Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

A couple of things came together at once -- and I attribute these to
The Well, as much as to Al Gore.

I sold half a dozen articles about "electronic democracy" "online
government" and so on, based on early products such as StateNet and
Hanna Information Systems, as well those states that had BBSes of
various kinds, such as Florida.  I was a delegate to the 1991 White
House Conference on Libraries and Information Services.  I interviewed
Dr. Michael Nelson, Vinton Cerf, and three or four other people whom I
would not have known to search out, but for my interactions here.

Then, one dark 5:00 pm night in January 1995, coming home with NPR on
the car radio, I heard Newt Gingrich announce Thomas.  I knew my work
was done.
  

    
Michael, you're right that I should not have generalized (NEVER
generalize, I tell my children) about BBS culture. In fact, Art Kleiner
wrote about some great diversity among BBS in the first edition of the
Software Catalog. Yet, when I attended BBScon, later in the Eighties,
the overwhelming vibe was one of hobbie boards and, increasingly,
access to growing libraries of software.

I attended four meetings of the Electronic Networking Association
while I had the prestige of the WELL behind me. Those conferences
allowed me to meet other people in similar roles to mine. We showed one
another our scars and told our uplifting stories. We shared our
visions of where our attempts to channel social interaction through
technology would take us and the world. 

This week I'm working on pulling together an online community of
practice around the topic, Feeding Ourselves Sustainably. The aim is to
improve community leadership skills in the developing world. I'm also
planning online dialogues for civic input on the topic of a new airport
for San Diego, and working on a proposal for online forums to support
retired doctors coming back to work in free clinics.

What I learned here about people and groups and onscreen dialogue have
continued to be very practical in my work. I can always point to the
six years of concentrated immersion in the WELL's soup o' ideas as a
unique and precious experience. It matters a lot to know what we all
discovered together when you're asking someone to front the money for
an online community venture that will last more than a year.
  

    
I hope you'll share links to those when they're up and running, fig.
  

    
fig, are you hooking up with the various Earth Institutes around the
country?
  

    
The links to the organizations were included in the intro post by
Gail, early in this topic. Not all of them include the parts I'm
involved with  at this time. 

And Hi, Sharon Lynne. No, I haven't hooked up with the Earth
Institutes, but they would be a natural for me. Thanks.

Ms. "slf" - you were one of the stalwarts when I was here. Just want
to throw some appreciation your way for hanging tough and being part of
the conversation, however circular it might have been.

Ten years ago, when Katie Hafner was working on her article about the
WELL for Wired, she and I had a couple of long sessions during which
she encouraged me to ramble on with stories and facts and not-so-humble
opinions. Only a small portion made the cut for the article and the
subsequent book. Which is probably for the best. I was kind of
embarrassed to see my stilted farewell messages included intact in the
book. Let's just say that my last year working at the WELL was not my
finest hour in terms of happiness or sanity.

I often wonder how things might have been if we'd had enough business
knowledge to find our own new owners to buy out Point and NETI at
around Year Five. It could have spared us all a lot of controversy and
stress. I might not have felt like I had to quit. But - and here's the
paradox - the WELL may not have been any "better" for it.

No one has ever gotten rich from the WELL, though Bruce Katz may have
actually profited from owning it and selling it. But he was already
rich.
  

    
> There was KJ, who was, I recall, rather caustic online

KJ had already been one round with cancer, which was thought to be in
remission when, in '93, I decided I wanted to spend a few days in the 
Bay Area and asked if I could spend a few nights on her couch.

I'd had in mind to just walk about, but instead she acted as my personal
tour guide for the entire time I was there, making sure that I hit all 
the high points.

Maybe she was always hyper like that, or maybe she was trying to fit a 
lifetime into the year that, as it turned out, she had left.

About the same time that the recurrence of a tumor was diagnosed, I was
deeply involved, along with <lisa>, Lisa's Doug, <dpd>, <kline>, <jax>, 
<sumi>, and one or two others in getting the <rockies.> conference ready 
for launch, and either didn't hear about it or didn't process the 
information until she was near death.  That, combined with the results 
of the '94 election, which put Newt Gingerich in the driver's seat, had
a lot to do with my giving up the "wuwei" account for what turned out 
to be about a six-month break from the Well.
  

    
Oh, well, thank you, Mr. Cliff. :-)
  

    
I go back to the earliest days of the Well, but not as a member. I knew
<slf>, <bandy>, <booter>, <fair>, <crunch>, a few others (who am I
forgetting? Were Hugh Daniels and Eric Hughes members?) in 1985 from
social, work, and hacking circles, and got regular reports about
goings-on, but had the fixed idea that the Well was basically a
hippie-granola-New Age-Grateful Dead BBS, and well, what with all of
Usenet and ARPANET out there, what was the point?  (And I was in a
severely anti-hippie phase then, as well. I mean, I still am, but I try
to be nice.)

Erik <fair>, who I knew from UNIX circles c. 1982-83, became my
office-mate at Livermore Lab in 1985, and he dragged me to an early WOP
at Gate 5, and I met a whole bunch of people, notably <dhawk>, and it
was a lively and challenging crowd, but I still didn't sign up.

