The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 103

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Brand turned the idea into something grander: creating the world’s most stimulating online community where people could discuss anything they wanted. “Let’s just have a conversation and get the smartest people in the world,” he suggested, “and let them figure out whatever they want to talk about.”⁵ Brand came up with a name, The WELL, and reverse-engineered an acronym for it: the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link. A playful apostrophe, he later said, was “always worth having in a name.”⁶

Brand championed a concept, abandoned by many later virtual communities, that was critical to making The WELL a seminal service. The participants could not be totally anonymous; they could use a handle or pseudonym, but they had to provide their real name when they joined, and other members could know who they were. Brand’s credo, which popped up on the opening screen, was “You own your own words.” You were accountable for what you posted.

Like the Internet itself, The WELL became a system designed by its users. By 1987 the topics of its online forums, known as conferences, ranged from the Grateful Dead (the most popular) to UNIX programming, from art to parenting, aliens to software design. There was minimal hierarchy or control, so it evolved in a collaborative way. That made it both an addictive experience and a fascinating social experiment. Whole books were written about it, including ones by the influential tech chroniclers Howard Rheingold and Katie Hafner. “Just being on The Well, talking with people you might not consider befriending in any other context, was its own seduction,” Hafner wrote.⁷ In his book Rheingold explained, “It’s like having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are.”⁸ When Rheingold discovered that his two-year-old daughter had a tick in her scalp, he found out how to treat it from a doctor on The WELL before his own physician had called him back.

Online conversations could be intense. A discussion leader named Tom Mandel, who became a central character in Hafner’s book and also helped me and my colleagues at Time manage our online forums, regularly engaged in fiery exchanges, known as flame wars, with other members. “I expressed opinions about everything,” he recalled. “I even started an altercation that dragged half of West Coast cyberspace into an electronic brawl and got myself banished from the WELL.”⁹ But when he revealed he was dying of cancer, they rallied around him emotionally. “I’m sad, terribly sad, I cannot tell you how sad and grief stricken I am that I cannot stay to play and argue with you much longer,” he wrote in one of his last posts.¹⁰

The WELL was a model of the type of intimate, thoughtful community that the Internet used to feature. It still remains, after three decades, a tight-knit community, but it was long ago overtaken in popularity by more commercial online services and then by less communal discussion venues. The widespread retreat into anonymity online has undermined Brand’s creed that people should be accountable for what they say, thus making many online comments less thoughtful and discussions less intimate. As the Internet goes through different cycles—it has been a platform for time-sharing, community, publishing, blogging, and social networking—there may come a time when the natural yearning that humans have for forging trusted communities, akin to corner bars, will reassert itself, and The WELL or startups that replicate its spirit will become the next hot innovation. Sometimes innovation involves recovering what has been lost.

AMERICA ONLINE

William von Meister was an early example of the new frontiersmen who would drive digital innovation beginning in the late 1970s. Like Ed Roberts of Altair, von Meister was a supercharged serial entrepreneur. Fueled by the proliferation of venture capitalists, this breed of innovators threw off ideas like sparks, got an adrenaline rush from risk taking, and touted new technologies with the zeal of evangelists. Von Meister was both an exemplar and a caricature. Unlike Noyce and Gates and Jobs, he did not set out to build companies but instead to launch them and see where they landed. Rather than being afraid of failure, he was energized by it, and his ilk made forgiving failure a feature of the Internet age. A magnificent rogue, he started nine companies in ten years, most of which either crashed or ejected him. But through his serial failures, he helped to define the archetype of the Internet entrepreneur and, in the process, invent the online business.¹¹

Von Meister’s mother was an Austrian countess and his father, a godson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, ran the U.S. division of the German zeppelin company that operated the Hindenburg until its 1937 explosion, and then ran a division of a chemical company until he was indicted for fraud. His style rubbed off on young Bill, born in 1942, who seemed hell-bent on matching his father’s flameouts in flamboyance if not in severity. Growing up in a whitewashed brick mansion known as Blue Chimneys on a twenty-eight-acre estate in New Jersey, he loved escaping to the attic to operate his ham radio and build electronic gadgets. Among the devices he made was a radio transmitter that his father kept in his car and used to signal when he was nearing home from work so that the household staff could prepare his tea.

After a desultory academic career that consisted of dropping into and out of colleges in Washington, DC, von Meister joined Western Union. He made money with a bunch of side ventures, including salvaging some of the company’s discarded equipment, and then launched a service that allowed people to dictate important letters to call centers for overnight delivery. It was successful, but in what became a pattern, von Meister was forced out for spending wildly and not paying any attention to operations.^II

Von Meister was one of the original breed of media entrepreneurs—think Ted Turner rather than Mark Zuckerberg—who lived larger than life and mixed craziness with shrewdness so thoroughly that they became almost indistinguishable. He had a taste for flashy women and fine red wine, race cars and private planes, single-malt Scotch and contraband cigars. “Bill von Meister was not just a serial entrepreneur, he was a pathological entrepreneur,” according to Michael Schrage, who covered him for the Washington Post. “Bill von Meister’s ideas, on average, when you look back at them, don’t seem stupid. But at the time they seemed outlandish. The big risk was he was such a loon that his looniness would get confused with the idea, because they’re so intertwined.”¹²

Von Meister continued to prove adept at coming up with new notions and raising money from venture capitalists, though not at running anything. Among his startups: a bulk telephone routing service for businesses, a restaurant in suburban Washington called McLean Lunch and Radiator that allowed customers to make free long-distance calls from phones at their table, and a service called Infocast that sent information to computers by piggybacking digital data on FM radio signals. Then in 1978, when he had become bored or unwelcome at these ventures, he combined his interests in phones, computers, and information networks to create a service that he called The Source.

The Source linked home computers via telephone lines into a network that offered bulletin boards, message exchanges, news stories, horoscopes, restaurant guides, wine rankings, shopping, weather, airline schedules, and stock quotes. In other words, it was one of the first consumer-oriented online services. (The other was CompuServe, a business-oriented time-sharing network that in 1979 was just venturing into the consumer dial-up market.) “It can take your personal computer anywhere in the world,” proclaimed an early marketing brochure. Von Meister told the Washington Post that it would become a “utility” that would provide information “like water comes out of a faucet.” In addition to piping information into the home, The Source focused on creating community: forums and chat rooms and private file-sharing areas where users could post their own writings for others to download. At the official launch of the service in July 1979 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, the sci-fi writer and pitchman Isaac Asimov proclaimed, “This is the beginning of the Information Age!”¹³

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