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Vegan Cheeseburgers Months ago, I was thinking about changing careers. I wasn't working at Electric Minds yet and was daydreaming about finding a job doing new media computer-related stuff. I had heard that a great place to meet cool people doing cool work was Thursday Night Dinner. Thursday Night Dinner took place on the second floor of an old house in the Mission, on Ramona Avenue. First thing I noticed: a stack of cheeseburgers. I knew that each TND, as everyone kept calling it, had a theme. This week's theme was vegan food. Hmmm, I thought, these people aren't overly concerned with consistency. Second thing I noticed was that the house wasn't really a house: office equipment and computers filled the rooms. But it wasn't really an office, either. Well, if it was, then it was the funky office of my dreams, with a back stairway leading to a patio and a kitchen and couches and hot-pink Ethernet cable running from computers up the stairs and out windows and a glow-in-the-dark palimpsest of postcards and kitsch in the bathroom. I saw a friend there, and we giggled and gossiped in the narrow hallway as people squeezed past us. She knew where everyone worked, all the romantic entanglements, who the movers and shakers were. "Oh, yeah, she's been working at c|net and can really tell you the dirt on what it's like to be there now. And that guy by the door, he used to date the woman pouring drinks in the kitchen. Oh and I want you to meet my friend - he's going to India next month." There were seventy-five people there--a lot of old friends, it seemed. Every computer sprouted a cluster of onlookers showing each other web pages, using a chat program or carving their names into a virtual picnic table. I felt like a new arrival on a friendly shore and I wanted to find out more about who these people were. Jenny Cool When I started doing Thursday Night Dinners with my roomies at 59 Ramona in 1994, the idea was to hardwire sociality into the week. No matter how busy, no matter how crazed we all were, we ate together each Thursday. We would have that time to connect with others like us (single techno-folk) and to begin, little by little, to build a community. It's great to see that still going on and to see it growing. It's heartening to see how strongly people gravitate to Cyborganic and TND--because really they're gravitating towards one another. TNDs are keeping the Cyborganic community fueled with face-to-face time--every week, a different theme, and every week, you get the sense that you are with your people: mostly young, fun, smart as hell, technologically savvy. These are the people you go to for cutting-edge Web design, and they're employed at Organic, C|Net, @home, HotWired--the biggest guns across town. Cyborganic attracts people who want more than a place to put their home page. Internet service? You can get that anywhere. What you can't get anywhere is a tribe strung together with shocking pink Ethernet cable. Cyborganic was born in 1993 of a collective vision of how technology can cement a community. Longtime friends Jonathan Steuer, Jenny Cool and others wanted to find ways to combine a real-time hangout and a virtual, computer based space. As apartments came up for rent, a core of people moved to one-block-long Ramona Avenue. In September 1996, Cyborganic moved from its old home to shiny new headquarters on Mission Street, with Multimedia Gulch to the south and the Financial District to the north. The place is huge, three floors, with plate-glass floor-to-ceiling windows facing onto Mission Street. When I first saw it, I thought, "Oh, wow, anyone can walk by and see the geeks in action!" Howard Rheingold I knew Jonathan Steuer was not your ordinary geek when I first laid eyes on him: pre-Raphaelite hair, purple overalls, cell-phone with a Keroppi sticker poking up out of one pocket. I trace the origins of HotWired and Cyborganic and a lot more to the Net Jams he used to have at Stanford. When Steuer was a graduate student and had the keys to a room full of workstations connected to a T-1 line, he'd invite friends to bring junk food and tunes and spend the night exploring cyberspace. Then he became Online Tsar for Wired and convinced the keepers of the keys that they needed something a bit more net-savvy than an AOL folder. That's when Jonathan brought me in; we started thinking up what was to become HotWired. Ultimately, neither of us were comfortable with the direction that venture took. I left and started dreaming of the webzine/community that was to become Electric Minds. Jonathan and a bunch of friends started working on their dream of a community that would have an online component and a real life component. As Thursday Night Dinner became a legendary institution in San Francisco, their real-world gathering place outgrew their cyber-commune on Ramona Street and they moved into their public space on Mission Street. The mandate seems to be the same: find ways to use technology that are both humane and fun. I'm all for it. No one wants to look at the Internet all the time.
