Photo: Joe Pugliese
This summer it was announced that the WELL, a revolutionary online community founded nearly 30 years ago, had been put up for sale by its current owner, web magazine Salon. If no buyer emerges, this historic online watering hole will likely have to close up shop. It would mark the end of an era—but no matter what happens, the WELL's legacy will continue to live on all around us, in the rollicking conversations we enjoy every day on social networks and comment threads.
In that regard, the WELL is just one of many world-bending triumphs in the long, strange career of its cofounder, Stewart Brand. A Merry Prankster in the early 1960s, Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a bible for both the back-to-the-land movement and the first computer hackers. Indeed, the community that sprang up around the catalog was what formed the seed of the WELL (an acronym of Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), an early BBS that became an Internet service provider at the dawn of the web.
In addition to his many entrepreneurial ventures, Brand has also been a vocal visionary on technology and its future, famously coining the phrase "Information wants to be free" (though it also wants to be expensive, he immediately added in a far less-quoted caveat). He's written extensively and perceptively about alternative energy, the environment, and bioengineering. Today Brand heads the Long Now Foundation, a group devoted to thinking about what humanity and Earth will look like in 10,000 years.
As part of our 20th-anniversary Icons series, we sent Kevin Kelly—a longtime writer and editor for Wired as well as an early member of the WELL and a former contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog—to chat with Brand about the legacy of his online community and the challenges of trying to peer into the future.
Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called "the mother of all demos"—when Stanford's Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?
Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.
Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner today—drones, magic glasses, self-driving cars—are just premature promises?
Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I don't mean that just in terms of power or capacity—driven by Moore's law—but also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.
Kelly: Another harbinger of the digital age is on the ropes right now. In June, Salon announced it was selling the WELL, which you cofounded. How would you describe the WELL?
Brand: My first impulse is to say it was a jumped-up bulletin board, a teleconference system using dialup modems, running on a minicomputer. But no one knows what those are now! Best to say it was an early version of social email, with themed threads of messages you could read whenever. We liked to think of it as a digital pub—a "great good place" you got to by typing.
Kelly: I think of it now as community text messaging. Regardless, it was ahead of its time.
Brand: There is a common feeling that when you're making something new you had better get the structure of it right, because it may wind up being the structure of everything important in the future. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier describes that feeling as "karma vertigo."
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Wired Staff 17 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/Agcij4wTBN8/
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