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THE RISE OF VIRTUAL
COMMUNITIES
IN CONVERSATION WITH
VIRTUAL WORLD PIONEERS
Amber Atherton
The Rise of Virtual Communities: In Conversation with Virtual World
Pioneers
Amber Atherton
San Francisco, CA, USA
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-9296-9 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-9297-6

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6
Copyright © 2023 by Amber Atherton
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Printed on acid-free paper
Advance Reactions to
The Rise of Virtual
Communities
Lots of people talk about community, but few know how to build it. To
understand the history of Internet communities, and be inspired to build
your own, this is the book to read.
—Mike Butcher, Editor-at-large, TechCrunch
Every start-up founder who goes through Y Combinator sees first-hand

the power of being part of a community. Atherton's book provides a his-
tory of valuable insights for the next generation to build legendary com-
munities upon.
—Michael Seibel, Managing Director, Y Combinator
This book is an excellent read for any founder or leader looking to learn
how to build community from the very best.
—Jessica Sibley, CEO, TIME Inc
Reading this book is a masterclass in managing and designing

communities.
—Greg Isenberg, Community Expert
For Wayne, Jane, and my little sister.
“Ideas come from curiosity.”
—Walt Disney
Contents
About the Author ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
Chapter 1: Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, Cocreators of

Lucasfilm Games “Habitat” 1
Chapter 2: Howard Rheingold, Writer and Lecturer on
“Virtual Communities” and an Original Member of The WELL 15
Chapter 3: Stacy Horn, Founder of Echo 29
Chapter 4: Jim Bumgardner, Creator and CTO of the Palace 39
Chapter 5: Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life 53
Chapter 6: Sampo Karjalainen, Cofounder of Habbo 67
Chapter 7: Lance Priebe, Cofounder, CTO, and CCO of Club Penguin 79
Chapter 8: Angelo Sotira, Cofounder of DeviantART 89
Chapter 9: Caterina Fake, Cofounder of Flickr 99
Chapter 10: Alexis Ohanian, Cofounder of Reddit 107
Chapter 11: Kevin Rose, Cofounder of Digg and PROOF Collective 117
Chapter 12: Jason Citron, Cofounder and CEO of Discord 129
Chapter 13: Trevor McFedries, Cofounder of Brud and Founder of
Friends with Benefits (FWB) 137
Chapter 14: Cherie Hu, Founder of Water & Music 149
Chapter 15: Michelle Kennedy, Founder of Peanut 161
Glossary 171
Index 173
About the Author
Amber Atherton is a British entrepreneur
and investor based in Silicon Valley. A commu-
nity building expert, Atherton began coding as a
child, starting various Internet businesses and
garnering an online following, before cocreating
the hit TV show Made in Chelsea. In 2018, she
took part in Y Combinator with her community
software startup Zyper, which was later acquired
by Discord. Atherton went on to join the early-
stage venture capital firm Patron as a Partner
in 2023.
Alongside investing, her charitable initiative The Atherton Award recognizes
entrepreneurial spirit in young women across the UK.
Amber frequently appears as an expert on television (BBC, CNBC), radio
(Bloomberg), and at global conferences (Davos, Web Summit) and has written
for publications including Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue Business.
twitter.com/amberatherton
Acknowledgments
I’d first like to thank my editor James Robinson-Prior for responding to my
proposal, sharing my fervor in online communities, and agreeing to publish
this book. He provided a lot of advice that helped make this book better.
Thanks to my research and copy editor Chiara Benn who dove down many
rabbit holes to uncover the important events in Internet history that helped
shape the questions and narrative of this book.
Thanks to all the people I interviewed for taking the time to share their
incredible stories with me. It was truly an honor to talk to them. I know the
nuggets of advice and the sincere nature of their answers will inspire founders
and community builders for years to come. Thanks to my friends, fellow
founders, and community professionals who offered introductions and
insights. Thanks to the former Zyper team and investors who went on a jour-
ney with me, especially Lulu Jopp, with whom I have spent endless hours geek-
ing out on community behavior and trends. Thanks to the first #charmgang
members and Brand Fans that agreed to spend their time with other strang-
ers online to form friendships and even marriages. Thanks to the Y Combinator
community, the Discord team, who are some of the smartest people I’ve ever
met, and my incredibly supportive partners, Brian and Jason, at Patron.
Special thanks to my sister and parents who I admire greatly and who never
seemed to doubt that I could do anything I put my mind to. Whose love,
tenacity, and passion for technology let me grow up in an environment full of
discovery and possibility.
Most of all, thanks to my fiancé Vishal who enthusiastically encouraged me to
prioritize writing this book.
Introduction
In 2007, when I was 15 years old, my father gave me a book called Founders at
Work published by Apress. In a series of interviews with famous founders, the
author Jess Livingston (cofounder of the Silicon Valley accelerator program, Y
Combinator) rolled back the curtain on building startups to reveal the familiar
learnings and similar struggles that every founder faces. In 2018, I joined Y
Combinator with my own community software startup, Zyper, moved to Palo
Alto, and started to build, fundraise, and grow a team. Four years and an
acquisition later, I found myself harboring an insatiable curiosity to look back
in history and figure out how virtual communities came to be. What lessons
could I learn and share from the first brave founders who started to bring
people together on the Internet? How would the patterns from the past, offer
hints for what the future of gathering virtually is going to be like? In 2022,
Apress agreed to publish this exploration, and I began a fascinating journey,
tracking down pioneers and finding out how they ventured into the unknown
and built communities online.
In this book, you’ll read firsthand the fascinating stories of how some of the
most famous virtual communities in history were built. Tracking technological
shifts and advancements, from the first bulletin board and Internet relay chat
systems, to fully simulated virtual worlds and token gated chat rooms.
What surprised me the most in these interviews is how little the fundamen-
tals of online community and world building have changed. You’ll notice recur-
ring problems that still challenge community builders today. From moderation
and new member retention, to the importance of in-jokes, lore, and real-life
meetups.
Today, community building has become inseparable from business building.
Most founders and executives are acutely aware of the value of community. In
CMX’s 2021 Community Industry Report, 86% of respondents (community
managers from 508 different companies) said community was critical to their
company’s mission, and more than two-thirds said their company planned to
increase their investment in community in the next year. Giving your custom-
ers, users, and players a place to hang out and learn together gives businesses
a chance to get invaluable insights, but more importantly creates something
that every human being needs: a sense of belonging.
xiv Introduction
Between starting and running Zyper, a platform that connected brands with
superfans, to leading community acquisition strategy at Discord, I’ve built
hundreds of healthy communities for businesses, brands, and creators. Before
diving in and hiring a dedicated community team, I’ve learned community
builders need to have a strong grasp of two essential concepts:
1) The community quadrant (to understand how community

differs from other groups of people who interact with a
product)
2) The community funnel (to understand what makes a
community compelling to prospective members)
I’ll cover both concepts in the next chapter. I’ve also learned that so often the
best way to predict the future is to look back and study the lessons of history.
My goal with these interviews is to establish a manual of experience that
everyone can learn the secrets to community building from. If you’ve picked
up this book, you’re likely already excited by the magic that comes with bring-
ing people together, so I hope these stories encourage you to keep at it.
Experiment, fail, succeed, but most of all just have fun doing it with great
humans (and bots!) along the way.
What a Community Is (and Isn’t)

One common misconception, I’ve noticed, is the idea that “community” and
“customers” are synonymous terms. They aren’t. Understanding how they
differ is critical, so let’s start there.
The people who interact with your product generally fall into one of four
buckets:
• Customers/users buy and/or use your product.

• Evangelists tell everyone they know to buy or use your
product because they genuinely love it.
• Community is the group of people who’ve found
belonging and utility through your product.
• Ambassadors are incentivized, through payments or
rewards, to promote your product.
What distinguishes community members from those in other groups is the
congregation element: beyond using, liking, or writing glowing reviews of your
product, they spend time forming connections with other people based on a
shared affinity for it.
Introduction xv
The Quadrant, Sequenced

Three of these groups reliably emerge in a fixed order: users/customers come
first, followed by evangelists, and then community.
Ambassadors don’t fit neatly into this sequence, so you’ll need to make a deci-
sion about their relationship to the other three groups. Even though ambas-
sador endorsements aren’t organic, they still help spread awareness of your
product to new segments and markets. Ambassadors range from nano-influ-
encers and affiliates to well-known celebrities, and they can collectively
become a community in their own right, with gamified rankings and events.
Generally speaking, my advice is to build an ambassador program that func-
tions separately from the other three groups.
The ideal time to launch a community varies, but you should wait until you
have confirmed evangelists. People who love your product are your proof
point. If self-professed evangelists haven’t announced themselves yet, email a
group of your earliest customers (50 is enough) to find out if they love your
product. Those who respond enthusiastically are your first evangelists; invite
them to join your community. Evangelists don’t automatically become com-
munity members, but they’re the most obvious cohort to start with because
you know that they like your product and want to talk about it.
xvi Introduction
Next, start a conversation with this founding group in a private space designed
for that purpose, such as a Discord server, a Slack channel, a Telegram chat,
or even a group DM on Instagram. Some community platforms are designed
to be versatile, while others are geared toward specific populations. One
thing you shouldn’t do is waste engineering resources on building out your
own community infrastructure. At this stage, third-party community plat-
forms will meet all your technical needs. Plus, your target community mem-
bers might already use them. Meeting people where they are never hurts.
The early days of community building should feel like user research. You’re not
trying to build an audience or sustain engagement. Instead, you’re experi-
menting with different offerings to figure out what your evangelists want.
Audio? AMAs? IRL meetups? Ask them directly. Not only will you learn what
they find valuable, you’ll also give them a sense of belonging.
Once you have a handle on the quadrant, the second concept to master is the
community funnel.
The Community Funnel: Invited → Invested

Communities are primarily valuable to businesses for two reasons:
• They create a built-in source of real-time user feedback,

which is critical for building a product people really want.
• They foster friendships rooted in an affinity for your
product, which drives lifetime value and new customer
referrals.
Introduction xvii
When it comes to community building, it’s your job to spark the fire. But you
can’t keep it burning alone. The key to a thriving community is members who
care enough to take initiative – they pose thoughtful questions to the group,
introduce new topics to explore, and sometimes even plan events, online or
offline, to help people bond. And they’re invested enough in the community
to assume some of the responsibility of steering it forward. Early on, think
about identifying folks you’d like to see take on more responsibility.
But new community members don’t magically turn into devotees. You need to
set the stage for that to happen – both by letting early members play a role in
shaping and growing the community and also by creating an environment
compelling enough to reel in anyone who enters. The community funnel
charts a prospective member’s path from receiving an invitation to becoming
an invested, active member. It’s important to think about your role in moving
members through the funnel.
One priority should be optimizing introductions: a member’s first few interac-
tions with the community can have an outsized influence on whether or not
they stick around. Consider those early experiences through the eyes of a
new member:
Is the initial invitation compelling? Does it spark excitement or curiosity
or make prospective members feel special? Making invites hard to find makes
them fun to discover. This also gives new members something to bond over
right away.
Do members land in space that’s easy to understand and navigate
and also fun to spend time in? Simply numbering channels and visually lay-
ing out the first steps a new member should take is a low-lift way to guide
people through the onboarding experience. Extra points if the space is beauti-
fully designed.
Are members individually welcomed into the space by a human
(rather than a bot) and introduced into the conversation? Community
managers set the culture from day one. Digital hospitality goes a long way;
welcoming new members is essential for retention.
Once introduced, do community members feel compelled to par-
ticipate in the conversation? Participation primes members to become
friends, which makes them feel more deeply tied to the community and moti-
vated to contribute to it regularly. Most people who join your community will
be evangelists for your product. By the time they reach the end of the funnel,
they’ll (also) be evangelists for your community.
xviii Introduction
Now that you understand these two foundational community building con-
cepts, it’s time to begin architecting your community strategy. Start by clearly
articulating why you’re building the community and what the value exchange
will be. In other words, what will community members gain from joining and
participating, and how does it help your business (now and down the road) to
devote resources to communities that could go elsewhere?
The value of community isn’t always easy to quantify financially, but there are
benefits beyond the bottom line. If you get the basics down and approach
community building thoughtfully, your company will become a catalyst for
strong relationships that grow alongside it.
CHAPTER
Chip
Morningstar
and Randy
Farmer
Cocreators of Lucasfilm Games “Habitat”
“Habitat” was the first massively multiplayer online game (MMO) and virtual world
cocreated by Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer in 1985 while they were working
at Lucasfilm. Interacting through text chat and moving around a graphical
environment, users bartered for objects and eventually created self-government –
creating rules independent of the server operators – forming the first social virtual
world. Morningstar coined the term “avatar” for the online representations of
Habitat users. Morningstar and Farmer encouraged innumerable possibilities within
© Amber Atherton 2023

