# The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) Related dossiers: [[Book Summaries/Hafner, Katie/The WELL - Katie Hafner|The WELL]] · [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/The Virtual Community - Howard Rheingold|The Virtual Community]] · [[Book Summaries/Turner, Fred/From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Fred Turner|From Counterculture to Cyberculture]] · [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Tools for Thought - Howard Rheingold|Tools for Thought]] · [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Smart Mobs - Howard Rheingold|Smart Mobs]] · [[Book Summaries/Rheingold, Howard/Net Smart - Howard Rheingold|Net Smart]] ## Overview The WELL is a text-based dial-up conferencing system. Stewart Brand's Point Foundation (Whole Earth) and Larry Brilliant's company NETI started it in Sausalito, California, in 1985. It was never large, peaking at roughly 5,000 to 8,000 subscribers depending on the source. Its influence was out of proportion to its size. Rheingold's writing about it put the phrase "virtual community" into general use. The idea of naming "cyberspace" for the present-day net, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many habits of later social media can be traced to conversations held there. It still runs as a member-owned subscription service (owned by its members since 2012). Its defining features, according to the sources below: - **"You own your own words" (YOYOW).** This was Brand's disclaimer, shown at login. It made each person responsible for what they posted, and it was later also read as a claim of authorship. - **No anonymity.** Playful handles called "pseuds" were allowed, but every post was always linked to a real login. - **Conferences, topics and hosts.** The model was the French literary salon. Volunteer hosts welcomed newcomers and kept the peace. - **PicoSpan software** by Marcus Watts. Each topic was one continuous scrolling conversation (the "clothesline" model). Self-deletion ("scribbling") left a visible gap, and posts did not expire. - **Face-to-face life.** There were monthly WELL Office Parties from 1986, plus picnics, weddings and funerals. - **"Tools, not rules."** Users built tools such as the "Bozo filter" instead of management making rules. ## Chronological outline | When | What happened | Source | |---|---|---| | Late fall 1984 | At a Western Behavioral Sciences Institute conference in La Jolla, Brilliant pitches computer conferencing to Brand over lunch. NETI supplies the computer and software, and Point becomes half-owner. Brand names it, keeping the apostrophe. | Hafner 1997 | | Feb–Mar 1985 | The VAX 11/750 and PicoSpan are installed in the Whole Earth offices on the Sausalito waterfront. Matthew McClure is the first director, and the first conference is "General." | Figallo 1993 (online Feb); Hafner (Mar) | | 1 Apr 1985 | Opens to the paying public. Hafner gives the price as $8 a month plus $2 an hour, and Figallo and Rheingold give $3 an hour. *The sources disagree.* | Hafner; Figallo; Rheingold ch. 2 | | Summer–fall 1985 | Early members arrive, including Tom Mandel (Future conference), David Hawkins "dhawk" (Sexuality), Rheingold (Mind) and McClure (Pub). Journalists get free accounts. | Hafner; Rheingold ch. 2 | | Spring 1986 | David Gans, Mary Eisenhart and Bennett Falk start the Grateful Dead conference. By 1987 it accounts for between a third and a half of all WELL activity. | Hafner; Rheingold ch. 2 | | 1986 | Mark Ethan Smith becomes the first member expelled (Oct 1986). Monthly office parties begin (Sept 1986). McClure leaves, and Cliff Figallo (director) and John "Tex" Coate take over. Mandel and Rheingold start True Confessions in July. | Hafner; Figallo | | Dec 1987 | About 2,000 users, and a small profit. | Hafner | | 1988 | Members prepay their bills, raising $28,000 (plus a $30,000 loan) to buy a Sequent computer. Rheingold calls this a "barn raising." | Hafner; Rheingold ch. 1 | | Oct 1989 | "The Mandel Incident." Mandel uses the Kill tool against Nana (Maria Syndicus) and deletes the Future and Weird conferences. He is suspended and later readmitted. | Hafner | | Dec 1989 | *Harper's* holds its electronic forum on hackers on the WELL. | Hafner | | 1990 | Blair Newman mass-scribbles his posts and then takes his own life. It is the first death among active members. | Hafner; Rheingold ch. 1 | | May 1990 | After a WELL post by John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor flies to Wyoming, and the two plan the EFF. Barlow had earlier applied Gibson's word "cyberspace" to the present in a WELL post. | Hafner; Figallo | | 1991 | Bruce Katz (of Rockport shoes) buys NETI's half for $175,000. Tex leaves in late 1991. | Hafner | | 2 Jan 1992 | Internet connection through BARRNet opens, with full service in June 1992. Figallo leaves in July 1992, and Maurice "mo" Weitman becomes general manager. | Figallo; Hafner | | Jul–Aug 1992 | Mandel mass-scribbles his own posts and starts the "expedition" topic attacking Nana. | Hafner | | 1993 | About 7,000 subscribers, a staff of 12 or more, and gross income approaching $2 million a year. Rheingold publishes *The Virtual Community*. | Figallo; Rheingold | | Jan 1994 | Katz buys Point's half for $750,000, with membership around 8,000. He tries the "McWell" franchising idea and the web interface *Engaged*. Members form "The River" as a co-op alternative. | Hafner; Rheingold 2012 | | 5 Apr 1995 | Tom Mandel dies of lung cancer, four days after marrying Nana, saying goodbye online. | Hafner | | May 1997 | Hafner's *Wired* cover story appears. | Hafner | | 1999 | Salon buys the WELL. | Rheingold 2012; Salon 10-K | | 29 Jun 2012 | Salon puts the WELL up for sale and lays off its staff, and members start a pledge drive. | WELL press release; Salon 10-K | | 20 Sep 2012 | The Well Group, Inc., 11 long-time members, buys it for about $400,000. | Salon 8-K; WELL press release | *Gail Ann Williams:* her long tenure as a WELL manager and director (1990s–2000s, including under Salon) is widely reported, and Turner interviewed her. None of the sources fetched here confirm her title or dates. **Unverified.** **Discrepancies to note:** - Rheingold (2012) dates Hafner's *Wired* story to 1995, but the article is dated May 1997. - He also says Katz bought the WELL from Point and NETI in 1994. Hafner says Katz bought NETI's half in 1991 and Point's half in January 1994. - Figallo says Coate was the first *customer-service manager*, while Hafner says *marketing director*. ## How the WELL shaped the modern internet and social media 1. **Real-name accountability.** Pseudonymous handles were always tied to a real login. Brand told *Wired* in 2007 he would have preferred that later systems move away from anonymity. Facebook's real-name norm is the descendant most often mentioned. *That link is an interpretation, not a claim made in these sources.* 2. **Users own their content.** Brand contrasts YOYOW with the Source and CompuServe of the time, which closed forums where users discussed the service itself. He says the WELL's approach largely won out (paraphrase). 3. **Volunteer moderation.** Hosts traded their work for free time. Figallo notes that at one point half of all hours logged were uncharged "comptime." This is the forerunner of Reddit moderators and Facebook group admins. *That comparison is an interpretation.* 4. **Tools, not rules.** User-built filters such as the "Bozo filter" (an early mute or block) were preferred to bans handed down by management. 5. **Online and offline together.** Office parties, picnics and "barn raisings" (the Sequent fund, per Rheingold; Elly's medical evacuation, Philcat's leukemia support) showed that online ties could become real-world support. This is the forerunner of Meetup and of GoFundMe-style help. Brand himself names MeetUp. 6. **Community as product.** Figallo describes the WELL as selling its users to each other (paraphrase). This is the core model of social networks, minus the ads. 7. **Conflict patterns.** Flame wars, "thrash," trolls (Mark Ethan Smith), harassment (Mandel and Nana), mass deletion and grief online all appeared here first. So did the argument over free speech versus civility. 8. **Reputation and the gift economy.** Rheingold describes a gift economy. Turner shows that the gift economy also served as freelancers' reputation-building and networking, which became the logic of LinkedIn and Twitter. *The comparison to those platforms is an interpretation.* 9. **Lineage of people.** Steve Case (AOL) and Craig Newmark (Craigslist) lurked on the WELL (Rheingold 2012). Members also included the EFF founders, Kevin Kelly (*Wired*) and many journalists. ## Article summaries Text in quotation marks is taken from the article being summarized. Anything marked (paraphrase) is my summary. ### 1. Katie Hafner, "The Epic Saga of The Well," *Wired* 5.05 (May 1997). *Full text read.