Angeline Henriquez

Digital Media and Society

December 1, 2015

The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL) was, as Turner explains it, a teleconferencing system that was modeled after Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Originally, the arrangement between Brand and Brilliant was for Brand to post Whole Earth Catalog items onto the WELL, and users then would be allowed to comment and discuss on these topics in a sort of bulletin board system or forum. However, Brand keeping true to his anti-hierarchical and New Communalist dogma, proposed that instead users should be allowed to create their own topics of discussion. It was “a way to create the countercultural ideal of a shared consciousness in a new ‘virtual community’” (p.142).  With the participation of users in an array of fields from engineers and computer technologists, to journalists and musicians, the WELL came to be both a community and a business because of its networking potential and the access to information that could be used offline for a profit.

In this way it served the “shared consciousness” aspect of the New Communalist approach, but it also had to remain non hierarchical which Brand aimed for through management strategies that prompted self-governance within the virtual community. One example of this was the way in which system owners “refrained from intervening in fractious debates whenever possible” (p. 145) and instead gave users the power and authority to erase other users’ posts that they might have found upsetting. However, they were only able to erase them form their own screens, not from the system. Much like we adjust our Facebook settings today to not see updates from certain users on our newsfeeds. Additionally, WELL users that changed their opinions or regretted writing a post were allowed erase them, and so “rather than assert their authority directly, the WELL managers chose to give users the powers to self-rule” (p. 145).

Another strategy to prompt self-regulation required as McClure puts it, “staying the hell out of the way at the right time” (p. 148). By this he meant allowing the system to evolve in its own way. Instead of designing it to be something in particular, they designed it to evolve. By having a text-based forum in which its users were able to build on existing information, and putting the responsibility of these postings on their users, the WELL created in them a sense of ownership (regardless of these postings creating any sort of profit) and the need to maintain the new network/relationships formed and the cyber-structure that provided them. “The WELL sells its users to each other and it considers its users to be both its consumers and its primary producers” creating a self-regulating environment and remaining non-hierarchical.

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.

Fred Turner devotes chapter 5 to the history, philosophy and community of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, known as the WELL. The WELL began as an expansion of the Whole Earth Catalog and as with the catalog, Stewart Brand “hoped to allow the system’s users to converse with one another and to market that conversation back to its participants.” (142) But the catalog was published only a few times a year so while its subscribers contributed by writing letters or reviewing products, they were not actually communicating in real time. The WELL gave users a chance to collaborate and “meet” one another instantaneously. The team that designed the WELL in 1985 had seven design goals, one of which was that it would be self-governing. The plan was a text-based forum that would combine a business and a community and would do away with the hierarchical model of business but still make a profit. The conditions would be such that the users, who were both the contributors and readers, (producers and consumers) would subscribe to the WELL by paying to participate. The subscription model was one that Brand thought worked best but he set the subscription rates much lower than the rates of commercial competitors as a way “to shape interpersonal relations on the WELL.” (145)

In his design of the WELL as a self-governing system, Brand was bringing the New Communalist’s vision of community to an electronic forum. The WELL’s first managers were veterans of the FARM, a commune in Tennessee that was founded by San Francisco hippies. They brought their experience building and supporting relationships with members of the commune to the participants of the WELL. Turner compares the proposed structure to a homeostat, where the manager would set the original conditions and then stand back and observe. “Once set in motion by its creators, it was to learn as it went, to find its ideal temperature, so to speak, through the actions of its constituent parts.’” (146) The users would supply and monitor the text that would determine the direction of future conversations.

A self-governing system, such as the WELL, operates on the belief that the users will take more responsibility for their contributions in a system where there is less direct involvement with a manager. Since they have more control in deciding the direction the work will take, they have more at stake in the outcome. They are thus likely to create the environment they want to be a part of, and in doing so will continue to be an active part of it. So managers, by ceding control to the users, increase the likelihood of the continued participation of the users. Businesses that have changed from the traditional organizational structure to a “Holacracy”, or self-governing structure, claim that their employees are more likely to contribute more, be happier and to stay at their jobs longer.

By interpreting the descriptions given by Turner, the self governing system operates by being completely inclusive and dependent of itself. While it is not exactly self-perpetuating, it does, for lack of better phrasing, grow of its momentum – generating growth from the efforts put forth by the users but at the same time those efforts are the product consumed by the users. The act of the product being consumed creates more product, as well as increases the value of the product. And in the case of the WELL, what is the product? The product is a user community developed through forum based interaction AND the information that is shared through the conversations and relationships created on the WELL, which are both archived by the system and individually user managed.