A. Atherton, The Rise of Virtual Communities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_1
2 Chapter 1 | Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer,
Habitat, allowing users to drive the direction of design and Lucasfilm to facilitate.
“Habitat” ran from 1986 to 1988, eventually closing due to unviable costs. In 1988,
a downsized version called Club Caribe was shipped preinstalled on the Commodore
64.1 The software was later licensed and launched in Japan as “Fujitsu Habitat.”
“Habitat” is widely acknowledged as foundational to present-day online community
design, particularly for immersive, 3D graphical environments. In 2017, the Museum
of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) supported Farmer in his restoration of
“Habitat” (available to play online at neohabitat.org), as part of a playable online
video game museum.
Aside from “Habitat,” Morningstar and Farmer created what many agree to be the
first decentralized metaverse, in the late 1990s, while working at Electric
Communities. Along with Doug Crawford, they also created the JSON Protocol.
Atherton: Chip, Randy, you’ve built some incredible things together over the
years. How did you first meet?
Morningstar: I hired Randy to work on the development team for Habitat
back at Lucasfilm; I think it was 1985. He had been working for us as a
contractor on our games and had done a good job with those and worked
quickly. I had finally received the go-ahead to begin hiring for the product
team. So I recruited Randy. It turned out he’d already been working on virtual
worlds since the dawn of time! Since then, we have worked together a lot
over the years, not just at Habitat. We’ve collaborated in many roles and
consulted for some of the later communities in this book, including for the
Palace and Linden Lab, which owns Second Life.
Atherton: Randy, what virtual worlds had you already been working on?
What was exciting and emerging in online communities at the time?
Farmer: I’ve been working in online communities since the 1970s. I cocreated
a game, SPB, where people in high school formed teams and logged in to a
server.2 Each team had a text terminal, into which you would type commands.
Sadly, the cocreator passed away a couple of years ago – that’s how old this is.
Some friends have kept the game alive; the modern version has port views
and maps, but at its core, it is still the original game and is playable online. I
also have images of the source code for my first Bulletin Board System (BBS),
COMUNI, which dates from 1976. Through this BBS, I was connecting high
school students to play games. Back then, there was no centralized network
like the Internet for talking together.
Meanwhile, Richard Bartle in England was creating the first text multiuser
game (MUG) in 1978, called MUD1. Simultaneously, the University of Illinois
1
An early and popular home computer, featuring the first affordable color graphics.
2
SPB was a pseudo-acronym for “A SPace Battle.”
The Rise of Virtual Communities 3
was building PLATO.3 At this time, I was using standard terminals, while the
University of Illinois was using plasma screen terminals, an expensive
technology that was never widely adopted. All of these developments were
happening in parallel.
Morningstar: There were also several early online communities which
simulated the future through the use of money. PLATO was one of them,
alongside what was developed at Xerox PARC.4
Atherton: Before Lucasfilm’s Habitat, had you experienced any need for
online community moderation?
Farmer: I had a great interest in connecting humans online, to share a game
experience or to talk and communicate. At high school, a member of one of
my message boards took to trolling me, with what are now laughable insults
but hurt a lot back then. He likened me to a peanut butter sandwich…
Nothing by comparison to what we suffer today online, but I started learning
about the challenges of auditing virtual communities in the late 1970s.
I had an idealism then, which I shared with my father, which was that the
Internet would connect everyone and that great things would happen. People
would cooperate more. There would be fewer wars. Now I’m not sure that
throwing everyone into a big pile on the Internet was good design. Over the
years, I realized that the best communities are the ones that have shared
content, a shared purpose for existing, even if it’s temporary and on a
smaller scale.
Atherton: How did the idea for Habitat come about as the first MMO?
Morningstar: The initial genesis was actually a lunchtime conversation
between Noah Falstein (a coworker at Lucasfilm) and I. We were discussing
artificial intelligence in games, which had a very different connotation back in
those days. AI just meant the computerized opponent that you would play a
game against. My take was that we simply didn’t know how to provide an
opponent that players could interact with that had the richness, depth, and
subtle nuances of an actual human being. AI opponents could not be convincing.
So I suggested that we don’t even try. What if we used modems to connect
real people, so they could play against each other?
That led to the idea which we initially called Lucasfilm’s “Universe.” It was an
open world space game, which anybody could connect up to and then interact
with each other. We didn’t have a clear concept of what the gameplay would
be. I wrote up a two- or three-page project proposal, which was how we
pitched our ideas at Lucasfilm Games. The team would discuss the proposal,
3
A programmed logic for automation of teaching operations on which many concepts
such as forums and message boards began.
4
A research and development facility for computer hardware and software – PARC stands
for the Palo Alto Research Center.
and then it would be filed away in the General Manager Steve Arnold’s filing
cabinet. Then when clients approached Lucasfilm, shopping for projects,
Arnold would gauge the client’s brief and match it up against the catalogue of
ideas in his filing cabinet. He’d pull out a couple of these proposals and
pitch them.
One of the driving constraints at Lucasfilm Games was that our mission
statement was, “stay small, be the best and don’t lose any money.” George
Lucas, the founder of Lucasfilm and creator of the Star Wars and Indiana
Jones franchises, was clear on this. The result was that we could build what
we wanted, but we had to get somebody else to pay for it.
One day, Clive Smith, the VP for strategic planning at Commodore
International, came in.5 Commodore’s big initiative that year was going to be
cheap modems for Commodore 64s. As part of that, Commodore made a
strategic investment in a company called Quantum Link, which was a
consumer-oriented online service. That in itself was pretty radical because it
was cheap, targeted at consumers, and used a client-server architecture which
kept their costs down. Commodore approached Lucasfilm asking if we had
any ideas for what they could do in the game space.
Steve pulled the “Universe” proposal out and I pitched it, which led to an
extended negotiation. After months of discussion, they funded what became
known as Habitat, and Lucasfilm mostly executed the project. It took months
for the lawyers to settle on the terms of the deal. In the meantime, I produced
innumerable design documents. At one point, I had a three-inch ring binder
full of specifications and design material, a lot of which was not used in the
end. But it meant that we had thought through the ins and outs of Habitat
ahead of time. When issues came up in development, we had often already
thought about that and so had a leg up in solving whatever the problem was.
We didn’t have a grand vision that magically unfolded, we were making it up
as we went along.
Atherton: How did the community begin to form in the early days around
Habitat?
Farmer: Habitat went through some testing phases. It was initially internal,
mostly employees and a few companies. Then it went into alpha and paid beta.
We invited a curated group from existing Quantum Link users, who were
interested. This led to some great community formation. Habitat then went
into wider beta testing around 1986.
We touch on this in our publications: Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat and Habitat
Anecdotes. We discuss that in a virtual world, where there is no strict “winner”
or “rules,” we did need some areas that were safe – that you could retreat
5
Commodore International was a home computer manufacturer that launched the best-
selling Commodore 64.
from the threat of being killed – while other areas were wild. We did several
experiments on what worked best.
When you’re pioneering something – and none of these features existed in
1986 – that something doesn’t even have a name yet. One of our biggest
problems with Quantum Link was that they couldn’t wrap their head around
what we were building. They wanted to know how you win the game. We
kept responding that you play Habitat, you don’t win overall, though there are
some games within the game. The idea of a virtual environment, a virtual
reality, an MMO, was novel and disruptive. Quantum Link wouldn’t accept a
description of less than 25 words. The Habitat promotional video was eight
and a half minutes long, attempting to describe what a virtual world is!
Morningstar: There was a lot of stuff that nobody had the vocabulary for
yet. Some of it we tried to explain and demonstrate. Elsewhere, we made
vocabulary up. The most notable example was the term “avatar.”
Avatars sparked widespread debate. Are they you? Is it a representation of
how you’d like to be portrayed? Is it some other character that you control?
The answer was all of the above.
Atherton: Chip, you’re credited with coining the term “avatar.” How did
avatars change how people were interacting online? Unlike traditional text-
based Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), users now had an avatar that they could
connect with the community through.
Morningstar: It was all new. It signaled that you were in this virtual world.
Your presence was designated through avatars, a visual metaphor that you are
there. It also created a notion of place. There were other people and various
objects in this virtual world that you could interact with, pick up, and move
around. People fell into it pretty naturally because they had already been
playing single-person computer games which had a world model in them.
Habitat was a radical departure though, because some of the other entities
users interacted with were wired back through the network to other actual
human beings elsewhere in the real world.
Quantum Link did a lot of thrashing around, trying to explain Habitat, which
turned out to be completely irrelevant because people intuitively grasped it
right out of the box. Rather than explaining for ages prior, they should have
let users play it, and it would click within minutes.
Atherton: Was there any accompanying social phenomena to these
innovations that took you by surprise?
Farmer: So many things! Some had to do with mechanics of the game, which
we would fix in later versions. For example, users would steal from each
other. I know it seems obvious now, but when you do it the first time, it’s new.
The very nature of how crude the interface was meant that if you wanted to
trade with people, you had to trust them. You would put something on the
ground and expect they would give you something in return. But, they could
put whatever they had offered you back in their pocket, grab your item, and
run away. So we had to establish a few rules. We made changes so that when
you went into your house – every avatar had a house – you could control who
came in. That way, you could then build trust.
Also early on, people were trying to figure out the divide between the virtual
and real world. In a virtual society, your avatar existed in a different context
from real life. Even the promotional video explains that your avatar is not you,
Habitat is just a place to have fun. But being stolen from in the game affected
real-life emotions. Users would then meet in real life, and some got married.
There was an intersection.
Habitat only continued until the end of paid beta in 1988. It was then
transformed into Club Caribe, which was run by different people. The “world”
became a beach resort with all the fantasy elements stripped out – all those
things that had emerged as we were experimenting were removed. Over the
years, they readded those features, which they could do without changing the
front end as it was already there. The Habitat software was then licensed to
Fujitsu in Japan. It was the first virtual world and MMO in Japan when it
launched. Some of the developers at Habitat went on to create WorldsAway,
another multiplayer community with avatars, in 1995. There were some
shared social challenges between all of these projects.
One common aspect was that users would find bugs in the software that
generated money. In Lucasfilm’s Habitat, Club Caribe, Fujitsu Habitat, and
other virtual worlds since – this has continued to occur for generations –
there would be bugs where the internal currency could be generated arbitrarily.
If there’s a bug, people will find it. We were fortunate, at least during the
testing phases, that Habitat users would take this money and then figure out
how to redistribute it in the game, by financing mini games they ran inside
Habitat. WorldsAway created APIs for users to run games on top of the
game, so that users could create social context and value.6
Habitat and its successors were modeled upon a fact that paved the way for
NFTs: scarcity becomes the thing of value. In the original Habitat, users could
buy heads in vending machines, which were a unique way of styling your avatar.
Heads were purchased with the coins that users had earned in-game. Some
heads were scarce. Many could be purchased easily. Heads could be colored
or redecorated a little, but as in WorldsAway now, there were some heads
that were given out that could not be purchased. This gave those heads huge
value. People treasured having the only munchkin head that was stripey, for
example. Scarce items were valuable; that’s why people would be so upset if
their items were stolen – they might be irreplaceable.
6
APIs are application programming interfaces, in other words, software developments.
Atherton: Did you find that BBSs were popping up around the game, or was
most of the interaction happening in-world?
Morningstar: A bit of both. We had a guy who started publishing a newspaper
within Habitat. Every few days, he’d produce 20–30 pages about funny or
interesting things that had happened, the “news” of the community. He did
that for quite some time. It was spontaneous and community generated.
We were constantly building tools that would permit users to create. For
example, we had single sheets of paper that users could write text and
graphics on. We also had a book which had multiple pages, but you couldn’t
edit the order of those pages. There was demand for more flexibility, so we
created a machine that could take several disparate pages and bind them
together into a book. We also allowed users to stock their own vending
machines. The feedback cycle of users wanting something and us figuring out
how to enable it happened quite a lot.
Atherton: How did you go about moderating Habitat?
Morningstar: There’s an interesting distinction between the rules which we
enforced technologically and the rules we enforced socially. To prevent stealing
in later systems, we created an automated trading machine to let people swap
items back and forth – an example of technological rules. But up until then,
we had to rely on social rules.
There was controversy surrounding people stealing things. The users wanted
a sheriff to crack down on that. We weren’t sure how to do that, but we were
able to create a voting machine so users could have an election. They self-
organized election campaigns for two or three candidates to be sheriff. They
held a candidates debate where other users could ask them questions. Then
one person got elected sheriff, and we gave him a special avatar head that had
a cowboy hat with a star on the top. Because of the collective approval of the
community, he carried with him a lot of moral authority. So if somebody did
something which wasn’t the Habitat culture, like stealing, and he suggested
they return what they had stolen, people took that seriously and were more
inclined to respond in a constructive way. Of course, we could have manipulated
that – gone into the database and restored items to their original owners –
but we didn’t want to have a dictatorial rule over the community when they
were able to develop their own set of norms that were mostly enforced by a
consensus model.
Atherton: The principle of allowing the community to vote on who they
want to be the moderators is not that dissimilar from how DAO communities
are structured today: they are governed by its members.7
7
DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organizations. An organization on the block-
chain that is governed by the votes of its token holders, rather than a centralized authority.
I’m curious how you have seen moderation evolve in online communities and
how you would advise approaching virtual governance?
Farmer: Let me first distinguish social media from online communities.
We’ve conflated those words over the years. I try not to, but a lot of people
say “the Twitter community” or “the Facebook community.” There’s no
community there. You don’t take big piles of people and call them a community
just because they use an application; that is a shared tool. It’s like saying I use
a hammer, I’m part of the hammer-using community! An online community
requires a shared context, something that is valuable to its users. For example,
a cancer survival support site.
Social media involves moderating everyone in the world to speak the same
exact words. When I worked at Google, specifically on YouTube, I came to
realize that. YouTube hosts videos, and most videos have a comment section,
which requires moderation. But the same word in different contexts can have
different meanings. The word “queer,” for example, is often a term of
endearment and membership that the community support, but in other
contexts, that word can be hate speech. How do you universally tell? You
can’t tell without the context. That’s why moderation on a global scale is
unsolvable, unless solved locally. When I was at YouTube, I suggested you
should only allow comments to be turned on if the video creators moderate
those comments. They have to decide what’s good and what’s bad, and if they
refuse to do that, they shouldn’t have comments. Otherwise, comments
become garbage.
Online communities differ. They can be moderated by their members, because
they care about the platform. I have been a member of numerous online
message boards since the first one was created in the 1970s, and they’re great
because the topics are limited and specific. For example, a forum on paper
craft is not going to accept posts on politics or the price of oil. If someone
comes in and doesn’t behave, they are kicked out, no big deal. Online
communities define their own rules. If you don’t like the rules, you can form
a new community.
Atherton: I wanted to ask you both about the nature of trust in online
communities. In your experience, do real-life interactions, meeting the person
behind the avatar, reinforce this trust?
Morningstar: Trust is a very slippery thing. You have to define what that
trust is for. I know people who I would trust to manage my money who I
would not trust to do a good job looking after my children!
Farmer: I coauthored a book called Building Web Reputation Systems in which
I talk about trust in virtual communities.
Communities meeting in real life does not necessarily create trust. I am part
of virtual communities in which I share values with people that I have never
met and have no reason to ever meet. But I trust them. I send them money
when they can’t pay for the servers. All kinds of trust, but not all trust.
Trust is hard to measure. Five-star ratings and reviews are among the most
dumb reputation systems in existence today, because of the collapsed context.
I wrote a paper when I was working at Google, outlining the reasons you
should not use those scores. Firstly, they’re sexist. Consider movie reviews on
IMDb. Did you know that movies focused on women are more than one star
lower on average rating on IMDb than movies focused on men? That’s because
more men give ratings on IMDb. So why would a woman trust IMDb ratings?
Five-star ratings are also racist and subject to inflation. Even the same products
rated in different virtual locations (IMDb vs. Rotten Tomatoes) have different
scores. Additionally, this system is designed for abuse. If you have a new object
in this database, you need reviews. So you ask people to write reviews, which
is against the policy. Why would you have a mechanism that requires a
bootstrap, which you cannot get without abusing the system?
Reviews contain social data which is unrelated to content or product quality.
For example, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States,
all of his property ratings dropped two stars on average. People who had
never been to those places, who hated him, rated them badly. Businesses shut
down because of social data influencing these ratings. I’m not going to say
whether social justice is a good thing, I’m just saying that the resulting reviews
are out of context. Varying factors are folded into ratings and yet are
indecipherable, so why would you average those numbers? What a customer
needs is the opinions of people who are like them.
Turning to trust in Web 3, DAOs are complex. They often use token ownership
as a marker of trust, rather than earning trust. With DAOs, trust is founded
in the ability to buy tokens early and cheaply, which suggests that money is
trust, and I reject that. I think distributed systems are trying to reject that
also, so I’m confused how DAOs have moved to the forefront in so many cases.
Atherton: Is contribution not also a factor influencing trust in DAOs and
Web 3 communities? It’s not just about buying in through tokens, but then
how you contribute to the community and how that contribution is
incentivized, no?
Farmer: It’s hard to measure quality of contribution, so it ends up being
measured in numbers. People in message boards threw this out a long time
ago; they stopped displaying post counters for people, because people started
jacking up their numbers by posting pointless content. Another example is
Instagram: girls suffer horrible psychological effects from the number of likes
on their posts, because these are public value scores that they are trying to
increase.
Morningstar: Every time you have a number which is a measure of something,