A couple of years later I met <jef>, <shibumi>, <pozar>, and some of
that crowd, when <shibumi> came to work for me at IntelliGenetics in
'91 or '92 or so. Well membership was again offered, but rebuffed!

I joined Table Talk in '96 when it was new, watched with approval when
Salon acquired the Well (it seemed at the time to be a guarantee of
financial stability). So when Table Talk went pay-only in August 2001 I
sent in my $$ and was amused to see that it included Well membership,
and I finally bowed to the inevitable. I have logged in and posted
essentially every single day since 8/01, and set as my goal to rise to
the top of the Lurkometer. And I finally met <fig> at a launch party
for his book HOSTING WEB COMMUNITIES (when was that exactly?) and it is
good to hear his old stories from the early days.
  

    
re: 55 -- Ms. "slf" - you were one of the stalwarts when I was here.
Just want to throw some appreciation your way ... 

I go through the Eros conference and imagine what she has scribbled.
Seriously, though, it is interesting to see a regular like SLF have
scribbled posts in some conf or other, blushable or not.  I wonder if
they had some insight that antiquated the old truth, or if they were
obsessive and found a typo, or if they regretted calling an idiot a
moron, or what.

... and moving right along, allow me to drop the name "Bob Bickford." 
  

    
Harry Henderson
  

    
Kinda bad form, there, mercury.  
  

    
I was living in Austin, subscribing to  and reading Coevolution
Quarterly = Whole Earth Review, wanting to be part of that community,
but it was a million miles away as far as I was concerned. I was also
avoiding computers that friends and relatives dangled before me ("you'd
be really GOOD at this!"), seeing computers as glorified slide rules
and seeing myself as a devoted non-techie... a writer, dang it, not a
gearhead! But I got sucked into technology various ways, and the
biggest way was in the back pages of the WELL, where there were posts
about a Whole Earth BBS. When we finally bought one of the early PCs
with a 300 baud modem, I told my wife I was going to dial into the WELL
and join. You're out of your mind, she said, and we dropped it for a
while... but eventually I logged on, made some idiotic posts, and met
Gans, who mentioned he had a copy of an album I'd lost in the shuffle,
Autosalvage, and sent me a tape (with a performance by his band Crazy
Fingers on side B). I also ran into Mike Godwin, who I knew through the
Austin BBS community at "Johnny Mnemonic." He was mnemonic on the
WELL; told me he had a job with a new nonprofit, EFF. I immediately
looked into it, found the EFF conference when it formed, and recognized
what was up (I'd read the transcription in Harper's of the hacker
discussion that Barlow had put together in a private conference). Steve
Jackson posted that he was going to have a meeting in Austin to talk
about EFF, maybe start an alpha chapter, and I showed up, joined the
Board of Directors... and those two moves, joining the WELL and getting
involved with EFF, set the direction for my life and career
thereafter.

I joined the Whole Earth conference and started talking with Howard,
looking for an opportunity to write something that would actually
appear in the magazine. I was aware of Factsheet Five via Bruce
Sterling, and found the F5 conference, started posting there, too.
Gareth Branwyn invited contributions for the 7 day issue of Going Gaga,
an issue comprised of pieces submitted over a week's time;
coincidentally Desert Storm broke out around then, and I wrote a piece
about my ambivalence re. that and other wars. Mark Frauenfelder asked
me to be an editor at bOING bOING. I proposed a Mondo 2000 conference
and set that up as cohost with R.U. Sirius... which led to a few pieces
published in Mondo. I met Paco Nathan through bOING bOING and the
WELL, and we started FringeWare, Inc., and published Fringe Ware
Review, which was modeled on bOING bOING and Whole Earth Review....

The WELL was a big part of my life over the years. I've hosted several
conferences here. I was a curator of the WELL gopher with Matisse
Enzer and Eric Theise, and I've done the tips report and hosted
Inkwell.vue. I've developed close friendships with several folks, and
I've been engaged in flame wars with others. At some point the flames
predominated so I stopped posting much outside the conferences I host. 
Somehow we all seemed really tense for a while; I'm tempted to dig
back in and see who's there now and what's happening.

During one of my bouts of inattention Tom Mandel learned that he was
dying, and I never knew about it until it was too late. Tom had
mentored me a bit when I first joined the WELL, and I'm bummed that I
didn't have a chance to say goodbye.

I suppose a lot of us have moved on to other venues, and that's too
bad. The WELL is still a great city.
  

    
Mercury, I imagine there's a lot of curiosity among a lot of people
about who has scribbled what and why. One of the things I've really
enjoyed about these various 20-year retrospectives is the ability to
look at the past without getting sucked into it and refighting old
battles, and I certainly plan to do my part in keeping it that way. 
  

    
very gracious response, sharon.
  

    
Yes, nicely said.
  

