Is There a There in Cyberspace?
for Utne Reader
by John Perry Barlow


There's no there there.
				--Gertrude Stein (speaking of Oakland)


It ain't no Amish barn-raising in there....

--Bruce Sterling (speaking of Cyberspace)

I am often asked how I went from pushing cows around a remote Wyoming ranch
to my present occupation (which Wall Street Journal recently called a
"Cyberspace cadet").  I haven't got a short answer, but I suppose I came to
the virtual world looking for community.

Unlike most modern Americans, I grew up in an actual place, an entirely
non-intentional community called Pinedale, Wyoming. As I struggled for
nearly a generation to keep my ranch in the family, I was motivated by the
belief that such places were the spiritual home of humanity. But I knew
their future was not promising.

At the dawn of the 20th Century, over 40% of the American work force lived
off the land. The majority of us lived in towns like Pinedale. Now fewer
than 1% of us extract their living from the soil. We just became too
productive for our own good.

Of course, the population followed the jobs. Farming and ranching
communities are now home to a demographically insignificant percentage of
Americans, the vast majority of whom live not in ranch houses but in more
or less identical split-level "ranch homes" in more or less identical
suburban "communities." Generica.

In my view, these are neither communities nor homes. I believe the
combination of television and suburban population patterns is simply toxic
to the soul. I see much evidence in contemporary America to support this
view.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, doom impended. And, as I watched community in
Pinedale growing ill from the same economic forces that were killing my
family's ranch, the Bar Cross, satellite dishes brought the cultural
infection of television. I started looking around for evidence that
community in America would not perish altogether.

I took some heart in the mysterious nomadic City of the Deadheads, that
virtually physical town which follows the Grateful Dead around the country.
The Deadheads lacked place, touching down briefly on whatever location the
band happened to be playing and they lacked continuity in time, since they
had to suffer a new Diaspora every time the band moved on or went home.

But they had many of the other necessary elements of community, including a
culture, a religion of sorts (which , though it lacked dogma, had most of
the other, more nurturing aspects of spiritual practice), a sense of
necessity, and, most importantly, shared adversity.

I wanted to know more about the flavor of their interaction, what they
thought and felt, but since I wrote Dead songs, I was a minor icon to the
Deadheads, and was thus inhibited, in some socially Heisenbergian way, from
getting a clear view into what really went on among them.

Then, in 1987, I heard about a "place" were they could gather continuously
and where I might come amongst them without distorting too much the field
of observation. Better, this was a place I could visit without leaving
Wyoming. It was a shared computer in Sausalito, California called the Whole
Earth 'Lectronic Link or WELL. After a lot of struggling with modems,
serial cables, init strings, and other computer arcana which seemed utterly
out of phase with such notions as Deadheads or small towns, I found myself
looking at the glowing yellow word, "Login:" beyond which lay my future.

"Inside" the WELL, were Deadheads in community. There were thousands of
them there, gossiping, complaining (mostly about the Grateful Dead),
comforting and harassing each other, bartering, engaging in religion (or at
least exchanging their totemic set-lists), beginning and ending love
affairs, praying for one another's sick kids. There was, it seemed, about
everything one might find going on in a small town, save dragging Main or
making out on the back roads.

I was delighted. I felt I had found the new locale of human
community...never mind that the whole thing was being conducted in mere
words by minds from whom the bodies had been amputated. Never mind that all
these people were deaf, dumb, and blind as paramecia or that their town had
neither seasons nor sunsets nor smells.

Surely all these deficiencies would be somehow remedied by richer, faster
communications media. These featureless login handles would gradually
acquire video faces (and thus, expressions), shaded 3-D body puppets (and
thus body language). This "space," which I recognized at once to be a
primitive form of the Cyberspace Bill Gibson had predicted in his sci-fi
novel Neuromancer, was still without apparent dimensions or vistas. But
Virtual Reality would change all that in time.

Meanwhile, The Commons, or something like it,  had been rediscovered. Once
again, people from the 'Burbs had a place where they could randomly
encounter their friends as my fellow Pinedalians did at the Post Office or
the Wrangler Cafe. They had a place their hearts could remain as the
companies they worked for shuffled their bodies around America. They could
put down roots which could not be ripped out by forces of economic history.
They had a collective stake. They had a community.

It is seven years now since I discovered the WELL. In that time, I
co-founded an organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated
to protecting its interests and those of other virtual communities like it
from raids by physical government. I've spent countless hours typing away
at its residents, and I've watched the larger context which contains it,
the Internet, grow at such an explosive rate that, by 2004, every human on
the planet would have an e-mail address unless the growth curve flattens
(which it will).

