@heaven: The Online Death of a Cybernetic Futurist

"@heaven recalls a time when the net was about people, ideas, compassion, and everything that made us human. It is both an accurate portrait of the online world as it once was, and a profound call to retrieve this desire for a genuinely connected future." —Douglas Rushkoff

1994, Northern California. The Internet as we know it is just beginning. Groups of idealistic technologists are coming together online to explore its potential.

In the chat rooms of one such gathering, soon-to-become-famous as The WELL, a Stanford futurist named Tom Mandel creates a new conference topic, headed Local Bug Report. In it, he asks for advice about how to shake off a persistent cough. A few weeks into the conversation it emerges that Mandel’s illness is something much more serious. Within six months he is dead.

This astonishing and deeply moving book is a record of the exchanges that took place on The WELL as Mandel’s sickness worsened. It traces the way an innocuous health topic morphed into a dramatic chronicle of terminal illness and the complicated and emotional issues that surrounded it.

With an introduction by Paper editor Kim Hastreiter, who followed the exchanges on The WELL as they happened, @heaven opens a window onto the early days of the Internet, highlighting the values of kinship and community that the early pioneers aimed to instill in it.

© 2015 The WELL

Published by OR Books, New York and London

Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

First printing 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Posts by Phil Catalfo are copyright © 2015 Phil Catalfo

A Death on the Net © 2015 Gerard Van Der Leun

ISBN 978-1-939293-75-6 paperback

ISBN 978-1-939293-76-3 e-book

Typeset by CBIGS Group, Chennai, India. Printed by BookMobile in the United States and CPI Books Ltd in the United Kingdom.

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter.

—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

I had another motive in opening this topic, to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I’ve done online since last October when my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn’t going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocate us. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew online—here, in TIME Online, on the Net in various places—I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn’t really have to leave…large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space. Not an ­original idea, but what the hell, worth the try...

—TOM MANDEL

Contents

IT'S ALL THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT

    foreword by Kim Hastreiter

A DEATH ON THE NET

    an obituary for Tom Mandel

    by Gerard Van Der Leun

A NOTE ABOUT PERMISSIONS

TOPIC 1007 [HEALTH]: LOCAL BUG REPORT

TOPIC 1744 [NEWS]: MY TURN

ABOUT THE EDITOR

It’s All the Same but Different

When I think about the past couple of decades I feel out of breath standing still. Like I’m living in the most exhilarating moment possible, yet perched on quicksand. The 21st century has thus far thrown the world into the craziest reinvention mode imaginable. And it’s all still moving faster than a speeding bullet. As someone who loves radical change, I feel so lucky to be alive during this great pivot. I feel even luckier to have straddled in my lifetime two vastly different centuries—an evolution from analogue to digital that has triggered a thrilling and dramatic wave of fallout. Huge industries have gone topsy-turvy before my eyes. It’s been a rush just to witness the shift—where everything that used to be true isn’t any more, those who used to be powerful aren’t any more and all that is standard becomes irrelevant faster than you can say WTF. Hell, who needs drugs!

As a member of what I call the straddle generation, I’ve lived in both worlds. I’ve traveled Europe with lire, pounds and francs in my pocket, yet I just learned a few weeks ago how to download a bitcoin wallet. Early in my career, I’d type stories for my little indie magazine called PAPER on my classic green 70s Hermes typewriter and I now type 140 character newsflashes with my thumbs on a tiny digital touch screen I keep in my pocket. I remember developing rolls of film in canisters by shaking them back and forth then printing the photos from the negs in a dark closet redolent with chemical fumes. Yet a few months ago I scanned my own face and printed a 3D image of myself that now sits on my desk as a paperweight! I learned to take my own photo when I was in art school by using a time release on my Nikon camera—running in front of the lens before the shutter clicked while these days I’ve finally figured out how to take a semi-flattering selfie (from above) on my iphone to upload on Instagram.

It was a little over 20 years ago that I really began to first understand the extraordinary power and potential of this new phenomenon called the Internet (the web in those days was actually called Cyberspace BTW). And this little book you hold in your hand is a document of the moment in time that opened the door to my personal digital AHA! moment—when I realized that the crux of the new digital age would be about PEOPLE not TECHNOLOGY. That the potential of the web would lie in its community and in it’s great power of connecting like-minded people like never before.

In 1992 I snagged my first newfangled slowpoke device called a modem and excitedly plugged it into my telephone and computer. Bam! My jaw dropped as I began to connect to and explore the vast mysterious world wide web which was still just beginning to be inhabited by the early radicals and pioneers who recognized what the future for the world could be. The Internet was tricky and complicated in those days. I’d sit at my Macintosh SE 30 (which still occupies a corner of my desk as a keepsake) and enter all kinds of crazy key symbol configurations and complicated dos codes to log onto pre-browser bulletin boards where I’d be able to read about a wide variety of cool topics and discover smart and interesting people and information.

