Chapter six 
Inside a Virtual Community
At first glance, they look like any other group of suburban friends gathered on a Sunday afternoon, half of them manhandling an innocent volleyball, the other half hovering over a platter of barbecued chicken and drinking homemade beer.
Yet they aren’t a normal group of friends, they are what Net people call “virtual” friends, an electronic community. They are patrons of the Cellar, one of thousands of small bulletin board systems (BBSs) scattered around the world.
What makes the Cellar and other BBSs different from the Internet is mainly a question of size. While an estimated 30 million people use the Internet, about 150 people dwell in the Cellar. While Usenet has thousands of discussion groups available, the Cellar has just over twenty-five. Cellar owner-operator Tony Shepps, in fact, calls his diminutive BBS the Anti-Net.
“If the Net is the equivalent of an encyclopedia,” he explains, “we’re the equivalent of a dusty old novel. If the Internet is the world’s biggest mall, we’re the friendly coffee shop down the street.”
In other words, the Internet is dizzying and wonderful, allowing us to trade our thoughts with Chileans, Finns, Germans, and over a million American college students, but at the end of the day, we haven’t grown too intimate. On a small system like the Cellar, however, we exchange ideas day in and day out with a small pool of regular users, quickly finding and identifying those people who seem intelligent (they agree with us, or disagree in interesting ways) and those who seem to have left their brains in a small sack under the bed. Before long, we rely on the former group, testing theories, asking advice, following up trains of thought, sharing the occasional joke, until some of our best friends are nothing more than words on a screen.
Proponents of these virtual communities say that electronic relationships of this sort can be as real as relationships that take place off-line. In many cases, they say, electronic pen pals become more like neighbors than the people who actually live next door.
Well, that sounds good, doesn’t it? But as part of my ongoing investigation into what people are really doing out there in our electronic culture, I really wanted to get a firsthand look. Are these electronic communities something new and wonderful, or are they just high-tech hidey-holes, so much sand into which the ostriches among us can stuff our heads?
Fortuitously for me, the Cellar has one other distinguishing feature—its people have feet. Every so often, maybe once or twice a year, they power down the 486 towers, flip off the high-resolution monitors, scrub their pale faces, and leave home. They call it a GTG, as in “get-together.”
Even Thoreau left his cherished woods to go huckleberrying once in a while, so when Cellar-owner Tony was nice enough to invite me to a barbecue in his backyard, and didn’t even ask me to bring the hot dog rolls, I accepted his offer.
The Cellar is based in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, about forty-five congested minutes north of Philadelphia. Tony lives in Collegeville, so known because of Ursinus College, though Tony’s comfortable split-level home sits far from the center of town, in one of the mushrooming suburban developments eating up almost all of the region’s former farmland.
When I arrive, Tony’s house is packed with folks, around thirty of them, and his wife looks understandably nervous—more than a few unattended children are tearing up and down the stairs, looking for loose glassware. The adults are all white, seemingly middle-class, of varying ages, and few are obvious computer nerds. Judging from the volleyball action in the backyard, not many of them will be headed to the Olympics any time soon, but they are certainly nice enough to a visiting writer, and boy can they cook.
The menu includes chicken, salmon, catfish, cole slaw, potato salad, cut celery and carrots with fattening dips, various other munchies, and some of the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever scooped from a plastic plate. A few of those attending the GTG are old friends from other GTGs, while some know each other only by their computer addresses (so-and-so@cellar.org) and are busy placing faces with the names.
Adam Zion, at twenty-three one of the Cellar’s youngest users, has a forceful, intense manner that suggests a future in politics; instead he is preparing to enter a postbaccalaureate premedical program at the University of Pennsylvania. “Most online communities are just that—on line,” he tells me. “You ask, ‘Let’s meet,’ and all of a sudden people stop talking. Here you say, ‘Let’s meet,’ and people say, ‘Where?’ Big difference.”
Adam and I are chatting in the basement of Tony’s home, in a boxish room stuffed with furniture, bookshelves, milk crates, two computers, and six modems. The modems handle the incoming calls, which means only six users can call at any one time. This room is the Cellar’s modest control center.
