![]() He had chronicled the earliest days of personal computers in the pages of Rolling Stone, and in 1974 he had published a book titled II Cybernetic Frontiers. ![]() Technology was familiar territory for Brand. Brilliant thought he could find that ready-made user community around Stewart Brand. ![]() This was a technology in search of people who could use it and help it come to life. But so far, the overall response to NETI had been tepid. He had become convinced of this several years earlier, while presiding over an emergency electronic meeting called to discuss the extraction of a crippled UN helicopter from the Himalayas. Brilliant believed that computer conferencing was an idea whose time was coming. The lunchtime pitch to Brand went like this: Brilliant had a company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Network Technologies International, or NETI, which sold computer conferencing systems and had recently capitalized itself to the tune of C$8.6 million (US$6.3 million) on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Brilliant, a roly-poly man who had spent years in India on a campaign to eradicate smallpox, had a lot of ideas-and an eye for people who could help him realize them. Larry Brilliant, a physician whose career had been a mix of good works and business ventures, collared Stewart Brand, the leonine publisher of Whole Earth fame. This particular meal occurred one late fall afternoon in 1984 in a restaurant in La Jolla, California, during a conference of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. Its destiny, meanwhile, would come to hinge on the still-unanswered question: Can you build a community and a business as one and the same? In later years, this resulted in a great deal of confusion and conflict over The Well's goals. ![]() Perhaps most intriguing, it began more as a social experiment than as a business proposition. It wasn't carefully designed or planned it was born of a single idea, and then nurtured by a multitude of competing intellectual visions. In truth, though, as with many great inventions, The Well was mostly the product of creative accident. At The Microsoft Network, at AOL-with its multimillion-user base-and at countless other, smaller network providers, people analyze The Well hoping to divine the magic formula that made it so special, so captivating, so unique. The intense connectedness fostered by The Well's relatively feeble technological base has been admired and studied far and wide as a model for the future of sophisticated networked systems. It would become a harbinger of both the excitement and the concerns that would arise on the Net over the uses of electronic networks and virtual dialogs, free speech, privacy, and anonymity. The Well created a paradox: scruffy, undercapitalized, and armed with a huge amount of clout. Though always small in overall numbers, its influence and recognition far outweighed any significance that could be measured by membership or revenues. History has already decreed The Well to be synonymous with online communication in its best, worst, and, above all, most vital forms. It seems almost as if I am the one who will be left behind to grieve for all of you dying. I'm sad, terribly sad, I cannot tell you how sad and griefstricken I am that I cannot stay to play and argue with you much longer. For better and for worse-there were a lot of both-it has been the time of my life and especially a great comfort during these difficult past six months. I could start off by thanking you all, individually and collectively, for a remarkable experience, this past decade here on the WELL. It's bad luck to say goodbye before it's time to do so and there's no point in embracing death before one's time, but I thought maybe I'd sneak in a topic, not too maudlin I hope, in which I could slowly say goodbye to my friends here, curse my enemies one more time and otherwise wave a bit at the rest of you until it's just not time to do so any more. On March 25, 1995, Tom Mandel sat down at his computer and wrote: Public, that is, to the few thousand people on The Well. The World's Most Influential Online Community (And It's Not AOL)
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