Social Capital & Social Movement: The case of Cyborganic 1994-2004

Social Capital & Social Movement: The case of Cyborganic 1994-2004 Jennifer Cool <cool@usc.edu> COMM 647x, October 21, 2005

Bring the mess, not the solution • What I am doing • What I have done • Main areas on which I seek help

What am I doing? • Analysis of Cyborganic—an online and face-to-face community formed in San Francisco in the early 1990s—as a social form that fits in many ways what others have discussed under the rubric of “social capital,” but can also usefully be examined as an urban social movement. • What I seek to explain is the dynamic between innovative subcultures with anti-establishment visions and the mainstream markets, industries, and media to which they contribute.

What have I done? • Participant observation 1993 to present • 12 member interviews (1996) as part of IFTF Study on Telecommunities (1996 Questions) • 12 questionnaires, 7 interviews (2004) as follow-up research (2004 Questions) • Sought tools and concepts in relevant literature to aid in my analysis. (e.g. Putnam, Castells)

Where do I seek help? • Coherence: Are the description and analysis clear? • What are your thoughts on the logic of the analysis? • Framing: Am I asking the right questions? Are there better ways to frame this research? Are there other concepts that would be useful to the analysis? • What portion of this presentation would you include in a 9-page version? Help me crystallize the focus for my upcoming paper at the Annual Anthropology meetings. • How to present participant-observation methodology to audience of non-anthropologists?

What Was Cyborganic? The Facts • A residential neighborhood & physical network (LAN) that extended across several blocks in SF Mission Dolores • A social network, first of ravers and multimedia geeks, then of Internet workers, in SF Mission/SOMA area (1991—1997), who collaborated in both work and life activities. Like The Well and SFRaves groups before them, Cyborganic combined online and offline components. • A telecommunity of webpages, mailing lists, chat, shared technological tools and resources • Cyborganic Gardens site has been inactive since 1997, but is archived: archive.cyborganic.org • Spacebar.com (text chat) is still active, now hosted on Superdeluxe • A business, first Cyborganic Media (a sole proprietorship 1993-95), later The Cyborganic Corporation (1995-97)

What Was Cyborganic? The Stories • Cyborganic was Jonathan Steuer’s project to create a community-based Internet business • Our Big Plan • Jonathan Steuer • Cyborganic was group of multi-person households on Ramona Street that shared meals, recreation, and computer networking. Only 3 of the 12+ residents of this “Ramona Empire” were principles in the Corporation, but all worked to realize the community vision on a variety of paid, barter, and voluntary bases (along with many non-residents). • Credits Page • Cyborganic was a voluntary, informal, community of technology-savvy, young urbanites brought together around the Cyborganic project, particularly through TND. Many lived in the neighborhood and worked in SOMA, but members came from all over the Bay Area (e.g. Berkeley, Oakland, Silicon Valley) • Thursday Night Dinner (TND) • Wired News Article on TND revival in 2002

Ethnographic Examples • Productive role of Cyborganic community as an example of the social capital and regional advantage perspectives. • Tibet web sites and wiring as examples of Cyborganic’s utopian dimensions and their real world repercussions • Cyborganic continues as a small bandwidth cooperative and at least a dozen similar communities have subsequently been created in San Francisco by members of the former Cyborganic community.

Productive Role of Cyborganic Community • Show the role of Cyborganic’s online and offline community in the creation of Internet, firms, products, tools, and processes • Firms: Wired, Hotwired, Organic Online, c|net, Electric Minds, Critical Path • Products: Apache, Vignette Story Server, Geek Cereal • Draw on my analysis in my Comm. 559 paper, “Place, Community & Innovation in the Growth of San Francisco's Internet Industry in the 1990s: The Case of Cyborganic”

Cyborganic & Tibet: Utopian Visions, Sub-state Actors • In May 1997, a group of 5 Cyborganic members spent $60K of their own money to fly to Dharamsala, India to set up a LAN for the Tibetan government in exile. • Press coverage of the project • www.tibet.net & www.tibet.org are still hosted without charge on Cyborganic • Email from the Pentagon <osd.pentagon.mil>

