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The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL, is one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation. In 1993, it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12 and a gross annual income of $2 million.[1] By 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members.[2]It is best known for its Internet forums, but also hosts email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited.[3]

Most content is available only to members, but three conferences are publicly viewable: Inkwell.vue, Mindful.vue, and Deadsongs.vue. A “State of the World” conversation with author Bruce Sterling is held in the Inkwell.vue conference every January.[4]

The WELL is ad-free and says it collects “almost no personal data from our users, and what we do collect, we don’t sell.” Instead, it relies on membership fees for support.[5]

Corporate History

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The WELL was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, and the name (an acronym for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) is partially a reference to some of Brand's earlier projects, including the Whole Earth Catalog.[6]

Initially The WELL was owned 50% by The Point Foundation (publishers of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review) and 50% by NETI Technologies Inc. a Vancouver-based company of which Larry Brilliant was at that time the chairman. Its original management team—Matthew McClure, soon joined by Cliff Figallo and John Coate—collaborated with its early users to foster a sense of virtual community.[7] McClure, Coate and Figallo were all veterans of the 1970s commune called The Farm.

After John Coate departed to help create SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle's first website,[8] Gail Ann Williams was hired by Figallo in 1991, as community manager. Williams, one of the principals of the satirical group the Plutonium Players, had been working in nonprofit theater management and was already an active member of the WELL.[9]

In 1992 Cliff Figallo also left his job at The WELL [10] and long time WELL member Maurice Weitman was hired as General Manager[7]. Figallo's resignation letter to the Board cited changes in company approach: "I am too much identified with the permissive and accommodating attitude that has been part of The Well's growth to preside over a more restrictive régime," [7]

Staff of The WELL on March 7, 1993 at 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, California

From 1994 to 1999 The WELL was owned by Bruce R. Katz, founder of Rockport, a manufacturer of walking shoes.[11]

In April 1999 it was acquired by Salon, one of the first online-only magazines, whose founders included several WELL members. Wired reported, “The surprise move… gives Salon a dose of new credibility by tying it directly into a members-only community of scores of artists, writers, thinkers, scientists, programmers, and visionaries.”[12]

In August 2005 Salon announced that it was looking for a buyer for The WELL, in order to concentrate on other business lines. In November 2006, a press release of The WELL said, as Salon had been unable to find a suitable purchaser, it was suspending efforts to sell. [13]

In June 2012 Salon once again announced that it was looking for a buyer for The WELL as its subscriber base "did not bear financial promise". Additionally, it announced that it had entered into discussions with various parties interested in buying the well.com domain name, and that the remaining WELL staff had been laid off at the end of May.[14]The community pledged money to take over The WELL itself and rehire important staff.[15]

In September 2012, Salon sold The WELL to a new corporation, The WELL Group Inc., owned by a group of eleven investors, who were all long-time members. The sale price was reported to be $400,000.[16]"In a world where online platforms come and go, this is a testament to the dedication of a truly remarkable community," Cindy Jeffers, CEO of Salon Media Group, said in the press release announcing the sale. "As a true pioneer of the digital age, and a forerunner of today's ubiquitous social networks, The WELL has played a central role in the origin of countless creative endeavors and cultural movements."[17] Gail Ann Williams had been part of Salon's layoffs in anticipation of the sale, but continued in a consulting role during the transition.[9] The CEO of the new corporation was Earl Crabb, a programmer and supporter of the Bay Area folk music community, who died on February 20, 2015.[18] No announcement was made as to his successor.

Founded in Sausalito, California, the service is now based in San Francisco, California.

Technology, Structure and Policies

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The WELL began as a dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) influenced by EIES. It became one of the original dial-up ISPs in the early 1990s when commercial traffic was first allowed, and changed into its current form as the Internet and web technology evolved.

