The WELL (30 Years After)
Aug. 7th, 2022 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraLena D_______ died.
Those WELL people are dropping like flies.
###
What is the WELL?
Well…. (yuck, yuck, yuck). Back in the Dawn of Time (i.e. before the World Wide Web), The WELL was the very first social media platform.
Many people will argue with that assertion, pointing to Usenet and other distributed discussion systems as the true social media forebearers, but I think they are mistaken. I would argue that Usenet was a kind of an amphibian with a peer-to-peer network and an incredibly arcane hierarchical organization that only resembles what we call social media in superficial ways.
(And it was terribly interesting to me when blockchains and crypto breathed new life into the peer-to-peer model. But probably not to anyone reading this. 😀)
###
Graduate school did one great thing for me: It cured me of the Fear of the Black Box.
Although I’ve always been good at math, before graduate school I was petrified of anything that smacked of engineering.
But in graduate school, I had to become familiar with using a computer. Understand I went to graduate school between 1987 and 1990, and computers were not the ubiquitous appliances they are today.
Once I became comfortable with using computers for basic tasks like word processing and very primitive graphics creation, I naturally became interested in programming.
I was spending many hours a day playing with my computer, a Macintosh Plus with a whopping 1 MB of RAM. (Right from the beginning, I was a gazelle in the Big Fruit Company’s lion cage.) Neglecting my young son and my then husband.
Then I read an article by Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist I admired, about something called The WELL.
Evidently, your computer would talk back to you if you joined the WELL!
So, I joined.
Here’s how I described the experience in the Wired article Katie Hafner wrote about the WELL’s early days:
I fell in love. Instantly, effortlessly, irretrievably. With the WELL. So here's where all the brilliant people have been hiding out, I marveled. Because all my life, I'd felt like a misfit. While other people talked about sports and mileage and the adventures of their favorite sit com characters, I longed to talk about books and ideas. I mean I could talk other-people-ese with the best of them (I'm good at dialects) but I longed for people whom I didn't have to translate, with whom I could speak my own language. The WELL abounded with these people. Although it never quite dawned on me at this stage that they were people. More like penumbra.
So weird rereading that Wired article now!
Hafner got so many, many, many details wrong.
Tom Mandel was my best friend.
His Menlo Park condo wasn’t that bad though of course, he was a hoarder and a chain smoker who never bothered to take his cigarettes outside.
He was not logged on to the WELL when he got the news about his lung cancer.
I know because he got the news just before he showed up at the baby shower April threw for me when I was pregnant with RTT.
And Maria Wilhelm was what they call on Law & Order my “rabbi.”
Maria was very foresightful when it came to tech. Something of a business genius when it came to stuff like that. When the WELL floated into her path, she immediately knew the cyber-community model could be monetized for the BIG bucks.
Except the WELL itself could not be monetized.
Because that particular cyber-community was inhabited by some truly nasty human beings.
And you couldn't evict them.
For example: Shortly before I joined the WELL, WELL members had bullied one long-time user so relentlessly that he committed suicide. And they refused to accept any kind of responsibility! Would bully you if you dared however meekly to suggest that at least some of the impetus behind Blair Newman’s death was the horrible things people said to him online.
Plus WELL inhabitants were incredibly snotty about being a text-based interface.
The WELL had structural elements that might be floated to another monetized cyber-community play.
But that play would take time to build.
So, eventually, Maria grew restless and moved on to show biz.
And took me with her.
###
I only ended up being an active WELL member for about five years.
The WELL was all about people expressing their opinions—often in extremely scintillating prose, true! But still. Opinions.
Turns out that I’m not that interested in other people’s opinions.
I’m much more interested in people’s lives.
LiveJournal turned out to be a much better fit for me than the WELL.
###
One of the other things that turned me off about the WELL was its members’ incessant yammering about being a “community.”
I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be part of that community—or any community if it came down to that. I’ve always seen myself more as a free agent: I play well for the team while I’m on it, but I reserve the right to wander away at any time.
There were occasional real-time meetups of WELL members, which I found myself not enjoying.
In person, many of the scintillating wits whose epic prose swept like meteors across my computer monitor turned out to be doughy and tongue-tied.
###
I can’t remember when I first met Lena except that when I met her, she was vastly overweight.
We’re not talking chubs, or some extra padding, or even 50 pounds of avoirdupois.
We’re talking morbid obesity.
And this would have been fine. I mean, it’s her body; she gets to make the rules.
But then, the next day, she emailed me to ask whether I take her out makeup shopping and teach her how to use makeup.