* This long narrative history follows the WELL from Brilliant's 1984 lunch pitch to Brand through the Katz ownership. It follows the life and death of Tom Mandel, the gifted and combative futurist from SRI who made the WELL his home and said goodbye there in March 1995. Hafner covers the founding choices (YOYOW, no anonymity, PicoSpan's visible scribbles, salon-style hosts) and the Farm veterans who ran it (McClure, Figallo, Coate). She also covers the early crises: the expulsion of Mark Ethan Smith, and Mandel's campaign against Maria "Nana" Syndicus, including the use of the Kill tool, the deleted conferences and the 1992 "expedition" topic. Acts of community appear too, including Philcat's son, Maurice Weitman finding his birth mother, and the 1988 prepayment drive. She describes the Grateful Dead conference's financial rescue, the WELL's journalist-driven influence (Barlow's "cyberspace," the EFF, *Harper's*), the 1992 Internet connection, and Katz's well-meant but resented spending (McWells, Engaged). Her underlying question is whether a community and a business can be built as one thing (paraphrase). *(This is the basis of her 2001 book, which has its own dossier.)* ### 2. Howard Rheingold, *The Virtual Community*, ch. 1, "The Heart of the WELL" (1993). *Full text read.* This chapter makes the case for virtual community through stories from the Parenting conference: - getting tick-removal advice from Flash Gordon, M.D., at 11 p.m. - Jay Allison's late-night posts about his daughter's tracheostomy - Phil Catalfo's leukemia topic for his son Gabe - Casey's poster fundraiser - the WELL-organized medical rescue of Elly van der Pas from a coma in New Delhi ("This is love in action") It describes the 1988 barn raising for the Sequent. It frames the WELL with Ray Oldenburg's "third place" and Licklider and Taylor's 1968 prediction of communities "of common interest." It closes with Blair Newman's mass-scribble and suicide. Rheingold's lessons: "Words on a screen can hurt people," online talk "has the reach and permanence of a publication," and, quoting Barlow, "you aren't a real community until you have a funeral." ### 3. Rheingold, ch. 2, "Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place" (1993). *Full text read.* This chapter traces the WELL's roots to the Whole Earth Catalog and to the 1960s backgrounds of Brand (the Merry Pranksters, the Trips Festival) and Brilliant (the Hog Farm, smallpox eradication). It covers the Farm managers and the founders' goals as remembered by McClure and Kevin Kelly: cheap, profit-making, open-ended, self-governing, self-designing, a community. Rheingold identifies three founding populations: Whole Earth types, PC-revolution hackers and Deadheads, with journalists added on top. He profiles regulars (Dhawk, Onezie, Maddog/tnf, Mandel, Tex) and maps the conference structure. He sets out the WELL's **gift economy** and "Experts on the WELL" as a living encyclopedia. He notes that 16% of people contributed 80% of the words. He draws on Kiesler, Sproull, Durkheim and Benedict Anderson, and calls for social science to study how people behave online. ### 4. Fred Turner, "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community," *Technology and Culture* 46 (July 2005): 485–512. *Full text read (author's PDF).* Turner argues that both the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL were **"network forums,"** places where different groups met, exchanged information and came to see themselves as one network. He traces the WELL's design and culture to the Catalog's New Communalist ideals, drawing on interviews with Brand, Rheingold, Coate, Barlow, Gail Williams and others. His central point is that for the Bay Area's freelancers and "symbolic analysts," the WELL's "gift economy" was also a market for **reputation and work**. As Coate put it, professional and personal life overlapped "like a village." The irony he draws is that the New Communalists (not the New Left) turned away from politics toward information, technology and commerce. The WELL achieved their nonhierarchical, information-linked ideal, but it also eased their absorption into the mainstream network economy. Turner later expanded this argument in *From Counterculture to Cyberculture*. ### 5. Howard Rheingold, "What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community," *The Atlantic* (6 July 2012). *Full text read from the Internet Archive's 2012 snapshot; the live site blocks scripts.* Rheingold wrote this when Salon put the WELL up for sale. It is a personal look back that opens with Philcat's son Gabe. Members gave the family more than $15,000 and first gathered in person at Gabe's memorial service. In 2010, WELL people drove Rheingold to his own cancer treatments. He recalls the in-person meetups, weddings and funerals, insisting that real community does happen online, and notes that Steve Case and Craig Newmark lurked there. He gives the ownership story: Katz, then "The River" co-op attempt, which failed. Salon bought it in 1999, and he calls Salon the "third benevolent absentee landlord." He puts the peak at around 5,000 in the mid-1990s, citing no marketing budget, competition, and a culture that tolerated free speech at some cost to civility (paraphrase). He was hopeful about the member buyout. *(He contradicts Hafner on two dates; see the discrepancies above.)