My enthusiasm for virtual community has cooled. In fact, unless one counts
interaction with the rather too large society of those with whom I exchange
electronic mail, I don't spend much time engaging in virtuality at all.
Many of the near-term benefits I anticipated from it seem to remain as far
in the future as they did when I first logged in. Perhaps they always will.


The WELL has changed astonishingly little, which one would generally
consider an asset in a small town. Pinedale hasn't changed that much
either. And the majority in both places seem to adhere to the common rural
dictum, "Even if it is broke, don't fix it."  (In my experience, only
Bolinas, California rivals Pinedale for the obduracy of its conservatism.)

But Pinedale works, more or less, as it is, and there is a lot which is
still missing from the communities of Cyberspace, whether they be places
like the WELL, the fractious newsgroups of USENET, the silent "auditoriums"
of American Online, or even enclaves on the promising World Wide Web.

What is missing? Well, to quote Ranjit Makkuni of Xerox PARC, "The prana is
missing," prana being the Hindu term for both breath and spirit. I think he
is right about this and that perhaps the central question of the Virtual
Age is whether or not prana can somehow be made to fit through any medium
but the act of Being There.

Prana is, to my mind, the literally vital element in the holy and unseen
ecology of relationship, the dense meshwork of invisible life, on whose
surface carbon-based life floats like a thin scum. It is at the heart of
the fundamental and profound difference between information and experience.
Jaron Lanier has said that "information is alienated experience," and, that
being true, prana is part of what is removed when you create such easily
transmissible replicas of experience as, say, the Evening News.

Obviously a great many other, less spiritual, things are also missing
entirely, like body language, sex, death, tone of voice, clothing, beauty
(or homeliness), weather, violence, vegetation, wildlife, pets,
architecture, music, smells, sunlight, and that ol' Harvest Moon. In short,
most of the things which make my life real to me.

Present, but in far less abundance than in the physical world which I call
"Meatspace," are women, children, old people, poor people, and the
genuinely blind. Also mostly missing are the illiterate and the continent
of Africa. There isnot much human diversity in Cyberspace, consisting as
it largely does of white males under 50 with plenty of computer terminal
time, great typing skills, high math SAT's, strongly held opinions on just
about everything, and an excruciating face to face shyness, especially with
the opposite sex.

But diversity is as essential to healthy community as it is to healthy
ecosystems (which are, in my view, different from communities only in
unimportant aspects).

I believe that the principal reason for the almost universal failure of the
intentional communities of the 60's and early 70's was a lack of diversity
in their members. It was a rare commune with any old people in it, or
people who were fundamentally out of philosophical agreement with the
majority.

Indeed, it is the usual problem when we try to build something which can
only be grown. Natural systems, such as human communities, are simply too
complex to design by the engineering principles which we insist on applying
to them. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Western Civilization is now finding its
rational skills inadequate to the task of creating and stewarding life. We
would do better to return to a kind of agricultural mind-set in which we
humbly try to recreate the conditions from which life has sprung before.
And leave the rest to God.

Given that it has been built so far almost entirely by people with
engineering degrees, it is not so surprising that Cyberspace has the kind
of overdesigned quality which leaves out all kinds of elements which Nature
would have invisibly provided.

Also missing from both the communes of the 60's and from Cyberspace are a
couple of elements which I believe are very important, if not essential, to
the formation and preservation of real community. They are an absence of
alternatives and a sense of genuine adversity, generally shared. What about
these?

It is hard to argue that anyone would find the loss of his modem literally
hard to survive, while many have remained in small towns, have tolerated
their intolerances and created entertainment to enliven their culturally
arid lives simply because it seemed there was no choice but to stay. There
are many investments, spiritual, material, and temporal, one is willing to
put into a home one cannot leave. Communities are often the beneficiaries
of these somewhat involuntary investments.

But when the going gets rough in Cyberspace, it is even easier to move than
it is in the 'Burbs, where, given the fact that the average American moves
some 17 times in his or her life, moving appears to be pretty easy. One can
not only find another BBS or newsgroup to hang out in, she can, with very
little effort, start her own.

And then there is the bond of joint suffering. I think most community is a
cultural stockade erected against a common Enemy which can take many forms.
In Pinedale, we forbore together, with an understanding needing little
expression, the fact that Upper Green River Valley is the coldest spot, as
measured by annual mean temperature, in the lower 48 states. We knew that
if somebody were stopped by the road most winter nights, he would probably
die there, so the fact that we might loath him was no sufficient reason to
drive on past his broken pickup.

By the same token, the Deadheads have the DEA, which strives to give them
20 year terms without parole for distributing the fairly harmless sacrament
of their faith. They have an additional bond in the fact when their
Microbuses die, as they often do, no one but another Deadhead is likely to
stop to help them.