“I like being on-line with people who are genuinely mature,” Adam continues. “I like being on-line with people who aren’t going to flame you when you post something. They may argue with you, but I’ve never seen a genuine flame (a deliberately insulting message) on the Cellar. That is unique. Flaming is a real problem in the BBS and Internet world.” He pauses, opens his hands, and indicates the people outside. “This is a community that happens to be virtual rather than physical. A lot of BBSs are just service providers. But this is a community.”
I speak also with Bruce Morgen, a jolly fellow with long, graying ex-hippie hair, a wonderfully fuzzy beard, a big belly, and a yellow T-shirt that says “ALIENS BACK CLINTON.” The T-shirt displays the cover from an old issue of the Weekly World News, a photo of the candidate enthusiastically shaking hands with an extraterrestrial. Bruce looks decidedly unconventional but admits to “two kids, a wife, the whole nine suburban yards.”
“The Cellar is a very convenient community when you have a busy life,” he tells me. “People with disabilities aren’t the only ones who don’t get out. People with young families have a tremendously hard time getting places. The Cellar is a way for me to have a relatively friendly and often interesting social life that I can basically handle in an hour or hour and a half a day.”
Bruce has bounced around the Internet and logged on to numerous other BBSs, but he says the Cellar is different. “The Cellar is prescreened for intelligence. The stupid modemers [his term for people who use a modem] or immature modemers are basically on-line to get pirated software or game hints, and that’s not what’s on the Cellar, so they get bored and leave.” He waves his arm, indicating the friends and strangers standing around the table with plates full of food. “The whole pulse of the Cellar seems to suit me. I find people I have a lot in common with, and intelligent people that I differ with quite a bit, and that’s good.”
The people I speak with seem pretty content with the small corner of the electronic world they have staked and claimed, and the Cellar’s ratio of men to women seems more balanced than some areas of the greater Net. Bronwyn, a nurse, with dark curly hair, a bright smile, and two daughters, tells me she has been on the Cellar for two and a half years. “What I like is that it’s open all hours,” she jokes, “but you don’t have to go anywhere or have anyone over. You don’t have to clean the floor, you don’t have to stock the fridge, you don’t have to worry about a babysitter. You can access it at any time.” She “lurked” for months, reading messages posted to the various subject boards but never replying, but now she is a full participant in the daily exchange of ideas. “People are perfectly willing to slap you across the face and say ‘you’re wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, your logic is flawed, everything about this is faulty,’” she tells me, “but having said that, though, they are forced to back it up. ‘Here’s where your logic is flawed.’ It can’t just degenerate into insult, it goes into argument and debate. There is a delightful ability to bat something back and forth until all the meaning is wrung out of it.”
What distinguishes these people, it seems, beyond their cooking and conspicuous lack of volleyball skills, is that they do love to argue, they are full of ideas, they love to talk, and they are excited about just how much arguing and talking they can get done in front of a computer. They are also excited about Dan and Suzy, and many insist I talk to them next. So I do, dragging Dan and Suzy down to the basement so we can hear one another speak.
Dan Reed and Suzy Freeman met on the Cellar, planned their first date on the Cellar, and are now engaged. (This is becoming common enough in the Net world, of course, so much so that some people find it mundane, but Dan and Suzy will be the Cellar’s first marriage, and everyone seems proud.) They are both in their twenties; he is an automotive technician, she a database manager. They will make an excellent married couple, in my opinion—they already finish one another’s sentences.
“By the time we dated, I knew a lot about him already,” Suzy tells me. “I knew what he liked, what he didn’t like, what his political beliefs were. The weirdest things about him, I knew already. It wasn’t like I had any big surprises.”
Dan concurs. He thinks trading messages on the Cellar is an excellent way to become acquainted. “There are just things you can find out about somebody that you really couldn’t just if you’d gone out on a date.”
“Our first date, we spent the entire day, from ten in the morning until eleven at night, together,” Suzy points out, “and we were comfortable. Which is pretty rare…”
“Rare,” Dan says, “on a first date.”
The Cellar is hardly the only virtual community, of course. One of New York City’s many is ECHO (East Coast Hang Out); in Austin, Texas, they gather at the Spring; there are many others.