people will start layering interpretations on it. You can’t necessarily control
what they layer.
A great example was Orkut, an early social network experiment that came
out of Google in 2004. Orkut had a facts page, and one figure mentioned how
many market users there were in different countries. Some of the countries
that were disproportionately represented started treating this as a leaderboard.
As a result, Brazil became the number one country on Orkut, mostly because
the Portuguese language community challenged themselves to get to number
one. Orkut became a Portuguese-only site by default, just because somebody
decided to post the number of users in each country. What Orkut saw as a
page of amusing information was understood by other users as a leaderboard.
Atherton: For a text-based community, is the level of active participation by
members a good indicator of community health?
Farmer: This is known as the engagement trap. The reason YouTube,
Facebook, and Twitter have a fundamental problem is because engagement is
their revenue model. They sell advertisements, so they need you online more.
This led to teaching algorithms to highlight anything that was highly engaging
because it meant more revenue. This cycle is well documented. Even Jack
Dorsey, cofounder and former CEO of Twitter, knows about it. Controversial
content is exaggerated, because controversy generates revenue.
Another problem with engagement metrics is that they often reduce the
quality of content in message boards. Those who have the most time are not
necessarily the best people for your community. When I post on message
boards, I spend a lot of time crafting thoughtful responses. Others might have
time during the day for chatter. Once others log on in the evening, it might
have 500 back messages, which I’m not going to read. Engagement metrics
reinforce chat and shut out long form.
Morningstar: You can have a group of 1000 people in an online environment,
in which 20 of them are having a sophisticated, nuanced conversation among
themselves, and the other 980 people are watching it because it’s interesting
and informative.
You can also have a group of 1000 people who are all constantly nattering to
each other, and its content is trivial. Activity metrics are going to suggest that
this second group is the one you want as everyone is engaged, when in fact
the first one was better. The second is a different form of entertainment, with
a lot of noise, but it’s not a driver for deep psychological satisfaction or
progress in the world or anything that you might attach value to. The shape
of the interaction is more important than the size of it.
Atherton: Looking at virtual community architecture, you’ve both seen

everything from virtual worlds, message boards, asynchronous chat… Are
certain architectures preferable for deep engagement?
Farmer: I’ve consulted for a lot of virtual communities, and really that
question is “what helps the community?” It’s not a list of features that it has
to have: chat, message boards, email relay.
At one point, I created a community around a podcast. When we moved from
message boards to Discord, which values engagement metrics, the community
lost its value, as thoughtful posts were lost among chatter. In fact, chatter was
promoted as it was produced by “more engaged users.” It creates brain drain.
When people think about community design, you literally have to start with
“what does the community need?” That could even be utilizing email or SMS
relay. The original Habitat had internal mail; you could send messages to other
avatars and never know who was behind them. So my answer would be that
you should architect the community to serve the community.
Morningstar: On a related note, one of our long-term collaborators Doug
Crawford has a saying: “media has biases.” I don’t mean biases as in left wing
or right wing, pro-this or anti-that; rather, that with any given medium, there
are certain messages that get through that medium more easily than others.
Features filter the experience, which is why Twitter is different from Facebook,
Discord, and Reddit. They are effective at transmitting different kinds of
messages, information, and emotional effects.
Having different media does not necessarily make companies more flexible or
powerful, which is a misconception that I hear a lot. Any combination of
media will create a different set of biases. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish,
there are features which will be more or less effective at achieving what you’re
trying to do, whether that’s chat or video conference, they’re just different.
Somehow we’ve absorbed this idea that you want all possible tools. In reality,
you want to make design choices that will aid what you’re trying to construct.
We don’t have a body of theory on what design choices are going to work
better as a mailing list or a chat service yet though.
Farmer: Chat services are febrile: if you aren’t there, you miss the
conversation. So if everyone in your community is supposed to be on the
same page, a message board won’t work so well. Even if it’s archived, because
now you’re reading a conversation that somebody else had, you’re not
participating. Only recently have chat platforms allowed you to edit posts. For
a long time, you weren’t allowed to, so posts might be outdated by the time
you read it, even on the same day. For example, “car repair” is a common
search term online. You wouldn’t want the information of your company to
be on a message board – the information would get lost – you want it in a
place that is persistent and curated. These things can be features or bugs,
depending on what you want from your community.
Morningstar: There’s also what I call the fundamental paradox of the

