In the beginning was The Well…

While Katie Hafner doesn't begin the story of "the seminal online community" this biblically, her tale of The Well is nothing less than a creation myth. Woven into her account of visionary — and not so visionary — businessmen and women, commune refugees, and assorted pioneers of the electronic frontier is the story of a world being built, of archetypal figures and the conflicts they waged on a virtual battlefield, and of the triumphs and tragedies attending the incorporation of any new community.

The Well — The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link — was born in 1985 out of the belief "that computer conferencing was an idea whose time was long overdue." Physician and entrepreneur Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand — who among other credits founded the Whole Earth Catalog — put down stakes in the cybernetic interstices between the counterculture and computer culture. Distinct from the Arpanet, the precursor to the modern Internet, and from established Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), the founders of The Well hoped to create a space for "intelligent people with diverse interests who were sufficiently outgoing and extroverted that they would be naturals in the medium."

As with the genesis of any new world, the creation of The Well required the development of fundamental rules. In the case of this new online community, the first commandment or prime directive was the simply stated credo, "You own your own words." This rule functioned as a liability shield as much as it did a statement of personal accountability. For the pioneering members, "[t]he Well offered new and intriguing ways to express themselves," and this commandment was intended to place the onus for any potentially libelous or slanderous online behavior squarely on the users' shoulders.

In keeping with its role as a primal story, Hafner's tale of The Well features a requisite primal adversary. In the case of this electronic heaven, a member of The Well named Mark Ethan Smith played the part of the angel who dared to challenge the status quo. Smith, the nom de post of a woman in Berkley, California, had a knack for disrupting The Well's admittedly easygoing social contract, both in the tenor of her online conversations and confrontations and in her offline hounding of fellow Well members. According to Hafner, Smith's behavior eventually became so disruptive that the Well's Director suspended her access, effectively casting her out of the community.