Jonathan Steuer The first
round of funding was designed to get us into a new space, launch GeekCereal and stabilize our technical
infrastructure. We did those things. Building out our new space will have
to wait for another round of financing. Potential investors should call me
immediately!
In the basement, we will have our server room. Computers don't mind
where you put them. And we will have classrooms and small private workrooms
where you can rent a computer and equipment in a well-supported
environment. You can come to hang out for the whole day and work. We want
to support the community of people who stick around here, host their pages
with us and participate as active members of Cyborganic.
The ground floor will be informally nerdy in the front and get nerdier
as you go toward the back. The front will have regular cafe tables and a
couple of little terminals--nothing too in-your-face. No one wants to look
at the Internet all the time. We will work more technology in as you go
back. At the end of the room will be a Powerbook docking corner for the
execs on the go who come in need a place to jack in and check their mail
and slam an espresso, and generally a place for geeks to hold court. The
mezzanine will have conference rooms to rent so the nerds who work out of
their garages can have somewhere nice for presentations, and for the trade
show folks at Moscone who want a more private meeting place with a net
connection without major hassle or expense. And the top floor is the
Cyborganic office space. The glass and chrome of Mission Street was a startling change from
back-porch, laid-back house-as-office Ramona Avenue. But two things hadn't
changed: movement toward a grand vision of the ties between community and
technology and the pinkest Ethernet cable known to humankind.
And we used it, but most of the cable just sat there at Ramona. Almost
exactly two years later, we took occupancy of this place on Mission Street.
I still wanted the pink cable, so we wired the mezzanine with it, and we
ran out halfway through and ordered more pink cable, and they sent us the
wrong cable. So we had to call back the nerd stuff wholesaler. They were
like, "Oh fashion-conscious nerds." P-ter Normal managed to chase down the
correct color. It took an extra week to finish our wiring here but we did
it. P-ter is finishing up the wiring as we speak.
A substantial portion of the wire in this building was actually paid for by
Wired, which I find very funny.
When we were at Ramona, we strung Ethernet across the street. Sonic, who still lives on
Ramona, climbed up the phone pole and I stood on the roof with a piece of
Ethernet. We tied a tennis shoe to the end to give it enough weight so she
could catch it. We hung little notes from the cable that said "Attention
cable and phone people: do not cut. It's just ethernet." It runs across a
couple of people's roofs but no one seems to mind too much. I'll keep that
alive as long as I can afford to. Family values are not just for Bible-thumping
conservatives.
The orginal funky dream office at 67 Ramona Avenue was the creation of
Jonathan, Jenny, Caleb
Donaldson, and others. In addition to serving as the TND base, the
house was where Cyborganic ran its web site and event creation service and
hosted Cyborganic members' personal web pages. And it was the physical home
of the space bar, a free chat area
where Cyborganites hang out day and night. Anyone can log into the space
bar; you don't have to be a Cyborganic member, though if you spend any
amount of time there, you'll most likely get sucked in. Cyborganic also set
up mailing lists to discuss items of general interest to the community --
everything from who is cooking and cleaning at the next TND to the
environmental consequences of old-growth logging. The discussion on the
lists is not always harmonious; lately, they have been alternately
soul-searching, rancorous and cacophonous, focusing on the meaning and
purpose of Cyborganic, what is suitable content for the lists themselves,
and how to handle vociferous critics of the Cyborganic community and its
efforts.
Jenny Cool For me,
Cyborganic has always been about "family values." It's a voice that says
families, communities, neighborhoods are not just for Bible-thumping
conservatives, but are essentials for every human being--even geeks. We have to define what's meaningful to us, what we want. That's what I sought to do
with Cyborganic, and I still see Cyborganic as an experiment in how to meet
basic social needs in nifty new ways. I tend to think of Cyborganic as a
club for people who don't ordinarily belong to clubs, an association of
outcasts and rebels. Seems most Cyborganic folks take rebel pride in being
weird and wild. I know I do.
