CHAPTER 3
The Global Electronic Village

Persecution of psychedelics users has fostered the development of a cyberian computer
subculture. De Groot is a model citizen of the cyber community and dedicates his time,
money, and equipment to fostering the Global Electronic Village.'' One system he developed,
which takes up almost half his apartment, is an interface between a ham radio and a
computer.
He eats an ice cream from the shop downstairs as he explains how his intention in
building the interface was to provide ham radio operators with access to the electronic mail
services of UNIX systems to other sites on the Internet. My terminal is up twenty-four hours
a day. It was never done before, it was fun to do, it gave me the ability to learn about
electronic mail, and it provided a service.'' No profit? "You could make money off of it, I
suppose, but my specific concern was to advance the state of the radio art.''
It's hard to keep in mind that young men like de Groot are not just exploring the
datasphere but actively creating the networks that make it up. This is not just a hobby or
weekend pastime; this is the construction of the future.
De Groot views technology as a way to spread the notion of interconnectedness. We
don't have the same distance between us anymore. Camcorders have changed everything.
Whenever something happens in the world, chances are that someone's around with a
camcorder to tape it. We're all neighbors in a little village, as it were.'' Even de Groot's more
professional endeavors have been geared toward making computers more accessible to the
community at large. The success of the cyberian paradigm is dependent on regular people
learning to work with the technologies developed by vanguard, countercultural entrepreneurs
and designers.
If you don't adhere to the new paradigm then you're not going to survive.'' De Groot
puts down his ice cream spoon to make the point. "It's sink or swim. People who refuse to
get involved with computers now are hurting themselves, not anybody else. In a very loose
sense, they are at a disadvantage survival-wise. Their ability to have a good-quality life will
be lessened by their reluctance to get with the program.''
Getting with the program is just a modem away. This simple device literally plugs a
user in to cyberspace. Cyberspace, or the datasphere, consists of all the computers that are
attached to phone lines or to one another directly. If a computer by itself can be likened to a
cassette deck, having a modem turns it into a two-way radio. After the first computer nets
between university and military research facilities went up, scientists and other official
subscribers began to post'' their most recent findings to databases accessible to everyone on
the system. Now, if someone at, say, Stanford discovers a new way to make a fission reactor,
scientists and developers around the world instantly know of the find. They also have a way
of posting their responses to the development for everyone to see, or the option of sending a
message through electronic mail, or "E-mail,'' which can be read only by the intended
recipient. So, for example, a doctor at Princeton sees the posting from Stanford. A list of
responses and commentary appears after the Stanford announcement, to which the Princeton
doctor adds his questions about the validity of the experiment. Meanwhile, he E-mails his
friends at a big corporation that Stanford's experiment was carried out by a lunatic and that
the corporation should cease funding that work.
The idea of networking through the computer quickly spread. Numerous public
bulletins boards sprang up, as well as information services like Compuserve and Prodigy.
Information services are large networks of databanks that a user can call through the modem
and access everything from stock market reports and Macintosh products updates to back
issues of newspapers and Books in Print. Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, an early but
unprecentedly user-friendly way of moving through files, has been working for the past
decade or so on the ultimate database, a project aptly named Xanadu.'' His hope is to
compile a database of--literally--everything, and all of the necessary software to protect
copyrights, make royalty payments, and myriad other legal functions. Whether or not a
storehouse like Xanadu is even possible, the fact that someone is trying, and being supported
by large, Silicon Valley businesses like Autodesk, a pioneer in user-interface and cyberspace
technology, legitimizes the outlook that one day all data will be accessible from any
node--any single computer--in the matrix. The implications for the legal community are an
endless mire of property, privacy, and information issues, usually boiling down to one of the
key conflicts between pre- and postcyberian mentality: Can data be owned, or is it free for
all? Our ability to process data develops faster than our ability to define its fair use.
The best place to watch people argue about these issues is on public bulletin boards
like the Whole Earth `Lectronic Link. In the late 1970s, public and private bulletin board
services sprang up as a way for computer users to share information and software over phone
lines. Some were like clubs for young hackers called kødz kidz, who used BBSs to share
anything from Unix source code to free software to recently cracked phone numbers of
corporate modems. Other BBSs catered to specialized users' groups, like Macintosh users,
IBM users, software designers, and even educators. Eventually, broad-based bulletin board
services, including the WELL, opened their phone lines for members to discuss issues, create
E-mail addresses, share information, make announcements, and network personally, creatively,
and professionally.
