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.