Internet, which is that nothing lasts, yet nothing ever goes away…
Atherton: Can we touch on your work on communities in the metaverse
and the implications of these?
Farmer: At present, I am the executive director of the Spritely Networked
Communities Institute, which is working to build technology to remove
servers from communities. It’s working toward an environment where anyone
can create communities with whomever they want, with no centralized server.
On this project, I haven’t worked with Chip, but we tried to do something like
this before when we were working at Electric Communities, an Internet
application developer. Everyone focuses on the virtual worlds that we worked
on at the firm, but our ultimate success was that we removed the necessity
for a central server, in that case implemented on top of a virtual world. In
doing so, we made the first fully decentralized metaverse in the late 1990s!
Morningstar: One contributor to the demise of Electric Communities was
that there wasn’t great demand for decentralized, secure, virtual world
infrastructure at the time, even though it solves important coordination
problems, as Randy was just explaining.
An unintended but fantastic consequence of framing a decentralized, secure
metaverse in a graphical environment was that the metaverse and its
implications were visualized in a virtual world, which gave them the same
moral intuitions as if it were the real, physical world. It helped your brain
understand the problems with the metaverse in a way that you could make
sense of them and come up with possible solutions. So human engineers were
able to think about the underlying technical problems of decentralization.
Farmer: Through the lens of a decentralized, secure virtual world – the first
metaverse – it’s easy to say who should be allowed to turn the light off at my
house or take the head off my avatar’s body. We think of that not as data, but
as behavior, so it’s easier to consider rationally. With data alone, there is no
context. So when someone says nowadays, let’s take your social network
graph and put it on the blockchain, that is morally wrong, but they’re thinking
of it as a contextless object.
Morningstar: There’s a lot of confusion about ownership of data, particularly
medical data or financial data. Some believe you should own your own data.
To me, there’s a fundamental confusion rooted in that, which is that people
know things about their acquaintances and the companies they interact with.
What you know about them is stored inside your brain. When somebody says
they should own their own data and you know something about them, are
they saying that they own part of the contents of your brain? Because that
doesn’t make sense.
The real question is what is done with your data. If a robot knows your
deepest, darkest secrets and never does anything with that information other
than while it’s interacting with you, has your privacy been violated? Our
society is still grappling with these questions.
Atherton: Randy, what have you been working on with the Museum of Art
and Digital Entertainment (MADE)?
Farmer: I have been working on two projects with MADE.
One is a restoration of Lucasfilm’s Habitat as it was on its beta test in 1986,
for their playable online video game museum and exhibit. We reinstated the
database, rebuilt the server, and it’s using the original software. MADE even
has Commodore 64 emulators, which are astonishingly accurate to the
original technology… pitifully slow! It is available online at NeoHabitat.org,
and there are people who log in every day!
Separately, we’re working to restore the work of Electric Communities, most
notably the history of decentralized systems, which foreshadowed the
blockchain. Out of Electric Communities came some developments that
nobody else has ever done since, and we’d love to see those make it out into
the world.
Atherton: You both seem to have found yourself at the forefront of every
major technological and cultural shift!
Morningstar: Yes, we often laugh that we have started several industries in
which other people have made billions of dollars!
CHAPTER
Howard
Rheingold
Writer and Lecturer on “Virtual Communities”
and an Original Member of The WELL
The WELL was a dial-up Bulletin Board System (BBS) that stood for the “Whole
Earth ’Lectronic Link.” It was the earliest affordable multiline chat-based forum.
Founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, it was an electronic offshoot
of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue (1968), a how-to guide for building
your own off-grid civilization. The WELL featured message board–style discussions,
divided by topic. Writing about The WELL in 1993, Rheingold popularized the term
“virtual community” with his article The Virtual Community: Homesteading on
the Electronic Frontier. Rheingold has since lectured at Stanford on community
and become a leading commentator and advisor for technology companies. The MIT
Press has referred to Rheingold as the “First Citizen of the Internet.”1
1
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier,
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_2
16 Chapter 2 | Howard Rheingold, Writer and Lecturer on “Virtual Communities”
Atherton: Can you take me back to the early days of The WELL and how
the community differed from the other Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs)?
Rheingold: The WELL started in 1985, and for a year or two before that, I
had been exploring BBSs. There were tens of thousands of BBSs before there
was an Internet or Usenet, and so a lot of people, like myself, who later
became involved with systems like The WELL, started on other BBSs. The
problem with BBSs is they were usually a PC in some teenage boy’s bedroom
that was connected to a phone line, and only one person could log on at a
time. So you had to wait your turn. There was one thread. It doesn’t sound
like a lot to be excited about these days, but it was interesting. You met
people who shared your interests who you may never have known otherwise.
Aside from The WELL, there were a couple of other online systems. ARPANET
was one, but you really had to be a computer scientist to participate in that.
The Source and CompuServe were also big commercial services in the early
1980s. The Source in particular had something called Participate, which was
similar to forum software today. So it was on these platforms where I got
involved in multithreaded discussions that went on for days. But it was
expensive and I was a struggling freelance writer, so I couldn’t spend too many
hours on any of these BBSs.
The WELL had a couple of technical advantages. Mainly that it had 30 or 40
phone lines coming into it. In fact, The WELL office used to have this room
full of phone lines and modems. The WELL was based on Unix (pre-Internet),
so it had a forum software that was overlaid, which allowed the kind of
asynchronous text conversations that you see today. Unix had a couple of
utilities: you could see somebody’s profile by entering a command, and you
could send them a private message. So The WELL was a combination of
public forum posts and private messaging. We were excited about the
possibilities of doing both of those things.
Another important innovation was that The WELL was relatively inexpensive.
I think the Source and CompuServe cost about $10–$15 per hour, whereas
The WELL cost around $3. I immediately became very involved in The
WELL. My wife became concerned about all the time I was spending online,
and my daughter actually said, “was that daddy laughing at his computer
again?” As a writer, I started producing content about the platform because it
fascinated me. It also gave me an excuse to be online a lot.
Living in the San Francisco Bay area, The WELL was an offshoot of Stewart
Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue (1968). The WELL’s office was just on the
other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. One day, I visited
their office and talked to the manager of The WELL. He told me that if you
host a conference, The WELL is free.2 So I started the “mind” conference,
2
A conference on The WELL was a collection of conversations about a particular topic.
hosted it, and spent a lot of time online. That was the start and the basis for
the piece I wrote about hosting online conversations in 1998. By then, I had
been using BBSs for over a decade.
Atherton: Do you think that the formula for healthy online communities =
hosts + moderators + rules?
Rheingold: I’m not saying that you can’t have a healthy community without
a host, but I believe that the chances of it being successful are multiplied
manifold by having someone that cares.
When I advise people about building online communities, I said that in addition
to having an experienced facilitator from the beginning, you should identify
the people in the community who are the most eager contributors and enlist
them in helping as you scale up. Your hosts, your facilitators, should really
come from the most enthusiastic members of the community. Obviously,
these are people who have a stake in the community, but also it signals to
everyone else that we, the community participants, are the owners of this
virtual space. It is not some distant company who hires people to corral us.
That feeling of ownership is key to feel they can participate and take
responsibility for the health of the space.
From my research, the main takeaway was that the success of an online group,
whether it becomes a community or not, has a great deal to do with the way
it is facilitated. To describe that, I borrow the term that The WELL used,
which is to “host.” A lot of people use the word moderation. Moderators
back in the days of Usenet were really gatekeepers. Moderated newsgroups
meant you sent your message to the newsgroup and the moderator decided
whether to send it on to everybody else. A host isn’t a gatekeeper or a
sensor, but is rather more like a host at a party. You don’t just invite people,
buy beer, and rent a room to have a party, you need to greet your guests at
the door. You need to invite an interesting crowd. You need to introduce
people to each other. You try to break up the fights or at least move it away
from the punch bowl. That is key to successful online communities.
As I wrote in The Virtual Community, the host should also demonstrate the
behavior that they would like to see. Another important aspect is to have
rules of behavior clearly set out at the beginning. By that I mean you need to
agree to them before you join. The rules might differ in content and how they
are enforced in different places. Rules should not be decided online with the
group once it’s going, it needs to be decided before you start; otherwise, it’s
an endless rathole. I’ve been in many discussions about what people call
censorship. If somebody is driving people away with their behavior, censoring
their behavior signals to people who might not otherwise have participated
that it’s okay for them to participate. If those people see users getting away
with attacking others, a lot of people will not participate for fear of sticking
their head up and getting shot at.
Those are really the basics. Have a simple set of rules that everybody
agrees to beforehand and have someone who is not just a moderator or a
police of behavior but somebody who’s actively engaged in catalyzing
community. I often use that analogy of a host at a house party. You need
to greet the guests, introduce them, and welcome them; direct them as to
where they might go based on their interests and who they might enjoy
speaking to. The first impression that you get when you enter a party or
online community, I think, dictates how engaged those users will go
on to be.
Atherton: To what extent were the online forums of The WELL and other
communities you played a key role in powered by real-life connections? What
overlap was there between the real life and the virtual at The WELL?
Rheingold: In the early days of The WELL, you had to dial up to log in, which
meant you paid phone charges. So it was less expensive for people in the San
Francisco Bay area, although there were people who paid long-distance
charges to get into The WELL from elsewhere. Therefore, most of the
participants online were in the same geographic area. The community crossed
into real life when one of the people running The WELL had a birthday, and
some WELL users suggested we show up at The WELL office with some beer
to give him a birthday party. For many of us, this was the first time that we
saw people face to face that we had communicated with for hours online.
People just talked and talked, as we did online. It was a great success, so we
decided to have a regular monthly WELL party.
I remember one WELL party that was held at a beach. When it got dark, we
had no lights, but people stood in the dark and continued to talk. People felt
this commitment or need or want to communicate with each other. From
there developed a series. In the parenting conference, where we talked about
our kids, we decided to have a softball game and bring our kids. In another
conference, somebody started an argument about who made the best chilli,
so we decided to have a chilli cook-off. By that time, we had moved the parties
to a larger place that had a kitchen, and so the chilli cook-off became an annual
event! To many communities, having face-to-face gatherings was important.
Bear in mind that Usenet has existed since 1980, and there were Usenet
groups worldwide before the Internet. When I was researching The Virtual
Community, I came across the Harley-Davidson motorcycle Usenet group. It
had users from all over the world, and they organized meetups, for which
people would travel halfway across the globe to attend. People were reporting
that they met their spouses online. There seemed a desire to move toward
face-to-face communication. But of course, there are many online communities
in which people are scattered around the world that don’t often have a chance
to get together.
I started a group in 1998 called Brainstorms that I have written a little bit
about. We had face-to-face gatherings where people came from the
Netherlands and Australia and all across the US. I think they help to build
trust, but it is not necessary.
Trust however is somewhat transitive in that I may not know person A, but
we have a mutual friend. This often translates to trust, until proven otherwise.
I think that the number of those transitive trust relationships can help catalyze
a sense of community. A certain amount of trust is required to open up to the
community in a public thread.
Online groups are not necessarily communities, if people don’t have
relationships with each other. If they don’t necessarily care enough about each
other to rescue somebody who’s in trouble. But they do exchange information.
For example, in Silicon Valley, at one point almost all the engineers were on
Usenet, and they were exchanging information with other engineers around
the world. “I have x problem. Do you know how to solve it?” Had their bosses
known that they were communicating with engineers from competing
companies, they probably would have shut it down, and we would not have
seen the growth that entailed. In some cases, exchanging information might
create a commitment to that particular group, but not to individuals within it.
By contrast, there are online communities for sufferers of rare diseases. If you
have a disease that one in a million people have, there are 2000 people like
you on the Internet. Those groups have very strong relationships with each
other, but may never meet face to face. So I think it’s a mix.
Atherton: If not a crossover with real-life interactions, what do you believe
is needed to start a community?
Rheingold: One of the things you need is a strong center of gravity, something
that’s going to attract people to your online community, say, Harley-Davidson
motorcycles or a rare disease.
The WELL had a number of conferences; some people were just in the books
conferences or the politics conference. The real core members of the
community were in a number of different conferences. Now we have Reddit,
which has thousands of subreddits, some of which may be communities and
some of them may just be for exchanging information.
Atherton: Do you think there is a limit to how many virtual communities
you can be a part of as a user?
Rheingold: That’s a tricky question. Because I was writing about online
communities, I spent a lot of time exploring different ones, in the early 1990s,
before the Internet. Around this time, I went to England, and there was a
WELL community there. There was another one in Paris, and I went to a
meetup in the outskirts. People all around the world were doing this as the
Internet began to open up these opportunities. The WELL was no longer a
San Francisco Bay area platform, people could go there through the Internet.
If it’s for your job, then how many hours does your boss allow you to use
BBSs? But there’s a lot of online fatigue going on now, and I think that using
Zoom so much during the COVID-19 pandemic has really affected people’s
tolerance for how much online communication they can do.
Atherton: What shift is required to turn an online discussion into a
community?
Rheingold: One is to have people actively facilitating community and
welcoming people. In my experience, the one factor that most affects whether
someone who participates for the first time will return and continue to
participate is whether anybody acknowledges their participation by name.
There’s nothing like having someone say they read your post. I can remember
the first response that I had to my first post on The WELL. I said I wanted to
talk about a certain topic, and someone said, “oh goodie”; I just felt
acknowledged and welcome.
A good host or facilitator will look at a person’s profile and try to direct them
to places where they might be interested. Then your chances of having a
community grow out of that increase.
I told a story in The Virtual Community about a fellow parent that started the
softball tradition at The WELL’s parenting conference. His son was diagnosed
with leukemia, and of course medical support groups are commonplace today,
but back then our parenting conference had doctors and nurses in it. We
created a topic thread and raised about $15–20,000 to help out with expenses.
The WELL became an online support network for them. There was another
woman whose circumstances caught her very sick in Asia, and the people in
The WELL figured out how to get her home and raise money to do that.
There was a woman who was dying, and people took turns sitting with her. I
think when you begin doing those things for each other, it’s proof of a true
sense of community.
There’s an expression that it’s really not a community until it’s had a funeral.
Indeed, weddings, breakups, rites of passage that occur in face-to-face
communities are also important milestones online.
Another way of shifting discussions to communities is the presence of rituals.
The rituals that work best are when they just emerge naturally. When
someone says, “what does it look like where you’re sitting?” Or “what did you
have for breakfast today?” Anything that catches people’s interest and that
they then turn into a regular event.
Atherton: Looking back to The WELL and Usenet, what were the scale of
these communities?
Rheingold: Usenet was all over the world in about 100 countries, and it had
hundreds if not thousands of newsgroups, so I would guess between tens and
hundreds of thousands of users. The number of people online was then hugely
multiplied when the Internet came along.
Atherton: In your experience of the communities that you’ve been a part of,
is there an optimum number of people for a healthy community?
Rheingold: I’m sure you’ve heard of Dunbar’s number, which suggests a
healthy community is around 150 people.3 Sociologist Barry Wellman has
suggested that the Dunbar number may be flexible online.4
If you look at The WELL or at Reddit, they are an overarching community
platform with subcommunities. In The WELL, each conference had probably
around 150 people, maybe more. With the exception of the news conference
that everybody participated in, most conferences like the science fiction
conference or the books or media conferences were around 150 members.
So I think that online groups kind of naturally spin off into subgroups that are
more of a manageable size.
I know that Facebook groups, which I no longer participate in, can have
hundreds of thousands of people. I have a complaint about that. In fact, I’ve
spoken to the social scientists at Meta, because a Facebook group is a bad
affordance for a large number of people in which to discuss a large number of
topics over a longer period of time. The thread that has been most recently
posted goes to the top. And everything else gets buried. For a group with say
5000 people, if a discussion starts on something that interests you, if you log
in an hour later, you might not even be aware of that.
This was a technical problem that forums solved in the 1980s, whereby the
system knows what you read, what you ignore, and the last thing you posted;
it was solved by showing you everything that’s been posted since then. To me
it’s important for a forum to keep track of posts for you. There are a lot of
bad forums in which you see links and then you have to click on the link to get
to the discussion, and then you have to figure out which was the last response
that you read. That should all be taken care of for you. That’s really the
advantage of asynchronous text.
Atherton: How do you go about attracting new members to a community?
Rheingold: It’s a lot harder now because people are spending 150% of their
available time online, and they’re already participating in other venues, so
that’s an issue that didn’t exist before. Somewhere in the 2000s, around the
tenth anniversary of Facebook when the online social population became very
3
Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, has suggested in his publication “Neocortex Size
as a Constraint on Group Size in Primates” (1992) that cognitively humans are able to
sustain relationships with up to 150 people.
4
Barry Wellman, “Is the Dunbar Number Up?” British Journal of Psychology, May, 2012.
large, word of mouth became very important. If someone participates in a

forum and is enthusiastic about it, that attracts people and they are more
likely to stick.
I think there are two key ways to attract new members: Firstly, do your
participants have a sufficient feeling of ownership that they themselves want
to grow the community? Secondly, you need to know your target market.
That’s marketing 101. Who do you want to join, an engineer or a mother?
What distinguishes that person? What are their interests? What attracts
them? Where do you find them? How do you get them to try your platform?
And to come back again? This is the way you market any product.
The other key attraction of your community is specialist knowledge. I use the
example of Patreon because its users have an art form or podcast or videos
around a particular theme, and people who are interested will find their way
to it. They might then spend five or ten bucks a month to support that person
to continue producing content and to participate, say, in their Discord. I think
cross-medium is important. For example, if people from your community
make videos and YouTube promotes those videos and you’re inviting these
new viewers to your community, you can be using other platforms to promote
your own.
Atherton: From your time in text-based communities vs. avatar-based
communities, did you feel there was any difference in the community
connections? Were connections deeper in text-based communities?
Rheingold: Connections had to do with the quality of the interaction rather
than the environment the interaction occurred in. In a very visual virtual
world with fantastic avatars, if the conversations were mundane, community
was less likely to grow.
Atherton: In a virtual world environment that is more visual, how can you
encourage more meaningful conversations? I’m curious whether we will have
the same level of meaningful interactions and connections as we spend more
time in the metaverse, as we have had thus far in text-based worlds?
Rheingold: Well some of the rituals I have highlighted in text-based virtual
communities do not occur in more visual virtual worlds, like Second Life,
because there’s an element of escapism. Users role-play a perhaps slightly
different version of themselves, a more playful, fictional version; so they’re not
necessarily sharing the person behind the User ID, sending pictures of where
they’re reading this or topics they’re concerned about.
At the same time, especially for females, being able to disguise your gender
has advantages. One of the experiments I have done for research involved me
logging in to different online communities with a male-presenting name and
asking for advice, then logging on with a female-presenting name and asking
for the same advice. I got greater responses to my female-presenting persona,