The ability of the system to grow and evolve is made possible by the WELL managers who are equally uninvolved observers and involved as observers. They enable the system to operate in the model of a homeostat, that is being capable of adapting to its environment. The system is able to evolve because the managers make the boundaries pliable. The users themselves can manipulate the platform as they explore and test its boundaries, making the WELL develop as the users develop as individuals and not by direct involvement by managers. That is, the more the users experiment the more the platform will reflect those efforts. The managers do not push or suggest changes, they monitor the needs of the users and act accordingly by allowing the system to be manipulated.

The self governing system, using the WELL as a model, can be interpreted as an operating system in which the users have a great amount of control and create the world (platform, system, product) in which they want to interact (or consume). The more efforts put in by the users means more capabilities granted by the system moderators who are otherwise hands-off, which then cycles back to the users wanting to interact even more with the system as it improves (evolves). The cycle encompasses interpersonal (user community), electronic (user platform), and economic (user subscription) spheres so it, as a cyberculture, can perpetuate.

Due by midnight Tuesday, December 1st (350-400 words).

When outlining the subscription process at WELL, Turner (2006:145-146) argues that Brand “lay down boundary conditions for a self-governing system.” Drawing on details from chapter 5 which describe the virtuality and community on the WELL, explain how you think a self-governing system operates.

Turner (2006:56) references Buckminster’s Fuller’s idea of the “Comprehensive Designer,” described in Fuller’s book Ideas and Integrities (1963). As Turner (2006:56) explains, “[a]ccording to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness.” Elaborating on the idea of the comprehensive designer, describe the vision of the world espoused by Fuller. Why do you think this vision was so appealing to Stewart Brand? If you are unsure, take a guess.

Resilience.org: From counterculture to cyberculture: the life and times of Stewart Brand by Big Gav, originally published by Peak Energy  | MAR 13, 2010

I found an article that gives a detailed description of the idea of the comprehensive designer:

Comprehensive Designer would be aware of the system’s need for balance and the current deployment of its resources. He would then act as a “harvester of the potentials of the realm,” gathering up the products and techniques of industry and redistributing them in accord with the systemic patterns that only he and other comprehensivists could perceive. To do this work, the Designer would need to have access to all of the information generated within America’s burgeoning technocracy while at the same time remaining outside it. He would need to become “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” Constantly poring over the population surveys, resource analyses, and technical reports produced by states and industries, but never letting himself become a full-time employee of any of these, the Comprehensive Designer would finally see what the bureaucrat could not: the whole picture.

Being able to see the whole picture would allow the Comprehensive Designer to realign both his individual psyche and the deployment of political power with the laws of nature. In contrast to the bureaucrat, who, so many critics of technocracy had suggested, had been psychologically broken down by the demands of his work, the Comprehensive Designer would be intellectually and emotionally whole. Neither engineer nor artist, but always both simultaneously, he would achieve psychological integration even while working with the products of technocracy. Likewise, whereas bureaucrats exerted their power by means of political parties and armies and, in Fuller’s view, thus failed to properly distribute the world’s resources, the Comprehensive Designer would wield his power systematically. That is, he would analyze the data he had gathered, attempt to visualize the world’s needs now and in the future, and then design technologies that would meet those needs.

Fred Turner (2006:38) writes that “For both the New Left and the New Communalists, technological bureaucracy threatened a drab, psychologically distressing adulthood at a minimum and, beyond that, perhaps even the extinction of the human race. For the New Left, movement politics offered a way to tear down that bureaucracy and simultaneously to experience the intimacy of shared commitment and the possibility of an emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counter-culture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative.” Explain how Turner distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists through the affinities of latter to a cybernetic vision of the world “built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information” (2006:38).

While both movements of the New Left and New Communalists were revolutionized because of the fear that both sides had, due in part to what they considered as being inconsistencies in governmental monopolies and problems that steered separation and phobia after the war. The New Left was nervous about the process of change and the New Communalism formed communities that were not against the war.  Turner distinguished the New Left from the New Communalist through different visions, one from the other as having the same ideas of technology and war while the other is the formed communities and organizations to make for a stronger design made by all.  However both were overshadowed by forces of capitalism and according to the Book Review by Anna McCarthy: Turner’s history of the New Communalism, a cultural formation as rooted in the collaborative, interdisciplinary research culture of Cold War defense science as it is in Trips Festivals and tofu potlucks, offers us a far more complex, and to my mind, more interesting and politically necessary story of how present day visions of new media came to be. If contemporary spin offers us a potent, if naive, vision of the digital network as a space where community, democracy, and economic growth can finally coexist, Turner’s book is a convincing account of very tangible social networks, embodying and disavowing certain forms of power and privilege, that made such visions possible.

Reference:

Volume 1 Issue 1 (2008)        DOI:10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.316

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) Book Review by Anna McCarthy