History is faster than it used to be. Generations are shorter. The build-up of layers is more rapid; archaeology encompasses events that happened within the life span of the archaeologists.
In 1987, I joined The Well without knowing what I was joining. I didn't understand anything about life online; indeed, I was unaware that life existed online. I knew less about my computer than I knew about my car, and I knew nothing whatsoever about my car. Through sheer sloth (I had a modem because I wanted to work at home because I hated getting dressed in the morning) and luck (I knew a guy named David Gans who said, "The Well, The Well you must get on The Well, The Well"), I became an almost-charter member of the "World's Most Influential Online Community," as Wired magazine famously called it. I, of course, believe that characterization is true because it makes me look important.
The Well I joined does not exist anymore. The Well I joined existed in a universe where no one had opinions about the Internet. In early 1988, when I began talking about The Well with the evangelical passion of a fresh convert, I quite literally did not know how to begin to explain it. Often I never did; often I was treated as a crazed hobbyist, sort of a cross between a ham radio operator and a man who collects Victorian tractor parts.
In my column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I tried to tell amusing stories about online life. I couldn't; by the time I got finished explaining the context, I'd used up my 800 words. Besides, no one cared anyway. All the cheerful emailers and Web surfers of today have now conveniently forgotten the blank expressions and muttered insults of earlier days. Heavy lies the mantle of greatness.
("Heavy lies the mantle ..." Ironic arrogance is one of the dominant modes of online communication; there's a certain tribal boastfulness, like African praise songs. Another dominant mode is heightened self-consciousness and increased access to the secret voices, so that people often offer running commentary on their own prose.)
(Also, it gets very recursive very quickly. The conversation can be like a series of open parentheses; it is never clear whether they all get closed.)
(Anyway.)
What was important to me about The Well was the people I met. What was important about the people I met was that I would never have met them any other way. I also think it was important that they were meeting me. Through an accident of killer apps - the miracle of word processing! - writers were the third major professional group to get online in any numbers, after computer professionals and scientists involved in defense work.
Into the nerd Eden came the snakes of the liberal arts. They brought with them lots of disdain (computers were soulless machines and their keepers mere technocrats); they were greeted with similar disdain (writers were fuzzy-brained wishful thinkers stupidly proud of their own gigantic ignorance). The writers brought with them (at least on The Well) classic liberalism, and were met with a fierce libertarianism.
They brought with them a sense of writing as a specialized craft, and were greeted by a whole bunch of recreational typists who could turn a phrase or invent an aphorism as fast as the writers themselves could. It was love at first sight. It turned out that people from both camps understood language as music; it turned out that people from both camps understood online conversation as a kind of jazz. It turned out that both groups were tuned to the idiocies and quirks of popular culture, and loved to see what happened when symbols clashed. It turned out that both groups felt profoundly alienated from the mainstream, and had felt that way since childhood.
One of my first friends online was, like me, a voracious consumer of media and literature; like me, he found that he had a knack for the sort of improvisational writing that The Well rewarded. Like me, he had grown up in Southern California, in an otherworldly suburb, in an atmosphere of genteel dysfunction. Like me, he had discovered a way to market his native cleverness. He was (again, like me) restless, tended toward fits of depression, was almost obsessively heterosexual. We were different in two ways: He was 22 years younger than I was, and he was a computer programmer.
Writers and programmers (and musicians, it turned out) tended to come from a certain fringe of society. They tended to spend too much time in their brains. They welcomed the online life as a way of overcoming certain face-to-face fears. They were profoundly distrustful of commercial hype, impulsively generous to friends in trouble, frequently too arrogant, frequently too shy.
I understand these are generalizations; they nevertheless reflect my experience. It is my belief that shocks of recognition were as common as line noise on the early Well. In any event, it was true for me. I had found the people I never knew I was looking for. This was my America, my new-found land. I developed a theory why this was true, a theory about language.
Writers use language as a tool, to make things happen, to evoke tears or outrage or laughter. Programmers use language as a tool too, to make machines work, to tell a very stupid box how to do very smart things. Both groups understood viscerally how important language was. Both developed ways of thinking that were useful in their toolmaking; these ways of thinking were almost eerily complementary. We acted as checks on each other's magical thinking.
Easy generalizations about the nature of media, so dear to libertarians everywhere, were effectively shot down in online conversations. That scene in Annie Hall, with Marshall McLuhan appearing from behind the sign, was repeated online so often that it became a cliché: "Well, actually I work for that newspaper, and decisions are just not made like that."
Easy generalizations about the nature of hackers, so dear to journalists everywhere, were just as effectively shot down, and in the process a lot of sheltered writers became aware of certain truths about security and surveillance and the reality of paranoia. In later years, when the Internet became an Issue and the low-level ignorance and fear about it became a staple assumption of the evening news, the trust formed in these casual conversations helped form a coalition that brought a measure of sanity to discussions of encryption, obscenity, and the other hot-button issues of the Net.
We were all nerds; that was the truth of it. The club was suddenly open again, and the numbers swelled. An important subset of America society had found, in an utterly literal way, a common language. The Well was a place where the language was found - there may have been other places, but I didn't go there. It was the only club I ever found where I felt as though I truly belonged.
It's all changed now - the nature of Web-based technology makes rapid conversation more difficult while providing an easy platform for meandering monologs, so the tough part of online interaction - the listening - is less rewarded. Even The Well is not the same, with portions of the community splitting off into River or E-Minds for sundry reasons, many of them compelling. I have no real opinions about the future; I feel privileged to have been around during the early years of a great society.
I have some lovely potshards. Wanna see? Right, some other time....
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
