises brought cross-fermentation between them and
in particular provided a context where an extremely broad topical
reach was simply assumed. 

The Well has always been an open system in the sense of information
and people flow with other efforts -- the Deadheads of course, but also
Art Com, Pickle Family Circus, the scavenger hunt, Hackers, Anon Salon,
CompuMentor, and so many others.  And especially EFF.  

EFF is to me an indicator of another key Well characteristic, which is
the devotion to truly free speech, but with enough responsibility built
in that it never quite fell apart.  YOYOW, the spectacular rise and
fall of the anon conference, "tools not rules," and much more.  I'm
constantly amazed at how some basic online patterns were encountered
early on the Well and we often worked out (at extensive and sometimes
excruciating length) all of the dimensions of how to sustain online
conversation and relationships.  

The lessons and experience of all this have been beyond valuable.
Being in Portland all this time, I have been privileged to take a
role that is fairly unusual -- direct participation thanks to frequent
trips to the Bay Area, but distance enough to put some perspective on
all of it.

These days the Well seems a bit like a resort community with a fading
history as a hellraising frontier town.  I'm exceedingly thankful it
(we) have all gotten this far with a system that is still home to
a vibrant community/network/whatever.  I've often wished we could
bottle whatever essence it was that has made this such a rich and
quirky and at times aggravating but always enlightening experience.
But in the end, borrowing Bill Graham's maxim about the Grateful Dead,
we aren't the best at what we do, we're the only ones who do what we do.
  

    
"And how original and UNusual", dammit.

I guess it's appropriate that my first post here has a typo that has me
saying the opposite of what I intended.




"These days the Well seems a bit like a resort community with a fading
 history as a hellraising frontier town."

Of course.  For me, it's now a tool I use to organize my social life, and
it's been the medium in which I've met some of my best friends.   It's
become mundane in a good way.
  

    
<rik> slipped, but it turns out the end of my post ties right in

I'm a representative of both those threads too - the Whole Earth one
and the Dead one.  One thing they have in common is both brought folks
who already had experience with weaving together the embodied and
disembodied, together and apart, simultaneously episodic and continuous
relationship.

>[Coev/Whole Earth] in particular provided a context where an
extremely broad topical reach was simply assumed. 

I think the comparable thing the Dead contingent brought was the
assumption of an extremely broad spiritual reach.  Deadheads of the
late '80s and '90s had regular practical experience with ecstatic
community.  But it was also years of great influx, transition, and
change for the audience - it wasn't just the "60's in a bottle". 

Come to think of it, the same was true for WER.  In both cases, the
people who came here with those backgrounds had a practical problem
going on with the "tradition", if you will, that they came from.

And so they weren't here just idly chatting, they were here working
out the next phase of a functioning community-equality-synchonicity
system that existed elsewhere.
  

    
I don't know about that, Phred. You tell me whether these groups
accomplish utopian -- or at least powerfully positive social ends -- or
not:

http://www.rheingold.com/vc/digital-comm.html

(The Well ought to apply for this some  year)
  

    
I mean, who would have imagined, back in 1985, HIV education
communities in Uganda, cancer support communities in Germany, Japanese
textile crafts communities, and all the other prize winners -- which we
culled with difficulty from a list of hundreds? Literally every
continent but Antarctica. Utopia is "nowhere," but it's clear that
people use the ability to connect with each other online to do a lot of
things in the real world beyond chit-chat.
  

    
great to hear this stuff, folks.
i came from the bbs world, too and had heard about the well,
read the book synopsis in wired maybe?
anyway, tnf told me to get my ass on down here to sign up so i did.

being an east coaster in geography only, i loved being in touch with the bay
area.

the folks here really helped me get going with picospan, especially
pellmell.

as long as the well is here, i'll be here.
  

    
For me, Howard's arrival was a bump in the road.  I had already sold a
couple of articles to Kevin Kelly when the ship changed captains.  So,
I had to start over again and I lost a couple of those sales.

My experience with BBSes was just the opposite of the basic
assumptions made in #4.  What I saw of BBSes 1984-1994 was a LOCAL
focus because telephone billing made local calls "free."  In the town
of Lansing, Michigan, admittedly the state capital, but only 250,000
its tri-county region, we had 20 to 30 BBSes, all of them with several
interests, none of them to my knowledged, focussed on just one thing,
but all were limited to the dial-up locality.

One of the seminal boards was "Political Forum" BBS, run by our state
senator, Bill Sederburg of East Lansing.  You can read some of the
archives here http://www.textfiles.com/virus/virs.vir 
Dr. Bill Sederburg is now the President of Utah Valley State College
and Dr. Lawrence Kestenbaum is now the clerk for Washtenaw County (Ann
Arbor) Michigan.  

I touted Bill Sederburg's "Political Forum" BBS  for the Millennial
Whole Earth on Electronic Democracy and for other similar articles in
computer magazines such as PC Today.  Even though this does seem to be
a "single purpose" BBS, the fact is that the Virus discussion reflects
other interests.  We had message areas for restaurants, for instance.
In fact, I had the opportunity to cite an idea given to me by one of
the other participants, Dr. Gordon Williams, a psychologist.  We were
discussing online whether or to what extent viruses are "softlife." 
"What is life?" is a topic in the news today.

Of the 20+ other BBSes, most of them had message areas for several
interests.  With BBSing local, people were competing for readership in
several ways.

When I tried out national BBSes -- for instance for libertarians -- I
found more focus.  The time and effort, the long distance charges --
tended to push national BBSes into narrow areas.