Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein had now found real motivation to explore the new world. They were willing to go into cyberspace with dreams that it could perhaps be a more interesting place than the real world. They were also ready and willing to protect this new space from the drones of the old world who were intent on imposing a dull morality on it. They were to be the ‘the First Street Gang of the Information Super Data Highway’.

After the festival, Zai and Brainhard returned to Vienna, the others to Zürich. Their determination to live online crystallised. The only impediment was their need for a catchy and distinctive domain name of their own – like in cnn.com or bbc.co.uk – the address where they would park their Web site. To continue the metaphor of cyberspace as the digital West, the domain name was like a homestead, the claim of the frontiersman. During the Internet’s goldrush years, millions of hopeful punters bought such claims, in the belief that a name was all it took to strike Internet gold. Indeed, some did win out, selling simple names – such as events.com or business.com – for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and later millions. etoy were conscious that their decision to acquire a domain name was vital to their future.

When the Domain Name System was invented, the possibility for avaricious demand was never even contemplated; it was simply designed to make the locating of information easier and to organise the network more efficiently. But, as the Internet grew more commercial, the Domain Name System became the focus of a heated and rancorous conflict, at the heart of which lay the question of who should control the Internet itself.

At the epicentre of this battle was Jon Postel, of TCP/IP Standards fame. Since co-authoring the Standards, he had gone on to edit the documents that further improved the working of the network. It was his work on the Domain Name System, however, that ultimately gained him heroic status.

The Domain Name System began life in 1983. Postel had asked his colleague Paul Mockapetris to write a specification about how a naming system for the Internet could work. Already in place was the system of giving every computer on the network a number, the so-called IP number, but these were difficult to remember. Also, rather like the old telephone system, there was no easy way to carry the numbers between computers – in effect meaning that every time a user switched computers they had to take a new email address. The Domain Name System was to overlay the IP numbers with a portable and easy-to-remember name system.

The central idea of Mockapetris’s Domain Name System is that there is only one ‘address book’, which accurately locates every computer on the Internet. Without a unique address for each computer, information intended for one machine could end up at another; were this to happen, the Internet would no longer be a unified and universal information system, but rather a set of fragmented, networked fiefdoms. In deciding on this single naming system, Mockapetris gave enormous power to the authorities in control of the registration and stewardship of the domain names, in that they could decide to delete any entry from the Internet without offering an alternative.

Essential to Mockapetris’s system is arguably the most powerful document on the Internet, the A-Root, containing the key to the complete road map – all the addresses for every named computer connected to the Internet. Following the creation of the Domain Name System, this document became the Royal Standard, the Holy Grail over which competing armies in the domain wars would fight. What is most remarkable about the all-important A-Root is that it contains only 250 lines of information. Yet this tiny record, while not a list of every computer sitting on the Internet, can determine the addresses of the hundreds of millions of computers on the Internet; it is a collection of pointers to where this information can be found.

The distribution of the singular address book among many hands was not only an elegant technical solution to the problem of managing what would become such a big network, but also an ideological one. As Mockapetris – in whose Silicon Valley office now hangs a rebellious skull-and-crossbones flag – remembers, ‘At that time I was a true believer in the idea of distributing the authority, rather than having it centrally.’

Mockapetris wrote the specification for the Domain Name System and gave it to Jon Postel, who became the pre-eminent domain-name politician. At first, this simply meant that he was the one who stewarded the technical details through the consensus-gathering process of Internet engineering. But it was also Postel who later determined the precise contents of the A-Root; as if he controlled the address book which in turn contained the addresses of the other 250 address books of the top-level domains. Postel chaired the committee that decided there should be 243 top-level domains named as country codes – .uk for Britain, .ch for Switzerland, etc. – and seven generic domains – .com for companies, .edu for academic institutions, .org for not-for-profit organisations, .net for networks, and so on.