The most famous is certainly the WELL, based in San Francisco. One of the reasons the WELL is so well known is that lots of interesting, innovative, computer-fluent, and drug-addled people live in the Bay Area. Another reason is that the founders of the WELL passed out free memberships to journalists and writers back in 1985, when the system was just starting up, and amazingly there were approximately 17 billion subsequent stories written about what a neat place it was.
Coincidence?
The WELL was the brainchild of Stewart Brand, publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog. WELL stands for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link. The first director-operator was Matthew McClure, a veteran of the 1960s commune movement, and there is certainly a communal atmosphere to this and other virtual communities—an inclination to let the inmates run the asylum.
A famous WELL anecdote concerns a young woman, a WELL regular, named Elly who decided to go to the Himalayas and become a Buddhist nun. She was breathing in and out for six months or so, had dropped off the WELL, and was almost forgotten, when she suddenly became ill with a dangerous liver ailment. Word was soon posted to the WELL that one of their own was in trouble (Elly had been hospitalized and was in a coma). The WELL regulars, which included doctors, travel agents—one of just about everything—mobilized quickly and efficiently, and arranged for Elly to be flown home.
Elly was cured, the WELL legend continues.
For those of you reading this who still aren’t sure how a BBS differs from the larger Net, let me try to break down how it works:
On the Cellar, there is a local phone number, a suburban Philadelphia exchange (since that is where Tony lives). First, you set your computer to dial that number, and your modem makes a connection with one of the modems stacked in Tony Shepps’s basement. The modems beep then make a horrible scratchy sound as if they are about to launch into space. The screen blinks a few times, you type in the command “bbs,” then your name, and you are presented with a command-line menu that lets you do a number of things.
If you type “new” on the Cellar, you get instructions. If you type “cookie,” as in fortune cookie, you get a pithy message, generated at random and often very funny. If you type “mail,” you get your E-mail, if you have any. Most people on the Cellar type “boards” and read the various bulletin board topics.
On the Cellar, for instance, you can read messages posted to:
Board 100 Failsafe’s Black Bag. Medicine and Related Topics.
Board 101 Philly Sports with Thorn Darling.
Board 102 Aesch’s Mathematics Board.
Board 103 Bears Auto Emporium.
Board 104 Toad’s Wine Cellar.
Board 105 RichH’s Memorial place. (Sex talk.)
Board 106 Bartz Political Zone.
Board 107 Trader’s Zine Scene.
There are also boards for the discussion of books, movies, or computers, one with helpful tips on brewing beer, boards for gays and lesbians, a main board for the discussion of absolutely anything, and one for Extropians.
(What are Extropians? At first I figured they must be people who once lived in the tropics but have moved away. Later, I learned that the Extropians are a political group, basically Libertarian but more extreme, with an interest in cryonics and the technological extension of human intelligence. Go figure.)
Most everyone on the Cellar has their favorite board, many people read from and post to a number of boards, and a few brave souls read everything. (Frankly, I worry about them—the messages are not that interesting.) Each of these boards is like an intimate version of a Usenet group, like the bulletin board in my grocery store, only interactive. Anything goes. Some people are deadly serious no matter what the topic; some people can only crack wise.
According to folks at the barbecue, only one Cellar user ever offended enough people to merit discipline. He attacked everybody, they tell me, being simultaneously homophobic, separatist, and misogynistic. No, he wasn’t a radio talk show host, but good guess.
No one could say a word without this guy jumping into the discussion, attacking, insulting, espousing viewpoints of which Hitler only dreamed. The Cellar’s loyal users value the principle of free speech, however, and though most everyone soon grew sick of the offending voice, no one seemed ready to throw him off outright. (Yet it would have been quite easy—Tony could have just invalidated his account.)
Instead, in an E-mail conspiracy, they ignored him to death. If he advocated burning feminists at the stake, no one took the bait. If he suggested a separate African-American state, no one disagreed. If he championed the idea of boot camps for homosexuals, the idea went unacknowledged. He had the right to say it, but he couldn’t get a rise out of anyone. He reportedly got bored—“Hey guys, don’t you want to play anymore?”—and eventually went away.