The WELL's core software, PicoSpan is written in The C Programming Language and runs on the Unix operating system, which Howard Rheingold said made it an attractive environment for "young computer wizards." PicoSpan is conferencing software written by Marcus D. Watts for Network Technologies International (NETI). A license for PicoSpan was part of NETI's initial investment in The WELL (along with a VAX 750 computer running the mt Xinu variant of Unix) in exchange for a half interest in the WELL.[19] In 1996, the WELL began also using and licensing the "Engaged" conferencing software, which was built on top of PicoSpan and provides a Web-based user interface which requires less technological expertise from users. The Wall Street Journal was among the websites reported to use Engaged for online community. [20]

Logged-in members can see the real name of the author of each post. The intent is to foster a more intimate community through “people taking responsibility for opinions, obsessions, insights, silliness, and an occasional faux pas.”[21]

The community forums, known as conferences, are supervised by conference hosts who guide conversations and may enforce conference rules on civility and/or appropriateness. Initially all hosts were selected by staff members.  In 1995, Gail Ann Williams changed the policies to enable user-created forums. Participants can create their own independent personal conferences—either viewable by any WELL member or privately viewable by those members on a restricted membership list—on any subject they please with any rules they like. Within conferences, members open separate conversational threads, called topics, for specific items of interest. For example, the Media conference has (or had) topics devoted to The New York Times, media ethics, and the Luann comic strip. An example of a local conference is the one on San Francisco, which has topics on restaurants, the city government, and neighborhood news. "Public" conferences are open to all members, while "private" conferences are restricted to a list of users controlled by the conference hosts. Some "featured private" or "private independent" conferences (such as "Women on the WELL" and "Recovery") are listed in the WELL's directory and members may request admittance from the hosts.[22]

Gail Ann Williams recalled a number of different interpretations of Stewart Brand’s original member agreement, "You Own Your Own Words" or "YOYOW"). In an era when it was uncertain how laws applied to online content, Brand intended it to place legal responsibility for posts on the people who wrote them, she said. But “a lot of people saw it as being about property, that it was about copyright, and other people saw it as meaning you have to own up to your words, if you say something heinous, it won’t go away, you’re going to have to live it down.”[9] Currently, the agreement notes members have both the rights to their posted words and the responsibility for those words. Members can also delete their posts at any time, but a placeholder indicates the former location and author of a deleted or "scribbled" post, as well as who deleted it.[23]

Many early writings about the WELL stress members’ attempts to test utopian forms of self-government in the online community. Kevin Kelly recalled the original goal was for the WELL to be cheap, open-ended, self-governing and self-designing.[19] Cliff Figallo said the “exercise of free speech and assembly in online interaction is among the most significant and important uses of electronic networking,” and hoped that the WELL would be a grass-roots alternative to “electronic consumer shopping malls.”[1] But members were shaken in 1990 when one popular and active member scribbled all his posts, then died by suicide, despite other members’ attempts to reach out to him.[19] A few years later, two members involved in a messy real-life relationship posted about it across several conferences, dividing the community and ultimately becoming a central narrative device for Katie Hafner’s book about the WELL.[24] In her 1994 essay, “Pandora’s Vox,” WELL member Carmen Hermosillo observed that by posting her thoughts and feelings where an online platform could profit from them, “I had commodified myself.”[25] However, during a panel at the 1994 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Figallo reported that “encouraging the formation of core groups of users who shared their desire for minimal social disruption” had been generally successful in promoting free discussion without the need for heavy-handed intervention by management.[26]

Cultural Impact

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A "Virtual community" with strong real-world presence

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WELL users after a day spent working to re-plant a part of the roadside near the WELL office.
Members of The WELL at a "office party" on September 20, 1991

Frequent in-person meetings of WELL members has been an important facet of The WELL, starting in September 1986[27] and continuing for many years thereafter.[28]

The "Berkeley Singthing" is perhaps the longest running of the in-person gatherings of WELL members. Started in 1991, and taking its name from the Berkeley conference in the WELL where it was originally organized[29] it is one of the many ways that WELL members connect in the physical world.

A collection of photos from various WELL parties from many different years is curated by the WELL[30].

“AOL for Deadheads”

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Sociologist Rebecca Adams noted that “Deadheads were electronic pioneers long before it became fashionable to use the Internet or populate the World Wide Web,” with Grateful Dead-related Usenet forums predating the creation of the first WELL conference for Deadheads on March 1, 1986.[31] Musician David Gans, who was hosting an hour of Grateful Dead music on a San Francisco radio station, launched the conference with Bennett Falk and Mary Eisenhart as co-hosts.[32] The creation of the Grateful Dead conference led to a “growth spurt” in the number of WELL members, and in the early years, Deadheads who used its conferences to make plans, trade audiotapes or discuss lyrics were the largest source of revenue for the WELL. Matthew McClure, part of the WELL’s original management team, recalled: “The Deadheads came online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system to create a community around themselves… Suddenly our future looked assured.”[19] By 1997, Eric F. Wybenga’s almanac of Grateful Dead resources said the WELL “is to Deadheads what AOL is to the average American online.”[33]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

