Limos and Shopping Carts

(Part 3)

Gregori's Sfnet idea, never likely to grace the hot and fervid chromatic adolescence of Wired glossed stories and ever-glossier pages, is that internet "communities" - that wonderful untamed frontier of Intellectual Property (IP), the social small change that is the last resort of a commercial colonisation and exploitation oversold and saturated in other areas - only work when they naturally grow, not artificially forced to grow seeded by IPO money and watered by personal greed. Perhaps this explains the persistence of earlier, corporate-free communications zones, like BBSs and news groups, in spite of the "competing" glitz of hollywoodised silicon graphics web-o-mmercials. Gregori's small Sfnet community includes "politicians, priests and prostitutes", students and slackers, the homeless and the homeowner.

"I look around, and I've been in this virtual revolution, cyberspace thing for a long time and watched it grow, and see that corporations have grabbed it" says Gregori. "They see a paradigm that works - it's TV. Their idea is to just lay the TV paradigm on top of the Web and - bingo - you've got a new broadcast medium and you're making billions of dollars.

I just don't see it that way. I see the Web and virtual space as working - when it works well - for relatively small groups of people. We may be using computers that can access millions of people but ultimately were human beings and how many people can we really interact with on a reasonable level and feel that the interaction has some depth or gives us some enjoyment?.

With Sfnet we've got a thousand people who use it a lot and maybe another who 1,000 who are kind of the voyeurs who drop in and out. Its a comfortable level. People know each other, more or less. When you look at what things work on the Web it seems they grow out of small outcroppings. When the masses jump on it, it all comes tumbling down.

We started with five cafes and it was an immediate success because it spoke to a small group of people. I always tell people: "Sfnet is like what church used to be like in this country 50 years ago". Now whether that was a healthy place or not for people, the bottom line was people felt like they were in a community. Our system serves a community of people. But, usually in the building of any community in modern-day society, there's a certain "culling" process that happens where ultimately you have lots of people who very similar in many respects. And this breeds boredom. I think this incredible malaise that hangs over the country is because people are bored out of their minds. They're bored talking to people who they can predict pretty much what they're going to say - they know em - they're like me!

But Sfnet bridged that completely. I mean, we didn't put terminal in yuppie cafes - we put 'em in the Mission, the Lower Haight (poorer suburbs) where people from, say Iowa (Editor - Bourke would be the Australian equivalent - land of the christian pro-gun lobby) would think: "these people are weirdoes". But you put them together with people calling from their office or home and, because they don't know who it is they're talking to, soon they're friends. The corporate use of the net can be seen as the "suburbanisation" of the net.

In Sfnet I was able to create an environment that said something about an autonomous society. One of the most important things we did was to make Sfnet a paid system - either quarters (25 cents) from the coinslots in the cafes or by cheque if they're calling in from home. And you can pass time back and forth between users. You can be at home and see a poorer person crying out for time at a cafe and you can pass them twenty minutes and it shows up on their little clock on their cafe terminal. That's been an amazing mechanism to knit a community together.

If you look at what really holds a community together its the small kindnesses, the things that let people know that they're a valued member of that community. That civility has nearly completely disappeared from our society and our society's crumbling around us. Online, we actually have discussions about civility! I find it's amazing that we can have a conversation on civility and the community with people who have mostly checked out from society. From the discussion you can see that they attach no value to this civility but, as time goes on, you can see them lightening up to it, beginning to understand it by seeing it happening online - that your world can become a more secure place. They have no world whatsoever and so a secure place becomes very appealing. In the real world they have no money, no family, no means. But online, all of a sudden, you see kids who were, in the past, very abrupt and rude and crude, taking on these tools.

My mother's Portuguese and my father's Italian and when I was a kid on holidays we'd have 70 people at family get-togethers, eating and having a good time. I took it for granted that everyone had families like that. When you get older you realise it's not like that for everyone, and now we know it won't be like that even for the kids you're bringing up. There's a big lack in my life of that large group of people that knows each other in a fairly profound way."

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