all from men. I think that women can use that ability to disguise gender to
their advantage.
Atherton: Do you think whether a virtual world is in 2D or 3D impacts the
community interactions? 2D BBSs like the Palace perhaps heighten the text
interactions vs. in a fully 3D virtual world you’re immersed.
I wonder if there might be a resurgence in 2D. If you look at the rise of
Webtoons, VTubers, and the anime community, they’re largely 2D. More
teenagers in America and the Western world are now spending time in 2D
interactions, which feels nostalgic given that VR headsets now make 3D more
accessible.
Rheingold: I wrote about virtual reality in 1990, and its technicalities have
come a long way since then. But I think the same fundamental remains, which
is that in VR you feel cut off from the world. An immersive 3D environment,
which is the attraction of VR, simultaneously contributes to a distancing from
other people in the real world.
In VR, you are disengaged from society in a different way than when you’re in
a text-based virtual community. Traditionally, text-based communities have
been asynchronous, so you could read it a week later. Discord and Slack are
now semi-synchronous. Virtual worlds and VR are ephemeral and not
recorded, so you have to be present online, which can take you away from the
real world.
Atherton: Sometimes, it’s intimidating when you join a new community, and
there are elements of language and lore that you don’t understand.
Contrastingly, many community founders cite funny inside jokes and memes
as critical to community building.
Do you have any examples of other communities where inside jokes are key,
and do you see them as important to the platform’s success?
Rheingold: To me, there’s a collision involved here. If the community has
developed its own kind of language and its own events that people refer to, it
creates a sense of unity. Yet the other side of that is that every person who
joins a community feels like an outsider. To a newcomer, people you may feel
are embedded in the group may only have joined an hour before you, so that’s
also partly the nature of being a newcomer. More fundamental is that there
are people welcoming and explaining the community traditions to newbies.
People use abbreviations like “Lmk” for “let me know,” and you can search to
find out what they mean, so slang is a little bit different in the larger scale. I
think every community has to balance their emergent norms with the
necessity to not make people feel like outsiders.
Atherton: Touching on rituals and community events, I read that at Electric

Minds, the online magazine + community you founded in 1996, you hosted an
infamous discussion about the chess rematch between the Grand Master and
Deep Blue, IBM’s chess playing system. Was hosting discussions on real-life
events key to the success of the community?
Rheingold: People that may not have been interested in participating in our
forum, but were fanatic about chess, joined our platform specifically to come
to that event. In some ways, it was inventing a ritual that would attract people
with a particular interest; they would spread the word, and then some may
stick around. So you might be able to cross-pollinate different communities
with a big event and then hopefully convert some of those guests to become
community members.
Atherton: Philip Rosedale, founder of the virtual world Second Life, is also
interviewed in this book. Can you tell me about how you have used Second
Life in novel ways for teaching?
Rheingold: I have been invited to Second Life frequently to do lectures and
have discussions. I had participated in multiuser dungeons (MUDs) before
that, in which you could create objects that had behaviors with a little code.5
For example, in some MUDs you could have a permanent residence which
you could decorate; you could enter doors and even make a camera to put in
your room, so you could see who had visited while you were gone. The ability
to shape your environment, I found extremely interesting.
Of course, in Second Life you could shape your avatar and your environment.
There were and still are some really dedicated communities in Second Life. A
lot of companies built real estate in Second Life and spent a lot of money on
it, though nothing really came from that.
Interestingly in the educational sphere, nobody has really taken advantage of
online environments like Second Life. In my lectures, I would be in Second
Life, floating in the air and others would be floating around me, but other than
that, it was a normal lecture. There are real advantages to having an immersive
3D environment in education. You could take people through a model of the
Great Pyramids or Notre Dame. You could have students manipulate
molecules with their hands or crawl inside of a plant cell. I’m not seeing that
happening; I would love to see that.
5
MUDs are a virtual world in which users are represented by avatars and interact
with others.
The frustrating aspect was griefers that would interrupt lectures, showing up
as squadrons of flying penises.6 Facebook is already having tremendous
problems trying to moderate at its scale. I don’t know how they are going to
do this. Griefers will always come up with new ways of making people’s lives
miserable.
Atherton: The term “virtual community” was popularized by your article
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier about The WELL
and Usenet. I read that you wrote this to counter the idea that there was
something dystopian about virtual communities. Is that right?
Rheingold: I tried to get that book project going in the late 1980s, and I was
told by my agent and editors that only electrical engineers want to communicate
through computer networks. It wasn’t until the New Yorker cartoon was
published in 1993, “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” that people
began to accept online communication. At the time, it was deemed peculiar,
even pathological, for people to spend a lot of time talking to strangers online.
I didn’t think so.
Atherton: You revisited this idea of the positive and darker sides of online
communities in your book Netsmart. How have your ideas changed with the
emergence of the loneliness epidemic and online communities influencing
voting and so on?
Rheingold: Now a significant percentage of the human race is online. If you
count Facebook, a significant percentage of those participate in social
communications online. With that, we get all that comes with the human
race. Put it this way, if a rising tide lifts all boats, then it lifts the hospital ships
along with the pirate ships. A lot of good things have been happening
alongside bad.
I wrote Netsmart in 2012 because I felt that the way to improve the virtual
public sphere and individuals’ experience of it was for them to gain literacy in
this new medium. Ten years have since passed, and I still have not seen
educational institutions teaching kids how to search and differentiate facts
from misinformation. I’m now much less sanguine about virtual literacy, as it’s
not spreading. Our educational institutions are very conservative and slow
moving. They have not proved themselves up to the task. But even worse is
that we now have computational microtargeted propaganda, so you can
gather a huge amount of information on a huge number of individuals, and you
can target not only advertising toward them but political persuasion. You can
exacerbate differences in a society and spread misinformation about vaccines,
racism, antisemitism. Facebook is particularly guilty of this. The more money
and technology that goes into deceiving people, the more education is
required to help people avoid being deceived. I’m concerned about that.
6
Griefers refers to people in online environments who deliberately trouble other community
members.
People that for whatever reason gain pleasure from making other people
miserable online, they’re called griefers or trolls. Sophisticated misinformation
that has entered the public sphere online, which has exacerbated conspiracy
theories and bigotry. These have poisoned the atmosphere of virtual
communities for a lot of people.
On Twitter, you can have complete control over your experience. You should
have people whose opinions and intelligence you have some respect for, but
with whom you disagree as part of the mix. I think that’s all part of having a
good experience. But you can also block people, make accounts private, and
control who you follow and who follows you. People complain about their
horrible experience even though they have the tools to prevent that. Again,
Twitter’s not educating you about it.
Knowing how to use a medium and how not to be misled online are huge
issues and critical uncertainties about the future of online communication. If
platforms become mistrusted, then people stop using them.
Atherton: So you think the usage might decline if we don’t tackle this
problem of platforms providing minimal education on how to not be deceived?
Rheingold: Yes, or even worse usage might not decline, and people would
just be credulous…
Atherton: What virtual communities are you most excited about now? Do
you feel there are any pioneering platforms?
Rheingold: Well, back in the days of The WELL, we knew that there would
be greater bandwidth and that computers would have greater capabilities
someday. It wouldn’t just be words on a screen, there would be images, sound,
and video. What nobody foresaw was that amateurs would upload more video
in a few minutes than the entire history of broadcast television, so the scope
and scale of what happened, for example, when YouTube came about, was not
really anticipated.
I participate in a couple of communities that have forum software that enable
you to embed video players and drag and drop images. On those platforms,
we have traditions; one week every year, people upload photographs of their
food in their backyard and their hometown. A long time ago, a fellow at a
newsletter asked his recipients, “where are you reading this and what does it
look like?” People sent in pictures of their offices and homes. That’s something
that I’ve done with a number of different communities. It really gives you a
sense of other people’s space. So I’m all for videos, images, and links that
create these rituals within the community. People can take photos of their
coffee and participate in a way that lowers the barriers to entry.
Atherton: How do you feel about virtual communities today, like Discord or
Reddit? Discord’s layout recalls IRC; avatars have not developed dramatically
since the Palace. I’m curious to know what you think about that?7
Rheingold: In 1997, I had a company called Electric Minds, and we had a
Palace. That was great fun and a type of graphical environment that we don’t
see a lot of these days.
People have said that Discord is a modernized version of what had been going
on in IRC for a long time, so I think if you take an old medium and put it in a
new bottle, that offers you some better affordances, and it’s going to be even
more popular. IRC was a little esoteric: you had to join a server, et cetera, so
it was the domain of more tech-oriented people.
Reddit, I have not explored very much, but I think that the great advantage of
Reddit is its multiplicity, that there are so many different forums that you can
participate in and the people who run those forums really help determine the
atmosphere in them. Lately, I’ve been seeing that people doing Google
searches can get better information by specifying “Reddit” in their search terms.
Atherton: What thoughts would you like to leave our reader with? Do you
have any parting advice for future community builders or perhaps some
predictions?
Rheingold: There used to be this legend that you build the community and
people will come. That has long since ceased to be true. There is so much
happening now in people’s lives competing for their attention.
In the early 2000s, I had a consultancy, and there was a period where every
startup, every company felt that they had to have a community. The first thing
I would ask those people is, do you really need to have a community? Have
you thought about what its downsides might be? For example, if you are a
company that offers a technical product, if you start an online forum around
that product, if people just complain or recommend and nothing ever happens,
then that’s really a negative for your company. Again, it’s back to marketing
101. Who are the people that you want to attract? Why do you want them?
What is your value proposition? What are you giving them in exchange for
their attention?
Another issue that I think still persists is that companies rarely budget for
having a full-time community manager. No matter how many facilitators you
have, your community may get out of hand without a plan. A lot of planning
is required for a community to have a good chance at success: How will you
market your community? Who will your members be? What kind of technology
7
IRC stood for Internet Relay Chat and was a protocol that offered instant messaging in
1988. The Palace was a virtual world, which launched in 1981.
will you use? What will the information infrastructure be? What are your
norms and rules? People who want to start a community should question why
they want to build one and whether they have the resources to do it
successfully. That was true 20 years ago, but infinitely more so today.
Community manager is a role that is now understood. Pay attention to your
members at the beginning and draw them into your planning. I used to say
something which perhaps doesn’t hold up as well today: do an experiment
before you invite 10,000 people. Invite 100 people and let them know that it’s
an experiment and that you want their feedback. That you’re going to change
what you do according to their feedback. If you change things without telling
people you’re going to change things, they get upset, because they feel
ownership of the platform too. So do an experiment before this stage and see
what you learn. Scale it from there. Don’t try to have the grand opening with
100,000 people invited before you see what happens. At the end of the day,
you would do product testing before launching, why not with a community?
CHAPTER
Stacy Horn
Founder of Echo
Echo is a text-based platform intended to be “the virtual salon of New York” that
comprises a Bulletin Board System and personal messaging, known as “yo’s.”
Founded in 1989 by Stacy Horn, Echo was one of the earliest social networks to
emerge in New York. At its peak, Echo was used by tens of thousands of people,
maxing out New York phone lines. Echo stands for East Coast Hang Out, a small
but vibrant collective of people, known as “Echoids,” who discuss arts and culture in
its conferences. Echo pioneered online media, hosting the first interactive TV show
and went on to be described as “a cultural icon of the online community” by The
New York Times. Horn has subsequently taught Virtual Culture at NYU and
published Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town.
Horn turned down offers to acquire Echo, and it remains active today at EchoNyc.com.
Atherton: Can you take me back to how Echo started in your student days?
I would have liked to have sent a “yo” and been the host of a conference!
Horn: I had been working as a telecommunications analyst for a few years,
and my job was connecting people around the country to each other in a
work environment. I was working for Mobil Oil at the time, and one of the
higher-ups came into my office one day, and he said, “you’re never going to
move up the corporate ladder if you don’t get a graduate degree.”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_3
30 Chapter 3 | Stacy Horn, Founder of Echo
I didn’t want to move up the corporate ladder. I’d always wanted to be a

writer. I fell into telecommunications somewhat by accident. I was trying to
decide what to do with the rest of my life, and graduate school just sounded
like fun while I made up my mind and came up with a plan. I picked the
interactive telecommunications program at NYU only because it had telecoms
in the name. I had no idea what went on there. I applied, I got in, and discovered
that it was a playground. People were experimenting with all these new
technologies. Remember, this was 1986 when I started graduate school.
Everyone was having a ball. I would work all day at Mobil Oil, and then at night
I would go to NYU and play.
At NYU, I had an assignment in my very first year to call up The WELL and
just try it out. I just loved it. It was a glance into what we’re used to today. I
had instant communication with people in California except this was 1986,
and there was nothing else like it at the time. Doing something like this was
new and unheard of. I was thrilled.
Atherton: When you say you called up The WELL, could you clarify what
you mean?
Horn: You had to buy something called a modem, connect your phone line
to the modem, literally dial up a phone number, and pay long-distance phone
charges to participate in The WELL, a forum in California. Mobil Oil was
spinning the bill so I could do that.
Long after that assignment was over, I continued to call up The WELL. In my
last year of graduate school, I was logged in to The WELL, and somebody said,
“we heard you were starting an East Coast version of The WELL.” I don’t
remember ever saying that, but as soon as someone said it to me, I thought
that’s a great idea!
I dropped a class that I was taking at the time and signed up for a class called
Writing a Business Plan. I thought I would start what we called a “virtual
community” at the time; a social network was not a label that was used then.
I never liked the term “virtual community,” but I couldn’t come up with
anything better. I wrote a business plan and tried to raise some money. But
everyone would laugh me out of the office for even thinking that people
would want to socialize through their computers. Not only did they think that
“virtual communities” would never become widely used, they thought there
was something a little pathetic about me, that only losers and nerds would
want to do this!
Atherton: Were you pitching to VC investors?
Horn: Yes, but I only tried a couple of times; I got the idea that nobody was
going to give me money. I came to this conclusion quickly because of a prior
experience at Mobil Oil. As soon as I had discovered this way of communicating,
I pitched it to Mobil Oil. I suggested that we start a virtual community like

