Hybrid Assignment 11 – The WELL System
According to Fred Turner, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded one of the most powerful computer networks up to the present time, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. Members of WELL consisted of groups of computer technologists, counterculturalists, hackers, and journalists who worked together and built a community where they could exchange information and build social networks for future employment. According to Kevin Kelly, one of the seven design goals of the WELL team was that it would be self-governing. Additionally, Turner said that, “As he set subscription rates, Brand was helping to lay down boundary conditions for a self-governing system. Like a communard of the late 1960s, he was working to establish a forum in which individuals could express themselves and form an alternative community of kindred souls” (Turner, p. 146).
One of the ways that Turner described WELL as a self-governing system was through its early managers’ way of governing it: against hierarchy and for the “power of tools.” This was evident in the way power was given to WELL members to participate in different conference topics available, join or leave conferences as they pleased, and even to create their own conferences if they would like to. Conference hosts and systems owners were also authorized to remove members from WELL (which only happened three times in the first six years, and the removed members were allowed to return). In this way, WELL’s early managers did not exercise their authority to control the system and interaction directly. Members were given the “power of self-rule through information technology.” They could use this power by deleting postings of other members that they did not like from their own screens and also removing their own postings that they wanted to erase.
Another way that the WELL operated as a self-governing system was explained through the managers’ roles in setting the conditions for the environment or the system and then taking a step back and observing how WELL’s users interact, exchange information, make connections, and build new communities, and contribute to how the system evolves. According to Turner, “The WELL as described by Kelly, McClure, Figallo, and Coate was a little, self-contained world, and its managers, like scientists, were ‘as gods’ – designing that world, channeling its embodied ‘energies’ through talk, creating settings in which individuals could simultaneously build their new community and transform themselves by using a new set of digital ‘tools’ to which the WELL had given them access” (Turner, p. 148).