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The WELL was the forum through which Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor, the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, first met. Barlow wrote that a visit from an FBI agent investigating the theft of some Apple code made him aware how little law enforcement understood the Internet, and even though he was able to persuade the agent he was not involved in the case, he became concerned about the potential for overreach. EFF was formed in 1990 and Mike Godwin, also a WELL member, was hired as the first on-staff attorney. Barlow and Kapor hosted the EFF conference on the WELL, which discussed topics related to free speech and internet regulation.[34] Godwin helped publicize flaws in the Rimm[35] study of pornography on the Internet, which had led to calls for legislative censorship.[36]

Craigslist

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Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joined the WELL shortly after moving to San Francisco in 1993, and was inspired by members’ discussions about internet community, as well as by examples of members offering other members time and professional help without compensation. In 1995, he started sending out an email list of events and job opportunities to friends. Even after this list expanded to a public listserv and incorporated as a for-profit, Newmark said he viewed it as a community trust and emphasized, “The purpose of the Internet is to connect people to make our lives better.”[37]

Salon

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Salon.com was founded in the wake of the San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994 by a group of journalists that included WELL members. “The Well is where a lot of us got our first experience online,” Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg wrote. “In Salon's formative days in 1995 we actually used a private conference [on the WELL] to plan our launch." [38] Salon hired WELL management team member Cliff Figallo in 1998 and WELL conference host Mary Elizabeth Williams to direct its online community, Table Talk. After Salon purchased the WELL in 1999, WELL community manager Gail Ann Williams (no relation) became a Salon employee.[9]

Kevin Mitnick hacking case

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In 1995, Tsutomo Shimomura noticed some of his stolen software had been stored in a WELL account. He worked with WELL management to track and identify hacker Kevin Mitnick as the culprit. This effort was described in Shimomura’s book Takedown, which he wrote with John Markoff, and in a Wired article excerpted from the book.[39]

Media coverage of the internet and online community

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The WELL was described in the early 1990s as a “listening post for journalists,” with members who were staff writers and editors for the New York Times,  Business Week, the  San Francisco Chronicle, Time,  Rolling Stone,  Byte,  Harper's, and the  Wall Street Journal.[19] This early visibility may have been helped by the early policy of providing free accounts for interested journalists and other select members of the media.  Notable journalists who have written about their experiences on the WELL include John Seabrook of the New Yorker[40], Katie Hafner of the New York Times[7][24], Wendy M. Grossman of the Guardian[41], and Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle[42].

In the News

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The WELL received numerous awards in the 1980s and 1990s, including a Webby Award for online community in 1998, and an EFF Pioneer Award in 1994.

In March 2007, The WELL was noted for refusing membership to Kevin Mitnick, and refunding his membership fee.[43]

Academic Publications about The WELL

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Bruckman, Amy; Curtis, Pavel; Figallo, Cliff; and Laurel, Brenda. “Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities.” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, Massachusetts, 24-28 April 1994. Conference Companion. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221515969_Approaches_to_managing_deviant_behavior_in_virtual_communities. Accessed 6 February 2022.

Coate, John. "Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community." Proceedings of Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (DIAC-92). Berkeley, California, May 2-3, 1992. Collected in Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Explorations of Computing as a Social Project. Philip E. Agre and Douglas Schuler, eds. Greenwich, Conn.: Ablex Publications, 1997. 978-1567502589. An updated and revised version is hosted on his website.

Kirk, Andrew."Appropriating Technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture Environmental Politics". In Environmental History, 374–94, 2001.

--"Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism". Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2007.

Ludlow, Peter, ed. High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Foreword by Mike Godwin. MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 9780262121965.

Turner, Fred. "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism" (2006) University of Chicago Press ISBN 0-226-81741-5

--"Where the Counterculture met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community", Technology and Culture, Vol.46, No.3 (July, 2005), pp. 485–512.

Rushkoff, Douglas. “Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace.” 2nd ed. Clinamen Press, 2002.