It was around that time that I began hearing buzz about something called the WELL, an experimental bulletin-board-slash-virtual community run out of northern California that attracted many of the early radical Internet pioneers as participants. I registered, logged on, and immediately became hooked. The WELL offered its small and vibrant online community many diverse forums that evoked strong opinions, maverick ideas, and intense conversations on quite a variety of alternative, cultural, intellectual, political, and even every day subjects. As a member, you could scan the categories—from books to sustainability to technology—enter any of the ongoing topics that piqued your interest and join these conversations. Or just lurk if you didn’t feel like speaking up. As a newbie, I was timid among all these super-brainy geeks so I began lurking big-time, avidly following many topics that interested me and soaking them up like a sponge.

After about a year, a topic caught my eye in the Health conference called Local Bug Report. It was September 1994 and flu season was just beginning. I felt feverish and was looking for advice. This topic had been started by WELL veteran Tom Mandel (mandel) because he couldn’t seem to shake his cold. Turns out that Mandel, this dispenser of sore throat and phlegm advice, was actually a futurist working at the Stanford Research Institute where he was a forecaster. He was also a consultant at Time Online (which in those days could be found on AOL). No slouch.

I got a kick out of lurking in Mandel’s Local Bug Report forum, poring over all the snarky complaints and suggested cures from a gaggle of uber-smart tech pioneers from all over the world. Mandel conscientiously kept the conversation on topic but still wasn’t feeling any better despite all the advice from fellow topic-mates, including a nurturing woman (nana) and a supersmart MD (flash) who recommended everything from decongestants to sinus sprays.

But on October 18th, a huge topic drift hit the conference that forced Mandel to change the nature of his Local Bug Report. After a month of feeling like shit with no improvement, he finally went to a specialist who discovered two spots on his lungs. Word of his trouble spread fast on the WELL and throngs of Mandels’ supporters joined the conversation, trying to help him keep his sense of humor. But it went from bad to worse. By mid-November, he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and revealed the news to his shocked Flu Bug buddies. And so this once innocent little health topic morphed before our eyes into a dramatic ongoing chronicle of a man’s fatal illness and the complicated and emotional issues surrounding it—from wrestling with his short term survival options to coping with the end of his life six months later. And those of us who both lurked and exchanged support and love for Tom during this intense time morphed into a powerful little posse of accidental witnesses. Witnesses not only to his life and death drama, but witnesses to the power of the Internet.

I continued to lurk constantly in these intense and emotional conversations with hundreds of participants I’d never met from all over the world (I never did feel confident enough to post), getting to know and deeply care for this ill stranger and his friends. I monitored Mandel’s mood, condition, and daily progress. His philosophical posts and conversations with his growing group of virtual friends from around the world entered a whole new unexpected dimension. I saw someone looking death in the eye surrounded by a powerful community of people he’d never met IRL, people who were supporting him in his heavy decisions, inspiring him and loving him.

By March, Mandel’s health was getting worse but he logged in and shared like a trooper every day until April when nearing the end, he became too weak to post. After actually marrying Flu Bug’s nana (Maria Syndicus) on April first in the hospital, Tom Mandel passed away a few days later. flash announced Mandel’s death in the Local Bug Report conference on the day he died and froze the conference forever.

Sensing its historical impact, I immediately copied and pasted the entire 6-month transcript from beginning to end onto my hard drive before it was taken off line. I have been so moved by what I had experienced with these people that I have never even met that this has stuck with me for all of these years. Looking back, I realize now that I had watched history happen in the ether through a community of pioneers who were planting the seeds for what social networking would become. For twenty years I have backed up this transcript on every computer I have ever owned, secretly dreaming it would someday make a sweet little book that told the story in a small way about something that was bigger than any of us could ever imagine.

The future might be now, but human nature remains the same no matter how high or low-tech our tools are. In the current world of bitcoins, drones, cyber-terrorism, Klout, and romances with operating systems, it’s so interesting to see that hand-cranked coffee grinders, slingshots, heirloom marijuana seeds, sign painting, axes, and artisanal bread making are what is trending with young people these days. Change might be all around us and is moving faster than ever but the urge remains to slow down. The reach of the Internet is vaster and bigger than anyone could have ever imagined but "the power of small" is still at the forefront of this revolution. No matter how radical and futuristic new technology becomes, it can never change the world without brilliant, creative, and idealistic people to realize its potential. Many skeptics describe the digital habits of the millennial generation as isolating but I disagree. The strongest pillar of this amazing place called the Internet is community.

I will always be grateful to the late great Tom Mandel and the WELL for showing me the way forward. Remember folks, this brave new world is still the same (but different).

—KIM HASTREITER

June 2014

A Death on the Net

An obituary for Tom Mandel by Gerard Van Der Leun (1995)

I knew mandel long before I met him. This is common enough in these days when more and more of us live second-hand and virtually in cybersomewhere. People bump into other people on America Online, or the WELL, or some place else on the Net, and after a time arrange to meet. Meeting mandel though changed my life. This is uncommon on