The WELL serves as a cyber-village hall. As John Barlow explains, In this silent
world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a
thing of words alone. You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not
what either they or their physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and
discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules.''
The discussions on the WELL are organized into conferences. These conferences are
broken down into topics, which themselves are made up of individual responses. For example,
there's a conference called EFF, which is dedicated to discussing issues related to Electronic
Frontiers Foundation, a group that is attempting to develop legal frameworks for
cyberactivities. If you browse the topics on the EFF conference, you will see a list of the
conversations now going on. (Now is a tricky word. It's not that users are continuously
plugged in to the conference and having a real-time discussion. Conversations occur over a
period of days, weeks, or months.) They might be about Copyright and Electronic Mail,'' or
"Sentencing of Hackers,'' or even Virtual Sex!''
Once you pick a topic in which to participate, you read an opening statement that
describes the topic or issues being discussed. It may be as simple as, I just read The
Turbulent Mirror by Briggs and Peat. Is anyone interested in discussing the implications of
chaos math on Western philosophy?'' or, "I'm thinking of buying a hydroponic system for
growing sensemilla. Any advice?'' Other interested participants then enter their responses, one
after the other, which are numbered in the order entered. Conversations can drift into related
or unrelated areas or even lead to the creation of new topics. All participants are required to
list themselves by name and user identification (userid) so that someone may E-mail a
response directly to them rather than post it on the topic for everyone to see. The only rule on
the WELL is, you own your own words,'' which means that anything someone posts onto the
WELL remains his own property, so to speak, and that no one may exploit another user's
words without permission.
But the WELL is not a dry, computery place. Once on the WELL, there's a tangible
feeling of being plugged in'' to a cyber community. One develops a cyber personality
unencumbered by his looks and background and defined entirely by his entries to topics. The
references he makes to literature, the media, religion, his friends, his lifestyle, and his
priorities create who he is in cyberspace. One can remain on the sidelines watching others
make comments, or one can dive in and participate.

Cyberspace as Chaos
The danger of participation is that there are hundreds or even thousands of potentially
critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be challenged, a lie will be uncovered,
plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth serum. Violations of cyber morality or
village ethics are immediately brought to light and passed through the circuits of the entire
datasphere at lightning speed. A store with a bad returns policy that cheats a WELL user has
its indiscretions broadcast globally within minutes. Information about crooked politicians,
drug conspiracies, or other news stories that might be censored from sponsored media outlets
finds an audience in cyberspace.
The cyber community has been made possible by the advent of the personal computer
and the telecommunications network. Other major contributors include television and the
satellite system as well as the appearance of consumer-grade video equipment, which has
made it more than likely for police indiscretions to occur within shooting range of a
camcorder. The cyber revolution has made the world a smaller place. Just as a company
called TRW can expose anyone's economic history, links like the WELL, UseNet, or even
CNN can expose TRW, too. Access to cyberspace--formerly reserved for the military or
advanced scientific research--now alters the context in which many individuals relate to the
world.
Members of the Global Village see themselves as part of a fractal event. The virtual
community even incorporates and promotes many of the principles of chaos mathematics on
social and political levels. A tiny, remote voice criticizing the ethics of a police action or the
validity of an experimental result gets heard and iterated throughout the net.
Ultimately, the personal computer and its associated technologies may be our best
access points to Cyberia. They even serve as a metaphor for cyberians who have nothing to
do with computers but who look to the net as a model for human interaction. It allows for
communication without the limitations of time or space, personality or body, religion or
nationality. The vast computer-communications network is a fractal approach to human
consciousness. It provides the means for complex and immediate feedback and iteration, and
is even self-similar in its construction, with giant networks mirroring BBSs, mirroring users'
own systems, circuit boards, and components that themselves mirror each participant's own
neural biocircuitry. In further self-similarity, the monitors on some of these computers depict
complex fractal patterns mirroring the psychedelics-induced hallucinations of their designers,
and graphing--for the first time--representations of existence as a chaotic system of feedback
and iteration.
The datasphere is a hardwiring of the planet itself, providing ways of distributing and
iterating information throughout the net. To join in, one needs only to link up. Or is it really
that easy?

Arbitrating Anarchy
David Gans, host of The Grateful Dead Hour (the national radio program that our
Columbia University hacker taped a few nights ago) is having a strange week. The proposal
he's writing for his fourth Grateful Dead book is late, he still has to go into the studio to
record his radio show, his band rehearsal didn't get out until close to dawn, and something
odd is occurring on the WELL this morning. Gans generally spends at least several hours a
day sitting in his Oakland studio apartment, logged onto the WELL. A charter member of the
original WELL bulletin board, he's since become host of dozens of conferences and topics
ranging from the Grateful Dead to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. In any given week,
he's got to help guide hundreds or even thousands of computer interchanges. But this week
there are even more considerations. An annoying new presence has made itself known on the
WELL: a user calling himself Stink.''
