Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler
company bought the struggling Network Solutions. Really he had hoped to exploit the other side of Network Solutions’ business, telecom consultancy, but almost by accident he found he was sitting on a registration venture that might soon prove to be a goldmine. Encouraged by Telage, and to prevent the collapse of the Domain Name System, the National Science Foundation agreed that Network Solutions should be allowed to charge $100 for each new two-year registration and $50 annually thereafter. Thirty per cent of the fees would revert to an ‘Internet intellectual infrastructure fund’, while the remainder would go towards Network Solutions’ costs and to their profit. Charging for registration was to be introduced on 1 October 1995. When the news leaked out, speculators rushed in their thousands to register for free before the deadline. Thus it was brought forward to 12 September.
This event rocked the Internet engineering community – which until then had been organised around grindingly slow opinion-gathering processes. Around the Web campaigners, engineers and entrepreneurs began to complain about the new system, hopelessly fracturing the rough consensus that Postel had nurtured for twenty years. Many felt that domain space was a public resource that should not be pursued for private profit. The shift also created a monopoly for the registration of dot-com and other top-level domains; and this monopoly was in the hands of Network Solutions, which now had every reason to guard jealously its singular right to register and charge.
When etoy first discussed where to build its home on the World Wide Web, etoy.ch with the Swiss country code was dismissed as being parochial. etoy.net was favoured because it had the essence of the underground hacker-scene and a sense of community. Soon, however, etoy.com became the group’s preferred option because ‘dot-com is an Internet status symbol (at least for primitive people like me)’, as agent Kubli wrote in an email. ‘And status symbols stand for power and power, in the end, stands for money.’ The mischievous and musical Goldstein was the only group member to disagree; he thought that etoy should be pushing ‘love’, not power. His objections were eventually overcome. In Vienna Brainhard spoke for the rest of the group when he argued that ‘dot-com is the commercial image, beautiful, brilliant like steel and hard’. The decision was made.
On 15 October 1995, the etoy members registered their domain name – etoy.com – with Network Solutions for a fee of $100 under the new rules. Had they completed the process one month earlier it would have cost them nothing. In registering they gave Network Solutions enormous power over their destiny. At the time, however, they foresaw no apparent danger – and anyway, they had no choice.
With the domain name registered, the boys relentlessly finished work on their Web site. Everywhere trailblazers were reaching for metaphors to describe the perfect Web site. Some thought the Web would deliver the written word like a magazine; others thought that Web sites were actually more like TV shows, streaming images and sound. To enable users to navigate around the sites, some contained headline-blaring front pages, structured like a newspaper, while others gave maps of information. For the etoy site, Zai and Gramazio proposed a metaphor which was a network of tanks and pipes – like a sewage farm. Initially the front page was to be a picture of the system, a sort of schematic plan, linking the various components. Gramazio remembers, ‘We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.’
During these intense months of creativity, etoy was also developing its own language. The word ‘professional’, for instance, came to be used as the primary aspiration and injunction of the company, and the word ‘unprofessional’ the central pejorative. These became, as Esposto recalls, Zai’s favourite terms. ‘He always said that we had to be “professional”. The word “professional” was used to paper over the weak spots of the organisation. I didn’t understand all the company details any more, but I was very impressed by this guy who thought of everything.’
Slightly more surprising was their use of the word ‘hardcore’ in almost every sentence. For them, it denoted determination, wild and adrenaline-fuelled, as well as alluding to the beat-heavy industrial house music of that name. Interestingly, and unbeknown to the boys, the only corporation to regularly use the word ‘hardcore’ as much as they did was Microsoft. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta called a whole chapter of his book World War 3.0 about Microsoft ‘Hardcore’. As Rob Glaser, CEO of Real Networks, who used to work with Bill Gates, said: ‘I do think the Microsoft culture was one where being hardcore and not being seen as less than hardcore was very important and very highly valued. The Microsoft culture is one where people are not chastised for being paranoid or over-competitive.’
Eventually the etoy Web site was completed, named the etoy. TANKSYSTEM and described as a ‘parallel world somewhere in between LEGO-land, Internet training camp, virtual fairground, hypermedia test ground, sound & vision dump and Internet motel for travellers of the new kind’. Visitors could navigate through the tanks by clicking on arrows at the top of the screen. In the Supermarket tank they could order online etoy sunglasses and laughing-gas cylinders – though these were never delivered. In the Gallery the IP numbers of Web-surfers were checked and printed on the screen, while a Big Brother-ish eye, created by the brilliant hacker Udatny, looked on. etoy also built the first suite of its cybermotel. Coco, the transsexual who had flown through their launch party, furnished it with pictures of and interviews with herself.
The most visited tank was called Underground. There, etoy featured the forbidden – pornography, violence and drug abuse. This was the place where the boys were determined to repudiate the stuffy and constricted sensibilities of the communities they came from, pushing to the absolute limit their critique of the middle-class righteousness and virtue that they so despised. As Zai remembers, ‘etoy, at that time, thought that any moral was bad.’ Their method was to shock in the most extreme and distasteful ways. The Underground tank contained a photograph of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it had been bombed; underneath it was the caption ‘Such work needs a lot of training’. There was also a picture of a woman’s naked breasts pierced with dozens of needles, and a naked man bound and hung upside-down. It was not that the boys supported terrorism or were enamoured by sadomasochism; rather, it was that they thought these shocking images would serve to both get them noticed and provoke and move on the world in which they lived.
When the Web site was completed, Zai was euphoric, exhibiting a hubris that would in time become overwhelming. He wrote to the Zürich crew, ‘We are now the biggest, strongest and most beautiful of the world! This is the first time in my life that we have done something really great. My partners Brainhard and Udatny, and me today worked for the tank for 12 hours without stopping, online, non-linear, not local! HARDCORE! nobody can catch up with us. fuck mtv. fuck netscape. fuck all.’
Soon etoy would announce to the world that they were the first people ever to have emigrated to the Internet to live a digital existence. This ‘emigration’ led to them relying more and more on the robustness of the Domain Name System to protect their homestead at etoy.com. Within a year, they had left their hair, their clothes, their names and, of course, their personal freedom on the altar of the etoy brand; they were henceforth committed to following the etoy corporate identity. And from now on, all communiqués were signed ‘etoy, leaving reality behind’.
In the hills above Hollywood, Timothy Leary, now an old and sick man, was also preparing to leave reality behind, with the support of his ‘godson’, Joichi Ito. They had first met each other at Ito’s twenty-fourth birthday party, in Tokyo in the summer of 1990, when Ito – then a DJ entrepreneur – who had been reading books about Leary, asked him if he ever really had received messages from aliens. Leary laughed. ‘That’s just a lie; we made it up.’ They broke away from the party and strolled across the Ropongi district, where Ito showed the older man the hip, technology-loving children of Japan’s economic bubble at play. ‘He got really excited,’ Ito recalls; Leary was also intrigued by this representative of tech-savvy Japanese youth and soon began describing him as his godson.
Less than a month later, Leary took Ito – along with Ito’s Los Angeles-based mother and sister – to a party in northern California at the Mondo 2000 house in the Berkeley hills. There, Joichi Ito met the scene. Soon he was appearing with Leary on stage in a show called ‘Psychedelics to Cybernetics’, and was staying with the liberty-defending John Perry Barlow in Pinedale,