The first dot-com domain name was registered on 15 March 1985 by a software company called symbolics.com. The registration process involved Postel creating the first entry in the database of dot-com domains, the dot-com address book. This in turn pointed to the database for the symbolics.com address book in which their own systems administrators could allocate numbered computers to specific sub-domains. For example, they would later take ‘www’ for their Web site – www.symbolics.com – but they would also have an email computer, at something like mail.symbolics.com. As the Internet grew, the fact that system administrators could name additional computers without resorting to a central command made it all the easier for the network to expand at incredible rates.

Jon Postel reigned benign and supreme across the Domain Name System from its inception until the 1990s. He was at the head of a shell organisation, the Internet Assigned Numbers of Authority (IANA), that had control over the A-Root and its future. But as the Net became more commercialised, so his authority was challenged. The biggest such threat came from an organisation that was initially brought in to help him out. In 1993, the US Government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), which subsidised the Internet and funded Postel, gave a contract to a small company based in Herndon, Virginia, called Network Solutions. They were charged with physically looking after the A-Root while Postel kept control of the policies relating to the ways in which it could be changed. Network Solutions was also required to maintain the database of new generic-domain registrations like dot-com.

By 1995, this somewhat lowly administrative contract was on the verge of radical change. As the Internet blossomed and increasing numbers of for-profit firms and foreign organisations registered names, those at the National Science Foundation began to feel queasy about the prospect of continuing to subsidise these operations. In addition, Network Solutions was faced with developing legal liability as the first ‘domain dispute’ – between the owner of a trademarked brand and the owner of a domain name – was filed in a Chicago court and named Network Solutions as a co-defendant. As the problem grew, the company had no real idea of the kind of liability such a dispute might entail – there was the possibility of bankruptcy, which could have forced the collapse of the naming system and even the Internet itself.

It was at this time that Don Telage, who worked for a secretive defence contractor, Science Applications Industries Corporation (SAIC), stepped into the fray, when his company bought the struggling Network Solutions. Really he had hoped to exploit the other side of Network Solutions’ business, telecom consultancy, but almost by accident he found he was sitting on a registration venture that might soon prove to be a goldmine. Encouraged by Telage, and to prevent the collapse of the Domain Name System, the National Science Foundation agreed that Network Solutions should be allowed to charge $100 for each new two-year registration and $50 annually thereafter. Thirty per cent of the fees would revert to an ‘Internet intellectual infrastructure fund’, while the remainder would go towards Network Solutions’ costs and to their profit. Charging for registration was to be introduced on 1 October 1995. When the news leaked out, speculators rushed in their thousands to register for free before the deadline. Thus it was brought forward to 12 September.

This event rocked the Internet engineering community – which until then had been organised around grindingly slow opinion-gathering processes. Around the Web campaigners, engineers and entrepreneurs began to complain about the new system, hopelessly fracturing the rough consensus that Postel had nurtured for twenty years. Many felt that domain space was a public resource that should not be pursued for private profit. The shift also created a monopoly for the registration of dot-com and other top-level domains; and this monopoly was in the hands of Network Solutions, which now had every reason to guard jealously its singular right to register and charge.

When etoy first discussed where to build its home on the World Wide Web, etoy.ch with the Swiss country code was dismissed as being parochial. etoy.net was favoured because it had the essence of the underground hacker-scene and a sense of community. Soon, however, etoy.com became the group’s preferred option because ‘dot-com is an Internet status symbol (at least for primitive people like me)’, as agent Kubli wrote in an email. ‘And status symbols stand for power and power, in the end, stands for money.’ The mischievous and musical Goldstein was the only group member to disagree; he thought that etoy should be pushing ‘love’, not power. His objections were eventually overcome. In Vienna Brainhard spoke for the rest of the group when he argued that ‘dot-com is the commercial image, beautiful, brilliant like steel and hard’. The decision was made.

On 15 October 1995, the etoy members registered their domain name – etoy.com – with Network Solutions for a fee of $100 under the new rules. Had they completed the process one month earlier it would have cost them nothing. In registering they gave Network Solutions enormous power over their destiny. At the time, however, they foresaw no apparent danger – and anyway, they had no choice.