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References

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  1. ^ a b Figallo, Cliff (1 September 1993). ""The Well: Small Town on the Information Highway System"". Whole Earth Review. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  2. ^ Anonymous (29 June 2012). "The Well, a Pioneering Online Community, is for Sale Again". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  3. ^ Anonymous (6 March 2013). "The WELL". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 5 November 2021.
  4. ^ "Conferences". The Well. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  5. ^ "Home". The Well. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  6. ^ Tierney, John (27 February 2007). "Stewart Brand: An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New Heresies". The New York Times. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  7. ^ a b c d Hafner, Katie (May 1997). "The Epic Saga of The Well". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  8. ^ Fost, Dan (2001-01-30). "Chronicle Online Chief Resigns".
  9. ^ a b c d Johnston, Bill and, Dr. Lauren Vargas (1 June 2021). "The Golden Age of Online Communities and the WELL, with Gail Ann Williams". Cohere. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
  10. ^ "Interview with Cliff Figallo and Nancy Rhine".
  11. ^ Markoff, John (4 January 1994). "Company News: Influential Computer Service Sold". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 July 2014.
  12. ^ Anonymous (7 April 1999). "Salon Buys The Well". Wired Magazine. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  13. ^ Anonymous (14 November 2006). "The Well to Stay With Salon". The Well. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  14. ^ Salon Media Group. "Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 2012". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  15. ^ Au, Wagner James (2 July 2012). "Will The WELL Survive? Members Pledge $100K+ to Buy Influential Virtual Community From Corporate Owners". New World Notes. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  16. ^ Grossman, Wendy (27 September 2012). "Salon Sells The WELL to Its Members". The Guardian.
  17. ^ Anonymous (15 November 2022). "Salon Media Group Sells The WELL to The Well Group" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 November 2012. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  18. ^ Anonymous (31 March 2015). "Earl Crabb, 1941-2015". Berkeley Daily Planet. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  19. ^ a b c d e Rheingold, Howard (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (PDF). Addison-Wesley. pp. 31–45. ISBN 978-0262681216.
  20. ^ "WELL Tools For the People". CNET. 11 November 1996. Retrieved 19 February 2022.
  21. ^ "Real People, Real Names". The Well. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  22. ^ "Conferences are the Heart of The WELL". The Well. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  23. ^ "You Own Your Own Words". The Well. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  24. ^ a b Hafner, Katie (2001). The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community. Carroll & Graf. ISBN 978-0786708468.
  25. ^ Hermosillo, Carmen (humdog). “Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace.” High Noon on the Electronic Frontier. Ed. Peter Ludlow. MIT Press, 1996. 9780262121965.
  26. ^ Bruckman, Amy; Curtis, Pavel; Figallo, Cliff; and Laurel, Brenda. “Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities.” Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Boston, Massachusetts, 24-28 April 1994. Conference Companion. ResearchGate. Accessed 6 February 2022.
  27. ^ Pernick, Ron (1995). "WELL HISTORICAL TIMELINE: THE FIRST TEN YEARS".
  28. ^ Carroll, Jon (2012-07-04). "A maybe farewell to the dear old Well". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
  29. ^ Woodman, Eric (2008-01-15). "Berkeley Singthing FAQ".
  30. ^ "WELL party photos 1997-2010".
  31. ^ Adams, Rebecca G.; Sardiello, Robert (2000). Deadhead Social Science: You Ain't Gonna Learn What You Don't Wanna Know. Altamira Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0742502512.
  32. ^ Richardson, Peter (2015). No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. St. Martin's Press. pp. 158–160. ISBN 978-1250010629.
  33. ^ Wybenga, Eric F. (1997). Dead to the Core: An Almanack of the Grateful Dead. Delta Books. ISBN 978-0385316835.
  34. ^ Barlow, John Perry (8 November 1990). "A Not Terribly Brief History of the Electronic Frontier Foundation". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  35. ^ Elmer-DeWitt, Philip (1 July 2015). "Finding Marty Rimm". Fortune. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  36. ^ Anonymous (26 July 1995). "Cyberporn Hearing and the Exposure of Flaws in the Rimm Study". EFFector. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  37. ^ Weiss, Philip (6 January 2006). "A Guy Named Craig". New York Magazine. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  38. ^ Staff (7 April 1999). "Salon.com Acquires The Well". SFGate. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
  39. ^ Shimomura, Tsutomo (1 February 1996). "Catching Kevin". Wired. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
  40. ^ Seabrook, John (1997). Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0684801759.
  41. ^ Grossman, Wendy (1997). Net.wars. New York University Press. ISBN 978-0814731031.
  42. ^ Carroll, John (6 April 2015). "Guess What? The Well Is Still Alive". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
  43. ^ Poulson, Kevin (21 March 2007). "Kevin Mitnick is Unforgiven". Wired. Retrieved 6 February 2022.
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