by Adam Fisher
Brian Behlendorf: Raves were pretty obscure in March of ’92, which was when I started the SF Raves list. It seemed to be a gathering point, or a concept that a lot of young, creative, future-minded people seemed to be attracted to.
R. U. Sirius: In the early nineties a guy named Mark Healy who had been writing for i-D magazine in London came over and started doing articles on the cyberculture in America. He interviewed me and he interviewed Terence McKenna, the psilocybin guy, who was very much into virtual reality. And he decided to move to the United States and try to bring the cyberculture together with the rave culture. He started this thing called Toon Town.
Jane Metcalfe: At the time the Toon Town people were living in a house in South Park and doing the best drugs, having the best parties, and experimenting with visuals. So they brought a lot of that energy into our office.
Brian Behlendorf: Wired was in that building at Second and South Park and then moved to 510 Third Street. Every time we expanded we had a rave, basically, starting in the new space we were taking over, before we moved desks in or painted the walls or whatever. These would be all-night, not-permitted kind of parties.
Justin Hall: When we moved out of 2 South Park, I threw a Halloween rave to celebrate, taking advantage of the fact that even though we’d moved to Third Street, we could still use the old space. They gave me a $1,500 budget to acquire food and drinks and stuff. I ended up I think spending five hundred or more dollars of it on LSD microdots that I handed out to people at the door. It was the launch party for HotWired.
Brian Behlendorf: I think electronic music was a filter then as well. People who were into that tended to be programmers, tended to be very eager to embrace new technology. In the nineties we were still optimistic about technology and the future, and spending more time online.
R. U. Sirius: It’s like this whole cultural thing came together. It was a psychedelic celebration of technologically oriented music. You’d have these spaces where people would come and be in a virtual reality and drink smart drinks and play with other tech toys. There wouldn’t even be any virtual reality there sometimes, you know? Just people partying about this idea of another place for minds, I guess.
Po Bronson: It was a rave scene somehow under the guise of a tech thing, because all the tech people wanted to rave.
Justin Hall: There was a strong overlap between the people who organized and deejayed these parties and the people who had some internet connection. Obviously, that was a small group at the time, but it also felt very open because it was sort of like, “Oh my God, this internet thing!”
Captain Crunch: I got involved with the SF Raves scene. I started giving out rave reports. Man, once I got hooked into dancing and candy flipping, I just couldn’t stop the rave scene. Candy flipping is taking Ecstasy and acid at the same time.
Brian Behlendorf: I had set up a simple website for the SF Raves mailing list at this time, and it was just the back archives of the mailing list and maybe a few deejay sets and some scanned-in flyers and things like that, because it was very early days for the web. SF Raves was starting to generate traffic, so I went and bought a piece of server hardware and I parked that box at Wired, because I could hang it off the bandwidth Wired had, and no one would notice. I gave it a different name—Hyperreal.
Justin Hall: Hyperreal.org, which was Brian’s web domain, was where so much raving culture happened. There were flyers posted for parties. The fact that he hosted the SF Raves mailing list meant that he was the hub for the rave community in the San Francisco Bay Area. So if there was a party happening he knew about it, and there was a good chance he would be driving out with them. Today I think there’s a lot of people in San Francisco who sort of live that life where there is a mailing list that tells you about a party. But it was very fun to be doing that when I was nineteen and when that was the portal to a world that was just being created.
Brian Behlendorf: Hyperreal became this kind of independent incubator for interesting little projects that I started to get into. It became home for erowid.org; it became home for burningman.com.
R. U. Sirius: And then, again, there was this huge adoption of Burning Man by the tech culture. Really, suddenly, it became this massive thing that everybody had to do.
Joey Anuff: The SRL, rave kind of vibe coalesced into the Burning Man thing.
Tiffany Shlain: Burning Man was a big through line! We all went there for years.
Amy Critchett: So Michael Mikel, who was one of the founders of Burning Man, was a handyman for Wired. So it definitely was a presence in the early days of Wired.
Michael Mikel: I was involved with Burning Man from pretty close to the beginning. I brought in a lot of tech people. The main thing I was doing was just inviting everyone I knew, and putting them on the mailing list.
Amy Critchett: My crew, we started going in 1994.
Justin Hall: Burning Man in 1994 was just a mass of people who were all parked in the middle of the desert in any which way. I don’t remember where people pissed and shit. There certainly were no Porta Potties. There were no organized roads. There were motorcycles and there were dogs and there were fireworks and there were probably guns. I remember dropping acid that had Beavis’s and Butt-Head’s faces printed on it. Then this man burned and I jumped over it in my toga and Birkenstocks or whatever. It was the core essence of what Burning Man is today just with two thousand people or something.
R. U. Sirius: You couldn’t plug in. You didn’t have cell phones there then or anything like that. It wasn’t really a tech event.
Michael Mikel: It isn’t really a tech event, but by its very nature it appeals to tech-minded cyberpunk people. It’s a complete alternate reality, a different world.
