Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
off on being lords of their domains. I just wanted everybody to get along. It
might have been the fi rst MUD run by somebody over 30. I felt more like a be-
leaguered sys-admin who sometimes had to be a babysitter.
The Wizards were pledged to serve the will of the community, but had no way
to know what the community wanted. So in 1993, Pavel introduced a petition pro-
cess. “It came out of necessity,” he says. “I just needed some way to have the collec-
tive will expressible.” The Proposition structure “worked remarkably well for providing
at least some sense of order and process. I provided a structure within which change
seemed possible.” Rules for vetting were created to make petitions more effective
(see Mnookin 1996). The Petition system was also highly controversial, but some ex-
tremely smart petitions were created and passed, and the community survives until
this day with the process intact.
In retrospect, Pavel shares this wisdom:
LambdaMOO was just one more iteration on the great wheel of BBSs. None of
these things ever really disappeared. There are still BBSs and MUDs and Blogs
with lively comment communities, and Second Life will probably never die, but
it is what it is at this point. We see these communities form when technology
changes. Every time we give people another mechanism to communicate, they
latch onto it. And then we see human nature happen again. People. Some of
them will be assholes, some of them will care an enormous amount. Some will
be beautiful and wonderful and some will be hateful and awful. There's such a
hunger for these kinds of systems. Facebook is certainly an example. Then hu-
man nature does what we expect it to do if we're paying attention at all, and
there will always be people who are disappointed because they thought, this
time—this time it is pure.
a fairly large percentage of alt.* topics, many were (and are) also devoted to
activism, human rights, and free speech issues.
The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), founded by Stewart Brand
and Larry Brilliant in 1985, became a very tight community in which many
of the digerati of those days found a home. The community was friendly
toward the Whole Earth movement and refl ected some of the distinguish-
ing bits of Northern California culture (e.g., technology; the Grateful Dead).
It was originally a dial-up BBS, morphing with technology into its current
