I am often asked how I went from pushing cows around a remote
Wyoming ranch to my present occupation (which Wall Street
Journal recently described as 'cyberspace cadet'). I haven't
got a short answer, but I suppose I came to the virtual world
looking for community.
Unlike most modern Americans, I grew up in an actual place, an
entirely nonintentional community called Pinedale, Wyoming. As I
struggled for nearly a generation to keep my ranch in the family, I
was motivated by the belief that such places were the spiritual
home of humanity. But I knew their future was not promising.
At the dawn of the 20th century, over 40 percent of the American
workforce lived off the land. The majority of us lived in towns
like Pinedale. Now fewer than 1 percent of us extract a living from
the soil. We just became too productive for our own good.
Of course, the population followed the jobs. Farming and
ranching communities are now home to a demographically
insignificant percentage of Americans, the vast majority of whom
live not in ranch houses but in more or less identical split-level
'ranch homes' in more or less identical suburban 'communities.'
Generica.
In my view, these are neither communities nor homes. I believe
the combination of television and suburban population patterns is
simply toxic to the soul. I see much evidence in contemporary
America to support this view.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, doom impended. And, as I watched
community in Pinedale growing ill from the same economic forces
that were killing my family's ranch, the Bar Cross, satellite
dishes brought the cultural infection of television. I started
looking around for evidence that community in America would not
perish altogether.
But they had many of the other necessary elements of community,
including a culture, a religion of sorts (which, though it lacked
dogma, had most of the other, more nurturing aspects of spiritual
practice), a sense of necessity, and, most importantly, shared
adversity.
I took some heart in the mysterious nomadic City of the
Deadheads, the virtually physical town that follows the Grateful
Dead around the country. The Deadheads lacked place, touching down
briefly wherever the band happened to be playing, and they lacked
continuity in time, since they had to suffer a new diaspora every
time the band moved on or went home. But they had many of the other
necessary elements of community, including a culture, a religion of
sorts (which, though it lacked dogma, had most of the other, more
nurturing aspects of spiritual practice), a sense of necessity,
and, most importantly, shared adversity.
I wanted to know more about the flavor of their interaction,
what they thought and felt, but since I wrote Dead songs (including
'Estimated Prophet' and 'Cassidy'), I was a minor icon to the
Deadheads, and was thus inhibited, in some socially Heisenbergian
way, from getting a clear view of what really went on among
them.
Then, in 1987, I heard about a 'place' where Deadheads gathered
where I could move among them without distorting too much the field
of observation. Better, this was a place I could visit without
leaving Wyoming. It was a shared computer in Sausalito, California,
called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL. After a lot of
struggling with modems, serial cables, init strings, and other
computer arcana that seemed utterly out of phase with such notions
as Deadheads and small towns, I found myself looking at the glowing
yellow word 'Login:' beyond which lay my future.
'Inside' the WELL were Deadheads in community. There were
thousands of them there, gossiping, complaining (mostly about the
Grateful Dead), comforting and harassing each other, bartering,
engaging in religion (or at least exchanging their totemic set
lists), beginning and ending love affairs, praying for one
another's sick kids. There was, it seemed, everything one might
find going on in a small town, save dragging Main Street and making
out on the back roads.
I was delighted. I felt I had found the new locale of human
community -- never mind that the whole thing was being conducted in
mere words by minds from whom the bodies had been amputated. Never
mind that all these people were deaf, dumb, and blind as paramecia
or that their town had neither seasons nor sunsets nor
smells.Surely all these deficiencies would be remedied by richer,
faster communications media. The featureless log-in handles would
gradually acquire video faces (and thus expressions), shaded 3-D
body puppets (and thus body language). This 'space,' which I
recognized at once to be a primitive form of the cyberspace William
Gibson predicted in his sci-fi novel Neuromancer, was still
without apparent dimensions or vistas. But virtual reality would
change all that in time.
Meanwhile, the commons, or something like it, had been
rediscovered. Once again, people from the 'burbs had a place where
they could encounter their friends as my fellow Pinedalians did at
the post office and the Wrangler Cafe. They had a place where their
hearts could remain as the companies they worked for shuffled their
bodies around America. They could put down roots that could not be
ripped out by forces of economic history. They had a collective
stake. They had a community.
It is seven years now since I discovered the WELL. In that time,
I co-founded an organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
dedicated to protecting its interests and those of other virtual
communities like it from raids by physical government. I've spent
countless hours typing away at its residents, and I've watched the
larger context that contains it, the Internet, grow at such an
explosive rate that, by 2004, every human on the planet will have
an email address unless the growth curve flattens (which it
will).
