- “i want to make something that makes people fall in love”
- “The WELL”: an internet community from 1985 that operated using modems
- built by steward brand
- stood for The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link
-
At the same time, as Well member Tom Portante once put it, "talking with people you might or might not consider befriending in any other context was its own seduction." You couldn't see what anyone else was wearing or hear what their voices sounded like, but in a way, absent those trappings, the isolated prose revealed something still more intimate.
-
“But then I felt the energies on The Well. It reminded me of the Open Land communes I’d been to in the 1960s. The tribal need is one our culture doesn’t recognize; capitalism wants each of us to live in our own little cubicle, consuming as much as possible. The Well took that need and said, ‘Hey, let’s see what happens if we become a disembodied tribe.‘”
- a place for misfits. That’s who the internet helps bring together / connect
-
Beyond that, McClure believed Mark Ethan Smith was an interesting problem to observe within The Well’s grand experiment. Smith was masterful at reading the system and manipulating it. McClure called her a vibes magician. “We were building a little culture here, and somebody came in and saw how it worked and just played it like an instrument,” he recalls. “Just because she was obnoxious and had strange ideas didn’t mean that she shouldn’t get to play.”
-
But the real magic happened when people wandered outside their usual haunts—when the technical people wandered into the cultural conferences and the literary people became regulars in the Macintosh and Unix and Telecom conferences. The Well parlance for this was to “go over the wall.”
-
Recalls Fig: “We were conditioned to respond to the Community Imperative—the need to build and maintain relationships between people and to preserve the structure that supported those relationships. I also became aware, largely through Tex’s dogged insistence, that those relationships were the only 'product' we had to sell. It became our thing; a living, breathing collaboration that Tex and I could recognize as having real community characteristics. We knew we were making history on some level.”
-
In the process, some people in the Spirituality conference invented "beams"—good vibes, essentially, or, as one person put it, healing prayer sent by request. Beams weren’t a substitute for other therapies, but an augmentation, a way to ask for comfort without having to use the word prayer. The more cynical Well members dismissed beams as a New Agey concoction, but a lot of people believed in the effectiveness of beams the way they believed in the effectiveness of Tylenol.
-
On the other hand, without admitting to an ounce of community spirit Mandel accepted Fig’s invitation to join The Well’s volunteer “Kill” crew. One of the technical problems users frequently ran into was that of the "hung session"; this happened when The Well's computer failed to recognize that a user had disconnected from the service and continued to tie up the line, inflating the user's bill. The Kill crew was a select group of half a dozen or so Unix-savvy power users who monitored the system during off hours. They searched for long idle times, armed with a Kill command that could terminate users’ sessions.
-
” “I used to say about The Well that it was a place where I could pluck the brains of 50 of my best friends before breakfast,” she says. “And it was lunch, dinner, and midnight snack to boot. A feast for the mind and the soul. I’d be in the office, working, and at the same time, posting in conferences, sending email, and having a conversation in Sends. I’d be at home, cooking dinner, and logging on to check what was new. Relationships developed fast and furious, ideas spread like wildfire. I never laughed so hard, argued so passionately, soaked up so many new ideas. The Well made me run on high.""