With the domain name registered, the boys relentlessly finished work on their Web site. Everywhere trailblazers were reaching for metaphors to describe the perfect Web site. Some thought the Web would deliver the written word like a magazine; others thought that Web sites were actually more like TV shows, streaming images and sound. To enable users to navigate around the sites, some contained headline-blaring front pages, structured like a newspaper, while others gave maps of information. For the etoy site, Zai and Gramazio proposed a metaphor which was a network of tanks and pipes – like a sewage farm. Initially the front page was to be a picture of the system, a sort of schematic plan, linking the various components. Gramazio remembers, ‘We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.’

During these intense months of creativity, etoy was also developing its own language. The word ‘professional’, for instance, came to be used as the primary aspiration and injunction of the company, and the word ‘unprofessional’ the central pejorative. These became, as Esposto recalls, Zai’s favourite terms. ‘He always said that we had to be “professional”. The word “professional” was used to paper over the weak spots of the organisation. I didn’t understand all the company details any more, but I was very impressed by this guy who thought of everything.’

Slightly more surprising was their use of the word ‘hardcore’ in almost every sentence. For them, it denoted determination, wild and adrenaline-fuelled, as well as alluding to the beat-heavy industrial house music of that name. Interestingly, and unbeknown to the boys, the only corporation to regularly use the word ‘hardcore’ as much as they did was Microsoft. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta called a whole chapter of his book World War 3.0 about Microsoft ‘Hardcore’. As Rob Glaser, CEO of Real Networks, who used to work with Bill Gates, said: ‘I do think the Microsoft culture was one where being hardcore and not being seen as less than hardcore was very important and very highly valued. The Microsoft culture is one where people are not chastised for being paranoid or over-competitive.’

Eventually the etoy Web site was completed, named the etoy. TANKSYSTEM and described as a ‘parallel world somewhere in between LEGO-land, Internet training camp, virtual fairground, hypermedia test ground, sound & vision dump and Internet motel for travellers of the new kind’. Visitors could navigate through the tanks by clicking on arrows at the top of the screen. In the Supermarket tank they could order online etoy sunglasses and laughing-gas cylinders – though these were never delivered. In the Gallery the IP numbers of Web-surfers were checked and printed on the screen, while a Big Brother-ish eye, created by the brilliant hacker Udatny, looked on. etoy also built the first suite of its cybermotel. Coco, the transsexual who had flown through their launch party, furnished it with pictures of and interviews with herself.

The most visited tank was called Underground. There, etoy featured the forbidden – pornography, violence and drug abuse. This was the place where the boys were determined to repudiate the stuffy and constricted sensibilities of the communities they came from, pushing to the absolute limit their critique of the middle-class righteousness and virtue that they so despised. As Zai remembers, ‘etoy, at that time, thought that any moral was bad.’ Their method was to shock in the most extreme and distasteful ways. The Underground tank contained a photograph of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it had been bombed; underneath it was the caption ‘Such work needs a lot of training’. There was also a picture of a woman’s naked breasts pierced with dozens of needles, and a naked man bound and hung upside-down. It was not that the boys supported terrorism or were enamoured by sadomasochism; rather, it was that they thought these shocking images would serve to both get them noticed and provoke and move on the world in which they lived.

When the Web site was completed, Zai was euphoric, exhibiting a hubris that would in time become overwhelming. He wrote to the Zürich crew, ‘We are now the biggest, strongest and most beautiful of the world! This is the first time in my life that we have done something really great. My partners Brainhard and Udatny, and me today worked for the tank for 12 hours without stopping, online, non-linear, not local! HARDCORE! nobody can catch up with us. fuck mtv. fuck netscape. fuck all.’

Soon etoy would announce to the world that they were the first people ever to have emigrated to the Internet to live a digital existence. This ‘emigration’ led to them relying more and more on the robustness of the Domain Name System to protect their homestead at etoy.com. Within a year, they had left their hair, their clothes, their names and, of course, their personal freedom on the altar of the etoy brand; they were henceforth committed to following the etoy corporate identity. And from now on, all communiqués were signed ‘etoy, leaving reality behind’.