Justin Hall: My favorite thing that year is someone brought out like a truckload of like sixteen old upright pianos and they were all piled on top of each other, and people at all hours of day and night were just hammering on these pianos. Like pulling the pianos apart and then beating on the pianos with piano parts. It was the most amazing cacophony.
R. U. Sirius: I think it shows some of the flexibility, creativity, imagination, and strangeness of tech culture in the nineties, in that virtually everybody adopted it.
Joey Anuff: I fucking hate Burning Man! It’s my least favorite thing that has ever existed. And I see it as like the most goddamn poser-tastic thing that has ever happened to California since like Wavy Gravy.
R. U. Sirius: I think that the core energy of the cyberculture counterculture thing seemed to dissipate in about ’94.
Joey Anuff: One of the things that happened in the first year of Suck was the Netscape IPO. And that was also game changing because just in terms of supplying a wealth-creation narrative, which turns everybody’s head and becomes the dominant narrative in every instance.
Jamie Zawinski: And then, when the money came in, let’s just call it July ’94, the industry exploded. Suddenly, there’s another quarter-million people in this industry who are nineteen years old, twenty years old, and haven’t met these old hacker guys, and their experience with computing is completely different. These new people who got into the computer industry? If it was 1982, they would’ve been traders. They would’ve gone into finance because “Oh, that’s challenging work. And man, you can make a lot of money doing that if you get hired by the right firm.” It’s that attitude. Programming is the safe job. It’s the safe job for smart people.
Po Bronson: Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand had lent the early technology this incredible gravitas and nobility and high-mindedness. The ultimate thing was your mind—mind expansion. Prior to the dot-com, it was this philosophical aspiration where ultimately the money was irrelevant. There was never a conversation about money.
Joey Anuff: It turned into a money story.
Jamie Zawinski: So the story is that we won the lottery, we made a bunch of money, and because of that, we sucked all of the creativity out of the computer industry and turned it into the finance industry, and made everything ter
rible.
R. U. Sirius: That’s when the scene down in South Park becomes a whole different kind of thing. The upscale tech geeks were moving in.
Jamie Zawinski: There was a big boom and suddenly there were a lot of people moving to San Francisco who weren’t actually interested in what San Francisco was. They came here and they wanted to make it be more safe and suburban. It was the South Bay–ification of the city
Jack Boulware: Maybe people were tired about reading about smart drugs and this and that in Mondo 2000? You know it was all really cool for a long time to get a stud put in your dick or whatever it was. But computer geeks were moving in because there were jobs and opportunity, and they’re walking around the city going, “Why are you guys doing this? I’m not interested in this at all.” A younger group of people is always going to be suspicious of what came immediately before. At some point it will be a cliché that they will just laugh at. Generations come and go.
R. U. Sirius: In a way, it’s sort of a movement from the hippies and the punks to the hipsters, if you will. I used to call them the “golden nose rings.” A lot of them were like sweet hippie kids but like with no edge, no struggle in them. The golden nose rings had no politics. They just kind of go along with whatever’s happening. “Go with the flow,” I guess—and make lots of money. That seemed pretty weak to us. Mondo was very punk influenced, very sort of left-anarchist influenced. Whereas, you know, then Wired came along and had more of the right-libertarian vibe to it. In some ways, that’s representative of the change that went on there.
Erik Davis: We don’t think much about magazines anymore, but they really were markers of identity. And the transformation of magazines reflected something about what was happening on a deeper level in culture or even in people’s identities. If you look at the Whole Earth Catalog, it has a collage logic. That reflects the way it’s laid out but it’s also a kind of constructivist idea, manifested in design—you take bits and pieces and you combine them together to build culture. Then comes this desktop machine that allows you to control typography and this good laser printer that can make something that doesn’t look janky. There’s a new cultural logic. This new cultural moment is not collage-y; it’s not bits and pieces just sort of jammed up against each other. With the new media tools we can actually sort of invent a new environment. It’s smoother, it’s more global, more virtual in a way, because you can make a worldview appear more present than it necessarily is, and then you have people identifying with being cyberpunk and living out their cyberpunk experiences. So it actually kind of engenders itself. That’s what Mondo did and Wired brilliantly recognized that and absorbed elements of it, and then it took off in a more mainstream way. So both magazines actually invented, in many ways, the culture that they end up writing about. And that recursive loop, that self-reference, is essential to technoculture: That’s what it is. This is the moment when technology—not economics, not history, not new social norms—starts driving the culture.
BOOK THREE
NETWORK EFFECTS
We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN
The Check Is in the Mail
eBay’s trillion-dollar garage sale
The web, suddenly accessible by ordinary people thanks to Netscape, sparked a gold rush. Almost everyone had the same big idea: to sell things on the internet. Up in Washington State, Amazon sold books. But down in Silicon Valley, something stranger and more surprising was being sold. What we now know as eBay started out as a philosophical experiment, utopianism in the form of a website. Back in 1995 General Magic employee Pierre Omidyar was a young, ponytailed idealist: He believed in the power of markets to improve people’s lives. So over Labor Day weekend he hacked together an online marketplace. It was powered by free (and flaky) open-source software—and the honor system. Strangers mailed each other money and stuff with no guarantee that they would get what they were expecting. The founding conceit was that people were basically good, and if you gave them the opportunity to be good, they would prove to be so. Remarkably, people on the internet were good. The checks were in the mail. Even more astonishing is how thoroughly the often barely functional site trounced the auction-site competition. Something about eBay made people loyal, too.
