Short Cuts: Episode I 
Love and War in Cyberspace
Brandon and Denise were not like other people. They were smarter, more introverted. They adored computers.
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These handles had been an important part of their identities since childhood when they started playing computer games. Brandon was Violent Bob (from a grisly therapeutic toy in Terry Pratchett's fantasy series, Discworld). Denise was Wrenling (taken from Charles de Lint's fantasy book Riddle of the Wren). Some of the residents even received junk mail and magazine subscriptions addressed to their fictional selves. ("Violent Bob, You May Have Just Won a Million Dollars!") Birth names disappeared at Walden.
Online, they became armed with two modes of communication: ICQ ("I seek you," an instant-messaging chat software) and an e-mail system for residents known as the mailing list. On the latter, the more personal exchanges took place on something called a misc list. They started out doing simple things like bartering: "I'll trade you my car for a decent motherboard and processor." Or about how much they liked Walden:
BOOmDude: I had a great time at the BBQ, great way for the new kid on the block to get acclimated to the hard drinkin', cpu abusin' culture that is the Walden.
Ché: Hey, I just moved here and let me say I am dizzy with the raw power of having such an internet connection for personal use.
GrimHippi: I suspect that there will come a time when a need becomes evident [for an even faster connection]. My favorite T-shirt design for [Walden] is "Until then—Walden" with the picture of a port on the back of someone's neck.
Gradually, as people started to come out of their shells, the messages became more social:
EyeBurn: Howdy, "neighbors"—We're planning a small get together . . .
Greg: Anyone big on crawfish?
Teresa: Very big on crawfish!
Michael:CRAWWWWWWWWFISSHHHINNNNN . . .
Then they got a little more intimate:
Stoner: Hey folks—I had this really kewl idea, and was gonna share it with ya. But this chick came on TV and I lost my train of thought.
Eric: women, huh. (no offense to you women, we all love you. just that you have strange effects on men such as memory loss.)
Paul K: yeah? try marrying one—if only it was just memory loss . . .
LadyFire: Gotta luv that whole distraction thing. It CAN be fun.
Denny: Distraction? I'm too busy working for a GOOD distraction any more.
The intimacy extended to discussions of the protocols that governed their electronic communications:
Qartman: Please don't think I am being rude, but I must urge this wild idea upon you—Paul, you should resist temptation more often when considering sending an email or not—or, maybe just save up all of your thoughts until the end of the day and send out one thorough email which addresses every temptation you encountered during the day . . .
Cameron: I personally like seeing give and take of the emails and watch the windings of the conversations. So what if Paul is a bit prolific with what he has to say? I'm glad that we have forums in which we can communicate with each other. It helps the community-feel . . . I know I have gained some useful information from everyone's ramblings, rants, and raves.And rant and rave they did. Once, Brandon came back from work, turned on his computer, tapped into the big, fat pipe, and found more than one hundred new posts on the misc list in which a Wiccan, a Muslim, and a Baptist—all Walden residents—were ferociously arguing the nature of God. Other discussions included guns, drugs, evolution, abortion, and politics; the opinions, especially on religion, were often sharp-edged:
Curt: Though a Christian will never say "I, as a Christian, firmly believe in bringing a halt to progress, science, knowledge, and understanding in the name of our lord and savior, Christ the Luddite," the zealous tenacity with which they cling to their literal interpretation of an ancient collection of parables amounts to pretty much the same thing . . .
It got nasty sometimes (Qartman: "[Y]ou deserve to be flamed dude—not via email, but with gasoline and a lighter"). But as far as the Waldenites were concerned, it could have said, "Hot Sexxx, free! No—wait! I'll pay YOU!" Brandon loved it. Almost all of them loved it. Brandon found himself spending up to a third of his waking hours poring over the misc list. It was a democratic space with no strictures, no dominant value system.
One of Brandon's first postings was: "Anyone posting spoilers to [revealing the details of] the Phantom Menace will be shot, beaten, stabbed, emasculated, raped, caned, eviscerated, car bombed, roach bombed, have their doors egged, find their pets are 'missing', etc, etc, etc." It was the way Brandon spoke on the list: imaginative, extreme, and occasionally bombastic.
"There were times I would do twenty-five posts going through the whole thing," Brandon said. "Horrible! But fun. It would just erupt! And then it was just deserted. Then a couple of days later, a new thread would start up." For people who had felt isolated or alone, it meant company all the time, a sort of nonstop, free-form conversation.