From Interview with Dan Haig9/24/2004 “When I got back from India in ‘97 and then about a month later I got an email from this guy from the office of the Secretary of Defense — osd.pentagon.mil was his email address — saying “Look, what’s your deal kid, we’d like to talk to you” I was like…alright, I’ll go talk to these guys, but I’m sure as hell not going alone. You know, I was like, I think Steuer would be up for such an adventure as this… And they’d just closed Cyborganic, and I knew he was down, so ‘Hey, Jonathan, man, check out this invitation, want to go to DC and talk to these people?!’ And he was like… ‘yeah … that’d be great, actually, let’s go do that’ and I think he quite enjoyed the fact that Cyborganic, you know, by virtue of being this synergistic thing had created one little flurry of activity…sufficient to attract interest of the Pentagon and to be asked to go speak at their top-level information technology forum. He was amused…and then he had the letter from the Secretary of Defense taped to his rack for quite awhile…”

From Interview with Dan Haig9/24/2004 “It was...Captain Dick who runs the Pentagon Highlands Forum…which is…he started this thing…probably 10 years [ago] … because he knew the government and the military were dangerously ignorant of technology matters…you know…he saw in the mid-90s, later 90s, a lot of really misinformed and misguided attempts to manage the Internet…so the Highlands Forum was there to address that kind of dangerous… ignorance in government and military… so…… they …wanted me to come out and talk about Tibet Online and what we did in Dharamsala as an example of how sub-state actors can have disproportionate affects on geo-politics by utilizing technology. So, we’re kind of like the other side of the coin from terrorists who in small groups can blow stuff up and cause severe disruption they just considered it the non-violent way of messing with China … and … they kinda wanted to know … you know, Steuer said, it’s like, anything they really want to know, they can find out, they’ll know exactly what you had for breakfast in India everyday, if they really want to know, but… they just kinda want to know why you did it, and the motivation of somebody who’s crazy enough to do such a thing.”

Cyborganic’s Legacy (1) • Cyborganic continues as a small bandwidth cooperative of seven systems administrators supporting a few dozen users and about 100 Internet domains. Tibet.net and Tibet.org continue to be hosted here. Jonathan Steuer owns the hardware, but lives in New York. Locke Berkebile, who lives in the Bay Area, is the only one who deals physically with the machines. These two also bear most of the monetary costs. • Email on next page gives the latest news of this social arrangement.

Cyborganic’s Legacy (2) • Groups like Cyborganic—Superdeluxe, Saturn5, Vigilante, arctic, and spore—have formed since 1997. Many continue to be active today. • http:superdeluxe.com/ (hosts spacebar.com) • http://sharon.net (hosts Geek Cereal) • http://www.hungry.com/ • http://www.saturn5.com/ • http://www.vigilante.net/ • http://arctic.org/ • http://www.spore.org/ • Many former Cyborganics have also continued their own personal websites, for example: • http://www.dom.net

Trust & Social History “That’s one of the things that I think is a hallmark of Cyborganic…so many connections opened so quickly and so intensely that it’s um….You stumble in to people and you have these intimate relationships with them and you don’t know who they are, right, because they know eight people and are really close to eight people…that you know…that comes out of the same community, it just gives you instant history with people that…it just makes it really easy to trust people…in ways that are both positive and negative, if that makes sense…like you have this shared ground …and to some degree it’s legitimate, but to some degree it’s also like you don’t know this person from Adam and yet you’re trusting them in some major way…it’s wacky stuff, you know?” • Jim Home, Operator, Superdeluxe.com Interviewed 9/24/2004

Utopian Vision: “You can attribute anything that I say to me…I’m extremely open with my life. I actually think that…I don’t judge people who aren’t that way negatively at all but I think that…. I’m not happy with the direction that the world is going in …as far as just general culture goes…and I feel like one of my jobs as someone who’s really happy with their life is to be as, not foist, right, but be as open with what I’m doing as I possibly can so it might be a little infectious, so……there’s not much I’m quiet about you know, I’m pretty open about sex and drugs and rock and roll…” Jim Home (aka Vagabond Jim) Operator, Superdeluxe.com Interviewed 9/24/2004

Themes & Questions • What is are the relationships among Cyborganic as a life project, a business, and an occupational network? Between its entrepreneurial and utopian dimensions? • In what ways should the “coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” that this community represents be understood in terms of social capital? In what ways can they be analyzed as a social movement? • Should Cyborganic be analyzed as a subcultural, occupational, or corporate group? (Corporate in the anthropological sense of shared and integrated household, kin, and economic units). Or as some hybrid form associated with network society? • What was the relationship between Cyborganic and media, both in terms of coverage of the group & media produced by them?

Social Capital & Social Movement: The case of Cyborganic 1994-2004