Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet. Regula Bochsler
that he chose. Even his boss at the time, Joseph Hardin, describes his arrogance, ‘He very much felt that he was the leader of the thing.’
On leaving this first meeting in Illinois, Berners-Lee felt that his Web was in danger of fatally fracturing, because Andreessen’s team was running ‘single-handedly’ towards the goal line. As he recalled: ‘Evidence was mounting that “the Web” could splinter into various factions – some commercial, some academic; some free, some not. This would defeat the very purpose of the Web: to be a single, universal accessible Hypertext medium for sharing information.’
To prevent this, soon afterwards Berners-Lee released the Standards under a ‘public license’ which meant that the World Wide Web could never be controlled by a single institution or corporation. He also established the World Wide Web Consortium, a not-for-profit organisation whose sole purpose is to guard the Standards that make the Web work. This was in order to guarantee that the Standards would not be perverted by corporations seeking to extend them to the exclusion of other users, and as a way of preventing any individual, including Berners-Lee himself, from profiting from his innovation.
In various subsequent meetings, tension continued to be felt between the consensual Tim Berners-Lee and the determined and singular Marc Andreessen. Observers describe the young hacker’s behaviour as childish, with his wisecracking to the sniggers of his team, making sarcastic, deprecating comments about his elders, and ‘we are going to conquer the world’ attitude. Nonetheless, this gung-ho spirit did inspire incredible productivity from the Mosaic team. During 1993 the Mosaic Web browser was released first for Windows and then Macintosh – and it was the Mosaic browser that Hans and Herbert discovered via Franz Penz. The Web phenomenon had begun, and growth in traffic suddenly became exponential as new users flocked to the easy-to-use Internet. In the one year until the end of 1993, the number of Web sites grew from a few hundred to more than 10,000.
The opposing characters of the Web’s main protagonists did much for its ultimate success. While Tim Berners-Lee built the Web, safeguarded the Standards and kept order, the younger Marc Andreessen made a compelling browser and fought aggressively to make the World Wide Web a simple, accessible technology.
Marc Andreessen went on to set up a corporation that made browsers – and in doing so became the first of the boyish Internet millionaires, a role model for a new generation of entrepreneurs using the Internet as a platform for profit. For their cover, Time magazine placed him barefoot on a gold throne – the rebel king.
By contrast, Tim Berners-Lee adopted the role of consummate politician, defending his creation from avaricious colonisation by any commercial interest. Fortune magazine in turn depicted him as Saint Tim. Always the European, he would later write, ‘Many people ask why I didn’t commercialize the Web. It’s a strange question. By asking the question, people are suggesting that they respect people as a function of their net worth. That’s worrying. It’s not an assumption I was brought up with; and it is disturbing, the extent to which it pervades [the USA].’
Without these two notes the Web phenomenon could not have had such explosive resonance. What Berners-Lee and Andreessen achieved was remarkable: despite the anarchistic sensibility of the Internet community, they had built order, a set of common rules that was widely adopted because nobody owned or controlled it. Yet the Web would not have been so massive had a singular individual and the company that he became part of not dominated the process in the first years. This struggle between self-interest and public good, between wilful individualism and determined collectivism, was the defining conflict of the birthing of Web technology. This conflict would set the framework for and determine the path of many others of the coming years.
From Vienna, Hans and Herbert quickly communicated their discovery of the World Wide Web to the other members of the gang. ‘A world opened up to me that I did not know existed. It was like a parallel universe, and it seemed to be incredibly huge,’ says Franco. ‘I had this impression despite the fact that there was almost exclusively university stuff up there.’ Almost immediately, the group came to see the Internet as more than a vehicle for simple communication – they began to realise that it was a medium through which they could define their identity.
Herbert and Hans were so excited about their discovery that they demanded Internet access at their art school, and even set about organising access for the rest of their class (though their efforts were met with derision from the archly hip art students, who thought that the latest cool media was video, not the Internet). In Zürich, the rest of the crew wangled passwords for the computer lab at the university.
One of the first things the friends used the Web for was to search for a new name, because Thomas hated Combination-Combination. He thought it was both too long and too dull ever to be seen as anything cool. Instead, the story goes that Juri created a little computer program called the Term Shooter, a script that was able to generate names. It created four-letter words with a vowel in the middle, like that of their role model Sony, and descenders or ascenders for graphic effect. Supposedly, one night towards the end of 1994, they were huddled around their respective computers in Vienna and Zürich with the Term Shooter spewing out thousands of scrolling names. It was like a transnational shoot-’em-up word game; if a name didn’t stick immediately, it wasn’t worth considering. At first they found nothing. Then one name resonated across the collective. Herbert, Juri and the others danced on their keyboards. It was better than Sony. It looked good and it had comic connotations. They liked it for its whimsy, for its drug reference and its playfulness. The name was etoy.
Later in 1994, Peter was using Mosaic to navigate his way around the Web one day when he chanced upon a Web site, based at a polar-research centre in Ohio, that also hosted Web sites for free. There he created the beginnings of etoy’s first site; it was dreary, with black text on a grey background. It had a Web address and a URL with so many parts that it was impossible to remember: http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/hppetoy.html. Next to the icon of a little bomb, Peter had written, ‘etoy, here we are now! … etoy is THE new lifestyle for the coming generation. Please visit us when this site will be finished, in mid-January.’
The boys celebrated in the way they knew best: by getting drunk at a party. Elated by their new discovery, they ran round scribbling the ‘@’ symbol on to party-goers’ hands. As Peter remembers, ‘We were so excited that we told everybody how brilliant the future would be.’
‘Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence.’
Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2000
‘It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.’
The Times, about the telegraph, 1858
In early 1995, the etoy gang worked relentlessly for their common aims. Hans and Herbert considered the strategy, created graphics and wrote manifestos and poetry. Peter and Franco wrote and recorded music. Juri explored the working of Web technology. Alberto worked on three-dimensional graphic representations that he hoped would become a ‘virtual disco’. Thomas wrote witty essays about their lifestyle. There was no central direction, but the seven of them had a shared sensibility and all seemed to push in roughly the same direction. ‘It was as if we were ants,’ remembers Juri, ‘and we all knew independently where the sugar was.’
They also began planning a more extensive Web site. They wanted to show its visitors their work – Herbert’s images and Hans’s WORDWAR poems. In the ‘disco’, Peter and Franco were going to make their soundtracks available. To launch themselves and their first steps on the World Wide Web, they decided to hold a party, which they initially hoped could be online, with party-goers logging on around the world, listening to their music and chatting and smooching with each other across the Internet. But while they were confounded by the impossibility of virtual drinks and drugs, their biggest problem was that the technology didn’t quite live up to their expectations: the