Escalante
Image source: From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner.
And then we turn to the side and we see, who is this videoing Doug Engelbart doing the most important demo of the 20th century? Why, it’s Stewart Brand manning the video camera, who just happens to be hanging out.
You can look at society, like our financial system, and just see these vast inhuman systems. But really, once you look a bit closer, you see people, people like us. People who know each other. Communities.
The people who invented the world we live in were just people who knew each other.
So let’s do a quick where-are-they-now. Doug Engelbart’s personal computer did, as we know, rather well.
Stewart brand co-founded, in 1985, a bulletin board system called the WeLL, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. It’s the precursor to all the online social systems we use now, and where they thrashed out how a lot of the social dynamics online works. It was the first place to call itself a virtual community.
The lessons we take from it are what we call social software.