There is not much human diversity in cyberspace, consisting as
it largely does of white males under 50 with plenty of computer
terminal time, great typing skills, high math SATs, strongly held
opinions on just about everything, and an excruciating face-to-face
shyness, especially with the opposite sex.
My enthusiasm for virtuality has cooled. In fact, unless one
counts interaction with the rather too large society of those with
whom I exchange electronic mail, I don't spend much time engaging
in virtual community at all. Many of the near-term benefits I
anticipated from it seem to remain as far in the future as they did
when I first logged in. Perhaps they always will.
Pinedale works, more or less, as it is, but a lot is still
missing from the communities of cyberspace, whether they be places
like the WELL, the fractious newsgroups of USENET, the silent
'auditoriums' of America Online, or even enclaves on the promising
World Wide Web.
What is missing? Well, to quote Ranjit Makkuni of Xerox PARC,
'the prana is missing,' prana being the Hindu term for both breath
and spirit. I think he is right about this and that perhaps the
central question of the virtual age is whether or not prana can
somehow be made to fit through any medium but the act of being
there.
Prana is, to my mind, the literally vital element in the holy
and unseen ecology of relationship, the dense mesh of invisible
life, on whose surface carbon-based life floats like a thin film.
It is at the heart of the fundamental and profound difference
between information and experience. Jaron Lanier has said that
'information is alienated experience,' and, that being true, prana
is part of what is removed when you create such easily
transmissible replicas of experience as, say, the evening news.
Obviously a great many other, less spiritual, things are also
missing entirely, like body language, sex, death, tone of voice,
clothing, beauty (or homeliness), weather, violence, vegetation,
wildlife, pets, architecture, music, smells, sunlight, and that ol'
harvest moon. In short, most of the things that make my life real
to me.
Present, but in far less abundance than in the physical world,
which I call 'meat space,' are women, children, old people, poor
people, and the genuinely blind. Also mostly missing are the
illiterate and the continent of Africa. There is not much human
diversity in cyberspace, consisting as it largely does of white
males under 50 with plenty of computer terminal time, great typing
skills, high math SATs, strongly held opinions on just about
everything, and an excruciating face-to-face shyness, especially
with the opposite sex.
But diversity is as essential to healthy community as it is to
healthy ecosystems (which are, in my view, different from
communities only in unimportant aspects).
I believe that the principal reason for the almost universal
failure of the intentional communities of the '60s and '70s was a
lack of diversity in their members. It was a rare commune with any
old people in it, or people who were fundamentally out of
philosophical agreement with the majority.Indeed, it is the usual
problem when we try to build something that can only be grown.
Natural systems, such as human communities, are simply too complex
to design by the engineering principles we insist on applying to
them. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Western civilization is now finding
its rational skills inadequate to the task of creating and caring
for life. We would do better to return to a kind of agricultural
mind-set in which we humbly try to re-create the conditions from
which life has sprung before. And leave the rest to God.
Given that it has been built so far almost entirely by people
with engineering degrees, it is not so surprising that cyberspace
has the kind of overdesigned quality that leaves out all kinds of
elements nature would have provided invisibly.
Also missing from both the communes of the '60s and from
cyberspace are a couple of elements that I believe are very
important, if not essential, to the formation and preservation of
real community: an absence of alternatives and a sense of genuine
adversity, generally shared. What about these?
It is hard to argue that anyone would find losing a modem
literally hard to survive, while many have remained in small towns,
have tolerated their intolerances and created entertainment to
enliven their culturally arid lives simply because it seemed there
was no choice but to stay. There are many investments -- spiritual,
material, and temporal -- one is willing to put into a home one
cannot leave. Communities are often the beneficiaries of these
involuntary investments.
I have no idea how far we will plunge into this strange place.
Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end. It is so
dissatisfying in so many ways that I suspect we will be more
restless in our search for home here than in all our previous
explorations.
But when the going gets rough in cyberspace, it is even easier
to move than it is in the 'burbs, where, given the fact that the
average American moves some 17 times in his or her life, moving
appears to be pretty easy. You can not only find another bulletin
board service (BBS) or newsgroup to hang out in, you can, with very
little effort, start your own.
And then there is the bond of joint suffering. Most community is
a cultural stockade erected against a common enemy that can take
many forms. In Pinedale, we bore together, with an understanding
needing little expression, the fact that Upper Green River Valley
is the coldest spot, as measured by annual mean temperature, in the
lower 48 states. We knew that if somebody was stopped on the road
most winter nights, he would probably die there, so the fact that
we might loathe him was not sufficient reason to drive on past his
broken pickup.
By the same token, the Deadheads have the Drug Enforcement
Administration, which strives to give them 20-year prison terms
without parole for distributing the fairly harmless sacrament of
their faith. They have an additional bond in the fact that when
their Microbuses die, as they often do, no one but another Deadhead
is likely to stop to help them.