Our goal is for there to be a thousand Justin Halls
Jonathan Steuer We're
trying to provide resources for communities in the technical direction, a
readymade set of tools. And we have a core audience of a particular sort:
people who are actively making stuff on the web. We give them the stuff
that they don't want to build themselves, whether that's a reliable server,
a decent net connection, a way to preview their pages on a staging server
before it goes live, conferencing tools which we're slowly rolling out and
hacking together, the tools to do commerce, credit card-processing shit,
that whole side of the fence.
We're appealing to those people as our community, their peers and their
wannabe peers. These are people who know that they have something
interesting to say but are not quite sure where to get the technical
resources to do that in an interesting and flexible manner. I think that
these are the people who ultimately will stick with Cyborganic. Right now,
that's a very San Francisco-centered community of people. But as time goes
on that will become less and less true. Our goal is for there to be a
thousand Justin Halls, for it not to be
a problem to find a place to host your site when it gets a lot of traffic,
a place that will help you sell ads on your site and help you deal with the
tracking and the reports to sponsors so you can concentrate on the stuff
that you do well, which is making the content. That's the broad vision: an
on-the-web and off-the-web place to support people doing cool stuff
online. Cyborganic's new location, on one of the main drags in the center of
the city, makes it
impossible to keep the door open, like they did at Ramona. There's a
doorbell now.
An "if you don't swing, don't ring" sign greeted loungewear-clad arrivals
at the recent Playboy Mansion TND. The new lavender walls helped set the
decadent tone. I said hi to familiar faces, met some new ones, talked to
Terri Nelson, Cyborganic's Operations Manager, resplendent in a leopard
pantsuit and platform heels, messed around on the space bar, looked at
snapshots of bygone Ramona days with Jenny Cool, gossiped and giggled, ate
a strawberry, admired the new wiring job, and settled into an evening of
geek bliss.
Virtual Community Center Producer Jill Davidson had way too much fun
writing this profile of Cyborganic. She was ably aided by Jenny Cool,
Caleb Donaldson, Marjorie Ingall, Terri Nelson, M Normal, Ryan Powers,
Howard Rheingold and Jonathan Steuer. Many thanks to all of you.
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minni said: What I find interesting is that most of the "environments" for VCs ( for example, chat rooms like the Palace) all have identifiable artifacts derived from real world, such as rooms, doors, places. The funny thing is that they are merely backdrops to help citizens navigate through the web of passages, and they do not provide any experience of the "place" like physical places do. Let's say we want a monumental public plaza that celebrates the pride of civility. How the heck can do we that? Most Active Topics: Topic 3 Introduce Yourself! Topic 39 Musicians Unite! | |||
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Other Profiled Communities: New York Online Cyborganic | ||||
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Jonathan Steuer In the
summer of 1994, when I worked at HotWired, I was adamant about getting neon
or fluorescent or day-glo or whatever the fuck you want to call it Ethernet
cable. I kept bugging the tech guy. "Pink pink pink cable pink cable must
have pink cable." He told me, "It's a hassle, they have to order it, it
takes an extra four days." But they ordered it, they got it in, it looked
awesome. Several months later I heard, when they were wiring the Wired
offices across the hall, that they weren't going to use it for the rest of
the offices. All of the leftover spools of cable were just sitting around.
So I said, "Can I takethese, if you guys don't want them?" I was in the
process of wiring the house on Ramona in the very early days of getting
Cyborganic going. In fact, if you go over to 67 Ramona Avenue you can tell
which building is the Cyborganic one because it's got pieces of pink
ethernet going outside the house. Anyway, they were like, yeah, whatever.
They're pretty heavy, I remember carrying them down to the car. But I
figured, save me a hundred bucks a reel for category-five Ethernet.
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