The Community Machines ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them. Tom Maddox tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reports from the Electronic Frontier: The Community Machines Tom Maddox --A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. --By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same place for the past five years. So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it --Or also living in different places. --That covers my case, says Joe. As Leopold Bloom discovers, it is not so simple to say exactly what we mean when we try to talk about some of the fundamental ideas that bind us. Nationality is one issue here, in Ulysses, but in fact the xenophobic Irishmen of what is usually called the "Cyclops" episode really want to deny membership to Jews in general and Leopold Bloom in particular not only in the Irish nation but also and more importantly in the Irish community. Which means they're trying to deny to others an abstract but essential part of our shared humanity. David W. Minar and Scott Greer say, in The Concept of Community: Community is indivisible from human actions, purposes, and values. It expresses our vague yearnings for a commonality of desire, a communion with those around us, an extension of the bonds of kin and friend to all those who share a common fate with us. Such a notion of community has become common coin online lately. People cite approvingly the creation of new communities through the new possibilities for communication offered by CMC, computer-mediated communication. Mitch Kapor, Lotus 1-2-3 tycoon and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says: New communities are being built today. You cannot see them, except on a computer screen. You cannot visit them, except through your keyboard. Their highways are wires and optical fibers; their language a series of ones and zeroes. Yet these communities of cyberspace are as real and vibrant as any you could find on a globe or in an atlas. Those are real people on the other sides of those monitors. And freed from physical limitations, these people are developing new types of cohesive and effective communities--ones which are defined more by common interest and purpose than by an accident of geography, ones on which what really counts is what you say and think and feel, not how you look or talk or how old you are. Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet (1993, 1994) However, there's more at work here than new technologies. Equally important is the social context in which the new technologies have come into play. As numerous social and political commentators have said at length and in their various ways, the United States has become a nation of increasingly more isolated and deracinated individuals, alienated selves deprived of many of the comforts and conveniences of traditional community. And one doesn't have to refer to such narrowly focused notions as "the lonely crowd" or "the organization man" to agree that we live in a world more mobile, fragmented, and uncertain than our parents and theirs before them. More and more of us have come to accept as usual a condition in which most or many of our friends and family live far away, as we accept that we may have to pick up our immediate families and move to another city, state or country to work or get an education. We have enlarged our individual possibilities but at the cost of lasting communal ties. In addition, many of us find ourselves alienated from the communities we live in whatever our length of stay. Our aspirations, interests, and ambitions can effectively isolate us from the mainstream life of smaller communities in particular. The would-be artist, musician or dancer; the sf fan, nerd, or radical--such folks and others can find themselves at odds with what they perceive to be the mores and habits of their community, and so they seek a spiritual home, a place of communion with others who share their anomie and consequent longing. As a result, we find community where we can. Organizations come into being around work and interest, and they give us things that our daily lives cannot. SF fans organize and attend conventions, but so do doctors, lawyers, used car salesmen, and advocates of sado-masochistic sex. However, whatever gratification we find at such gatherings, we quickly become aware of their fleeting nature. For some small time we've got coaches and footmen, but all too quickly we're back to pumpkins and mice. The overall problem remains: whatever our particular concatenation of circumstances, many of us live in a condition somewhat detached from the communities we inhabit-- citizens in economic, political, geographic and demographic terms, but outlanders of the spirit, strangers in any given strange land. It's in this context that the advent of widespread computer-medicated communication (henceforth CMC) has to be understood. We seek our kind in cyberspace because we find so few of them in real space and time. This context also explains some of the quasi-visionary, implicitly or explicitly utopian tone of the discussions of online community--Kapor's tone and content are typical in this regard. With regard to all such affirmations of the joys of online community, however, I find myself wondering whether they speak for a liberating technology, or perhaps for a '90s version of the "Gernsbach Continuum," the ubiquitous, bloodless portrait of things to come offered so often this century by technophiles and social planners and parodied so nicely by William Gibson. Let me make clear that I do not doubt Kapor's good intentions, merely the completeness and accuracy of his vision. Continuing on with his description of online communities, he says: The oldest of these communities is that of the scientists, which