And I didn’t know what to do.
I mean, of course, I had to say, Yes.
But the truth was no amount of makeup was going to turn her into a conventionally attractive woman.
Only losing 150 pounds was going to turn her into a conventionally attractive woman.
And she was not a stupid woman, so I knew she knew this.
But obviously, this was not something I could say to her.
She was trying to bond with me over girly-girlness. Except she hadn’t done the necessary girly-girlness prep work, and we both knew it. So, I felt like I was being manipulated.
###
The other thing that was terribly off-putting about the WELL was that periodically, one person would become a Designated Pariah, and everyone else would dump on that person in a terribly public way.
I can’t remember what my specific transgression was. I think maybe outing Rossney and David Gans for the horrible things they said about Tom after his death in their Sooper Sekrit Private Conference.
Seems laughable now!
Who the fuck cares?
But at the time, it was a Very Big Deal, and I was the Worst Person Who Ever Lived, and reams and reams of server space were devoted to my sheer awfulness.
Lena was one of the people who dumped on me.
I wasn’t surprised.
I had been kind to her, but she had been looking for friendship.
No kind deed goes unpunished, right?
###
When the cyber world migrated on to Facebook, I was constantly surprised by the number of “friend” requests I got from old WELLies. Some of them I accepted—I did like a fair number of people on the WELL (particularly the ones I’d never met in the flesh! 😀) —but many of them I ignored.
Lena’s was one I ignored.
I kinda knew her ever-after story through osmosis.
A Famous Cyber Geek broke up with his girlfriend and advertised for a new girlfriend. Lena accepted the position. They got married. They had a house in Palo Alto, which means they got rich.
But I never so much as thought about Lena again until I set up that GoFundMe for Marissa.
On the first day, I got two donations in significant amounts.
One was from the creepy double-crossing manager who terminated me from my job at People.
The other was from Lena.
Significant amounts!
And anonymous donations. Except that since I was managing the GoFundMe, I saw who they were from.
So, apparently, my creepy X-manager and Lena were reading my FB homepage.
That made me feel kinda weird.
But I guess the donation was Lena’s way of telling me, Sorry.
###
Lena died of pneumonia complications that were directly related to morbid obesity.
And I was sorry to hear it.
She was my age.
I wish you an easy passage to the other side of that river, Lena.
Those WELL people are dropping like flies.
###
What is the WELL?
Well…. (yuck, yuck, yuck). Back in the Dawn of Time (i.e. before the World Wide Web), The WELL was the very first social media platform.
Many people will argue with that assertion, pointing to Usenet and other distributed discussion systems as the true social media forebearers, but I think they are mistaken. I would argue that Usenet was a kind of an amphibian with a peer-to-peer network and an incredibly arcane hierarchical organization that only resembles what we call social media in superficial ways.
(And it was terribly interesting to me when blockchains and crypto breathed new life into the peer-to-peer model. But probably not to anyone reading this. 😀)
###
Graduate school did one great thing for me: It cured me of the Fear of the Black Box.
Although I’ve always been good at math, before graduate school I was petrified of anything that smacked of engineering.
But in graduate school, I had to become familiar with using a computer. Understand I went to graduate school between 1987 and 1990, and computers were not the ubiquitous appliances they are today.
Once I became comfortable with using computers for basic tasks like word processing and very primitive graphics creation, I naturally became interested in programming.
I was spending many hours a day playing with my computer, a Macintosh Plus with a whopping 1 MB of RAM. (Right from the beginning, I was a gazelle in the Big Fruit Company’s lion cage.) Neglecting my young son and my then husband.
Then I read an article by Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist I admired, about something called The WELL.
Evidently, your computer would talk back to you if you joined the WELL!
So, I joined.
Here’s how I described the experience in the Wired article Katie Hafner wrote about the WELL’s early days:
I fell in love. Instantly, effortlessly, irretrievably. With the WELL. So here's where all the brilliant people have been hiding out, I marveled. Because all my life, I'd felt like a misfit. While other people talked about sports and mileage and the adventures of their favorite sit com characters, I longed to talk about books and ideas. I mean I could talk other-people-ese with the best of them (I'm good at dialects) but I longed for people whom I didn't have to translate, with whom I could speak my own language. The WELL abounded with these people. Although it never quite dawned on me at this stage that they were people. More like penumbra.
So weird rereading that Wired article now!
Hafner got so many, many, many details wrong.
Tom Mandel was my best friend.
His Menlo Park condo wasn’t that bad though of course, he was a hoarder and a chain smoker who never bothered to take his cigarettes outside.
