The Origin of Online Community with a dose of Farm History
If Al Gore can claim he invented the internet, then in many ways the whole idea for social media was brought into being by 3 guys from The Farm.
The story goes like this: Before Facebook, there was The Well, an acronym for The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, the first and now one of the oldest virtual communities in continuous operation.
You could say it all started when in 1968, Stewart Brand produced the first Whole Earth Catalog, the oversized black paperback that was a true smorgasbord of ideas and practical tools for creating an alternative counter culture.
He was assisted in this effort by Mathew McClure, who then went on to become a founding member of The Farm, living in the community up until The Changeover (the end of the communal period) in 1983. Mathew returned to California and was once again hired by Brand at the offices of what was then the Whole Earth Review.
The Well was founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand, publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog, and Dr. Larry Brilliant, contemporary of Ram Dass (author of Be Here Now). Like Ram Das he was a student of Indian guru Neem Karoli Baba, who instructed Brilliant to join the United Nations team to eradicate small pox in the world, a goal he and others achieved in just a few years through an intense effort to vaccinate the entire country of India.
Dr. Larry Brilliant was also an early visionary in the world of digital conferencing. He approached Brand with the idea that could allow people to communicate with each other directly from their desk top computers through a private online forum. Brilliant offered to front the hardware, software and start-up capital if Brand could use his knowledge and expertise to get it going.
Brand put Mathew in charge of the project. Mathew then hired Farm buddies John Coate and Clifford Figallo, who had both moved back to California to translate their up close and personal experience in community into this new virtual realm. John recalls, “I coined the term “online community” in 1986 for a poster at a computer fair”
The Well became the template for all online communities to follow, setting the standard for conduct and personal accountability that in many ways seems lost in today’s world of “fake profiles and news.”
Both John and Clifford were founding members of The Farm Community, with roots that go all the Way back to Monday Night Class in San Francisco. In 1988, John and Clifford wrote about some of their shared history on The Farm in an essay for The Whole Earth Review called Farm Stories. It is an interesting glimpse into The Farm’s backstory and some of the idiosyncrasies that became both the community’s strengths and its weaknesses.
Farm Stories
John: “I first met him (Stephen Gaskin) when I was 18. He was conducting Monday Night Class at the Straight Theater on Haight Street.
Steve was a guy who could trip (on LSD, ed) at an extremely high level and later talk about it in such a way that an entire group could understand simultaneously his descriptions of energy and karma and what he knew about how to trip, which basically came down to how to make good decisions so as to not lose your energy. For a lot of young trippers these could be good reassuring words.
It was also like a big study group where we would read and learn and talk about Eastern and Western religion, mysticism, and magic. At first it was called “Einstein, Magic, and God.” Along the way Steve went from being just the teacher of a class to a Teacher as in “your guru.” He once said, “I started
out teaching people how to trip. Then I found out life was a trip…”