In the hills above Hollywood, Timothy Leary, now an old and sick man, was also preparing to leave reality behind, with the support of his ‘godson’, Joichi Ito. They had first met each other at Ito’s twenty-fourth birthday party, in Tokyo in the summer of 1990, when Ito – then a DJ entrepreneur – who had been reading books about Leary, asked him if he ever really had received messages from aliens. Leary laughed. ‘That’s just a lie; we made it up.’ They broke away from the party and strolled across the Ropongi district, where Ito showed the older man the hip, technology-loving children of Japan’s economic bubble at play. ‘He got really excited,’ Ito recalls; Leary was also intrigued by this representative of tech-savvy Japanese youth and soon began describing him as his godson.

Less than a month later, Leary took Ito – along with Ito’s Los Angeles-based mother and sister – to a party in northern California at the Mondo 2000 house in the Berkeley hills. There, Joichi Ito met the scene. Soon he was appearing with Leary on stage in a show called ‘Psychedelics to Cybernetics’, and was staying with the liberty-defending John Perry Barlow in Pinedale, Wyoming. In the summer of 1990, he wrote in his diary, ‘I got a call from Timothy just now, what a godfather, I’m having trouble keeping up with all this energy, I feel an almost ecstatic vertigo from the acceleration of progress.’

But if Timothy Leary introduced Joichi Ito to his world it was Ito who introduced the older man to the World Wide Web, and opened up for him another dimension beyond the disappointment of virtual reality. Ito – like the etoy boys – had a previous history with computers, that he had all but forgotten. In 1981, as a teenager in Tokyo, he’d managed to hack his way into university computer systems and then jump from one location to another. He eventually found the first interactive game, the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) at the University of Essex, in England. For weeks he played this text-based adventure game, as a character whom he called Sid – after the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. When Sid met a gruesome virtual death, Ito wept for a whole night.

By the time the Web browser Mosaic was released, Ito was in Tokyo running clubs and various other businesses. The Web was a medium to which he took with great ease. As Howard Rheingold, a writer from the West Coast technology elite, wrote, ‘Mosaic in Joi’s hands had that instantly recognisable look of the future to it.’ Tim Leary had a similar revelation on seeing Mosaic. On his Web site he wrote: ‘A few years ago, a young Cyber-Wizard named Joichi Ito said, “Our computer screens are windows into Cyber Worlds which we can explore. The first step is to design, construct, and furnish our personal-private Home, where friends can hang out.” And that’s when I realized the empowerment that inter-personal computers offer individuals.’

Joining Leary’s vision to Ito’s ideas, in the middle of 1995 the pair began to create a ‘Home on the Internet’ for Timothy Leary. So enamoured of the future was Timothy Leary that he sold his car, leaving behind what he thought of as the old fossil-fuel economy, and transformed his garage into the workspace for a number of young Web designers and hackers; this he called his ‘digital garage’. Ito, meanwhile, had been using his bicultural and technical knowledge to translate the Internet to the Japanese. He founded a company called Eccosys and set up Japan’s first Web server in the bathroom of his apartment, then sent his godfather and mentor the computers he would need to implement his final dream.

Tim Leary wanted his Web presence to replicate his real-life house, for viewers to be able to see inside the living room and dining room and to ‘pick’ books off his shelves. The concept was simple, as Chris Graves, Leary’s Webmaster, remembers, ‘He wanted people to have as much access to his life and his work as he gave them in real life.’ Graves and his friends mapped out the house, photographing it from top to bottom and uploading the pictures on to the Web. ‘Tim was the mastermind of the whole thing; he was directing the whole process,’ recalls Graves.

Leary was dying of prostate cancer, and he planned for the Web site to be his swansong. He registered his drug intake on it, and in one rash moment even claimed that he would broadcast his death live over the Internet. The global media reported hysterically this strange final twist from the great provocateur of the sixties; it seemed so new, so radical and so innovative. In the event, Leary did not go ahead with the broadcast.

