This intimate history of an early web community and a man’s choice to die in public shows that the internet can be a place where real social bonds are formed
Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Wi-Fi, before even the widespread use of email, back in the dark ages of dial up, there was the WELL. An acronym for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, it was one of the very first online communities, founded in 1985 and run for many years out of a dingy office on the Sausalito waterfront.
As the name suggests, the WELL arose out of a fertile coupling between techno-visionaries and the California hippy scene. One of the founders was Stewart Brand, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture bible with a readership already primed to grasp the benefits of online discussion and idea-exchange. These early WELL-dwellers, as they called themselves, cross-pollinated merrily with an eclectic mix of largely left-leaning journalists, hackers and politicos, alongside almost every Grateful Dead fan with access to a modem (it was the Deadhead population that kept the site financially afloat for years).
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