But what are the shared adversities of cyberspace? Lousy user
interfaces? The flames of harsh invective? Dumb jokes? Surely these
can all be survived without the sanctuary provided by fellow
sufferers.
One is always free to yank the jack, as I have mostly done. For
me, the physical world offers far more opportunity for prana-rich
connections with my fellow creatures. Even for someone whose body
is in a state of perpetual motion, I feel I can generally find more
community among the still-embodied.
Finally, there is that shyness factor. Not only are we trying to
build community here among people who have never experienced any in
my sense of the term, we are trying to build community among people
who, in their lives, have rarely used the word we in a heartfelt
way. It is a vast club, and many of the members -- following
Groucho Marx -- wouldn't want to join a club that would have
them.
And yet...
How quickly physical community continues to deteriorate. Even
Pinedale, which seems to have survived the plague of ranch
failures, feels increasingly cut off from itself. Many of the
ranches are now owned by corporate types who fly their Gulfstreams
in to fish and are rarely around during the many months when the
creeks are frozen over and neighbors are needed. They have kept the
ranches alive financially, but they actively discourage their
managers from the interdependence my colleagues and I required.
They keep agriculture on life support, still alive but lacking a
functional heart.And the town has been inundated with suburbanites
who flee here, bringing all their terrors and suspicions with them.
They spend their evenings as they did in Orange County, watching
television or socializing in hermetic little enclaves of
fundamentalist Christianity that seem to separate them from us and
even, given their sectarian animosities, from one another. The town
remains. The community is largely a wraith of nostalgia.
So where else can we look for the connection we need to prevent
our plunging further into the condition of separateness Nietzsche
called sin? What is there to do but to dive further into the
bramble bush of information that, in its broadcast forms, has done
so much to tear us apart?
Cyberspace, for all its current deficiencies and failed
promises, is not without some very real solace already.
Over a year ago, the great love of my life, a vivid young woman
with whom I intended to spend the rest of it, dropped dead of
undiagnosed viral cardiomyopathy two days short of her 30th
birthday. I felt as if my own heart had been as shredded as
hers.
We had lived together in New York City. Except for my daughters,
no one from Pinedale had met her. I needed a community to wrap
around myself against colder winds than fortune had ever blown at
me before. And without looking, I found I had one in the virtual
world.
On the WELL, there was a topic announcing her death in one of
the conferences to which I posted the eulogy I had read over her
before burying her in her own small town of Nanaimo, British
Columbia. It seemed to strike a chord among the disembodied living
of the Net. People copied it and sent it to one another. Over the
next several months I received almost a megabyte of electronic mail
from all over the planet, mostly from folks whose faces I have
never seen and probably never will.
They told me of their own tragedies and what they had done to
survive them. As humans have since words were first uttered, we
shared the second most common human experience, death, with an
openheartedness that would have caused grave uneasiness in physical
America, where the whole topic is so cloaked in denial as to be
considered obscene. Those strangers, who had no arms to put around
my shoulders, no eyes to weep with mine, nevertheless saw me
through. As neighbors do.
'It ain't no Amish barn-raising in there...'
-- Bruce Sterling (speaking of cyberspace)
I have no idea how far we will plunge into this strange place.
Unlike previous frontiers, this one has no end. It is so
dissatisfying in so many ways that I suspect we will be more
restless in our search for home here than in all our previous
explorations. And that is one reason why I think we may find it
after all. If home is where the heart is, then there is already
some part of home to be found in cyberspace.
So... does virtual community work or not? Should we all go off
to cyberspace or should we resist it as a demonic form of symbolic
abstraction? Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality
itself?
Like so many true things, this one doesn't resolve itself to a
black or a white. Nor is it gray. It is, along with the rest of
life, black/white. Both/neither. I'm not being equivocal or
wishy-washy here. We have to get over our Manichean sense that
everything is either good or bad, and the border of cyberspace
seems to me a good place to leave that old set of filters.
But really it doesn't matter. We are going there whether we want
to or not. In five years, everyone who is reading these words will
have an email address, other than the determined Luddites who also
eschew the telephone and electricity.
When we are all together in cyberspace we will see what the
human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there. I
am convinced that the result will be more benign if we go there
open-minded, open-hearted, and excited with the adventure than if
we are dragged into exile.
And we must remember that going to cyberspace, unlike previous
great emigrations to the frontier, hardly requires us to leave
where we have been. Many will find, as I have, a much richer
appreciation of physical reality for having spent so much time in
virtuality.
Despite its current (and perhaps in some areas permanent)
insufficiencies, we should go to cyberspace with hope. Groundless
hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind that
counts.
-- In Memoriam, Dr. Cynthia Horner
(1964-1994)