Tony, the man who not only owns the Cellar but owns the cellar that holds the Cellar, is thirty, with dark hair, glasses, and a somewhat chagrined smile. He is a genial, generous host, spending most of the GTG with smoke in his eyes, trying to cook enough chicken to feed a ravenous, fidgety crowd.
“There’s a loose stereotype of people who like to interact with others by computer—we’re supposed to be geeky, antisocial types who can’t deal with live relationships,” he tells me later. “These GTGs really disprove that image. Almost all of the regular callers will eventually come to a GTG, and when they do, they’re typically very social.”
Tony refutes the notion that people who experience their social lives through a computer are retreating into shells. “We are very social—we tell stories, we ask for advice, we have secrets, we share concerns. So, when we get together, it feels natural and right to be social with each other, and so we are. We computer people are sometimes told to ‘get a life’—I think this is actually a very nice part of a real life.”
Tony makes no money off the Cellar. In fact, he loses money on a regular basis. He gives it away, actually. While those subscribers who want certain advanced features pay a small monthly fee, most subscribers, those who only want to read the Cellar’s local boards, get their accounts for free. It is a word-of-mouth operation—Tony doesn’t advertise. He lets anyone join and simply absorbs the costs of the equipment and phone lines. His wife rolls her eyes a lot. Tony is not a businessman, but he is a true lover of words and conversation, and he runs an extremely amicable, literate BBS.
He has wrestled, though, with the idea of making the Cellar bigger, better, and profitable. Even those Cellar subscribers who pay for advanced features can only toy around with two of the Internet’s main tools (E-mail and Usenet.) The Internet has many other geegaws with names such as Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Gopher, ftp, and telnet—useful tools for searching on-line databases, contacting distant networks, or playing MUSH games. To use those features, Cellar dwellers need accounts with other service providers.
Admiring the Cellar’s “community atmosphere,” and no doubt its active base of users, a competing Internet provider in the Philadelphia area offered to grant Tony the software and Net connection necessary to make the Cellar a true Internet system. It would be a merger of sorts.
If Tony took his competitor up on the offer, and if he dug a deep trench into his neighbor’s lawn to run some extra phone lines, a few things would happen:
1. More people would use the Cellar.
2. The neighbor would probably have a royal fit.
3. Tony might start making some money.
In his own inimitable, communal way, Tony went to the Cellar’s current users to ask for opinions. “I have been thoroughly confused by all the possibilities,” he confessed on the main message board. “Imagine if 50,000 people read a particular board, 400 people regularly posted messages to it, and there were all sorts of hit-and-run postings, anonymous postings. In general, you don’t want to get to know the people on the other end of those messages. More often than not, you want them to come to physical harm.
“But if the Cellar could become an Internet hangout of sorts, with the kind of interplay we have, where we really get to know people, that would be interesting. It’d be interesting if one of our regular users was calling from Seattle, or England, or wherever.”
Cellar loyalists quickly logged in with their responses, most of them sharing their host’s fears of the Attack of the Internet Hordes, and some questioning the motives of the generous competitor. What really seemed to worry people was that the Cellar might get big and messy, and lose its intimacy.
Early into 1995, the Cellar remained a small, circumscribed system, and Tony was still weighing his options.
“I feel that it’s generally better to do a few things very well,” he explained, “than to do many things half-assed.”
The Cellar’s barbecue get-together dealt me a few surprises. I had expected awkward, ashen-faced computer junkies, and, well, okay, a few were there, but I was surprised by just how interesting they were, compared to my own preconceptions. I was, as I’ve said, also surprised by how well they could cook. I was surprised to find just how little equipment sat in Tony’s basement, considering his BBS serves upward of 150 users. I was surprised that Tony was losing money in the midst of a gigantic Internet commercial boom. And I was surprised by how easily the straight males seemed to accept the Cellar’s “transgendered” subculture.
Jerry Winner was the one who first tipped me off to the trans-gendered angle. Jerry is a young fellow, heavy with a dark beard, about to leave for the Baltimore area and a new job. “I was really shocked with the outpouring of sadness,” he tells me, “because I didn’t think I affected people that way. But I got about thirty messages from people saying ‘I will really miss you’ and ‘keep in touch.’ It’s a big family thing.”