actually predates computers. Scientists have long seen themselves as an international community, where ideas were more important than national origin. It is not surprising that the scientists were the first to adopt the new electronic media as their principal means of day-to-day communication. I look forward to a day in which everybody, not just scientists, can enjoy similar benefits of a global community. As do I. However, I remember that the scientists who first adopted the new electronic media often did so because they were developing it for the Department of Defense in one of its many guises. Howard Rheingold, who believes along with Kapor in the power and importance of online communities, says, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison--Wesley Publishing Company, 1993): CMC was following the same path of diffusion that computer technology had followed ten to twenty years before: first developed as part of weapons-related research, computers and networks soon proved valuable and then affordable first to scientific researchers outside weapons research, then to big businesses, then to small businesses, and then to citizens. I am reminded of the adage that when one sups with the Devil, one should bring a long spoon, and I am worried at the ease with which many people have sat down to these particular dinners. On this and other matters, Rheingold's book is of considerable interest. He has been online since 1985, a very long span in the compressed history of widespread CMC, and he has extensive first-hand experience with some of the most interesting and characteristic online cultures, the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) in particular. I've met him briefly a couple of times and seen quite a few of his postings on the WELL, and I can testify that he's a very nice guy, one temperamentally well-- suited to making friends online and to appreciating those friendships. In fact, his book gives the best taste of life online of any I have seen. His most intimate experiences have been with the WELL, but he also gives adequate histories of the rise of the BBS community in general and Tom Jennings's FidoNet in particular, of Usenet, MUDs, MOOs, and MUSEs, of Dave Hughes's Big Sky Telegraph and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of Japan's TWICS and France's Minitel. Rheingold seems to have been everywhere and talked to everyone who has moved and shaken the online communities. Also, as editor of the Whole Earth Review and long-time counterculture citizen, Rheingold is not just another purveyor of virtual snake oil. He is concerned about the possibilities of individual loss of privacy and freedom latent in CMC and specially concerned about the intrusions of big government and big business into the net. He says, The transition from a government-sponsored, taxpayer-supported, relatively unrestricted public forum to a privately owned and provided medium has accelerated recently, and this transition might render moot many of the fantasies of today's true believers in electronic democracy and global online culture. And he concludes his book with this call to informed online citizenship: Instead of falling under the spell of a sales pitch, or rejecting new technologies as instruments of illusion, we need to look more closely at new technologies and ask how they can help build stronger, more humane communities--and ask how they might be obstacles to that goal. . . .Armed with knowledge, guided by a clear, human-centered vision, governed by a commitment to civil discourse, we the citizens hold the key lever at a pivotal time. What happens next is largely up to us. How could one possibly object to such an honorable and good-hearted call? Well, alas, I must. By way of focusing my objections, let me quote Neil Postman, itinerant anti-technologist, from a speech he gave in 1990 to the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft Fuer Informatik) in Stuttgart. He makes the following ill-tempered comments on the evolution of CMC: Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better--best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. [. . .] As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot. While I'm not convinced by many of Postman's analyses, which often seem driven by an unreasonable desire to live in the Middle Ages, I find this particular line of reasoning convincing. Over the years the "geniuses of computer technology" have promised too many things and, as I mentioned, have sat down at too many dinners with too many devils for us to trust them. They have also shown a persistent inability to see what people will in fact do with their devices--an inability for which I do not blame them specially, because other people, such as those in my line of work, science fiction, didn't do much better. Also, in rebuttal to Rheingold's claim that "what happens next is largely up to us," I have to say, not really. [T]he clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it its not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose. Technologies have their own dynamics, and we are often propelled along by them, will-we nil-we, to destinations we didn't even know existed. Furthermore, we haven't looked at some of the less attractive qualities of the communities that are evolving. For instance, online communities tend to be almost entirely male-dominated. While I'm reasonably sure that the percentage of women online has increased in recent years, they remain a small minority, and their presence in a particular group almost always highlights how adolescent, geeky, and masculine online communities remain. To put the matter shortly, women are routinely harassed both sexually and otherwise, and generally made to feel that many of their of their fundamental concerns