* ### 6. Cliff Figallo, "The WELL: Small Town on the Information Highway System" (Sept 1993; adapted from a May 1993 Harvard Kennedy School talk). *Full text read.* The WELL's director from 1986 to 1992 gives a firsthand account. In 1993 it had about 7,000 subscribers, more than 12 staff, gross income approaching $2 million, and almost no advertising. It "sells its users to each other," and its users are both its consumers and its producers. He covers YOYOW and its two readings (responsibility versus copyright) and management's refusal to act as police. He describes PicoSpan's anti-censorship design and linked topics, and the influence of the Farm on management: tolerance, a flat hierarchy, management by example. He also covers the Archives conference as collective memory, the 1986 Pacific Bell packet-network beta, and the Internet connection on 2 January 1992. On community-building, he describes staff being visible and honest about what they didn't know, monthly office parties (later held at the Presidio Yacht Club), "tools, not rules" (the Bozo filter), and comptime for volunteers. He argues for many small grassroots systems instead of a few big corporate services ("Let a thousand CompuServes bloom"). ### 7. "Q&A With Stewart Brand, Co-founder of The Well," *Wired* (20 Dec 2007). *Full text read (transcript).* Brand names three models: the bulletin board system, the phone company (sell the dial tone and stay out of content, which is the basis of YOYOW), and Oldenburg's *The Great Good Place*. He credits the Grateful Dead fans with making it take off, and that cross-traffic between conferences made it work. He defends no anonymity: amusing handles, but each linked to a real person so everyone was accountable. He notes that office parties led to marriages, businesses and the EFF. He says tight online communities become conservative and enforce their own norms, and he warns companies that customers organized online can turn on them (paraphrase). He contrasts the WELL with rivals that shut down discussion of themselves, says content belongs to users, and calls cell phones the "fifth platform." ### Also: The WELL press archive (well.com/articles) This is the WELL's own index of press coverage. My fetch returned only the page's styling code, so it isn't summarized here. The WELL's 2012 press releases "How The Well Bought Itself" and "Salon Media Group Sells The WELL to The Well Group" were used, through search excerpts, for the 2012 sale. ## Sources - Hafner, Katie. "The Epic Saga of The Well." *Wired*, May 1997. https://www.wired.com/1997/05/ff-well/ - Rheingold, Howard. *The Virtual Community*, ch. 1. https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook1.html - Rheingold, Howard. *The Virtual Community*, ch. 2. https://people.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbook2.html - Turner, Fred. "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy." *Technology and Culture* 46, no. 3 (2005). https://fredturner.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj27111/files/media/file/turner-tc-counterculture-new-economy.pdf - Rheingold, Howard. "What the WELL's Rise and Fall Tell Us About Online Community." *The Atlantic*, 6 July 2012. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/what-the-wells-rise-and-fall-tell-us-about-online-community/259504/ (read via https://web.archive.org/web/2012/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/what-the-wells-rise-and-fall-tell-us-about-online-community/259504/) - Figallo, Cliff. "The WELL: Small Town on the Information Highway System." 1993. https://archive.org/download/CliffFigallo/TheWELLfig1993.html - "Q&A With Stewart Brand, Co-founder of The Well." *Wired*, Dec 2007. https://www.wired.com/2007/12/st-15thewell-brand/ - The WELL press archive. https://www.well.com/articles/ - The WELL. "How The Well Bought Itself." https://www.well.com/about-2/pr/how-the-well-bought-itself/ - The WELL. "Salon Media Group Sells The WELL to The Well Group." https://www.well.com/about-2/pr/salon-media-group-sells-well-well-group/ - Salon Media Group, Form 8-K, Sept 2012. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1084332/000143774912009710/salon_8k-092012.htm - Salon Media Group, Form 10-K, FY2013. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1084332/000143774913008089/slnm20130618_10k.htm