In the spring of 1996 Joichi Ito had his last cigar with the dying Timothy Leary. When Ito left the house, he took a plane from LAX to Austria in order to attend that year’s jury deliberations for the Prix Ars Electronica. The following night, Timothy Leary quietly died in his bedroom, surrounded by his friends and the various people who had been looking after his Web site. John Perry Barlow was at home that night. ‘The phone just rang in the middle of this rainy Wyoming night, and now I’m here naked in the dark trying to think of something to follow him out with,’ he wrote hours after the call. His eulogy spread across the Internet, posted as a memorial on hundreds of Web sites and email lists; the symbol of the sixties had died and it seemed like the end of an epoch.

Meanwhile Ito had arrived at Ars Electronica, where etoy, almost a year after their first attendance as a group, were about to step from the shadows into the spotlight. For them, a new era was about to begin.

3 Kool-Aid Kings and Castles in the Air (#ulink_4a0e14bc-a522-5732-a43d-489b7b7c8e68)

‘This emerging new economy … has its own distinct opportunities and its own new rules. Those who play by the new rules will prosper; those who ignore them will not.’

Kevin Kelly, ‘New Rules for the New Economy’,

WIRED, 1997

‘Computer hackers … their programs are like surrealist paintings.’

Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995

When John Perry Barlow founded his Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990, he was determined not only to fight for freedom of speech in cyberspace, but also to open the network to the free market. At that time, the Internet was an academic resource and commerce was restricted from it. For years the US Government’s National Science Foundation which subsidised the Internet had controlled access to it by making new users agree to an Acceptable Use Policy that precluded any profit-seeking activities.

But Barlow – along with various other campaigners – worked hard to repeal these restrictions. In his capacity as an advisor to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Vice President Al Gore, Barlow took his belief in the economic potential of the utterly unregulated Internet to the very highest levels. (He even joked that his favourite mode of transport was Airforce Two – the Vice Presidential plane.) Key pieces of legislation were gradually put in place, allowing the National Science Foundation to foster economic growth and enabling commercial service-providers to hook up to the public network.

Hucksters soon got online, and those who failed to learn the strange language and customs of the early cyberspace pioneers were cruelly punished by a community that was sceptical of their free space being colonised by commerce. One key spat, a precursor to many that followed, began when husband-and-wife lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, sent an email advertising their services to every bulletin board on the Internet. This amounted to some five and a half thousand postings, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of users would see it, over and over again. This was considered to be ‘spamming’, and extremely bad-mannered. Many of the victims of this unwanted attention were already loosely organised as communities within email lists and online discussion-boards. They declared war on the lawyers, filling the firm’s inbox with thousands of useless emails – many containing threats and obscenities – and bunging up their fax machine. The story made it to the cover of Time magazine and was viewed as a warning to those who sought precipitous commercialisation of the not-for-profit cyberspace.

Despite such hostility from some sections of the old Internet community, the forces of commercialisation were too strong to resist and Barlow’s libertarian ideas came to dominate. As he took on a new role, as a corporate consultant and contributing writer to WIRED magazine – which promoted a business ethic wrapped in party-going clothes of Mondo 2000’s dayglo graphics – Barlow perfectly embodied the Internet’s transformation from hippy playground to new capitalist marketplace. One significant point of inflection on this journey happened in April 1995, when, after years of bureaucratic wrangling, the US National Science Foundation formally privatised the Internet. The key parts of the infrastructure – the hubs that routed traffic, and the transcontinental telecom links – were handed over to commercial organisations; as a consequence, the Acceptable Use Policy was repealed and the age of the commercial Internet truly began.

At about this time, thirty-six-year-old nebbish computer entrepreneur Bill Gross was away from his home in Pasadena, California, to attend a family wedding in New York. As ever, his mind was racing through new possibilities for his existing businesses, radical technical innovations and the possibilities of the Web as a new toy. Just before the wedding, he decided that he needed a haircut, so took a look through the New York Yellow Pages to find a barber. Hundreds were listed, but Gross had no idea where any of them were located or of how good they were. He was not about to wait for a recommendation. Instead, he hailed a cab and chose a barber at random. Arriving outside his selected shop, he immediately realised, just from the look of it, that it wasn’t the kind of place for a man who was already a multi-millionaire. But it was too late.