The WELL.
At the time, my job in telecoms was to set up Mobil Oil buoys all around the
country to our main networks in Princeton and Dallas. To do this, I was
shipping equipment to all these different locations and sending installers from
the phone company and from the modem company. I was sending a lot of
people very complicated installations, and things were always falling through
the cracks and going wrong. I thought it would be great to have a place where
people at every stage of these installations could check in and update what
they had managed to get done, so that I would know exactly what was going
on, and determine if I needed to send more people to fix something. With a
virtual community, I could address problems as they arose. I pitched a
computer conference system, a virtual community for Mobil.
I was the only woman in the office working in telecoms at that time. Every
week, at our long conference table, I would stand up and tell them about
these new, cool things called virtual communities and how we could utilize
them. They would shoot me down, and every week I would come up with
another reason why they would be helpful.
Eventually, I went to the head of Corporate Telecoms and told them, “I know
with every fiber of my being that virtual communities are a good thing. It
could be very effective and save us a lot of money in terms of communications.
It’s going to take over the Internet and the world.” He didn’t believe me. I
suggested we do a pilot, set it up, and see how it works. He agreed.
I set up something called Monet, an amalgamation of mobile and network,
though in my mind I was pronouncing it like the artist! It failed miserably. I
later learned that the other people in my department had quietly agreed that
they weren’t going to allow it to succeed; they wouldn’t use it as intended or
check in regularly. A very important lesson for me was to consider alternative
perspectives: while I saw it as a way of knowing what everyone was doing so
I could fix problems, others thought it exposed problems and highlighted
what installers had not achieved.
After that experience, when I approached VCs and received the same response
that I got at Mobil, I thought I’d better do this on my own. I lucked out
because around the time that I finished graduate school, Mobil announced
that they were moving to Virginia and closing the NYC office. I was entitled
to severance pay, and I used that to fund my startup.
Atherton: When you started Echo, what was your business plan? How were
you going to monetize the platform?
Horn: Through monthly subscriptions. When I took that course, How to
Write a Business Plan, and then wrote my own business plan, I learned that
you can make those initial financials say whatever you want. Early-stage funding
32 Chapter 3 | Stacy Horn, Founder of Echo
is like sticking a finger in the air, but I figured members paying a monthly fee
made the most sense.
Atherton: With your severance pay, you set up Echo in your apartment and
just started coding it yourself?
Horn: I bought this software that already existed called Caucus, a text-based
computer conferencing software which Echo uses to this day. The WELL used
PicoSpan, and structurally it’s entirely the same, it just has slightly different
commands. I had to learn Unix to troubleshoot problems, but I wasn’t very
good at it, and things were always going wrong!
One day, I was talking on a computer radio show, Off the Hook, about how
much trouble I was having with the software end of the system and that I
needed some help. Echo would go down, and I’d have to figure out how to
bring it back up. I wasn’t a Unix programmer, I had learned enough to get by,
but I couldn’t deal with these complicated problems. Off the Hook told me
that on air next was the well-known hacker Mark Abene, who went by the
name Phiber Optik. When I came off air, he introduced himself. I was looking
at one of the most famous hackers in the world, and he was telling me he can
fix all my problems. But in order to fix them, I would have to give him access
to Echo, the keys to the castle. What a dilemma. But I looked at him, and he
seemed sincere, not that you can tell that by looking at someone! My gut
reaction was that he would help us, and I was right. He became my CTO.
Atherton: What was the first conference on Echo?
Horn: When I got it all set up, I had a bunch of empty conferences. I couldn’t
advertise “Join Echo” and participate in discussions that don’t yet exist! So I
got 20 people to log in and help start these conversations.
Among the early conferences was “Central,” which was where you came first,
like a lobby, where you could tell newcomers how to get around Echo and
what other conferences there were. Users would answer questions and could
raise problems with getting around Echo. From there, we started the
New York conference to talk about the city, where to go, where to live,
anything to do with that very general heading “New York.”
Those 20 people just went around to all these different conferences, starting
discussions and talking, so that when I finally did open my doors, there were
conversations to join. I lucked out from the very beginning that the idea of
virtual communities or social networks was very new and interesting. Most of
the people involved with early computer technologies were men. My presence
in this arena was very novel, so journalists jumped on that, and I got a lot of
attention, just by the virtue of my sex. Being female had not been an advantage
for most of my life, as someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. With
that press, I got a lot of people joining right off the bat.
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The caravan starts at daybreak and proceeds without a sound. The
baggage-camels step out briskly and their drivers keep pace with
elastic steps; the riding-camels hasten at full trot, urged according to
their strength, and soon leave the burden-bearers far behind. With
unslackened speed they hurry on. All one’s bones seem to crack
with the jerks and jolting caused by the rapid pace of the riding-
camels. The sun beats down, piercing through all the garments with
which one tries to protect oneself. Under the thicker clothing
perspiration pours all over the body, on the more lightly clad arms
and legs it evaporates as it is formed. The tongue cleaves to the roof
of the mouth. Water, water, water! is the one idea left to those
unaccustomed to these discomforts. But the water, instead of being
in iron vessels or flasks, is in the characteristic skin-bags of the
country; it has been carried for days in the full sun on the camel’s
back, it is more than lukewarm, of evil odour, thick, brown in colour,
and tastes so vilely of leather and colocynth varnish that it produces
nausea or even vomiting. But it seems as impossible to improve it as
to do without it. Its penetrating taste and smell baffle all attempts to
enjoy it in coffee or tea, or mixed with wine or brandy. Undiluted wine
or brandy simply increase the burning thirst and oppressive heat.
The traveller’s condition becomes one of torture before the sun
reaches the zenith, and his distress is the greater the worse the
water. But it has to be and is endured. And although the Northerner
can never conquer his repugnance to the kind of water which we
have described, he grows used to the heat, at first so unbearable,
and, as he begins to be at home with his steed, other discomforts
are also lessened. In the future he will make sure of water which is at
least clean, and will soon cease to complain of its warmth or of any
other inevitable inconveniences of his journey.
Resting comfortably, though rudely wakened by the loud grumbling
of the baggage-camels, the experienced travellers allow the caravan
to go on ahead while they comfort body and soul with coffee and
tobacco. Thereafter they mount the dromedaries and speed along as
quickly as these trotters will go. Not a word is exchanged, the only
sounds are the crunching of the sand under the elastic hoofs, the
loud breathing, and hollow, deep grunting of the camels. In a short
time the baggage-train is overtaken, and we shoot on ahead. A
gazelle browses near our course and raises hopes of welcome
booty. With spirited movements the graceful creature—image of the
desert poet’s fancy—skips and dances before its pursuers; the
gasping, sharply-spurred camels rush on with gigantic strides. The
gazelle seems careless and allows near approach; the riders act as
if they would pass it, they rein in their beasts and ride more
moderately. But one slips from the saddle to the ground, stops his
beast for a moment, and from under cover of its body fires a deadly
shot. In a trice the leader has sprung from his saddle to make sure of
the fallen game; triumphantly he drags it along, fastens it dexterously
to his saddle, and on goes our cavalcade.
Towards noon a halt is called. If there is a hollow near, it will probably
contain an umbrella-like mimosa, whose thin foliage will afford some
slight shade; but if the sandy plain stretches unbroken on all sides,
all that can be done is to fix four lances in the sand and stretch a
blanket over them. Though the sand on which one must lie is
glowing, and the air one breathes is oppressive, languor and
weariness overpower even the natives, how much more the
Northerner. One seeks rest, but it comes not, and refreshment, but
one cannot enjoy it. Blinded by the overflowing light and the
tremulous atmosphere, we shut our eyes; but, tormented by
scorching heat, and tortured by feverish thirst, we toss about
sleepless. The hours go by on leaden feet.
The baggage-train winds slowly past and disappears in a vapourous
sea on whose heaving waves the camels seem to float. Still one
lingers, and continues to suffer the same agonies. The sun has long
since passed the zenith, but his glowing beams are as fierce as ever.
It is not till late in the afternoon that a fresh start is made. And again
there is a rapid ride, whose swiftness seems almost to create a
cooling breeze of air. The baggage-camels come in sight again, and
are soon overtaken. The drivers stride behind them, singing; one
leads the song, and the rest join in at the end of each verse in
regular refrain.
When one knows the toilsome labour of the camel-driver in the
desert, one wonders indeed to hear him singing. Before daybreak he
loaded his camel, after he had shared with it a few handfuls of soft-
boiled dhurra grains—the sole food of both; all through the long day
he strides behind his beast, without a bite to eat, with at most an
occasional mouthful of ill-smelling water; the sun scorches his head,
the glowing sand burns his feet, the hot air parches his sweating
body; for him there is no time to pause or rest; he may perhaps have
had to change the loads of some of the beasts, or to catch one or
other which had bolted; and yet he sings! It is the approach of night
which inspires him.
When the sun goes to rest, the limbs of these wizened children of
the desert seem to become supple again; in this, as in all else, they
are like their mother. Like her they are parched at noon, like her they
revive at night. As the sun declines, their poetic gifts weave golden
dreams even in waking hours. The singer praises the well-springs
rich in water, the groups of palms around them, and the dark tents in
the shade; he greets a brown maiden in one of the tents, who hails
him with welcome; he extols her beauty, likens her eyes to those of
the gazelle, and her mouth to a rose, whose fragrance is as her
words, and these as pearls in his ear; for her sake he rejects the
sultan’s eldest daughter, and longs for the hours when fate shall
permit him to share her tent. But his comrades admonish him to seek
after higher joys, and raise his thoughts to the Prophet, “who
satisfies all longing”.
Such is the song which falls on the Northerner’s ears, and the songs
of home rise to his lips, and when the last rosy flush of the setting
sun fades away, when night stretches her robe of witchery over the
desert, then it seems to him as if the hardest had been easy, as
though he had suffered no thirst in the heat, nor discomfort by the
way. Cheerfully he leaps from the saddle, and while the drivers
unload and tether the camels, he heaps and smooths the sand for
his bed, spreads his carpet and coverlet, and gives himself over with
delight to the rest he had longed for.
The small camp-fire illumines the plain only for a few paces. Around
it the dark, half-naked sons of the desert move about busily; the
flame casts a weird light on them, and in the half-darkness they look
like shadows. The bales and boxes, saddles and utensils assume
strange shapes; and the camels, lying in a wide circle outside the
baggage, become ghostly figures when their eyes gleam with the
reflection of the firelight. It becomes quieter and quieter in the camp.
One driver after another leaves the camels, with whom he has
shared his frugal supper, wraps himself in his long body-cloth, sinks
to the ground, and becomes one with the sand. The fire flares up for
the last time, loses its glow, and goes out. It is night in the camp.
He who would describe a night in the desert should be, by the grace
of God, a poet. For how can its beauty be described, even by one
who has watched, revelled, and dreamed through it all? After the
heat of the day it comes as the gentle, compensating, reconciling
bestower of unspeakable comfort and inspiration, bringing peace
and joy, for which a man longs as for his beloved who atones to him
for his long waiting. “Leïla”, the starry night of the desert, Leïla is with
justice the Arab’s image of all that is fair and joyous. Leïla he calls
his daughter; with the words, “my starry night”, he embraces his
beloved; “Leïla, O Leïla!” is the musical refrain of his songs. And
what a night it is, which here in the desert, after all the burden and
discomfort of the day, soothes every sense and feeling! In undreamt-
of purity and brightness the stars shine forth from the dark dome of
heaven: the light of the nearest is strong enough to cast slight
shadows on the pale ground. With full chest one breathes the pure,
fresh, cooling, and invigorating air; with delight one gazes from star
to star, and as their light seems to come nearer and nearer, the soul
breaks through the fetters which bind it to the dust and holds
converse with other worlds. Not a sound, not a rustle, not even the
chirping of a grasshopper interrupts the current of thought and
feeling. The majesty, the sublimity of the desert is now for the first
time appreciated; its unutterable peace steals into the traveller’s
heart. But what proud self-consciousness also fills his breast: here,
in the midst of the infinite solitude, so alone, apart from all human
society and help, reliant on himself only, his confidence, courage,
and hope are strengthened. Dream-pictures full of infinite charm
pass before his wakeful eyes, and merge in ever fresh and
fascinating combinations, and as the stars begin to twinkle and
tremble, his thoughts become dreams, and his eyes close in sleep.
After the refreshment which the desert night brings both to body and
soul, the discomforts of the next day seem lighter, however much
effort it may require to drink the water, which becomes more vile
every hour. Perfect rest, unclouded comfort is only to be had at one
of the desert wells. Always menaced by dearth of the most essential
necessaries of life, every desert journey is a ceaseless anxiety, a
restless hastening on; it is therefore entirely devoid of that ease and
comfort with which one would prefer to travel. One day passes like
another; each night, in favourable seasons at least, is like that which
I have described. But in the oasis, the day becomes a holiday, the
evening is a joyous festival, and the night brings perfect rest.
The essential condition for the formation of an oasis is a basin-like or
valley-like depression. Without a gushing spring, without at least an
artificial well, rich vegetation is impossible, and water is found in the
desert only on the lofty mountains or in the deepest hollows. As the
sea of sand is in so many respects the counterpart of the ocean, so
its oases are counterparts of islands, but they do not rise above the
surface, they are sunk beneath it. The water may either rise in a
visible spring, or it may be found at a slight depth below the surface.
Its abundance and its quality determine the character of the oasis. In
the minority the water is pure and cool, but in most cases it is salt,
ferruginous, or sulphurous, and on that account probably very
healthful. But it is by no means always drinkable or conducive to
fertility. Perhaps there is hardly one oasis which produces fresh,
green sward. And it is only in very favourable places that the water is
evident at all; in most cases it collects drop by drop in clefts of the
rock or in shafts which have been dug for it; at times at least it has to
be artificially forced. Even where the water wells up copiously it
would soon lose itself in the sand, if it were not carefully collected
and distributed. At the same time it always evokes a refreshing life,
doubly welcome amid such sterility.
Around the spring, long before men appeared to take possession, a
company of green plants had effected settlement. Who can tell how
they got there? Perhaps the sand-storm sowed the seeds, which first
germinated by the well, and grew into plants, with leaves, flowers,
and another generation of seeds which were scattered through
whole valleys. It is certain, at least, that they were not planted by
men, for the mimosas which form the greater part of the little colony
occur also in springless hollows, where one sees them sometimes
singly, sometimes forming a small thicket of ten or twenty. They
alone are able to keep life awake in the desert; they put forth green
leaves, they blossom and send forth fragrance—how fresh and
balmy! In their pleasant shade the gazelle rests; from their tops
resound the songs of the few feathered songsters of the desert. The
sappy leaves, seen amid the stiff masses of limestone, the cones of
black granite, and the dazzling sand, do the eyes good like a
meadow in May; their flowers as well as their shade refresh the soul.
In the larger, more copiously watered oases, men have planted
palms, which lend a fresh charm to the settlement. The palm is here
all in all: it is the queen of trees, the giver of fruit which sustains man
and binds him to his little spot of earth, the tree around which saga
and song are twined, the tree of life. What would an oasis be without
palms? A tent without a roof, a house without inmate, a well without
water, a poem without words, a song without tune, a picture without
colour. The palm’s fruits feed the nomad herdsman and the settler
alike, they become wheat or barley in his hand, they satisfy even the
tax-gatherer of his lord and master. Its stems, its crown, its narrow
leaves supply him with shelter and utensils, mats, baskets, and
sacks, ropes and cords. In the sandy desert one first appreciates its
full worth and importance, it becomes the visible emblem of Arabian
poetry, which rises like it from frequently barren ground, which grows
strong and fades not, which raises itself on high, and there only
bears sweet fruit.
Fig. 52.—An Oasis in the Desert of Sahara.
Mimosas and palms are the characteristic trees of all oases, and are
never absent from those which have so many springs or wells that
gardens and fields become possible. Here they are restricted, like
outposts against the invading sand, to the outer fringe of the desert
island, while the interior is adorned with more exacting plants which
require more water. Thus around the springs or wells there are often
charming gardens in which grow almost all the fruit-bearing plants of
North Africa. Here the vine clambers, the orange glows amid its dark
foliage, the pomegranate opens its rosy mouth, the banana expands
its fan-shaped leaf clusters, the melons straggle among the beds of
vegetables, prickly-pears and olives, perhaps even figs, apricots,
and almonds, complete the picture of fruitfulness. At a greater
distance from the centre lie the fields, bearing at least Kaffir-millet,
and, in favourable conditions, wheat, or even rice.
In oases so rich man finds a permanent home, while in those which
are poorer he is but a sojourner, or a more or less periodic guest.
The village or small township of a large oasis is essentially like that
of the nearest cultivated country; like it it has its mosques, its
bazaars, its coffee-houses; but the inhabitants are children of a
different spirit from that which marks the peasants or townsfolk in the
Nile valley or along the coast. Although usually of diverse race
among themselves they all exhibit the same customs and habits.
The desert has shaped and fashioned them. Their slender build,
sharply-cut features, and keen eyes, gleaming from under bushy
brows, mark them at once as sons of the desert; but their habits and
customs are even more characteristic. They are unexacting and
readily contented, energetic and full of resource, hospitable and
open-hearted, honourable and loyal, but proud, irritable, and
passionate, inclined to robbery and acts of violence, like the
Bedouins, though not their equals either in good or evil. A caravan
entering their settlement is a welcome sight, but they expect the
traveller to pay them toll.
Very different from such oases are those valleys in which a much-
desired well is only to be found at times. The Arabian nomads are
well pleased if the supply of drinking-water for themselves and their
herds is sufficient for a few months or even weeks; and the caravan,
which rests in such a place, may be content if its demands are
satisfied within a few days. The well is usually a deep shaft, from
whose walls the water oozes rather than trickles. A few tom-palms
rise among the sparse mimosas and saltworts which surround the
well; a few stems of grass break through the hard ground.
Unutterably poor are these nomad herdsmen, who pitch their tents
here as long as their small flocks of goats can find anything to eat.
Their struggle for existence is a continuous succession of toil, and
want, and misery. Their tent is of the simplest; a long dark web of
cloth, made of goats’ hair, is laid across a simple framework, and its
ends pinned to the ground; a piece of the same stuff forms the back-
wall, and a mat of palm-leaves forms the door in front. The web is
the wife’s self-made dowry, the materials for which she gathered,
spun, and wove from her eighth to her sixteenth year. A few mats
which serve as beds, a block of granite and a grindstone for
pounding the grain got in barter, a flat plate of clay to roast the
cakes, two large jars, some leather sacks and skins, an axe and
several lances, form the total furnishings. A herd of twenty goats is
counted a rich possession for a family. But these people are as
brave as they are poor, as lovable as they are well-built, as good-
natured as they are beautiful, as generous as they are frugal, as
hospitable as they are honourable, as chaste as they are devout.
Ancient pictures rise in the mind of the Occidental who meets with
these folk for the first time; he sees biblical characters face to face,
and hears them speak in a manner with which he has been familiar
from his childhood. Thousands of years have been to these nomads
of the desert as one day; to-day they think, and speak, and act as
did the patriarchs of old. The very greeting which Abraham uttered
meets the stranger’s ear; the very words which Rebecca spoke to
Abraham’s servant were addressed to me, when, tortured with thirst,
I sprang from my camel at the well of Bahiuda, and begged a
beautiful brown damsel for a drink of fresh water. There she stood
before me, the Rebecca of thousands of years ago, alive and in
unfading youth, another and yet the same.
On the arrival of the caravan the whole population of the temporary
settlement assembles. The chief steps forward from their midst, and
utters the greeting of peace; all the rest bid the strangers welcome.
Then they offer the most precious of gifts, fresh water; it is all that
they have to give, and it is given with dignified friendliness,
ungrudgingly, yet without urgency. Eagerly the travellers drink in long
refreshing draughts; the camels also press in riotously upon the
watering-place, although they might know from experience that they
must first be unloaded, tethered, and turned on the grass before they
are allowed to quench an unbroken thirst of four or six days. Even at
the well not a drop is wasted, therefore the camels first get any water
that remains in the skins, and it is not till these are filled up again that
the beasts get a fresh draught, and that with more respect to the
existing supplies than their actual needs. Only at the copious wells
can one satisfy their apparently unbounded desires, and see, not
without amusement, how they swallow without ever looking up, and
then hasten from the well to the not less eagerly desired pasture,
forced by their hobbles to grotesque and clumsy movements, which
make their stomachs rumble like half-filled casks.
And now begins a festival both for travellers and settlers. The former
find fresh water, perhaps even milk and meat, to increase the delight
of the longed-for resting-time; the latter gladly welcome any break in
their life, which, in good seasons, is very monotonous. One of the
camel-drivers finds in the nearest tent the favourite instrument of
those who live in the desert, the tambura or five-stringed zither, and
he knows right well how to use it in accompaniment to his simple
song. The music allures the daughters of the camp, and slim,
beautiful women and girls press inquisitively around the strangers,
fastening their dark eyes on them and their possessions, inquiring
curiously about this and that. Steel thy heart, stranger; else these
eyes may set it on fire. They are more beautiful than those of the
gazelle, the lips beneath put corals to shame, and the dazzling teeth
excel any pearls which thou couldst give these daughters of the
desert. And soon all yields to music and to song. Around the zither-
player groups arrange themselves for the dance; hands both hard
and soft beat time to the tune, the words, and the regular swaying
movements. New forms come and those we have become familiar
with disappear; there is a constantly changing bustle and crowd
around the strangers, who are wise if they regard all with the same
innocence and simplicity which their hosts display. All the
discomforts of the journey are forgotten, and all longings are
satisfied, for water flows abundantly and takes the place of all that
one might desire in other places or at other seasons.
Such a rest revives body and soul. Strengthened and encouraged
the caravan goes on its way, and if the days bring nothing worse
than scorching, thirst, and fatigue, a second, and a third well is safely
reached, and finally the goal of the journey—the first township on the
other side of the desert. But the desert—the sea of sand—is like the
all-embracing ocean also in that it is fickle. For here too there are
raging storms, which wreck its ships and raise destruction-bringing
billows. When the north wind, which blows continuously for months,
comes into conflict with currents from the south, or yields them the
mastery, the traveller suddenly sees the sand become alive, rising in
huge pillars as thick as they are high, which whirl more or less
rapidly over the plain. The sun’s rays sometimes lend them the ruddy
gleam of flames, at another time they seem almost colourless, yet
again, portentously dark, the furious storm weakens them and
strengthens them, splits them and unites them, sometimes merging
two or more into one huge sand-spout which reaches to the clouds.
Well might the Occidental exclaim at the sublimity of the spectacle,
did not the anxious looks and words of his escort make him dumb.
Woe to the caravan which is overtaken by one of these raging
whirlwinds, it will be good fortune if man and beast escape alive. And
even if the inexorable messenger of fate pass over the party without
doing harm, danger is by no means over, for behind the sand-spouts
usually comes the Simoom or poisonous storm.
This ever-dreaded wind, which blows as the Chamasin through
Egypt, as the Sirocco towards Italy, as the Föhn through the Alps, as
the Tauwind in North Europe, does not always rise into a storm; not
unfrequently it is hardly noticeable, and yet it makes many a man’s
heart tremble. Of course much that is fabulous is told of it, but this
much is true, that it is in certain conditions extremely dangerous to
the caravan, and that it is responsible for the bleached skeletons of
camels and the half-buried, half-mummified, corpses of men that one
sees by the wayside. It is not its strength, but its character, its
electric potential, which brings suffering and destruction to man and
beast wandering on the sandy sea.
The natives and the observant can foretell the coming of the sand-
storm at least one day, often several days, ahead. Unfailing
symptoms tell of its approach. The air becomes sultry and
oppressive; a light, grayish or reddish vapour obscures the sky; and
there is not a breath of wind. All living creatures suffer visibly under
the gradually increasing sultriness; men grumble and groan; the wild
animals are shyer than usual; the camels become restless and
cross, jostling one another, jibbing stubbornly, even lying down on
the ground. The sun sets without any colour; no red-glow fringes the
evening sky; every light is veiled in a vaporous shroud. Night brings
neither coolness nor refreshment, rather an aggravation of the
sultriness, the lassitude, the discomfort; in spite of all weariness one
cannot sleep. If men and beasts are still able to move, no rest is
taken, but they hurry on with the most anxious haste as long as the
leader can see any of the heavenly bodies. But the vapour becomes
a dry fog, obscuring one constellation after another, hiding moon and
sun, though in the most favourable conditions these may be visible,
about half their normal size, pale in colour and of ill-defined contour.
Sometimes it is at midnight that the wind begins to raise its wings;
more commonly about noon. Without a watch no one could tell the
time, for the fog has become so thick that the sun is completely
hidden. A gloomy twilight covers the desert, and everything even
within a short radius is hazy and indistinct. Gently, hardly perceptibly
the air at length begins to move. It is not a breeze, but the merest
breath. But this breath scorches, pierces like an icy wind into bone
and marrow, producing dull headache, enervation, and uneasiness.
The first breath is followed by a more perceptible gust, equally
piercing and deadening. Several brief blasts rage howling across the
plain.
It is now high time to encamp. Even the camels know this, for no
whip will make them take another step. Panic-stricken they sink
down, stretch out their long necks in front of them, press them
closely on the sand, and shut their eyes. Their drivers unload them
as rapidly as possible, build the baggage into a barricade, and heap
all the water-bags closely together, so as to present the least
possible surface to the wind, and cover them with any available
mats. This accomplished, they wrap themselves as closely as may
be in their robes, moisten the part which surrounds the head, and
take refuge behind the baggage. All this is done with the utmost
despatch, for the sand-storm never leaves one long to wait.
Following one another in more rapid succession, the blasts soon
become continuous, and the storm rages. The wind roars and
rumbles, pipes and howls in the firmament; the sand rushes and
rages along the ground; there is creaking and crackling and crashing
among the baggage as the planks of the boxes burst. The prevailing
sultriness increases till the limit of endurance seems all but reached;
all moisture leaves the sweat-covered body; the mucous membranes
begin to crack and bleed; the parched tongue lies like a piece of lead
in the mouth; the pulse quickens, the heart throbs convulsively; the
skin begins to peel, and into the lacerations the raging storm bears
fine sand, producing new tortures. The sons of the desert pray and
groan, the stranger murmurs and complains.
The severest raging of the sand-storm does not usually last long, it
may be only for an hour, or for two or three, just like the analogous
thunder-storm in the north. As it assuages the dust sinks, the air
clears, perhaps a counter-breeze sets in from the north; the caravan
rearranges itself and goes on its way. But if the Simoom last for half
a day or for a whole day, then it may fare with the traveller as it did
with an acquaintance of mine, the French traveller Thibaut, as he
journeyed through the Northern Bahiuda desert. He found the last
well dry, and with almost exhausted water-bags he was forced to
push on towards the Nile, four days’ journey off. On him and his
panic-stricken caravan, which had left every dispensable piece of
baggage at the dry well, the deadly storm broke loose. The
unfortunate company encamped, hoped for the end of the storm, but
waited in vain, mourning, desponding, desperate. One of Thibaut’s
servants sprang up maddened, howled down the storm, raged, and
raved, and at last, utterly spent, fell prostrate on his master, gasped,
and died. A second fell victim to sunstroke, and when the storm at
last abated was found dead in his resting-place. A third lingered
behind the rest after they had started again on their life-or-death
race, and he also perished. Half of the camels were lost. With the
remnant of his company Thibaut reached the Nile, but in two days
his coal-black hair had become white as snow.
To such storms are due the mummied corpses which one sees by
the path of the caravan. The storm which killed them also buries
them in the drifting sand; this removes all moisture so quickly that
the body, instead of decaying, dries up into a mummy. Over them
one wind casts a shroud of sand, which another strips away. Then
the corpse is seen stretching its hand, its foot, or its face towards the
traveller, and one of the drivers answers the petition of the dead,
covers him again with sand, and goes on his way, saying, “Sleep,
servant of God, sleep in peace.”
To such storms are also due the dream-pictures of the Fata Morgana
which arise in the minds of the survivors. As long as a man pursues
his way with full, undiminished strength and with sound senses, the
mirage appears to him merely as a remarkable natural phenomenon,
and in no wise as Fata Morgana. During the hot season, especially
about noon, but from nine in the morning until three o’clock, the
“devil’s sea” is to be seen daily in the desert. A gray surface like a
lake, or more accurately like a flooded district, is formed on every
plantless flat at a certain distance in front of or around the traveller; it
heaves and swells, glitters and shimmers, leaves all actually existing
objects visible, but raises them apparently to the level of its
uppermost stratum and reflects them down again. Camels or horses
disappearing in the distance appear, like the angels in pictures, as if
floating on clouds, and if one can distinguish their movements, it
seems as if they were about to set down each limb on a cushion of
vapour. The distance which limits the phenomenon remains always
the same, as long as the observer does not change his angle of
vision; and thus it varies for the rider and the pedestrian. The whole
phenomenon depends on the well-known law, that a ray of light
passing through a medium which is not homogeneous is refracted,
and thus it is inevitable, since the lower strata of air become
expanded by reflection of heat from the glowing sand. No Arab hides
his face when he sees a mirage, as fanciful travellers assure their
credulous readers; none puts any deep interpretation on the phrase
which he likes to use—“the devil’s sea”. But when the anxiety,
distress, enervation, and misery consequent on a sand-storm beset
and weaken him, and the mirage appears, then it may become a
Fata Morgana, for the abnormally excited imagination forms pictures
which are in most perfect harmony with the most urgent desire of the
moment—the desire for water and for rest. Even to me, who have
observed the mirage hundreds of times, the Fata Morgana appeared
once. It was after four-and-twenty hours of torturing thirst that I saw
the devil’s sea sparkling and gleaming before me. I really thought I
saw the sacred Nile and boats with full-bellied sails, palm-groves and
woods, and country-houses. But where my abnormal senses
perceived a flourishing palm-grove, my equally abnormal comrade
saw sailing-boats, and where I fancied I recognized gardens, he saw
not less imaginary woodland. And all the deceptive phantasms
vanished as soon as we were refreshed with an unexpected draught
of water; only the nebulous gray sea remained in sight.
Perhaps every one who crosses a stretch of desert in the Nile-lands
sees the devil’s sea; but there is a real and most living desert
picture, a sight of which is not granted to all. On the extreme limit of
vision, raised perhaps by the mirage and veiled in vapour, a number
of riders appear; they are mounted on steeds swift as the wind, with
limbs like those of deer; they approach rapidly, and urging to full
gallop the steeds which till then they had restrained, they rush down
upon the caravan. It always gave me pleasure to meet these
haggard, picturesquely-clad men; they and their horses seemed to
be so thoroughly harmonious with the desert. The Bedouin is indeed
the true son of the desert, and his steed is his counterpart. He is
stern and terrible as the desert day, gentle and friendly as the desert
night. True to his pledged word, unswerving in obedience to the laws
and customs of his race, dignified in bearing, lofty in discourse,
unsurpassed in self-restraint and endurance, more sensitive than
almost any other man to deeds of prowess, to glory and honour, and
not less to the golden web of fancy into which his poetic genius
weaves such wondrous pictures and twines such tender fragrant
flowers; yet is he cunning and crafty towards his enemies, a
bounden slave to his customs, unscrupulous in his demands, mean
and paltry in his exactions, greedy in his pleasures, unrestrained in
cruelty, terrible in revenge, to-day the noble host, to-morrow a
threatening and shameless beggar, now a proud robber and again a
pitiable thief. In short he is to the stranger as fickle and changeful as
the desert itself. His horse has the same keen, fiery, expressive
eyes, the same strength and agility in its thin, almost fragile limbs,
the same endurance, the same frugality, the same nature as his
master, for they grew up together under the same tent, they rest and
dwell beneath the same roof. The animal is not the slave but the
companion, the friend of its master, the playmate of his children.
Proud, spirited, and even savage in the open desert, it is as quiet as
a lamb in the tent; it seems altogether inseparable from its master.
Fig. 53.—Band of Mounted Bedouins.
In all the deserts which are, in name at least, under the sway of the
Khedive of Egypt, the Bedouins no longer fill the rôle which was
theirs in earlier times, and still belongs to them in Arabia and in
North-west Africa. For between them and the Egyptian government
there is a strict treaty which binds them to allow caravans to pass
through their haunts unmolested. Thus robberies in the desert are of
the rarest occurrence, and an encounter with the Bedouins raises
the less apprehension, since these children of the desert are usually
the owners of the hired camels. At the same time the true lords of
the waste still love to cling to the old customs and to retain a
semblance of their dominion, so that it is prudent before setting out
on a desert journey to claim safe-conduct from some recognized
chief. With this in possession, an encounter took form somewhat as
follows.
One of the sunburnt horsemen sprang forward from the troop, and
turned to the leader or head of our caravan.
“Peace be with thee, O stranger!”
“And with thee, O chief, be the grace of God, His mercy, and His
compassion!”
“Whither journey ye, sirs?”
“To Belled-Aali, O Sheikh.”
“Do ye journey under protection?”
“We journey under the safe-conduct of his Excellency, the Khedive.”
“And no other?”
“Also Sheikh Soliman, Mohammed Cheir Allah, Ibn Sidi Aulad Aali,
has granted us protection and peace.”
“Then are ye welcome and blessed.”
“The Giver of all blessings bless thee and thy father, O chief!”
“Have ye need of ought? My men will supply it. In Wadi Ghitere are
our tents, and ye are welcome there if ye seek rest. If not, may Allah
grant a prosperous journey!”
“He will be with us, for He is merciful.”
“And the Guide on all good ways.”
“Amen, O chief!”
And the troop wheels off; rider and steed become one; the light
hoofs seem scarce to touch the sand, the white burnooses flutter in
the wind, and the poet’s words rise into memory—
“Bedouin, on thy steed, thou art a poem in thyself!”
Such are some of the fascinating pictures shown to the receptive