Brandon joined a team for a game called Tribes that was played at a LAN (local area network) party. At a LAN party, ten to sixty gamers would either hook up to the game from their apartments or haul their computers into a bare room above the front office called the Nexus Café, where they'd all plug into the T-3 and wage virtual war from ten in the evening to eleven the next morning.
"Get the flag!" would be followed with sounds of amplified gunfire.
"Taking fire—oh, no—they got me!" was accompanied by the clicking racket of 120 typing hands.
"Aarrgggh!"
The scene in the morning looked like a slumber party: Those who had stuck it out through the night lay slumped under the card tables, in deep sleep.
The more they got to know each other, the more oddities they found in common. They all lived like Trappist monks, for one thing. Their residences were, in the words of a baby-faced, ponytailed graphics designer named Christian, little more than "containers." Walking into an apartment, all you'd see were bare white walls, a sleeping bag, and an alarm clock on a plastic crate. A prisoner has as much. But smack in the center of these barren quarters, an average of four computers would dominate each Waldenite's den—the altar to the big, fat pipe. Some residents even boasted up to $600,000 of tech equipment—floor-to-ceiling towers requiring additional fans to cool the motors—to take advantage of the T-3's speed for role-playing and shoot-'em-up games.
The T-3 attracted some real oddballs too. One, a young man who had heard about the pipe from a resident named Nathan, flew from Arizona, parked himself on Nathan's floor, and started playing a game called EverQuest. It was so much cleaner, so much faster at Walden with the enormous pipe. The man is known around Walden to this day as Dude on the Floor because for two months, from the day he walked though Nathan's door, he didn't talk, he didn't move, he didn't work, he didn't bathe, he only played the game. At least that's the way it seemed to the others. Nathan's cat started using Dude on the Floor as a scratching post. But Dude was unmoved; he became werewolflike, growing out his toenails and his fingernails and his hair. One day the Waldenites were hanging out in the hot tub when the repellent creature ventured out to bathe in the pool. "Who is that?" one of them asked. "It's Dude on the Floor!" another exclaimed. "Scatter!" After Nathan finally sent the Dude back to Arizona on a bus, he had to bleach the area where the Dude had sat, but the stain wouldn't come out. "We like games," the Waldenites thought, "but at least we're not as bad as the Dude."
Little by little, through these bonding experiences, the community began to gel. They started to understand that they needed to be brought together, proving that Birney's vision had large-scale possibilities. Maybe this—Walden—was the way the new American techie was going to live in the adult world. "In American society, the way it's made up right now, there is no tendency for people to seek out friendships," said Alan LeFort, the young man who had shown Brandon and Denise around. "How many neighbors do you know where you live? There's no common reference. Potential residents don't even know that they want community. They're suspicious. 'Why are people intruding in my space?' they think. And once they live here, it makes perfect sense. You can have all the components necessary to create life, yet you put it in a petri dish and nothing happens. Then one day—it happens!"
This is how it worked for Brandon. One day a guy's doing the stand-around shuffle ("Hey," he says as his leg twitches) and the next thing he knows, the magnetic impulse takes hold of him and he's hanging out with the Waldenites in the pool, in the courtyard, across the street at Whataburger, and in their apartments. Around the spring of 1999, after Brandon and Denise had settled in, Brandon had a daily schedule that was typical of a Waldenite. He got up at seven-fifty in the morning, drove down Westheimer, on the west side of Houston, stopped at Starbucks, got to work by eight-fifteen, and spent most of his day fixing problems for, as he puts it, either "intelligent people who [were] just having problems" or "the criminally obtuse." The monotony of work was broken up by ICQing upward of sixty Walden residents. Brandon would get home around eight, game with his Tribes team, and go to bed around midnight. Others with more important business stayed awake and chatted with each other through ICQ and the misc list all night long.
Johnnybravo: Anybody up this late?
LadyFire: hell—i am STILL up!
Paul K: ok—it's 6:35am and I am still up, surely everyone else is sleeping by now?
Little B: Hope you all get sleep.
EyeBurn: Note to ppl that don't know—quite a few of us gather by the hot tub . . . pretty much every evening (anywhere from 9pm to 3am on weeknights, 5pm to 8am on weekends). For myself and fellow gamers—it's where we take breaks from Tribes. Come out and meet your neighbors, most are nocturnal like you . . .
Bosch: here here—even gamers find the time to move away from their puters to "hang" out so should everyone else. So come out you T3 addicted people and enjoy life!!
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