The experience led to a typical ‘eureka’ moment for the entrepreneur, who loved finding solutions to the world’s problems in the form of snazzy new business ideas. It made him wonder: if pictures of all the city’s barber shops were accessible on the Internet, surely he could have been saved the fruitless journey. In contrast to many of the virtual-reality concepts that were the currency of the moment, Gross’s plan was to use the Internet as a means to help real people in the real world. The trouble was that he didn’t have the time to focus on a new project himself, so he persuaded his old friend Charles Conn, a partner at the management consultancy McKinsey, to look at the idea. Conn didn’t care much for Gross’s initial and limited concept of a photographic directory, but he did think it could be the starting point of a much larger idea. And so, in the summer of 1995, Bill Gross managed to persuade his friend to start an online city-directory company, CitySearch. As Gross said: ‘What lured him there was the opportunity to direct his own drama, to own his own destiny.’

Gross may have been busy with other businesses, but he did help Conn by finding high-profile investors like Steven Spielberg and Michael Douglas for the venture. He also assisted in making the Web site easy to use. Conn remembers, Gross was ‘a sort of strange combination of geek, technologist and a huckster marketer all rolled into one.’ Gross’s other role was to entertain and cajole potential employees, persuading them to jump ship from their steady careers and join the risky world of a new company and a new frontier. At the time, nobody really imagined that the Internet was going to make them huge amounts of money, but it did seem to be exciting and to have the potential to change the way the world worked.

CitySearch’s emerging success placed Bill Gross at the vanguard of the Internet revolution, and demonstrated that he had a Midas touch in this new arena too. He was now beautifully poised to benefit from the coming boom with the absolute belief that he had seen the future. He enthused, ‘I’m unbelievably bullish on the Internet. I think the Internet is going to be in everybody’s home, on everybody’s watch, in everybody’s pocket, pretty much by the end of this century.’ Soon he had set up more than twenty different Internet businesses – among them a toy company. And in due course he would be catching private planes, being driven in limousines and chased by groupies, as well as being hailed as the most important entrepreneur since J. D. Rockefeller. Not bad for a man well into his thirties who gave the impression – perhaps because he was short, wore simple clothes and scurried around with his gaze fixed on the floor – that he could still be a teenager. Whatever, in the midst of a world of inexperienced entrepreneurs, Bill Gross’s unique asset was that he had a history.

Gross enjoyed telling journalists his perfect entrepreneurial-creation myth. The son of an orthodontist in Encino, California, he had become a candy salesman (a start like that of both Rockefeller and Thomas Edison) at the age of twelve, buying confectionery in bulk and undercutting the local drug store. By the time he reached high school, Gross had employed a few salesmen to work for him.

His next venture, at high school, saw him enter the world of engineering – selling, via adverts he placed in the back of Popular Electronics magazine, hundreds of kits of tin foil and cardboard along with instructions on how to make parabolic dishes for solar energy. This venture paid for his tuition at the California Institute of Technology, where he sold stereo loudspeakers to his classmates. Upon his graduation, in 1981, he started his own audio shop in Pasadena, vaingloriously called Gross National Products.

However, when it came to convincing potential investors and a hungry media that he was a substantial force in the Internet boom, Bill Gross’s real asset was the fact that he’d previously built two multi-million-dollar software businesses. And both had been exactly in sync with two fundamental shifts within the computer business over the precious decade.

The first of these shifts began in August 1981 with the launch of IBM’s personal computer, marketed as their ‘smallest, lowest-priced computer system, designed for business, school and home’. Until then, PCs had been thought of as hobby machines and were only properly used by esoteric academics; IBM’s endorsement jump-started the micro-computer market for business. The computer even became Time’s ‘Man of the Year’.