Internet elite look for places to avoid the masses

Margie Wylie
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

As more and more people rush online, a funny thing happened to a media that was once touted for its openness. The Internet, despite all the hype of being the people’s media where information and opinions were shared freely and frequently, is increasingly turning into the cyberspace equivalent of gated communities, complete with clubs so selective that most people don’t know they exist.

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CONVERSATIONS ONCE HELD on virtual street corners have moved out of earshot of the public.
       One place the elite escape the chatter is The Obvious. It is run by Michael Sippey, a consultant with San Francisco-based Viant, a Web marketing firm. The trappings of The Obvious, like other such gathering places, are decidedly low-rent. Most private spaces use one of the Net’s simplest technologies: e-mail. Members of e-mail “lists” send messages to a single address. The computer there keeps track of who is on the list and where to find everyone, “exploding” a single message out to all the participants.
       The participants at The Obvious are about two dozen 20- and 30-something Web workers, many already the leaders in their fields. They talk about everything from solving a work problem to dealing with the shock of parents going online.

EXCLUSIVE LISTS
       Many members of these exclusive lists seldom leave their own e-mail boxes.
       With good reason. Venturing into public spaces (like Usenet’s public bulletin boards) can be akin to wading through a crowd of tourists asking again and again where to find the Pamela Anderson Lee video and passing out chain letters, bogus computer virus warnings, online petitions and other pestilences of the Information Age.

‘It’s fair to say that most of the conversation has gone to private places.’

“I’d say in about 1993 when Usenet starting getting AOL people, and then in 1994 when it had both AOL people and spammers (junk e-mail), that’s when everyone really abandoned Usenet for private forums,” recalls Rebecca Eisenberg, a free-lance writer from San Francisco who is a member of Sippey’s list. “I think that has pretty much remained the trend. It’s fair to say that most of the conversation has gone to private places.”

ESCAPE FROM THE RABBLE
       For the Net-savvy, virtual gated communities aren’t just an escape from the rabble. They can also be a status symbol, an opportunity to be identified with the best and brightest the Net has to offer.

‘Sure it’s networking. I don’t have a problem saying it’s a club, a clique, a cabal, because it is.’

Nobody gets on The Obvious without a coveted personal invitation from Sippey. He considers nominations from current list members, but he has final say. That’s no different from most every other private list. Among typical list rules: Nobody quotes from the list without permission, and nothing on the list is for public consumption.
       “Sure it’s networking,” admits Sippey. “I don’t have a problem saying it’s a club, a clique, a cabal, because it is.”
       Sippey says he gets many requests from both strangers and acquaintances to join The Obvious, most of which he brushes off with a joke. But even with the social clout of a circa-1970s bouncer at Studio 54, Sippey longs to be invited to join another list. Once a week, Oliver Muoto, a founder of the Web software firm Epicenter in Sausalito, Calif., sends out the scoop on where to find Silicon Valley parties and reviews the prior week’s high-tech bacchanals.
       “Now that’s a list with value,” you can hear Sippey grin through the phone. “There are plenty of places to get free thinking on the Internet, but where else can you find free beer?”

CIVIL DISCOURSE AND NO SPAM
       Surprisingly, what happens on these lists is little different from conversations elsewhere on the Net, except the discourse tends to be more civil and spam stays out.
       Noel Chiappa of Yorktown, Va., runs a list of about eight participants, many of whom possess varying degrees of responsibility for the Internet’s critical underpinnings. (This group is so exclusive, it doesn’t want its name published.) Yet the members, mostly computer scientists, discuss a fusion of philosophy, art, sciences and technology.
       On another mailing list, Friends of Fire Engine Red, the talk among the Net entrepreneurs who hang out there tends toward technical problems. Really, it doesn’t matter. Like country clubs, where your day’s golf score is less important than whom you teed off next to.

REWARDING PRIVATE LISTS
       A private mail list can also be its own reward. People who can’t get invited to join a popular list have become celebrities by running their own. “There’s a certain amount of social capital that’s built on self-initiative on the Net,” said Sippey.

Today’s hot list, The Edge, boasts a virtual Who’s Who of Internet pioneers, including Stewart Brand and Jaron Lanier.

         As with nightspots, list cachet rises and falls. Five years ago, the place to see and be seen was Interesting People, a list run by David Farber, an influential computer professor at the University of Pennsylvania. So many Internet hotshots and celebrities subscribed to the list that people still frequently call it “Important” People. But when Farber opened the list to all comers, the computer cognoscenti lost interest. Like Yogi Berra said, no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

READ BUT DON”T WRITE
       Today’s hot list, The Edge, boasts a virtual Who’s Who of Internet pioneers, pundits and proselytizers ranging from Stewart Brand, who in 1985 started The Well, one of the first companies to sell access to the Internet, to Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who practically invented the idea of virtual reality.
       Howard Rheingold, another early denizen of The Well and early explorer of online communities, hosts an invitation-only Web-based community called Brainstorms.
       Online gated communities may keep undesirables out, but they don’t lock their denizens in, as real gated communities tend to. Many highly selective lists publish some or all of their discourse on publicly available Web sites. (You can read, you just can’t write.) 

Some say the utopian vision of the Internet as the ultimate, hands-off democracy was always an unattainable illusion.

         People also belong to many communities online — gated and public.
       To be fair, the digital commons is hardly habitable for anyone. And that may have more to do with the history of the Internet than with the hordes of people flocking to it.
       At the dawn of the Net, there were so few people online that democracy by consensus seemed like a great idea. Public spaces were built not just without rules and policing mechanisms, but with the means to resist them.
       “It wasn’t a fantasy, it was really working that way,” said Paulina Borsook, author of the forthcoming book “Cyberselfish: Techno-Libertarians and the True Revenge of the Nerds.” “It’s not that they were deluding themselves, it just didn’t scale up.”
       And when it did scale up, public forums became chaotic.
       Some say the utopian vision of the Internet as the ultimate, hands-off democracy was always an unattainable illusion. And to become more democratic, the public spaces of the Net may have to become a little less free.
       “I think that increased democratization has made it impossible to lead, and there’s too many people out there that are total nitwits and take up too much time and you can’t tell them to just go away,” said Chiappa, who was also the inventor of a key Internet technology in the late 1970s. “In some sense I’m a victim of a revolution that I helped start.”

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