The Hacker Crackdown

In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.

Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to struggle to explain the very nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling. Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a suspect group called the Hackers Conference.

The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts. The hackers of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do with the hackers of the digital underground. On the contrary, the hackers of this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers" most likely to react with militant fury at any criminal degradation of the term "hacker.")

Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though his computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled by this anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.

Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the Point Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort.

Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous. Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the *Whole Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The *Whole Earth Catalog,* and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a National Book Award.

With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the *Whole Earth Catalog* had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."

*CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was never a widely popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor, *CoEvolution Quarterly* failed to revolutionize Western civilization and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness. *CoEvolution Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of mouth.

It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers. And yet -- it never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in, year out, decade in, decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the magazine. The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").

But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by. Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, *CoEvolution Quarterly* suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered the computer revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog* of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie- dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution Quarterly* folded its teepee, replaced by *Whole Earth Software Review* and eventually by *Whole Earth Review* (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold).

1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.

As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the begi

Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board. Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings") were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended to work in the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and journalists were especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."

There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft. No one used handles. Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disco

The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum for access and storage, and lost money for years -- but not enough to hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that could last for months or years on end.

In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:

CONFERENCES ON THE WELL

WELL "Screenzine" Digest (g zine)

Best of the WELL - vintage material - (g best)

Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops)

Business - Education ----------------------

Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri) Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds (g cla) Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult) Consumers (g cons) Design (g design) Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g disability) Education (g ed) Energy (g energy91) Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g home) Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g invest) Kids91 (g kids) Legal (g legal) One Person Business (g one) Periodical/newsletter(g per) Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future (g fut) Translators (g trans) Travel (g tra) Work (g work)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff) Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp) Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)