are alien. This syndrome does not hold universally, but it holds generally, and I see very little evidence online of radical and widespread change in this matter--which is to say that now and for the near future, the experience of virtual communities will be problematic for women. More generally, technocratic, elitist, and sexist behavior characterize life online in unacknowledged ways, and there's a whole literature about denial that explains just how harmful failures to recognize such truths can be. But I'm not anti-virtual communities or anti- CMC or anti-the quasi-utopian efforts of people like Kapor and Rheingold. Rather I'm convinced by the history of humankind's relationship to technology that we must always be aware of our status as sorcerer's apprentices, always on the verge of losing control. At the same time, we must remain aware that vast industries exist whose purpose is to package our needs and sell us commodified gratification for them, thus rendering us emotionally stunted and intellectually stupefied. Online News: The United States Senate has established an online presence in the form of an ftp server on the Internet, ftp.senate.gov. As is usual with such sites, you login as anonymous and give your e-mail address as password. Senators Stevens of Alaska and Kennedy of Massachusetts have files available at the present time under the directories /member/ak and member/ma respectively. I assume others will follow. Bruce Sterling has made available online the entire text of his last book, The Hacker Crackdown. It can be downloaded free from the WELL Gopher (gopher.well.sf.ca.us) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation ftp site (ftp.eff.org). He has several other documents there as well, all prefaced by the following "Acceptable Use Policy," which I believe is interesting enough to quote at length: The documents on this disk are not commodities. They're not for sale. They are not part of the "information economy." Some of them were part of the commercial economy once, in the sense that I got paid for writing some of them, but they've since been liberated. You didn't have to pay any money to get them. If you did pay anything to see this stuff, you've been ripped off. If you didn't get this data for free, send me some e- mail and tell me about it. Information *wants* to be free. And I know where you can get a lot more. You can copy them. Copy the hell out of them, be my guest. You can upload them onto boards or discussion groups. Go right ahead, enjoy yourself. You can print them out. You can photocopy the printouts and hand them around as long as you don't take any money for it. But they're not public domain. You can't copyright them. Attempts to pirate this stuff and make money from it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl; believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it's really not worth it. This stuff don't "belong" to you. A lot of it, like the Internet electronic zines I've included, doesn't "belong" to me, either. It belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information economics, for whatever *that's* worth. You don't have any right to make this stuff part of the conventional flow of commerce. Let them be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference. Don't sell them. And don't alter the text, either; that would be a hopelessly way-dork move. Just make more, and give them to whoever might want or need them. Now have fun. So find yourself a gopher connection to the WELL or an ftp connection to EFF and grab a bunch of Sterling (as it were) prose. Also at EFF, you can find a recent recension of The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, which in addition to containing the full text of the Kapor article I quote above, also is one of the better guides to the Internet available online. Consumer News: (This is a spot for notes about software, hardware, firmware, wetware, or etceteraware that I've found interesting lately). My hunt continues for the perfect database for freeform data, and I've lately found two interesting contenders. At the simple end of things there's Dyno Notepad (from Portfolio Software, 10062 Miller Avenue, Cupertino, CA 95014), a rewritten version of Acta (later Acta 7), one of the simplest and best outliners for the Macintosh. Dyno Notepad came to me on a single disk with no accompanying documentation, and I found I wasn't missing anything. The program has two help screens that effectively summarize not only the program's commands but also its structuring ideas, the elements of computer outlining. It is in short a slick piece of work: cheap, fast, and easy to use. And then there's Arrange, a big bucks database from Common Knowledge, Inc., Palo Alto, CA. It has extensive online documentation and a good-sized manual and will do just about anything to any kind of information that you can imagine--if you can figure out how to make the program perform. The program ought to make some sort of big industrial noise when it loads up to indicate its rather alarming capabilities. Using it I find myself very tentatively trying out various ways of structuring and retrieving data, and sometimes I can make things happen the way I want them to and sometimes I can't. So I'll have to get back to you on this one because I'm not sure that I am willing to put in the time necessary to learn how to control this thing. Meanwhile I still wish for simple tools for the Macintosh like a few that exist in the MSDOS world--for instance, a text reader with the speed and power of Vernon Buerg's List, a freeform database with the speed and ease of Tornado Notes. E-Mail Address: tmaddox@halcyon.com ======================================================================= This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .