Читать книгу Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet - Regula Bochsler - Страница 7

‘Branding, in its truest and most advanced incarnations, is about corporate transcendence.’

Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2000

‘It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.’

The Times, about the telegraph, 1858

In early 1995, the etoy gang worked relentlessly for their common aims. Hans and Herbert considered the strategy, created graphics and wrote manifestos and poetry. Peter and Franco wrote and recorded music. Juri explored the working of Web technology. Alberto worked on three-dimensional graphic representations that he hoped would become a ‘virtual disco’. Thomas wrote witty essays about their lifestyle. There was no central direction, but the seven of them had a shared sensibility and all seemed to push in roughly the same direction. ‘It was as if we were ants,’ remembers Juri, ‘and we all knew independently where the sugar was.’

They also began planning a more extensive Web site. They wanted to show its visitors their work – Herbert’s images and Hans’s WORDWAR poems. In the ‘disco’, Peter and Franco were going to make their soundtracks available. To launch themselves and their first steps on the World Wide Web, they decided to hold a party, which they initially hoped could be online, with party-goers logging on around the world, listening to their music and chatting and smooching with each other across the Internet. But while they were confounded by the impossibility of virtual drinks and drugs, their biggest problem was that the technology didn’t quite live up to their expectations: the network was slow and the computers lacked power. In the end, the online-party idea was abandoned in favour of an offline event at a converted Zürich sports-centre. They called their launch party etoy. FASTLANE as a homage to the information superhighway.

Prior to the event, Thomas had filled hundreds of plastic bags with capsules of icing sugar; on the day, many guests thought these contained drugs, thinking the ‘e’ in etoy stood for ecstasy. Laughing gas was served alongside the beer and snacks at the bar. Dominating the room was a huge black box on which Peter danced in a silver dress and sunglasses – trying to be a digital David Bowie – lip-synching his way through two of etoy’s Internet-inspired techno tracks, ‘Mail Me’ and ‘We Can’t Stop’.

Coco, a beautiful blonde transsexual and Swiss tabloid celebrity on the way to greater fame on the Paris catwalks, produced the evening’s climax. Suspended on a rope, she flew across the room dressed in a silver angel costume and singing a Japanese song, while a Russian TV crew filmed the event as the perfect expression of decadent Zürich youth. Coco had recently discovered her own fascination with cyberspace, along with a crush on Herbert. She had offered to be his muse and to use her media connections and photogenic posturing to help the group. In return, Herbert would declare her ‘etoy’s lifestyle angel’. It was as if the Seven Dwarves had discovered their Snow White.

All the members of etoy were pleased with what they considered to be an edgy and glamorous party. For those guests who made it into the VIP area, there was the added thrill of an Internet connection – which many of them were seeing for the first time. It was as etoy had promised in their pre-party press release: ‘Navigate with a mouse-click through worlds that recently were not even imaginable. Cyberspace for everybody! THE FUTURE IS NOW!’

However, the future they thought they had launched didn’t come quickly. A slot they had been promised on a local TV station in Zürich under the tag line ‘etoy – the first street gang on the international super data highway’ fell through, and attempts by Herbert and Peter to secure a record deal in London also came to nothing. Herbert was convinced that the dullards of the entertainment industry didn’t understand quite how the world had moved on. etoy decided that from then on they would only release their music and other creations on the Internet – ‘a non-material platform, the virtual stage for the new travelling generation’, as they called it. For this new world of Internet stardom they coined a new slogan: ‘etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.’

The Internet and pop stars were not the only influences to be fuelling etoy’s dreams. ‘At the core of etoy are the computer and LSD,’ Herbert explains. LSD had been their favourite vice as adolescents; they all remember their first acid trip. Together they had gone to Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse, the home territory of the city’s financial gnomes, and watched hallucinations of blood running down the façades of the banks, which then metamorphosed into the red-and-white Swiss flag. ‘We took these common drug experiences back into reality. It glued us together as a group,’ says Peter. The experience of tripping together welded the bonds of their friendships closer and created a common understanding about their lives and work.

Nowadays the conjunction between computers and LSD seems surreal. Most computers have become simply the dull cogs of the global economy. But in the early 1990s this symbiosis of technology and narcotics did not seem at all strange; even the sixties drug guru Timothy Leary was promoting his latest passion: computers. Although etoy never met him, they came to know his friends, some of whom were to have a profound influence on the gang. In the pantheon of etoy influences Tim Leary is another angel.

In his days as a Harvard professor of psychology, Leary had advocated the benefit of hallucinatory drugs such as LSD to the Flower Power generation. Described by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s as the most dangerous man in America, he had escaped from a twenty-year jail sentence, fleeing first to Algeria and then to Switzerland, only returning to Beverly Hills in the 1980s.

From its outset, Leary was fascinated by the life-altering possibilities of the personal-computer revolution. One of his first endeavours was to create a computer program to analyse the human mind. By the early 1990s he was committed to pushing the computer as a social force, saying that, ‘The PC is the LSD of the nineties’ and reworking his famous drug slogan ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ into ‘Turn On, Tune In, Log on.’ He encouraged his audiences to connect to the Internet as a method of political empowerment, and advocated ‘digital power to the people’.

A regular performer at raves and technology conferences alike, Leary became a guru to a small and peculiar scene in the Bay Area of Northern California that centred around a magazine called Mondo 2000, the self-declared ‘User’s Guide to the New Edge’ which hit American news-stands in 1989 and was soon to become the bible of a new counterculture called cyberculture. The so-called cyberpunks drew their identity from an amalgam of science-fiction literature, the drug rebellion of the sixties and the computer culture of nearby Silicon Valley. By 1993 they had made it to the cover of Time magazine in an article that called cyberculture the ‘defining counterculture of the computer age’ and described it as ‘bubbling up from the underground, popping out of computer screens like a piece of futuristic HYPERTEXT’.

Mondo 2000’s contributors ranged across the spectrum, from writer William Burroughs to the anarchistic promoter of magic mushrooms Terence McKenna. Also involved were the Grateful Dead’s ex-lyricist and Wyoming farmer John Perry Barlow; monologist Spalding Gray; New Age dolphin researcher John Lilly; and Eric Gullichsen, who had helped develop virtual reality. At Mondo 2000, partying was integral to the cyclic editorial process: ideas for articles appeared at parties; parties happened as a result of articles. In this ‘far out’ environment, Mondo 2000 and Timothy Leary provided each other with a mutual fan club – Mondo declared Leary a ‘cyberdelic guru’ and ‘MVP (Most Valuable Philosopher) of the twentieth century’, while Leary saw the magazine as ‘a really remarkable institution’ for its ‘beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary, and the artistic’.

One idea that captured the collective imagination of the Mondo 2000 group more than any other – because it promised a kind of technology-assisted acid trip – was virtual reality: the simulation of a three-dimensional environment experienced through a computer. By the late 1980s the world’s press had become fascinated by the prospect of existence in another world – the broadsheets by the manipulation of molecules in another three-dimensional space; the tabloids by the prospect of virtual sex, absurdly called teledildonics.

‘Cyberspace’, the term used to describe this ‘other world’ created between computers, was coined by the novelist William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer. In this cult classic he described the new place as a ‘consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation’. Gibson’s dystopian future saw an alternative space, in which people would interact. This was ‘a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.’ Tim Leary loved the idea of cyberspace, believing that it was possible to create ‘electronic realities’ on the other side of the computer screen in which one could talk, dance, swim and float.

By this time Leary, in his seventies and increasingly fragile, became enraptured by thoughts of a non-corporeal future. He reckoned that ‘within ten years many of us will not have to “go” to work. We will get up in the morning, shower, dress in our cyberwear suits, and “beam” our brains to work … Tomorrow our brains will soar on the wings of electrons into the offices of friends in Tokyo, then beam at light speed to a restaurant in Paris for a flirtatious lunch, pay a quick, ten-minute visit to our folks in Seattle – all without physically leaving our living rooms.’

In the coming years, the influences of the acid-head guru and the strange magazine persisted. Their countercultural ideas were currency to the newly established Internet community; and, later, as this community was forced into conflict under the pressure of corporate incomers’ colonisation of cyberspace, it was Leary and Mondo’s philosophies that lent galvanising force to the battles of opposition.

By 1995, etoy had really taken to heart the idea of virtual reality. For the boys, cyberspace was a new and open territory that they were intent on squatting. As with their real-world activities of a few years before, they wanted to create a place in cyberspace that was an alternative cultural centre, as a means of bringing their radical, alternative lifestyle and ideas online.

However, their rudimentary Web site did not fulfil this ambition and their resources were not sufficient to turn it into a fully functioning virtual space. So, despite their rebellious sensibilities, they turned to government and private agencies for financial help. They were pioneers, and the grant givers did not understand them. One member of the Swiss Arts Council was wrong-footed by the unfamiliar ‘@’ sign on etoy’s business cards and asked what email addresses were; etoy soon realised that the funding bodies had no real idea what the Internet was – never mind the Web. One cultural bureaucrat even suggested to them that a CD-rom would be a more suitable project. This only made etoy all the more determined to prove themselves right.

To find a stage for their Web-based countercultural ideas, in April 1995 Herbert travelled to Linz in Austria in a bid to persuade the organisers of the prestigious arts festival Ars Electronica to hold an etoy event. Situated on the River Danube, with its tourist boats and cargo freighters, Linz had gained unwelcome notoriety as the place where Hitler attended school and was an unusual setting for such a forward-looking event. The festival was first held in the late 1970s, developed initially by the city council as a fringe programme to their annual festival celebrating the Victorian composer Anton Bruckner. The event soon flourished into a fully fledged festival of its own, exploring the relationship of art, technology and society and so becoming a draw for a stellar list of Big Thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene; William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the fathers of cyberpunk; Jean Baudrillard, France’s favourite post-modern philosopher; Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control and executive editor of the seminal magazine WIRED; Vilém Flusser, philosopher of communication, and his colleague, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek.

Each year, Ars Electronica has a different theme; and in 1995 it was ‘Welcome to the Wired World’. This was the first time that the festival celebrated the World Wide Web, and included in the schedule was a special prize category for innovative use of this new medium. Herbert hoped that etoy could organise a party there as a means of promoting themselves, but to his disappointment their project was outshone and undercut by some art students from Linz who had offered to organise a cheaper ‘Netnite’ party.

Even without an official role, etoy planned to use the festival as their stage. In preparation they brainstormed how best they could present themselves to the digital-arts world. They remained adamant that their countercultural ideas were best furthered not by a manifesto, a poem or a painting, but by a corporation. Herbert gave out the order that the whole crew must show up in Linz because, as he put it, ‘this is one of etoy’s markets’. The festival would be etoy’s first opportunity to launch their ‘corporation’ to the world of art and culture.

They had big dreams. As Franco remembers, ‘We were dreaming of a headquarters that was a skyscraper, all in glass with a big logo on top of it.’ The key to their venture was etoy’s ‘brand’. Hans borrowed a corporate-identity booklet from his father’s company; what they learned from this led to their decision to establish a rigorously defined set of rules concerning company presentation. Their first step was to design the etoy logo. It was agreed that the name would always appear only in lower case; they chose a typeface – Microstyle Bold Extended Oblique – with a precise stretch of 135 per cent; and then their corporate colour – orange – because it reminded them of warning signals.

One of the boys’ more remarkable moves was to jettison individual fashions in favour of a uniform corporate look. Throughout the Western world, people were ‘dressing down’ and wearing casuals – even Silicon Valley’s millionaires were increasingly jeans- and sneaker-clad – but Herbert and his gang were determined to follow a more time-honoured corporate aesthetic. Just as IBM had once been seen as an army of executives in identical blue jackets and pressed shirts, etoy would from now on adopt a consistent company style. They chose what would become their most notable icon: an orange bomber jacket with the etoy logo on the back. These were set off by black trousers, mirrored pilot sunglasses and little black attaché cases. The final touch was that they all shaved their heads. Spectators described them variously as resembling a group of astronauts, a security squad and a fascist street-gang.

etoy’s corporate identity was a striking break from normal modes of behaviour. It was as if they were forcing themselves into the most radical position with their look and their rigorous graphic style. They seemed to revel in – and criticise – the power of ‘brands’, precisely mirroring one of the era’s dominant themes.

Branding, in 1995, was in the middle of its magisterial rise to prominence. By the end of the nineties, Tom Peters – the preeminent management guru of the decade – would write, ‘It’s a new brand world.’ It was estimated that corporations were spending an annual $465 billion supporting the logos, tag lines and philosophies that gave ‘value’ to their products. Many of the world’s leading corporations divested themselves of responsibility for producing anything at all, instead positioning themselves at the centre of networks of independent contractors and establishing their role simply as ‘managers’ of the all-encompassing world-view of their various brands. As Naomi Klein would write in No Logo, ‘Overnight, “brands, not products!” became the rallying cry for a marketing renaissance led by a new breed of companies that saw themselves as “meaning brokers” instead of product producers.’

The etoy brand’s ‘meaning’ was the group’s antagonistic sensibility itself, standing against the banality of the ordinary, the dullness of life. They would steal the clothes of corporations – the branding, the rhetoric and the aesthetic – to create an absurdist critique of corporate culture. Theirs was a satire of the overbearing power of corporations, and yet they simultaneously paid a kind of twisted homage to the heroic brands that had dominated their youth. They were not afraid of playing both ends against the middle, paradoxically celebrating and lampooning corporate life in demonstration of their cynicism. Even their intentions became couched in the language of enterprise, as Herbert remembers, ‘We wanted to enter a market, the market of entertainment, art and culture. It’s a limited market, so we had to fight for recognition and promote etoy internationally … We played it hard.’

Beyond the thin epidermis of branding, the corporate ideal was to have a profound effect on how the gang behaved. Again like IBM, which in the 1950s had a corporate ideology that extended to a song book containing such lyrics as ‘All Hail to the IBM’, the etoy members resolved to push their absolutist dogma to its limits and submit to the will of the corporation. The source of this will was not to be a CEO or a Board of Directors, but rather a computer. As if the boys had canonised their computer system, they vested in it a power beyond their control. ‘The system itself was at the centre,’ says Herbert. ‘The server [computer] was like our god, being superhuman and incomprehensible.’

The commandments that this computer-Moses brought down from the mountain were absurd. The most important rule was that etoy members should always put the company first, which meant being reachable at all hours of the day and night and dedicating most of their energy to the company’s success. The corporation also determined when members were allowed to go on holiday – and even when they were allowed to see their girlfriends.

The commandments in a sense codified the dominant work-ethic of the contemporary technology industry. After all, computer scientists and early hackers had for years worked eccentrically long hours – a tendency only exacerbated by the arrival of the Web, when everything was always online and always available. In the frenzied ethos of the day, each moment spent away from a terminal came to seem like a missed opportunity. By the time one came in to work, who knew, the world might have changed again, another future forged by someone who had not gone out for dinner.

etoy’s company rules also insisted that members keep the group’s inner workings secret from outsiders; any transgression of this was fiercely punished. It was an intensely claustrophobic adventure that Herbert remembers being like a journey into space. ‘We often used the metaphor of the spacemen. They can only concentrate on their work when they are isolated from the rest of the world. The spaceship is also a symbol for risk and loneliness, for setting off and leaving many things behind.’

Their ultimate sacrifice on the altar of company ‘professionalism’ was their decision to give up their names. It was at this point that they began to call themselves ‘agents’ and adopted new titles. Peter, the charming musician, had already taken a different name because he hated his own; he had chosen Goldstein when he became a radio DJ after the character in the novel 1984 whom Orwell described as ‘the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity’. Therefore when the others chose their new names the obvious choice for him was to stick to what he had and simply become agent.GOLDSTEIN. The new monikers would be capitalised as part of the group’s obsessive rules of corporate identity.

Hans searched for a name that would match his aspirations and chose to become agent.BRAINHARD. Herbert called himself agent.ZAI and for years afterwards would symbolically spell it for journalists, Zoo, America, Idiot. Alberto used Gramazio; Franco chose Esposto; Juri opted for Udatny and Thomas became Kubli. Henceforth they would only be known by these titles, except on occasions when the group swapped names to confuse journalists. Despite the boys’ real names being easily available on the Web, Zai still sweats with anger when journalists reveal his.

As time wore on, the boys’ intonation and vocabulary sounded increasingly similar; this, along with their orange jackets and skinheads and interchangeable names, ensured that it became nearly impossible for anyone to tell them apart. In some ways they were merging into a single character, played out by seven individuals, their own identities more and more difficult to distinguish. In uniformity, the etoy group found a salve for their explosive egos, because, as Zai explains, ‘It prevented members from putting their individual characters into the foreground. No one could stick out, and this guaranteed the group’s equilibrium; it solved several problems at once. That the members were interchangeable was good for the art aspect also.’

Submitting to the company was a painful process that most of the group did not enjoy, but they were prisoners of ambition and friendship. ‘It was a collective decision,’ Brainhard (formerly the blustering poet Hans) remembers. ‘It was, in a very cool way, radical, experimental and completely crazy.’ They all thought they were playing an ‘edge game’ pushing ideas about identity and technology to their limits in the hope of provoking a response both from the world’s staid institutions and from their peers, who they dreamed of as their fans. The result was a complicated intellectual construct, an absurd fantasy-world of branding that was a sort of amalgamation of a company, an artists’ club, and an absolutist sect.

They hoped also that this weird world might be able to make them a living. Like the designer of Diesel Jeans, Renzo Rosso, who piously claims, ‘We don’t sell a product, we sell a style of life’, etoy declares, ‘The notion of lifestyle is central to what we were searching for. We wanted to create our own lifestyle and sell it.’ More specifically, they wanted to sell what they called ‘Digital Lifestyle’, which would include their products, projected images and music for parties.

It was with this rigorous formation in place that etoy set forth to conquer Ars Electronica, determined to make their mark although still without an official role. The festival was opened in June 1995 by the Mayor of Linz and comprised, among other things, a collection of performances, including one by the New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson. There was also what the programme esoterically described as ‘an attempt to do a critical analysis of Wagner’s works on the basis of Bernard Shaw’s simultaneous reading of Wagner’s operas and Karl Marx’s Kapital.’

Heads turned as the seven orange-clad shaven-headed youths wandered the streets of Linz. ‘We staged ourselves like a boy-band, and we always drank too much,’ Zai recalls. But when they gatecrashed the gala party and tried to shock the celebrating crowd, they were received with only wry amusement from the openhearted liberals.

One of the festival events was a symposium to which a dozen speakers had been invited to share their visions of a wired future. As the programme stated, ‘no longer do we live in streets and houses alone, but also in cable channels, telegraph wires, email boxes, and global digital Net-worlds’. Zai and the gang were diligent attendees, while one of the major stars to appear was Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

Another was John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist, now a pre-eminent defender of liberty on the Internet. In the five years prior to this Ars Electronica, he had established himself as a sort of roving ambassador, travelling the world promoting the Internet community. Some of this time had been spent as an advisor to US Vice President Al Gore and also to Newt Gingrich, yet in conflicts and court cases against the government he was often taking the side of hackers and community insiders.

In the auditorium at Ars Electronica, John Perry Barlow told the assembled mass – including the attentive etoy crew – how he had initially found his way on to the Internet, in the late 1980s. At the time he was a farmer, running a cattle ranch in Wyoming, and he had wanted to eavesdrop on a community of Grateful Dead fans – the Deadheads. Someone pointed him towards the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an early online service that had started in 1985 and was for the most part a collection of bulletin boards. Users could send a message to whichever board they found of particular interest, and in turn provoke responses from others in lively strings of discussion that would continue intermittently. These debates about politics, music, culture and technology were often thoughtful, erudite and long-running. As a result, the WELL was regarded for years to come as the prototypical model for all ‘online communities’.

Barlow told the audience at the festival of how he won his struggle with modems and cables to gain access to the WELL: ‘I found myself looking at the glowing yellow word “Login”, beyond which lay my future … I was delighted. I felt I had found the new locale of human community.’ Remarkably, for a community where people had no physical contact, he thought it much like his home in Pinedale, Wyoming, because its members ‘had a place [where] their hearts could remain as the companies they worked for shuffled their bodies around America. They could put down roots which could not be ripped out by forces of economic history. They had a collective stake.’

What had most intrigued Barlow was that this was a self-governing community, pioneering its own set of laws about member behaviour and applying its own sanctions against those who transgressed them. Consequently Barlow was one of the first to identify the Internet as being a place with real politics, where interest groups and individuals could struggle for power between themselves. To distinguish the Internet as an arena for social forces, power and politics, he decided to name it borrowing William Gibson’s word, cyberspace, and in so doing gave it political intent.

Almost as soon as he found cyberspace, Barlow became concerned that governments and corporations were trying to impose their will on ‘the desperadoes and mountain men and vigilantes’ of the digital Wild West. Thus in 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to defend freedom of speech online. His partner was Mitch Kapor, the man who founded Lotus Computers and who was by 1990 a bona fide member of Silicon Valley royalty. Together, Barlow and Kapor corralled a collection of their friends – some of them the founders of Sun Microsystems and Apple Computers – to sit on the board and make hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of donations. The EFF began by defending kids who were victims of an FBI crackdown on computer crime, and went on to fight attempts by the US government to impose censorship on the Internet.

With the rhetoric he used and the images he painted, Barlow positioned himself as a kind of cowboy survivalist, armed and ready to defend his cyberspace wilderness from the approaching posse of Federal forces. Barlow’s most grandiose and historic political stand came when he proclaimed himself as the Thomas Jefferson of the new world. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he wrote ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, in which he demanded that governments back off.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

The declaration, which runs to more than a thousand words, was posted on hundreds of Web sites and was a clarion call to regulators, lawyers and courts to leave the Internet community alone. As the Internet became more commercial and the space more contested, various new conflicts erupted between governments and the community and between individuals and corporations. In these it was often the spirit of this declaration – its wilful libertarianism and plea for independence from the laws and courts of the corporeal world – that was invoked.

When etoy heard John Perry Barlow talking at Ars Electronica, they were struck most of all by his question about cyberspace, ‘Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality itself?’ Barlow drenched his answer in the utopianism of the euphoric believers in the Californian technological dream. The new world that he was describing was not just going to be a replacement for the real one; it could, he hoped, be an improvement on it, more humanistic and wonderful. ‘When we are all together in cyberspace then we will see what the human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there … Despite its current (and, perhaps, in some areas permanent) insufficiencies, we should go to cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind that counts.’

Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein had now found real motivation to explore the new world. They were willing to go into cyberspace with dreams that it could perhaps be a more interesting place than the real world. They were also ready and willing to protect this new space from the drones of the old world who were intent on imposing a dull morality on it. They were to be the ‘the First Street Gang of the Information Super Data Highway’.

After the festival, Zai and Brainhard returned to Vienna, the others to Zürich. Their determination to live online crystallised. The only impediment was their need for a catchy and distinctive domain name of their own – like in cnn.com or bbc.co.uk – the address where they would park their Web site. To continue the metaphor of cyberspace as the digital West, the domain name was like a homestead, the claim of the frontiersman. During the Internet’s goldrush years, millions of hopeful punters bought such claims, in the belief that a name was all it took to strike Internet gold. Indeed, some did win out, selling simple names – such as events.com or business.com – for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and later millions. etoy were conscious that their decision to acquire a domain name was vital to their future.

When the Domain Name System was invented, the possibility for avaricious demand was never even contemplated; it was simply designed to make the locating of information easier and to organise the network more efficiently. But, as the Internet grew more commercial, the Domain Name System became the focus of a heated and rancorous conflict, at the heart of which lay the question of who should control the Internet itself.

At the epicentre of this battle was Jon Postel, of TCP/IP Standards fame. Since co-authoring the Standards, he had gone on to edit the documents that further improved the working of the network. It was his work on the Domain Name System, however, that ultimately gained him heroic status.

The Domain Name System began life in 1983. Postel had asked his colleague Paul Mockapetris to write a specification about how a naming system for the Internet could work. Already in place was the system of giving every computer on the network a number, the so-called IP number, but these were difficult to remember. Also, rather like the old telephone system, there was no easy way to carry the numbers between computers – in effect meaning that every time a user switched computers they had to take a new email address. The Domain Name System was to overlay the IP numbers with a portable and easy-to-remember name system.

The central idea of Mockapetris’s Domain Name System is that there is only one ‘address book’, which accurately locates every computer on the Internet. Without a unique address for each computer, information intended for one machine could end up at another; were this to happen, the Internet would no longer be a unified and universal information system, but rather a set of fragmented, networked fiefdoms. In deciding on this single naming system, Mockapetris gave enormous power to the authorities in control of the registration and stewardship of the domain names, in that they could decide to delete any entry from the Internet without offering an alternative.

Essential to Mockapetris’s system is arguably the most powerful document on the Internet, the A-Root, containing the key to the complete road map – all the addresses for every named computer connected to the Internet. Following the creation of the Domain Name System, this document became the Royal Standard, the Holy Grail over which competing armies in the domain wars would fight. What is most remarkable about the all-important A-Root is that it contains only 250 lines of information. Yet this tiny record, while not a list of every computer sitting on the Internet, can determine the addresses of the hundreds of millions of computers on the Internet; it is a collection of pointers to where this information can be found.

The distribution of the singular address book among many hands was not only an elegant technical solution to the problem of managing what would become such a big network, but also an ideological one. As Mockapetris – in whose Silicon Valley office now hangs a rebellious skull-and-crossbones flag – remembers, ‘At that time I was a true believer in the idea of distributing the authority, rather than having it centrally.’

Mockapetris wrote the specification for the Domain Name System and gave it to Jon Postel, who became the pre-eminent domain-name politician. At first, this simply meant that he was the one who stewarded the technical details through the consensus-gathering process of Internet engineering. But it was also Postel who later determined the precise contents of the A-Root; as if he controlled the address book which in turn contained the addresses of the other 250 address books of the top-level domains. Postel chaired the committee that decided there should be 243 top-level domains named as country codes – .uk for Britain, .ch for Switzerland, etc. – and seven generic domains – .com for companies, .edu for academic institutions, .org for not-for-profit organisations, .net for networks, and so on.

The first dot-com domain name was registered on 15 March 1985 by a software company called symbolics.com. The registration process involved Postel creating the first entry in the database of dot-com domains, the dot-com address book. This in turn pointed to the database for the symbolics.com address book in which their own systems administrators could allocate numbered computers to specific sub-domains. For example, they would later take ‘www’ for their Web site – www.symbolics.com – but they would also have an email computer, at something like mail.symbolics.com. As the Internet grew, the fact that system administrators could name additional computers without resorting to a central command made it all the easier for the network to expand at incredible rates.

Jon Postel reigned benign and supreme across the Domain Name System from its inception until the 1990s. He was at the head of a shell organisation, the Internet Assigned Numbers of Authority (IANA), that had control over the A-Root and its future. But as the Net became more commercialised, so his authority was challenged. The biggest such threat came from an organisation that was initially brought in to help him out. In 1993, the US Government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), which subsidised the Internet and funded Postel, gave a contract to a small company based in Herndon, Virginia, called Network Solutions. They were charged with physically looking after the A-Root while Postel kept control of the policies relating to the ways in which it could be changed. Network Solutions was also required to maintain the database of new generic-domain registrations like dot-com.

By 1995, this somewhat lowly administrative contract was on the verge of radical change. As the Internet blossomed and increasing numbers of for-profit firms and foreign organisations registered names, those at the National Science Foundation began to feel queasy about the prospect of continuing to subsidise these operations. In addition, Network Solutions was faced with developing legal liability as the first ‘domain dispute’ – between the owner of a trademarked brand and the owner of a domain name – was filed in a Chicago court and named Network Solutions as a co-defendant. As the problem grew, the company had no real idea of the kind of liability such a dispute might entail – there was the possibility of bankruptcy, which could have forced the collapse of the naming system and even the Internet itself.

It was at this time that Don Telage, who worked for a secretive defence contractor, Science Applications Industries Corporation (SAIC), stepped into the fray, when his company bought the struggling Network Solutions. Really he had hoped to exploit the other side of Network Solutions’ business, telecom consultancy, but almost by accident he found he was sitting on a registration venture that might soon prove to be a goldmine. Encouraged by Telage, and to prevent the collapse of the Domain Name System, the National Science Foundation agreed that Network Solutions should be allowed to charge $100 for each new two-year registration and $50 annually thereafter. Thirty per cent of the fees would revert to an ‘Internet intellectual infrastructure fund’, while the remainder would go towards Network Solutions’ costs and to their profit. Charging for registration was to be introduced on 1 October 1995. When the news leaked out, speculators rushed in their thousands to register for free before the deadline. Thus it was brought forward to 12 September.

This event rocked the Internet engineering community – which until then had been organised around grindingly slow opinion-gathering processes. Around the Web campaigners, engineers and entrepreneurs began to complain about the new system, hopelessly fracturing the rough consensus that Postel had nurtured for twenty years. Many felt that domain space was a public resource that should not be pursued for private profit. The shift also created a monopoly for the registration of dot-com and other top-level domains; and this monopoly was in the hands of Network Solutions, which now had every reason to guard jealously its singular right to register and charge.

When etoy first discussed where to build its home on the World Wide Web, etoy.ch with the Swiss country code was dismissed as being parochial. etoy.net was favoured because it had the essence of the underground hacker-scene and a sense of community. Soon, however, etoy.com became the group’s preferred option because ‘dot-com is an Internet status symbol (at least for primitive people like me)’, as agent Kubli wrote in an email. ‘And status symbols stand for power and power, in the end, stands for money.’ The mischievous and musical Goldstein was the only group member to disagree; he thought that etoy should be pushing ‘love’, not power. His objections were eventually overcome. In Vienna Brainhard spoke for the rest of the group when he argued that ‘dot-com is the commercial image, beautiful, brilliant like steel and hard’. The decision was made.

On 15 October 1995, the etoy members registered their domain name – etoy.com – with Network Solutions for a fee of $100 under the new rules. Had they completed the process one month earlier it would have cost them nothing. In registering they gave Network Solutions enormous power over their destiny. At the time, however, they foresaw no apparent danger – and anyway, they had no choice.

With the domain name registered, the boys relentlessly finished work on their Web site. Everywhere trailblazers were reaching for metaphors to describe the perfect Web site. Some thought the Web would deliver the written word like a magazine; others thought that Web sites were actually more like TV shows, streaming images and sound. To enable users to navigate around the sites, some contained headline-blaring front pages, structured like a newspaper, while others gave maps of information. For the etoy site, Zai and Gramazio proposed a metaphor which was a network of tanks and pipes – like a sewage farm. Initially the front page was to be a picture of the system, a sort of schematic plan, linking the various components. Gramazio remembers, ‘We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.’

During these intense months of creativity, etoy was also developing its own language. The word ‘professional’, for instance, came to be used as the primary aspiration and injunction of the company, and the word ‘unprofessional’ the central pejorative. These became, as Esposto recalls, Zai’s favourite terms. ‘He always said that we had to be “professional”. The word “professional” was used to paper over the weak spots of the organisation. I didn’t understand all the company details any more, but I was very impressed by this guy who thought of everything.’

Slightly more surprising was their use of the word ‘hardcore’ in almost every sentence. For them, it denoted determination, wild and adrenaline-fuelled, as well as alluding to the beat-heavy industrial house music of that name. Interestingly, and unbeknown to the boys, the only corporation to regularly use the word ‘hardcore’ as much as they did was Microsoft. New Yorker writer Ken Auletta called a whole chapter of his book World War 3.0 about Microsoft ‘Hardcore’. As Rob Glaser, CEO of Real Networks, who used to work with Bill Gates, said: ‘I do think the Microsoft culture was one where being hardcore and not being seen as less than hardcore was very important and very highly valued. The Microsoft culture is one where people are not chastised for being paranoid or over-competitive.’

Eventually the etoy Web site was completed, named the etoy. TANKSYSTEM and described as a ‘parallel world somewhere in between LEGO-land, Internet training camp, virtual fairground, hypermedia test ground, sound & vision dump and Internet motel for travellers of the new kind’. Visitors could navigate through the tanks by clicking on arrows at the top of the screen. In the Supermarket tank they could order online etoy sunglasses and laughing-gas cylinders – though these were never delivered. In the Gallery the IP numbers of Web-surfers were checked and printed on the screen, while a Big Brother-ish eye, created by the brilliant hacker Udatny, looked on. etoy also built the first suite of its cybermotel. Coco, the transsexual who had flown through their launch party, furnished it with pictures of and interviews with herself.

The most visited tank was called Underground. There, etoy featured the forbidden – pornography, violence and drug abuse. This was the place where the boys were determined to repudiate the stuffy and constricted sensibilities of the communities they came from, pushing to the absolute limit their critique of the middle-class righteousness and virtue that they so despised. As Zai remembers, ‘etoy, at that time, thought that any moral was bad.’ Their method was to shock in the most extreme and distasteful ways. The Underground tank contained a photograph of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it had been bombed; underneath it was the caption ‘Such work needs a lot of training’. There was also a picture of a woman’s naked breasts pierced with dozens of needles, and a naked man bound and hung upside-down. It was not that the boys supported terrorism or were enamoured by sadomasochism; rather, it was that they thought these shocking images would serve to both get them noticed and provoke and move on the world in which they lived.

When the Web site was completed, Zai was euphoric, exhibiting a hubris that would in time become overwhelming. He wrote to the Zürich crew, ‘We are now the biggest, strongest and most beautiful of the world! This is the first time in my life that we have done something really great. My partners Brainhard and Udatny, and me today worked for the tank for 12 hours without stopping, online, non-linear, not local! HARDCORE! nobody can catch up with us. fuck mtv. fuck netscape. fuck all.’

Soon etoy would announce to the world that they were the first people ever to have emigrated to the Internet to live a digital existence. This ‘emigration’ led to them relying more and more on the robustness of the Domain Name System to protect their homestead at etoy.com. Within a year, they had left their hair, their clothes, their names and, of course, their personal freedom on the altar of the etoy brand; they were henceforth committed to following the etoy corporate identity. And from now on, all communiqués were signed ‘etoy, leaving reality behind’.

In the hills above Hollywood, Timothy Leary, now an old and sick man, was also preparing to leave reality behind, with the support of his ‘godson’, Joichi Ito. They had first met each other at Ito’s twenty-fourth birthday party, in Tokyo in the summer of 1990, when Ito – then a DJ entrepreneur – who had been reading books about Leary, asked him if he ever really had received messages from aliens. Leary laughed. ‘That’s just a lie; we made it up.’ They broke away from the party and strolled across the Ropongi district, where Ito showed the older man the hip, technology-loving children of Japan’s economic bubble at play. ‘He got really excited,’ Ito recalls; Leary was also intrigued by this representative of tech-savvy Japanese youth and soon began describing him as his godson.

Less than a month later, Leary took Ito – along with Ito’s Los Angeles-based mother and sister – to a party in northern California at the Mondo 2000 house in the Berkeley hills. There, Joichi Ito met the scene. Soon he was appearing with Leary on stage in a show called ‘Psychedelics to Cybernetics’, and was staying with the liberty-defending John Perry Barlow in Pinedale, Wyoming. In the summer of 1990, he wrote in his diary, ‘I got a call from Timothy just now, what a godfather, I’m having trouble keeping up with all this energy, I feel an almost ecstatic vertigo from the acceleration of progress.’

But if Timothy Leary introduced Joichi Ito to his world it was Ito who introduced the older man to the World Wide Web, and opened up for him another dimension beyond the disappointment of virtual reality. Ito – like the etoy boys – had a previous history with computers, that he had all but forgotten. In 1981, as a teenager in Tokyo, he’d managed to hack his way into university computer systems and then jump from one location to another. He eventually found the first interactive game, the Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) at the University of Essex, in England. For weeks he played this text-based adventure game, as a character whom he called Sid – after the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious. When Sid met a gruesome virtual death, Ito wept for a whole night.

By the time the Web browser Mosaic was released, Ito was in Tokyo running clubs and various other businesses. The Web was a medium to which he took with great ease. As Howard Rheingold, a writer from the West Coast technology elite, wrote, ‘Mosaic in Joi’s hands had that instantly recognisable look of the future to it.’ Tim Leary had a similar revelation on seeing Mosaic. On his Web site he wrote: ‘A few years ago, a young Cyber-Wizard named Joichi Ito said, “Our computer screens are windows into Cyber Worlds which we can explore. The first step is to design, construct, and furnish our personal-private Home, where friends can hang out.” And that’s when I realized the empowerment that inter-personal computers offer individuals.’

Joining Leary’s vision to Ito’s ideas, in the middle of 1995 the pair began to create a ‘Home on the Internet’ for Timothy Leary. So enamoured of the future was Timothy Leary that he sold his car, leaving behind what he thought of as the old fossil-fuel economy, and transformed his garage into the workspace for a number of young Web designers and hackers; this he called his ‘digital garage’. Ito, meanwhile, had been using his bicultural and technical knowledge to translate the Internet to the Japanese. He founded a company called Eccosys and set up Japan’s first Web server in the bathroom of his apartment, then sent his godfather and mentor the computers he would need to implement his final dream.

Tim Leary wanted his Web presence to replicate his real-life house, for viewers to be able to see inside the living room and dining room and to ‘pick’ books off his shelves. The concept was simple, as Chris Graves, Leary’s Webmaster, remembers, ‘He wanted people to have as much access to his life and his work as he gave them in real life.’ Graves and his friends mapped out the house, photographing it from top to bottom and uploading the pictures on to the Web. ‘Tim was the mastermind of the whole thing; he was directing the whole process,’ recalls Graves.

Leary was dying of prostate cancer, and he planned for the Web site to be his swansong. He registered his drug intake on it, and in one rash moment even claimed that he would broadcast his death live over the Internet. The global media reported hysterically this strange final twist from the great provocateur of the sixties; it seemed so new, so radical and so innovative. In the event, Leary did not go ahead with the broadcast.

In the spring of 1996 Joichi Ito had his last cigar with the dying Timothy Leary. When Ito left the house, he took a plane from LAX to Austria in order to attend that year’s jury deliberations for the Prix Ars Electronica. The following night, Timothy Leary quietly died in his bedroom, surrounded by his friends and the various people who had been looking after his Web site. John Perry Barlow was at home that night. ‘The phone just rang in the middle of this rainy Wyoming night, and now I’m here naked in the dark trying to think of something to follow him out with,’ he wrote hours after the call. His eulogy spread across the Internet, posted as a memorial on hundreds of Web sites and email lists; the symbol of the sixties had died and it seemed like the end of an epoch.

Meanwhile Ito had arrived at Ars Electronica, where etoy, almost a year after their first attendance as a group, were about to step from the shadows into the spotlight. For them, a new era was about to begin.