å Tuesday, December 1st, 2015

When Stewart Brand decided to take his Whole Earth Catalog digital, he created the WELL (Whole Earth Lectronic Link) and envisioned a self-governing system. In Brand’s view, information could be shared by users more frequently and allowed then to communicate in real time. Unlike the Whole Earth Catalog which was produced a few times a year, the WELL would allow users to communicate as frequently as they wanted or needed too. They would be able to access information more readily than they could from the catalog.

Brand decided that his Lectronic Link would be a self-governing system even though he charged users a subscription fee. The difference between this fee and what the other corporations were offering is that it was not a means for Brand to profit off of consumers. Brand believed that people would be more willing to exchange information through his site if they felt they were a community and a network, instead of workers for a company. I found this to be interesting because eight years ago I found myself being a part of a blogging community called “Shine” which was (and probably still is) a part of Yahoo. I remember being eager to blog as often as I could, to share my thoughts, advice, or great buys with this newfound community. It never felt like a chore to take time out of my day to do this. I believe this is what Brand envisioned when he wanted a self-governing system.

One user stated “The WELL is the online hangout of choice for an incredible array of experts; multimedia artists, musicians, newspaper columnists, neurobiologists, radio producers, futurists, computer junkies. I can contact any of them directly, through email or post a plea for information in a public conference and more often than not be deluged with insights and informed opinions. Most compellingly, the conferences devoted to non-work issues and to fun and nonsense give me a chance to get to know these folks better, and vice versa.” When reading this description, I thought about how Google has become the main search engine for us to get information. The WELL in contrast allowed people to share information with one another, without anyone profiting from it. This is how I think a self-governing system operates.

Turner establishes in this chapter that the innovation of the WeLL was a direct descendant from the ideological and technical framework of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Even though WeLL reflected the anti-authoritarian and technologically ambitious new communalist communities adherence to cybernetic ideals, the WeLL still needed a financial base to function beyond the limitations of its capacity at that time. The subscription support provided by the Dead Head community seemed to underwrite much of WeLL’s continued offerings to the general communities that were it’s original inhabitants – the technologists and journalists and communalist entities from scatter shot communities. I’d like to point out that this dead head influx of money via subscriptions was crucial to supporting the WeLL. This niche fan subculture and community contributed money and intellectual and cultural value to the overall purposes of the conferencing system, and allowed the other, primarily targeted users to continue to participate with free subscriptions. (Fandom as free labor, ahem.)  And it seemed to work – all these different communities under one network – with the ability to interact freely and without fear of restrictions or criticism, which seems to be a blend of the countercultural stance against autocratic rule, and the militarily derived systems theory that Brand and other technological adopters took in and fashioned to their own ends.

The inclusion of the seven design goals of WeLL of page 143 was really interesting , a casual blend of profit and free peer led (driven) experimentation that would establish WeLL’s ethical and technical parameters. That the goal of its self-design is set for early users to determine is really striking – and while it seems altruistic and cool, it signifies that whomever had access to this early iteration of “the web” played a huge role in determining who and how it would function in the future. Suffice to say it makes the reader wonder if the communities that had access – via free or paid subscriptions were really that diverse beyond the eclectic countercultural and technologically ambitious.

In the sense that this system was self-governing, it’s probably apt to assume that the control of self-governance was dictated by a heavy sense of individualism and personal investment in belonging to a very elite and enlightened strata – and that this demographic reflected the typical user. In chapter four we saw evidence that the communalists had developed a new age survival religiosity in response to the nixon era inflation and amping up of cold war tensions. My guess is that they wanted to harness the positive attributes of a technological future without investing in cosigning on the legacy of waging war. The additional publications developed in tandem with the Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly as the prime example for instance, speaks to that spiritual reinvigoration that many of the communalists turned to while mitigating the impending mid-life crises they faced. A liberatory consciousness and attendant right living as detailed in chapter four is what these people were after, and the cybernetic ideals of the WeLL provided these people with a new way to manage the information technology that fused their consciousness. Referring back to the seven design goals, in many ways they can be interpreted as a set of tenets like a cybernetic bible for the emerging consciousness of this peer led and peer driven network. That’s attractive sounding though like any system, there are bound to be individual pieces of its control that don’t work for everyone. And ultimately these designs were adhered to by the users not created through consensus by the users.