Jeff Skoll: In 1995 when I graduated from Stanford Business School, I was living in a house with five guys that were sort of internet focused, even though ’95 was still a little bit early on the internet trail. I knew Pierre from just hanging around, and when Pierre talked about the idea of eBay—or AuctionWeb, as Pierre called it back then—I wasn’t quite so sure. Pierre said, “We’re going to build this thing, and it’s going to get people selling things to each other.” And there were other players coming along. Amazon was around, there was a CD site called Music Boulevard…
Brad Handler: There were fifty other sites that were in the actual space that eBay was in.
Mary Lou Song: One site comes to mind which actually took physical possession of the goods: So basically the seller has an item, they send it to the company, the company puts the item up for bid, and then turns around and delivers it to the buyer. That was OnSale.
Jerry Kaplan: OnSale was very much what Overstock.com is today, but with an auction component. That was the concept. We ran a test and somehow got some publicity and basically said, “Get on your computer, dial into America Online, connect to this thing, and you can put in bids.” We didn’t know if it was going to work, and people loved it. They went nuts over it—of course it was a total nerd-ball crowd. That was early 1995. But when I first took this idea around to the venture capital community, nobody thought that it was a good idea at all! You have to understand that the computer community at that time was kind of countercultural, that’s where most of those people came from. And so for them the opening up of the internet for commercial purposes would be a little bit like the selling of advertising on PBS.
Jeff Skoll: There were things in the early nineties that were considered taboo. You don’t charge people for news, right? News is free. But we had the philosophy that free is bad, because nobody knows how to associate value to what you are getting for free. So you actually have to charge, even if it is a small amount—a penny. We thought that was an important line to lay down from the start.
Mary Lou Song: Pierre has always been interested in economics.
Brad Handler: Pierre is very libertarian.
Mary Lou Song: Although much wiser and more spiritual than that.
Jaron Lanier: The eBay people were a later generation of Silicon Valley people, but there was still a continuity there. They were still hacker-y and kind of nerdy.
Jerry Kaplan: Pierre Omidyar was working at General Magic, and we wanted to hire a good engineer and he came in for an interview, and we obviously told him all about what we were doing at OnSale, and he thought that it was really cool. We offered him a job, and he said, “No, I think I’m going to stay where I am and work on this thing on the side,” so he began to take the concept that we had, and apply it to person-to-person trading.
Pierre Omidyar: I wanted to create an efficient market where individuals could benefit from participating in an efficient market, kind of level the playing field. And I thought, Gee, the internet, the web, it’s perfect for this. This is more of an intellectual pursuit, you know, than anything else. It was just an idea that I had, and it started as an experiment, as a side hobby, basically, while I had my day job.
Jeff Skoll: There was no prototype. It was in Pierre’s head. And I ended up taking a job out of school with Knight Ridder and Pierre kept his previous job at General Magic. I said, “Pierre, I just don’t see it. I’ll work with you on weekends and see what happens, but I’m not terribly optimistic about what one guy with an idea in this giant space with all these destroyer boats around can do.”
Steve Westly: Pierre just took it three levels deeper than anybody else. Pierre’s a true genius for figuring it out.
Jeff Skoll: Part of proving that this
would work was building a fairly open system and trusting that people would do the right thing.
Pierre Omidyar: The whole idea there was just to help people do business with one another on the internet. And people thought that it was impossible, because how could people on the internet—remember, this is 1995—how could they trust each other? How could they get to know each other? And I thought that was silly. You know, it was a silly concern because people are basically good, honest people. So that was very motivating. It was, Gee, I’ll just do it. I’ll just show them. Let’s see what happens.
Jeff Skoll: The site turned on—as an experiment—on Labor Day of 1995.
Mary Lou Song: Pierre had a broken laser pointer which was the first thing he sold.
Mark Fraser: Somebody pointed me to a brand-new website which turned out to be eBay, and I was amazed to discover a broken laser pointer that was listed, and thought, “Hey, I can make that work!”
Mary Lou Song: To Pierre that was the sign: “If I can sell a broken laser pointer, this is good for everything.”
Jeff Skoll: Almost right away, people started transacting. They started sending money around.
Jim Griffith: I remember the day I started using eBay, it was May 10, 1996. I was living in Vermont at the time, rebuilding computers and selling them locally to people who wanted to get online, for a couple hundred bucks. And I needed parts. So I bid on this chip and I get it a few days later, that’s my first purchase, but I’m fascinated by this site—fascinated by both the concept of people getting together and buying directly from each other with no real middleman, and by this guy Pierre, who shows up every night on his little chat board to ask questions: “How do you like what’s going on? Do you have any suggestions? I just had a long day at General Magic.” He was working at General Magic at the time.