He was not logged on to the WELL when he got the news about his lung cancer.
I know because he got the news just before he showed up at the baby shower April threw for me when I was pregnant with RTT.
And Maria Wilhelm was what they call on Law & Order my “rabbi.”
Maria was very foresightful when it came to tech. Something of a business genius when it came to stuff like that. When the WELL floated into her path, she immediately knew the cyber-community model could be monetized for the BIG bucks.
Except the WELL itself could not be monetized.
Because that particular cyber-community was inhabited by some truly nasty human beings.
And you couldn't evict them.
For example: Shortly before I joined the WELL, WELL members had bullied one long-time user so relentlessly that he committed suicide. And they refused to accept any kind of responsibility! Would bully you if you dared however meekly to suggest that at least some of the impetus behind Blair Newman’s death was the horrible things people said to him online.
Plus WELL inhabitants were incredibly snotty about being a text-based interface.
The WELL had structural elements that might be floated to another monetized cyber-community play.
But that play would take time to build.
So, eventually, Maria grew restless and moved on to show biz.
And took me with her.
###
I only ended up being an active WELL member for about five years.
The WELL was all about people expressing their opinions—often in extremely scintillating prose, true! But still. Opinions.
Turns out that I’m not that interested in other people’s opinions.
I’m much more interested in people’s lives.
LiveJournal turned out to be a much better fit for me than the WELL.
###
One of the other things that turned me off about the WELL was its members’ incessant yammering about being a “community.”
I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be part of that community—or any community if it came down to that. I’ve always seen myself more as a free agent: I play well for the team while I’m on it, but I reserve the right to wander away at any time.
There were occasional real-time meetups of WELL members, which I found myself not enjoying.
In person, many of the scintillating wits whose epic prose swept like meteors across my computer monitor turned out to be doughy and tongue-tied.
###
I can’t remember when I first met Lena except that when I met her, she was vastly overweight.
We’re not talking chubs, or some extra padding, or even 50 pounds of avoirdupois.
We’re talking morbid obesity.
And this would have been fine. I mean, it’s her body; she gets to make the rules.
But then, the next day, she emailed me to ask whether I take her out makeup shopping and teach her how to use makeup.
And I didn’t know what to do.
I mean, of course, I had to say, Yes.
But the truth was no amount of makeup was going to turn her into a conventionally attractive woman.
Only losing 150 pounds was going to turn her into a conventionally attractive woman.
And she was not a stupid woman, so I knew she knew this.
But obviously, this was not something I could say to her.
She was trying to bond with me over girly-girlness. Except she hadn’t done the necessary girly-girlness prep work, and we both knew it. So, I felt like I was being manipulated.
###
The other thing that was terribly off-putting about the WELL was that periodically, one person would become a Designated Pariah, and everyone else would dump on that person in a terribly public way.
I can’t remember what my specific transgression was. I think maybe outing Rossney and David Gans for the horrible things they said about Tom after his death in their Sooper Sekrit Private Conference.
Seems laughable now!
Who the fuck cares?
But at the time, it was a Very Big Deal, and I was the Worst Person Who Ever Lived, and reams and reams of server space were devoted to my sheer awfulness.
Lena was one of the people who dumped on me.
I wasn’t surprised.
I had been kind to her, but she had been looking for friendship.
No kind deed goes unpunished, right?
###
When the cyber world migrated on to Facebook, I was constantly surprised by the number of “friend” requests I got from old WELLies. Some of them I accepted—I did like a fair number of people on the WELL (particularly the ones I’d never met in the flesh! 😀) —but many of them I ignored.
Lena’s was one I ignored.
I kinda knew her ever-after story through osmosis.
A Famous Cyber Geek broke up with his girlfriend and advertised for a new girlfriend. Lena accepted the position. They got married. They had a house in Palo Alto, which means they got rich.
But I never so much as thought about Lena again until I set up that GoFundMe for Marissa.
On the first day, I got two donations in significant amounts.
One was from the creepy double-crossing manager who terminated me from my job at People.
The other was from Lena.
Significant amounts!
And anonymous donations. Except that since I was managing the GoFundMe, I saw who they were from.
So, apparently, my creepy X-manager and Lena were reading my FB homepage.
That made me feel kinda weird.
But I guess the donation was Lena’s way of telling me, Sorry.
###
Lena died of pneumonia complications that were directly related to morbid obesity.
And I was sorry to hear it.
She was my age.
I wish you an easy passage to the other side of that river, Lena.
