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By Root 2056 0

his fellows imploring them to show "cooperation and trust." His pleas also posed the question of how best to define property in a new technology, such that the rules for their venture might be comprehended-a problem that was becoming more pressing in the PCC itself. As the operation began to divide into two camps-one more interested in advancing technology, the other dedicated to using computers to empower communitiesMoore joined with an engineer named Gordon French in a bid to revive what they recalled of the original sensibility Moore and French posted notices everywhere they could think of inviting like-minded enthusiasts to what they called an "amateur computer users group-Homebrew computer club ... you name it." It would be open to anyone who was both interested in building a computer "or some other digital black magic box" and enthusiastic about sharing information, working together, or "whatever."

The first meeting of the new group, on March 5, was a success. In subsequent months turnout increased by leaps and bounds. Before long more than four hundred people were coming, and the group had to relocate to SLAC's auditorium.18 Lee Felsenstein-the pioneer of Commu- nityMemory- became its unofficial compere. The Homebrew Computer Club, as it was soon called, fast became a principal center for Californian hacking.

For the committed, like Felsenstein, norms of information sharing and hands-on invention were more than just countercultural platitudes. They related rather specifically to the kinds of convictions voiced by Ivan Illich, the one-time Catholic priest whose Centro Intercultural de Document- acion in Mexico served to facilitate conversations among skeptics of technological and corporate modernity. Running through Illich's work was a call for individuals to retain creative autonomy in the face of the cultural homogeneity that he believed corporate technologies tended to foster. He wanted to develop an "autonomous and creative" interaction, as he put it, both among people and between people and their surroundings. "Conviviality" of this kind implied living "a life of action," and one full of active creativity rather than receptive consumption. Books, media, and machines were all to be regarded as "tools," not as delivery devices. So society should seek to design and adopt "convivial" technologies. For IIlich the telephone networkwas aprime example of a convivial technology, as long as the charges were low and access free. A still better example was the audiocassette. In Bolivia, Illich lamented, the government had established a television broadcaster at great cost, which reached some seven thousand sets spread among a population of 4 million. The same money could have been usedinstead to provide cassette recorders to eight hundred thousand citizens, alongwith blank cassettes and a huge library ofrecord- ings. Not only would far more people have benefited, but the resulting "network" would have been of a radically different, decentralized kind. Input by citizens, literate and illiterate alike, would have been normal. Its principle would have been creativity, not receptivity. That was what it was to be convivial - and in Illich's terms freedom required conviviality. 19 Illich likewise believed that conventional education was receptive and commoditized, and therefore illiberal. He proposed replacing schools by "webs"-computer-based "reticular structures for mutual access"-that would facilitate open-ended and creative interactions. They would resemble enthusiasts' clubs. Some might establish "skill exchanges" at which laypeople could gather to learn about technical tools, perhaps in storefronts. In a city like New York, convivial computing of this kind would permit a culture of reading to be created democratically, rather than on the basis of a "selection by some Chicago professors."

The problem was that modern industry did not produce convivial technologies. It preferred "a world of things that resist insight into their nature." Concealed inside closed boxes -or inscribed in silica- technology was becoming ever less