Stink showed up late one night in the Grateful Dead conference, insisting to all the
Deadheads that Jerry Garcia stinks.'' In the name of decorum and tolerance, the Deadheads
decided among themselves to ignore the prankster. "Maybe he'll get bored and go away,''
Gans repeatedly suggested. WELLbeings enjoy thinking of the WELL as a loving, anarchic
open house, and resort to blocking someone out completely only if he's truly dangerous.
Stealing passwords or credit card numbers, for example, is a much more excommunicable
deed than merely annoying people with nasty comments.
But today David Gans's electronic mailbox is filled with messages from angry female
WELLbeings. Stink has begun doing sends''--immediate E-mail messages that appear on the
recipient's screen with a "beep,'' interrupting whatever she is doing. People usually use sends
when they notice that a good friend has logged on and want to experience a brief, live''
interchange. No one "sends'' a stranger. But, according to Gans's E-mail, females logged on to
the WELL are receiving messages like Wanna dance?'' or "Your place or mine?'' on their
screens, and have gotten a bit irked. Anonymous phone calls can leave a girl feeling chilly, at
the very least. This is somehow an even greater violation of privacy. From reading the girl's
postings, he knows her name, the topics she enjoys, how she feels about issues; if he's a
hacker, who knows how much more he knows?
David realizes that giving Stink the silent treatment isn't working. But what to do? He
takes it to the WELL staff, who, after discussing the problem with several other distressed
topic hosts, decide to put Stink into a problem shell.'' Whenever he tries to log on to the
WELL, he'll receive a message to call the main office and talk to a staff member. Until he
does so, he is locked out of the system.
Stink tries to log on and receives the message, but he doesn't call in. Days pass. The
issue seems dead. But topics about Stink and the implications of his mischievous presence
begin to spring up all over the WELL. Many applaud the banishment of Stink, while others
warn that this is the beginning of censorship. How,'' someone asks, "can we call ourselves an
open, virtual community if we lock out those who don't communicate the way we like? Think
of how many of us could have been kicked off the WELL by the same logic?'' What are we,
Carebears?'' another retorts. "This guy was sick!''
David lets the arguments continue, defending the WELL staff's decision-making
process where he can, stressing how many painful hours were spent deliberating on this issue.
Meanwhile, though, he begins to do some research of his own and notices that Stink's last
name--not a common one--is the same as another user of the WELL called Bennett. David
takes a gamble and E-mails Bennett, who tells him that he's seen Stink's postings but that
there's no relation.
But the next day, there's a new, startling addition to a special confession'' conference:
Bennett admits that he is Stink. Stink's WELL account had been opened by Bennett's brother
but never used. Bennett reopened the account and began using it as a joke, to vent his "alter
ego.'' Free of his regular identity, he could be whoever he wanted and act however he dared
with no personal repercussions. What had begun as a kind of thought experiment or acting
exercise had soon gotten out of hand. The alter ego went out of control. Bennett, it turns out,
was a mild-mannered member of conferences like Christianity, and in his regular persona had
even consoled a fellow WELLbeing after her husband died. Bennett is not a hacker-kid; he
has a wife and children, a job, a religion, a social conscience, and a fairly quiet disposition.
He begs for the forgiveness of other WELLbeings and says he confessed because he felt so
guilty lying to David Gans about what had happened. He wants to remain a member of the
cyber community and eventually regain the trust of WELLbeings.
Some WELLbeings believe Bennett and forgive him. Others do not. He just confessed
because he knows you were on to him, David. Good work.'' Some suggest a suspension, or
even a community service sentence: "Isn't there some administrative stuff he can do at the
WELL office as penance?''
But most people just wonder out loud about the strange cyber experience of this
schizoid WELLbeing, and what it means for the Global Village at large. Was Bennett like
this all the time and Stink merely a suppressed personality, or did Cyberia affect his psyche
adversely, creating Stink where he didn't exist before? How vulnerable are the rest of us when
one goes off his virtual rocker? Do the psychology and neurosis of everyday real-life human
interactions need to follow us into cyberspace, or is there a way to leave them behind? Just
how intimate can we get through our computers, and at what cost?