Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler
I’m having trouble keeping up with all this energy, I feel an almost ecstatic vertigo from the acceleration of progress.’
But if Timothy Leary introduced Joichi Ito to his world it was Ito who introduced the older man to the World Wide Web, and opened up for him another dimension beyond the disappointment of virtual reality. Ito – like the etoy boys – had a previous history with computers, that he had all but forgotten. In 1981, as a teenager in Tokyo, he’d managed to hack his way into university computer systems and then jump from one location to another. He eventually found the first interactive game, the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) at the University of Essex, in England. For weeks he played this text-based adventure game, as a character whom he called Sid – after the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. When Sid met a gruesome virtual death, Ito wept for a whole night.
By the time the Web browser Mosaic was released, Ito was in Tokyo running clubs and various other businesses. The Web was a medium to which he took with great ease. As Howard Rheingold, a writer from the West Coast technology elite, wrote, ‘Mosaic in Joi’s hands had that instantly recognisable look of the future to it.’ Tim Leary had a similar revelation on seeing Mosaic. On his Web site he wrote: ‘A few years ago, a young Cyber-Wizard named Joichi Ito said, “Our computer screens are windows into Cyber Worlds which we can explore. The first step is to design, construct, and furnish our personal-private Home, where friends can hang out.” And that’s when I realized the empowerment that inter-personal computers offer individuals.’
Joining Leary’s vision to Ito’s ideas, in the middle of 1995 the pair began to create a ‘Home on the Internet’ for Timothy Leary. So enamoured of the future was Timothy Leary that he sold his car, leaving behind what he thought of as the old fossil-fuel economy, and transformed his garage into the workspace for a number of young Web designers and hackers; this he called his ‘digital garage’. Ito, meanwhile, had been using his bicultural and technical knowledge to translate the Internet to the Japanese. He founded a company called Eccosys and set up Japan’s first Web server in the bathroom of his apartment, then sent his godfather and mentor the computers he would need to implement his final dream.
Tim Leary wanted his Web presence to replicate his real-life house, for viewers to be able to see inside the living room and dining room and to ‘pick’ books off his shelves. The concept was simple, as Chris Graves, Leary’s Webmaster, remembers, ‘He wanted people to have as much access to his life and his work as he gave them in real life.’ Graves and his friends mapped out the house, photographing it from top to bottom and uploading the pictures on to the Web. ‘Tim was the mastermind of the whole thing; he was directing the whole process,’ recalls Graves.
Leary was dying of prostate cancer, and he planned for the Web site to be his swansong. He registered his drug intake on it, and in one rash moment even claimed that he would broadcast his death live over the Internet. The global media reported hysterically this strange final twist from the great provocateur of the sixties; it seemed so new, so radical and so innovative. In the event, Leary did not go ahead with the broadcast.
In the spring of 1996 Joichi Ito had his last cigar with the dying Timothy Leary. When Ito left the house, he took a plane from LAX to Austria in order to attend that year’s jury deliberations for the Prix Ars Electronica. The following night, Timothy Leary quietly died in his bedroom, surrounded by his friends and the various people who had been looking after his Web site. John Perry Barlow was at home that night. ‘The phone just rang in the middle of this rainy Wyoming night, and now I’m here naked in the dark trying to think of something to follow him out with,’ he wrote hours after the call. His eulogy spread across the Internet, posted as a memorial on hundreds of Web sites and email lists; the symbol of the sixties had died and it seemed like the end of an epoch.
Meanwhile Ito had arrived at Ars Electronica, where etoy, almost a year after their first attendance as a group, were about to step from the shadows into the spotlight. For them, a new era was about to begin.
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‘This emerging new economy … has its own distinct opportunities and its own new rules. Those who play by the new rules will prosper; those who ignore them will not.’
Kevin Kelly, ‘New Rules for the New Economy’,
WIRED, 1997
‘Computer hackers … their programs are like surrealist paintings.’
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995
When John Perry Barlow founded his Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, he was determined not only to fight for freedom of speech in cyberspace, but also to open the network to the free market. At that time, the Internet was an academic resource and commerce was restricted from it. For years the US Government’s National Science Foundation which subsidised the Internet had controlled access to it by making new users agree to an Acceptable Use Policy that precluded any profit-seeking activities.
But Barlow – along with various other campaigners – worked hard to repeal these restrictions. In his capacity as an advisor to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Vice President Al Gore, Barlow took his belief in the economic potential of the utterly unregulated Internet to the very highest levels. (He even joked that his favourite mode of transport was Airforce Two – the Vice Presidential plane.) Key pieces of legislation were gradually put in place, allowing the National Science Foundation to foster economic growth and enabling commercial service-providers to hook up to the public network.
Hucksters soon got online, and those who failed to learn the strange language and customs of the early cyberspace pioneers were cruelly punished by a community that was sceptical of their free space being colonised by commerce. One key spat, a precursor to many that followed, began when husband-and-wife lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, sent an email advertising their services to every bulletin board on the Internet. This amounted to some five and a half thousand postings, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of users would see it, over and over again. This was considered to be ‘spamming’, and extremely bad-mannered. Many of the victims of this unwanted attention were already loosely organised as communities within email lists and online discussion-boards. They declared war on the lawyers, filling the firm’s inbox with thousands of useless emails – many containing threats and obscenities – and bunging up their fax machine. The story made it to the cover of Time magazine and was viewed as a warning to those who sought precipitous commercialisation of the not-for-profit cyberspace.
Despite such hostility from some sections of the old Internet community, the forces of commercialisation were too strong to resist and Barlow’s libertarian ideas came to dominate. As he took on a new role, as a corporate consultant and contributing writer to WIRED magazine – which promoted a business ethic wrapped in party-going clothes of Mondo 2000’s dayglo graphics – Barlow perfectly embodied the Internet’s transformation from hippy playground to new capitalist marketplace. One significant point of inflection on this journey happened in April 1995, when, after years of bureaucratic wrangling, the US National Science Foundation formally privatised the Internet. The key parts of the infrastructure – the hubs that routed traffic, and the transcontinental telecom links – were handed over to commercial organisations; as a consequence, the Acceptable Use Policy was repealed and the age of the commercial Internet truly began.
At about this time, thirty-six-year-old nebbish computer entrepreneur Bill Gross was away from his home in Pasadena, California, to attend a family wedding in New York. As ever, his mind was racing through new possibilities for his existing businesses, radical technical innovations and the possibilities of the Web as a new toy. Just before the wedding, he decided that he needed a haircut, so took a look through the New York Yellow Pages to find a barber. Hundreds were listed, but Gross had no idea where any of them were located or of how good they were. He was not about to wait for a recommendation. Instead, he hailed a cab and chose a barber at random. Arriving outside his selected shop, he immediately realised, just from the look of it, that it wasn’t the kind of place for a man who was already a multi-millionaire. But it was too late.
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