He says he will probably continue to call into the Cellar, though it will now be long distance. “It’s gotten to the point where I really like these people, and I don’t want to lose that.”
How, I ask him, does an on-line community differ from a face-to-face community?
“When you are on-line,” Jerry theorizes, “you go a little bit farther, you’re a little bit more frank and open. There are some things I would say on the Cellar that I would never say to my own friends. And a lot of times when you don’t know what people look like you don’t have the preconceptions about them. When you don’t have anything to focus on, you just have to make judgments based on ideas and thoughts, and that’s really cool.”
I ask for an example.
“Well,” he says, “for two years I thought Janice was a woman.”
Janice is Mark. Or Mark is Janice.
In any case, Mark was born as Mark, but his on-line name is Janice, and some of his friends call him Janice, and some call him Mark. His wife is at the party. So are his daughters. They call him Dad.
Mark is not noticeably different from others in the room unless you take a close look. He has long, straight hair, but so do a lot of men. He has purple hoop earrings, though, really big ones, and a gold heart on a small chain. The heart is inscribed with his Net name, “Janice.” He posts as Janice, always has, and unless you ran into him at a GTG, you would have no way to know that he is not a woman.
“The Cellar is a smaller space, and consequently more intimate,” he says when I corner him for a chat. “You tend to have local folks on the Cellar and that gives it a unique flavor. It has culture and collective memory of its own. It’s somewhat like a small town.”
He is a computer programmer by day, and very personable. He enjoys the GTGs and seems amused that people are so astonished to find out what Janice really looks like. “I make no allusion to my birth gender on the Cellar.”
Transgendered people are by definition those who want to live in a gender other than the one into which they were born—this includes cross-dressers, transvestites, and transsexuals. Transgendered people are fairly common on the Internet; it seems somewhat of a friendly magnet for them. “It was through CompuServe that I first discovered how many of us there were and how common it really was,” Mark explains. “That was certainly a factor in my personal growth.”
There is an organization known as TransgenderNet, a loose affiliation of BBSs that serve the transgendered community. Mark has served as a moderator on the cross-dressing section of TransgenderNet, and he says the anonymity offered by computer networks is very helpful to transgenderites. “A local psychologist said in a lecture to our support group, ‘The first step in the process of coming out, admitting that you are in some way different, is coming out to yourself,’ and these forums provide a place for this to occur without fear of rejection or censure.”
Has he ever had a bad reaction from Cellar users?
“As a whole, they seem accepting. The people that hang out on the Cellar tend to be much less judgmental and a lot more open-minded. I guess it is the tone of the place. In general there is a tolerance for a broad range of viewpoints and kinds of people. Probably the only way you can get ostracized on the Cellar is to be intolerant. The one way you can gain censure is to be censorious yourself?
Mark points out Susan. Susan was once Fred, but she is a postoperative transsexual, which means now she is just Susan. She is blond, trim, husky-voiced, and she works in the same automotive tool-and-die shop she worked in before the operation. One day the guys in the shop just hung up a banner reading, GOODBYE FRED, HELLO SUSAN.
Sometimes the world is a marvelous place.
“I personally seem to have a tough time just meeting people,” Susan confides. “Always have. Computer networking is an anonymous way of meeting people ahead of time, so you can kinda pick and choose who you might actually meet.”
This is her first GTG, and she is finding the folks to be friendly. “I think we all kinda feel we know each other to a certain extent.”
Like Mark, Susan allows that the Internet played a key role in her gender journey. “The Cellar gave me access to the Internet and to a rather private kind of area. It was through the Internet that I chose the surgeon to do the surgery. I was able to do an enormous amount of research.”
That was another useful use for the Net that came up again and again as I was writing this book: it is a great place to ask questions you might be embarrassed to flat-out ask someone face-to-face.
Susan also likes the ability to tell people about herself from a distance. “You can tell people anonymously. You’re not committing yourself to someone who might not take it the right way. If someone doesn’t take it the right way, it’s easy to ignore them. It gives you a real nice way to find out—whatever it might be, on any subject—how it’s going to go.”
“So you like the Net?” I ask.
She laughs, a big, hearty, genuine laugh. “I think it’s just great. Hey, what can I say?”