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In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay-area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL's text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained, computer networks like the WELL allowed us "to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology."2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and "rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life-a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion."3
In the years since Rheingold's book appeared, the Internet and the Worldwide Web have swung into public view, and both the WELL and Rheingold's notion of virtual community have become touchstones for studies of the social implications of computer networking.4 Yet, despite the WELL's prominence, few have rigorously explored its roots in the American counterculture of the 1960s. As its name suggests, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link took shape within a network of individuals and publications that first came together long before the advent of ubiquitous computer networking, with the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog. In the spring of 1968, Stewart Brand, a former Merry Prankster and coproducer of the Trips Festival that helped spark the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic scene, noticed that many of his friends had begun to leave the city for the wilds of New Mexico and Northern California. As sociologists and journalists would soon explain, these migrants marked the leading edge of what would become the largest wave of communalization in American history.5 Brand had just inherited a hundred thousand dollars in stock and, as he recalled several years later, imagining his friends "starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks" got him thinking about the L.L.Bean catalog. This in turn led him...