eye. The more intimately one comes to know the desert, the more it
grows upon one, alleviating and lessening all toil and discomfort. Yet
the last hours of the journey are those of greatest joy. When the first
palm-village of cultivated land appears in sight, when the silver line
of the sacred river is once more visible, gladness fills the heart. Men
and beasts hasten as if to prove that the glad reality is not an illusion
which may vanish in the mist. But the goal becomes more and more
distinct; it seems as if we had never seen fresher colours, we fancy
that nowhere else can there be trees so green, water so cool. With a
final effort the camels push on, far too slowly for their impatient
riders. Friendly greetings reach our ears. The village on the Nile is
reached at last. From all the huts throng men and women, the aged
and the children. Inquisitively they crowd around the camp, men and
women curiously questioning, youths and maidens eager for the
dance. Tambura and tarabuka, the zither and drum of the country,
invite to motion; and the dancing-girls gladden the eyes of strangers
and countrymen alike. Even the creaking of the water-wheel on the
river, formerly a thousand times cursed, seems musical to-day. The
evening brings fresh joys. Comfortably couched on the cool and
elastic divan, the foreigner pledges the native in palm-wine or
merieza—the nectar of the land; while the sound of zither and drum,
and the rhythmic hand-clapping of the dancing youths and maidens
form a merry accompaniment to the dainty banquet. But at length the
approaching night begins to press its claims. Tambura and tarabuka
sink into silence and the dance comes to an end; one after another,
refreshed and well-content, the travellers seek rest. At length only
one is left, a son of Khahira, the mother of the world, whom sleep still
refuses to bless. From beside the flickering camp-fire comes his
simple, tremulous song—
Sweet night, dear night, thou mak’st me sad,
Longer thou seem’st and alway longer;
No peace from thee I ever had,
With thee day’s pain grows ever stronger.
Oh, gentle night, how long, how long,