But what are the shared adversities of Cyberspace? Lousy user interfaces?
The flames of harsh invective? Dumb jokes? Surely these can all be survived
without the sanctuary provided by fellow sufferers.

One is always free to yank the jack, as I have mostly done. For me, the
physical world offers far more opportunity for prana-rich connections with
my fellow creatures. Even for someone whose body is in a state of perpetual
motion, I feel I can generally find more community among the
still-embodied.

Finally, there is that shyness factor. Not only are we trying to build
community here among people who have never experienced any in my sense of
the term, we are trying to building community among people who, in their
lives, have rarely used the word "we" in a heartfelt way. It is a vast
club, many of the members of which are people who, as Groucho Marx said,
wouldn't want join a club which would have them as members.


And yet...

How quickly physical community continues to deteriorate. Even Pinedale,
which seems to have economically survived the plague of ranch failures,
feels increasingly cut off from itself. Many of the ranches are now owned
by corporate types who fly their Gulfstreams in to fish and are rarely
around during the many months when the creeks are frozen over and neighbors
are needed. They have kept the ranches financially alive, but they actively
discourage their managers from the interdependency which my colleagues and
I required. They keep agriculture on life-support, still alive but lacking
a functional heart.

And the town has been inundated with surburbanites who flee here, bringing
all their terrors and suspicions with them. They spend their evenings as
they did in Orange County, watching television, or socializing in hermetic
little enclaves of fundamentalist Christianity which seem to separate them
from us and even, given their sectarian inter-animosities, from one
another. The town remains. The community is largely a wraith of nostalgia.

So where else do we have to look for the connection necessary to prevent
our plunging further into the condition of separateness which Neitzsche
called sin? What is there to do but to dive further into the bramble bush
of information which, in its broadcast forms, has done so much to tear us
apart?

Cyberspace, for all its current deficiencies and failed promises, is not
without some very real solace already.

Some months ago, the great love of my life, a vivid young woman with whom I
intended to spend the rest of it, dropped dead of undiagnosed viral
cardiomyopathy two days short of her thirtieth birthday. I felt as if my
own heart had been as shredded as hers.

We had lived together in New York City. Except for my daughters, no one
from Pinedale had met her. I needed a community to wrap around myself
against what seemed colder winds than fortune had ever blown at me before.
And without looking, I found I had one in the Virtual World.

On the WELL, there was a topic announcing her death in one of the
conferences to which I posted the eulogy I had read over her before burying
her in her own small town of Nanaimo, British Columbia. It seemed to strike
a chord among the disembodied living of the Net. People copied it and sent
it to one another. Over the next several months I received almost a
megabyte of electronic mail from all over the planet, mostly from folks
whose faces I have never seen and probably never will.

They told me of their own tragedies and what they had done to survive them.
As humans have since words were first uttered, we shared the second most
common human experience, death, with an open-heartedness that would have
caused grave uneasiness in physical America, where the whole topic is so
cloaked in denial as to be considered obscene. Those strangers, who had no
arms to put around my shoulders, no eyes to weep with mine, nevertheless
saw me through it. As neighbors do.

I have no idea how far we will plunge into this strange place. Unlike
previous frontiers, there is no end to this one. It is so dissatisfying in
so many ways that I suspect we will be more restless in our search for home
here than in all our previous explorations. And that is one reason why I
think we may find it after all.

But if home is where the heart is, then there is already some part of home
to be found in Cyberspace.

So... Does virtual community work or not? Should we all go off to
Cyberspace or should we resist it as an even more demonic form of symbolic
abstraction? Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality itself?

I'm sorry. Like so many true things, it doesn't resolve itself to a black
or a white. Nor is it gray. It is, along with the rest of life,
black/white. Both/neither. I'm not being equivocal or wishy-washy here. We
have to get over our Manichean sense that everything is either good or bad,
and the border of Cyberspace seems to me a good place to leave that old set
of filters.

But really it doesn't matter. We are going there whether we want to or not.
In five years, everyone who is reading these words will have an e-mail
address...unless s/he is so determined a Luddite that s/he also eschews the
telephone and electricity.

When we are all together in Cyberspace then we will see what the human
spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there. I am convinced
that the result will be more benign if we go there open-minded,
open-hearted, excited with the adventure, than if we are dragged into
exile.

And we must remember that going to Cyberspace, unlike previous great
emigrations to the frontier, hardly requires us to leave where we have
been. Many will find, as I have, a much richer appreciation of physical
reality for having spent so much time in virtuality.

Despite its current (and perhaps, in some areas permanent insufficiencies),
we should go to Cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, like unconditional
love, may be the only kind that counts.