    
I was living in Bolinas on the Mesa just down the road from Cliff and Anita
when I first got on the WELL via a 2400 baud modem and an Apple //e.  I
still have that old Apple //e and the Profile Hard drive which probably has
a lot of transcripts of those early WELL sessions.  But finding it and
firing it up would have to be for a day when I have a lot of time on my
hands (not too soon!).  I did a couple of reviews, with Cliff's help, on the
BPI Accounting System and on Appleworks which I used for it's communications
program to access the WELL.

I lived on the Tennessee and Wisconsin Farms and have mixed feelings about
that whole era.  There was a great feel to the vibes there and I went from
being a bachelor degreed urban planner to a farmer/carpenter/oilfield
roughneck.  At the same time, I spent some time in Winters, CA working on
David Katz Odyssey Orchards Farm and got to hang around with J Baldwin some.

I remember tearing down a barn with him and every aspect of his existence
being some kind of object lession, like the time I was driving the salvage
truck down a deeply rutted road and him telling me to keep my thumbs pointed
up in case the steering wheel suddenly jerked around.

I hope Jon is right about the tension cease fire thing.  The WELL is an
enlightened place and it's also a dark alleyway.  It would be nice if folks
loosened up a bit and weren't so hypercritical.

Glad you're contributing to this, slf.
  

    
The reviews, I forgot to mention, were for the Whole Earth Software Review.
Like Jon, I still have my collection of Coevolution Quarterlies which take
up one full shelf on my bookshelf.  The bookshelf is in our guest room and I
wonder if our visitors sometimes persue those wonderful old magazines.


Cliff, where can we find the "Feeding Ourselves Sustainably" community you
mention that you're pulling together this week?
  

    
Hey, Paul. Feeding Ourselves Sustainably is starting up on the Berkana
Exchange (www.berkanaexchange.org). It's still in the formative
stages. 

Hey, that was a good tip about keeping your thumbs outside the
steering wheel on a rutted road. I remember someone telling me that on
the Farm. 

The Anita that Paul referred to was my first wife, probably never
mentioned before on the WELL. I rarely posted anything about my
personal life on the WELL. (You're welcome.)

It's a remarkable thing to have a record of relationship and personal
growth like this, complete with the rights to scribble your personal
record. We all witnessed the changes we were going through and, in many
cases, the changes in our personalities and attitudes. I haven't done
any reading in Archives lately, but a few years ago I dropped in and
read some of the topics from the 80s and found them to be as quaint and
dated in a cyberspace way as reading letters written during the Civil
War. 

Sharon Lynne THEN is certainly not Sharon Lynne NOW, but thank Gopod
that's also true of me and most of us. It took some years before the
WELL emerged from our collective illusion that it was a private
conversation where we could post outrageous stuff under our real names.
Once it became a station on the Internet, it seemed to adopt what
became the Internet social standard where you could only be uninhibited
if you were posting under an alias.

And that's why they call 'em The Good Ol' Days.
  

    
I guess I came in around year 5, and those discussions about whether
to offer an <anon> option were still going on.  That's one of the
fascinating things I find about the evolution of the internet.  The
WELL came down on the side of "you own your own words" and "real names
required," while the rest of the world went pretty much for "we own
your words" and an <anon> free-for-all.
  

    
Personally, I don't feel that connecting to the Internet was a major
factor, though it's possible that the group experience, for lack of a
better term, changed around the same time. It really does amaze me the
sorts of things people talked about freely at that point. 
  

    
Conversely, the ability to telnet into the Well, and then to do so without
an hourly surcharge for the connections, made a huge difference for those
of us not located in the bay area, and gradually transformed it from a
predominately regional system to a system with members all over the world,
anywhere internet service reaches, although still with a concentration
around its home base.

A demographic some might find surprising is that there's long been another
knot of Well members on the eastern seaboard, in and around NYC, since
before telnet access was possible, presumably using Tymnet then the CSN 
Packet Network.  (I mostly used CSN's network at first, since I was a 
CompuServe member before joining the Well, but I also made my share of 
long distance calls to Sausalito.)
  

    
ooooops!  slipped twice
  

    
I think that one of the major watersheds was jeffreyp and cynsa's genx
conference.   The hippie/beatnik/deadhead hegemony had been a bit of an
irritation factor amongst some of the younger users just prior to the
explosion of the Worldwide Web, and the genx conference gave them a place of
their own, which they expanded upon as time progressed.   But it seemed to
me that Well culture fractured along age lines at that point.
  

    
The switch to free telnet access happened around the same time that the
<rockies.> conference launched, and no doubt had something to do with its 
early success.  Suddenly we were spending hours online and not worrying 
about the meter, at least not at the Well's end.  (Most ISP's still had 
hourly charges then.)

Easier access and growing fame also meant that people were hearing about
the Well through non-personal vectors -- books, articles, etc. -- and
venturing in without some preexisting social connection, more often than
had previously been the case at any rate.  Getting people oriented quickly
took on even greater importance, and is something the Well has
collectively become very good at.
  

    
I should probably point out that "telnet" is no longer recommended, for
security reasons.  Instead, it's better to use the "ssh" protocol, if you
want the PicoSpan command-line interface (and @well.com email, and your
own web directory, and use of the "extract" search tool).