Personally speaking, my understanding or vision of what a system of self-governance could look like is informed by a consensus or collectivist agreement. In many senses, Brand’s vision of a subscription system of self-governance was akin to this, the main agreement that users were paying into developing and sustaining a shared space for connection and building a counter-consciousness to the dominant paradigm of society at that time. I imagine that at that point, this system was relatively free of surveillance – so the appeal to all these disembodied nomadics (individualists really) was a sense of opting out of mainstream society and the fear driven cold war technocracy, as Turner mentions in chapter four. What could people accomplish together outside of a surveillance based state? Well, the idea that all these separate entities, communes, journalists, niche subcultural fans, could even just locate each other without having to announce themselves in a public space is a pretty big deal, and almost impossible to imagine now, as we live in a culture of round the clock surveillance.

In this chapter, Turner talks about the WELL (a computer system, that was a predecessor of modern social media platforms).  The “self-governing system”, Turner ascribed to Brand when he set up the subscription service for the membership of the WELL, would seem to work in a manner that we have become use to now in our daily interactions on the Internet.  The goal was to create a forum where like minded people could come and part take in discussions and posts on topics of interest.  However, the point of the subscription fee was to help deter domination of discussions by members who were likely to do so, if given the chance; while at the same time, encourage greater interaction and participation by members in general.  This would make for a richer environment to/for everyone.

One of the interesting examples turner used to illustrate how this self-governing system worked, was the connection McClure, Coate and  Figallo had to the Farm (a 1,750 acre commune in Tennessee).  They hoped to create a community of interpersonal/shared openness.  “Members were encouraged to challenge one another, to make it possible to drop their defenses and become part of a transcendent collective”.  This was important because, as the commune had to change to be remain solvent (“its members voted that year to stop pooling all their resources communally and to reorganize as a cooperative to to which individual members paid dues”).  This change in the way communal resources were used, made the transition to the cyber world, which was becoming the place that New Communalists were migrating to.  “The communal imperative – the need to build and maintain relationships between people and to preserve the structure that supported those relationships;” this way of thinking is evident within the system Brand put into place.

The WELL was basically a cybernetic experiment, where the perimeters were set and then left one to see what it would become.  As explained by Figallo: “Principles of tolerance and inclusion, fair resource allocation, distributed responsibility, management by example and influence, a flat organizational hierarchy, cooperative policy formulation and acceptance of a libertarian-bordering-on-anarchic ethos were all carryovers from our communal living experience.”  Figallo also said that, “in perserving and supporting the exercise of freedom and creativityby the WELL’s users through providing an open forum for their interaction,” was of vital importance to the WELL’s evolution.

The Well was one of the first online websites created by Stewart Brand in 1985. This came from the already existing Whole Earth Catalog, which featured stories, news, and articles online. The Well allowed the users to have discussions in real time. Brand’s motive behind the site was to have it run in a nonhierarchical manner, giving the users the power. This two-way conversation was ground-breaking and the system of self-governing, the users producing and writing was unlike anything before.

The site was ran by managers that had small interactions and rarely intervened. Users were producing meetings and a community that they felt proud to be a part of. In doing so, the site has the ability to grow in value. Not only producing a monetary gain for the user, but also giving the users the control to create the environment they are engaged in. This also placed most of the liability on the users making them responsible for their own actions online.

Brand had goals in mind when creating this site, one that mirrored the New Communalist model of self-governing. With it, he envisioned a cyber space where as the users contribute, the site will change and evolve and he planned on learning and changing along with it. His intent was to have a more step back approach and observe. This type of management increased involvement and revenue. The community online discussed many topics forming longtime friendships and professional relationships.