Since these poor eyes last saw her beauty!
Seeing aught else they do her wrong;
When will she come to claim their duty?
Oh, tender night, now hovering near,

Lighten Love’s load, and my undoing!
Bring Peace to me, Peace to my Dear,
Shelter my Sweet, and speed my wooing!
But this lover’s plaint also dies away, and the silence of the night is
unbroken save by the murmurings of the wavelets on the sacred
river.
NUBIA AND THE NILE RAPIDS.[B]
[B] In order to understand and appreciate this chapter the reader
should bear in mind that the Nile is in flood from June to about the
end of September, being at its highest in the latter month, and at
its lowest in April. At low Nile the rapids present a very different
appearance from what they do at high Nile.
Egypt and Nubia, though immediately adjacent, and closely
connected by a river common to both, are essentially different
countries. Through Egypt the sacred Nile flows with leisurely dignity,
through Nubia it rushes in furious haste; over Egypt it distributes its
blessings widely, in Nubia it is hemmed in by high rocky banks; in
Egypt it triumphs over the desert, in Nubia the desert is supreme;
Egypt is a garden which the river has formed after thousands of
years of ceaseless labour, Nubia is a desert which it cannot conquer.
Of course this desert has its oases like any other, but they are few
and scarcely worth considering in comparison with the lands on both
sides of the stream which remain in unchangeable sterility and
desolation. Throughout the greater part of the long winding valley
which forms what we call Nubia, dark, gleaming masses of rock rise
from the bed of the river or from its immediate vicinity, and over wide
tracts prevent the growth of almost all vegetation. They have for their
sole adornment the waves of golden yellow sand which are blown
from the deserts on east and west, and gradually slide down the
rocks into the river. The sun beats from the deep-blue and rarely
cloudy sky; for many years together not a single shower refreshes
the thirsty ground. In the deeply cut gorges the life-giving waves of
the fertilizing stream contend in vain with the unimpressionable
rocks, on which they hurl themselves roaring and foaming, blustering
and thundering, as if enraged that their generosity is met with
ingratitude and their beneficence with disdain. The field on which this
battle is waged is the region of the rapids.

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The Rise of Virtual Communities: In

Conversation with Virtual World

The Rise of Virtual Communities. In Conversation with

The Rise of Virtual Communities Amber Atherton

How To Thrive in the Virtual Workplace Robert Glazer

The Psychosocial Reality of Digital Travel: Being in

Make Virtual Learning Matter Paul Axtell

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ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-9296-9 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-9297-6

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• Customers/users buy and/or use your product.

The Quadrant, Sequenced

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Morningstar: Every time you have a number which is a measure of something,

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Oh, gentle night, how long, how long,

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